Censored Eleven

The Censored Eleven is a group of Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons originally produced by Leon Schlesinger Productions and released by Warner Bros. Pictures between 1931 and 1944. All of them have been withheld from syndication in the United States by United Artists (UA) since 1968. UA owned the distribution rights to the Associated Artists Productions library at that time, and decided to pull these 11 cartoons from broadcast because the use of ethnic stereotypes in the cartoons, specifically African and African-American stereotypes, was deemed too offensive for contemporary audiences. The ban has been continued by UA and the successive owners of the pre-August 1948 Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies. Since 1968, these shorts have not been officially broadcast on television and have only been exhibited theatrically by Warner Bros. once (in 2010, see below for more details) since their withdrawal. They have turned up, however, on low-cost VHS and DVD collections.