Disney should not re-theme Splash Mountain.

[Xolodno]

I'm probably going to get flamed, condemned...perhaps even hidden. But I don't think Splash Mountain should be re-themed.

1. Yes, its based off of the movie Song of the South...which Disney won't re-release due to its racist themes...but, many have not seen it, and the torrent version which I downloaded and watched...well, when I look at Dumbo...uh, yeah.

2. It isn't a "Disney Story", its based off a book "The Tales of Uncle Remus" by Gayle Cornelison. Like many Disney movies of the past, use older inspiration.

3. Uncle Remus, never appears in the attraction. It's ultimately, how two dumb shits, Br'er Bear and Br'er Fox are very stupid and toss Br'er Rabbit right back into his home. Also the extra characters in the attraction show, never were in the movie, but relocated from the America Sings attraction to spice things up (there's a huge mess in that story, but that's another topic...if asked politely, I'll diverge the info).

4. If we apply racial stereotypes...the Southener's Br'er Bear and Br'er Fox....shows just how stupid they were. And Br'er Rabbit, representing, show's how much more intelligent he was.

5. Changing the theme to the Princess and the Frog won't do the movie any justice. It will be a band aid. The movie depicted two white bankers refusing to give a loan to a Black Woman to start her business. That needs its own attraction.

And too add my personal opinion...release the fucking "Song of the South" movie to the public. Don't hide it, show it...and add comment why they hid it and explain it was a product of its time....like Blazing Saddles.

[BamaRefugee]

1. As a Southerner I can tell you that if you want to re-release a lot of old Southern songs...there's

gonna be some fires set!
Not gonna post the possibilities here but wow, Pandora's box of virulent racism.

[Xolodno]

4. Then why hide it?

It should be exposed. When I watched 12 Years a Slave, some "friends" said they should have glossed over/hide those parts. But that happened. The horrid of slavery needs to be shown....and the assholes who sing its praises.

And to your point, fairly sure a lot of those songs are sung in certain circles. Better to expose them for their filth rather than hide and gain ignorant idiots.

Add to that, should we hide the Jewish Genocide from Germany...or the Ottoman Genocide of the Armenians? Neo-Nazis try to say the genocide didn't actually happen...Just as the Turks do. Hide and bury it, then it never happened.

[BamaRefugee]

6. Well you can't walk around singing the Jewish Genocide at the top of your lungs.

I'm born and bred Southern, I may know every Uncle Remus story by heart as well as reading Little Black Sambo at least 50 times when I was a kid, along with Flannery O'Connor and William Faulkner and others when I was less of a kid.

But singing things like (since you don't want to hide anything)"All C**ns Look Alike to Me", "Old Black Joe", and "Pickaninny Paradise", just for some of the GENTLER ones, are not gonna go over well in certain communities.

And don't even get me started on the anti-Semitic songs from Tin Pan Alley in the early 20th century.

[Xolodno]

8. Did I say you should go out publicly singing that?

No. I said to expose it. The reason why Confederate Generals are revered is because their sins were swept under the rug.

And in my case of Disney, while reading a biography of Walt Disney, he was asked about an investment by someone. Walt responded, "let me call my Jew"....aka, his accountant.

Walt was a flawed man, like many of that time. Bury it? I say no. Expose it, recognize the sins from the past so we never have the opportunity to repeat them.

Side note; Song of the South gets a shit load or notoriety because it is buried....if you actually saw the movie, like me, you should get a medal for staying awake for the entire time.

[BamaRefugee]

9. well, to expose a song you need to either sing it or play it on some kind of device. Just reading

lyrics isn't the whole thing, although that would be the heart of the racism or, as they would have called in it 1915, the "humor".

[Xolodno]

10. Ok. I see your point

And I would say, let people hear a recording of it...just to see how people can get swept up...while exposing its dark history.

When I was in the 4th grade, we sang "Dixie Land" and "The Battle Hymn of the Republic"...in school, in Southern California...and no explanation as to what these songs represented. Hell, once a year, there was a competition to draw/paint by groups "American Hero's"...Southern Generals were included.

Side note, the odd thing, my teacher was Polish who escaped the Communist takeover....never told him I was Russian, but he probably could tell just looking at my last name and face.....first time I got bad grades. But him being from an oppressed people, you would think he would relate....

[BamaRefugee]

11. well as I learned after fleeing from the South to NYC in the 70s, a huge portion of NYC and NJ folks

, descendants of lots of "oppressed" people, found it EXTREMELY easy to start oppressing black folks as soon as they started climbing up the ladder.

