re: Disney accused of 'whitewashing' its 'troubling past' for omitting 'Song of the South'

I try not to think of lost opportunities as much as gems from the past swept under the rug because they are considered embarrassing by some.


My go-to example for this is Blazing Saddles, which was explicitly a movie to take the piss out of racism.

People like to bring up A Million Ways To Die In The West as a modern counterpart but a halfassed Seth McFarlane remembered by few doesn’t match Saddles’ performance as a top 5 grossing film of its release year.

Thing is, the movie is never clear if its during slave times or not. Uncle Remus leaves and comes back on his own free will, he's not sold off or anything like that.

of course, sharecropping wasn't too far removed from slavery but its not clear if its before or after the civil war - and I haven't read his stories.

I always thought the story of a white boy looking up to a black man, having affection for him, and learning life's lessons from him was not racist.

If it gets closed, where will chicks whip their tits out at a Disney park?

Uncle Remus was wise as hell, and the most sympathetic character in the movie. The white kids adored him. The eye dialect is exaggerated. Stereotype? Yep. Racist? Nah.

Instead, let's all pretend former slaves didn't work on plantations in Georgia. They really spoke with the Mid-Atlantic accent, similar to Theodore Roosevelt and Katherine Hepburn.

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Tried to buy that video for my kids during the 1980s.Found out Disney had locked it away.

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I think SOtS came out on LD at some point in the 90's but it may not have been in NTSC. Probably an outside market that's not full of pansies that are easily offended.

Yep here we go:
SOtS LD releases

In brave, they had Scottish accents. In Pocahontas they had Indian accents. Sword in the stone they had English accents. Coco had Hispanic accents.


Why wouldn’t blacks from S Carolina have natural accents? Have they never heard people talk in that region?


There was a reason the tales of uncle Remus were written in that vernacular. Because that’s how they talked

What I originally thought you were talking about

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Jim Crow scene in 1941’s Dumbo will be edited out

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Oh frick that. And I bet they left in the Pink Elephants on Parade scene where Dumbo and Timothy get drunk and hallucinate.

Disney will edit those things out but has no problem with racism against Native Americans. This song in Peter Pan is a hell of a lot worse.

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What Makes the Redman Red?

Why does he ask you, "How?"
Why does he ask you, "How?"
Once the Injun didn't know
All the things that he know now
But the Injun, he sure learn a lot
And it's all from asking, "How?"

When did he first say, "Ugh!"
When did he first say, "Ugh!"
In the Injun book it say
When the first brave married squaw
He gave out with a big ugh
When he saw his Mother-in-Law

What made the red man red?
What made the red man red?
Let's go back a million years
To the very first Injun prince
He kissed a maid and start to blush
And we've all been blushin' since

You've got it from the headman
The real true story of the red man
No matter what's been written or said
Now you know why the red man's red!

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