ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF ...

slips away with his clothes. The tigers spin so fast they melt into butter, which becomes
part of an impressive meal of pancakes at Sambo’s household.
The story was republished dozens of times in the coming century, and inspired a
large number of related children’s stories. Well into the mid-twentieth century, reviewers
and educational specialists cited the book as exceptionally well-crafted, and highly
recommended. Some went so far as to claim that the book helped raise racial
consciousness in the minds of white children. 243
In the 1930s, Sambo was a staple of children’s entertainment. Many puppeteers
adopted the minstrelsy characteristics of the Bannerman tale in their productions.
However, theatre historians are fortunate that Martha Perrine Munger, of the Munger
family of puppeteers, published her version of the play in A Book of Puppets (1934), else
no contemporary scripts would have been preserved. 244 Munger provides detailed
descriptions of her family’s production, explicating their stage, costumes, sounds,
properties, and music.
Munger’s adaptation was a telling blend of minstrelsy-derived stereotyping and
faux-eastern exoticization. To begin, the puppeteer introduced “Negro songs and
243 Selma G. Lanes, Down the Rabbit Hole (New York: Atheneum, 1971), 161-62. In later
decades, objectors to the story grew to outweigh its defenders. Among the targets were the story’s many
illustrations, which seemed to make Sambo’s mother into the “Aunt Jemima” or “Mammy” character, a
stereotyped domestic, obese, Southern black mother, and depicted Sambo in his finery similar to a minstrel
costume. Attempts to quell the controversy without sacrificing the book included renaming the book Little
Sambo or Little Brave Sambo (in which Sambo is a white boy living in the African jungle) but by then the
name was too well known for its connections to counterfeit ethnicity. By the mid-1970s, the title had been
removed from most lists of recommended books.
244 Puppeteers who drew their plays from well-known texts seldom printed their adaptations.
Munger’s is the sole contemporary adaptation of Sambo.
190