Disney's Most Notorious Film (21 page)

As
I mentioned earlier, three key players in Disney’s diversification strategies were Western, Capitol Records, and ABC. In this section, I wish to look closer at these three alliances not because they are unique, but rather because they are powerfully representative of Disney’s extended media reach from the 1940s to the 1960s. Moreover,
Song of the South
maintained a strong presence in each. As early as 1933, Disney and Western began talks for a Mickey Mouse book.
⁴⁹
By 1944 they had begun working together on the “Golden Books,” a children-oriented line of products originally commissioned by the publisher, Simon and Schuster, which Western printed. Together they produced
Through the Picture Frame
—the first of many collaborative Golden efforts.
⁵⁰
Meanwhile, Capitol Records, founded by Johnny Mercer in the early 1940s, within the decade was also doing business with the Disney company. Finally, by 1954, Disney entered into an agreement with ABC to broadcast
Disney land
—a recycling of old material from the Disney vault that was also intended to promote and pay for the park itself.

Disneyland
prominently featured
Song of the South
.
Chapter 5
looks more closely at the film’s relationship to the physical theme park, but here I am primarily examining the television show. Collectively, the
Disneyland
project proved the single most important event in the history of the company. In addition to the theme park and hit TV show,
Disneyland
helped launch other hit properties such as
Davy Crockett
,
Zorro
, and
The Mickey Mouse Club
. The program was also key in promoting Disney’s theatrical films, such as when it dedicated a whole hour to promoting the hugely successful
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
(1954). Yet, as with its work during World War II, the business decision to collaborate with ABC was a practical one largely motivated by desperation. While Disney was still creatively ambitious, the days of major cinematic experimentation in sound and animation, such as in a film like
Fantasia
, were gone. By this point, almost everything the company did involved more cost-conscious projects, such as live action. Disney needed the money from a major network to offset the costs of building the park. Meanwhile, the struggling television channel matched such desperation. “The third place network [ABC],” Anderson writes, “gambled on Disney by committing $2 million for a fifty-two-week series (with a seven-year renewal option) and by purchasing a 35 percent share in the park for $500,000.”
⁵¹
Many saw the building of Disneyland and the accompanying television program as a foolish financial endeavor. Yet ABC emerged with two huge hits (
Disneyland
and
The Mickey Mouse Club
). Disney, meanwhile, became the first Hollywood studio to become keenly aware of television’s ability to market films and to recirculate existing material. “[Walt] Disney was the first Hollywood executive during the 1950s,” writes Anderson, “to envision a future built on television’s
technical
achievements—the scope of its signal, the access it provided to the American home.”
⁵²
As many scholars have noted, it is impossible to overstate the importance of this period in the company’s shift from a minor niche studio to a major multimedia corporation.

The first episode of
Disneyland
featured a substantial excerpt from
Song of the South
, yet only a brief introductory clip of Uncle Remus and the children.

Most of the
Song of the South
footage shown on the premiere episode was from the “Laughing Place” animated sequence.

At the heart of
Disneyland
’s carefully crafted recycling and diversification practices rested
Song of the South
. It appeared on
Disneyland
at least seven separate times (including reruns) in the first two seasons of its broadcast. Notably, the “Laughing Place” sequence was one of the clips that Disney reused during the premiere episode on October 27, 1954. Featuring only a brief introductory moment with Uncle Remus and the children and then a whole Brer Rabbit animated sequence, this footage from
Song of the South
appeared along with excerpts from
True-Life Adventures
(1948),
Fantasia
,
Lonesome Ghosts
(1937), and a preview of
Davy Crockett
(1954). On February 16 the following year, a sequence from the film appeared along with scenes from
Three Little Pigs
(1933) and
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
(1937). The episode, titled “A Cavalcade of Songs,” was dedicated to—as Walt says in the introduction—explaining “where we get the songs for our pictures, how we decide what songs we want to use, and how we go about working them into our stories.”
⁵³

More significantly,
Song of the South
reappeared on
Disneyland
in an episode titled “A Tribute to Joel Chandler Harris.”
⁵⁴
First broadcast on January 18, 1956, this was a full hour dedicated to promoting
Song of the South
’s upcoming theatrical rerelease that year. This episode was again rebroadcast on both March 28 and June 27 during the show’s second season. Like many
Disneyland
episodes, “A Tribute to Joel Chandler Harris” was theatrical advertising masked as both informative education and television entertainment. “Nearly one-third of each
Disneyland
episode was devoted entirely to studio promotion . . . ,” writes Anderson, and “capitalized on the unspoken recognition that commercial advertising had made it impossible to distinguish between entertainment and advertising.”
⁵⁵
What was particularly effective was that such promotional strategies always coexisted with a pseudo-intellectual demeanor that infused all the material with a perceived historical and educational value. This was perhaps never truer than with “A Tribute to Joel Chandler Harris.” Beginning most episodes in a soundstage library or office, surrounded by papers and books, Anderson notes, Walt Disney “appeared professorial. Inspired by knowledge, yet free from scholastic pretension, he is television’s image of an intellectual, kindly and inviting. . . . This lecture seems motivated only by Disney’s inquisitive character until the Disney sales pitch gradually seeps in.”
⁵⁶
While the performance of middle-class
intellectualism
was often about reverence for Disney’s own (and Hollywood’s) cinematic past, it was not exclusively so.

