![]() ![]() 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. The picture won Best Original Song, too, for "Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah," and the validation seemed to quell the controversies for a while. Walt was so convinced his film belonged alongside the classics that he successfully lobbied for the actor who played Uncle Remus, James Baskett, to receive an "honorary" Oscar. 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, Harris' formerly enslaved Uncle Remus loved his past masters so much that he stuck around the 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.” 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. #Splash mountain installLike 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. The region had a terrible reputation owing to its role in the Civil War, the financial ruin that followed, and more generally in perpetuating a system of violent racism. ![]() The Uncle Remus tales were first published as a book in 1880 by a Georgia-born journalist, Joel Chandler Harris, who wanted to create a new literary mythology that could instruct the world about the ideals of the New South. Disney was willing to release the film in foreign countries, where racial scrutiny was not as intense. Then, as now, it was deemed too racist to distribute commercially-at least in the United States. #Splash mountain movieDespite those valid criticisms of Song of the South-described at the time as "an insult to minorities" by Harlem Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.-in 1989, Disney took the movie and adapted it into Splash Mountain, which would become one of the most popular rides at Disney parks.Įven at the time of the ride's debut, the company knew the movie was objectionable. ![]()
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