Links:
Traditional Animation – Celebrating the 68th Anniversary of Song of the South
Song of the South: Disney’s Most Notorious Film
Harry Belafonte Give a Rousing, Eloquent Primer on Hollywood’s Racial History
Is Song of the South Too Racist to Screen?
Articles/E-Journals/E-Books/PDFs:
Reassuring Convergence: Online Fandom, Race, and Disney’s Notorious Song of the South
- This essay explores recent Internet fan activity around Walt Disney’s notorious Song of the South (1946), an “Uncle Tom” musical so offensive that the company stopped releasing it to American audiences in 1986. Yet, through the circulation of bootleg copies and various forms of Internet discourse, fans have kept Song in public consciousness—detailing their own affective attachments to the film, resisting any suggestions that it is racist, and hoping to force Disney to finally release it on DVD.
Books:
Who’s Afraid of the Song of the South: And Other Forbidden Disney Stories, by Jim Korkis
- Brer Rabbit. Uncle Remus. Song of the South. Racist?Disney thinks so. And that’s why it has forbidden the theatrical re-release of its classic film Song of the South since 1986.But is the film racist? Are its themes, its characters, even its music so abominable that Disney has done us a favor by burying the movie in its infamous Vault, where the Company claims it will remain for all time?Disney historian Jim Korkis does not think so.In his newest book, Who’s Afraid of the Song of the South?, Korkis examines the film from concept to controversy, and reveals the politics that nearly scuttled the project. Through interviews with many of the artists and animators who created Song of the South, and through his own extensive research, Korkis delivers both the definitive behind-the-scenes history of the film and a balanced analysis of its cultural impact.What else would Disney prefer you did not know? Plenty.
Korkis also pulls back the curtain on such dubious chapters in Disney history as:
- Disney’s cinematic attack on venereal disease
- Ward Kimball’s obsession with UFOs
- Tim Burton’s depressed stint at the Disney Studios
- Walt Disney’s nightmares about his stomping an owl to death
- Wally Wood’s Disneyland Memorial Orgy poster
- J. Edgar Hoover’s hefty FBI file on Walt Disney
- Little Black Sunflower’s animated extinction
Plus 10 more forbidden tales that Disney wishes would go away.
Whether you’re a film buff, an armchair academic, or a Disney fan eager to peek behind Disney’s magical (and tightly controlled) curtain, you’ll discover lots you never knew about Disney.
With a foreword by Disney Legend Floyd Norman, Who’s Afraid of the Song of the South? is both authoritative and entertaining.
Jim Korkis is the best-selling author of Vault of Walt, and has been researching and writing about Disney for over three decades. The Disney Company itself uses his expertise for special projects. Korkis resides in Orlando, Florida.
Disney’s Most Notorious Films, by Jason Sperb
- The Walt Disney Company offers a vast universe of movies, television shows, theme parks, and merchandise, all carefully crafted to present an image of wholesome family entertainment. Yet Disney also produced one of the most infamous Hollywood films, Song of the South. Using cartoon characters and live actors to retell the stories of Joel Chandler Harris, SotS portrays a kindly black Uncle Remus who tells tales of Brer Rabbit, Brer Fox, and the “Tar Baby” to adoring white children. Audiences and critics alike found its depiction of African Americans condescending and outdated when the film opened in 1946, but it grew in popularity-and controversy-with subsequent releases. Although Disney has withheld the film from American audiences since the late 1980s, SotS has an enthusiastic fan following, and pieces of the film-such as the Oscar-winning “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah”-remain throughout Disney’s media universe. Disney’s Most Notorious Film examines the racial and convergence histories of Song of the South to offer new insights into how audiences and Disney have negotiated the film’s controversies over the last seven decades. Jason Sperb skillfully traces the film’s reception history, showing how audience perceptions of SotS have reflected debates over race in the larger society. He also explores why and how Disney, while embargoing the film as a whole, has repurposed and repackaged elements of SotS so extensively that they linger throughout American culture, serving as everything from cultural metaphors to consumer products.
Documents:
Uncle Walt thought Song of the South would be his masterpiece. Now it’s invisible.
Still From Song of the South
“We’re through with caviar,” Walt Disney lamented. “From now on it’s mashed potatoes and gravy.” The company that bore his name was reeling from the disappointing box office returns of Pinocchio and Fantasia. During the war, the perpetually unsteady company had been kept afloat by government-commissioned propaganda movies and cheaply produced “package films” like The Three Caballerosand Make Mine Music. Now the war was over, and the boss needed a hit. Something technically innovative but not too expensive. Something instantly beloved.
Disney had cunningly negotiated the rights to Joel Chandler Harris’ plantation-set Uncle Remus’ tales back in 1939, while Clark Gable was still dominating movie screens. A known literary entity that oozed bankable southern charm: Disney had found his potatoes.
The resulting film, Song of the South, turned out to be yet another commercial disappointment. But as Jason Sperb details in his fascinating new book Disney’s Most Notorious Film, its life as both corporate emblem and fount of controversy would last for decades. The Disney Company hasn’t let Song of the South out of its hallowed “vault” in 25 years. The film’s live-action depictions of Uncle Remus and his fellow smilin’, Massah-servin’ black folk are embarrassingly racist. But South’s central song, “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah,” is all but synonymous with Disney itself, and the characters live on in the company’s massively popular Splash Mountain rides. So Song of the South lives on, yet the company can’t even really acknowledge the film, much less cash in on it directly. If you were born after 1980, you’ve almost certainly never seen it in full, and it’s unlikely that will change anytime soon.
Song of the South concerns a young boy, Johnny, who moves to his mother’s family plantation in Georgia right as his father leaves the family to fight for some unspecified cause in Atlanta. Alone and depressed, he’s comforted by the tall tales of Uncle Remus, an ex-slave living on the property. The era of the film’s setting is purposefully vague; while it’s implied that the black workers are no longer Johnny’s family’s property, they are still completely subservient, and happily so. James Baskett plays Remus as a preternaturally jolly companion, a buoyant and beatific link between the stately live-action sequences and the animated ones involving Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox as a proto-Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote.*
For Baskett’s magical-Negro presence, for the cartoon characters’ ludicrously stereotypical voices, and for the generally pleasant dynamic between the white landowners and their help, Sperb calls Song of the South “one of Hollywood’s most resiliently offensive racist texts.” That last word is the giveaway that Disney’s Most Notorious Film isn’t a work of movie criticism so much as the latest entry in the ever-expanding academic subculture of Disney Studies. Sperb spends relatively little time with the movie itself, instead tracing its place in the popular consciousness as it went in and out of style.
