‘Black Dynamite’ Creator Carl Jones Defends Blaxploitation Films – And Pimping! [VIDEO EXCLUSIVE]

Carl Jones, creator of the animated version of Black Dynamite and The Boondocks, thinks that blaxploitation, the film genre that was popularized in the 1970s, should be celebrated not maligned. Most of the main protagonists in the films were actually pimps, which inspired the concept of Black Dynamite. “In a lot of ways if you look at it under the right scope, you’ll see pimps were probably the first iteration of black men—in America,” Jones told uInterview. Byron Minns, who voices the character Bullhorn on Dynamite, jokes that Jones is “glorifying pimping.”

Michael Jai White, who voices Black Dynamite on the show, recalls how blaxploitation films, such as Superfly (1972), in which pimps were the predominate on-screen representation of a black male, were just the norm when he was growing up. “That made me think about, how twisted of a childhood that we had these—but that was the only representation of an alpha-male that we had,” he laughs.

The Black Dynamite Season One DVD/BluRay will be released on July 15.