Disney's Most Notorious Film: Race, Convergence, and the Hidden Histories of Song of the South

Conclusion

Prints are unavailable and a childhood memory is notoriously unreliable. Richard Schickel, The Disney Version At various conferences in the last six or seven years, I have given presentations that touched on different aspects of my research into the histories of Disney’s most notorious film. In each case, I was greeted with the same dawning awareness of Song of the South I mentioned in the introduction. Many people had forgotten that they remembered the film, or at least the Brer Rabbit books. But I was also always asked the same question, which I had studiously avoided addressing in my talks: What did I think about Song of the South? Specifically, did I personally feel the film should be rereleased officially? While my project here has been to document historically what others did with Song of the South (both Disney and the film’s various audiences), I have never claimed to be impartial. It should be clear throughout what I personally think of Song of the South. I have not tried to sugarcoat its racist connotations, nor have I defended the film or its supporters. Since I will again be asked, I wish to end by stating clearly that I do not believe the film should be kept out of circulation either. While I am not sympathetic to its supporters, or to Disney’s bottom line, I do think Song of the South should be rereleased. This comes with at least two important qualifications. For one, audiences today need to understand how the film was not inoffensive even in 1946, or at any other point in time. Of all the myths surrounding it today, I am most troubled by the persistent claim that Song of the South is merely a “product of its time,” an assumption that is racially ignorant, culturally destructive, and just plain historically inaccurate. Second, detractors should be allowed equal space to criticize the film by calling attention to the various historical Conclusion On Rereleasing Song of the South 228 Disney’s Most Notorious Film and cultural reasons why it was, and remains, so offensive. In many ways, these two ideas are what I have worked so aggressively to reinforce throughout this book. It is important to bring the film and its racial stereotypes out of the briar patch and back into the open. Once there, we can again make visible the series of larger cultural debates that Song of the South activates, instead of conceding them to a vocal minority that is empowered by critical (and corporate) silence. Disney’s Most Notorious Film Song of the South has always coexisted with questions of its accessibility and discussions about its controversy. Within that dynamic is a particular history of race, media audiences, and technologies in the twentieth-century United States. This project was less about Song of the South and more about the issues it raises in circulation through repetition and difference. The coexistence of its presence and absence over nearly seventy years offers a uniquely illuminating history of affect, nostalgia, technology, and critical race theory. My book explored three interrelated issues: how questions of race have been negotiated through the media, how Disney emerged as the dominant media giant it is, and how changes in media technologies are inseparable from the cultural, political, and historical issues with which they intersect. The film’s first appearance in 1946 was met with criticism from both white and black audiences, and therefore Disney kept the work out of circulation for another ten years, and then another sixteen. In a way, limited access to the film today is nothing new. During many of those years, as with today, the film was less widely available in its full-length theatrical whole than it was in transmediated fragments (books, records, clips, etc.). When Song of the South finally succeeded at the U.S. box office in the 1970s, it coexisted with the legacy of the film’s controversy—which, along with other factors, played a role in Song of the South’s success. That controversy most explicitly manifested itself in Ralph Bakshi’s Coonskin (1974), a blaxploitation satire based on the Disney film. When the film was released again in 1980 and 1986, it was met with criticism that was more direct. This was tied in no small part to Song of the South’s perceived affinity with the political ascendency of Ronald Reagan. Because of that enduring criticism, Disney began in the late 1980s and 1990s to rewrite and dissipate Song...