I have Disney+. I was watching a show from 1966 about Disneyland. It was an episode of the Wonderful World of Color I think. Before the show started, they put up a notice that said “This program includes negative depictions and/or mistreatment of people or cultures. These stereotypes were wrong then and are wrong now. Rather than remove this content, we want to acknowledge its harmful impact, learn from it and spark conversation to create a more inclusive future together.”
I watched the show and I’m not sure which things were wrong. Nothing jumped out at me as “Ooh, that is just wrong.” For part of the show, they were talking about New Orleans Square as it was just opening and they did show a couple of boys (performers) that were dressed as shoe shine boys and were dancing and singing. I suppose that might have been what they were referring to. But I can’t be sure.
This got me thinking, if they were ok with this content with a notice, why don’t they do the same with Song of the South. I know it is controversial but I’ve seen the movie and James Baskett’s performance (as Uncle Remus) was wonderful and I think it is a shame that his performance can’t be seen. Maybe I am naïve, but I saw the story in the movie as a story about the relationship between a boy and Uncle Remus and what Uncle Remus taught the boy about how to deal with situations in life.
Probably the basis of one but not the other is the difference between something being perceived as “incidental” and something that is perceived as pervasive through the whole work.
Probably because the issues with Song of the South were realized before the medium of streaming, or at least Disney’s ability to control distribution through that mechanism, were available to enable them to set that message, so the excision of SotS from the available Disney catalog was done as a much more blunt instrument, and just not yet re-visited. Perhaps now that Disney+ has been successfully launched, Disney will consider releasing it with a similar warning if there is enough demand.
I will be curious to see if SotS comes to D+. I think it should, but the high-profile nature of the original controversy and the overt nature of the issues probably calls for something a little more heavy handed than the simple disclaimer. Maybe a brief video intro in which someone important (in lieu of Walt himself) explains the problems and cautions against the content.
Just like we don’t erase nasty stuff from our history books, we shouldn’t erase cultural products that arose from those same events. Seeing how this stuff evolved then might help us avoid or recognize similar mistakes from today’s prejudices that maybe aren’t yet universally recognized.
Disney has apparently put the notice up for several films. I can easily guess the reasons
Dumbo – the crows
Lady and the Tramp – Siamese cats
Aristocats – ethnic cats, especially the Chinese one
Swiss Family Robinson – east Asian pirates, no doubt
Disney’s caution extends beyond these obvious cases. I once saw a documentary on war cartoons that mentioned (but didn’t show) Der Fuhrer’s Face, apparently to avoid slandering caricatures of Germans.
Actually, quite a few of Disney’s cartoons are problematical about such things. I re-watched their "Man into Space’ series, and the depictions of Chinese people in the historical cartoon segments wouldn’t have been made today. Things were different as recently as the 1960s.
In order to truly understand SotS, you should read “Who’s afraid of Song of the South” by Jim Korkis.
I agree with the OP this should be done, but due to the overwhelming ignorance about the film, it likely never will be.
Having seen the film, and read the book, the main issue is ignorance. However, yes there’s some stereotyping going on, and today it is not “woke”, for sure. It is problematic, but not racist.
The cartoon shows Donald Duck living in Nazi Germany. At the end, he wakes up in America, and is overjoyed to find out that it was only a nightmare.
I can easily imagine the corporate suits being afraid that someone would take a snippet, completely out of context, and accuse Disney of being pro-Nazi.
It’s set on a plantation, and costars this happy black man named Uncle Remus whose only concern is the plantation owner’s little boy son. He lives in a shack off the property with other black people, and is clearly bossed around by the owners.
It’s technically set after the Civil War, but this isn’t explicitly stated in the film. To may of the day, it came off as whitewashing what slavery (and even Reconstruction with the sharecroppers who were slaves in all but name) was like.
The animated segments use some stereotypical imagery of the type that you’d expect in a Disney film featuring black-inspired characters, and Uncle Remus himself has some of that black accent used back then. I’d say that, however, that’s at the level of films at the time. It’s the happy slavery thing that got the film attacked at time of release. ’
The NAACP came out against it. It was picketed by black organizations. So Disney has direct evidence that it was seen as racist, not just going by what some “woke” people said. That said, they kept it around for a lot longer than you’d expect, rereleasing it (like it did all its movies) in theaters up until 1996.
Not everyone didn’t like it. But it definitely got more backlash than the content on Disney with the disclaimers. I suspect Disney wants to do more with it. They said back in 2010 that they planned to do something with it—eventually.
I remember noticing a lot of casual racism* in early Disney stuff, but I like their disclaimer because whne I was a kid, almost every media depiction of minorities was cartoonishly off-the-mark.
*In one discussion on their portrayals of blacks, I called it Disney’s Wonderful World of Coloreds