NEW YORK (AP) — Disney’s Maker Studios and Google’s YouTube are distancing themselves from a top YouTube star after he made jokes construed as anti-Semitic and posted Nazi imagery in his videos.
Felix Kjellberg, known online as PewDiePie, has the most popular YouTube channel, with more than 53 million subscribers. The Swedish YouTube star rose to fame by posting videos of him playing and commenting about video games. More recently, he branched out into non-gaming videos that show him performing skits, stunts or making jokes.
Disney, whose Maker Studios runs Kjellberg’s channels and network, said he crossed the line with some of his videos. One video from January shows two Indian men paid by Kjellberg to hold up a sign that says “Death to all Jews.” Kjellberg said the video was meant to demonstrate how far people will go if they get paid to do something, but he didn’t think they would actually do it. Other videos show Nazi imagery in a satirical way.
In blog post Kjellberg said he was making jokes, but realizes now that they were offensive.
Kjellberg’s channel was already part of Maker Studios when the Walt Disney Co. bought Maker in 2014 for $675 million. Maker contracts with individuals such as Kjellberg to produce videos for various YouTube channels.
Kjellberg (pronounced SHEHL’-burg) pulled the video showing the two men displaying the anti-Semitic sign, but it is excerpted in a Wall Street Journal video. Other videos still on the site show Nazi imagery being used satirically.
Maker Studios said in a statement that while Kjellberg’s channel is popular because he is irreverent and provocative, the studio is ending its affiliation with him because he went too far.
YouTube spokeswoman Michelle Slavich said YouTube has canceled the release of the second season of Kjellberg’s reality show “Scare PewDiePie” and removed the PewDiePie channel from its Google Preferred advertising program, which aggregates top YouTube content for advertisers to buy time on.
Copyright 2017 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Oh come on! This is such a Mickey Mouse charge. He’s just being Goofy.
The neigh do wells at Breitbart and Stormfront must be appalled at the attack on Snow White.
AG Jefferson Beauregard Sessions is now investigating why there are no restored copies of Song of the South.
Ah, “Song of the South.” I believe I, as a tot, saw its very last theatrical release. (Back in the olden days, before streaming, Blueray, DVD, VCR, or even Betaxmas and Laserdisk, Disney used to re-release the classics in the vault every x years, they ran as first run movies on the A circuit time after time, and people went to see them, if only to inflict the same traumatizing terror on their children that they themselves experienced when they were kids.)
Never to be seen again, and yet still less grotesquely offensive than “Gone With the Wind” which still gets shown on TV all the time.
Trump: We welcome him to Trump administration.
FOX: No, he has signed up with us.
Trump: Is there any difference between us?
FOX: Trump has a point.
[quote=“ncsteve, post:3, topic:51447”]
Disney used to re-release the classics in the vault every x years, they ran as first run movies on the A circuit time after time.
I never saw Song of the south in a theater, only clips on TV. The Frank Zappa tune Uncle Remus is a biting satire on it and race in general.
I remember when they did this. They’d rerelease say Fantasia in some of the upscale theaters like a Ziegfeld. The neighborhood houses would get the latest Disney fare like Herbie, the Love Bug and Boatninks with Robert Morse and the vivacious Stephanie Powers with some shorts thrown in. Disney from his frozen crypt knew how to keep the audience clamoring for product.
The very thing that made Song of the South less offensive than Gone With the Wind is that there are no depictions of enslaved people deeply happy and satisfied with their servitude and loyally devoted to their masters, particularly Scarlett who, frankly, was the type most at risk of being poisoned by the enslaved cook.
Disney was determined to make the movie, but knew he was dealing with dynamite that could either get him boycotted by every theater in the south or set off a wave reputation damaging of protest and condemnation in the north. So he set the story in the 1880s (which, after all, was when Chandler actually heard the stories) and portrayed Remus as a freedman and retired retainer to wash away that part of the stain, but they also sanitized away some of the more overt “this is how you survive as an enslaved person and resist where and how you can, the theft of your labor and freedom” aspects to the stories.
He still got condemned for avoiding the unavoidable, but he basically managed to tread that line. No depictions of enslaved people happy to be enslaved because of their own inferiority and the kindness and benevolence of their owners, but also the reduction of the stories to funny animal tales, with the obviousness of Br’er Fox and Bear’s being overseers rubbed away and King Lion, the plantation owner perfectly capable of killing you if not handled carefully, entirely omitted.
But still, that one’s in the vault, while we are still periodically subjected to Gone With the Wind, and Big Sam, shovel in hand, cheerfully announcing “we’s gone dig for de Souf, Miz Scarlett!” and saving her from the pillaging, raping Yankees on TV.
The worst part being that the novel Scarlett is an even nastier piece of work than the movie Scarlett.