Disney's Most Notorious Film (37 page)

Song of the South
is one of many texts to which
Roger Rabbit
pays homage. By alluding to that earlier film, by internalizing
Song of the South
characters in a larger animated world,
Roger Rabbit
also conceals a film of which it can never be free. Continuing Disney’s recirculation of profitable intellectual properties, the character of Roger Rabbit himself reappeared in additional animated shorts in subsequent years, such as
Rollercoaster Rabbit
(1990) and
Trail Mix-Up
(1993). He even appeared in the “Disneyland Fun” sing-along version of “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah.” In
Trail Mix-Up
, Roger at one point rides a log from a lumber mill over a steep waterfall. The implicit reference to Splash Mountain’s log ride is quickly made explicit. As Roger and Baby Herman go over the ledge and down the drop, the back of the log reveals a bumper sticker that reads “We Visited Splash Mountain” (the use of a bumper sticker also recalls Disneyland’s presence in highway culture). Like Splash Mountain, which was conceived around the same time as
Roger Rabbit
, these strategic reuses of
Song of the South
both expand and conceal the possibilities for exploring racial attitudes that the original Uncle Remus film continues to activate through its dispersed presence.

As
Trail Mix-Up
suggests, Splash Mountain’s presence and popularity extends far beyond the ride itself, especially as we move into the realm of modern gaming. In 2000, a Splash Mountain–themed game was included in the
Walt Disney World Quest: Magical Racing Tour
for PlayStation and other videogame platforms. In this version, the user plays as Mickey Mouse or one of several other Disney characters as they race on boats through a somewhat ambiguous virtual simulation of the ride’s environment (no characters or music from the ride itself are prominently featured). Several years later, Splash Mountain was featured in its own old-fashioned board game,
Sorry! Splash Mountain
(2005), part of a series of several games based on Disney theme park attractions. Most recently, Splash Mountain appeared prominently in Xbox 360’s
Kinect Disneyland Adventures
(2011). Like all Kinect games,
Disneyland Adventures
is an interactive, physical experience that works through a motion sensor device that allows the gamer to play hands-free. In the Splash Mountain portion of the game, people are able to join with Brer Rabbit as he runs through the Briar Patch, and then in a boat as he paddles down the river. In both stages, completion of the game is dependent on the gamer physically completing the same tasks as Brer Rabbit. Befitting the innovation in computer graphics and high-definition imagery,
Disneyland
Adventures
’ re-creation of Splash Mountain is far more detailed and sophisticated than that of
Magical Racing Tour
. Halfway through the game, meanwhile, there is also a new animated sequence featuring Brer Rabbit, Brer Fox, and Brer Bear. In this regard,
Disneyland Adventures
is by far the most extensive use of
new Song of the South
–related footage since the film was last seen in theaters. It is also the most elaborate use of digital animation to re-create Brer Rabbit and the other characters. Both developments suggest
Song of the South
not only quietly lives on in fragments, but perhaps has benefited from the emergence of digital culture as much as any old Hollywood film.

WHITENESS AND THE TRANSMEDIA DISSIPATION OF
SONG OF THE SOUTH

This chapter has focused on the diverse ways in which Disney directly and indirectly negotiated the continuing risk associated with
Song of the South
during the Eisner era. Embracing the value of the studio’s long history to its present economic fortunes, Disney could not simply toss the old film aside in the mid-1980s.
Song of the South
continued to draw decent crowds to theaters, while its Oscar-winning song, “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah,” had emerged as a central pillar of the Disney media empire, on par with visions of Mickey Mouse and Uncle Walt. Yet the image-savvy Team Disney that now led the company was also mindful of how much a racist old plantation movie threatened their family-friendly brand. The fact that Disney supporters within the generally conservative political climate of the 1970s and 1980s had defended
Song of the South
’s critical reputation was only a short-term business solution. All of this came to a head when Disney made the long-term investment to turn
Song of the South
into a costly and more permanent theme park attraction. The 1946 film would be mined for its remaining value to the company, which they found in the music and the animated characters. The rest would be quietly put away.

