Scrub Me Mama with a Boogie Beat (1941)

Directed by

Walter Lantz

Genre

musical film

Country

United States

Runtime

7 min

Rating

4.4 of 10 from 27 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

This is a short musical cartoon from 1941. It shows a laundry woman in Harlem whose scrubbing draws a crowd. The film has been criticized for its offensive racial stereotypes.

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What happens

"Scrub Me Mama with a Boogie Beat" is a 1940 hit boogie-woogie song written by Don Raye. A bawdy, jazzy tune, the song describes a laundry woman from Harlem, New York whose technique is so unusual that people come from all around just to watch her scrub. The Andrews Sisters and Will Bradley & His Orchestra recorded the most successful pop versions of the song, but it is today best recognized as the centerpiece of an eponymous and controversial Walter Lantz Studio cartoon from 1941, distributed by Universal Pictures. The short was denounced by the NAACP for its racist and stereotypical imagery of African-Americans. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

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