Yet to dump it on Disney+ with a standard disclaimer would expose casual clickers to some truly shocking material without the context necessary to process it.
It does no one any service to paper over an important piece of Disney history, even one that so severely maligns the image of Walt Disney as the benevolent dream-maker responsible for your last family vacation and myriad plushies and lunchboxes. The issue of how to contend with Song of the South is as thorny as the briar patch the film’s mischievous animated hero, Br’er Rabbit, calls home. But it was never released on home video in the US, and its most enduring cultural footprints are the song and the Splash Mountain log flume rides at Disneyland, Magic Kingdom and Tokyo Disneyland. The film was a modest success when it came out – and won an Oscar for the original song Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah – and children of multiple generations got to know it through periodic rereleases that lasted as far as 1986.
It’s creepily apropos that Song of the South debuted in the racially segregated city of Atlanta, an urban center that the Georgia plantation dwellers in the film consider grimly as a chaotic destination for its African American characters. The word “may”, frankly, smacks of unnecessary bet-hedging.īut there’s one title that won’t be appearing on the service any time soon: 1946’s Song of the South, a live-action/animation hybrid that’s much more comprehensive in its “outdated cultural depictions” than any other film in the catalog. While the new documentary series The Imagineering Story plays up Disney’s innovation and meticulousness in developing the company’s theme parks, the retrograde elements in some of his animated films (the singing crows in Dumbo, the “stay with your own kind” sentiment of The Jungle Book, the Siamese cats in Lady and the Tramp, the “What Made the Red Man Red?” song in Peter Pan, etc) are preserved with a warning to viewers that the films “may contain outdated cultural depictions”. Yet The Walt Disney Company has a longstanding Walt Disney problem, and for Disney+, the answer so far has been to mix propaganda with gentle disclaimers.
0 kommentar(er)
