Posted on 03/16/2020 8:35:32 AM PDT by rktman
Disney will not be adding the 1946 animation Song Of The South to its Disney+ streaming service because it is “not appropriate in today’s world,” the company’s executive chairman Bob Iger said this week.
Iger made the remarks during Disney’s annual shareholder’s meeting on Wednesday when he was asked a question as to whether the full Disney library will be available on the service.
“I’ve felt, for as long as I’ve been CEO, that Song of the South – even with a disclaimer – was just not appropriate in today’s world,” he said. “Given the depictions in some of those films, to bring them out today without some form or another, without offending people. So we’ve decided not to do that.”
The film, which is nearly 75 years old, has become highly controversial in recent years for its depiction of black Americans working on a plantation in Georgia after the Civil War.
(Excerpt) Read more at breitbart.com ...
” His first collection of folk poems and proverbs was published in 1881 as Uncle Remus: His Songs and Sayings. Further collections included Nights with Uncle Remus (1883), Uncle Remus and His Friends (1892), and Uncle Remus and the Little Boy (1905). As the titles suggest, relationships are important; they develop between the wide-eyed audience (likened to a little white boy from the main plantation household) and the narrator who acts as “best friend”-whiling away the hours with a seemingly endless supply of tales. The lasting impression of the Remus stories on readers of all ages and from many countries (there were translations into twenty-seven languages) stems from the force of their slave lore.
Harris insisted that his sources were genuine and that his documentation of the plot and dialect was accurate. In this way, Uncle Remus goes back in time to African models, as well as to the animal tales of Aesop and Chaucer.”
https://www.uncleremus.com/bio.html
That was my impression of it when I saw it as a little white toddler. Uncle Remus was a wise elder, friendly, and a good and trustworthy person.
Progs are always looking for evil, and as they seek, they find.
I have a copy of SotS on DVD. Had to order it from Europe.
Best Movie ever for kids.zippity do da and Uncle Remus telling the stories of brer rabbit and brer fox.
I got it on line.I wish they would bring it out but I understand why.
I have the story in Readers Digest book very hard to read.But was absolutely one of my favorites.
I realized my error right quick but was hoping nobody would notice! Thanks for the correction!
Reconstruction & Creating Hate In America Today
Moreover, the cast of animal characters, in the Uncle Remus tales, reflected popular folk tales among West African tribes, strongly suggesting that the American author was truly purveying a very positive cultural image. Why would anyone want to disparage same?!
I caught it because when I was born, we lived about 40 miles from Eatonton, Harris’ home. I’ve been through Eatonton off and on for the past 70 plus years.
When I was a kid there were Negro/Colored families (the term “Black” was an insult and “African-American” had not been invented) living just down the road from us. This was before Brown v. Board of Education or the Civil Rights Amendment. They treated this little white boy much the same as the folks in Song of the South treated the white kids.
There WAS segregation and inequality, but there was civility.
Iger schmieger
Was he better than Eisner?
Roy shoulda never let the fleas in the tent...
They killed what Disney meant to those of us over 55
Eisner and Iger....same shite
Frank Wells dying hurt almost as bad as Walt did at least from an executive perspective
Since you have a bootlegged copy (presumably from Taiwan), help me with my recollection of the movie.
As I recall it, the movie is actually a live action framework for linking together cartoon depictions of the famous Brer (sp) Rabbit folktales.
The timeframe is never stated explicitly but is probably the pre-Civil War South. The occasion is a visit of a northern (white) family (parents and their children) to their plantation owner southern relatives. The plantation workers, who, as I recall, are never actually referred to as slaves but who are also clearly dressed in rough clothing and depicted as workers, are having a noisy celebration in the evening after work. This draws the attention of the small son of the visiting family. He is escorted down to see the celebration and is eventually put under the elderly Uncle Remus’ charge to safeguard him during his visit and to see him back to the manor house afterwards.
The rest of the movie then cuts back and forth between animated episodes from the folktales and the live action scenes linking them together. The one exception to this is the “Zippity Do Da” song where the Uncle Remus character interacts with animated scenery and animals as he walks along.
We have a large format, illustrated story book of the Brer Rabbit stories that we purchased new at least 30 years ago to read to our daughters. It explains how the stories came to be collected and how the collector ( a white doctor to the local community) was careful to preserve the Gulla-dialect English they were told in. The illustrations were either direct lifts from the animated movie or drawn by the same artists.
I have to admit I enjoyed reading them (with considerable animation, of course) as much as my daughters enjoyed listening to them. “The Tar Baby” still brings a smile from recollecting Brer Rabbit’s first “Howdy do!” to the insolent tar baby to poor Rabbit being “so stuck up he could scarce move his eyeballs” to his fast thinking and fast talking escape from Brer Fox and Brer Bear into the briar patch.
