I watched Song of the South last week for the first time and the only racially stereotypical stuff that I seemed to get were the voices of Br'er Rabbit and Br'er Fox
I'm sure I missed plenty of other racist moments, so feel free to elaborate
I know "slavery" isn't mentioned anywhere in the film, probably because it takes place during the reconstruction era during the Grant or Hayes years, but I might be incorrect
it's not racist, it's just a depiction of a black guy set in a very racist time period, made well before the civil rights era, which just makes some americans uncomfortable. very few americans have even seen it because it doesn't get shown or released, they just know it as racist by reputation. i had it on VHS when i was young and enjoyed it
I vaguely remembered seeing part so f this when I was a kid. I always thought Uncle Remus was a nice friendly guy, but apparently presenting blacks as being nice is super racist for whatever reason.
years ago i tried to understand why it was racist, and i read a criticism that said it genuinely IS racist to show a black person as being happy in his station when he's living in a very racist society. i also found out that the NAACP called it a racist depiction of a happy slave, accidentally revealing that they hadn't seen it
Taking post 100% seriously and sincerely.
It's not that the film or the character Uncle Remus are racist. It has to do with the author of the books it's based on. He claims that the stories are negro folk tales he learned from black people while living on a plantation. This means one of two things.
#1 He did actually did hear these stories and appropriated them to sell for profit.
#2 He made that shit up and his characters are just stereotypes.
Either route doesn't sit well with most people. Fun fact, Uncle Ruckus is a parody of Uncle Remus.
Mixing live action and 2D animation is kino
>Either route doesn't sit well with most people
i am willing to bet that if you surveyed the population about this film and then asked those who called it racist why it's racist, they wouldn't even know it's based on a book, let alone that the author claimed to write adaptations of negro folk stories. conversely i also disagree that most americans would take an issue with writing books about folk stories learnt from blacks
It's not racist. Idiots think it's set before the Civil War and they're happy slaves, but it's set after and they're happy sharecroppers. The NAACP decried it as racist without ever actually watching it. Also, the stories of Br'er Rabbit are legit African folktalkes, even the tar baby bit isn't racist because that's how it is in the African folktale. Even the voices of Br'er Rabbit and Br'er Fox aren't racist because they're done by real black people.
Ultimately, it's just people crying racist out of their own ignorance. In truth, the movie is a very progressive film for its time considering it has white kids be friends with black people. It's also the only time Disney has ever done African folktales (The Princess and the Frog is based off a story written by a white person).
Will this history revisionism backfire? To pretend slavery didn't happen by hiding these kind of films wont turn America history into a big fairytale?
america doesn't give a shit about history
Well first, they are based on African folklore, it's not something that was just made up. Second, Joel Chandler Harris, the man who collected those stories, was long dead by the time Song of the South came out. Hard to say a dead man was profiting off the movie. Not that people give a fuck, nobody cared that it was a bunch of Jewish people profiting off Black Panther.
>black people in the old South can never have been happy at any moment in their lives, they must have been miserable at every moment of every day
I wonder if eighty years from now people will look back and say that poor people who were depicted as being happy in movies were awful regressive stereotypes and that the movies that depict them this way should be banned.
>1 He did actually did hear these stories and appropriated them to sell for profit.
Nothing wrong with that, it's it like they were under copyright or anything.
#1 He did actually did hear these stories and appropriated them to sell for profit.
Yeah bro collected folktales tales are a thing, been around for centuries. What isn’t new is pussy mentality which is what’s causing the problem. Lord knows if I had media of my folktales I’d want it to be spread prominently, that’s culture war.
Isn't that kind of what Disney does anyways, take old stories from different cultures and make movies out of them? Like, if you aren't up in arms over them "culturally appropriating" Snow White then why the fuck would you care when they "steal" Br'er Rabbit?
Bless you user. I watched this as a kid because I loved Splash Mountain and wanted to know where the characters came from. Then I enjoyed Song of the South because it was... nice. And I really liked the Uncle Remus character.
I think it's cheap to have it memory-holed by Disney, yet they're still perfectly happy to have Splash Mountain remain open and unchanged.
I feel fortunate to have seen that VHS copy all those years ago because when it gets slammed by millennials and I defend it, they've never actually watched the damn thing.
Splash mountain is changed though, isn’t it?
>sharecroppers
>happy
the depiction of the black isn't a muscular rich genius so it's racist.
Not him but the only alteration is they tar baby is honey and a beehive and not tar.
Isn't that how they do it in Germany? Pretending the Third Reich never existed?
Yes. And?
My apologies, the tar baby change slipped my mind - but the core characters (and their voices) and storyline are all there.
Actually they pretend the holocaust happened.
No.
I was thinking of Thunder Mtn RR.
>and appropriated them to sell for profit.
Imagine fucking believing someone can "appropriate" a folktale.
In all seriousness; the older generation are really tight-lipped about the second world war. I have a lot of German friends and their parents WILL not talk about it until they've known you for years. My family has known this one family for close to 20 years and only this year the father showed me his collection of art work, including a sketch of his father and mother, with his father in his Whermacht uniform.
The younger generation though, a lot of them do not give one fuck about it. It's not that they're a new wave of nazis, nothing of the sort. It's just that they rightly view nazi Germany as this thing that's in the past and has no bearing on them.
>NOO YOU CAN'T JUST MAKE STORIES BASED ON PEOPLE'S LIVES
So literally 50% of all media?
>SWEET P'TATO AND I SHUT MY MOUTH
How do you do>Zippty doo dah>Laughing place