Mike Henry, a white voice actor on “Family Guy,” tweeted that “persons of color should play characters of color,” ending his twenty-one-year run as the voice of Cleveland, Peter Griffin’s high-talking black friend, who’d inspired his own spinoff show. It read, “Kristen, along with the entire creative team, recognizes that the casting of the character of Molly is an opportunity to get representation right-to cast a Black or mixed race actress and give Molly a voice that resonates with all of the nuance and experiences of the character as we’ve drawn her.” The announcements continued thusly throughout the week. The first was Jenny Slate, who played the breathy, bright-eyed, and horny Missy Foreman-Greenwald for four seasons of the animated comedy “ Big Mouth.” (Season 4 has not yet been released.) In a statement posted on Instagram, Slate explained that although she once thought it “permissible” to play Missy “because her mom is Jewish and White”-as Slate herself is-Missy “is also Black,” and “Black characters on an animated show should be played by Black people.” Later the same evening, Kristen Bell posted a statement from the team behind “Central Park,” stating that Bell would relinquish her character, Molly Tillerman, another animated daughter of an interracial marriage. Last Wednesday, two white actors announced that they would be taking leave from the black animated characters they had been voicing. Audiences liked the show well enough, but it failed to replicate the enormous success of its radio predecessor, apparently unable to capture the American imagination as thoroughly onscreen. The “Amos ’n’ Andy” television show, starring the luminous performers Alvin Childress, Tim Moore, and Ernestine Wade (reprising her role from radio), ran in prime time for two seasons before going into syndication for a little more than a decade. “If we can find actors with suitable voices, we’ll let them do the talking,” Gosden said, in a 1948 interview. Gosden and Correll toyed with the idea of retaining their titular roles in sound but not in body-they would hire black actors as their avatars and dub over the performers’ voices with their own-but, in the end, simply sought black actors who could perform serviceable impressions of their fictional Negroes. But how to translate the aural alchemy of their radio show-which, in its twenty-year run, had amassed a mixed-race audience of millions in segregated America-to television? Both men were white, while Amos and Andy were black. Paley, of the Columbia Broadcasting System. It was time to transition to the burgeoning medium of television, and the pair had a lucrative deal lined up with William S. Radio was no longer the nation’s dominant form of entertainment, and Gosden and Correll’s long-running program, “Amos ’n’ Andy,” about a pair of Southern migrants making their way in Chicago, had lost its pizzazz, growing hokey and hemmed in by the late-stage half-hour format. Although there was much controversy over the show and its casting, Amos ‘n Andy opened the door for dozens of black sitcoms to flood American televisions since.It was 1948 or so, and the comedy duo Freeman F. According to an Ebony Magazine article from October 1961, the chosen main actors (Alvin Childress, Spencer Williams, and Tim Moore), were asked to keep their voices and speech patterns close to the original white characters who were now the TV show producers.Īs it was aired, the NAACP protested the show, stating it was “a gross libel of the Negro and distortion of the truth.” After 65 episodes were produced, Amos ‘n’ Andy was canceled. Over time, however, these men aimed to bring their show to television, and after a three-year struggle, chose to cast Black actors to portray the show’s characters. The first episode aired in 1951, but two white men had been already hosting a radio series with the same name since 1928. The sitcom was titled Amos ‘n’ Andy and starred over fifteen black actors. In 1951, a new show made history as the first Black sitcom to be broadcasted on national television.
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