Old Mouseketeer
Well-Known Member
I saw it once in the theater on re-release. I borrowed my friends laserdisc player and rented a copy of the Japanese release and I have seen a bootleg DVD copy. The problem with the Japanese laserdisc was toggling between the mono English dialog track and the stereo Japanese language track that had the songs in English in stereo.
I actually like the idea of releasing a "Criterion"-style special edition with historians discussing the real history of the Uncle Remus stories going back to its literary roots. The fact that these stories were recorded by a white author is controversial enough. That's before it even got to Disney. And remember, a lot of the controversy over the movie was based on outrage ginned up by a disgruntled African-American actor who didn't get the lead. He provoked the NAACP into protesting without ever seeing the movie.
Song of the South has issues. But it needs to be judged on what it actually is, not on what people say it is without any facts. It doesn't depict slaves in the antebellum South. I takes place after the Civil War. It may have offensive racial stereotypes, but it didn't do any favors to poor white trash, and I have some cousins like that back in Oklahoma!
As a an overwhelmingly white person (somewhere between 60 and 90% British and certainly 95% NW European) it's not for me to judge whether Song of the South is offensive to African-Americans. There has been a very spirited debate about this among black historians and literary people for decades. There is a passionate debate over whether these beloved stories collected from African-Americans by the white author Joel Chandler Harris have any worth given that he is not black, himself. I leave the final judgment to others.
