Song of the South’s racist legacy and Disney’s quiet reboot, explained

Earlier this year, Orlando’s Disney World theme park closed down the water ride Splash Mountain due to its ties to Disney’s 1946 film Song of the SouthThis is a well-known brand for its racist cartoons and simplistic view of Reconstruction-era America. It’ll ultimately be replaced with a ride inspired by 2009’s The Princess and Frog, a movie built around Disney’s first Black princess. The decision kicked off a wave of backlash, particularly from people who can’t stomach any sense of cultural change. Of course, a backlash to that backlash wasn’t far behind.

Splash Mountain is not being discussed in the same way as other topics: Any nuanced references to Walt Disney Company history the ride refers to, and all that Walt Disney Company has attempted to erase. Song of the South only exists as an artifact of random video uploading — Disney has never released the film digitally. However, a little research can reveal another Disney movie. You might also like Song of the South, it’s missing from Disney Plus. Like Also Song of the South, it’s a 1940s movie that mixes live action with animation, leans heavily on a nostalgic view of America unsupported by historical record, and features a black character who wins over the white characters who view him as problematic and an upset to the status quo. What is the movie? 1948’s It’s so dear to my heart, about a boy who adopts a black sheep on his grandfather’s Indiana farm and raises it to be a prize-winner at a local fair.

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One of the best things about It’s so dear to my heartAfter the critical humiliation Walt received, it was an opportunity for Walt to retake the Walt Disney Company. Song of the SouthHe is his passion project. There is one major difference: the problematic black character in It’s so dear to my heart This movie stars the exact same two children actors. Song of the SouthLuana Patrick and Bobby Driscoll James Baskett played the part of Uncle Remus as an animal. Song of the South fared well enough commercially when it was first released, but its overtly sentimental view of historical racial relations was criticized as a low point in Walt’s soft-pedaling of cultural history. Then he attempted again.

In both films, a narrator guides the audience into the storybook version of America’s heartland, a place where cartoons and people mingle freely, so long as they’re willing to believe in the magic of things. Walt got into serious trouble because Song of the South He was referring to harmony in the Reconstruction South as the magic. And in Disney’s version of history, Black people were happy to stay on plantations working for white masters, caring for white children, and knowing their place was out of sight until they were called.

Walt Disney spent many long years trying to create the perfect Disney movie. Song of the SouthJoel Chandler Harris wrote Uncle Remus stories for Atlanta newspapers and Harris was a long-time fan. Harris, then a teenager, moved on to Turnworld Plantation in the 1860s. There, Joseph Addison Turner was publisher. During the Civil War, Harris worked for Turner on The Countryman, a proudly Confederate newspaper, but he spent as much time in the slave quarters, listening to the stories shared by Turner’s slaves. Harris was a journalist for The Atlanta Constitution after the war. His Uncle Remus stories made him famous. Uncle Remus was a character who told the same outlandish stories Harris heard from Turner’s slaves, centering on mischievous forest animals Brer Rabbit, Brer Fox, and Brer Bear. They were written by him in the exaggerated and cartoonish Southern Black patois style of that era. Here’s one passage from Harris’ collection Uncle Remus: His songs and his sayings:

“Hol’ on dar, Brer Rabbit,” sez Brer Fox, sezee.
“I ain’t got time, Brer Fox,” sex Brer Rabbit, sezee, sorter mendin’ his licks.
“I wanter have some confab wid you, Brer Rabbit,” sez Brer Fox, sezee.”
“All right, Brer Fox, but you better holler fum whar you stan’. I’m monstus full er fleas dis mawnin’,” sez Brer Rabbit, sezee.
“I seed Brer B’ar yistdiddy,” sez Brer Fox, sezee. “En he sorter rake me over de coals kaze you en me ain’t make frens en live naberly, en I told ’im dat I’d see you.”

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Harris, in his introduction to the volume, says his intention was to “preserve the legends themselves in their original simplicity, and to wed them permanently to the quaint dialect — if indeed, it can be a called a dialect — through the medium of which they have become a part of the domestic history of every Southern family; and I have endeavored to give to the whole a genuine flavor of the old plantation.” The animals in Harris’ regurgitations all bear close relation to the lazy and dimwitted stereotypes of Black culture employed by minstrel performers and caricaturists after the Civil War. The versions of Brer Rabbit, Brer Fox, and Brer Bear seen in the movie uphold that dialect and those stereotypes as well, and they’re the characters seen throughout Splash Mountain. However, Uncle Remus isn’t, so he has been removed from the movie. This means that any context or confession for racism will be lost. Song of the South.

The history of the film is a part of this context. She conducted a thorough podcast analysis of Song of the South, You Must Remember This host Karina Longworth notes that the likeliest source of the film’s Oscar-winning song, “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah,” was in a Reconstruction character type named Zip Coon. Jim Crow and Zip Coon were both iconic caricatures depicting Black men at the close of the Civil War. Jim Crow had already received a sort of airing in a Disney company film, during the sequence in 1941’s Dumbo A group of Crows serenaded the hero, using the exaggerated language as Brer Fox or Brer Rabbit. Jim Crow is also the common name for laws that maintained segregation throughout the United States up to 20 years later. Song of the SouthThese laws were the ones that stopped James Baskett’s stardom from him attending the Southern premiere screening of his film.

