"Walt Disney's Song of South premieres in Atlanta, Georgia - November 12th, 1946 "

On this day in 1946, the controversial Disney movie Song of the South premiered at the Fox Theater in Atlanta, Georgia.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This Day in History Class is a production of I
Heart Radio, Hello, and Welcome to This Day in History Class,
a show that strives to know at least a little
bit more history every day. I'm Gabe Blusier, and in

(00:22):
this episode we're talking about the most infamous movie in
Disney's proverbial vault, the rarely seen Song of the South. Spoilers,
You're not missing much. The day was November twelve, the

(00:47):
controversial Disney movie Song of the South, premiered at the
Fox Theater in Atlanta, Georgia. If you've never seen the film,
and there's a good chance you haven't, it takes place
us in an unnamed region of the South during the
reconstruction era. The simple story follows a young white boy
named Johnny who goes to live on his grandmother's plantation. There,

(01:12):
Johnny befriends an elderly black man named Uncle Remus, who
delivers moral lessons and life advice by telling him the
stories of Breyer Rabbit. Anytime Johnny runs into trouble, he
consults Uncle Remus, who has a story to fit every
issue and occasion. Most of the film's ninety minute runtime

(01:34):
is live action, a rarity for the Disney Studio in
those days. The other twenty minutes or so features animated
depictions of the stories told by Uncle Remus. In these
three hand drawn segments, viewers see how the cunning Breyer
Rabbit outwits his hungry foes Breyer Fox and Breyer Bear,

(01:56):
and in case you're wondering, Breyer is a Southern dial
electic take on brother, not the word Briar. Song of
the South has been the subject of controversy since before
it even premiered. One of the primary criticisms is that
the movie never clarifies the relationship between its black and
white characters. Though ostensibly set during the reconstruction era. The

(02:21):
only indication of this comes in the last ten minutes
of the movie, when Uncle Remus decides to leave the plantation,
something he presumably wouldn't be permitted to do if he
was still enslaved by Johnny's grandparents. Either way, the film
presents an idyllic view of relations between its black and
white characters, or put another way, between plantation owners and

(02:46):
their formally enslaved workers. There's no hint of animosity or
resentment between them, and both sides are depicted as equally happy,
though one group is obviously better off than the other.
Aside from this rose tinted view of history, the other
main criticism leveled at the film is that the Uncle

(03:06):
Remus character epitomizes the so called magical negro trope in Hollywood.
This is when a black character exists mainly to dispense
folksy wisdom to a white protagonist and has little to
no story or agency of their own. The discomfort from
this kind of portrayal is compounded by the fact that

(03:27):
all six screenwriters credited on the film were white, even
though its stories and characters are rooted in black storytelling.
Song of the South was adapted from the work of
Joel Chandler Harris, a white author who copied down the
folk tales he heard from enslaved black people and published
them himself to great success. Walt Disney had heard Harris's

(03:52):
Uncle Remus stories during his own childhood in Missouri. Decades later,
he purchased the film rights, viewing the stories as the
perfect vehicle for his company to break into live action filmmaking.
Walt had hoped to mimic the success of the Southern
epic Gone with the Wind, which had been released in
ninety nine and is still to this day the highest

(04:16):
grossing film of all time when adjusted for inflation. To
help link the films in the public's mind, Walt cast
Hattie McDaniel, who starred and Gone with the Wind and
became the first black performer to win an Academy Award
for her role in it. Walt even arranged for Song
of the South to premiere at the same theater in

(04:37):
Atlanta were Gone with the Wind was first screened. That
decision embodies some of the production's deeper flaws. At the time,
the city of Atlanta was racially segregated. That means that
if black cast members were to attend the premiere, they
would have been separated from the rest of the cast
and crew. James Basket, the lead actor of the film

(05:01):
who portrayed Uncle Remus, chose to spare himself that indignity
and did not attend the event. It would have been
easy to hold the premiere in a city where everyone
involved could have attended on equal footing, but Walt was
chasing the prestige of Gone with the Wind, even at
the expense of his own caste comfort and dignity. A

(05:23):
little over a year after Song of the South's premiere,
James Basket received an Honorary Academy Award for his role
in the film, making him the first black male performer
to ever receive an OSCAR. As For the box office,
Song of the South made just two hundred and twenty
six thousand dollars on a budget of over two million.