He first punctures the myth that the racial caricatures in Song of the South were “a product of its time.” This is an argument that the film’s defenders trot out reliably, when, in fact, Disney took uncharacteristic pains to undercut the Harris tales’ potential offensiveness. As Neal Gabler’s biography reveals, Disney hired a leftist screenwriter, Mauric Rapf, to modify the original script by southerner Dalton Reymond; Disney Company reps met with producers of the racially controversial 1943 film Stormy Weatherto hear about their marketing experiences; and Disney publicists warned management of potential racially charged blowback. Walt Disney himself even invited NAACP president Walter White to California to oversee script revisions, though the meeting never occurred.
In short, Disney knew he was playing with a loaded gun even before filming began. As Sperb puts it: “Not only is Song of the South a movie derogatory because of its ‘Uncle Tomism,’ it was made by people who were well aware of the stereotype, who knew others would be offended, and who clearly felt there was nothing wrong with that.”
Disney’s debt to Gone With the Wind was made clear by his casting of Hattie McDaniel in a minor role, and he might have been confused about why his film was attacked for tastelessness less than a decade after McDaniel won her Oscar for an essentially Mammy role. Sperb explains that racial progressivism was at a high point in America coming out of the war. Black Americans had served ably, of course, and Americans were eager to prove their superiority to the Nazis in terms of ethnic tolerance.
But after succeeding generations experienced Song of the South’s colorful imagery in their Golden Books and accompanying records, in episodes of the Disneylandtelevision series, and through the omnipresence of “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah,” Song of the South became an unlikely hit in three re-releases throughout the 1970s and ’80s. “People who grew up with Disney’s Uncle Remus in their homes were more receptive [in 1972] than 1940s audiences had been to a jarringly inappropriate ‘Uncle Tom’-ish Southern melodrama,” Sperb writes. And by the 1980s, when it was twice re-released theatrically, viewers brought nostalgia to Song that blinded them to its true offensiveness; in Sperb’s telling, the film had become “so outdated that its offensiveness was hard for some to see.”
As cultural history, this is an impressively researched, convincing argument. But Sperb is on shakier ground as a polemicist. He implies that the company has whitewashed (so to speak) its past by burying a moral embarrassment while still reaping profits from it. And ashamed as I am to type this, I’m not sure he’s being entirely fair to Disney.
My perception of Disney’s power and influence is probably skewed from the dozens of products clogging my two young kids’ dressers and toy drawers, but my guess is that no single DVD or theatrical release could possibly damage their reputation or bottom line beyond repair. For that reason, I choose to charitably interpret their withholding of a surely profitable Song of the South release as proof of some modicum of cultural sensitivity. Even if that sensitivity is informed by corporate fear, as it almost certainly is, all they’ve really done is salvage the noncontroversial elements of the film and unofficially disowned the rest.
Trouble is, this is our cinematic loss. Sperb is dismissive of Song of the South as a film, but it is a fascinating part of the Disney canon and even historically significant. For one, the live-action parts were the first color work by Gregg Toland, the legendary cinematographer of Citizen Kane. Far from the perfunctory or boring placeholders that Sperb claims, the studio portions of Song of the South (which account for all but 25 of the film’s 95 minutes) are often visually and emotionally stunning. Toland’s long panning shots and devastating close-ups of anguished Johnny are the most affecting non-animated screen images ever created under the Disney banner. Song of the Southis a major work by one of the great screen photographers of all time, and one of his final films at that.
It is also one of Walt Disney’s own most transparently personal (and self-serving) movies. Disney was the son of farmers who learned his famous work ethic by watching his parents eke out a living in Marceline, Mo. The Harris stories offered his first chance to put his own populist stamp on an American literary touchstone. While his choice of the Remus stories was motivated by profit and popular taste, it’s not hard to see how Disney would be drawn to a story about a beloved storyteller whose gift ultimately saves an impressionable boy’s life. Remus guides Johnny away from stilted real life and into “a laughing place,” an alternate time when “the folks, they was closer to the critters, and the critters, they was closer to the folks.” It is naturally a cartoon world full of eyelash-batting animals. The whole film is like a test run for the immersive theme parks that Disney would eventually destroy acres of forest to build.
Song of the South was Walt Disney’s attempt at literary respectability and an obvious effort to define his image. Watching the film now, this is the element that stands out as the real product of Song of the South’s time. While the Disney name and signature are still the reigning symbols for our entire country’s outlook and aesthetic sense nearly a half-century after the founder’s death, the old “Uncle Walt” personality has little to do with it anymore. Instead, the current Disney public face is now either a bevy of princesses or Lightning McQueen, depending on which gender of Happy Meal your kid demands. What’s remained from the Uncle Walt days is the insistence that Disney’s historical output is an unending line of “beloved classics” and “masterpieces,” ignoring the fact that many of their movies were actually commercial failures in their first release.
We won’t be seeing Song of the South anytime soon because the film’s controversy resists that narrative. The Disney marketing department doesn’t operate at any level below fawning adoration, and this is a film that requires a more solemn presentation. It’s more of a curio than a classic, as memorable for its utter tastelessness as for its technical accomplishments. Sperb’s book is an intelligent and readable academic treatment of its long shadow, and with any luck it will inspire some viewers to seek out the film itself—whether on torrents, questionably legal DVD, or, for now, on YouTube—rather than the arguments about it.
Correction, Jan. 6, 2012: This ariticle originally misidentified James Baskett as John Baskett. (Return to the corrected sentence.)
Harry Belafonte Gives a Rousing, Eloquent Primer on Hollywood’s Racial History
Harry Belafonte, the legendary singer, actor, and activist, received the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award on Saturday night. The occasion was the Academy’s 2014 Governors Awards, where Belafonte took the podium to deliver an eloquent, utterly absorbing account of Hollywood’s racial history and his own hopes for the industry.
Belafonte began by condemning Hollywood’s early penchant for racism, noting that films like Birth of a Nation, Song of the South, and Tarzan of the Apes saw “the virus of racial inferiority, of never wanting to be identified with anything African, swept into the psyche of its youthful observers.” But the actor concluded on an optimistic note, trumpeting film’s ability to craft a new, more progressive vision of society. Belafonte’s long history in movies—he was one of the first actors to tackle racial politics in Hollywood—only makes his wise, thoughtful words more moving.
