Disney's Most Notorious Film (40 page)

But fans are also using nostalgia to protect their own understanding
of
history. “No amount of political correctness is going to change the past . . . ,” writes one at Topix. “Films like [
Song of the South
] show how the world was,
or how it was perceived
” (emphasis mine). The need to distinguish between perception and reality here is telling. This fan implies that there ultimately was no distinction between
Song of the South
’s depiction of the past and (white) perceptions of that past. More to the point, any differences do not concern them. Instead, how some fans
want
to perceive these worlds (adolescent, Southern, idyllic) is all that matters. “One is nostalgic not for the past the way it was,” writes Boym, “but for the past the way it could have been.”
³³
Song of the South
may generate a feeling of nostalgia because fans knowingly hold on to an idealized past. It may also be because some fans sense that such an affectively evoked, idealized childhood was quite possibly not all that “perfect” to begin with.

THE UNSIGHTLY INSIDE THE VAULT

The lure of nostalgia always carries the danger of moving too close to the past. Instead of confronting that which is reassuring, something troubling is unlocked. I would suggest, however, that such ugliness is itself potentially liberatory. There is much of value to be gleaned from
Song of the South
’s most offensive defenses. Convergence can be reassuringly nostalgic—revisiting recycled childhood texts that have suddenly reappeared. It can also reveal the ugliness of suppressed images that are deeply troubling to one group or many. Users can see that which they lacked easy access to previously. Importantly, others can then highlight and contest those offensive ideologies. This struggle symbolically plays out in the
Saturday Night Live
skit “Journey to the Disney Vault.” Like many moments from film and television, this skit found a second life on the Internet. Between periodic appearances on such websites as YouTube, AOL Video, MySpace TV, and Hulu, “Journey to the Disney Vault” has probably been viewed by as many people online as by those who watched the initial NBC broadcast late one Saturday night in April 2006. The skit begins looking and sounding just like a typical Disney video advertisement. We see a perfectly reproduced “Disney Home Video Entertainment” logo, followed by an urgent advertisement. “This month,” says the narrator, “
Bambi II
is going into the Disney vault. . . . After just seventy days on sale, the glorious
Bambi II
DVD goes into the Disney vault for ten years.” “You better hurry,” says one of the
Bambi
characters,
“Flower,” urging consumers not to wait. Up to this point, the clip is a dead ringer for a real
Bambi II
advertisement, until the narrator starts listing off other, increasingly absurd titles (complete with images), that will be following the film into the Disney vault:
Cinderella II
,
Bambi 2002
,
Sleeping Beauty III: Lil Sleepy Meets Aladdin
,
Hunchback 6: Air Dog Quasi
,
Mulan 8: The Prozoids Fight Back
,
The Jungle Book 3.0: Jungle Blog
, and the pornographic
101 Fellations
. Each fake title (with the exception of the first one) highlights Disney’s obsession with exploiting every potential theatrical franchise through the ubiquity of direct-to-video merchandising. It also reinforces Disney’s strategy to rein in and mystify that exploitation further through the artificial scarcity of the Disney vault.

But “Journey to the Disney Vault” also explores issues of the unsightly. What unintended side effects does the desire for
access
bring? The skit cuts to two animated children, sitting in their living room, complaining about how “all my favorite movies are in the Disney vault.” The one girl says, “I wish we could live in the Disney vault.” This prompts the magical appearance of Mickey Mouse, who promises to take them inside the Disney vault—“The ultimate child’s dream come true.” Hence the skit becomes another advertisement for a new fictional Disney film,
Journey into the Disney Vault
(“available on DVD only”). Once inside, the children rediscover the titles they’ve missed, such as
Beauty and the Beast: Hawaiian Adventure
and
Lion King 5 2/3: Simba Sits in for Meredith
(a reference to the Disney-owned ABC’s daytime hit
The View
, and a subtle nod to the extent of Disney’s diversification strategies).

