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(For the record, Disney continued to release Song of the South in Asia long after determining the movie was inappropriate for American audiences.A petition for the removal or re-imagining of ‘Splash’ has long been in circulation, prompted by unease - and, in some cases, outrage - caused by the source material on which the ride is based. The third version, in Tokyo, is owned by the Oriental Land Company, which will make its own decision. So far, the change has also only been announced for Disneyland and Walt Disney World. The company might give the attraction one final season in the current form. Splash Mountain is a mammoth draw in the heat of summer, but the ride usually closes for several weeks each winter. In the very first line of the announcement, Disney asserts that this is a "project Imagineers have been working on since last year." Is that a signal by the company that it won't be cowed by petitions? Or is it yet another sign Disney chose not to acknowledge the ride's issues even though it saw them? Whatever the reason Disney felt it was important to qualify the origin of the coming redo, it took the popular uprisings of 2020 to finally goad the company into action. Disney even hired Hattie McDaniel, one of Gone with the Wind's stars, for a small role in Song of the South. As the Times review wryly put it, "The ratio of 'live' to cartoon action is approximately two to one-and that is approximately the ratio of its mediocrity to charm."įabulist versions of Southern history were in vogue: Song of the South began development in 1939, a year that also saw the release of Gone with the Wind, which became the biggest box office smash of all time. Walt's notion was that the effervescent universe of animation was a perfect fit for showing audiences the appeal of Ol' Dixie. Wrong as it was, the film's sweetened image of Dixie was accepted almost as documentary by mainstream white audiences when it was released.ĭisney's idea for the picture was to film the storyteller and his friends in live action, but to render the tales as animation. Remus was a great storytelling character, and Disney probably saw something of himself in that. You can almost understand how Walt Disney the man had been raised to think this was appropriate source material for a movie. But at the time, Harris was seen as elevating Black stories to a worldwide platform. Although he was white, he retold African American folktales-what we'd call cultural appropriation today. If it sounds like pure fantasy, that was Harris' intention. Instead, he stuck around their plantation, living in a shanty and telling stories to little white children who lived in the opulent mansion. Spike Lee has witheringly called Remus "a super-duper magical Negro.” Instead, Harris' formerly enslaved Uncle Remus loved his former owners so much that he didn't want to find a new life after emancipation. The author's version of the post-slavery South wasn't the real one, in which freed Black people were denied education, hunted by racists, and terrorized for daring to be elected to government positions.

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Like the women who campaigned to install Confederate statues across the land at the turn of the last century, Harris wrote to put a positive and nostalgic spin on Southern culture.

To Harris, that reputation required a retort.
