# Should Disney release "Song of the South"? **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [March 14, 2013, 4:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-disney-release-song-of-the-south/652891 "2013-03-14T04:49:44Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 13\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Spoke](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/a88e57/32.png) [@Spoke](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spoke)\ **Post date:** [March 14, 2013, 4:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-disney-release-song-of-the-south/652891/21 "2013-03-14T16:14:50Z")
> [@ministryman](#): > > “The events portrayed in this movie are fictionalized, and do not depict the brutality of American Slavery. Slavery was bad. Slaves did not dance around all day thanking their masters for a job that paid meager wages. That would not come until 1955, when Disneyland was built.” The story is set during Reconstruction, so the black people depicted are free. ---
**Author:** ![BrotherCadfael](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/977dab/32.png) [@BrotherCadfael](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrotherCadfael)\ **Post date:** [March 14, 2013, 4:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-disney-release-song-of-the-south/652891/22 "2013-03-14T16:24:42Z")
And the father, a journalist, is strongly implied to be in trouble with the Klan for his investigative reporting. He sends his wife and son to the plantation so that they will be out of harm’s way. ---
**Author:** ![ministryman](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/f6c823/32.png) [@ministryman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ministryman)\ **Post date:** [March 14, 2013, 5:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-disney-release-song-of-the-south/652891/23 "2013-03-14T17:02:50Z")
> [@Spoke](#): > > The story is set during Reconstruction, so the black people depicted are free. What is the Doper term for a whoosh of a whoosh? ---
**Author:** ![Spoke](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/a88e57/32.png) [@Spoke](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spoke)\ **Post date:** [March 14, 2013, 5:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-disney-release-song-of-the-south/652891/24 "2013-03-14T17:09:52Z")
> [@ministryman](#): > > What is the Doper term for a whoosh of a whoosh? Yeah, I got that you were joking. But your joke was based on a false premise. ---
**Author:** ![FriarTed](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/friarted/32/1052_2.png) [@FriarTed](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FriarTed)\ **Post date:** [March 14, 2013, 5:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-disney-release-song-of-the-south/652891/25 "2013-03-14T17:22:13Z")
> [@Rodgers01](#): > > 42?! Holy cow…did they [dye his hair](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcxYwwIL5zQ)? > > His costar, Bobby Driscoll, had what must be the prototypical tragic child actor story. His [Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobby_Driscoll) page makes for very interesting reading. Oh wow, that is sad, especially that his family had lost track of him & didn’t know of his death for 19 years. ---
**Author:** ![Sampiro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/2acd7d/32.png) [@Sampiro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sampiro)\ **Post date:** [March 14, 2013, 5:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-disney-release-song-of-the-south/652891/26 "2013-03-14T17:38:42Z")
> [@BrotherCadfael](#): > > And the father, a journalist, is strongly implied to be in trouble with the Klan for his investigative reporting. He sends his wife and son to the plantation so that they will be out of harm’s way. The father was, I think, an homage to Joel Chandler Harris, who did get in trouble with the KKK. Today he’d be seen as a dyed-in-the-wool racist of course, but in his own time he was a liberal on the race issue, which didn’t make him at all modern in his thinking or even radical for 1900, but he was enough left-of-center of the political spectrum of his time-place to get denounced as a N-lover by the people who were bigots even by the standards of their time-place. He was called names and denounced for making Uncle Remus so wise and for his writings about his childhood that we would now consider incredibly racist. (One thing he wrote of was his shock at how many slaves left when Sherman came past his plantation; he had known them all of his life and literally never known they were unhappy; he describes one very old slave couple leaving, and how a day or two after the army left he was going up a road and saw the old woman holding her husband, who died of natural causes a day into his journey, and weeping with joy that “He died free”.) An extremely important thing to know about J.C. Harris (I’ve mentioned before, probably will again) is that, while he did grow up on plantation, he was _NOT_ a rich white kid. He was illegitimate, never met his dad (an Irish laborer), and grew up in a shack near the quarters on Turnwold, the plantation where his mother was a seamstress. As the po-whitetrash kid and the black men telling their stories at night absolutely entranced him and they probably saw him as the closest thing to a white kid they could trust (a heavy qualification, but some clearance nonetheless). Later he was taken under the wing of the plantation owner, who gave him a job as printer’s devil at the newspaper he owned, which is what set him on a journalistic career. In later years he would cry while talking about how much some of these black men had meant to him as a lonely fatherless outcast child. ---