Is Song of the South too racist to screen?
Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah…Uncle Remus and friends. Photograph: songofthesouth.net
There are two Disney films I’d like to see but can’t. The first is a short cartoon – allegedly prepared for Walt’s 50th birthday – which showed Snow White having vigorous sex with the seven dwarfs. The second is the 1946 feature Song of the South.
Chances are we’ll never see the Snow White spoof: Disney reportedly fired the animators responsible and ordered that the print be instantly destroyed. But, prompted by a public petition, the studio is now considering lifting its ban on Song of the South. Since its 40th anniversary screening in 1986, Disney’s first live-action feature has been quietly mothballed. It has never been released on video or DVD in the US.
Back in the day, Song of the South might conceivably have been read as a warm-hearted salute to America’s “coloureds”. Since then it’s becomea shameful embarrassment for the company, the equivalent of a racist old relation who can’t be introduced to polite company. In depicting a (literally) fabulous Deep South strung sometime between slavery and Reconstruction, the film trades in a dubious form of myth-making – implying that African-Americans stuck below the Mason-Dixon line were a cheerful bunch who liked nothing better than going fishing, spinning tall tales and looking after white folks’ kids.
When he’s not waxing lyrical about “tar babies”, Uncle Remus explains why he likes “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah Days …. Dat’s the kinda day when you can’t open yo mouf without a song jumpin’ right out of it.” Thus Song of the South reheats the old canard about how slaves can’t really be so miserable because, my, just listen to them sing in that cottonfield.
Annoyingly this cosy misconception had already been nailed byFrederick Douglass way back in the 19th-century. “I have often been utterly astonished, since I came to the north, to find persons who could speak of the singing, among slaves, as evidence of their contentment and happiness,” Douglass wrote. “It is impossible to conceive of a greater mistake. Slaves sing most when they are most unhappy.”
Song of the South was hailed as a triumph when it was released and went on to win the Oscar for best original song. And perhaps the studio should even be applauded for casting a black actor (James Baskett) in a lead role at a time when black filmgoers were still forced to sit at the back of the cinema. (Incidentally, Baskett was unable to attend the movie’s premiere in Atlanta because he couldn’t find a hotel that would agree to put him up.)
If Song of the South were not a kids’ film I think that we’d have seen it before now. Birth of a Nation still gets regularly unveiled despite its openly, unapologetically racist stance (the KKK save the day!) and there are hundreds of other antique Hollywood movies that trade in a less virulent form of bigotry and yet continue to crop up regularly on the TV schedules. I love that bit at the end of Mr Blandings Builds His Dream House when the pliant black housemaid effectively saves Cary Grant’s job by devising an advertising slogan. “Give Gussie a raise!” he says. Whoo-hoo: a whole extra 50 cents for her trouble.
I’d appreciate the chance to see Song of the South. I last watched it as a callow nine-year-old (back in the days before racism was bad) and remember liking it a lot. This is a little worrying. It suggests that the film’s dodgy agenda either sailed clear over my head or has affected me so deeply that I remain unaware of it to this day – blithely going through life in the belief that there was zip wrong with segregation that a little doo-dahing couldn’t cure. I need it there on DVD, if only to put my mind at rest.
Failing that, I’d settle for Snow White.
Videos:
Song of the South Research Notes
Book: Disney’s Most Notorious Film: Race, Convergence, and the Hidden Histories of Song of the South, by Jason Sperb
Chapter Two: Put Down the Mint Julep, Mr Disney
The Film premiered at the Fox Theatre in downtown Atlanta on November 12. It was a large, three-day affair, with more than two dozen Southern reporters invited to cover the event. Walt himself had left for Atlanta several days early to attend. The day before Song of the South‘s theatrical debut, the city was treated to a large parade, Disney was interviewed on the Vox Pop radio program from Fox Theatre, along with Georgia Governor Ellis Arnall, Atlanta Mayor William B. Hartsfield, descendants of Joel Chandler Harris, and the film star Gene Tierney (who did not appear in the film). Also on hand were stars Ruth Warrick, Bobby Driscoll, and Launa Patten, along with actors and actresses who provided the voices of Donald Duck (Clarence Nash), Snow White (Adriana Caselotti), Pluto/Goofy (Pinto Colvig), and Jiminy Cricket (Cliff Edwards).As was eventually noted by many, Georgia’s enforced segregation prevented Song of the South‘s two African American stars, Baskett and McDaniel, from attending the festivities — something that even few Northern newspapers at the time made a point to mention.
Song of the South‘s eventual underperformance at the box office was not for lack of promotion. According to a studio advertisement at the time. Song of the South was sold throughout the country in “four-color” ads in 75 of the biggest sunday newspapers magazines and supplements in the country… saturating America with one of the most comprehensive campaigns on record!… including the most intensive and widespread music promotion ever devised.” This campaign did not necessarily help Song of the South‘s ultimate box office performance, but the music promotion paid off. According to Variety, “Sooner or Later” and “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” had already cracked the list of “Top 30” radio songs during the week of November 8 just before the film was released.
Unlike its soundtrack, however, Song of the South generated harsh reviews, offend may audiences, and garnered underwhelming box office returns. Despite later assumptions to the contrary, Song of the South was a commercial disappointment. In addition to the above promotional costs, the final production tab on the film itself ran over $2 million. The film essentially broke even when it later grossed $3.4 million. This was not a fiasco by any measure, but it was almost $2 million less than even Walt Disney had privately hoped. In any case, it was certainly not enough to reenergize the studio, or to pull it out of the deep financial trouble it had dealt with throughout the 1940s. Moreover, final numbers were especially underwhelming given the various factors that appeared in Song of the South‘s favor — Disney’s promotional efforts, the popularity of the film’s song on the radio, the appeal of Disney’s brand name, and, most important, the built-in literary audience represented by generations of Harris readers. By opening first in the South, and then later distributing it to the East and West Coasts — its own “Southern strategy” — Disney anticipated that favorable Southern press would send Song of the South off on a path to huge box office success.
As it was rolled out much more slowly than films are today, however, the word of mouth certainly could not have helped: the film suffered widespread critical abuse for its African American publication) reported that Song of the South came under “considerable panning from the press when producer Walt Disney first announced his intention to film the whimsical story.” That same Defender article also referred to the film as Uncle Remus before noting that the title was changed “following a Gallup Poll for a suitable title for the film.” The change from “Uncle Remus” to Song of the South was in part to avoid overt “Uncle Tom” connotations.
