More ado about Song of the South

Last updated on: May 12, 2007 at 12:15 pm by Peter T. Chattaway

More ado about Song of the South 2007-05-12T12:15:00-07:00 Peter T. Chattaway

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Song of the South (1946; my comments) makes the news again — this time via an article in Maclean’s magazine:

. . . The ironic thing is that keeping Song of the South out of circulation may have caused Disney even more trouble. Because the company is so anxious to hide it, the legend has arisen that the film is some kind of white-supremacist movie, a suppressed example of Walt Disney’s racism. Many articles about the film claim that Uncle Remus is a slave; if the movie were available, people could see for themselves that he isn’t. Saturday Night Live‘s Robert Smigel even did a parody of it where Uncle Remus sings, “Zip-a-dee doo-dah, Zip-a-dee-ay / Negroes are inferior in every way.” If people could see the movie, they’d see its virtues as well as its flaws; because they can’t see it, they’ve inflated it into a negative legend on a par with Disney’s support for fascism, or his frozen head.

What’s more, Disney executives have gotten worse publicity for not releasing Song of the South than they would probably get for releasing it. After Iger’s comments about the film at the 2006 meeting, there were stories in the newspapers and on the Internet that portrayed him as bowing to so-called political correctness. “I think Iger was genuinely being sincere,” Hill says. “He’d looked at the film, and was trying to give a sense of ‘this is the kinder, gentler, not-Michael Eisner version of the Walt Disney company. We’re not going to be nakedly about profit.’ ” But the story wasn’t that Iger was kind and gentle; the story was that he’d chickened out.

Iger has charged one of his executives, Dick Cook, with the task of finding a way for the company to flip-flop on Song of the South. Hill says Cook is considering putting the film into the Disney Treasures, a series of box sets where some controversial short subjects have been released. The problem with that plan, though, is that the Disney Treasures is a limited-edition series that prints only 100,000 copies of each title, and the demand for Song of the South is far bigger than that. “They need to make this as big a release as possible,” Hill explains, “but they also need to assure the Wal-Marts and the Targets that no one’s going to be protesting outside of their stores for selling Song of the South.”

Meanwhile, despite Song of the South‘s reputation as a “lost” film, it’s really only “lost” in North America. Though Iger claimed that “ethics and integrity” demand that the film be suppressed, it’s on television in England every year, and several countries have been allowed to release it on home video. So how would Hill, for one, sum up the Disney company’s attitude to Song of the South? This way: ” ‘We’re keeping it on moratorium in the United States because this is where all the pains in the ass live.’ “

FWIW, I believe the image above is from a bootleg DVD that took its cover art from the British VHS edition.

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