Disney's Most Notorious Film (17 page)

The longer
Song of the South
endured, the more its defenders repositioned it within this longer literary history. Yet Disney’s affection for the original literary stories undermined what Bernard Wolfe himself had identified: the joke of the Brer Rabbit tales was on white audiences. By 1949, Wolfe too was mostly concerned with
Song of the South
in relation to Harris’s legacy. “Is it too far-fetched to take Brer Rabbit as a symbol,” Wolfe asked, “about as sharp as Southern sanctions would allow—of the Negro slave’s festering hatred of the white man?”
⁸⁴
But Wolfe believed that Harris took the anger of the slave narratives and “fitted the hate-imbued folk materials into a framework, a white man’s framework, of ‘love.’
”
⁸⁵

Patricia Turner, James Snead, and others years later felt that a shift from the parables of black agency began with Disney’s decision to use a live action frame narrative. This de-emphasized Uncle Remus as a storyteller and made the adventures of Brer Rabbit a parable for the already-privileged white child Johnny’s own survival in life. Sorting out the remnants of slave agency in the different versions of Brer Rabbit anticipated the complexities that would later develop as a part of
Song of the South
’s own reception history. Just as nostalgia later became an inseparable part of its reception, the long passage of time also forced scholars to reconsider trying to hold onto Harris’s own work as a rare trace of oral slave heritage, regardless of its inherent racism. Harris’s literature was ubiquitous in the 1940s, yet by the end of the century he was for some a last sliver of connection, however problematic. Wolfe could not have foreseen how much the company’s appropriation of Harris would radically reframe the debate around the Uncle Remus tales.

Disney’s version of Brer Rabbit, not Harris’s, would become its public perception—but not yet. Wolfe’s article in the late 1940s revealed an interesting early moment in the evolution of
Song of the South
. His overall critique is not of the film, but of the books’ meaning and reception. The
Disney
version was merely symptomatic, Wolfe suggested, of the larger success and enduring legacy of Harris’s own problematic work. Yet the article’s introduction did stress the significant role that the film and its early paratexts played in renewing interest in the older stories. Wolfe’s essay was one of the first to acknowledge that
Song of the South
had changed the popular perception, if only slightly, of Harris’s legacy. The paradox in Wolfe’s article is that Disney was still marginalized as part of a larger critique that highlighted what he saw as Harris’s distortion of oral slave history.

Wolfe’s focus reminds us that, three years after its theatrical appearance,
Song of the South
was not really taken that seriously. He felt Harris’s tales were far more damaging in their representations of African Americans. Yet Wolfe’s evocation of
Song of the South
’s multi-textual presence acknowledged that something had changed. For all the controversy, Disney was not yet through with
Song of the South
. Harris’s centrality in the history of Uncle Remus was shifting. Wolfe, in his own way, first understood the cultural power in continuing to
remediate
Uncle Remus. As the next chapter will show, Disney’s early strategies of convergence and cross-media promotion were ultimately more responsible for
Song of the South
’s long-term survival than was the film itself.

Three

“OUR MOST REQUESTED MOVIE”

Media Convergence, Black Ambivalence, and the Reconstruction of
Song of the South

Never before in its history had Hollywood reissued so many films with so much success:
Gone with the Wind
(1967–68),
Swiss Family Robinson
(1969),
101 Dalmatians
(1970),
Song of the South
(1972),
The Sound of Music
(1973),
Mary Poppins
(1973),
Robin Hood
(1974). These reissues’ formal and thematic conservatism implied the existence of a longing for traditional modes and the established mythologies they represented.

ROBERT RAY, A CERTAIN TENDENCY OF THE HOLLYWOOD CINEMA, 1930–1980

In
A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema
, Robert Ray noted a “right cycle” movement in the 1970s.
¹
This included both new reactionary films, such as
Dirty Harry
(1971), and the recirculation of older films, such as Disney’s
Song of the South
, from Hollywood’s so-called golden age. Ray’s observation reminds us of the sometimes-forgotten fact that the
re
appearance of a film can be more important than its first appearance. In the 1940s, the cinematic “Old South” had been anachronistic for many post–World War II audiences. But decades later, such nostalgic texts suddenly came back into vogue, changing fundamentally how these films’ histories were later perceived. The subsequent rereleases of
Song of the South
, especially during the 1970s and 1980s, are the most overlooked, but also revealing, parts of its reception history.

There is another aspect of Ray’s argument that is important. Seemingly out of the blue,
Song of the South
was now
popular
. After its 1946 debut, the film spent twenty-five years uneventfully in and out of circulation. This included its first rerelease a decade later in 1956, which was met with a largely indifferent critical and commercial reception. The
fi
lm appeared in the 1950s not because it was in demand; rather, even before then, Disney figured out that its biggest profits often came from rereleasing the same material to a new generation of children.
Song of the South
was no different in that regard. Yet still the film underwhelmed. Moreover, the film’s racial politics made it even less worth the trouble. Thus
Song of the South
largely spent the years between 1946 and 1972 hidden in the Disney vault. Yet upon its second rerelease,
Song of the South
was suddenly more successful than it had ever been before.

It would have made sense if Disney had left
Song of the South
for dead by the 1960s. Critics dismissed its lame live action melodrama, while activists lamented its Uncle Tom representations. Meanwhile, the film barely recouped Disney’s considerable investment. The film had been the company’s big postwar hope for another
Snow White
–sized hit, but within a few years it was largely forgotten. As late as 1970, Disney announced through
Variety
that
Song of the South
would never be released again, because of its racial insensitivity. They made this announcement only because, Disney now claimed, it was the “most requested title” in the Disney vault.
²
One theater owner, Jeff Begun, was even quoted as calling the film, quite inexplicably, a “classic.”
³
Not surprisingly, within two years, Disney rereleased the film in 1972. This time, it proved the biggest rerelease in company history—despite never having been successful before, and having even been briefly “banned.”

In the span of three decades,
Song of the South
went from being a black eye to one of the company’s most valuable assets. The film earned over $6 million in only a few months after its January 1972 rerelease. This doubled its total haul from the 1940s, and surpassed the 1969 rerelease of
Swiss Family Robinson
(1960) as the highest-grossing Disney reissue at that point in the company’s history.
⁴
Song of the South
was on
Variety
’s list of “Top-Grossing Films” from January 26 to April 5 that year, reaching as high as fifth on February 2.
⁵
The film’s success was so pronounced that Disney then rereleased it again for a limited engagement a little over a year later in June 1973.
⁶
During the 1980s,
Song of the South
’s box office business was similarly impressive—grossing nearly $17 million more during two additional reissues between late 1980 and 1987.
⁷
I will argue throughout the next several chapters that
Song of the South
’s reputation is really a product of the 1970s and 1980s. Although produced originally in the 1940s, the film only became
timely
thirty years into its existence, and then started its run as a successful cult text for the next twenty years. It is the 1972 reissue of
Song of the South
—and the post–civil rights myth that the film was always popular—that is remembered today.

A common promotional image for the 1972 rerelease of
Song of the South
. Note the nice ’70s suit Uncle Remus wears here, a far cry from the tattered outfit he wears in the movie itself.

Still
the question remains—what
did
happen over the course of three decades that changed perceptions of
Song of the South
from an anachronistic disappointment, to being seen as a highly sought-after “classic”? Answering that question—documenting what
led up to
the film’s eventual success in the 1970s—is the goal of the present chapter. The decline of the civil rights movement and the rise of the white backlash in the late 1960s was one important factor. Yet even within African American communities, there was often an ambivalent attitude toward
Song of the South
. Through subsequent decades, Baskett’s “historic” achievement—the first black man to win an Academy Award—complicated some people’s attitudes toward the movie itself. The biggest factor explaining
Song of the South
’s reemergence, though, was that Disney itself changed—the corporation and its media offerings, along with the cultural and critical assessments of the company among American audiences.

Disney’s transmedia ubiquity evokes the notion of the “paratext,” the peripheral material—trailers, books, albums, toys, and so forth—that surround a primary text, such as a theatrical film or network television program. If noticed at all, these ancillary, ephemeral artifacts traditionally have been viewed as doing little more than promoting, exploiting, and solidifying audience attachment to the main text a studio or network is trying to sell. Yet, as Jonathan Gray recently argued, these same marginal documents are crucial to framing a text’s meaning. This is particularly important when people sometimes spend more time personally engaging with a paratext (such as a video game tie-in to a blockbuster movie) than with the text being promoted. “When [in today’s market] Disney might make several hundred dollars’ worth of product sales off a single young consumer compared to the child’s paltry five dollars at the box office,” Gray writes, “we might be foolish to see the film as ipso facto the ‘primary text.’
”
⁸
For decades media studies has focused on analyzing the main text when trying to understand a film or television program’s cultural and historical impact. Yet such textual analysis is incomplete. Instead, “hype, synergy, promos, narrative extensions, and various forms of related textuality position, define and create meaning for film and television.”
⁹
Specific audiences and historical contexts have played a key role in the construction of a film’s “meaning.” And there remains a wider history of paratextuality still unexplored, but which is crucial to understanding the cultural impact of most any major Hollywood text.

In the twenty-six years between
Song of the South
’s first (1946) and third (1972) releases, Disney expanded its media products far beyond the movie screen, offering one of the earliest iterations of a fully formed
convergence
culture. Although Disney had been licensing its characters to toy producers, book publishers, and record companies since the late 1920s, the company’s vision really came into focus after World War II. By the 1950s, writes Christopher Anderson, “Disney’s movies were subsumed into an increasingly integrated leisure market that also included television, recorded music, theme parks, tourism, and consumer merchandise.”
¹⁰
The heart of this empire in particular was Disneyland. By the middle of the 1950s, in an early moment of literal convergence, the word “Disneyland” simultaneously signified (1) a television show on the ABC network, (2) a theme park in Anaheim, California, (3) a profitable record company, and (4) a series of successful books.