This change from “Uncle Remus” to Song of the South was in part to avoid overt “Uncle Tom” connotations. But it also upset the Harris family and may have also alienated (or confused) his literary followers. There were many reasons why the film underperformed beyond the bad publicity that its Uncle Tom representations generated. But the negative word of mouth also tempted any excitement or anticipation the release might have elicited.
“Over the next half-century,” writes Brode, “African American film historians would insist on the need for ‘black roles that challenged the stereotypes that had been the icons of earlier times’ [citing Thomas Cripping]. Achieving this necessitates purposefully evoking, then reevaluating the cliché. Disney’s approach ought to be analyzed and understood in terms of the time in which the movie was made. The filmmaker sensed that utterly abandon the Tom and Mammy icons would disorient a mainstream audience in 1946.”
Responses to Song of the South were not universally bad, but audiences then were more critical and better informed than has been properly acknowledged. As Janet Staiger, Richard Dyer, and others have shown, movie audiences long before the 1940s negotiated images of African Americans in Hollywood cinema wit complexity, contradiction, and a practical understanding of history. Staiger’s work on the reception of D.W. Griffith’s racist Birth of the Nation (1915), for example, shows how audiences then saw the film as offensive even in its own time, through a variety of historical factors that informed and complicated these divergent responses. “Any individual (then or now)”, she writes, “might have conflicting or overdetermined views about Birth of the Nation depending on that person’s attitudes toward and judgment of its representation, its technical presentation, and censorship.”
Straiger acknowledges too that notions of conservative and progressive audiences are historically problematic categories themselves, given how connotations shift from decade to decade. But they were quite conscious of the offensive black stereotypes (the “brute”, the “coon”, the “Tom” and so forth) in Birth of the Nation in the early twentieth century – long before Song of the South ever hit the big screen. She notes that as early as 1906, “few individuals encouraged representing blacks as beasts” the most egregious, but far from the only, offensive stereotype later perpetuated by Griffith’s film.
Looking at newspapers and magazines from the 1940s reveals that the primary reading formation at work in Song of the South‘s first release was not progress, but rather a retreat from the social advances of World War II. During the conflict, the federal government worked to promote positive, non-stereotypical images (e.g. Bataan, 1943; Negro Soldier, 1944; Henry Browne, Famer, 1942) to help boost African American morale as part of the war effort. Song of the South undermined this cause in 1946. There were also other contexts at work in the film’s reception, some of which were outlined in the previous chapter — Disney’s artistic reputation, political activism by various associations and unions, and an awareness of the damaging legacy of literary and cinematic African Americans representations up to this point. All of these influences played a part in Song of the South‘s often-hostile greeting.
Henry Browne, Farmer, 1942
Bataan, 1943
Negro Soldier, 1944
Song of the South Research Notes – Part 2
Brer Rabbit Animation
Book – The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation, Ollie Johnston and Frank Thomas
Chapter 8: Burbank and the Nine Old Men
(p.g. 164) Several years for whatever reason the mold was further broken on the three Uncle Remus sections of Song of the South, where all the supervising animators handled footage in large blocks. Bill Peet’s great story work seemed to lend itself of casting. He developed entertaining situations with strong characters delineation, and the design of the characters inspired the animators to get a very loose handling in their work. But more important, Bill’s business called for much personal contact between characters that would have been impossible to handle in co-animation. This new way of working with character relationships encompassed the whole range of relations between two or more characters — from the broadest to the most delicate. It involved expressions scenes that often registered the most secret thoughts and inner emotions of the characters, which as they became more subtle were also more revealing. With money in shorter supply, we cut out the frills and put our energies to work in a new direction, doing the most with what we had, making up for what had been lost in one area by concentrating on outstanding characters in entertaining situations. It was a new dimension in animation and the key breakthrough in reaching the audience.
(p.g. 218) 1. The Thoughtful Thumbnail Developed by Ken Anderson and Wilfred Jackson for The Song of the South. With their knowledge of staging, layout, and visual communication, they worked from the storyboards in small thumbnail sketches, trying one way after another. When a continuity finally was found, the animators were called to criticize and suggest still more ideas. With Ken’s amazing ability these became the basis for the final layouts, cutting, and staging, and showed the animator where his scene fit into the full continuity.
(p.g. 331) Stranger than that, if the story parodies human activities, as in Song of the South and Robin Hood, there is no need to restrict a character’s movements by the limitations of its animal body. The character can have human hands, fingers, a human pelvis, and feet with shoes. Of course natural animal drawing or realistic action will always add sincerity and interest to this type of film, but it is not truly needed to tell the story. On the other hand, if the story is man’s view of what the animal world is like, as in Lady and the Tramp, 101 Dalmatians, and The Jungle Book, the animals must be completely believable or the whole premise will collapse.
(p.g. 462) The accent marked on the exposure sheet is “leading” the sound; in this case by three frames. James Baskett, the voice of Brer Fox, in Song of the South, rattled off this dialogue in one and a half seconds – which averages about 1/8 of a second per word.
Animator: Ollie Johnston – Song of the South: The mouth shapes for the high speed dialogue shown on the exposure sheet. the only possible way to achieve mouth sync with this rapid delivery is to put the action on “ones.”
(p.g. 464) 10. There are times when all your dialogue will have to be on “ones.” When working with Brer Fox’s voice in Song of the South, we found that the actor talked so fast we could not possibly hit the accents without animating all the dialogue on “ones.” Some of the words were as short as two exposures and not many were over four.
(p.g. 526) Song of the South, produced in 1946, kept the cartoon segments separate and complete for the most part, but integrated them so well with few connecting scenes and careful story work that result was one of the studio’s most successful. It was also one of the favourite films of the animators who worked on the sequences, for it combined broad characters with strong situations, in a setting that was pure fantasy. Part of this came from Bill Peet’s excellent story work in adapting the joel Chandler Harris’ classics about Uncle Remus, part of it was was the design of the characters, which offered maximum communication tools to the artists, and a very large part was the marvelous voice tracks, contributed primarily by the wonderful, multitalented James Baskett. The fact that all of the action actually was taking place inside a young boy’s mind, as he was being told the story, added an extra touch of life to the whole concept.
