Possible Release of Disney's "Song of the South"? (1 Viewer)

[Jeff Jacobson]

 

[Ernest Rister]

Still, the guy was a terrible actor.

At the age of 12, he won a special Academy Award for "outstanding juvenile performance" in the noir thriller, The Window. His work in Disney's crticially-acclaimed So Dear to My Heart (strangely MIA on DVD), is both winning and believable. The movie wouldn't work if Driscoll's character rang false, and he rarely hits a wrong note in that beautiful film. I think he's probably even better in Disney's Treasure Island, which I think is still the best cinema adaptation ever made of that oft-filmed boy's adventure.

Driscoll was very bitter about his career as he grew older. Like many child stars before and since, the town that gave him Academy awards and love when he was a tyke found little use for him as a man, and he fell into the abyss of substance abuse.

He was a fine actor, and long may his soul be at peace.

 

[Reagan]

Anyone see this from the latest "Merlin Jones" article about Song of the South over at SaveDisney.com?




Interesting, no?

-Reagan

 

[DaveK]

I missed the story....what happened???

 

[MatthewLouwrens]

This article? It is an excellent article, and well worth reading.

It is worrying news about the damage to the film, but hopefully if (when?) this is released, it will have had the necessary work.

 

[Jeff Kuykendall]

So many of you are defending Song of the South because you can't find anything explicitly racist in it. But I think you have to pull back a little bit to understand why it's controversial.

The furor over Song of the South is really part of a long-running controversy over Joel Chandler Harris, a white southerner in the 19th century who created the fictional character of Uncle Remus to frame these stories. What upsets so many people is that Harris took stories that slaves were telling to each other and appropriated them for a white audience. The novelist and essayist Alice Walker ("The Color Purple") has written very movingly about this. She has taken Disney to task for further removing the stories from their original source, often robbing them of their original meaning. She feels that great damage has been done to African-American culture because of it. I wish I could dig up the essay online for you guys, but I can't find it. I think it's called "Uncle Remus is No Friend of Mine." But she's not the only critic, just the best known.

That said, I agree that the film should be available on DVD because it's a part of film history, and by keeping it in their archives, it's always seemed like Disney's been trying to sanitize their past, presenting a false version of their own history. I say put it out as part of the Walt Disney Treasures series, introduce it with black scholars (NOT Leonard Maltin for crikey's sake), and be done with it. The news that Disney might do this is really good news for film scholars. But I don't think this should be presented as a "children's film" anymore.

I saw the film as a kid and was bored to death by the live action bits. I don't think it's a "great" lost film, by any means.

 

[Mark Zimmer]

The counter-argument to that of course is that if Harris hadn't written the stories for a white audience, many of them would have been lost altogether. Which is worse?

 

[Gary Seven]

Interesting, since as a child I did see this and performed many of the songs in a school play. It did nothing in any way of fueling any type of prejudice.

When it comes to "racism", children won't see it in this type of material but rather in the example set by their parents.

 

[Larry Bevil]

So? - why should this have any bearing on whether the film is released to dvd today?

 

[Ernest Rister]

I would argue that *American* culture, not "black" culture or "white" culture, is the product of influences and tales and stories and music shifting from one group to the larger whole. American culture is a melting pot of influences, with contributions from the one blending in with the whole. That's what happened to the Brer Rabbit stories -- they spread from one group to many, many other ethnicities.

While I respect Ms. Walker' point of view on the subject, I feel her argument ignores the larger facts of cultural evolution within a free society, and fighting for purity and ownership of myths and folk tales is a regressive attitude.

Should Eminem not be allowed to create Hip Hop, should Elvis have been prevented from performing Rock-n-Roll, should Gershwin have been prevented from incorporating Jazz into orchestral music - simply by virute of their respective skin color or racial origin?

Should white people not be allowed to re-tell a folk tale in their own way simply because the tales have roots in another ethnicity? There was an animated TV series on HBO that re-spun classic fairy tales and popular stories like "Pinocchio" for minority children. Any italians up in arms that Coloddi's Pinocchio was re-told by black artists, artists who substantially altered the original book? No, nor should there be. Any Japanese citizens up in arms over Sergio Leone's Fistful of Dollars, which played fast and loose with Yojimbo? No, nor should there be.

Joel Chandler Harris brought the Brer Rabbit stories to the larger American culture as a whole (a group that includes more than mere "white" people). Walt Disney thought those stories would be entertaining, and he put his own spin on them.

Steven Spielberg brought Alice Walker's The Color Purple to the screen, and he told it through the prism of his own abilities and sensibilities, removing all of the lesbian sex scenes and re-imagining the story as a sort of Dickensian tale of survival and endurance that large general audiences of any race could enjoy. Is this another example of a white man destroying a pieceof black culture? Some would say yes. Ironically, the anniversary edition of the DVD features Walker on camera defending Spielberg and his film.

We're little more than 140 years out from the Emancipation, and only 40 years out from the Civil Rights acts of the 60's, so I understand that points of view on this subject are still raw. I also understand that as a nation, we are still finding our way through and there is still much healing that needs to take place. But the way forward is not to regress into self-segregation, where America is splintered into ethnic groups battling for self-interest. Pride in one's contribution to American culture is a good thing, the Balkanization of America is not.

 

[Ruz-El]

Man, I didn't know this about The Color Purple. Too bad Speilberg didn't throw in The Animaniacs, it would of helped to speed up the live action pacing.

 

[Jeff Kuykendall]

Thanks for your thoughtful post, Ernest. I still think it's different when a white man takes stories from slaves and appropriates them into stories for white folks told by a jolly fictional slave--as opposed to just one culture riffing on another, as in most of your examples.

