page_title: Jungle Jitters
section_title: Plot
hierarchical_section_title: Jungle Jitters / Plot
caption_attribution_description: Español: Una escena de la caricatura 'Jungle Jitters' (1938).
context_page_description: Jungle Jitters is a 1938 Warner Bros. Merrie Melodies cartoon directed by Friz Freleng. The short was released on February 19, 1938.
  Because of the racial stereotypes of black people throughout the short, it prompted United Artists to withhold it from syndication within the United States in 1968. As such, the short was placed into the Censored Eleven, a group of eleven Merrie Melodies and Looney Tunes shorts withheld from television distribution in the United States since 1968 due to heavy stereotyping of black people.
context_section_description: In an African jungle, the natives are going about their day, with the jungle elements being intertwined with modern-day elements; for example, the people dancing around a tent when it turns into a makeshift merry-go-round, to the tune of "The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down," which promptly deflates and slows to a halt, and at least one of the denizens wears a top hat in resemblance of minstrel show stereotypes.
  A traveling dog-like salesman named Manny (a parody of Al Pearce's character Elmer Blurt) comes by to offer them the latest in "assorted useful, useless, utensils". The natives, after initially trying their hardest to avoid him, decide he would make a delicious dinner, so they invite him in, ransack his goods, and throw him into a cauldron while a mammy chef prepares him as soup. They proceed to familiarize themselves with vacuum cleaners, batteries, light bulbs, etc.
  The village queen (depicted as an old, chicken-like white woman, possibly to avoid any problems with the Hays code over the issue of miscegenation) hears of the arrival of the salesman, and desperate for a husband, she brings him in. As Manny delivers his sales pitch, the queen sees him as Clark Gable and Robert Taylor and is smitten, demanding she be married right away. The two are rushed into a marriage, and when asked to kiss the bride, Manny panics and jumps back into the cauldron; in a closing shot, he curses his captors with the hope that "they all get indigestion" as he submerges into the pot to his death.
caption: A scene from the film.
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