Disney+, Stream Song of the South, You Fucking Cowards
When it was recently announced that Disney+, the much buzzed about forthcoming streaming service from the corporation that now owns roughly 90 percent of the world’s intellectual property (pretty much only Domino’s pizza-defiler The Noid and kid-friendly cigarette pitchman Joe Camel are not owned and controlled by Disney at this point) would be opening up the vault for their much-hyped new launch that meant only one thing to weirdoes like myself: Song of the South would FINALLY be receiving an official release after being deemed excessively racist even for American audiences.
The prestigious Disney Vault contains many, many jewels and one big old lump of coal in the form of Song of the South, a part-animated, part live action 1946 adaptation of the folk stories white author John Chandler Harris compiled about Uncle Remus and the adventures of Br’er Rabbit, Br’er Fox and Br’er Bear.
The movie was heralded as a technological milestone at the time of its release. It was a financial success. James Baskett, who played Uncle Remus, received an honorary Academy Award for “his able and heart-warming characterization of Uncle Remus, friend and story teller to the children of the world in Walt Disney's Song of the South.” In the process he became the first black man to win an Oscar. The movie was nominated for a pair of non-honorary Oscars, one for best score and the other a best song nomination for “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah” but the film’s antiquated stereotypes, notorious “tar baby” sequence, rosy take on the Old South and extensive use of dialect have rendered it radioactive in the decades since its release.
Song of the South has periodically been re-released in theaters, and segments like the “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah” sequence have popped up in anthologies but the film itself has never received an official release on home video in the United States. Not on VHS. Not on Beta. Not on DVD or Blu-Ray. And now it appears that Song of the South will not stream either since Disney has announced that it and the notorious crow sequence in Dumbo will not be making the leap to Disney+.
That is not surprising. It is entirely consistent with Disney’s long-standing position that Song of the South is just too goddamn racist for it to ever be legally released on home video in the United States. That’s understandable. It’s also bullshit.
Keeping Song of the South locked away forever, like it was Jerry Lewis’ notorious, unreleased Holocaust melodrama The Day the Clown Cried or something, gives the movie a sinister power.
It’s a little like the lurid, low-budget 2013 independent film Escape from Tomorrow, which was covertly filmed at Disney World without Disney’s knowledge or permission. Everyone thought the famously litigious corporation would sue to keep the film from being released on the grounds that it was filmed illegally and uses Disney’s intellectual property without permission. But Disney shocked the world by letting the film be released to mixed reviews and negligible box-office. It has subsequently been more or less forgotten.
If Disney used its financial and legal muscle to keep Escape from Tomorrow from the public, it would have become low-key legendary, the movie Disney DOESN’T WANT YOU TO SEE . Other than Song of the South of course. Audiences would have wondered what kind of dark, trippy, revisionist darkness Disney was keeping the public. By letting the movie be released, and letting it fail, Disney robbed Escape From Tomorrow of its power. A similar dynamic would be at play if Disney finally allowed the public to see Song of the South.
Old Hollywood movies are full of racism but keeping Song of the South away from contemporary audiences for being too racist, and pretty much only keeping Song of the South away from contemporary audiences for being too racist, scapegoats the notorious the Oscar winner and multiple Oscar nominee while letting equally racist Hollywood movies from the same period off the hook. It makes Song of the South seem like a special case and not a movie whose incontrovertible racism exists within a broad spectrum of American racism.
Disney and society at large have officially branded Song of the South the racist movie instead of merely a racist movie and Breakfast at Tiffany’s is all, “Hey, what about me? Have you even SEEN Mickey Rooney’s performance? It’s as if he’s competing feverishly in an Olympics of Racist Representation!!!”
We are a racist country. We are a deeply racist country. Look at our president, a man who has been baying loudly for the blood of the Central Park 5 even after they were found incontestably innocent everywhere outside Trump’s own feverish bigotry and hatred/fear of young black men.
Or look at some of the classic films we’re shown in high school history or film school, movies like Birth of a Nation, Gone With the Wind and Triumph of the Will. Nobody is locking those movies away. No, students of film and students of history are being shown these toxic, deeply racist cultural touchstones because they are culturally and historically significant and watching them, and talking about them, and thinking about them, helps us understand the racism and bigotry of the times that created them and how that bigotry shifts and morphs and changes without ever going away.
Whoopi Goldberg, who made Disney a mint with the Sister Act movies has publicly lobbied for the release of Song of the South, telling Yahoo movies, “I’m trying to find a way to get people to start having conversations about bringing Song of the South back, so we can talk about what it was and where it came from and why it came out.”
True, Goldberg DID think then-boyfriend Ted Danson doing blackface would be a HILARIOUS idea but in this case she’s right.
If Song of the South were to debut on Disney+ it would undoubtedly kick off a spirited and intense culture-wide conversation about racism and representation and how we’ve evolved and de-evolved and gone tragically sideways on race in the uncertain decades since Song of the South’s release.
We wouldn’t passively receive Song of the South as mere entertainment or an accurate representation of plantation life in the Old South. The enduring shame of the House Mickey Mouse built is just too goddamn notorious and too infamous to not inspire controversy. That would be a whole lot healthier for our culture as a whole than acting as if Song of the South never existed.
It’s just a fucking movie. Let people see it. Let people talk about it. Let it inspire debate and thought and controversy. Let it be part of the historical record. Stream the damn thing and let people decide for themselves whether Song of the South deserves its toxic reputation.
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