Phallic!!

Apparently new mischief has occurred in Cartoonland.

... There is no way a phallic symbol should be able to make it into a kid’s cartoon series — but then came the Netflix original series Myah the Bee.

The show is an animated series based on a children’s book and it raised eyebrows in the past few days when a number of concerned parents spotted a penis drawing in one of the episodes. Despite Netflix removing the penis-bearing episode, receipts were kept as a number of parents took to social media to share their crude findings.

Dirty pictures have a long and storied tradition in the animation arts. I've been privileged to see dirty gag drawings of Virgil Partch and Ward Kimball from the long ago thirties and forties. I was able to freeze the frame of The Rescuers video and spy the Playboy playmate in the window of a New York skyscraper. I was the proud owner of a Little Mermaid VHS box with a palace tower shaped like an engorged male member.

In my (now completed) professional life, I oversaw a grievance against a large studio that accused a guild member of drawing breasts and penises into layout designs. The Animation Guild fought the good fight, but the company brought in three artists who testified that, yup, those curves and straight lines were indeed penises and breasts, because the artist himself had told them that's what they were.

(The guild lost the grievance.)

Add On: The producer of the penis Maya the Bee issues this heart-felt (but not really) apology:

“An absolutely inappropriate image has been discovered in a four-second fly-by scene in one episode of the total of 78 episodes of the series,” producer Studio 100 said in a statement released to media this morning. “The origin of this image obviously results from a very bad joke from one of the 150 artists working on the production.”

Come on, people! It was only ONE episode. Anybody can slip here and there. Netflix shouldn't hold this against Studio 100. Appropriate disciplinary measures will be taken, I'm sure.