Sorry for the late reply. Puppy takes up a lot of time.
No. No I don’t agree.
My mother, who was a teen in the 50’s, was taught not to be “easy” as she wouldn’t want to be perceived as a girl who was “putting out.” But that is totally different, at least in my mind, from “playing hard to get.” The latter connotes ideas that in the past few decades are circulating among incels* that girls are “prick teasers,” “playing hard to get,” “stringing the friendzoned guy along,” while waiting for a Chad (is that still a trope/term?)
*n.b. I am not calling DrD an incel, just that the phrase has some connotations that are problematic.
New post because the YouTube enshittification of Disgust.
A lot of these movies has something in common. And while I think that we have to judge them in context of their time,* I do think this tribute is great:
An interesting film could be made contrasting the happy ZipADeeDooDah songs with the family worked to exhaustion and whipped, showing “happiness” in the face of oppression. But that’s not a kid’s film anymore.
Technically, the story was set in the post-war South, but ‘ll bet a lot f people missed that.
I’ve got a bootleg copy of Song of the South. Even with the knowledge that it’s not supposed to be racist, it’s kind of cringe-y. If you threw away the framing story you’d have no problem with the cartoons, except for what I’ll say below. But they couldn’t have done that – cartoons are expensive and time-consuming to make, and in the 1940s even Disney made a lot of not-completely-animated films (like The Reluctant Dragon) to allow them to get movies out in a hurry. Song of the South needs its non-cartoon “filler” to help make ends meet.
People of all races can identify with Funny Animated Animals (which is why things like the Chlldren’s Apperception Test use pictures of animals) – unless you deliberately give them racial features of some sort.
James Baskett (who played Uncle Remus) also provided the voice for Br’er Fox (and from Br’er Rabbit in one segment). The parts of Br’er Rabbit elsewhere, and of Br’er Bear and Br’er Frog were voiced by black actors, too. Which seems altogether appropriate for characters in black folktales. But, to tell the truth, it wasn’t at all obvious to me what race the voice actors were. They could’ve been any race.
One feature that might be seen as racist is the “Tar Baby” sequence. A lot of people assume that the “tar baby” was code for someone of African ancestry. But the original story, like many of the Uncle Remus tales, can be trac ed back to an African original in which the Rabbit hero takes offense at the lack of response from a figure made by his enemies from a calabash, and he gets caught by the sticky insides of the squash. It’s the stickiness that characterizes the Tar Baby, and Joel Chandler Harris’ informants , lacking an appropriately stick fruit, made the trapping figure out of sticky tar instead.
But you’re not going to change people’s minds with arguments like this, that have a whiff of sophistry. The Tar Baby’s black and therefore irredeemably racist, and there’s no point in trying to rescue it.
Seabees was ostensibly about the formation of the Navy’s Construction Battalions. A remake of sorts could work with better source material; too bad Stephen Ambrose isn’t around to write it.
Actually, from the description in Wikipedia, Song of the South COULD have been a very interesting and non-racist film:
Disney hired African-American performer and writer Clarence Muse to be consulted on the screenplay, but Muse quit when Reymond ignored Muse’s suggestions to portray African-American characters in a way that would be perceived as being dignified and more than Southern stereotypes.[11] Muse subsequently wrote letters to the editors of black publications to criticize the depiction of African-Americans in Reymond’s script. Disney claimed that Muse attacked the film because Disney did not choose Muse to play the part of Uncle Remus, which Muse had lobbied for.[
Maurice Rapf, who had been writing live-action features at the time, was asked by Walt Disney Productions to work with Reymond and co-writer Callum Webb to turn the treatment into a shootable screenplay.[14] According to Neal Gabler, one of the reasons Disney had hired Rapf to work with Reymond was to temper what Disney feared would be Reymond’s “white Southern slant”.[15]
…
Rapf saw the animal stories as metaphors for slave resistance, and intended to portray Br’er Rabbit as a smaller, less powerful Black man, and in place of the oppressive whites would be Br’er Fox, Br’er Bear and the deleted character Br’er Coon.
Now THAT would’ve been something. But they chose not to go that route.
The story of the formation of the Seabees is fairly mundane. Admiral Moreell saw a need and acted on it, creating a force that could both do construction and defend what they built (hence the motto “We Build, We Fight”). Not much movie fodder there, so I can see why Hollywood would try to beef it up a bit with some gratuitous scenes. They’ve done some remarkable things over the decades, and I’m proud to have been a part of some of them, but I don’t see a movie coming out of it.
