Disney's Most Notorious Film (20 page)

Thanks in no small measure to its strategies of convergence, Disney’s overall cultural reputation swung widely over the course of the twentieth century. With it, the critical and commercial perception of its “classic” films also shifted, sometimes in profound ways. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, the company was seen as little more than an occasionally innovative, but often struggling, small-time Hollywood studio. Even Mickey Mouse’s popularity had largely waned by the end of the 1930s, and only government funds kept the studio afloat during World War II. By the time a generation of Americans raised on all things Disneyland had grown up, however, Disney itself had morphed in the 1970s and 1980s into a sacred American cultural institution on par with Norman Rockwell and baseball. As Michael Real noted in 1977, Disney was not only a company but also a “universe . . . an ideally self-contained illustration of mass-mediated culture.”
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Within this “self-contained” culture, Disney solidified its economic footing and transmedia reach. It also created its own alternate cultural reality: “Popular mass-mediated cultural expressions [like the ‘Disney universe’] ‘fix’ reality both by receiving and transmitting dominant patterns of perception, structures of feeling,
cognitive
maps, and cultural norms. They represent the ‘central zone’ of a cultural system.”
³⁷
The company became its own established, self-referential mythology in American culture. Within this environment, it is not hard to see why so many rereleases were suddenly successful. In general, as Ray notes, reissues were a common staple in American theaters at this time—a practice led by, but not limited to, the Disney Corporation.
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Disney’s mass-mediated ubiquity, along with the generally nostalgic and reactionary political climate, lifted all theatrical re issue ships in the proverbial sea.

Many old Disney titles found new (or continued) success throughout the 1960s and 1970s as a result of the company’s larger promotional and diversification strategies.
Song of the South
was not the only, or even the most visible, company product within this widespread cultural and industrial shift.
Fantasia
, for instance, underwent a similar transformation. In 1940, the film was a fiasco that almost sunk the studio, an expensive, failed experiment in stereophonic sound that appealed to neither highbrow classical music lovers nor middlebrow cartoon buffs. By the 1990s,
Fantasia
was considered one of Disney’s canonical treasures, with “Sorcerer Mickey” one of its most iconic images. In 1971,
Variety
noted that
Pinocchio
, another box office failure from the “classic” period, was enjoying a fourth theatrical reissue that was “substantially ahead of the initial outing [1940] or any one of the previous three reissue trips to market.”
³⁹
It remains
Song of the South
, however, that was arguably the biggest benefactor of this Disney universe. Like other films, its commercial and critical fortunes were reversed many decades after its initial release. Unlike those others, however, the film was brought back from the vault after being shelved for an entire decade. Its controversies were completely reframed and even tossed aside by a new generation raised on all things Disney.
Song of the South
went from a film that was widely regarded as offensive in the 1940s to one where even the possibility of its racism is now often questioned.

Song of the South
’s paratexts in the 1950s and 1960s kept the film “alive” in dispersed forms of nontheatrical circulation. Such ancillary texts continue to exist throughout the Disney media empire to this day (as
chapter 5
discusses). They had the specific effect of changing audiences’ relationship to
Song of the South
during this period, while also ensuring more receptive conditions for the film’s eventual rereleases. Disney and its various intellectual properties remained everywhere, even while the full-length theatrical version was locked away. Such gradual but continuous cultural ubiquity was crucial to developing and solidifying
Disney’s popular emergence as the standard-bearer for “family entertainment” and its socially constructed acceptance as an everyday part of American life. Within this history, intimately tied into the context of a rebranded corporate legacy,
Song of the South
would prove much more resilient. Even though Disney stopped releasing the film between 1956 and 1972,
Song of the South
was never really gone.

Many generations were less dependent on the sporadic rereleases of the film than on the continuous circulation of
Song of the South
–related books and records in the pre–home video, pre-Internet age. Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox, and in particular the story of the “Tar Baby,” were fixtures in children’s texts produced by several companies. In the Golden Books, children could read the tales of Brer Rabbit every night. Thanks to Capitol and Disneyland Records, Uncle Remus’s voice continued to materialize on numerous records that compiled both his stories and his singing. Likewise, segments of
Song of the South
reappeared on television on
Disneyland
and, later,
The Wonderful World of Disney
. It may be tempting to think of these pieces of memorabilia as ephemeral or fleeting—nostalgic fragments of a past time. But we should not be so quick to dismiss their durability. They remained in circulation for years, passed from friend to friend, family member to family member. Their impact could, and often did, last longer than the “primary” texts they sought to complement and promote. As the
Miami Times
reporter Earl Hutchinson offered as recently as 2007, “Down through the years [
Song of the South
] spawned a genre of popular kids songs that generations of school children (including this writer) hummed and whistled, and delighted in the antics of folk icons Brer Rabbit, Brer Fox, and Brer Bear.”
⁴⁰

By the time
Song of the South
finally reappeared theatrically in 1972, some audiences might not have ever seen the entire film. But many had literally and symbolically grown up with Disney’s version of Brer Rabbit and Uncle Remus in their living rooms, bedrooms, classrooms, church youth groups, and so forth. This helped perpetuate the socially constructed perception that
Song of the South
itself had “always” been a part of their lives. Just as important, this ubiquitous transmedia presence eventually altered perceptions of
Song of the South
’s politics, to the point where by the 1980s and 1990s, some even wondered whether the film was ever offensive in the first place.

