![]() The controversy remained but the audience demand seemingly overwhelmed any negative buzz. In 1980, it was released again (“It’s Uncle Remus, telling it like it is, about all those wonderful critters”), timed to the 100th anniversary of Harris’ Uncle Remus stories. It was released several more times: in 1972, with a slew of new merchandise (including a stuffed Br’er Bear toy, sheet music and records) and a theatrical trailer that this time was more focused around the song “Zip-a-dee-doo-dah” (a song that has its own uncomfortable ties to slavery) but still too-proudly proclaimed “Uncle Remus is back!” The 1972 release was a smash and the film returned the following year on a double bill with, of all things, The Aristocats, as part of a celebration of the company’s 50th anniversary. Baskett died a few months after he received the Oscar.Įven after the controversy, and a public admission (made in 1970, several years after Walt’s death) by Disney that the film had been pulled from rotation, Song of the South survived. He campaigned for Baskett to get an honorary Oscar and Baskett eventually did receive the award, although he was unable to attend the film’s premiere in Atlanta because the city was still segregated at the time. Even Raft agreed that the criticisms were warranted. ![]() Congressman Clayton Powell called it an “insult to minorities.” Picket lines popped up at theaters. The NAACP railed against Raft’s confusing change to have Remus happily live on the plantation in a shack. “The negro situation is a dangerous one,” Disney publicist Vern Caldwell wrote to one of the Song of the South producers before production was even underway.Īnd while the film was a modest hit (out performing the box office of Make Mine Music) and warmly received by critics, it rightfully received a huge cultural and political backlash. Disney publicists knew they were wading into choppy waters. One group called Disney’s project “a vicious piece of hocus pocus.” Gabler contends that Walt wasn’t racist but that “like most white Americans of his generation, he was racially insensitive.” Walt’s racial insensitivity (cited by Gabler) included calling the sequence where the dwarfs pile on top of one another in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs a “n***** pile” and some truly abhorrent cultural and racial depictions in movies widely regarded as classics, from Dumbo to Peter Pan to the “Pastorale” sequence in Fantasia. Roy Disney, Walt’s grumpy, fiscally minded brother, thought the project was too expensive and cumbersome.īefore the screenplay, by Dalton Raymond and Maurice Rapf, was finished, “members of the black community protested that any film version of the Uncle Remus stories was bound to portray black Americans in a servile and negative way” (according to Gabler). (A fully animated Uncle Remus was considered but rejected.) On his way to the Fantasia premiere in New York, Walt visited the Harris home, “to get an authentic feeling of Uncle Remus country so we can do as faithful job as possible to these stories,” he told Variety (recounted in Neal Gabler’s Walt Disney biography). Walt thought that he could produce the films using a combination of live-action photography and animation, which would allow him to get distributed under his deal with RKO and be much more cost effective. ![]() ![]() The property seemed perfect for Walt Disney, whose company had taken a hit during World War II, with an army occupation of the Burbank studio and a lack of worldwide exhibition markets. Remus would tell fantastical, moralistic tales involving andromorphic animals, most notably Br’er Rabbit, a wily trickster. #SPLASH MOUNTAIN SERIES#Based on a series of stories by Joel Chandler Harris, a white man who adapted (and profited from) stories originated by African and Native American storytellers, that featured a kindly black man named Uncle Remus. Song of the South, as detailed in the excellent series of You Must Remember This podcast episodes from last year, has always been a lightning rod. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |