Jabroniville wrote: ↑Wed Aug 22, 2018 8:33 pm
THE SONG OF THE SOUTH (1946):
Written by: John Chandler Harris (original stories), Dalton Reymond, Maurice Rapf, Callum Webb
And now we come to the most controversial and well-hidden of the entire Disney ouvre. This is effectively a Live Action Film that just has a handful of shorts (totalling 25 minutes in length) featuring Br'er Rabbit and friends, based off of the old
Uncle Remus folk tales told by black slaves in the pre-Civil War Era United States. Walt Disney LOVED those tales, and wanted to do honor to them. It features Uncle Remus as a worker at a plantation-something-or-other in Georgia post-reconstruction, teaching little lessons to young Johnny (Bobby "Peter Pan" Driscoll) by way of some old folk tales about the clever Br'er Rabbit in his trials against Br'er Fox and Br'er Bear.
Fearing that the movie could turn out "Uncle Tom"-ish, Walt hired on Maurice Rapf, an outspoken left-wing Jew, who was cynical of the project, to co-write, "because I know that you don't think I should make the movie". Unfortunately, personal issues between the makers caused Rapf to be taken off the project. James Baskett was hired on to play numerous parts (despite offering only to be a talking butterfly), and Walt became enamored with his abilities- he plays Uncle Remus and Br'er Fox.
The live actions scenes are... a pretty solid example of what child actors were like before an entire industry sprang up to make sure the boys all had their middle names spoken with their other two and everyone was given classical training. ie. the kids are over-acting like crazy, loud and whiny. It was pretty much the standard of the day. As for the racism... I just don't see it, and neither do many people.
Reception and Cultural Impact:
-The film is INSANELY controversial, and Disney has kept it vaulted since the 1980s, because it's become super-notorious (Disney parodies often mention it, like that
Saturday Night Live "Vault" gag-fest, where the lyrics to
Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah are changed to include "-Zip-a-dee-ay! Whites are su-per-i-or in ev-er-y way!"), so one would expect it to be pretty bad. Hell, it's got a short entitled
Br'er Rabbit and the TAR BABY!! But really, it's pretty tame. It even uses less "black dialect" than the infamous Black Crows in
Dumbo (though you'll hear some "Sho'nuff"s and the like). I think the only really iffy stuff is the fact that all the blacks working at the plantation are all depicted in the typical "Southern depiction of blacks", in that they're all cheerful, singing happy folks who love to work and tell tales (black activists note with no small degree of cynicism that when blacks were enslaved, they were stereotyped as people who LOVED work; once they became free, suddenly they were lazy and shiftless). So it's more of a stereotype/cliche than anything- the stereotypes certainly aren't really NEGATIVE in this case. Essentially it just glorifies the era and makes it sound cool and fun... which really wasn't the case for a lot of folks.
Granted, it's hard to win with a movie like this (as I'll note with
The Princess and the Frog). People are either going to be looking for racism because they LIKE blacks, or because they hate them (keep in mind this is twenty years BEFORE the South banned a bunch of TV broadcasts of a
Star Trek episode because of the Uhura/Kirk kiss). I mean, is a black person singing a traditional black folk song REALLY racist? Despite the controversy, it was re-released several times (like most Disney movies in the time before the Disney Vault and Home Video), the last being in 1986 when the criticism got too high (hell, even in its day, the National Negro Council picketed its openings). Despite THAT, the film ended up gaining immortality in the Disney Parks as the setting for the world-famous SPLASH MOUNTAIN, the wettest ride with the biggest drop in the parks. This is really odd nowadays when you consider that it's entirely likely that 99.9% of all children have never seen
Song of the South in their entire lives, and most people never will. To kids, its probably just another "random ride", like Space Mountain, Big Thunder Mountain or the Matterhorn Bobsleds- all iconic rides that were never based around official Disney characters.
In the end, the film is now more well-known for BEING controversial than for any of its own merits (which, to be honest, aren't many- it's BORING). If it weren't for Splash Mountain (which, to be certain, never mentions the movie at all), it'd probably be even MORE obscure. Honestly, I'm kind of shocked they had one of their biggest-name dark rides be inspired by what is a pretty low-tier film in Disney history. Like... the movie was forty-three years old by the time the first Splash Mountain opened (California, Florida & Tokyo all have one), and featured characters that don't show up on any other Merch- why THAT movie? But then, the Disney Parks of the 1980s were less "Base things off of the current Big Thing" and more interested in throwing in random attractions that fit into certain areas- in this case, they were a solid fit for the "Bear Country" thing going on in Disneyland at the time. Famous "Imagineer" Tony Baxter came up with the idea while stuck in traffic, wanting to attract guests to the then-empty Bear Country, and make use of the audio-animatronics from the unpopular
America Sings! attraction. Michael Eisner wanted it to be named after upcoming film
Splash, because of course he did.