The One Disney Film You'll Never Find On DVD
Jan-22-2013

"We're through with caviar," Walt Disney lamented. "From now on it's mashed potatoes and gravy." The company that bore his name was reeling from the disappointing box office returns of Pinocchio and Fantasia. During the war, the perpetually unsteady company had been kept afloat by government-commissioned propaganda movies and cheaply produced "package films" like The Three Caballeros and Make Mine Music. Now the war was over, and the boss needed a hit. Something technically innovative but not too expensive. Something instantly beloved.

Disney had cunningly negotiated the rights to Joel Chandler Harris' plantation-set Uncle Remus' tales back in 1939, while Clark Gable was still dominating movie screens. A known literary entity that oozed bankable southern charm: Disney had found his potatoes.

The resulting film, Song of the South, turned out to be yet another commercial disappointment. But as Jason Sperb details in his fascinating new book Disney's Most Notorious Film, its life as both corporate emblem and fount of controversy would last for decades. The Disney Company hasn't let Song of the South out of its hallowed "vault" in 25 years. The film's live-action depictions of Uncle Remus and his fellow smilin', Massah-servin' black folk are embarrassingly racist. But South's central song, "Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah," is all but synonymous with Disney itself, and the characters live on in the company's massively popular Splash Mountain rides. So Song of the South lives on, yet the company can't even really acknowledge the film, much less cash in on it directly. If you were born after 1980, you've almost certainly never seen it in full, and it's unlikely that will change anytime soon.

Song of the South concerns a young boy, Johnny, who moves to his mother's family plantation in Georgia right as his father leaves the family to fight for some unspecified cause in Atlanta. Alone and depressed, he's comforted by the tall tales of Uncle Remus, an ex-slave living on the property. The era of the film's setting is purposefully vague; while it's implied that the black workers are no longer Johnny's family's property, they are still completely subservient, and happily so.James Baskett plays Remus as a preternaturally jolly companion, a buoyant and beatific link between the stately live-action sequences and the animated ones involving Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox as a proto-Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote.*

For Baskett's magical-Negro presence, for the cartoon characters' ludicrously stereotypical voices, and for the generally pleasant dynamic between the white landowners and their help, Sperb calls Song of the South "one of Hollywood's most resiliently offensive racist texts." That last word is the giveaway that Disney's Most Notorious Film isn't a work of movie criticism so much as the latest entry in the ever-expanding academic subculture of Disney Studies. Sperb spends relatively little time with the movie itself, instead tracing its place in the popular consciousness as it went in and out of style.

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