And the crows are very much a racist trope, regardless whether they were included in the awful live action remake or not.
The bigotry is baked in…
No, I’m afraid I’m not; as I’ve been around long enough to see you self identify as part of the dominant in-group and to remember that little relevant factoid.
No again, actually I’m not; because I don’t actually care about your personal anecdotes or any justifications you may make for having the opinions that you do.
But since you want to share, in an effort to validate your questionable POV: my grandmother who I grew up with was White (like my mom) and she loved her grandkids, and we loved her… but she was still prejudiced and still held bigoted views that supported the White supremacist patriarchy, so her familial ties to me were rather irrelevant in the long run.
Clearly, the practical thing for @Bemopolis to do to satisfy his curiosity and understand better where the people with lived experience are coming from would be to take some courses at a local university. It’s a good solution to this issue.
The concentration in my English degree was in Film & Media Studies, and I had full range of courses in other fields that intersected and overlapped, like Women’s Studies. I even took a course in Black African Cinema that provided an interesting comparison/contrast to the US experience of African-American cinema.
That’s good advice… if one is interested in actually educating oneself, as opposed to just needlessly incensing an entire demographic of already marginalized and oppressed people.
i agree that 1946 was not a particularly enlightened time in terms of racial sensitivity but, as other folks have mentioned upthread, there were people who saw the racism baked into the cake at the time and even picketed the original release in places.
i saw it during its 1972 theater release and mom and dad took my younger sister and i to see it at the drive-in. even then, the 11-year-old version of me knew enough about race, slavery, and storytelling to ask my parents a series of questions which were answered with some increasingly long and awkward silences and a year or two later a discussion which resulted in a better understanding between the three of us regarding our racial attitudes along with our boundaries regarding the same.
while i would not put so much as a straw in the path of someone intent upon seeing it other than to say they should be required to buy it in a format which includes contextual addenda on a blu-ray or regular dvd and not a streaming format adrift in a context-free environment. i would no more show this to an unprepared audience than i would show a series of world war 2 era vd movies.
The reason this thread exists is that Disney never put it out on DVD or BluRay or anything, and presumably never will, because there’s no way to promote it without promoting all the bad stuff.
(This also happens with ten thousand other films that fall out of fashion for reasons, usually having less to do with perpetuating racism, too.)
All this takes me back to “The Dam Busters” (1955 UK war film) and the controversy surrounding it over the years. The “n-word” figures in the actual history of that WWII bombing operation: It was the name of the RAF wing commander’s popular, beer-drinking dog (it being the squadron’s de facto mascot); and it was also used as a codeword in the operation. A US-released version of the film replaced the n-word with “Trigger”. The UK reaction to airing of the US version in the UK was “interesting”. For more on that, refer to wiki (wherein you’ll also get the story on Peter Jackson’s efforts to do a remake of the film and the continued wrestling over the dog’s name in the remake. Me? I’m against giving fascist racists anything that brings them joy.)
BTW: The film’s bombing runs inspired George Lucas’s Death Star trench scene.
I think if Disney were truly interested in releasing this film for earnest study and and critique, they would do so free of charge. They could acknowledge as being equally important and a stain on their past and show no desire to profit off of it. But they won’t because it’s Disney and they never leave money on the table, and clearly it’s not in their best interest to try to profit off of it. So, it’s staying in the vault. Probably forever.
That said, one can easily find it if they are curious - several links have already been posted where one can watch it right now.
But it’s plausible that some people would want bomb making instructions that work. And it’s equally plausible that another set of people want a copy of the movie that is in focus, doesn’t have a strange color cast and an audibly distorted soundtrack.
Just as the federal government is theoretically capable of correcting any errors that might have found their way into Progressive’s November 1979 cover story, Disney is theoretically capable of releasing an accurate copy of the Song of the South. But, they likely will choose not to.
on some level, the historian in me hopes the film has been preserved - as in scanned at a high enough resolution for digital theatrical release, and yet i don’t want to see it released commercially. it probably has right?
as someone said above, its hard to see how it could be released without seeming to endorse it. i think history should be preserved but i don’t think it all needs to be freely accessible. store ut in a research library and back it up in case that library burns down and ill be happy.
We can have it out in the public domain when America has finally removed its head from its ass about racism. When that day comes, no one will latch onto it as social programming or “the way things should still be” or any such racist nonsense that kkk type people would totally do nowadays. Right now, it would be a hand grenade on a giant tank of gasoline. America is racist as fuck still. We don’t need any more reinforcing influences. In about, I am guessing don’t really know, two hundred years, then Song of the South will be an anachronism, like watching some old movie about gladiators in the coliseum. “How quaint, white people really thought that way back then?” “Yes, dear, what savages.”
It’s definitely been digitally preserved, but I don’t think it’s necessary to have a high-def version of it in existence. A mediocre quality version is good enough for historians to study, imho.
i just wanna jump in and say that the main overall plot in the story is that the children love uncle remus and the parents, who initially blame uncle remus for a kid getting hurt realize that he actually saved the kid. the theme is a disney theme of listening to the more innocent, less jaded children who see the real good in him.
its not as horrible as one might think not having seen the film.
but it does portray stereotypes of black people in the post civil war era. the idea that their lives weren’t that bad. minimizes the hardships and atrocities and glamorizes plantation life. its a problematic movie for sure. i see what walt was trying to do but it fails because of its reliance on stereotypes and that really comes from the fact that the source material was written by a white guy portraying a black character. its a sort of literary blackface.