[LuvNewcastle]

2. Joel Chandler Harris wrote the Uncle Remus stories.

I'm not sure who Gayle Cornelison is. I read those stories back in school during my free time in class. My teacher had all those books as well as Mark Twain's works on the shelves. They made a great impression on me as I got older. I still like humor and people who are free-thinkers. It's sad that those old stories might not be read anymore.

[Xolodno]

5. Whoops my bad.

Appears Gayle was the first person to depict the stories in a play....not the author. I'm getting old.

[bobbieinok]

3. IIRC the book with the Uncle Remus stories was written by a white man using the tales he heard

as a child from an old black slave

I believe anthropologists/folklorists say that Brer Rabbit is based on a staple character in African folk tales

Black slaves told tales about how he outwitted Fox and Bear. In reality, it's been claimed, they were stories about slaves outwitting or tricking their white masters

[Xolodno]

7. And that should be celebrated...and

...recognize the tragedy what caused it. The Pianist was a story about a Jew who managed survive the holocaust...but also showed the horrible conditions he had to endure.

[Gothmog]

12. I agree that this ride should not be re themed

[misanthrope]

13. I don't find "Blazing Saddles" to be analogous to "Song of the South"

"Song of the South" is intended as children's fare, with no thought given to the racial stereotypes and Lost Cause mythos it perpetuates.

"Blazing Saddles" is a bawdy satire intended for adults that deliberately employs aspects of prejudice and racial pejoratives for the express purpose of ridiculing them. Its goal is to skewer racism.

[spinbaby]

14. I've watched Song of the South

It’s been awhile, but I remember thinking that black folk came off more sympathetically than white folk. The movie I really object to is Peter Pan with its treatment of native Americans, but that never seems to get any mention.

[Archae]

15. Oh ye gawds, Peter Pan and his "Indians."

That was just plain racism.

[Voltaire2]

18. Uncle Remus was very good to his white people. nt.

[hunter]

16. They'll just make a "Splash Mountain" movie as they did with "Pirates of the Caribbean."

Then they can forget "Song of the South" entirely.

[Voltaire2]

17. It's racist crap.

On a technical level, Song of the South extends the experimentation Disney did with live-action and animation two years before in The Three Caballeros, a tour of Latin America which itself isn’t free of stereotypes, but does feature the unimpeachable delight of Aurora Miranda singing and dancing the samba with Donald Duck. But with some notable exceptions, like the Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah sequences that bookend the film, the live-action and animation sections are cordoned off from each other – to such an extent, in fact, that the three main Br’er Rabbit stories were harvested as standalone cartoons for television. Yet the worlds and themes of both reinforce a nostalgia for a plantation in the Reconstruction era, with its idyllic beauty and “bodacious” critters, its simple life lessons, and its harmonious racial hierarchies.

The word “slavery” never gets uttered, but surely Uncle Remus (James Baskett), the avuncular black man at the film’s center, was once the property of the plantation he calls home. The creation of folklorist Joel Chandler Harris, Uncle Remus is known for his Br’er Rabbit stories, and he becomes a father figure and friend to seven-year-old Johnny (Bobby Driscoll), a white boy who’s visiting his grandmother’s plantation as his parents grapple with some untold problem in their marriage. Remus’s sensitivity to Johnny far exceeds his parents’ coldness and neglect, but that warmth comes with the implication that men like Remus – and the housekeeper Aunt Tempy, played by Hattie McDaniel – are human only insofar as they serve the needs and destinies of the white characters. That notion persists in films deep into the 21st century, too.

Uncle Remus, played by James Baskett, is at the center of Disney’s Song of the South.
FacebookTwitterPinterest Uncle Remus, played by James Baskett, is at the center of Disney’s Song of the South. Photograph: Walt Disney
There are plenty of examples of pernicious racism in Song of the South that are right there on the surface: the minstrelsy of the animated characters, particularly Br’er Fox; the slang in the dialogue; a wandering chorus singing traditional black songs; and, most notoriously of all, a fable where Br’er Fox and Br’er Bear use a tar baby to fool and ensnare Br’er Rabbit. (That part didn’t make Splash Mountain.) Yet the subtle low point of the film comes in Remus’s narration just before Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah, when he reminiscences about how things were “a long time ago,,” when “every day was mighty satisfactual”. “If you’ll excuse me for saying so,” he adds, “’twas better all around.”

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/nov/19/song-of-the-south-the-difficult-legacy-of-disneys-most-shocking-movie

We need to be done with this shit.