Saint Peter and his Stepin Fetchit underling, the animators ducked the potential offense white audiences might have felt upon seeing a black God. Notes Many Hollywood cartoons from the 1930s are based on feature films. Therefore, it was only natural for Leon Schlesinger's cartoon studio to parody the 1936 Warner Bros. musical film The Green Pastures, itself an adaptation of a play by Marc Connelly which won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1930. The Green Pastures features an all-black cast and proved a success for Warner Bros., despite generating controversy. Animator Friz Freleng had directed the short Sunday Go to Meetin' Time in 1936. The cartoon lampoons African American religious beliefs to the backdrop of jazz music and tells the story of a rural black man who shirks church on Sunday in favor of worldly pastimes and finds himself in Hell as a result. Clean Pastures was thus keeping with his past work. Freleng even reuses animation of a jitterbugging couple from the Sunday Go to Meetin' Time in Clean Pastures. The short's use of caricatures of famous performers was in the same vein as such Freleng films as At Your Service Madame and The Coo-Coo Nut Grove. Schlesinger and Warner Bros. had problems with Clean Pastures from the start. Hollywood censors alleged that the film ran afoul of the Hays Production Code because it burlesqued religion. Later commentators surmise that the censors also objected to the portrayal of a Heaven run by African Americans. Modern critics have been no kinder to the film and cite its portrayal of black characters as offensive and reliant on negative stereotypes. Musicologist Daniel Goldmark interprets the film as a send-up of black religion and culture and the increasing identification of 1930s white audiences of jazz music with black culture. Religion scholar Judith Weisenfeld sees Clean Pastures as a metaphor for the replacement of rural, minstrel show stereotypes of blacks for modern, urban ones Warner Bros. had trouble distributing the film. In an interview for Look magazine, producer Leon Schlesinger complained that Clean Pastures gave him more trouble with Hollywood censors than any live-action film. Censor Joseph I. Breen alleged that the cartoon violated the Hays Production Code, a set of rules for the content of American films, because it burlesqued religion. In a letter to Schlesinger, Breen complained about the scenes set in a parodic Heaven known as "Pair-O-Dice" and said, "I