Pensamientos Acerca de Televisión

Davey and Goliath: “The Polka Dot Tie”

It has become so hip nowadays to make fun of the old stop-motion animated children's TV series Davey and Goliath that I sometimes forget how progressive this show could be. For example, this series once devoted an episode to a 1962 parable about racism which never quite mentions racism yet comes closer to mentioning it than most other animated shows of the era. Yet today hardly anyone remembers it.

Granted, messages of racial tolerance were not rare in 1962 when the African-American civil rights movement was in full swing, but they certainly were not very common in most American cartoon shows. And given the fact that Davey and Goliath is usually considered a conservative show because of its emphasis on overt Christian messages, the anti-racism message in this episode seems especially astounding.

To be fair, the episode never comes out and overtly argues on behalf of racial tolerance. But it was one of the first episodes to feature a black character and it is not very hard to connect the dots between the fuss title character Davey makes over said character's polka dot tie and the fuss many real-life adults in 1962 would have made about said character's skin color.

Of course, this being a positive show, Davey eventually comes around and accepts the friendship of the black character after his sister Sally spends the entire episode treating Davey as a fool for initially doing otherwise. And no one thinks anything of it.

It would be nice to believe that all racial conflicts were so easily settled back in 1962, but alas, I suspect otherwise. However, it is nice to see that even back then, some people's hearts were in the right place.