Mary Poppins, produced eighteen years later, in 1964, once again placed the live actors in a cartoon world, combining backgrounds that were partly real and partly drawn, with story situations that pull the actors together.
Song of the South Research Notes – Part 3
Book: Who’s Afraid of the Song of the South, Jim Korkis
Chapter One: Song of the South: The Beginning
(p.g. 21) In the lengthy publicity release from 1946 accompanying the initial release of Song of the South, Walt Disney discussed his feelings about the project:
“There is something endlessly appealing and satisfying in Joel Chandler Harris’ droll fables of animals who behave like humans, and in the character who narrates them. For a long time, they have been an open challenge to motion picture showmanship.
I was familiar with the Uncle Remus tales since boyhood. From the time I began making animated features, I have had them definitely in my production plans. But until now, the medium was not ready to give them an adequate film equivalent inscope and fidelity.
I always felt that Uncle Remus should be played by a living person, as should also the young boy to whom Harris’ old Negro philosopher relates his vivid stories of the Briar Patch. Several tests in previous pictures, especially The Three Caballeros, were encouraging in the way living action and animation could be dovetailed. Finally, months ago, we “took our foot in hand”, in the words of Uncle Remus, and jumped into our most venturesome but also pleasurable undertaking.
So while we naturally had to compact the substance of many tales into those selected for our Song of the South, in Technicolor, the task was not too difficult. And, I hope, nothing of the spirit of the earthly of the fables was lost. It is their timeless and living appeal, their magnificent pictorial quality, their rich and tolerant humor, their homely philosophy and cheerfulness, which made the Remus legends the top choice for our first production with Flesh-and-blood players.”
(p.g. 23) In a 1956 interview with writer Pete Martin, Walt said:
“I did it [Song of the South] just at the end of the war. I did about thirty minutes of cartoon and filled in with a little over an hour of live-action because I didn’t have the money to do an hour-and-a-half cartoon. I didn’t have the talent. I consider it my first real venture into live-action where I told a story. I had done a few live-action things but not with a full story.”
One of the early story treatments from 1939 was more connected to the African-American spirituals. Uncle Remus gathers the critters together for a prayer meeting and to encourage their efforts to build a church so that peace could finally exist between the prey animals and their predators. Another storyline showed Brer Rabbit doing battle with the addiction of gambling that was to be the springboard for all his various troubles in his adventures. Versions of some of these tales that the Disney artists developed later appeared in Disney children’s books and comics.
Walt’s brother Roy was doubtful about the project from the beginning, but not because of any fears of racial retaliation. He shared with Walt in a June 1944 memo his belief that the project was not “big enough in caliber” to warrant its time and budget.
Despite Walt’s reported dislike for sequels, if the movie had been successful, it would have been the first in a series of Uncle Remus pictures that would combine live-action and animation, utilizing the same live-action cast but with different animated shorts developed from other Remus stories.
In February 1941, after seeing African-American singer-actor Paul Robeson performing on stage in George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, Walt talked to Robeson about playing the role of Uncle Remus, and asked him to review and offer suggestions on a possible outline for the script. Walt kept in touch with Robeson for years about the project, indicating how excited he was to work with the well-known activist.Speculation exists that Robeson’s controversial profile, including his passionate involvement in anti-lynching laws, may have removed him from further consideration for the Remus role in the Disney film.
Walt also talked with several other African-American actors about portraying Uncle Remus, including Rex Ingram, perhaps best remembered as the envious genie in Alexander Korda’s The Thief of Bagdad (1940).
It evolved that only a third of the final film would be animated, with the rest live-action. Animator Marc Davis recalled:
“Walt had been interested in getting into live-action for some time. Here was a way he could do that and have his cartoon, too. I think almost all the animators who worked on it would have to say that they never did anything that was more fun than that. We, as a group, never liked the live-action film particularly. But maybe we’re jealous, too.
Chapter two: Song of the South: The Screenplay
(p.g. 25) Dalton Reymond was a musician as well as a writer. He attended Sewanee Military Academy, University of the South, Louisiana State University, and the University of Southern California. He studied music in Austria and conducted the Philharmonic Orchestra in Baton Rouge.
Reymond joined W.H. Stopher at the Louisiana State University School of Music in 1930, and eventually succeded Stopher as Director in 1933. For the 1935 season, in one of his last productions before leaving for Hollywood, Reymond lived in Hollywood, Reymond directed the opera Carmen.
Starting in 1936, Reymond lived in Hollywood, where his perhaps self-generated reputation as an authority on the “Old South” got him work as an uncredited technical advisor and dialog coach on many movie productions, including Jezebel (1938), The Little Foxes (1941), Saratoga Trunk (1945), The Yearling (1946), and Duel in the Sun (1946).
Reymond’s reputation led to Walt Disney hiring him to create the live-action framework for what was to become Song of the South, the only film for which Reymond ever received a screenplay credit.
The original story outline (with the working title Uncle Remus) prepared by Dalton Reymond is fifty-one pages long and dated May 15, 1944. Walt did only light editing on seven pages. On page 7, Walt wrote that “problems cannot be solved by running away from them”. On page 15, Walt wrote in the words “laughing place”, wanting the concept introduced earlier than in Reymond’s treatment, which doesn’t mention it until page 33.
The majority of Walt’s other notes concentrate on the story of the puppy and on the relationship between the young children Ginny and Johnny to help build a more sympathetic reaction from the audience. Reymond wrote:
“While this is only a story outline, every effort has been made to follow, with fidelity, the original intent of Joel Chandler Harris, in the development of the story and the characters, Many other ideas for situations and for more intimate bits of characterization have suggested themselves during the writing of this story, but which necessarily cannot be detailed in an outline.”
In the preface to th outline, he further stated:
“The Uncle Remus works of Joel Chandlier Harris have enjoyed tremendous popularity, exceeded only by the Bible, the works of Shakespeare, and Pilgrim’s Progress, and have been published in eleven languages. This fact in itself is enough to challenge the ingenuity of any writer who would attempt to adapt these works for the screen.
It is possible to explore for today’s audience what the Uncle Remus stories did in days gone by? After having read all available works of Joel Chandler Harris and other material bearing upon the subject, the answer, I think is yes.
Although the popularity of these stories, in book form, is undoubtedly less than when they were first published, they have nevertheless, grown into a define and cherished part of the folklore of America. I am convinced that they still possess such outstanding charm and such character that, if adapted to the screen with fidelity and presented in good taste in terms of today’s audience, they…
(Continued p.g. 26) … could be the basis of one of the finest ever made, and at the same time offer the perfect combination of live-action and animation.