Transmediated fragments of
Song of the South
continue to appear every where throughout Disney’s media universe. In addition to the versions of Splash Mountain in California, Florida, and Japan, direct traces of the film populate sing-along videos, compilation CDs, video games, and a wide range of other merchandise lines. Brer Rabbit himself is available in the form of plush toys and porcelain statues. Meanwhile, “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” is so deeply engrained within Disney’s media landscape
of
theme parks, videos, CDs, and television shows that its presence is nearly impossible to capture. The hit tune that preceded
Song of the South
on the pop charts back in 1946 has now outlived the film. “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” is perhaps the only part of
Song of the South
that most audiences instantly recognize, although the association is more often with Disney’s fun-loving corporate image than with the tales of Uncle Remus. It has showed up in numerous non-Disney texts—everything from films such as
National Lampoon’s Vacation
,
Fletch Lives
, and
Overboard
(1987), to the short-lived television show
Galactica 1980
(1980). By the 1990s,
Song of the South
had not disappeared; it simply dissipated throughout a universe of paratexts that had quietly replaced it.

The complicated histories of racial difference and inequality that
Song of the South
evokes dissipated along with the film itself. It is unfair to imply that any of the texts examined in this chapter are as potentially offensive as the film they strategically remediated, even if they benefited from aspects of
Song of the South
’s popularity. Criticisms of Splash Mountain, for example, seemed muted when the attraction opened. A 2002 article in the
Alabama Mobile Register
made reference to NAACP “protests against a Disneyland attraction with a ‘
Song of the South
’ theme a few years ago,”
⁵⁹
yet little evidence corroborates what these “protests” against Splash Mountain were. By the end of the 1980s, critics of
Song of the South
may have seen Splash Mountain’s considerable narrative revision as a small victory, especially so soon after the film’s latest rerelease. Even James Snead wrote in 1986 that the live action parts were the most offensive aspect of
Song of the South
—and they were nowhere to be seen in Splash Mountain, other than via a few unattributed quotations from Uncle Remus.

Yet it is also excessive to glorify Disney’s corporate strategies of minimizing risk as the definitive solution to a thorny subject. Instead, the film’s dispersed textual presence speaks to the awkward existence
Song of the South
continues to maintain in American culture. Likewise, the discourse of whiteness, the denial of anything other than white culture, remains stubbornly persistent in the media. In the “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” sequence from
Fletch Lives
, the shift to an all-white plantation symbolizes the ways that Disney and most every over major Hollywood studio in the 1980s avoided issues of race by often going so far as to deny even the representation of racial difference. When the designers of Splash Mountain changed the “Tar Baby” to a pot of honey, the move heightened the film’s core racism at the same moment of its erasure. Yet this is also lost
on
the Disneyland visitor whose only concern is surviving the fifty-foot drop that awaits him or her.

The decision to change
Song of the South
conceded its problematic aspects, and the ride’s continued existence always retains the potential to bring back the ghost of Uncle Remus. The deliberate avoidance of
Song of the South
’s overtly racialized content in
Fletch Lives
, as well as in Splash Mountain,
Kinect Disneyland Adventures
, and
Who Framed Roger Rabbit
, reinforced a post-racial logic that supports the norm of whiteness precisely by ignoring persistent questions of race. These texts do not avoid issues of race so much as they train their respective audiences
not to see racial difference
in any meaningful way. Disney tried to wipe its hands clean of Uncle Remus and Johnny. Yet, with the rise of the Internet, neither
Song of the South
nor questions of racism were going anywhere in a new age of participatory culture.

Six

REASSURING CONVERGENCE

New Media, Nostalgia, and the Internet Fandom of
Song of the South

Of course the film
is
available if you don’t mind infringing on Disney’s copyright by buying an illegal bootleg copy whose quality will not be perfect. . . . When one of these discs came into my possession I put it in my player. But even before the credits had finished rolling I turned it off, not because of the quality of the audio and video, which wasn’t sparkling, but certainly good enough. I guess I didn’t want to experience the disappointment an adult sometimes feel [
sic
] when they revisit the scenes of his childhood. Or maybe I was afraid of the long-buried emotions the film might dig up.