No bright-eyed, blushing, breathless baby-doll baby
No sir, that kinda child ties knots no sailor ever knew
I prefer to take a chance on a more adult romance
No dewy young miss who keeps resisting
All the time she keeps insisting
No bright-eyed, wholesome innocent female, no sir
Why, she’s the fisherman, I’m the fish you see? Plop
I flinch, I shy, when the lass with the delicate air walks by
I smile, I grin, when the gal with a touch of sin walks in I hope, and I pray, for a Hester to win just one more “A”
The sadder-but-wiser girl’s the girl for me
The sadder-but-wiser girl for me
The John Wayne Conqueror stuff was debunked, they actually looked at the cancer rates among the cast and crew and it was perfectly within the norm of cancer rates of the general public at large.
It doesn’t help the entire claim was based on an unresearched aside from People magazine iirc
Were they war propaganda? Do you accept that the Nazis were so evil that extraordinary measures against them were acceptable?
A shredder will do it nicely.
I won a prize for “Worst John Wayne impersonation” with my “That tartar woman fires my blood, uhhuh”.
No, no no. 12th graders or college students studying WW2 or War propaganda- sure. Not kids.
The “Hekawi” (they wouldnt let them use “Fugawi”) were played somewhat by Jewish actors as the joke-
As a sly jest based on the myth that Native Americans are the 13th tribe of Israel, many of the Hekawi Indians were played by veteran Yiddish comedians using classic Yiddish shtick. The regular Indian characters (none of whom were played by Native American actors) include:
His 5-7 pack a day (no really) likely didnt help.
I see that, but a “remake”? More of a tribute, IMHO.
Some issue, yes but not racist, read Whose Afraid of Song of the South by Jim Korkis.
No slaves, since the film was set in the reconstruction period, after the civil war and the 13th amendment.
Yes, very racist and so was Wilson. A terrible president who was racist and got us into WW1.
“Last few decades”? I am talking about the 1930s and 1950s. Yes, the incels are idiots, we agree. The period of some of these films and the time when that was taught- was well before they were born.
The film was set AFTER the Civil war AFTER slavery.
Right. I can buy a little cringy, after all - it was made in 1946.
Fake shit from articles that get made into memes are hard to kill.
Golly. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen it, yet I recalled them using “We smokum peace pipe” type talk, ya da, ya da
I was trying to explain to my wife, how in Breaking Bad, “Saul Goodman” tells Walter White something like people wouldn’t hire a lawyer named “Jimmy McGill”, they’d want a “member of the tribe” which I think is supposedly the 12th. And in “Better Call Saul” they kind of retconned the origin of the name to “[i]t’s all good, man”.
ETA: At first I thought “Fugawi” was some kind of curse word, which is a sort of way it is. I’m surprised the censors, as it took me a minute or two, got the joke:
BBC four is showing a couple Doris Day films. “Pillow Talk” which I only caught the end of, and “Lover Come Back” with Rock Hudson. 1961.
They are rival Madison Avenue advertising executives, and in the first act he “impresses” the owner/CEO of some company who wants to buy a product that doesn’t exist. Someone (Tony Randall?) says whoever gets the campaign is whoever shows the “best can”
CUT TO DANCING GIRLS showing their “cans”.
Rock has done his research, as his grandfather and this CEO, as it “just happened”, were both in the same outfit from Richmond in the Civil War - the CEO’s grandfather being a general and Rock’s grandfather both perishing in this conflict, as the CEO is getting hammered on bourbon.
Rock winks at the conductor and they play that “look away, dixieland” song, both rise with the CEO saying “they’re playing our song”, extolling the “Yankees” to do so. One of the girls opens her blouse and her bra/bodice is the stars & bars.
Next scene, one of the dancing girls is shown being smuggled into the CEO’s room in a double bass case.
Like wearing an onion on your belt, it was the style at the time.
Okay, too late to edit. The product looks like an Eggo about the size of an Eisenhower dollar coin. Apparently it’s “exactly what America needs, a good ten cent triple-martini!”
And one of its effects, seemingly more than alcohol alone, is making men extra lecherous towards women.
Probably why the cartoon Flukey Luke had its American Indian sidekick speaking with a stage Irish accent. Not as an implication of the Irish being a tribe of Israel, but as a riff on the Hekawi shtick, only altered to a different ethnic stereotype.
Sonny and Cher liked unexpected ethnic juxtapositions on their ‘70s TV show for the deliberately ironic kitsch value of stereotype pastiche. The Seven Samurai as a musical sung to “Irish” melodies. How will you know the Samurai? By their war cry “Tora tora tora.” They come on and sing to the tune of “Too Ra Loo Ra Loo Ral”:
”Tora tora tora,
We’re the Seven Samurai”
Its been forever since I saw it. As a little kid it was one of my favorite afternoon reruns. I seem to recall the main Hekawi characters spoke perfectly good English. They were basically conmen so they may have sprung out the broken English for effect at times.
