Disney's Most Notorious Film (18 page)

One of the many
Song of the South
paratexts that circulated in the mid to late twentieth century. This version of Brer Rabbit and the Tar Baby included both a book and a record to read along to. Disneyland records first released it in the early 1970s.

At
its core, Disney’s business success was due less to the modest artistic innovation that initially garnered it acclaim in the 1930s. In the long run, it was more indebted to the repetition, recirculation, and alteration of their theatrical content as it migrated across multimedia platforms in the second half of the twentieth century. This history of convergence stretched back as far as the 1940s and 1950s. It began with Disney’s collaboration with ABC television, Western Printing (Golden Books), Capitol Records, and others. As Disney grew more successful and powerful, it began to form its own ancillary companies, such as Disneyland Records, Buena Vista Distribution, and so forth. At the core of all this, meanwhile, were fragments—books, records, and toys—of a resilient old film whose racist reputation largely kept it out of theaters.

In this chapter, I suggest that Disney’s early convergence practices were an integral part of
Song of the South
’s transition from a racially insensitive, historically anachronistic box office failure in 1946 to the biggest rerelease in company history in 1972, despite its disappearance from theaters in a pre–home video age for almost all of the intervening twenty-six years. Largely exploring the period leading up to the film’s financially successful return, this chapter outlines three separate, if overlapping, historical conditions that shifted the film’s eventual fortunes. The first factor was the rise and fall of the more militant wing of the civil rights movement, which had effectively kept a great deal of offensive content out of theaters and off of television screens; the second was Disney’s early transmedia diversification strategies, which anticipated the future theatrical returns of the same old texts they recycled; and the third, in part dependent on the second, was the company’s larger critical rebirth as an American institution, which made all older Disney texts in some populist sense “sacred.”

RACIAL ATTITUDES, AMBIVALENCE, AND THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

While I argue that Disney’s transmedia ubiquity between the 1950s and 1970s was the central factor in
Song of the South
’s rebirth, it is also important to look closely at how much the racial climate in the United States changed during that same time frame. It’s not hard to see why Disney was already leery of
Song of the South
prior to the 1960s. Most famously, in 1968 Richard Schickel published the influential
Disney Version
, a biography widely considered the first critical study of
Disney’s
larger sexist, racist, and classist representations. At that point,
Song of the South
was little more than a long-since-passed historical curiosity. Schickel noted only briefly what had become commonplace—that the film “contained some pleasant animated sequences devoted to Joel Chandler Harris’ tales of life in the briar patch, plus a finale in which the darkies gather ’round the big plantation to sing one of Massah’s children back to health—a scene sickening both in its patronizing racial sentiment and its sentimentality.”
¹¹
On a quick glance of U.S. racial attitudes in the early 1960s, old Hollywood relics like
Song of the South
had not aged well. Added to that, the film hadn’t proven a consistent moneymaker anyway.

During this time,
Song of the South
’s prospective fortunes were met with stiff resistance by the ascendant civil rights movement. World War II had been only the starting point of the organized activism’s strength. Comprising several loosely connected organizations, the collective movement in the 1950s and early 1960s built on that postwar success. Aside from increased political clout, they also made considerable gains in terms of influencing media representations in film and television. That strength, meanwhile, only grew over the next decade. Sociologist Doug McAdam noted that the militant wing of the civil rights movement was in its “heyday” by the 1960s, citing public opinion polls of the time: “From 1961 to 1965, the salience of the ‘Negro Question’ reached such proportions that it consistently came to be identified in public opinion surveys as the most important problem confronting the country. . . . In six of eleven national opinion polls conducted between 1961 and 1965, ‘civil rights’ was identified as the most important problem facing the country. In three other polls it ranked second. Only twice did it rank as low as fourth.”
¹²
This was not a climate in which Disney wanted to provoke any trouble. A release of
Song of the South
then would tarnish the company’s success by needlessly dragging out one of its more insignificant, and certainly problematic, older titles. Along with the film’s underwhelming box office, the strength of the civil rights movement was certainly a factor in
Song of the South
’s sustained absence from 1956 to 1972.