BILL VAUGHN

With its last theatrical appearance now nearly thirty years past, and with no full-length home video versions ever released in the United States, it is tempting to talk of
Song of the South
in the past tense. A fan petition for its rerelease in 2007 was resisted by Disney, which said proper historical context would need to be included. “That was a polite way of saying,” wrote Earl Hutchinson then, “that there was no way that such a racially anachronistic film loaded with racially demeaning images and characters can be peddled without telling how and why the images and message are racially insulting today.”
¹
The official company line is that “Walt Disney Home entertainment uses many factors to evaluate which movies in its rich library will be issued on video and DVD formats. . . . To this point, we have not discounted nor committed to any distribution window concerning this
title
.”
²
In this instance, Disney was unwilling to even state the title,
Song of the South
.

Yet any notion that
Song of the South
has truly vanished is problematic. As Lucas Hilderbrand argues, there remains a whole history of media
reception to be explored by looking past “official” releases, and taking up the equally ubiquitous universe of bootleg ones.
³
Despite Disney’s official stance,
Song of the South
is relatively easy to find. These versions are often illegally recorded from the various VHS and laser disc versions Disney sold for decades in Europe and Asia. Personal anecdotes of its survival abound. The media scholar J. P. Telotte recently recalled stumbling on bootleg copies of
Song of the South
that were openly displayed in a gift shop in northern Georgia.
⁴
Scott Schaffer, a former Disneyland employee, once mentioned in a footnote to an article on the theme parks that “I have recently been asked—by a current Disney employee—to send copies of [
Song of the South
] to the United States from my residence in Toronto.”
⁵
Moreover, the film is regularly distributed online through file-sharing services such as BitTorrent. The original feature-length film is not hard to come by today, since Disney fans and the passing curious have embraced the bootleg as key to
Song of the South
’s (illegal) survival.

Digital culture has radically shifted audiences’ collective relationship to
Song of the South
in ways that Disney could not have anticipated when they built Splash Mountain and left the old version behind in the late 1980s. New avenues of access and participatory culture opened up in the age of the Internet. Any notion that
Song of the South
has truly disappeared from public consciousness is problematized further by those who continue to vocalize their desire to see it officially reissued. The very act of advocacy gives
Song of the South
continued life and circulation. In 2006, a prominent Disney fan blogger, Jim Hill, started a rumor that
Song of the South
was being released on DVD in conjunction with its sixtieth anniversary. As this news spread, lively debates about the film developed across Internet forums and comment sections. In the process, many Disney fans put on their virtual Mickey ears and at times expressed the kind of heated rhetoric that seemed to validate the corporation’s reluctance to rerelease the film in the first place.

So much of the contemporary criticism of
Song of the South
then stems from fans’ continued insistence on its innocuousness. In an essay titled “Song of a Never-Was South,” Hollis Henry wrote in response to the persistent, fan-generated rumors of the film’s return. He effectively rearticulated what others have long said regarding its racist depiction of African Americans living an idyllic life of social inequality and servitude. Yet Henry was focused on a new trend in the history of the film’s reception: “The question isn’t whether the film should be banned. The important phenomenon is the legion of incensed and activist fans (white
and
black) of the movie, fighting hard to have Disney release
Song of the South
. They argue it’s only a children’s movie. They say any offensive elements the film might have can be looked past. They say Walt Disney’s intentions were good. And most importantly, they question whether the film is offensive at all.”
⁶
It is worth noting that Henry still felt the need to explain after all these years why
Song of the South
is offensive. Henry was not arguing to continue censoring the film. Rather, he argued that its official absence only stoked reactionary fan anger over the perceived slight and facilitated conservative interpretations of the film, wherein offensive content was downplayed. While criticizing the film, Henry focused less on Disney and more on Internet fans who have repeatedly insisted on a distorted view of the film’s politics.