The Popeye and Pals Show on MeTV had "Jitterbug Jive" on this morning, and that brought on a flood of nostalgia.
Not that I lived through the Zoot Suit age of course, but rather that it lived through us for a while. There were a scattering of cartoons - Popeye, Tom and Jerry, Mighty Mouse, and Warner Brothers - that had the movement fossilized in several shorts.
We had no idea until the Nineties that the Zoot suit was "an important symbol of cultural pride and defiance of oppression in the Chicano Movement after the Zoot Suit Riots of 1943." We did understand that it was a youthful defiance of "the squares" with its colorful clothes and rhyming jargon. It was particularly popular among Mexican, Filipino, Italian, Japanese, and African Americans. It was, to us, sort of an equivalent of the Hippie culture of our youth, almost an object lesson on the passing nature of all 'hip' movements. Still, bits of it remain embedded in our Babelese, and my youngest brother Yen is liable to open every phone call to me with "Greetings, skate!" The Zoot Suit still appears in various more recent animations, its flamboyant and gaudy style making it well-suited (yuk-yuk!) to cartoon graphics.
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