**Author:** ![Nunzio\_Tavulari](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/b9bd4f/32.png) [@Nunzio\_Tavulari](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nunzio_Tavulari)\ **Post date:** [March 14, 2013, 5:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-disney-release-song-of-the-south/652891/27 "2013-03-14T17:55:27Z")
> [@friarted](#): > > oh wow, that is sad, especially that his family had lost track of him & didn’t know of his death for 19 years. 19 months ---
**Author:** ![VinylTurnip](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/v/b2d939/32.png) [@VinylTurnip](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/VinylTurnip)\ **Post date:** [March 14, 2013, 7:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-disney-release-song-of-the-south/652891/28 "2013-03-14T19:12:37Z")
> [@Mr.Accident](#): > > They should definitely release it. Its no worse than Birth of a Nation, or Reefer Madness, and both of those are far more racist. “Coming to Blu-Ray and DVD… Walt Disney’s _Birth of a Nation_!” ---
**Author:** ![C\_K\_Dexter\_Haven](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/b2d939/32.png) [@C\_K\_Dexter\_Haven](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/C_K_Dexter_Haven)\ **Post date:** [March 14, 2013, 8:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-disney-release-song-of-the-south/652891/29 "2013-03-14T20:17:17Z")
Agreed that the plot is stupid and the film itself awful, but it’s no more racist than it’s time (as others have said above.) And it’s “postivie” racism in the sense of stereotyping blacks as happy, simple folks (rather than the criminal rapists.) The little white kid has some sort of trauma or crisis and goes to the wise old black Mammy (Uncle Remus) who tells him stories that help him to deal with life. The fun part of the movie are the cartoon stories, of course. And THOSE should be available, even without the rest of the film, dammit. ---
**Author:** ![TBG](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/c89c15/32.png) [@TBG](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TBG)\ **Post date:** [March 14, 2013, 8:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-disney-release-song-of-the-south/652891/30 "2013-03-14T20:44:01Z")
Absolutely release it. If people find it offensive, they don’t have to buy it. ---
**Author:** ![Loach](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/loach/32/350_2.png) [@Loach](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Loach)\ **Post date:** [March 14, 2013, 9:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-disney-release-song-of-the-south/652891/31 "2013-03-14T21:21:53Z")
Release it. I see its currently on Youtube but the DVD would have much better picture and song quality. It can’t be any more racist than the crows in\* Dumbo.\* ---
**Author:** ![outlierrn](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/outlierrn/32/3005_2.png) [@outlierrn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/outlierrn)\ **Post date:** [March 14, 2013, 9:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-disney-release-song-of-the-south/652891/32 "2013-03-14T21:45:48Z")
I’ve never seen it, and would like to, so I’d say yes. People complain about the racial flaws of Gone with the Wind, so why not? I could see some sort of PC disclaimer at the beginning, though. ---
**Author:** ![Sampiro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/2acd7d/32.png) [@Sampiro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sampiro)\ **Post date:** [March 14, 2013, 9:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-disney-release-song-of-the-south/652891/33 "2013-03-14T21:51:48Z")
I’m really not sure where the “You have the right to not be offended” notion comes from. Watch _Celluloid Closet_ for depictions of gays in films, yet there isn’t an outcry to ban _Maltese Falcon_ for Peter Lorre’s character (who isn’t officially gay but stops just short of fellating his cane handle) or _Cruising_ for its leather clad rapists, nor should there be. > [@outlierrn](#): > > I’ve never seen it, and would like to, so I’d say yes. People complain about the racial flaws of Gone with the Wind, so why not? I could see some sort of PC disclaimer at the beginning, though. Or a documentary about the movie, the source material, and its times as an extra. (Alice Walker grew up a short walk from where Harris grew up- she hates everything about him, but I’m sure she’d do the documentary.) [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-disney-release-song-of-the-south/652891.md?page=1)