Disney Live-Action Films
Topic: 4/25/06 Rhett Wickham: Beggar at the Feast

#	Author	Message
21	mawnck Sun 8/3/2008 4:44a	>>I have never understood why the depiction of blacks in this film is any different than the depiction of blacks in the movie GONE WITH THE WIND, released a mere 7 years before SONG OF THE SOUTH and readily available on a special edition DVD. << N-A-H - This has been well hashed out in other topics, but here's the (relatively) short answer. Ted Turner is not Disney. Ted Turner does not have to worry about boycots, picketers, bad publicity, and shareholder revolts. It's not the content of SOTS that's the problem. It's the notoriety. It isn't that it's a racist movie, it's that it's a **famous** racist movie (and what's actually in it doesn't matter). Disney can get away with the Native Americans in Peter Pan, the Germans and Japanese in the WWII set, and just about everything in The Boatniks, because they are either so familiar that most people don't really think about them, or they're only offensive to people who don't have a loud and effective radical leadership constantly on TV, or they're so obscure that nobody knows them. Another famous, and rather more problematic animated film that is near and dear to animation fans' hearts is the Warner Bros. cartoon "Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs." An extremely unenlightened but certainly not mean-spirited cartoon (especially for the time), it's often sited as the best thing Bob Clampett and the Slessinger studio ever did, which makes it one of the best cartoons of all time. Yet Warner Bros. never could figure out how to work it into their massive "Golden Collection" DVD library. The last volume of the set was just announced, and "Coal Black" ain't on it. It remains largely unseen by the general public. Meanwhile, the recent "Woody Woodpecker and Friends" sets contain several non-classics that are not just unenlightened, but blatantly and unapologetically racist against African Americans. And you didn't hear a peep about them, did you. Why? Because nobody's ever heard of them and nobody cares whether or not Walter Lantz was a racist. Whereas people DO care about Merrie Melodies and Looney Tunes. Woody Woodpecker doesn't get news coverage. Bugs Bunny does. And then there's Disney, who gets so much coverage that they're forced to spend truckloads of money removing stuff from "Aladdin" and "The Lion King" that wasn't even in there in the first place. Plus, there's the little matter of the current Presidential frontrunner, which has made racism an even hotter potato. I truly believe we would've had a SOTS release announcement by now if Obama had done lousy in the primaries. If Disney's profitability starts to tank (and the most recent earnings announcement showed no such trend), their financials may overcome their fear and we may yet see a release. And in the meantime, it's readily available on YouTube despite being a blatant copyright violation against a very lawsuit-happy entertainment company. Funny, that, huh.
22	Next-Action-Hero Mon 8/4/2008 4:28p	"And in the meantime, it's readily available on YouTube despite being a blatant copyright violation against a very lawsuit-happy entertainment company. Funny, that, huh." That's what I thought, too. I enjoyed the film on YouTube so much I bought a "bootleg" copy. (Watch those disappear when Disney finally releases this film on DVD.) It makes me wonder how much money Disney is losing by not having this film available to the American public through any official channels. Seems the powers that be at Disney are (temporarily) turning a blind eye to bootlegs as they, for now, are satisfying the consumer demand for the film in this country, and they avoid the politics for a short time. But I still want a "restored two-disc special edition." If I were Disney, I would do a joint collaboration with Warner Bros. regarding films regarding race in the 30s, 40s, and 50s. That might be a place to see "Coal Black" and other hidden films.
23	mawnck Mon 8/4/2008 7:40p	>>That might be a place to see "Coal Black" and other hidden films.<< Aside from SOTS, Coal Black, Tin Pan Alley Cats, and the censored scenes in Fantasia's Pastoral Symphony, neither company really has anything else worth seeing that's in this category, at least when it comes to animation. The rest of the Warner Bros. "Censored Eleven" range from mediocre to lousy.

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