Because of heightened sensitivity among whites on issues of race (and the recognition of black audiences as a huge box office demographic), African Americans in Hollywood during the 1950s and early 1960s were no longer defined through overtly degrading, old-fashioned stereotypes. During this time, the “Uncle Tom,” “mammy,” and “pickaninny” images all so transparently on display in a film like
Song of the South
largely
disappeared
beneath the cinematic surface. Likewise, even as the new medium of television briefly brought back some of those same images, activist groups were largely successful in boycotting them off the air. At the same time, despite the progress of “social consciousness” films such as
Pinky
(1949) and
Lost Boundaries
(1949), Hollywood by the 1950s was in another thermidorian phase. It glided by on past formulas and successes, rather than pushing the envelope further. Hollywood films maintained the cultural integrationist logic of earlier World War II representations—films that depicted isolated blacks surrounded by a community of whites. The result was an emphasis on impossibly perfect figures like Sidney Poitier, who for a time reached considerable box office popularity with white and black audiences. He also became the first African American actor to win the Academy Award for Best Actor, for his performance in
Lilies of the Field
(1963).

For Thomas Cripps, the saintly roles Poitier repeatedly played were “a bland anecdote to racial tension.”
¹³
While Cripps recognizes Poitier’s genuine success and talent as an actor, the star’s popularity ultimately spoke to a regressive cultural appeal. “Much as Eisenhower had defined the national politics of the era . . . ,” he writes, Poitier defined “the last years of the genre of the combat movies, each with its lone black hero, that had begun with Walter White’s visits to Hollywood in the 1940s.”
¹⁴
Hence even Poitier’s modest success in terms of non-stereotypical representation is largely seen through the lens of a post–World War II cooling-off period, where Hollywood essentially repeated the same formula of modest challenges to stereotypes over a period of almost thirty years. The emergence of Poitier in the 1950s at best reflected a certain standstill in representations of African Americans. Hollywood had learned to avoid the old Uncle Tom stereotypes, but its solution (Poitier) was equally unrealistic.

Even after it left theaters,
Song of the South
continued to serve as symbolic of the lack of a meaningful shift in representation. One periodical to make that connection was
Ebony
, which at the height of the civil rights movement’s influence posited Uncle Remus as symptomatic of larger racial problems in the United States at the dawn of the 1950s. A “Photo-Editorial” from a 1952 issue, titled “Educating Our White Folks,” was accompanied by a full-page production still of Uncle Remus with Johnny. The article itself is not really about
Song of the South
, except for a brief mention of Uncle Remus as symbolic of the “
‘good’ Negro.” The criticism of Disney’s film, however, was unmistakable: “So well did they live up to those [white] beliefs that they became embedded into the
minds
and stereotyped into the literature and songs of America so that Uncle Tom figures like Uncle Remus . . . are still accepted as true portraits of the Negro.”
¹⁵
Although
Song of the South
may have quickly disappeared from theaters, Uncle Remus was still visibly representative of the negative perception of African Americans circulating in the media. The essay’s larger concern was frustration with white people for having been reluctant or unable to understand African Americans and the black experience in the United States. According to the magazine, it thus fell on what
Ebony
called the “New Negro” to educate whites about what it means to live in different cultural or economic situations. Because the “New Negro,” the paper stated, “knows the white man as few whites know the Negro, he has embarked on a crusade to educate the white man to the ways of the Negro.”
¹⁶

The Uncle Tom stereotype undermined such a project. Not only were these figures passive, failing to stand up to whites and correct misperceptions, but their generic identity also tapped into preexisting stereotypes and therefore blocked white understanding of other black experiences. “Because they confirm white folks’ fixed ideas about Negroes,” wrote
Ebony
, “it is hard for whites to understand why they want civil rights and equalities, why they should make themselves unhappy by desiring things they never had.”
¹⁷
Such an argument also confirms why some defenders of the film were unable to see the problems with Uncle Remus, a representation that already conforms to “fixed ideas about the Negroes.” For some,
Song of the South
was offensive not because it shows white audiences anything particularly shocking or derogatory, but because what it shows is not even noticed as being out of the ordinary. Yet, for a while, those stereotypes were successfully removed from theaters.