The girl’s desire to live inside the vault becomes an eerie, unsightly reminder of most children’s deep ignorance regarding Disney’s actual history. To her, Disney is nothing but Mickey and princesses. Inside, the kids find other, increasingly disturbing items as well. One is Walt’s own frozen head, which plays on the inaccurate urban legend that Disney had himself frozen so that he could eventually come back when science was able to do such things. We also see Vivien Leigh’s frozen head as well, so Walt could marry her after he was thawed. Other items, though, cut closer to historical accuracy: the HUAC files, regarding Walt’s notorious cooperation with blacklisting and his participation in other antilabor activities; references to Disney’s rumored anti-Semitism; references to controversial images in past films, such as
Who Framed Roger Rabbit
(1988) and
Fantasia
(1940); and Jim Henson himself, who has been kidnapped and imprisoned here because he refused to sell Disney the rights to the Muppets. More subversively, they find blueprints for a
Civil
War–themed amusement park, complete with attractions such as “Uncle Mickey’s Cabin” and “Donald [Duck]’s Slave Auction.” This is based only loosely on actual 1990s plans for a “Disney’s America” theme park in Virginia. The unbuilt Civil War theme park points cleverly to the company’s willingness to both distort and commodify American history. It also forcefully invokes issues of racial ignorance of which Disney has been often accused.

“Journey to the Disney Vault” and the wide variety of opinion expressed on the Internet remind us that racist discourse has not gone anywhere. Copresently, our awareness of it is not necessarily bad. Its potential prevents particular aspects of American media culture from sliding back into a Reaganist mind-set that claims not to see race. This is highlighted in particular when the kids find a VHS copy of
Song of the South
. “I’ve never heard of this one,” says the boy. A horrified Mickey tries to grab the tape: “Oh, nobody wants to see that one anymore.” “How bad could it be?,” asks the girl. “It’s the very original version,” Mickey says, “that [Disney] only played at parties.” The boy pops the tape in, and we hear the film’s well-known “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah,” featuring Baskett as “Uncle Remus.” While still sounding uncannily like Baskett’s voice, the skit changes the lyrics from “My, oh, my, what a wonderful day, plenty of sunshine headin’ my way,” to “Negros are inferior in every way, whites are much cleaner, that’s what I say.” The point of the
SNL
parody is not to perpetuate these supremacist attitudes, but rather to make explicit how the film itself reaffirms such stereotypes. As its creator, Robert Smigel, notes, “Obviously, that’s not a real clip. . . . They have kept
Song of the South
in a vault within a vault. I think there are three locks on it.”
³⁴
Suppressing the film in “Journey to the Disney Vault” represents Disney’s struggle to protect its own family-friendly brand from being tarnished, and its unsightly history from being exposed. As a text now circulating online, the “Journey to the Disney Vault” also serves as a metaphor for the cultural and affective lives of old texts—how the Internet potentially reexposes controversies once concealed. Here, the “vault” mutates from an “official” advertising metaphor, shrewdly sustaining product demand, to a more critical one representing Disney’s constant attempts to conceal that which otherwise threatens its carefully crafted public image.

“Journey to the Disney Vault” was not the only recent appropriation and criticism of
Song of the South
on
Saturday Night Live
. A few years earlier, the show did another spoof of the film with the mock testimonial commercial “Uncle Jemima’s Pure Mash Liquor.” In this skit, Tracy Morgan played “Uncle Jemima,” the husband of Aunt Jemima, who is trying
to
sell his own brand of moonshine. Although the Disney film is never directly referenced, Uncle Jemima is clearly based on Uncle Remus, down to the same bald head with sides of gray hair. Moreover, an unseen chorus sings a generic version of “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” with lyrics that reference a “wonderful day.” The skit is filled with animated bluebirds flying around the colorful mise-en-scène. The creatures, meanwhile, are eventually implied to be not the product of a fun, fanciful world, but rather Jemima’s drunken hallucinations. One of the implicit critiques of
Song of the South
here is that Uncle Remus—always happy, always hiding in his cabin behind the mansion—is close to the old racist stereotype of the “coon,” which articulates a white perception of blacks as lazy drunks.

New media can and does allow for the reinforcement of nostalgia, but on the complex and contradictory vastness of the Internet, nostalgia is unevenly copresent with what nostalgia tries to conceal, the unsightly. The Internet isn’t more “democratic”—but it does allow room for alternate content, good and bad, which networks, advertisers, and conservative advocacy groups were quick to censor at the advent of television. While major global corporations can and still do control much of the material online, they are often indifferent to the content
as long as they control potential revenue generated by it
. A side effect is that people have the ability to share material that corporations wouldn’t necessarily endorse. Certainly, Disney has taken online copyright infringement seriously, yet due to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act—which protects websites from lawsuits provided they pull content when notified
³⁵
—illegal material can appear online for considerable, if ephemeral, amounts of time.