Accumulatively, this textual ubiquity set different conditions of possibility for audiences during
Song of the South
’s eventual rereleases in the 1970s and 1980s. Disney’s strategies of convergence, in a sense, anticipated
Song of the South
, rather than the reverse. That is to say,
Song
of
the South
as a theatrical text did not so much spawn a diverse multimedia world of records, toys, television shows, books, and so forth; rather, the ubiquity of Disney’s transmedia universe spawned recognition and anticipation for the film’s eventual theatrical return. People who grew up with Disney’s Uncle Remus in their homes were more receptive than 1940s audiences had been to a jarringly inappropriate “Uncle Tom”–ish Southern melodrama in the more racially enlightened era of post–World War II America.

To understand the Uncle Remus film’s resurrection, it is important to also understand Disney’s. While the film largely disappeared from theaters for nearly three decades, much else changed between 1946 and 1972. It is difficult to pin it down to one particular event that began this shift. Certainly, the advent of
Disneyland
, both television show and theme park, in 1954 and 1955 was central. But Disney had already been working with other companies to circulate content for nearly twenty years by then. Such organizations included the television network ABC, the record company Capitol Records, and the children’s books publisher Western Printing. As early as 1930, Disney began licensing its property for merchandise.
⁴¹
By the end of that same decade, it was working with hundreds of manufacturers on thousands of different products.
⁴²
Initially, much of this was done for the royalty fees, which kept Disney’s costly animation studio running. But the studio also quickly discovered that it was great publicity for the films—in a sense, companies were paying Disney for the right to promote Disney products.

Disney was also succeeding because it discovered that rereleasing its “classics” every few years was a guaranteed moneymaker. Aside from the cost of new advertisements, it was otherwise pure profit. Gene Siskel commented in 1970 that Disney was the one company “that could continue to turn a profit even if it never made another film.”
⁴³
Discovering this was as much the result of dire financial straits as creative ambition. Disney found during World War II, when the war effort tied up all its resources, that the only way to make money was to rerelease old films. As Douglas Gomery noted, the 1944 rerelease of
Snow White
, just six years after it first appeared
,
“accounted for all of Disney’s corporate profits outside of government work. . . . It was from the film library that Disney—from this early date—realized additional pure profit.”
⁴⁴
Disney’s films, Richard Schickel added more cynically, are “for the most part, endlessly rereleasable.”
⁴⁵
Disneyland
’s success a decade later, which often benefitted from airing old Disney films on TV for the first time, was just another iteration of this distribution strategy.

My
goal in this section is not to reiterate information about Disney’s well-known corporate history. Rather, I wish to argue at greater depth for the
cultural impact
of this early transmedia empire. The redistribution and reconstruction of a problematic text such as
Song of the South
serves as a perfect example of the ways the immense Disney universe changed how people interpreted particular titles. By 1968, four years before
Song of the South
’s theatrical return, Schickel noted that Disney was everywhere: “[This year] Walt Disney Productions estimated that around the world 240,000,000 people saw a Disney movie, 100,000,000 watched a Disney television show every week, 800,000,000 read a Disney book or magazine, 50,000,000 listened or danced to Disney music or records, 80,000,000 bought Disney-licensed merchandise, 150,000,000 read a Disney comic strip, 80,000,000 saw Disney educational films at school, in church, on the job, and 6.7 million made the journey to that Mecca in Anaheim [Disneyland].”
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This was hardly the case during
Song of the South
’s first release. Over the course of three decades, the Walt Disney Company steadily emerged as one of the most powerful media giants in the United States. Disney’s strategies of diversification were central to this shift. Much of this information is not particularly novel. Yet those remain staggering numbers, and they served to alter audiences’ relationship to everything within the Disney universe, including
Song of the South
.

Nostalgia for Disney begins to play a considerable role here. Disney wasn’t successful in the 1950s only because it suddenly flooded ancillary markets with its brand; many people embraced the company’s consistent recycling of material in theaters and on television because these media featured content they had not seen since they were themselves children.
Disneyland
was a perfect example. Despite being highly innovative as one new medium (television) and as a blueprint for a new version of still another (theme parks), the ABC program was thoroughly
retro
even then. It offered an intensely nostalgic experience for adults and parents who tuned in each week in record numbers.
Disneyland
became a particularly acute instance of television’s early archival function, writes Anderson: “Hollywood’s past surfaced in bits and pieces [on the new medium], like fragments of a dream. One of the pleasures of
Disneyland
was the chance it offered to halt the flow of mass culture by remembering relics from the Disney vaults.”
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As with most Disney products by the 1950s, the seeds for a
future
nostalgia were planted in the children who experienced them alongside their sentimental parents. Disney had stumbled on a kind of generational nostalgia—remembered pasts coexisting with
anticipated
futures. This dynamic worked to create a powerful media influence that retains its grip to this day.

Walt Disney reintroducing his version of Uncle Remus on the premiere episode of ABC’s
Disneyland
in late 1954.

THE EARLY TRANSMEDIA PRESENCE OF
SONG OF THE SOUTH

For all of
Song of the South
’s problems—both politically and financially—it nonetheless maintained a considerable presence within the Disney universe. Disney was always trying to promote
Song of the South
and incorporate it into other ancillary texts. In 1956, in conjunction with the film’s first rerelease, Scotch Tape used Brer Rabbit and other characters from the film as part of its cross-promotion with Disney, which included the grand prize of a trip to Disneyland in Anaheim. Yet by then the film’s reuse was already widespread. A decade earlier, Disney had begun producing a weekly series of “Uncle Remus” comic strips, which ran from 1945 to the mid-1970s.
⁴⁸
As early as 1948, Donald Duck sang “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” in the opening moments of the short subject film
Soup’s On
. “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” was also featured in the title sequence of NBC’s
The Wonderful World of Disney
, the 1960s iteration of
Disneyland
. The song itself features a long history of individual exploitation, to which I will return at length in the fifth chapter.