The reactions to the decision by Disney to revive the nearsighted cartoon character, Mr Magoo, for a new film to be released at Christmas, show better than any sociologist how the US has changed.
Mr Magoo first appeared in 1949 as a "short, nasty, stubborn old man with a tomato-shaped nose". He was a mixture of comedian W.C. Fields and the mean uncle of the cartoonist, one of the Magoo creators from that time has recalled.
To make Magoo funny, the cartoonists made him half blind. In one of the first short films, Ragtime Bear, Magoo mistakes the bear for his nephew, Waldo, and fires a shotgun blast at him when he loses his temper. "Get yourself a new coat," he shouts at the bear, tearing at his fur. "You're disgraceful."
Today, many blind people think Disney is disgraceful for bringing Magoo back to the screen. The National Federation of the Blind is up in arms.
The federation's president, Marc Maurer, says: "The Disney people have dragged Mr Magoo back from richly deserved obscurity in the hope that Americans will think it's funny to watch an ill-tempered and incompetent blind man stumble into things and misunderstand his surroundings".
An almost-blind writer, Kathi Wolfe, said the news that Magoo was making a come-back brought back "unpleasant childhood memories" when "the other kids having seen Mr Magoo would point at my Coke-bottle glasses and shout `Magoo'." But Henry Saperstein of United Pictures of America (UPA), which owns Magoo, says that Ms Wolfe "completely misses the point that in more than 200 films, Mr Magoo - despite his near-sightedness - is courageous, heroic and dignified and always shows that you can win even if you have a handicap".
Disney has rushed to explain that the new Magoo will be different. The film will portray him as "a kindly gentleman who is nearsighted, not blind".
Leslie Nielsen, the actor who will play Magoo in the new film, says: "Yes, the vulnerabilities are there. But so are the strengths, the gentleness, honesty, inventiveness and courage. Above all, Magoo ends up as a hero."
Making Magoo a hero was the last thing his original creators wanted. Ironically, they were artists who had broken away from Disney after a strike in 1941 to set up UPA.
In a period of increasing conservatism and witch-hunts for alleged communists, the liberal UPA artists wanted to show that Mr Magoo's physical handicap was a satirical metaphor for his intellectual myopia. He only saw what he wanted to see. Besides, in those days, nobody worried about offending blind people.
Senator Joseph McCarthy's anti-communist blacklist later targeted the UPA artists and they had to split up. But Magoo survived by becoming a bit more lovable, and by the mid-1950s was getting Academy Awards.
Magoo's new milder conservatism appealed to American audiences. In Gumshoe Magoo he mistakes a spotted slab of beef for the butcher's saucy wife and reproves him. "She'll catch her death in that flimsy purple print frock. So daring too."
Television in the 1960s made Magoo less popular as cinema audiences fell off. UPA was bought by Henry Saper stein who re-invented Magoo as a cartoon character for children's television. "I softened him in the '60s so he was more like a doting, old fashioned uncle," he told the Wall Street Journal, which has traced the development of Magoo.
But the serious critics did not approve of the new Magoo who stumbled around patting the tops of fire hydrants thinking they were children and driving his car along pavements. In his book, Television Cartoon Shows, Hal Erickson wrote: "TV's Mr Magoo was as blind as a bat and that was the series only joke. The subtext that his myopia was as much psychological as physical was all but lost."
Mr Magoo took on a new role when NBC ran a successful series in which he interpreted literary classics. He played Ishmael from Moby Dick, Dr Watson, Gunga Din and Snow White's seven dwarfs, but without being blind.
Magoo had a spell starring in TV advertisements when he helped to sell Treasury bonds and to recruit for the navy. But his attraction was waning and UPA stopped making new Magoo films by 1970.
Cable TV called on Magoo re-runs in the 1990s to fill some of its slots but his Asian housekeeper, Cholly, had to be dubbed so that her singsong voice would not seem racist.
In 1993, Steven Spielberg took out an option to make a full-length Magoo feature film. He never took up the option so we will never know whether he would have turned Magoo into a space alien with glasses.
Then two years ago, Disney came looking for Mr Magoo. The wheel had come full circle. Disney executives say that "at a time when everyone is cynical and complicated, Magoo is innocent and naive".
In the new film, he is mistaken for a jewel thief, has a series of misadventures such as riding an ironing board down a ski slope and ends up capturing the robber.
See it close-up in a cinema near you.