Disney's Most Notorious Film (23 page)

Generational nostalgia is always more about the parent, and adults more generally, than about the child. The same person above, who remembered her mother reading it, has “tried to read these stories to my daughter, but I do not have the gift of the language like my mother used to have.”
⁷³
Older family members buy it for younger ones, hoping that the nostalgia will be passed on. “This book will be a great Christmas surprise for my nephew who use [
sic
] to listen to me read it to him when he was real young,” one person wrote on Amazon. “My nephew seems to bring this book up to me quite often reminising [
sic
] the memories of how enjoyable it was to hear the Tar Baby Story.”
⁷⁴
More brazenly, one consumer hoped to pass it on to their children’s children: “The Brer Rabbit book was a childhood favorite of my 30 year old son. I wanted one for his children to enjoy.”
⁷⁵
Like discussions about the movie itself, people’s memories of other Disney Brer Rabbit merchandise are focused on the child via an adult—and on the nostalgia imposed on that child before they are old enough to develop their own memories.

All this in turn leaves open the question of how many people actually remember seeing
Song of the South
, since more people recall Brer
Rabbit,
the “Tar Baby,” and “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” than Johnny, Uncle Remus, or Ginny. The same cynical commenter above, who thought “85%” of the people were remembering the book and not the film, also hypothesized, “While the movie is okay, it isn’t the blockbuster most people draw it out to be. The acting is mostly subpar and the animation isn’t much better. I question whether most people who purport seeing the movie actually have seen it, and if they have real memories of it or imagined ones.”
⁷⁶
To a point, there doesn’t appear to be a meaningful difference for many fans of
Song of the South
between the real memories or the imagined ones, or between the movie or the books, since it is all bound up in a deep affective attachment to the larger transmedia legacy of Disney’s film. Nostalgia is by definition dependent on a simplified and illusory view of the past, where the boundaries between real and imagined quickly dissolve. The lack of a clear distinction reinforces the point I have been emphasizing throughout the chapter. The most meaningful cultural reception of
Song of the South
as a historical event began not with full-length theatrical film appearances in 1946 or 1956, but rather with its paratextual presence during the 1950s and 1960s. The Disney executive Irving Ludwig speculated in 1972 that one major factor in
Song of the South
’s sudden success were “the large numbers of teenagers who were seeing it for the first time.”
⁷⁷
These were people with little sense of the racial climate after a war that ended before they were born. Instead, their only point of reference decades later was the Disney universe in general, and Golden Books in particular. They were thus more receptive to the film than the previous generation had been. The cult legacy of
Song of the South
began with memories of singing with records, reading along with family members, and other (perhaps misremembered) transmedia fragments of and from childhood. In that environment,
Song of the South
was destined to finally, if briefly, succeed.

EMERGING CULTURAL AND CRITICAL PRESTIGE

There were other adults, not just sentimental parents, who turned warmly to Disney by the time
Song of the South
returned to theaters in 1972. Despite Schickel’s notoriously harsh, but fair, critique in 1968, the larger critical trend toward Disney at this point was not condemnation, but reverence. Not since the 1930s had critics so warmly
embraced
Disney. In the intervening sixteen years between
Song of the South
’s second and third theatrical releases, Disney was repositioned as an American institution. While
Song of the South
was not a catalyst in that shift, it was clearly a beneficiary. Tribute works such as Christopher Finch’s
The Art of Walt Disney
(1973) and Leonard Maltin’s
The Disney Films
(1973) began dotting the landscape of American coffee tables. Also that year, Judith Martin wrote a similarly loving retrospective of Disney’s entire history in the
Washington Post
, titled “The Wonderful, Lovable, Universal, Wholesome World of Walt Disney.” The particular occasion for Martin’s extensive piece, appropriately, was a Disney retrospective film series at New York City’s Lincoln Center.