“What is it about these works which have made them such a standout in public favour? What do they contain which would justify such phenomenal popularity? This, I think, is the answer: They are stories of a gentle old negro and a little boy; of how an old man, through his stories and his human understanding, brings happiness to a little boy, whose life is troubled. It should be noted that while the dialect of Uncle Remus is difficult to read, it is easily understandable when spoken.”
However, as Reymond continued to work on the script, it became apparent that only he never written a screenplay before (and wouldn’t again), he needed assistance in handling the sensitive subject matter.
It became especially evident when the African-American consultant that Walt had hired, noted performer and writer Clarence Muse, quit after Reymond ignored his suggestions to portray the African-American characters with more dignity and as more than just Southern stereotypes. Muse had apparently only seen Reymond’s work when he began a campaign to alert the African-American community of how Disney was going to portray them in a negative manner.
Movies from 1930 to 1967 were governed by a Production Code administered by the Production Code Administration, which had been organized by the Motion Picture Producers & Distributors of America, Inc. The Code reviewed all screenplays and prevented stories and scenes that were considered inappropriate from reaching American cinemas.
The Production Code file in Los Angeles includes a note dated May 10, 1944, from Spencer Olin, titled registry of Walt Disney Productions. The note states that the name of the project was being changed from Uncle Remus to Song of the South. Perce Pearce, the associate producer, had suggested the new title as having greater box office appeal. Disney probably also wanted to evade the building negative connotation of the Uncle Remus title.
It was obvious that another writer was needed to collaborate with Reymond to produce an acceptable screenplay.
In 1944, while waiting for his commission papers as an ensign in the Navy, Maurice Rapf’s agent asked him if he wanted to spend five weeks working for Walt Disney. He was reluctant to accept the job because he thought writing for animation would hurt his chosen career writing for live-action films. He also worried about the racist material he saw in the original script for Song of the South that Disney had sent him to review.
Walt Disney assured Rapf that most of the film would be live-action, and that Rapf was being hired to remove potentially objectionable material from the script. Rapf has said that Walt knew he was Jewish and a radical, and that Walt hoped Rpf could figure out how to avoid the problems in the first treatment of the script. Rapf explained:
“I said he shouldn’t make that movie, anyway, because it’s going to be an “Uncle Tom” movie. And I told Disney that and he said, “That’s exactly why I want you to work on it – because I know that you don’t think I should make the movie. You’re against ‘Uncle Tom-ism’ and you’re a radical. That’s exactly the kind of point of view I want brought to this film.”
Rapf worked on the script for several weeks, but quit the project when he found out Dalton Reymond had told a woman in another department that he was Rapf, and that if she went out with him, he might get her a good job at MGM.
In an interview with Patrick McGilligan in the book Tender Comrades, Rapf recalled:
“I didn’t stay on Song of the South for very long. I was on that film for only six or seven weeks. I got…
(Continued p.g.27) … into a fight with my collaborator, the guy who had written the original story [Reymond], who was a Southerner. The fight wasn’t about the script at all. It was about the fact that my collaborator was pursuing a messenger girl on the lot and pretending to be me. I confronted him with that, and he wouldn’t admit it, but I knew it was true because I had seen the girl, who had told me, “You’re not the Maurice Rapf I know.” So I went to the producer – not to Disney himself – and said, “I can’t work with this guy anymore. One of us has to go.” And I got fired. But Disney hired me back to work on Cinderella.”
Re-release Trailer for Song of the South (1986)
This is a horrible redubbed trailer to promote the re-release for Song of the South, (1986).
Song of the South Research Notes – Part 4
“Pamela: Deficiencies in concentration and hyperactive behaviour. It explains everything!” – Saving, Mr Banks, 2013
Book: Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination, by Neal Gabler
Chapter Nine: Adrift (p.g. 432 – 439)
III
Walt Disney would not rest on the animations because he could not rest on them anymore. He needed something less costly, something new to restore the studio as well as his sense of self. Cartoons had become, Woolie Reitherman said, a ” pain in the ass to Walt: the personnel problems, waiting around for animation to come in, changes, and all those things. I don’t know of any features that sailed through.” Reitherman might have added that the real reason for Walt’s dismay was that the cartoons had become too expensive too do as well as Walt Disney had done them. But there was a way around these obstacles, and Walt had already been considering it long before the war, during the first economic pinch. He could reduce the amount of animation needed in a feature by combining the animation with live action, which was much cheaper and much faster to produce. He had thought of Alice in Wonderland as a prime possibility, with Alice as a real girl and Wonderland in animation – like the old Alice comedies he had made in the 1920s. But as the studio struggled with an Alice script, Walt seized on a new candidate: the Uncle Remus stories of Joel Chandler Harris. Walt would animate the tales themselves, but to accommodate the live action he would frame them in a melodrama about a bullied and neglected white boy who seeks solace in the wise Uncle Remus. Thus Walt would literally create two distinct worlds – a “real” on and a fanciful one. It was for Walt Disney, said animator Marc Davis, ” a way to get into live action, and have his cartoon too.”
At least since 1939, when he first began negotiating with the Harris family for the rights, Walt had been considering these stories, told in black dialect by a retainer in the Reconstruction era, for an animated feature, and by late summer of that year he had already had one of his storymen synopsize the more promising tales and draw up four boards’ worth of story sketches. A year later, in November, while on his way to the Fantasia premiere in New York, Walt had stopped in Atlanta to visit the Harris home, to meet the Harris family, and as he told Variety, “to get an authentic feeling of Uncle Remus country so we can do as faithful a job as possible to these stories.” Roy had misgivings about the project, doubting that it was “big enough in caliber and natural draft” to warrant a budget over $1 million and more than twenty-five minutes of animation, but in June 1944, even before the war ended, Walt hired a southern-born writer named Dalton Reymond to write the screenplay, and he met frequently that summer with Reymond, his own staff, and director King Vidor, whom he was trying to interest in making the live-action sequences. It may have been the only time during the war after he had finished Victory Through Air Power that Walt seemed thoroughly engaged. Writer Maurice Rapf, whom Walt had hired to assist Reymond, called Walt “insatiable.” “He ended every conference by saying, “Well, I think we’ve really licked it now,” Rapf would recall. “Then he’d call you the next morning and say, ‘I’ve got a new idea.’ And he’d have one. Sometimes the ideas were good, sometimes they were terrible, but you could never really satisfy him.” Rapf didn’t know it, but this was the Walt Disney of old.
