The 1986 Song of the South Rerelease

I have seen Song of the South in its entirety twice. Once was on a Japanese bootleg a classmate had when I was in college—it turns out, in fact, that due to copyright laws in Japan it’s in the public domain there. He informed our professors that he owned such a thing; the class we were taking was about the US South, and I suspect this would have been winter quarter, when we were studying Reconstruction through about the New Deal. Since the movie is set in the 1870s, it was appropriate, and after all we did read the books on which it’s based that quarter. The other time was years before, in the film’s final US rerelease.

There’s not a lot of story to Song of the South. Kindly Uncle Remus (James Baskett) tells stories about Br’er Rabbit (Johnny Lee) and the others to Johnny (Bobby Driscoll) and Ginny (Luanna Patten). Johnny’s father is in Atlanta publishing his newspaper, and Johnny and his mother are staying on his grandmother’s plantation. Ginny is not as well off as Johnny’s family, but they become friends. Things happen in a generic wholesome sort of way, with Kindly Uncle Remus using African folktales handed down through oral tradition in the US among the enslaved population as a way of teaching the white kids valuable and relevant lessons.

I mean, like I said, it’s been a while since I’ve seen it; that would’ve been in the 1999-2000 school year. My memories of the first time I saw it aren’t really of the movie, either. I remember standing in line. We were at the Pacific Hastings Theater. Given the length of the line, I can only assume they were playing the movie in its nine hundred-odd seat theatre, where I would later see Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and Batman Forever. Beauty and the Beast, too, I think. But that’s only a guess, because all I remember is the line.

It was a curious choice for a release that year. Its release on November 21, 1986, was ostensibly to celebrate the film’s fortieth anniversary. But even in 1946, the film had not been without controversy. Its official screenwriter, Dalton S. Reymond, was a white Southerner who’d never written a screenplay before and never would again. Walt also hired Maurice Rapf, who would be blacklisted the same year, ostensibly to weed out the racism. But why hire a white Southerner to write the screenplay in the first place, if you know you’re going to need to do that?

In reality, Disney was trying to test the waters for the ride that would be Splash Mountain. All the old America Sings animatronics, or anyway most of them, were being hauled across the park and installed in a flume ride. That would be, for reasons, Song of the South-themed. Why? An excellent question. They were putting it in Bear Country, to be renamed Critter Country, but that’s not really an answer. There are other Disney properties, were other Disney properties in the ‘80s, that could’ve filled that role and without controversy. Though it seems they weren’t particularly expecting the controversy, since Uncle Remus himself was never a character. They were wrong.

To this day, the film remains controversial. Whoopi Goldberg announced the day she was made a Disney Legend (“Film and Television”; the woman has done a lot of work for the Mouse over the years) that she wanted it released so that people would actually start talking about it. What it was, what it was like, why it was made. Valerie Stewart, whose father Nick was the voice of Br’er Bear, went to her grave insisting that at least some of the controversy stemmed from the dislike light-skinned NAACP executive secretary Walter Francis White had for dark-sinned Hattie McDaniel and how he tried to sabotage her career. Bob Iger, while he was still running the company, said it was the movie that would never be on Disney+.

That I have actually seen the movie puts me in an unusual position regarding it these days. I’m 47, and most people who have seen it are even older than I am. I’m frankly appalled to learn that the original script was too racist to pass the Hays Code and was even toned down by the office; once again, why in the name of Gods was Reymond, a musician and dialect coach, among other things, hired to write the damn thing? They were expected to make it more clear that it was set during Reconstruction than they did, too. It’s also not an uncommon opinion that the live-action bits of the movie are extremely dull.

Why did we stand in line, which I remember being hot but must have just been boring, to watch that movie? For one thing, we were a Disney family. Many of the other families in that line were Disney families. That close to the park, and in the days when tickets were so much less expensive, we spent a lot of our discretionary money on Disney. I wonder, though, if my mother was able to read the political tides and suspected there would not be a future release. This was at the cusp of the home video revolution, one in which Song of the South would not take part. It has never received a release in the US. Not on VHS, not on DVD, and not on Blu-Ray. Not streaming, either.

That line on the sidewalk is also a line in time. The last time Disney would consider releasing the movie. Almost the last time they would acknowledge it existed outside the pervasive “Zip-a-Dee-Do-Dah” and the characters that made it into Splash Mountain. And now even that is gone, changed over to a Princess and the Frog-themed ride instead. One assumes many of those same America Sings animatronics have continued their service on that ride as well.