Disney's Most Notorious Film (35 page)

But a funny thing happened on the way to the video store. Over the next decade, volume 2 of this profitable series also came literally to take
the
place of a hypothetical
Song of the South
home video release in U.S. markets.
⁴⁹
Disney’s Sing Along Songs
became the company’s way of exploiting the film
without actually using
almost any of the film itself. That this product was a substitute for
Song of the South
was most strikingly exhibited by the tape’s front cover, which featured the title “Zipa-Dee-Doo-Dah” and a picture of Baskett and the film’s moles. One version even includes the words “
Song of the South
” in bold lettering. This works to give the impression, upon a quick glance, of being the official VHS copy of
Song of the South
, even though only four minutes of the half-hour program are from the old plantation movie. To this day, many would-be consumers on Amazon have complained in the comments section that this Disney release gave the disingenuous impression of being the complete
Song of the South
.
⁵⁰
This particular volume was subsequently released multiple times with several different layouts, but each featured Baskett and the song title on the cover. The tape was quietly discontinued in the pre-DVD era of the mid-1990s, but various used copies remain easily accessible.

The song itself was also released later in
another
volume of the popular sing-along home video series, titled “Disneyland Fun” (1990), which substituted footage of people riding Splash Mountain and other rides for
clips
from
Song of the South
. This not only literally removed
Song of the South
from the song, but also helped promote Disney’s newest theme park attraction. “Disneyland Fun” also featured a new chorus recording of the song, where some lyrics were changed to reference such ride-specific features as going down waterfalls. As far back as Johnny Mercer’s hit cover in 1947, many versions of the Oscar-winning song do not feature Baskett’s original recording. With its new version of “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” and fresh footage from the Disney parks, “Disneyland Fun” spoke to the company’s successful attempt at
completely
remaking the song, removing almost all other references to
Song of the South
. Hence it is unsurprising that this
Sing Along
version, unlike the earlier one,
did
survive well into the era of DVD, having been rereleased as late as the fall of 2005.

A later volume of
Disney’s Sing Along Songs
, “Disneyland Fun” (1990), was able to promote both
Who Framed Roger Rabbit
and “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah,” in addition to the theme park. In the clip, Roger is afraid to go on the thrill rides with the children.

The version of “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” on “Disneyland Fun” featured footage from several thrill rides in Disneyland, not just Splash Mountain. This
Sing Along Songs
version further removed any direct connection between the song and the original film.

Home music platforms, meanwhile, were just as crucial in Disney’s continued, carefully selective recirculation of
Song of the South
. The popular audiocassette and later CD collections
Classic Disney
(1995) and
Disney’s Greatest Hits
(2001) made great use of “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” and other
Song of the South
tunes. Like the
Disney’s Sing Along Songs
videos, these albums recycled content from earlier films by compiling the most famous songs. Released as a series of five separate volumes between
1995 and 1998 (and then rereleased as one box set in 2002), the
Classic Disney
albums appeared on cassette and CD, and featured the audio recordings of several
Song of the South
tunes along with countless other Disney songs. In addition to repackaging “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah,” this collection also recycled “Everybody Has a Laughing Place” on volume 2 and the title song, “Song of the South,” on volume 5. Then, starting in 2001, Disney released many of the same songs again in a new series called
Disney’s Greatest Hits
, volume 1 of which again reused “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah.” But the continued recycling of Baskett’s original version is only the beginning of Disney’s exploitation. There are numerous “authorized” covers of “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah,” such as the R&B singer Patti Austin’s version, which was released on the album
Disney’s Music from the Park
(1996), or the version by Miley Cyrus, aka “Hannah Montana,” which appeared on the album
Disneymania 4
(2006). The song’s presence throughout the Disney empire is impossible to map fully today. In all these VHS tapes, DVDs, cassettes, and CDs, the company literally recirculated
just
“Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah,” without the other, more overtly problematic material that originally surrounded it. This extensive repackaging reiterates just how much “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” certainly was, and remains, the most valuable asset for Disney to come out of
Song of the South
.

“ZIP-A-DEE-DOO-DAH” AND THE CURIOUS CASE OF CHEVY CHASE

Even back in the 1980s, the omnipresence of “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” in American culture extended far beyond the direct textual reach of the Walt Disney Company. The road-trip comedy
National Lampoon’s Vacation
(1983) made direct reference to singing “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah.” An homage to Route 66 culture and road trips,
Vacation
is the comedic story of a Chicago family, the Griswolds, who drive cross-country to visit the fictitious “Walley World” in Southern California—a thinly veiled reference to Disneyland. This connection is made more explicit when the Griswolds sing the “Walley World” anthem, which sounds nearly identical to “The Mickey Mouse Club,” down to spelling out the main character’s name. The original short story that
Vacation
is based on, John Hughes’s “Vacation ’58,” was literally about a family’s road trip to Disneyland. It featured the particularly memorable opening line, “If Dad hadn’t shot Walt Disney in the leg, it would have been our
best
vacation ever!”
⁵¹
The short story, unlike the film, ends with Clark incarcerated after shooting Walt at his Beverly Hills home as the legendary entertainer attempts to flee.