As Reymond and Rapf finished the screenplay later that summer and the studio announced the project, a problem arose; members of the black community protested that any film version of the Uncle Remus stories was bound to portray black Americans in a servile and negative way. A “vicious piece of hocus-pocus,” one group called it. Walt Disney was no racist. He never, either publicly or privately, made disparaging remarks about blacks or asserted white superiority. Like most white Americans of his generation, however, he was racially insensitive. At a story meeting he had referred to the dwarfs piling on top of one another in Snow White as a “nigger pile,” and in casting Song of the South he noted a “swell little picaninny [sic]” he had found. Like most Hollywood producers, he had also engaged in racial stereotyping, from a blackbird in the short Who Killed Cock Robin? who speaks in a thick drawl and blanches white when frightened, to the hipster crows in Dumbo, though the case has been made that the crows were sympathetic to Dumbo precisely because they understood what it was like to be ostracized themselves. Worse, in the “Pastorale” sequence of Fantasia, Walt enthused over the idea of a little black centaurette with a watermelon who is terrified when Pegasus gallops after her. “She sees him and Jesus! She goes like hell,” Walt said at a story meeting, “There would be a lot of laughs and it would give a definite lift to the whole thing.”
But Walt had been racially insensitive, he now appreciated the minefield through which he was tiptoeing with the Uncle Remus film. “The negro situation is a dangerous one”, Disney publicist Vern Caldwell wrote producer Perce Pearce as the script was getting under way. “Between the negro haters and the negro lovers there are many chances to run afoul of situations that could run the gamut all the way from the nasty to the controversial.” Roy apparently had asked RKO, the Disneys’ distributor, to investigate “negro picture experiences” and said he foresaw interference from at least one organization, the League for the Advancement of the Negro; and Walt had instructed one of his publicists to meet with Bill Kupper, the sales manager of Twentieth Century-Fox, to hear their experiences in distributing Stormy Weather, which featured a black cast. Kupper said in the South the film had to be booked into two theaters, one for whites and one for blacks; that the studio got grief from both whites and blacks; and that the film had to be made in such a way that scenes featuring blacks could be cut or southern exhibitors wouldn’t show them.
One of the reasons Walt had hired Rapf to work with Reymond was to temper what he feared would be Reymond’s white southern slant. Rapf was a minority, a Jew, and an outspoken left-winger, and he himself feared that the film would inevitably be Uncle Tomish. “That’s exactly why I want you to work on it,” Walt told him, “because I know that you don’t think I should make the movie. You’re against Uncle Tomism, and you’re a radical.” Rapf made small changes in Reymond’s script, omitting reference to “negro boy” or “negro girl” as if the children were generic and cutting a line that a boy ran “like a black streak,” and he claimed to have made larger ones too – plunging the white family into poverty so that it would be clear the film was set during Reconstruction and Uncle Remus and the other blacks were not slaves scraping and bowing to white powers, though in the final film the whites so well-dressed and genteel that one couldn’t help but think of them as masters on a plantation.
In addition to hiring the radical Rapf – at a time when Walt was still steaming over what he had perceived to be Communist influence during the strike – Walt did something else that was uncharacteristic; he sent out the script for comment both within the studio (Gunther Lessing wrote Walt, ” I can’t find a damn thing to criticize or suggest,” and fondly recalled his own black nanny) and outside the studio, to producers Sol Lesser and Walter Wanger, financier Jonathan Bell Lovelace, who sat on the Disney board, and Ward Greene, the King Features Syndicate. Most of all, he solicited comment from black Americans, among them the actress Hattie McDaniel, who had won an Academy Award for her supporting role in Gone with the Wind and who praised the script after taking a role in the film. He even invited Walter White, the secretary of the National Association for Advancement of Colored People, to come to the studio and personally work with Walt on revisions, though White begged off, saying that the NAACP had no West Coast representative and that he wouldn’t be coming out to California until November, and then as a war correspondent.
Meanwhile Joseph Breen, who was charged with approving scripts under the Production Code of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association, had sent the Remus script to a Mississippi-born colleague for comment, and Walter Wanger had passed it along to Dr. Alain Locke, a prominent black scholar and philosopher at Howard University, asking that he write Disney directly with his criticisms. Breen’s colleague suggested a few changes – eliminating the word “darkey” – but he also warned that scenes of blacks singing happily could do “wonders in transforming public opinion about the Negro” but only if he shunned stereotypes, and he advised that Walt consult other black representatives. But to Wanger, Dr. Locke confided that Walt had shown “bad judgement” in not having contacted black leaders before having the script written. Now, he said, there would be a controversy that could have been avoided.
The controversy was gaining momentum. One correspondent wrote Breen that the black press was already prepared to launch an attack on the film and that the film might “cause serious trouble for the industry.” With this hint of trouble Walt reverted to form. He asked an associate to determine if the black newspapers leading the protest were Communists were targeting him. The FBI responded that Leon Hartwick, the theatrical editor of the black paper Los Angeles Sentinel, had launched his own investigation into the Uncle Remus film and learned that the black actor Clarence Maurice had been asked by the studio to “render an expert opinion on the contemplated picture.” Muse said he told the studio that the black characters were sufficiently dignified, an objection that he said Disney dismissed. Muse then appealed to black newspapers to protest the film. This was all Walt needed to know. In Walt’s version, Muse had come to him and said he wanted to play Remus. Walt refused, and now Muse had launched a personal vendetta with, n doubt, communist assistance.
Ironically, Walt had had someone else in mind for Remus, the athlete, singer, actor and political activist Paul Robeson, whose politics were well to the left of Muse’s. Walt had contacted Robeson as early as February 1941 after seeing him on stage in George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, and Robeson had agreed to review the general outline of the script and offer suggestions or criticisms. Though the film was in hiatus after the war began, Walt nevertheless kept open his lines of communication with Robeson, apologizing when he was unable to attend a reception in Robeson’s honor and saying how much he was looking forward to working with him on Remus . Somehow, possibly because of politics, Robeson was no longer under consideration when Walt revived the film in 1944. Instead he tested a number of other black actors – “practically every colored actor,” he once said – before finding, virtually by accident, forty-year-old James Baskett, who had appeared on the Amos and Andy radio program but had no film experience.