Unfortunately, as I recall, even if you could extract the animated sequences from the rest of the movie, there is enough stereotyping in how Brer Rabbit, Brer Fox, and Brer Bear are drawn, talk, and move that it would be unacceptable by modern standards. Heck, even use of the word “tarbaby” as a metaphor for a nearly inescapable situation is enough to have the “Woke” crowd assemble with pitchforks and bill hooks to demand vengeance. I think a allusion to the briar patch would probably draw fire as well.
It’s easy to see why Disney feels it is a product best left out of the available catalog. It’s purely business. Best to avoid creating controversy over a product very few remember or are even asking for. It is literally a tarbaby best avoided.
As all of who know of the writer’s childhood remembrance of these very same stories, recited to him. Mr. Joel Chandler Harris, a newspaper writer and associate editor of the original Atlanta Constitution (before the Cox woman et al,took it over. Ann Cox Chambers and spawn).
Mr. Grady, Harris’s boss as editor in chief of the Constitution, as well as Harris were for the ideas of the New South (a concept much maligned and mis-aligned by elements of the Old South as well as the carpetbaggers who came South like locusts to obtain wealth from the war ravaged region).
It is so true how much childhood memory and affection for the African folk tales inspired Harris to relate the Uncle Remus tales. Great affection and respect for how those stories came to this country.
No surprise that the hating Left (who objectify every aspect of race relations, just as obamaumao did,and Bernie the Marxist has to do because it is in the Communist dialectic specially written just for dividing US Blacks and other communities and peoples— instead of uniting.
Mr.Harris and Mr. Grady— from a very different time in Atlanta, along with the founding of the Coca-Cola company, the turn of the Century Arts and Crafts movement (architecture-modern & utilitarian). The neighborhood in SW Atlanta called Westview, with trolley car line to downtown. Virtually no one has personal memory of that, they are all gone. And the neighborhood has transitioned but not been erased such as seen in inner Detroit (a wasteland of human debris).
SOTS was one of my favorite movies when I was about 4-5 y/o.
Zip-E-Dee-Doo-Dah! Uncle Remus and all the Br’ers!
Iger is an idiot.
Nothing in the movie that should anger anyone. It’s an animated film with talking animals that appeals to kids.
Ignoring it as they, Taliban-like, continue to try to remove monuments which were erected to retain the memory of the events, as well as provide a bridge to healing the rifts of the country. By so doing, this monuments removal and history ignoring, attempting to erase real history from which all could and have learned— they are committing a criminal act in trying to change the facts and altogether eliminate them, fort their own convenience. And then, write exactly WHAT about the people and their descendants, white and black, who went on to fight for other’s freedom under the Flag of E Pluribus Unum.
Their motto is “out of ONE— make many” and keep them all fighting and pissed off so we can fleece them a thousand times over— we who believe in NOTHING BUT MONEY and our own POWER. Not for long, Iger. Not for long, you freaking loser with flattened emotional emptiness, vacuous liar, and leader of an organization of paedophiles. Soon to be known to all—ABC included.
I’ve read that Bre’r Rabbit was based on Anansi the Spider, a trickster from West African folklore.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anansi
Thumbs up!
Uncle Tom in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel was also a positive character for the time, but has come to be seen as a demeaning stereotype over the years. Loyal servant figures are bound to be seen as negative nowadays. In their day, to be a good and loyal servant may have been seen as a positive aspiration, but with time accepting subservience has come to be seen as negative and derrogatory.
Not as much as I used to for sure, can’t remember the last time I actually have purchased a LD new or used.
My wife's grandfather used to read those stories to the family when she was young. I think she like SOTS more because of that.
When I was a kid, our teachers frequently would read to us. There was a time of day reserved for the teacher to read a story or a chapter of a story. One collection of stories I remember was called Miss Minerva and William Green Hill. It was about a proper spinster who had to take in her incorrigible nephew after the death of his parents. The boy is very deep-south and speaks in a very hick dialect (sort of a Huck Finn type), and he constantly refers to all the things he used to do as a country boy, and frequently mentions his black friend "Wilkes-Booth Lincoln". Like Uncle Remus, I am sure those stories would not pass muster today, but I remember them as being charming and amusing.
Virus or no virus the dumb virtue signally is always good for Hollywood feels and tingles. Can you buy Song of the South on eBay? I looked and it is there but rare.
Here is one torrent that looks good>>> Wuz broadcast by the BBC! lol
Song of the South - Restored and Cleaned Up BBC HD Broadcast
Size 4.36 GiB
one comment>> Best copy out there. Burned it to DVD. Amazing colors, video and audio. Its like having the original. Great job for a film this old. PROPS to the uploader.
Great excerpt. Just watched it.
The inspiration of a lifetime... to LOVE life and happy to be living Life. God-given is in that equation also.
That song alone has created many other songs of the simple peace the thoughts and feelings expressed. Like Johnny Mercer’s “Moon River” with his boyhood reflection on the warm days on the river picking huckleberries with his “Huckleberry friend....”
And a modern one note there is no “race” — this is Southron.....from J.J.Cale’s writing here performed by the late Tom Petty and Eric Clapton: The Old Man and Me
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RJ_kkrLEJE
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