As its title implies, “A Tribute to Joel Chandler Harris” was packaged as a loving memorial to the American South’s literary heritage. Beneath the surface, though, it was primarily a quick recycling of some
Song of the South
footage, and a transparent promotion for the impending theatrical reissue. Besides footage of the “Tar Baby” sequence (and Walt’s introduction), the show created a whole live action dramatization to accompany it. “A Tribute to Joel Chandler Harris” reenacted the life of a young Harris (played by David Stollery) as he learns to be a printer and then writer. Along the way, he encounters a “servant,” Herbert (Sam McDaniel), who first tells him the parables he himself originally heard long ago from an unseen “Uncle Remus.” McDaniel, interestingly, was the older brother of the more famous Hattie, who appeared in
Song of the South
. Most of the episode is about Harris growing up and learning his profession from editors and printers, not listening to stories from slaves. In addition to the one animated Brer Rabbit scene, some of the slave and plantation footage is also recycled from
Song of the South
. These are intercut with new scenes featuring Stollery, McDaniel, and others, which were shot just for this episode.

“A Tribute to Joel Chandler Harris” both repackaged and reframed the historical context for
Song of the South
.
Disneyland
saved the “Tar Baby” sequence until the end of the broadcast to fully recontextualize the film as a small part of American literary heritage. Walt himself introduces the footage as a preservation of Harris’s legacy, to be “loved by children of all ages and of all races.” Saving the
Song of the South
footage until the end also forced audiences to sit through the whole program until getting to the prime theatrical content. Overall, the episode is largely a new expansion of
Song of the South
. It is one of the only true instances of “transmedia storytelling” in the film’s history of circulation. Disney explicitly expanded the narrative canvas of the film to include the story of Harris himself. While historically inaccurate, the narrative allowed Disney to sell
Song of the South
as a product of literary heritage. It also explicitly rewrote the film’s narrative conceit—a happy black servant recounting the stories of Brer Rabbit to a white child—as an assumed historical reality rather than as a figment of Disney’s imagination. Beyond just promoting the film, “A Tribute to Joel Chandler Harris” explicitly reframed
Song of the South
as the way history was, even though little evidence shows that white children in the Old South were allowed to spend extensive time
with
black slaves. It also obscures the historical fact that Harris himself really learned the Brer Rabbit stories as a journalist later in life.

Disneyland
’s strategic reuse of
Song of the South
in this episode both historicized the film’s origins and minimized Uncle Remus himself. It was also a small part of the larger trend in the early days of television to sidestep the racial problems the medium often inherited from the recycling of film. In
Genre and Television
, Jason Mittell discusses the careful ways in which networks came to recycle older theatrical cartoons in the early days of television. A whole range of classic cartoons were edited, or censored entirely, based on offensive images of violence, racism, smoking, and so forth. The result was excessively generic programming: “While not implying that the changing or censoring of racist or other images was inappropriate, it is important to note the cultural effects of such practices. By eliminating references to blacks and other nonwhite human characters out of fear of complaints of racism, television programmers essentially created a white-only genre of programming. This policy was consistent with network live-action practices of the 1950s and 1960s—both to avoid accusations of racist representations and to placate racist viewers who did not want to see ‘positive’ images of blacks, television presented mostly white characters.”
⁵⁷
Mittell argues that, by default, early television programming reinforced a mediated landscape of whiteness, where all other races and ethnicities disappeared. The contradictory protests to
Beulah
,
Amos ’n’ Andy
, and
The Nat King Cole Show
also reinforced this. Moreover, I would argue that network television’s decision to censor the most overtly offensive shorts might have created the impression that racism, and even the idea of racial difference, did not exist. This in turn made it increasingly likely that future generations would see less of what was offensive in
Song of the South
when it again reappeared in theaters. As the film moved into newer media platforms, the early television history of
Song of the South
provided an excellent example of how the Disney universe both promoted and concealed, both expanded and dissipated, the text’s problematic past.

While
Disneyland
was a powerful tool in keeping
Song of the South
alive, Brer Rabbit–themed records and children’s books would prove far more durable. Smith has noted the “largely unrecognized importance of the phonograph in children’s media culture.”
⁵⁸
Disney did not so much pioneer this ancillary market as maximize it in relation to recycling theatrical properties. One such early collaborator with Disney was the popular big band musician Johnny Mercer’s Capitol Records. In 1947 Capitol
released
The Tales of Uncle Remus for Children (from Walt Disney’s “Song of the South”)
, a three-record collection of stories and songs from the film. The album included both voice performers from the movie and re-recordings of the soundtrack by Mercer and his orchestra. Also that year, Mercer released a single of “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah,” while the famed band leader Billy Butterfield produced another 45rpm with one of
Song of the South
’s lesser-known tunes, “Sooner or Later.”
The Tales of Uncle Remus for Children
proved so popular that it was rereleased with different packaging in 1948 and 1949. Starting in 1952, meanwhile, Capitol began releasing that same record compilation divided up as three separate packages:
Brer Rabbit and the Tar Baby, Brer Rabbit’s Laughing Place
, and
Brer Rabbit Runs Away
. Finally, in 1962 and again in 1975, Capitol went back to releasing modified versions of the original three-record set.