Song of the South
A popular podcast tackles a controversial Disney film, writes Kylie Klein-Nixon.
Timing it perfectly with the release of Disney+, Karina Longworth has released a new season of her podcast, You Must Remember This. This time, it’s all about Disney’s most controversial (and hidden) film.
I’ll let Longworth, writing on the podcast website, explain: ‘‘The one film promised to remain locked away [from Disney+] is Song of the South, the 1946 animation/live-action hybrid set on a postCivil War plantation.
‘‘What is Song of the South? Why did Disney make it, even amidst protests? And why have they held the actual film from release for the past
30-plus years, while finding other ways to profit off of it?’’
Why indeed. Song of the South, based on the Uncle Remus folk stories of American author
Joel Chandler Harris, centres on a group of characters named Brer Rabbit, Brer Fox and Brer
Bear (the ‘‘brer’’ being African-American English for ‘‘brother’’, a dialect of English that’s used throughout the stories and film). They’re widely considered obnoxious caricatures of AfricanAmericans.
That’s not just my do-gooder, modern perspective talking. The film was railed against at the time for being full of nasty stereotypes and the way that, despite being nominally set after emancipation, it seems to portray pre-civil war slavery as a delightful romance lost forever because of the nasty the war.
If you’re old enough, you might remember seeing the film in 1986, when Disney briefly rereleased it. But since then, the film has been on lockdown.
Now, Longworth is yanking back the Disney modesty curtain to let in the light and, frankly, I cannot get enough of it.
Her podcasts are the stuff of nerdy film-buff