I wasn’t what you would call a quick convert to the Church of Tarantino. I remember when Pulp Fiction came out and I fully admit to thinking the ad campaign for it made the film look stupid. My freshman year at the University of Minnesota I lived on the St Paul campus which had its own movie theater. While I can brag that I watched Clerks there before you even knew it existed, I turned a blind eye to Pulp Fiction when it played there. Even that summer, when I was home and working at a movie theater, I did my best to ignore the marketing for it. Why would I care about a bunch of has-beens and never-weres with bad haircuts?

Soon enough I learned the error of my ways. I watched Reservoir Dogs and was so impressed that I finally was rather intrigued at what Pulp Fiction was going to be like. Luckily, I knew several clerks at my local video store and they loaned me a screener copy of the film so I could see what all the fuss was about.

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I’m not quite sure how I pulled it off, but I became a Ralph Bakshi fan at a fairly young age. My first introduction to him, as it probably was for most kids, was Bakshi’s failed children’s film Wizards. And by failed I mean totally awesome!

You see Bakshi was a bit of a novelty amongst American cartoonists in that he didn’t make animated films that pandered to children and their parents. He wasn’t much of a fan of Disney so when he made a children’s film about warring wizards in a post-apocalyptic world he made sure to include plenty of bloody violence, authentic Nazi war propaganda films and an assassin named Peace. Needless to say critics and parents were a bit bewildered by the film and it was soon relegated to obscurity.

From there I moved on next to Street Fight (aka Coonskin). Unlike Wizards, Street Fight was made specifically for adults as it was a parody of blaxploitation films and satirizes racist stereotypes. And as it was made for adults it came with an R rating attached. Now at the time I was around 13 years old, and the idea of an R rated cartoon seemed positively unthinkable, if not impossible to me. (Little did I know that Bakshi had already topped that rating with his first feature film Fritz the Cat, which had garnered an X rating.) Sure enough, like any blaxploitation film Street Fight was filled with violence, rampant cursing and even the occasional bit of nudity. Nudity in a cartoon? That’s unpossible!
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