(05:46):
As you can probably guess, that's a whole lot less
than what Gone with the Wind made. Reviews of Song
of the South weren't so hot either. The technical artistry
was praised, including the dynamic anime its sequences, and the
blending of animated characters with live action performers like when
a cartoon Bluebird lands on Uncle Remus's shoulder. However, the

(06:10):
film story was branded as predictable, saccharine, and pretty dull.
As you might expect, most attractors focused on the film's
flawed depiction of race and history. The n double a
CP picketed the premier, and one of the organization's leaders,
Walter Francis White, condemned the film for perpetuating quote, a

(06:34):
dangerously glorified picture of slavery. In his review for the
Afro American newspaper, Richard dear labeled the movie quote as vicious,
a piece of propaganda for white supremacy as Hollywood ever produced.
Despite the backlash, the film's black cast members defended their work.

(06:55):
In an interview, Hattie McDaniels said quote, if I had
for one moment considered any part of the picture degrading
or harmful to my people, I would not have appeared
therein Her co star James Baskett felt similarly. He said, quote,
I believe that certain groups are doing my race more

(07:17):
harm in seeking to create dissension than can ever possibly
come out of the Song of the South. Negative press aside.
In the first few decades following the film's premiere, Disney
routinely re released it to theaters. The first time was
in nineteen fifty six, followed by return engagements in nineteen

(07:38):
seventy two, nineteen eighty, and finally in nineteen eighty six.
To this day, there hasn't been an official home video
release of the movie in the United States. Disney no
longer distributes Song of the South to theaters, and you
definitely won't find it streaming on Disney Plus. But the

(07:58):
company didn't bury the film completely. In fact, they've continued
to make money off it for the past forty years.
If you're like me, you never saw a Song of
the South as a kid, but you did watch a
Disney sing along VHS tape that included the Zippity Doo
Dah musical sequence from the film. That song won an

(08:20):
OSCAR for Best Original Song, and it took on a
life of its own Apart from the movie. The Jackson
Five did their take on it, as did everyone from
Miley Cyrus to Louis Armstrong. It was also a fixture
of the Disney parks, playing in a loop with other
cheery songs, though it has been pulled from that rotation

(08:40):
in recent years. Speaking of the Disney parks, I can't
end the show without mentioning Splash Mountain, the Song of
the South themed ride that's still in operation as of one.
The popular log Flume ride borrows its characters, songs, and
locations from the movies animated segments, and features several animatronic

(09:03):
figures of Breya Rabbit, Brea Fox, and Brear Bear. The
ride was launched at Disneyland in nine, three years after
the movie's last release in theaters. It was later copied
into other Disney parks, in Florida and Tokyo, the designers
sought to avoid controversy by leaving out Uncle Remus and

(09:25):
other controversial elements of the movie and sticking just to
the adventures of Breya Rabbit. As for the name Splash Mountain,
that was suggested by then CEO Michael Eisner as a
strange and misguided way to promote Splash four, movie, in
which Tom Hanks plays a man who falls in love

(09:47):
with a mermaid. Today, many park guests love Splash Mountain,
but have no idea of its ties to Song of
the South or to Splash for that matter. However, in
twenty twenty, Disney announced that the Splash Mountain ride in
California and Florida will eventually be re themed to the

(10:07):
two thousand nine animated movie The Princess and the Frog.
At the time of recording, no timeline for those changes
has been announced, and the Song of the South theming
is expected to remain at the park in Tokyo. In
the years since its release, the controversy around Song of
the South has grown larger and larger, partly because Disney

(10:30):
has made the films so inaccessible even as they continue
to market and monetize portions of it. In other ways,
there's an argument to be made for releasing the film
for posterity. It does contain a standout performance by James Basket,
and there are some lovely bits of animation and music,
but by and large, the movie just doesn't deserve the

(10:53):
infamous status it's gained. Even if you look past their racism,
which is kind of the whole thing, you're left with
a bland, not very good movie that would probably bore
most modern children, not to mention adults except for Zippity Dud,
that song still slaps. I'm Gabe Louisier and hopefully you

(11:15):
now know a little more about history today than you
did yesterday. If you enjoyed today's show, consider following us
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And if you want to tell me how badly you
cringed when I used the word slaps, you can register
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(11:37):
media dot com. Thanks to Chandler Mays for producing the show,
and thank you for listening. I'll see you back here
again tomorrow for another Day in History class. For more
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(11:57):
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