Hittin’ The Trail For Hallelujah Land
It is the only cartoon from the Harman-Ising Studio that was censored. This film gives a hint of how Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising diverge in caricaturing African Americans. Harman worked with jazz scores and fashioned his Looney Tunes star Bosko as a blackface crooner of contemporary music; later at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), he directed cartoons featuring caricatures of African American jazz artists. Ising, in contrast, handled cartoons set in the antebellum South. Hittin is the first, but later at MGM he directed The Old Plantation.
But back to Hittin, it is very understated in its depiction of the antebellum South. No one specifically mentions slavery, and no dialogue or scenes refer to a southern location. The river and the riverboat are not identified as the Mississippi River and a Mississippi showboat.
