Bamboozled / YMMV - TV Tropes

Aluminum Christmas Trees:
- The whole premise mirrors The Black and White Minstrel Show, which ran to high ratings from 1958 to 1978 on BBC television and continued doing live performances until 1989. It had high production values, excellent writing and performances, and was hugely popular among British audiences at the time.
- Black people in blackface was also a real thing.
- The blackface baby on the film poster was an actual element of racist iconography in the United States, being sourced from a 1922 ad◊ for Picaninny Freeze.
Anvilicious: Spike Lee isn't exactly known for subtlety, but Bamboozled may be his biggest assault on discretion yet. The literal first words of the movie are the main character giving the dictionary definition of satire (because it is a satire, get it??) and doesn't go uphill from there. Meanwhile, many critics at the time felt the Springtime for Hitler plot was played either too dark or too unambiguously awful to be believable, with one critic arguing "Imagine a verse in 'Springtime for Hitler' about being sent to gas chambers."^note
Audience-Alienating Premise: A film that tries to examine how the media portrays black people, comparing it to blackface... with long scenes of actors in actual blackface. A very hard sell, to say the least.
Cult Classic: While it got pretty polarizing reviews and pulled some poor numbers at the box office during its initial release, it would later be appreciated for its satirical look at stereotypical depictions of black people in both historical and contemporary American popular culture.
Ending Fatigue: By the final act, the film has descended into bizarre melodrama and rambling repetition of its scattershot messages.
He Really Can Act: Savion Glover not only gets to show off his legendary tapping abilities, but gives a thoroughly convincing performance as the angry, self-absorbed Manray.
Jerk Ass Woobie: Delacroix. He's making a show that's deliberately harming black people for the sake of his own success and being a Boomerang Bigot in the process. But the crises of conscience that he has throughout the movie and the slow dawning realization of what he's done still makes it possible to feel sorry for him, at times.
Spiritual Successor: To Ralph Bakshi's animated film Coonskin, a similar satire of old-time racial and ethnic stereotypes in the entertainment industry, particularly Minstrel Shows, and how they're deployed against Black people while connecting them to more modern examples of the same. Lee himself is a fan of Coonskin, so it's likely that he was influenced by it.
Tear Jerker: Manray's death at the hands of the Mau Mau's. What's worse is that before that, he had a falling out with his best friend Womack and the two never got a chance to reconcile.
Values Resonance: While shows have not gone to the outlandish example shown in the movie, shows like Housewives of Atlanta and even the entire network BET have been accused of everything Lee was making a commentary on. Dave Chappelle even infamously abandoned his show after having a crisis of conscience over this.
Vindicated by History: On initial release, the film was dismissed as an overly-anvilicious piece that made its satire too on-the-noise and its subject too obvious to be genuinely compelling. By the mid-2010's, however, it would be frequently held up as one of Spike Lee's most underrated works and a prescient look into modern race relations and the persistence of anti-black tropes in popular media and culture.

YMMV / Bamboozled

Edit Locked