Song of the South starts with an Atlanta boy named Johnny (played by Driscoll) being dragged by his parents away from his old home and friends, to go live on his grandmother’s Southern plantation. Johnny, lonely and sorrowful, finds comfort in Uncle Remus’ stories, a Black Field hand living on the plantation’s edge. Uncle Remus’ fables about Brer Rabbit and his fellow animals are animated by Disney veteran Wilfred Jackson (CinderellaBaskett interacts with animated characters frequently, and this is a great example of how Baskett can be a good friend. The negative reviews from critics (John McCarten of The New Yorker claimed that Disney felt the 13th Amendment should not have been passed) were reflected in public protests.

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Walt Disney knew he was playing with fire so he began to make sure he covered his bases before even the film started shooting. Paul Robeson, a prominent Black singer and actor, was hired by Walt Disney to play the lead role and to sign off. Robeson refused to hire him. In her podcast, Longworth also reads transcripts of Disney’s correspondence with card-carrying Communist writer Maurice Rapf, the son of MGM executive Harry Rapf, who Walt hired to script the movie. Walt claimed Rapf’s left-leaning humanism was precisely what he wanted. Song of the South To keep the film away from shamefully trafficking in stereotypes, it was essential.

Rapf claimed that the script he had written bore very little resemblance with the film’s final version. Yet, he continued to work with Disney as a writer. CinderellaThe film is among others. Given Walt Disney’s history as a conservative — according to his daughter Lillian in the 2008 documentary Walt & El Grupo, Walt was deeply upset by the 1941 animators’ strike, and soured against radicalism — hiring Rapf was likely a way to launder his own politics, especially given that Rapf’s input was ignored.

Even in those days, however. Song of the SouthThe film was called racist pandering. It faced a national boycott. Why did Walt make a second film using the exact same method and the same cast? Kevin Perjurer — creator of the bountiful YouTube video essay series It is now defunctland, which explores theme park history — might have the answer. Perjurer is a keen observer of Walt Disney and has spent many hours deconstructing both his personality as well as business decisions. One theory Perjurer has forwarded, in an excellent episode on the scuttled original plans for Disney World’s spinoff park Epcot, is that what Walt chased most was control. It wasn’t enough to provide people with entertainment: He wanted to manage how they lived, how they learned, how they ate and dressed.

Epcot, the project Walt was obsessing over on his deathbed, wasn’t intended as the genially amateurish World’s Fair-style sampling of foreign cultures it is today, but rather as an entire city where people would be observed in the performance of their own lives, with everything from meals to schedules arranged by Disney. Disney World’s Epcot sounds just enough like the Turnworld Plantation to still raise eyebrows among people skeptical of his penchant for historical revisionism in the name of a cartoonish vision of harmony.

Disney’s perspective as an animator and his yearning for scientific control over human life are more related than they seem. You can read more about it here. Song of the SouthHe emphasized the need to bring in Black artists like Baskett or Nick Stewart, who had previously voiced Dumbo’s similarly shameful crows), who could not afford to turn down work, and whose mere presence would present a bulwark against criticism that the project promoted a racist worldview. In hiring Hollywood radicals like Rapf, Burl Ives (who assayed a role similar to Baskett’s in It’s so dear to my heartRobeson, whose presence is in Song would have doubled Walt’s ammunition against his critics), he could say that he was earnestly entertaining their perspective, even as he threw out their notes and made exactly the movie he wanted. Even if people complained, Walt paid such a handsome sum that it was difficult for creators not to leave.

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What time? Song of the SouthHe was rightly and strongly chastised. So he made another movie, this time with an animal character instead of a Black one, to avoid any criticism of the portrayal of race. He still managed to find time for it. It’s so dear to my heartHere’s an animated short that shows Columbus getting chased down by a dragon while he is on his journey to America. Disney hasn’t done as much to bury that movie’s existence — you can rent It’s so dear to my heart on Amazon and other digital platforms, though it isn’t on Disney Plus. And its more elliptical approach (and the fact that it’s less memorable overall) has kept it from being a lightning rod for controversy on the scale of Song of the South Now, Disney is finally removing Brer Rabbit from Splash Mountain, so he and his animated kin won’t keep serving as a reminder of Disney’s embarrassing history. The company learned Walt’s lessons about controlling reality all too well.

Walt Disney treated the lives of his public — to say nothing of his employees — like they were figures on a drawing board. When he did not understand an equation, he would make a correction and try again until the problem was fixed. Disney’s heirs took this lesson to heart, especially when faced with the legacy of Song of the South. While the original film failed to attract the American public’s attention, carefully timed rereleases in 1956, 1972 and 1980 proved that it still had the potential to make money among Americans looking for the enchanting images of Black servitude.

But Song of the SouthThe Disney vault kept it, but the contents of its remains are still there today. The Wetback Hound And Commando Duck. It was inconvenient to the company’s narrative, and to its bottom line. Splash Mountain would be more disturbing if people could see the movie. It was quickly crossed out, much like an improperly carried rest.

Moving forward, the company’s interpretations of ethnographic folklore have been managed with increasing care and input from the cultures being commoditized. It is a very popular book. Mulan, Lilo & Stitch, And Moana These complaints were not heard by mainstream media and they didn’t become major news. These days, it’s often seen as a badge of honor for a culture when the Disney company starts to tell some version of its story. Walt was determined to control the human experience. His grip on his entertainment empire continues to be felt all these many years later. Walt’s paradise was always an illusion, a cartoon fantasy, but perhaps the most bizarre thing about it is that some people are still trying to protect it, as if the old man had just wandered off and might — like Uncle Remus in Song of the South’s final act — come back if called.