American Pop is not a Hester Street nor a Mean Streets, films which deliberately develop ethnic themes and settings as their central focus. On the contrary, it is a film which incorporates ethnic material in a subplot, but the subplot of the melting pot and the call of the American Dream is so essential to the history of American popular music that the subject actually provides the narrative core for the entire film…. American Pop is more than music; it is about nothing less than the Great American Dream. All of Bakshi's films in fact, with the exception of his two voyages into fantasy, Wizards and The Lord of the Rings, are about the American Dream in one form or another…. (pp. 105-06)

Aside from his two fantasy films, all of Bakshi's work dramatizes the cultural diversity of American urban life. In Fritz the Cat (1972), Heavy Traffic (1973), and...