re: this paragraph:

"Some cats learnt how to be iceberg cold on the mic, because The Mack served as their instructional video of “the game.” Personally, it still bugs me out that the same person that directed The Mack also made the gritty and wonderful The Education of Sonny Carson, another one of those films like Sounder, Sparkle and Cooley High (a movie I still watch once a year) that were really quality films became stuck with the Blaxploitation label simply because the studio did know what to do with the project otherwise."


As the black version of the then-recently-popular "American Grafitti" and a production of the kings of exploitation, American International, "Cooley High" was labeled a blaxploitation film because that's what it was greenlit as. It just happened to be better than most (if not all) of the other films so categorized. It turned out far better than "Black Shampoo", that's for sure.

...not so with "Sparkle". Other than its being a period piece, not much separates "Sparkle" quality-wise from the average blaxploitation film (remember, some of those have a Lonette McKee caliber performance as well).

"Sounder", however, doesn't, in any way, qualify the "blaxploitation" tag.

Also, protests were only part of the end of blaxploitation. Diminishing returns (including the failure of "The Wiz") and the start of the shift of the film business towards the tentpole blockbuster both killed off blaxploitation (and by association most studio films with predominately black casts for some time afterwards).