The fact was that Walt himself had had very little experience in live action films either – only the Alice comedies, The Reluctant Dragon, and Seversky’s scenes in Victory Through Air Power. Though Stokowski’s scenes in Fantasia and Seversky’s in Victory had been shot on soundstage 1, it was not fully equipped live action, and the estimated cost of refitting if for that purpose was just under $200,000, or about a third the entire cost of Dumbo. In fact, Jonathan Bell Lovelace was as worried about the Disney’s inexperience as about the objections from the black community; he suggested that they partner with one of the major studios. Instead Walt contracted with Samuel Goldwyn, with whom he had collaborated for years on the aborted Hans Christian Andersen project and to whom he had as close relationship as he had with any producer in Hollywood with the possible exception of Walter Wanger. Goldwyn also lent the studio his cinematographer, Gregg Toland, who had shot Orson Well’s legendary Citizen Kane. The total cost of Goldwyn’s services would be $390,000 – steep but necessary under the circumstances.
The filming began in December 1944 in Phoenix, where the studio had constructed a plantation and cotton field for outdoor scenes, and Walt left for the location to oversee what he called “atmospheric shots,” missing Diane’s birthday and just barely making it home in time for Christmas. So eager was he to make a real movie amid the government work that he was back again in February and then again in March. Even as the live action was shot, the bulk of the animation was going to have to wait; with its war contracts, the studio could spare only a few animators, and the ones who did work on the film proceeded slowly. Wilfred Jackson and Perce Pearce, who directed in tandem – Jackson the animation and Pearce the actors – took the same deliberate approach to the live action, and Walt, obviously tense and hoping to save money, wasn’t pleased, scolding Jackson that they were spending too much time on these scenes.Yet for all their care Walt had to come to the rescue on the final day of shooting when Jackson discovered that the scene in which Uncle Remus sang the film’s signature song, “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah,2 hadn’t been properly blocked. “We all sat there in a circle with the dollars running out, and nobody came up with anything,” Jackson would recall. Then Walt suggested that they shoot Baskett in close-up, cover the lights with cardboard save for a silver of blue sky his head, and then remove the cardboard from the lights when he began singing so that he would seem to be entering a bright new world of animation. Like Walt’s idea for Bambi on ice, it made for one of the most memorable scenes in the film.
But all of that seemed to have taken place a long time ago when Walt returned to the project after the war to complete the animation, that limit allowed the animation to be done as painstakingly as in the old days. Marc Davis, alluding perhaps to how enervating the war work was said that, “almost all of the animators that worked on it would have to say that they never did anything that was more fun than that,” in part because they had such great voices with which to work. Milt Kahl went further. He called it “kind of a high in animation.” They weren’t the only ones who thought it might be a return to form. “Saw Walt Disney’s Song of the South this morning and it is in my opinion the most delightful creation that Walt had thus far brought to the screen,” RKO executive Ned Depinet beamed in a telegram he sent to Gus Eyssell, the manager of the Radio City Music Hall, “And has same wide audience appeal as Snow White,” though Vern Caldwell wrote Walt Skeptically that while this might be Depinet’s “real feelings,” it was at least “that way he is talking it up.”
Walt heard the same kind of enthusiasm from other quarters but also a more sobering prediction. The Audience Research Institute had determined that the “highest potential” of the film was $2.4 million – less than half what the studio had expected. Disney publicist William Levy said the figure “surprised and shocked” him, until he realized that the studio had been “feeling the pulse of the Trade” while ARI had been “feeling the pulse of the Public.” Now, Levy wrote Roy, they could only hope that word-of-mouth might save the picture. Meanwhile Walt left the studio on November 6 for the film’s premiere at Loew’s Theatre in Atlanta.
The dim financial prospects notwithstanding, if Walt Disney had hoped ti regain his artistic standing with critics, he did not. Bosley Crowther in The New York Times complained, “More and more, Walt Disney’s craftsmen have been loading their feature films with so-called ‘live action’ in place of their animated whimsies of the past, and by just those proportions has the magic of these Disney films decreased.” Citing the ratio of live action to animation at two to one, he concluded that is “approximately the ratio of its mediocrity to its charm.” Still, the film wound up grossing $3.3 million, better than the ARI estimate and more than the $2.2 million gross of Make Mine Music.
The most scathing criticisms, however, weren’t aesthetic; they were political. The release of the film had revived all the prospects in the black community that had lain dormant while the film itself had lain dormant. Many found abhorrent the idea of Uncle Remus happily serving a wealthy white family while he lived in a shanty. Walter White of the NAACP complained that the film perpetuated the impression of an “idyllic master-slave relationship which is a distortion of the facts.” Congressman Adam Clayton Powell called it an insult to “minorities.” The Theatre Chapter of the National Negro Congress threw a picket line around the Palace Theatre in New York, where the film was playing, and had its protesters carry placards reading, “We fought for Uncle Sam, not Uncle Tom.” Producer and columnist Billy Rose accused Walt of having caved to corporate interests and warned, “You stopped being Walt Disney, and became Walt Disney, Inc.” And he added, “You know, chum, you’re not just another movie producer. You’re the guy er brag about.” Even Maurice Rapf, who co-wrote the film, said he agreed with the attackers. But the worst criticism, certainly the most telling, may have been a remark in the B’nai B’rith Messenger, the publication of the Jewish social and charitable organization, that Song of the South “tallies with the reputation that Disney is making for himself as an arch-reactionary.”
Walt might have been mystified is he hadn’t had the Communists to blame. He liked the film, and he especially liked James Baskett, who he told his sister Ruth was “the best actor, I believe, to be discovered in years.” Long after the film’s release Walt stayed in contact with Baskett, even picking up a record of the singer Ber Williams for him when Walt was in New York because Walt knew Baskett was a fan of Williams. More, when Baskett was in ill health, Walt began a campaign to get him an honorary Academy Award for his performance, saying that he had worked “almost wholly without direction” and had devised the characterization of Remus himself. Thanks to Walt’s efforts, Baskett did get his honorary Oscar at the 1948 ceremonies, then died a few months later, after which his widow wrote Walt thankfully that Walt had been a “friend in deed and [we] certainly have been in need.”
Who Killed Cock Robin?, 1935
Jim Korkis, Disney Historian discusses Song of the South and Splash Mountain
The Help: Stereotypes of Black Women in Early Film
Disney Land: A Tribute to Joel Chandler Harris
Toonmation 