When Disney’s streaming site launches in the US in November this year, fans will be able to watch the Star Wars spin-off series The Mandalorian and classic films. However, there will be a notable absence from Disney Plus: the 1946 film Song of the South, which has long been a controversial title for Disney because of how it depicts the lives of African-American plantation workers in the southern states after the civil war.
The company has also decided to cut a scene from Dumbo that is considered racist.
Song of the South grossed $65m at the US box office but was never released on DVD in the country, partly because of criticism about its depiction of the lives of Uncle Remus and other former slaves on a plantation as idyllic.
Speaking about the film in 2011, the Disney chief executive, Bob Iger, said the film “wouldn’t necessarily sit right or feel right to a number of people today” and that there wasn’t a business case for it either. “It wouldn’t be in the best interest of our shareholders to bring it back, even though there would be some financial gain,” he said.
However, erasing the film from the company’s history isn’t simple. The success of the song Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah – which features in the film, won an Oscar in 1947 and is one of Disney’s most well-known songs – makes it extremely difficult. It does, however, have its champions: fans have regularly asked Iger at annual shareholder meetings why Song of the South has not been released on DVD in the US.
A petition on Change.org is calling for the film to be released on DVD in the US on the grounds that: “… the solution is not to bury the film as Disney has done since the 1980s, but rather to release it to the American public so we can learn from history and make our own decisions”.
The author and Hollywood historian Cari Beauchamp said she thought Song of the South should be included, with a caveat. “To not include it is to pretend it doesn’t exist. They do exist and they need to be put in context: when was it made? What world was it reflecting? Disney loves being praised for having princesses that are from diverse backgrounds, but you have to look at the whole history.”
The Jim Crow scene from Dumbo (1941) will also not be available on the streaming site. In the original animated version of the film a murder of cigar-smoking crows had a leader called Jim Crow – the Jim Crow laws enforced racial segregation in the south – and are largely considered to be thinly veiled racist caricatures. The scene was not included in Tim Burton’s 2019 live-action remake.
Ashley Clark, a critic and the author of Facing Blackness: Media and Minstrelsy in Spike Lee’s Bamboozled, said he believed showing controversial films with racist elements was crucial to understanding past racism, however painful.
“I have shown films that feature blackface prominently (like Bert Williams in Lime Kiln Club Field Day from 1913) and I’m always sure, in introductions, to convey the wider social and cultural context of the era.
“For a masterclass in confronting such shocking imagery, I think of the closing moments of Spike Lee’s film Bamboozled, which is a montage-cum-cavalcade of some of the most obscene stereotypes of black people throughout Hollywood history. It’s upsetting – it’s supposed to be. But it’s also powerful and educational.”
Disney Plus will launch in the US on 12 November and is set to change the streaming landscape with the company offering access to some of its vast back catalogue, which includes 7,500 TV episodes and 500 movies. The Star Wars, Pixar and Marvel franchises will be available on the service which costs $6.99 (£5.40) a month compared with $13.99 for Netflix.
A UK launch date for Disney Plus has not been announced but it is expected to be available before March 2020.