Disney appears limited in its attempts to suppress the awareness of its most controversial object,
Song of the South
. For example, fan websites (such as Christian Willis’s) have not been shut down for copyright infringement. Vendors openly sell copies online, including on eBay. Disney does not wish to rerelease
Song of the South
at present, but there doesn’t appear to be much evidence that it’s seeking to stamp out all traces of it either. As in the early 1970s, Disney seems content with the possibility that the controversy (and now the aggressive forms of online fan activity) keeps
Song of the South
present and still potentially lucrative, without the company having to appear as though it is actively working to condone the film. While “Journey to the Disney Vault” captures the unsightly aspect of the company’s past and its relationship to
Song of
the
South
, in another sense it misses Disney’s careful economic ambivalence toward the film.

While SNL’s “Journey to the Disney Vault” and “Uncle Jemima” circulate on the Internet as explicit and implicit critiques of the Disney style,
Song of the South
, and the racist assumptions that come with it,
³⁶
private individuals have also posted critiques of the film and of Disney’s long tradition of racism as well. Most of the work is by fans who post videos that resist the film’s racist connotations. But YouTube has yet to feel the brunt of Disney’s copyright protection regarding
Song of the South
. In addition to several presumably illegal postings of the film’s animated sequences, one particular user in June 2008 posted the entire film in ten separate segments, fragments that had still not been pulled off the site more than three years later.
³⁷
The user described the clips only as a “study of pre–Civil War South good race relations” [
sic
]. The description reinforces the perception that the film promotes positive race relations in some people’s minds, and that some still view it as a
pre
–Civil War film. Another fan posted a particularly emotional excerpt with Johnny and Remus discussing a dog, their friendship, and the stories they share;
³⁸
one posted the “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” sequence (lifted from the VHS sing-along version);
³⁹
and an older white man posted a video of himself reading the “Wonderful Tar Baby Story,” complete with his own Remus accent.
⁴⁰
This last user also promoted the importance of “books” in the new media age, believing that various versions of the story have been distorted through years of remediation. Many of these clips isolate
Song of the South
’s most powerfully affective fragments, reiterating the moments that struck these fans the most when they first saw it, and also positing the film’s emotional appeal as overriding any criticism of racism. These clips clearly violate Disney’s copyright—not to mention re-foregrounding its most notorious eyesore on a popular public forum. But the company was slow to make YouTube pull them down, if ever. Moreover, these clips only scratch the surface of fan activity online in defense of
Song of the South
.

THE CASE OF ROGER EBERT AND FAN RESPONSES ONLINE

One criticism of
Song of the South
in particular became a rallying point for fans. The
Chicago Sun-Times
critic Roger Ebert’s 2000
critique
of the old Disney film produced heated reaction from fans who found his take condescending and even racist. The responses are motivated in part by Ebert’s own ethnicity. Fans in the last ten years have shown reluctance to criticize (or even address) African Americans directly. Instead, they focus on “white liberal guys,”
⁴¹
as the online Disney enthusiast Jim Hill put it. Despite all the critics who have condemned
Song of the South
, many of them African American (such as Henry), Ebert is the one often used by fans as a rhetorical punching bag. Of course, Ebert’s stature gives his criticism more weight as well. The incident in question came in a section of his website called “Movie Answer Man.” Ebert received a passionate letter from a self-described black father who was frustrated that Ebert’s colleague (presumably his former television cohost Richard Roeper) had advocated rereleasing
Song of the South
because of its aesthetic value. Ebert’s short response noted that “I am against censorship and believe that no films or books should be burned or banned, but film school study is one thing and a general release is another. Any new Disney film immediately becomes part of the consciousness of almost every child in America, and I would not want to be a black child going to school in the weeks after [
Song of the South
] was first seen by my classmates. Peter Schneider, chairman of the Disney Studios, tells me that the studio has decided to continue to hold the film out of release.”
⁴²
Ebert’s argument that the film should be available for critical study (as opposed to being banned) was particularly irritating to fans. They adamantly argue that
Song of the South
is for kids (or for adults attempting to hold on to their childhood) to shut off possible discussions of racism. Criticism of Ebert across the Internet is well represented by a response from “Merlin Jones” in 2005, originally posted on
SaveDisney.com
(started as part of Roy E. Disney’s attempt to wrest control of the company from Michael Eisner) and later reposted on Christian Willis’s fan website
SongoftheSouth.net
. The post was likely anonymous, as “Merlin Jones” is certainly a reference to the live action Disney film
The Misadventures of Merlin Jones
(1964). In it, Jones wrote: