Fuckin’ A; the entire subject is a veritable “tar-baby” ~ just one big, nasty-ass mess.
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I used to have a kids’ book of “Br’er Rabbit Stories”, and the tar baby was replaced with a white glue baby.
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Like the suburban house jockey. Everyone is trying to whitewash the story.
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Serious question;
Did they call it a “glue-baby?”
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They did, to my memory.
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does she still read her podcasts in that overly breathy, conspiratorially-dishy voice? it drove me away from her podcast it in the past. i liked her topics and research, but her delivery was like the audio equivalent of a tabloid headline to me.
I live in the south, and you can literally buy “new” (presumed copied) packaged copies of this movie in all sorts of small stores and random places (cars bedecked with signs, neverending yard sales, flea markets.). It’s a specifically targeted “We’ll show THEM” gesture that’s kept alive by disgruntled southerners and the tacticool crowd. And probably poorly disguised Klan members.
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Im listening to it now. The over enunciation is killing me. Dan Carlin does the same thing. I wouldn’t call it breathy or dishy. It strikes me as an attempt to convey things as weighty and important. By stretching out and stressing all the wrong syllables and blowing out the mic with plosives.
It just makes things real monotone and difficult to follow. Is this supposed to be an ASMR thing?
What the actual fuck.
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And maybe to make that even clearer to anyone who might still not understand why the problem is deeper than just the movie…
This is “Uncle Remus”:
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maybe that’s what she’s doing, i don’t know. i just know that after a season i couldn’t take it any more.
Another odd twist in the saga of this film is that while it was never released on home video in the USA, it absolutely was available over here in Europe. Growing up, I had Disney films on video that had trailers for Song of the South on them So Disney was perfectly prepared to issue the film, but only in places where it wouldn’t be so controversial.
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The Disney company should start building up some credibility about slavery by making a movie about the estimated 21 to 46 million slaves in the world today. It’s easy for a megacorporation to denounce slavery in the distant past. It takes real courage to alienate potential movie markets by pointing out slavery being carried out by some of the people you want to buy tickets to your movies. If, in 1850, somebody condemned slavery that happened in 1700, but was silent about the slavery going on in his own day, that wouldn’t mean much. The Disney company can show they care about slavery by making a difference for people toiling away in bondage at this very moment.
After that, maybe they could make an effort to hire former slaves to be actors, directors, tech people, etc. on films and TV shows that they make. Eventually, they might build up enough credibility to initiate a conversation with the decendants of American slaves about what to do with the legacy of “Song of the South.” Something surprising and positive might eventually emerge from such a process.
Nah, they’ll just take the easy way out by avoiding the issue entirely.
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It’s time for Disney to make a serious documentary about SotS, not just a few pithy statements-with-still-images, the way they did with the similarly outrageous elements in Fantasia. A literal “This is something we did very wrong, and why we’re trying very hard to never do that again.” There were some incredibly ambitious technological and visual challenges in its technical production that helped blind its creators to the depth of their conceptual errors - There are still reasons to watch Birth of a Nation even today, so long as you examine the context that makes it as horrific as it is. There are modern industries (and other parts of our culture) making the same mistakes, even today. This needs to be examined, not swept aside.
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…or Disney could make another Star Wars/MCU film, rake in cash buckets, and disregard their past. Don’t conflate what they should do with what they will do. Introspection is bad for capitalism!
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The film has been easily available in the U.S. for years if you take the time to find it. I am surprised that not one person has mentioned the great performance of James Baskett as Uncle Remus, which now has been lost to most people except for some of the songs. Sadly, he died at age 44 about two years after “Song of the South” was released.
Are you also surprised that not one person has mentioned all the other movies that aren’t going to get high-production DVDs?
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(you can get it on DVD, but not in any quality)
James Baskett’s in this one too. Not a single person has shown concern for movies like this, which also contain great music. People defending SoTS have talked about the need to honor the underlying Black history, but they’re pretty clearly not talking about re-releasing actual films from Black culture. Just a movie made by Disney based on a book written by a white guy that portrays Black people as being most happy when they can make white people happy.
This one only came about after a Kickstarter campaign. There’s a lot of other films like this that historians need better copies of, rather than SoTS, which has the highest level of professional archival support already at Disney.
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Joel Chandler Harris supported the New South movement and was opposed to counter-Reconstruction (not Reformation; that’s a slip I’d make; it’s hilarious). I have many times heard profs and grad students in literary studies (my field) claim that Harris’s stories are problematic because he’s white. Fair enough; appropriation is actually a thing. But I also hear people say things based on the assumption that white meant opposed to reconstruction. That’s unfair to Harris.
And readings which present his work as supporting the Lost Cause are, well, lacking in nuance? The reason I’m dubious about leaving it at “lacking in nuance” is that I suspect a lot of people who make those claims have read 0-2 things by Harris. When I taught him, I typically paired him with Chesnutt, and they work well together, with Chesnutt clearly seeing things Harris didn’t but with the comparison to Chesnutt allowing us to see things (resistance?) in Harris.
To his credit, he was against people who were more racist than him. He was against lynching.
The problem wasn’t only that he was white, it was that he believed black people could be happier being slaves, and he spread that idea all around the world. He also always believed in the separation of races. He also always believed in white supremacy.
People’s issues with him extend farther than the color of his skin.
If you think that’s “unfair” to Harris, just think how “unfair” it was for all black people.
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