Disney’s Most Notorious Film

Disney’s Most Notorious Film /
Race, Convergence, and the
Hidden Histories of Song of the South

(forthcoming, University of Texas Press, 2012)


Images of Brer Rabbit, Uncle Remus and the “Tar Baby” linger throughout American culture, serving as everything from cultural metaphors to consumer products. Yet few know the origins of these complicated characters. Beginning as 19th century oral slave narratives, they were adapted into literary stories by Joel Chandler Harris. Today, they are also noted as the subject of Walt Disney’s most notorious film, 1946’s Song of the South. Disney offers a vast universe of movies, television shows, theme parks, and merchandise unparalleled in the modern entertainment industry. Its name also evokes a carefully crafted image of wholesome family entertainment. Yet as with all media companies that stretch back to the early decades of the 20th Century, Disney has a complicated history. No film better embodies that troubled past than Song of the South, which the company has refused to release to American audiences since the late 1980s. An early breakthrough in the process of hybrid animation, mixing hand-drawn cartoons with live-action footage, Song of the South is more famous today for its condescending representation of African-Americans. Depicting a romanticized American South as a white musical utopia, Song of the South was even then perceived as a regressive depiction of US race relations, particularly in the wake of World War II activism designed to elevate media images of African-Americans above the degrading slave stereotypes common to many Hollywood films. Although the film was met with criticism and lukewarm box office in the 1940s, Song of the South eventually found a cult following in the 1970s and 1980s. To this day, remnants of the film—such as the Oscar-winning “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah”—remain throughout Disney’s media universe. Disney's Most Notorious Film uncovers new insights into how both audiences and the family media empire negotiated the film’s controversies over the last seven decades. It examines the racial and convergence histories of Song of the South, seeking to correct the misperceptions that continue to exist around the film today.

"This book is extremely smart, painstakingly researched, and it ties together many concepts and issues that too rarely find themselves in the same book. Sperb is a gifted writer, who holds his reader’s attention with skill, and he provides a fantastic piece of work here, one that will serve multiple publics and that fills in important historical territory while also advancing discussions on race, convergence, Disney, film reception, textuality, and remediation. . . . This is really quite a spectacular achievement." – Jonathan Gray, University of Wisconsin

Table of Contents

Preface

Introduction

Chapter 1: Conditions of Possibility:
The Disney Studios, Post—War “Thermidor,”
and the Ambivalent Origins of Song of the South

Chapter 2: “Put Down the Mint Julep, Mr. Disney”:
Post—War Racial Consciousness and Disney’s Critical Legacy
in the 1946 Reception of Song of the South

Chapter 3: Our Most Requested Movie:
Media Convergence, Black Ambivalence and the
Reconstruction of Song of the South

Chapter 4: A Past that Never Existed:
Coonskin, Post—Racial Whiteness, and
Rewriting History in the Era of Reaganism

Chapter 5: On Tar Babies and Honey Pots:
Splash Mountain, “Zip—a—Dee—Doo—Dah,”
and the Transmedia Dissipation of Song of the South

Chapter 6: Reassuring Convergence:
New Media, Nostalgia and the
Internet Fandom of Song of the South

Conclusion

Appendix—Timeline for Song of the South and its Paratexts