African Americans on the new medium of television during the 1950s were a very different matter. Yet even this in large measure showed the strength of the civil rights movement. As is often the case in the history of transmedia shifts in the twentieth century, newer platforms often depend on reassuringly conservative content from previous media. Television was no different. As networks began programming new shows to fill the airwaves, the old stereotypes from film and radio, such as the “coon” (
Amos ’n’ Andy
) and the “mammy” (
Beulah
), quickly returned. Like many television programs, both
Amos ’n’ Andy
and
Beulah
were holdovers from the days of radio and represented the sort of outdated racial stereotypes that
Song of the South
had also perpetuated. Befitting the change in racial attitudes, however, neither lasted very long. The NAACP successfully pressured CBS and ABC, respectively, to remove
the
shows after only a couple of seasons in the early 1950s. It is important that this not be confused with substantive long-term progress, though. For one, as evinced by the eventual popularity of older film titles like
Song of the South
, the stereotypes
did
eventually return in full force and with greater resiliency. For another, the disappearance of these shows (along with programs like
The Nat King Cole Show
, which was pulled due to
white
protests) essentially removed all black performers from the airwaves for over a decade.

Given these complicated circumstances, it’s important to note that many black audiences were ambivalent about these images, even in the late 1940s and 1950s. While many were frustrated at seeing the old stereotypes return, others were also content to see any people of color on the small screen. In his reception study of
Amos ’n’ Andy
, as both a controversial radio program and later television show, Melvin Patrick Ely notes that while the NAACP harshly criticized such content in the early 1950s, the show was also “the only series in the new but already popular medium to have an entirely black cast.”
¹⁸
This did not negate the concerns many African American audiences had with the program, but it did emphasize the complexity of their reactions. Beyond the mobilization of activist groups, Ely adds, black audiences “in the country at large, however, were divided in their reactions to the television treatment of
Amos ’n’ Andy
.”
¹⁹
This was less tied to how “offensive” or “negative” the images were in and of themselves, and more—as with Baskett’s performance in 1946—to the tempered pride of seeing any African Americans succeed on-screen. Any understanding of responses in black communities to stereotypes during the twentieth century should be viewed within this complicated and constantly shifting context of alternating, coexistent feelings of pride, disappointment, sympathy, and disgust.

Black ambivalence toward
Song of the South
for much of the 1950s and 1960s was similar. As I noted in the previous chapter, Cripps argues that many African American audiences were largely frustrated by
Song of the South
because they had a personal respect for James Baskett’s effort. This admiration was only intensified in the immediate years after the film was released. Such attitudes were grounded in two interrelated events that occurred in 1948—the Academy Awards ceremony that year, and the subsequent passing of Baskett. In July 1948, Baskett died at age forty-four of a heart ailment. Services were held at the Fisher’s Funeral Home in Los Angeles, and reportedly observed from the outside by more than five thousand people.
²⁰
Obituaries and commentaries of the time prominently featured
Song of the South
. Aside from some work as “Gabby
Gibson”
on radio’s version of
Amos ’n’ Andy
(whose white stars, Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll, served as pallbearers), the Disney film was the one major project he ever worked on. The
Chicago Defender
even lovingly referred to him as “Uncle Remus” in the front-page headline of his obituary
²¹
and in the coverage of his memorial service a week later.
²²
Tributes to his life’s work, including his Oscar-winning effort in
Song of the South
, were understandably celebratory.