Can anyone tell me why MCA Home Video can not only get away with releasing a straight-to-video animated feature entitled “The Adventures of Brer Rabbit” but get major names in the African-American community like Wayne Brady, Nick Cannon, D. L. Hughley, Wanda Sykes, and Danny Glover to do the characters’ voices, even as Disney’s “The Song of the South” (1946), which tells approximately the same stories, remains locked tightly in their vaults…right next to Walt’s cryogenic freezer, presumably…and, to date, has NEVER received a home video release in the United States?
I don’t know about anyone else…and I’m willing to admit that this could be a phenomenon exclusive to the South…but I grew up listening to the soundtrack album to the movie, with James Baskett a.k.a. Uncle Remus singing “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah.” I also went and saw the film in the theater when it was re-released in the early ’80s, and, thanks to my father, who has been a staunch supporter of the movie for years, I have access to a copy of the film on DVD. (It was released in other countries…just not in the U.S..)
Rumors abound as to why the film has never seen US home-video release, but by reading what folklorist Patricia A. Turner had to say, as noted on the rumor-debunking website Snopes.com, you might get some perspective:
Disney’s 20th century re-creation of Harris’s frame story is much more heinous than the original. The days on the plantation located in “the United States of Georgia” begin and end with unsupervised Blacks singing songs about their wonderful home as they march to and from the fields. Disney and company made no attempt to to render the music in the style of the spirituals and work songs that would have been sung during this era. They provided no indication regarding the status of the Blacks on the plantation. Joel Chandler Harris set his stories in the post-slavery era, but Disney’s version seems to take place during a surreal time when Blacks lived on slave quarters on a plantation, worked diligently for no visible reward and considered Atlanta a viable place for an old Black man to set out for.
Kind old Uncle Remus caters to the needs of the young white boy whose father has inexplicably left him and his mother at the plantation. An obviously ill-kept Black child of the same age named Toby is assigned to look after the white boy, Johnny. Although Toby makes one reference to his “ma,” his parents are nowhere to be seen. The African-American adults in the film pay attention to him only when he neglects his responsibilities as Johnny’s playmate-keeper. He is up before Johnny in the morning in order to bring his white charge water to wash with and keep him entertained.
The boys befriend a little blond girl, Ginny, whose family clearly represents the neighborhood’s white trash. Although Johnny coaxes his mother into inviting Ginny to his fancy birthday party at the big house, Toby is curiously absent from the party scenes. Toby is good enough to catch frogs with, but not good enough to have birthday cake with. When Toby and Johnny are with Uncle Remus, the gray-haired Black man directs most of his attention to the white child. Thus Blacks on the plantation are seen as willingly subservient to the whites to the extent that they overlook the needs of their own children. When Johnny’s mother threatens to keep her son away from the old gentleman’s cabin, Uncle Remus is so hurt that he starts to run away. In the world that Disney made, the Blacks sublimate their own lives in order to be better servants to the white family. If Disney had truly understood the message of the tales he animated so delightfully, he would have realized the extent of distortion of the frame story.
I realize I’ve been accused of naivete in the past, but, really, I think you’ll find that most kids who’ve seen the film do not come out of the film, thinking, “Wow, Disney has really turned me around on race relations.” They come out of the film singing “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah.”
According to the film’s Wikipedia entry, the website JimHillMedia.com announced that “Song of the South” was possibly coming out on DVD in late 2006…but this was disproven at a Disney shareholders meeting last month, when Disney CEO Bob Iger responded to a question about when the film would see US DVD release:
“Um… we’ve discussed this a lot. We believe it’s actually an opportunity from a financial perspective to put Song of the South out. I screened it fairly recently because I hadn’t seen it since I was a child, and I have to tell you after I watched it, even considering the context that it was made, I had some concerns about it because of what it depicted. And thought it’s quite possible that people wouldn’t consider it in the context that it was made, and there were some… [long pause] depictions that I mentioned earlier in the film that I think would be bothersome to a lot of people. And so, owing to the sensitivity that exists in our culture, balancing it with the desire to, uh, maybe increase our earnings a bit, but never putting that in front of what we thought were our ethics and our integrity, we made the decision not to re-release it. Not a decision that is made forever, I imagine this is gonna continue to come up, but for now we simply don’t have plans to bring it back because of the sensitivities that I mentioned. Sorry.”.
That…is frickin’ ridiculous. And asinine. And a whole lot of other words that are far stronger than “ridiculous” and “asinine.” If Disney can release Walt Disney Treasures - On the Front Lines, which features World War II era portrayals of Germans as Nazis and Japanese soliders as grinning, slit-eyed caricatures, then they’re not afraid to acknowledge past political incorrectness…and, as such, there is absolutely no damned reason why they can’t release “Song of the South” on DVD.