Thats all Smokes!

Take one last look British ATSers, cause you won't ever see it again.

While reading the Sun (please don't judge me!) I came across this article.



It seems that Turner Broadcasting has decided to remove the cigarettes from their classic cartoons. However, I am not sure if this will affect the US too.
Further digging around led me to this more in depth article.

Now, personally I feel this decision is absolutely and completely wrong. You can't just 'edit' over 60 years of broadcasting because of todays ridiculously high level of finger pointing. Firstly they had hoped to ban Tom and Jerry because it was violent, but failing in that means that they have to remove smoking.

Personally, I don't smoke. Never have. And I used to spend literally hours watching Jerry smoke a cigar, or Bugs Bunny with a cigarette. How did it warp my naive, young mind into thinking smoking was cool?

I understand that the cartoons were made in a time when it was okay to show smoking in cartoons, but that is precisely why I feel they should be kept. They are the only relic of a time when censors didn't have the power to ruin entire volumes of footage because of one complaint.

It is my opinion that anyone who claims they started smoking because Fred Flinsotone did is foolish. I believe that the responsibility to prevent smoking in young children lies on parents and teachers.
How can a parent not realise that their child is chewing gum alot? How can they not notice that there clothes stink of cigarettes, or that they keep asking for money. How can teachers not monitor the children they are paid to be responsible for?

This is just another case in which the opinions of the few outweigh the many and, as with so called 'violent videogames', the people in charge believe that we, as consumers and viewers, are too stupid to think for ourselves and can only mirror what we see in front of us.

Actually, it is probably ok. They (the censors and politically correct) have done away with such classics as "Amos and Andy", Cream of Wheat advertisements with the black chef (although they draw a large premium in places where they can still be bought).

In order to create a new mindset such as, smoking is very bad, "they" have to create an atmosphere where all implications that it is not bad, does not exist.

I am a smoker, and have been for many years. However, each time I light up, I am reminded of a quote byKurt Vonnegut, also an unreformed smoker, "A cigarette is defined as, a tube of paper filled with tobacco with a fire on one end, and a fool on the other".