DisneyZip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah, Zip-A-Dee-A, my oh my, what a wonderful day, accusations of racism heading Disney's way, Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah, Zip-A-Dee-A. Song Of The South is a rare example of a film that the studio didn't bury on release, but whose availability has been severely repressed in the intervening years, thanks to some... shall we say problematic depictions of black people in what's otherwise a fairly standard Disney musical, combining live action actors with animation in an adaptation of the Uncle Remus stories collected by Joel Chandler Harris. You're gonna have some trouble with any film that involves black former slaves in Reconstruction-Era Georgia, especially when the film in question isn't a serious historical drama ala 12 Years A Slave but a whimsical family film with talking animals and singing. Let alone a film that inspired a ride at Disneyland (Splash Mountain) and won an Oscar for a song sun by a black man in 1947, when civil rights were, er, not the way they are now. Since then the film has rarely been shown in full, instead being aired on TV in a severely edited form that leaves only the animated musical sequences and not a whole lot else. So what's the problem with it? Well, it's unrelentingly racist. In a post-Civil War south setting, Song Of The South shows a totally unrealistic and offensive slave-master relationship, where James Baskett's Uncle Remus is a kindly old man who just loves hanging out on a plantation. Which is good, because he literally doesn't have a choice. Because he's a slave. This is a Disney film about how much fun it was to be a black slave. And so, it's never been released officially on home video in the US, and only on VHS in the eighties and nineties elsewhere
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
DisneyZip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah, Zip-A-Dee-A, my oh my, what a wonderful day, accusations of racism heading Disney's way, Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah, Zip-A-Dee-A. Song Of The South is a rare example of a film that the studio didn't bury on release, but whose availability has been severely repressed in the intervening years, thanks to some... shall we say problematic depictions of black people in what's otherwise a fairly standard Disney musical, combining live action actors with animation in an adaptation of the Uncle Remus stories collected by Joel Chandler Harris. You're gonna have some trouble with any film that involves black former slaves in Reconstruction-Era Georgia, especially when the film in question isn't a serious historical drama ala 12 Years A Slave but a whimsical family film with talking animals and singing. Let alone a film that inspired a ride at Disneyland (Splash Mountain) and won an Oscar for a song sun by a black man in 1947, when civil rights were, er, not the way they are now. Since then the film has rarely been shown in full, instead being aired on TV in a severely edited form that leaves only the animated musical sequences and not a whole lot else. So what's the problem with it? Well, it's unrelentingly racist. In a post-Civil War south setting, Song Of The South shows a totally unrealistic and offensive slave-master relationship, where James Baskett's Uncle Remus is a kindly old man who just loves hanging out on a plantation. Which is good, because he literally doesn't have a choice. Because he's a slave. This is a Disney film about how much fun it was to be a black slave. And so, it's never been released officially on home video in the US, and only on VHS in the eighties and nineties elsewhere