Like its literary source,
Vacation
is the comedic account of the American road trip from hell. If anything can go wrong, it will. This includes visiting tacky Wild West amusements, staying at dirty campgrounds, losing luggage, stealing money from a hotel, killing the family pet, strapping a dead relative to the car roof, and breaking into Walley World at gunpoint. At the morbidly comical low point of the road trip in Arizona, the family drops off the body of a deceased aunt at her son’s vacant home, so they won’t lose time on the drive. When other family members suggest just going home, the father, Clark Griswold (Chevy Chase), profanely lashes out: “We’re ten hours from the fucking fun park, and you want to bail out. Well, I’ll tell you something: this is no longer a vacation. It’s a quest. It’s a quest for fun. I’m going to have fun, and you’re going to have fun. We’re all going to have so much fucking fun, we’re going to need plastic surgery to remove our goddamn smiles. We’ll be whistling ‘Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah’ out of our assholes.” “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” is used as a direct point of reference for the Disney brand of family fun. In his early forties, Griswold is clearly a baby boomer, an allegorical child of the
Mickey Mouse Club
and
Davy Crockett
generation. Raised by television to see Disney as a consumerist mecca of all things entertaining, he is unable to abandon his “quest for fun.” He believes—living out the middle-class utopian dream that
Disneyland
constructed in the 1950s—that a visit to the theme park will make life all better. This suburban generation’s ambivalent fascination with Disney is often tied up with, as Disney had hoped, the ritualistic centrality of the family road trip experience.

Vacation
’s contradictory appeal is both attributable to, and a critique of, nostalgia for a white, postwar, middle-class Disney childhood embodied in the character of Clark. While his family’s “quest for fun” is an attempt at recapturing those childhood memories with parents and siblings, his verbal blowups highlight the impossibility of such a return to his childhood. In a rare moment of honesty late in the movie, he admits to his son, Rusty, that he “never had fun” during all those trips to California as a child. His own family’s road trip becomes a failed attempt to live out a childhood he never quite experienced himself. He was nostalgic, using Svetlana Boym’s definition, “not for the past the way it was, but for the past the way it could have been.”
⁵²
Vacation
tapped into a
particular
moment of nostalgia among the baby boomer generation for Disney culture.

The all-white plantation in
Fletch Lives
, as Fletch (Chevy Chase) sings “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah,” complete with the animated bluebird on his shoulder. Its sense of parody is muddled at best.

While the film makes no direct reference to
Song of the South
or Disney, the reference to “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” reiterates how, by the early 1980s, the song had become Disney’s “national anthem.” It was a shorthand signifier for the corporation and its brand of “family fun” for many middle-class American families. On an allegorical level,
Vacation
is clearly about the twentieth-century ritual of road trips to Disneyland (and about the televisual culture of leisure that
Disneyland
helped to create). At the same time, the Oscar-winning song is foregrounded in excess of the movie itself, marginalizing
Song of the South
at the very same moment that its memory was invoked.

Other films in the 1980s referenced
Song of the South
much more explicitly, through direct visual and aural cues. One such example was another Chevy Chase film,
Fletch Lives
(1989). In this film, a sequel to the successful investigative reporter comedy
Fletch
(1985), the title character inherits a plot of land in Mississippi from a deceased aunt. On the flight from Los Angeles to investigate the property, Fletch dozes off and daydreams about what life will be like in the South. In the sequence, Fletch imagines himself dressed as a Confederate colonel, drinking mint julep, and surrounded by hundreds of white plantation workers. Specifically,
a
few of them are acquaintances from L.A. whom he doesn’t like, but the remaining are all generic white characters. When one worker asks Fletch if he’d like to see the field hands dance for his amusement, Fletch responds, “Why, I’ll dance for them!” At this point, the entire cast breaks out into a Broadway-style rendition of “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah,” complete with the obligatory animated bluebird to match the lyrics. An animated dog comes to Fletch’s side, further mimicking the look of
Song of the South
’s hybrid animation.

Comic references to Disney linger throughout
Fletch Lives
. As Peggy Russo noted in her discussion of the film, “Admittedly, the dream sequence is designed to call up stereotypical images of an idyllic plantation world to be overturned later . . . but the fact remains that the stereotype follows Disney’s Remus.”
⁵³
When Fletch arrives in Mississippi, he discovers that the plantation is a run-down dump with only one African American helper (Cleavon Little), who turns out to be an undercover FBI agent. They are both investigating a local televangelist, with a massive media empire and biblical-themed amusement park, whom Fletch at one point calls “some deranged Walt Disney.” The “American South” Fletch actually encounters hardly matches the magnolia myth perpetuated by films such as
Song of the South
and
Gone with the Wind
. Instead, it is filled with rednecks, dim-witted police, KKK members, and so forth. The film replaces one cinematic stereotype of the region with its extreme opposite.