cartoon's themes, that sinners may be redeemed, from the opening credits. As the scene shifts to Harlem, the jazz standard "Sweet Georgia Brown" accompanies the bevy of African American vices. Caricatures of Bill "Bojangles" Robinson and Al Jolson perform snippets of the blackface tunes "Old Folks at Home" and "I Love to Singa". However, the short's major number is "Swing for Sale", performed by caricatures of popular black jazz performers. The short ends with a jazzed-up version of James A. Bland's minstrel spiritual "Oh! Dem Golden Slippers". Critical reception Black critics in the 1930s wrote about the play and film The Green Pastures, but they were silent on its animated parody. Weisenfeld speculates that this is because animated cartoons were not seen as significant at the time. Modern critics of Clean Pastures fault the film for its stereotypical depictions of black culture. Cultural studies scholar William Anthony Nericcio sees the film as representative of a pattern in the works of Friz Freleng, who also produced such stereotype-ridden films as Jungle Jitters, Goldilocks and the Jivin' Bears, and the Speedy Gonzales cartoons. Lindvall and Fraser are more forgiving and call the cartoon "playful", "light", and "mischievous". Daniel Goldmark alleges that the film is a burlesque of black religion and culture in its portrayal of Pair-O-Dice as "heavenly Harlem shops and singing choirs". In his interpretation, the film's use of rhythm is a metaphor for faith. This demonstrates white Americans' placement of jazz alongside religion and "the unfettered expressions of emotion associated with it" as aspects of African American culture. The cartoon implies that jazz cannot be replaced in the black psyche, as the musicians in the film must appropriate jazz, not compete with it, to draw Harlemites to Pair-O-Dice. The mortal characters are given no information about why Pair-O-Dice is better than Harlem, but the upbeat music is enough to lure them there. Even the Devil himself takes the bait. In the end, the film reaffirms the vision of Paradise from The Green Pastures, with its "perpetual Negro holiday [and] everlasting weekend fish fry." On the other hand, Judith Weisenfeld sees Clean Pastures as an explicit rejection of Connelly's fish fry. Instead, she argues that the short is a metaphor for the replacement of one generation of African American performers and stereotypes for a new one as the result of African Americans moving to urban areas. In contrast to The Green