YMMV / Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs

• Awesome Music: The short is credited with helping to introduce jazz to white audiences. Needless to say, most people who heard the excellent score all those years ago immediately got hooked on the genre.
• Crosses the Line Twice:
  • It's seen as this these days. There's something to be said about how unapologetically racist the jokes are.
  • Not just the race jokes either. The hitmen the queen hire have writing on their car saying they bump off midgets for half price. The "Japs for free" deal... well, that dates the time period when the cartoon was made.
• Fair for Its Day: For all its infamy, Coal Black came about out of Bob Clampett's deep love of black jazz music and was a serious effort to give work to black performers. Clampett even wanted an all-black band to perform all the music for the cartoon, but this was shot down by producer Leon Schlesinger, a man known for being notoriously cheap, who claimed that it would be too expensive (said band scored exactly one scene). That said, Clampett himself admitted that even his views on race at the time were dim and understood why later generations found it so offensive.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Disney, the very studio being satirized in this cartoon, would end up doing their own, significantly less controversial take on a classic fairy tale with a jazz score and predominantly black cast 60 years later. A few years before it, they'd also release another fairy tale pastiche in which a prince repeatedly fails to awaken a woman poisoned by an apple, but an ordinary man wakes her with just one kiss.
• I Am Not Shazam: The main character is named So White, not "Coal Black." The studio changed the title for fear audiences would expect a more standard version of Snow White.
• Memetic Mutation: The shot of Prince Chawmin' flashing his gold teeth while a loud music sting plays.
• Mexicans Love Speedy Gonzales: If you can believe it, there are black fans of this cartoon (mostly cartoonists and cartoons fans who appreciate seeing any black characters in Golden Age-era cartoons, stereotypical or not). According to Bob Clampett's daughter Ruth, during an appearance at an event honoring black filmmakers in the late 70s, the audience, which included respected animator of color Floyd Norman, responded to a screening of the short with thunderous applause (this despite Clampett apologizing for any hurt feelings before). There are also black people who find the jokes so unapologetically and over-the-top offensive that they just can't get mad at them.
• Overshadowed by Controversy: Any discussion of the cartoon's actual artistic merit takes second place to the blatant and offensive racial stereotypes it portrays and whether or not it still should be considered a classic in spite of them.
• Signature Scene: More like "signature shot". The shot of Prince Chawmin' mentioned in Memetic Mutation is usually used to sum up the Censored Eleven as a whole.
• Values Dissonance: Pretty much par for the course, considering that it's a World War II cartoon and has a lot of politically incorrect humor (like the "Murder Inc" truck offering to "kill midgets for half price and Japs for free").
• Vindicated by History: Despite being a part of the infamous Censored Eleven and containing the kind of politically incorrect humor that it could only get away with at a time with such radically different values, Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs is often considered to be one of the greatest cartoons ever produced, making not only The 100 Greatest Looney Tunes list, but The 50 Greatest Cartoons list as well.

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