All these broad critical reappraisals were written by younger generations who were raised on Disney products and who unabashedly wallowed in their own nostalgia. Accumulatively, they also worked to solidify the “great man” myth of Walt himself, the legacy of the company as cultural institution, and the Disney corporate brand as wholesome family entertainment. Critics who grew up on Disney had a very different relationship with the product than did people like Bosley Crowther three decades earlier. Commenting on that same 1973 Disney retrospective at Lincoln Center, Martin added that “probably no one who attends the month-long Disney film festival now going on in Lincoln Center in New York will be coming to the material fresh. There will be those [adult critics and moviegoers] revisiting the half-remembered scares and laughs of their childhood.”
⁷⁸
According to the
Wall Street Journal
reporter Joy Gould Boyum, who was also covering the event,
Song of the South
was shown there as part of an afternoon double bill with
Alice in Wonderland
. During the screening, she reported that “the children in the audience were heavily outnumbered by the adults, many of whom sat there without even a tiny companion to explain their presence.” Boyum speculated that while many of the adults might simply have been critics interested in Disney’s artistic and historical achievements, “a good many more were there, not in the service of art or craft, but in an unashamed attempt to recapture childhood.”
⁷⁹

Song of the South
achieved greater success in the 1970s and 1980s because the real or imagined childhood nostalgia of people who grew up with Disney needed to be in place. The response of adults to
Song of the South
, as Boyum described it, was the exact opposite of what it had been in the 1940s. Instead of being bored by the inferior aesthetic object, the adults seemed more into
Song of the South
than were the children, who
“squirmed
in their seats, talked among themselves, hardly a one of them either laughing or cheering or gasping audibly.”
⁸⁰
She believed that the indifference of these children was due ironically to being a generation raised on television. The result was a different cultural and stylistic sensibility that caused older Disney films to seem slow and boring. Boyum ended with the following anecdote about an actual child’s response to
Song of the South
in 1973: “A possible case in point is the response of a small boy seated behind me to what was clearly intended as a deeply touching moment in ‘
Song of the South
.’ [When Johnny chases after Uncle Remus late in the film, he cuts through a fenced-off field and is stampeded by a roaming bull. . . . The moment] inspired from the child not a cry of fright nor a tear of concern, but a question: ‘Hey Mommy, do you think they are going to sue?’
”
⁸¹

Uninfluenced by nostalgia or the desire to hold onto childhood, kids at the Disney retrospective watched
Song of the South
with passing indifference. In 1972, the scholar Frank McConnell took his four-year old son to see
Song of the South
as well and was intrigued by his reaction: he was frightened by Brer Fox, but otherwise he found the film, especially the live action, un-engaging.
⁸²
Many young children in the 1970s did not see the film with the same weight of memories or immersion in the Disney universe. Thus these factors did not necessarily affect their reception of the film. They simply saw the same awkward, even boring, Hollywood melodrama that film critics had dismissed in the 1940s. Meanwhile, adult critics sat there much more engaged. They remembered the experience of watching
Song of the South
as a child, or reading about Brer Rabbit and the “Tar Baby,” or perhaps watching “A Tribute to Joel Chandler Harris” on ABC with their own nostalgic parents.

After the 1960s, many audiences would go to see
Song of the South
, sit in darkened theaters, and watch their own childhood memories as much as the film itself. The controversies of the 1940s were long gone, perhaps even nonexistent to them. The white backlash, Disney’s revival as an American institution,
Song of the South
’s ubiquity in the transmediated Disney universe, and the emergent power of nostalgia among parents and critics for these childhood texts, all accumulatively worked to help Uncle Remus and little Johnny find sustained box office success. Given this context, it is not difficult to see how
Song of the South
had shifted from a culturally and critically panned company eyesore in 1946, to the “most requested” title in the Disney vault. By the 1970s,
Song of the South
was now itself officially a cultural institution for many audiences.

