I thought it was Roy Walley
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Put me in the âZip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah is from a movie?â category, although thanks to this thread I have vague memories of seeing clips in elementary schoolâI thinkâdid that really happen? Might have. I canât think of any good reason to re-release this movie.
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The clip I remember seeing is worth showing. I guess itâs Uncle Remus live in color with animated animals interacting with him. The song was likely Zippity.
But in 1946, color films were still a relatively new thing, and hereâs a black man on screen, with some animation (the combination still a new thing). So at least as excerpts there is some value.
As an aside, in the early sixties my father read me tge Uncle Remus stories, though I remember little. He"d read them when younger, and had them collected out of the newspaper in a scrapbook.
I have no idea what that means, other than the stories had fame before the movie.
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The âUncle Remusâ stories were from Joel Chandler Harris who took stories from black people on the plantation and re-wrote them and profited.
Having been filtered to only have the stories and characteristics pleasing to his ear, and thus showing no possible animus to white people, they became wildly popular with white people.
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Thanks.
I donât remember the stories enough to remember any context. I think in more recent times Iâve wondered in the back of my mind why they were in a Winnioeg newspaper before WWII. In some ways context comes from a wider knowledge.gained as an adult rather than when I was five or six hearing the stories. I suspect any awareness that they were âblack storiesâ probably comes in retrospect. That also gives context to the movie, an interpretation of a third party interpretation, rather than black stories turned into a movie by white people.
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The immediate source is Joel Chandler Harris, who collected/stole the folktales from former slaves in period 1880-1908, and published them as the Uncle Remus stories.
However, the folktales have much deeper roots. See Chapter 1 of The Tar Baby.
Hereâs an analogy. You know how Disney is criticized for taking rather gothic fairy tales from the public domain, stripping away all that is dark and edgy, and repackaging them to sell pink toys to girlsâall the while agitating for massively long copyright terms?
well, this is the same story-- with added racism. Did Harris have to write his versions of the stories in an artificial dialect? Did Walt Disney have to make a film that made white people feel good about Jim Crow and sharecropping and slavery?
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Hereâs Alice Walkerâs talk
The Dummy in the Window: Joe Chandler Harris and the Invention of Uncle Remus
https://books.google.com/books?id=m9vSViOPwN8C&pg=PA25#v=onepage&q&f=false
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No good answers here, Iâm afraid.
I donât want to perpetuate loathsome stereotypes, and I donât want to condone censorship, either.
I donât want to give up the songs of Stephen Foster, despite their odious context. (Iâm willing to dispense with the false-dialect lyrics of some of them, or re-render them into standard English.)
I donât want to give up Othello or Merchant of Venice because of their racism - particularly since the offensive characters are so sympathetic; the Bard has to have been at least subtly if not overtly suggesting that people examine their racism.
I donât want to give up Huckleberry Finn, either.
Song of the South is a much smaller sacrifice compared with these. But I think the principle is the same; it shouldnât be censored. Nevertheless, it presents a past that we should be trying to move beyond, and therefore shouldnât be promoted without recognizing that context, either.
Perhaps the ideal compromise is what we have today; Disney doesnât re-release it, but likewise refrains from going after archival sources for copyright infringement.
Our ugly history should not be forgotten; neither should it be elevated and glorified.
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Everything you listed has zero chance of being erased from the historical record.
No one will ever stop you from singing Oh! Susanna, if thatâs your jam.
Put this beside all the music, films, books, plays, every instance of sublime and irreplacable expression of the human condition that actually was erased because of systemic and widespread prejudice.
Imagine if we had all the music Stephen Foster stole from. The stories Joe Chandler Harris rejected or twisted.
Why are people crying for something thatâs not even being censored, instead of what we actually lost?
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does this work for forum topics as well as article headlines? LOL
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isnât there a difference between censorship from outside and the owner not wanting something released? its not like the government or even a school is banning this film. Disney has made that decision themselves.
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Including Song of the South.
Indeed, the world would be the richer for these. Since we donât have those works, the wreckage that remains is all we have to go on. Abandoning the fruits of the appropriation will not bring back the originals.
Precisely, and as I said above, I think itâs the right one. I was perhaps reading too much into other posts in this thread. Some posters seem to me to have reinterpreted the title as, "should Disney [be permitted to] release Song of the South?
Disney also seems tacitly to have made the decision not to pursue those who host it online; the corporation could have decided to use the weight of copyright actively to suppress it - and itâs well known for swinging rather a heavy hammer in the copyright department. DIsney has the power largely to censor the film, at least to the extent that one would have to gain in-person access to a rare screening of an existing analogue copy in order to view it.
I think this is close to the right middle ground. If youâre arguing that instead, Disney should be taking active steps to prosecute those who share the film, in order further to suppress it, please make that claim explicit.
Most of Disneyâs early opus is skin-crawlingly racist - as were the Disney brothers themselves. I would not shed many tears if it were to fade into obscurity, but I reflexively oppose active censorship of practically anything.
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