To restate, I do think the film should be out on DVD, but I'm trying to explain why it's not a well-loved film by many.

Anyone remember when Harry Knowles was guest-hosting on Roger Ebert's show about films not on DVD, and they argued about Song of the South?

 

[AnthonyC]

It's not about slaves. It takes place after the Civil War.

 

[ChristopherDAC]

One last time: slavery was abolished by Constitutional Amendment in the United States some years before Mr. J. C. Harris began his folklore collection. Uncle Remus and his millieu are freedmen, if oppressed freedmen; and it is my contention that the Race Question was created by the landowning classes to divide poor whites from poor blacks and keep them from recognising that the same tactics of opression were being practiced upon all the members of the labouring classes.
Since there is no ethnic group in the world, probably, which has not counted at least some slaves among its members over the thousands of years since "slavery" became a disctinct condition of life, objecting because a folklorist has collected tales from people who were once slaves would cut us off from all of our cultural heritage -- whoever "we" may be.
Simply put, Mr. Harris was not doing anything substantively different than what Alan Lomax did half a century later, in making the American Blues publicly accessible. I've never heard any serious complaints about that.

 

[Jeff Jacobson]

No, but it sounds interesting.

 

[Ernest Rister]

Trust me, it wasn't.

I still think it's different when a white man takes stories from slaves and appropriates them into stories for white folks told by a jolly fictional slave.

It was always my understanding that the "Brother Rabbit" or Br'er Rabbit stories were actually African in origin, only they were adapted by enslaved story tellers to fit into the Southern American setting -- in other words, these folk tales evolved culturally, from the classic myth of the Wily Trickster to Br'er Rabbit, as captured on the page by Joel Chandler Harris.

I don't think anyone would accuse the enslaved peoples of Southern America of "misappropriating" those stories from Africa. Common sense pervades over that notion. But speaking to the larger question, what culture *doesn't* have tales of clever animals and hungry predators who are outwitted and embarassed? Even if we ignore the concepts of cultural evolution and influence, does Ms. Walker's assertion still hold up that black culture in particular was misappropriated or harmed by Walt Disney in his film Song of the South?

I would submit to you that Mickey Mouse *himself* was a "Wily Trickster" in the mythological or folk tale mold. Mickey was a small figure who survived by his wits against the Big Cat, originally known as Peg-Leg Pete (today, just Pete). Early Disney animation is full of stories of "sharp-witted little guys" vs. "deadly predators". The African slaves did not invent this, nor did Walt Disney. One of Walt's first films, made in Kansas City, was "Puss In Boots" -- basically Brer Rabbit in feline form, outwitting everyone to bring wealth and respect to himself and his friends.

When Walt read the Br'er Rabbit stories, he must have immediately recognized the entertainment potential in these folk tales (just as he did in other American folk tales, like Paul Bunyan, Pecos Bill, Johnny Appleseed, Windwagon Smith, Casey Jones, etc.) - these were the types of stories he had been making his whole life, the types of stories perfect for animation.

You know what -- here is a proposition for you. If none of the live action footage had ever been shot, there would be no controversey over these shorts whatsoever. None. Walt and his team did a fantastic job with these American stories, just as they did a few years later with "Ichabod Crane".

It is Uncle Remus that is the crux of the argument, the character is in truth the focal point of this debate, (excuse me while I turn into Niles Crane) the star around which all the controversey orbits. Ms. Walker's complaints against misappropriating tales of wily animals are easily discounted, the true needlesome point is rerally Remus himself. The genial, loving, wise former slave who bears no ill will or no animosity towards his former enslavers or to the white race in general. Why, he even loves this sad little white child...

I think that is the specific source of controversey in this whole house of cards. Ms. Walker and Spike Lee and Florida University professors and everyone else can all argue to the contrary, but I know, in my heart of hearts, the true problem is the depiction of a former slave as a wise, loving, accepting and compassionate figure, one who even finds it within himself the joy to sing upon occasion. There's your conflict right there in a nutshell -- all the rest is intellectual window dressing.

 

[Eddie Estes]

So by using this logic a black director would have no business directing Shakespeare or any of the classical English writers.
Example:
A black director wants to do an update of Romeo and Juliet.
Are you saying it would be wrong for him or her to do that?
After all Shakespeare was white and European so a black director would just be appropriating white culture to entertain a black audience.

 

[Dick]

This is from the IMDB news box:

Disney May Finally Release 'Song of the South' on Video

The Kansas City Star, which has been running a daily feature saluting past Oscar winners in the run-up to the awards show on Feb. 27, today (Tuesday) selected Disney's 1947 film Song of the South, which won the best song Oscar ("Zip-a-Dee-Doo-dah") and a special Oscar for its star, James Baskett. It is the only Disney animated film never to have been released on home video in the U.S., largely because it was condemned during the civil rights era by the NAACP for "the impression it gives of an idyllic master-slave relationship." A website devoted to the film, www.songofthesouth.net has collected over 60,000 names on a petition to encourage Disney to release the film, and Disney Studios Chairman Dick Cook is being quoted as acknowledging that it has received more requests for a DVD release of the movie than any other film. Cook noted that a similar complaint about racial issues was addressed when the studio released World War II material in the Walt Disney Treasures DVD series "through introductions that place the material in context." Cook said that he was "confident" that a similar solution could be found for Song of the South.

 

[MarcusUdeh]

That's not funny. Reading that makes me wanna whoop Sydney Pollack's ass, now that's funny

 

[Ruz-El]

Uh oh, Clearly this is evedance that "The Color Purple" should be pulled, seeing as it incites violence and bad puns from grown adults. Tsk, Tsk Mr. Speilberg and Warners