“OUR
MOST REQUESTED MOVIE”

As the civil rights movement waned by the end of the 1960s, Disney proceeded cautiously with the idea of finally rereleasing
Song of the South
. “As recently as 18 months ago,” the
Chicago Tribune
film critic Gene Siskel wrote in 1972, “Walt Disney Productions said it would not release
Song of the South
in ‘the foreseeable future’ because it anticipated ‘negative community reaction.’
”
⁸³
Disney’s reasons for withholding
Song of the South
were made more explicit in
Variety
, which published an otherwise-minor article in 1970 stating that the company had long since decided that the film was too insensitive. As a self-fashioned family-friendly corporation, Disney was more image-conscious than most. The reporter, Ron Wise, speculated that Disney was particularly sensitive about
Song of the South
because African Americans were “disproportionately large in percentage as dependable adult box office support.”
⁸⁴

The article’s genesis began when an independent theater owner put in a request to Disney to obtain a copy of the film for a one-time screening. He was told, however, that “the company had no intention of rereleasing it because of the racial angle.” Wise concurred, and stated that “there is simply no editing out the racial condescension of that day in which it was created.” But the theater owner believed the film should be rereleased because of its entertainment and historical value; he wrote back to Disney, “I can appreciate your concern for the image of the Disney corporation, but I think you are doing a disservice to the film-going public by withholding”
Song of the South
, which he believed “must be considered a classic.”
⁸⁵

In the early 1970s, Disney and its surrogates publicly promoted the film’s real and imagined popularity in the face of controversy. That the theater owner assumed the film should be regarded as a “classic” was clearly the product of Disney’s inter-referential universe. The
Variety
article was in part a trial balloon to gauge reactions to the possibility of rereleasing it. According to the Disney publicist Tom Jones in 1972,
Song of the South
—despite never having been a significant box office hit—was “our most requested movie by mail.”
⁸⁶
By the time of its return, the film was now regarded in the popular press as “one of Disney’s most popular.”
⁸⁷
Meanwhile, Siskel reiterated its intense demand as the company’s “most requested” title
⁸⁸
in a
Chicago Tribune
review where he also claimed to have been the one who successfully talked Disney President E. Cardon Walker into rereleasing the film. While such lofty praise in
defense
of
Song of the South
could easily be written off as the result of a deceptive promotional campaign, the film’s extremely lucrative third release seems to confirm the assessment that it
was
one of Disney’s most requested titles.

Given all the factors I’ve discussed, the Disney company believed that it was worth the gamble to finally rerelease
Song of the South
. At the same time, Disney also later tried to deny that it had ever pulled the film permanently. In 1972, the
Los Angeles Times
reported that a “Disney publicity director said the film has never been shelved and is being released again because of fan letters requesting it.”
⁸⁹
Variety
likewise reported in January of that same year that the film simply “skipped a reissue cycle” in the early 1960s.
⁹⁰
There appears to have been an uneven balance in the company’s negotiation between acknowledging the controversy and not fully closing off the possibility of eventually cashing in on its demand.

Meanwhile, the film was less criticized in the 1970s because many prospective cultural critics did not take it seriously enough.
Song of the South
was at that point little more than a passing nostalgic fancy that was soon to fade, another racist text from a Hollywood past littered with racist texts. But as the film endured through a new decade and two more successful reissues, a great deal of the old criticism would return. The next chapter will more closely explore
Song of the South
’s renewed criticism through both satire (1974’s
Coonskin
) and print in the wake of Ronald Reagan’s election as U.S. president in 1980. Such critiques, however, would be met by a more hardened group of supporters. Unlike in 1946,
Song of the South
benefited from a generation raised in the Disney universe, who now saw the old Uncle Remus film as sacred. Eventually, Disney would once again see
Song of the South
as too much trouble, and finally put the film back in the vault—so far for good. Yet even then, Disney wouldn’t remove the film without continuing to exploit what little value it still possessed, most notably “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah.”