Joe Jitsu is a fictional police officer, one of ''

Dick Tracy ''Dick Tracy'' is an American comic strip featuring Dick Tracy (originally Plainclothes Tracy), a tough and intelligent police detective created by Chester Gould. It made its debut on Sunday, October 4, 1931, in the ''Detroit Mirror'', and it ...

''s crimefighters in the 1961 syndicated

animated cartoon Animation is a method by which still figures are manipulated to appear as moving images. In traditional animation, images are drawn or painted by hand on transparent celluloid sheets to be photographed and exhibited on film. Today, most anima ...

series of the popular comic strip. He has since been criticised as a Japanese stereotype. He is named after

Ju-Jitsu Jujutsu ( ; ja, link=no, 柔術 , ), also known as jiu-jitsu and ju-jitsu, is a family of Japanese martial arts and a system of close combat (unarmed or with a minor weapon) that can be used in a defensive or offensive manner to kill or subdu ...

, a Japanese martial art. His method of subduing criminals was to grab them by the wrist, and exclaim "So solly!" and "Excuse, prease!" while repeatedly judo-flipping them on the ground violently. The voice for this character was provided by

Benny Rubin Benny Rubin (February 2, 1899 – July 15, 1986) was an American comedian and film actor. Born in Boston, Rubin made more than 200 radio, film and television appearances over a span of 50 years. Career In 1929, Rubin went to Hollywood, where he ...

. Both Joe Jitsu and Go-Go Gomez, a Mexican stereotype, have been edited out of some reruns of the ''Dick Tracy'' cartoon series.

Henry G. Saperstein Henry Gahagen Saperstein (June 2, 1918 – June 24, 1998) was an American film producer and distributor. Biography The son of Aaron Saperstein and Beatrice Pearl Saperstein, Henry's father owned five independent cinemas in Chicago. Henry was ed ...

, then the chairman of UPA, stated "It's just a cartoon, for goodness' sake." Others pointed out that the 'stereotypes' included two Europeans (Hemlock Holmes and Heap O'Calorie, who are British and Irish respectively), and that the Joe Jitsu character was a deliberate attempt to re-introduce a sympathetic Japanese character after the passions of the last war had died down.

In other media

*Joe Jitsu makes a cameo in the ''

Drawn Together ''Drawn Together'' is an American adult animation, adult animated sitcom created by Dave Jeser and Matt Silverstein and premiered on Comedy Central on October 27, 2004. The series is a parody of ''The Surreal Life'' and follows the misadventures ...

'' episode "Foxxy vs. the Board of Education" and is depicted as one of the Asian students who disguised to take the

SAT The SAT ( ) is a standardized test widely used for college admissions in the United States. Since its debut in 1926, its name and scoring have changed several times; originally called the Scholastic Aptitude Test, it was later called the Schola ...

test in place of the other students who are using them to fake their scores.

References

Television characters introduced in 1961 Dick Tracy characters DreamWorks Classics UPA series and characters Fictional American police detectives Fictional judoka Fictional jujutsuka Fictional American characters of Japanese descent Male characters in animation Male characters in television Animation controversies in television Race-related controversies in animation Race-related controversies in television {{animation-char-stub