Disney Plus-Or-Minus: The World’s Greatest Athlete

Original theatrical release poster for Walt Disney's The World's Greatest Athlete

When I saw the title The World’s Greatest Athlete pop up in the Disney list, I first thought it was the third entry in the Dexter Riley series. I soon realized I was confusing it with The Strongest Man In The World, a movie we’ll get to soon enough, and that I had no idea what The World’s Greatest Athlete was about. When I read Disney’s official synopsis, my heart sank a little bit. Here it is. See if you can figure out why.

“Discovered in Africa by two U.S. college sports coaches, Nanu, a blond boy raised by natives after the death of his missionary parents, is an incredible athlete. Entered in a Los Angeles NCAA track-and-field competition, he wins all the events despite voodoo magic being used against him.”

Sounds like a recipe for some good old-fashioned casually racist stereotypes, doesn’t it? Well, the good news is that The World’s Greatest Athlete does not sink to that level. In fact, the movie refuses to engage with its complicated racial politics on any level, which is its own problem. But the biggest issue is that apart from a couple of scattered highlights, the movie simply isn’t that funny. Considering some of the talent involved, that’s a real disappointment.

The World’s Greatest Athlete was an original screenplay by comedy veterans Gerald Gardner and Dee Caruso. Gardner and Caruso had been head writers on the classic spy spoof Get Smart, created by Mel Brooks and Buck Henry, and had written for The Monkees and That Was The Week That Was. They were A-list TV writers but their only other feature credit had been the little-loved Jerry Lewis vehicle Which Way To The Front? This would be their only Disney credit and it seems likely they had little to do with the picture once the studio bought the script.

This would also be the only Disney feature for director Robert Scheerer, although he did have some experience with the studio. Scheerer started his career as a dancer, performing with the group The Jivin’ Jacks and Jills. He moved into directing in the early 1960s, focusing on variety shows and TV specials for acts like Spike Jones, Danny Kaye and Fred Astaire. In 1971, Disney hired him to produce and direct a 90-minute special for the grand opening of Walt Disney World featuring such stars as Julie Andrews, Buddy Hackett, Bob Hope and many others.

The World’s Greatest Athlete would be one of Scheerer’s few theatrical features. He continued to be a prolific television director, including work on Star Trek: The Next GenerationDeep Space Nine and Voyager. He briefly returned to Disney in 1988, directing Harry Anderson in a reboot/sequel of The Absent-Minded Professor for the recently retitled Magical World Of Disney.

Perhaps the most surprising name in the opening credits is composer Marvin Hamlisch. When The World’s Greatest Athlete came out in February 1973, Hamlisch was very much on the way up. He’d written some hit songs for artists like Lesley Gore and dabbled a bit in film with scores to movies like The Swimmer and Woody Allen’s Take The Money And Run and Bananas. By the end of 1973, Hamlisch was everywhere thanks to his work on two blockbuster soundtracks: The Sting and The Way We Were. In 1974, he won three Oscars for those two films, setting him on the road to show business’ coveted EGOT hat trick. Hamlisch continued to dominate the 1970s with Broadway shows like A Chorus Line and songs like “Nobody Does It Better” from The Spy Who Loved Me. His only Disney project is now a minor footnote in a huge career.

The star of the show is John Amos as Coach Archer, even though he receives third billing behind Tim Conway and Jan-Michael Vincent. Amos was an eleventh-hour replacement for Godfrey Cambridge, who had appeared in Disney’s The Biscuit Eater a year earlier. Cambridge fell ill during the first week of shooting and was forced to bow out. He never did return to Disney. In 1976, he suffered a heart attack during production of another film, Victory At Entebbe, and died at the age of 43.

Honestly, The World’s Greatest Athlete may have worked better with Cambridge. John Amos was still early in his career, gaining attention as weatherman Gordy Howard on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Around the same time The World’s Greatest Athlete hit theatres, Amos appeared as Esther Rolle’s husband on the sitcom Maude, a role that would soon be spun-off to the series Good Times. Amos has an authority and amiability well-suited to situation comedies but he was not a comedian. An actor like Amos is only as funny as his material, whereas naturally gifted comedians like Cambridge can mine laughs out of a less-than-stellar script.

Given all that, it’s no surprise that most of the laughs in The World’s Greatest Athlete come from top-billed Tim Conway. Conway shot to stardom as the scene-stealing Ensign Parker in McHale’s Navy, which ran from 1962 to 1966 including two feature films. When McHale’s Navy went off the air, Conway starred in a series of television flops: the comedy-western Rango, the self-titled sitcom The Tim Conway Show (costarring Disney regular Joe Flynn) and the similarly titled sketch comedy The Tim Conway Comedy HourThe World’s Greatest Athlete came along just at the right time for Conway, who really needed a hit.

Golden boy Jan-Michael Vincent stars as the Tarzan-like title character. Vincent started acting in 1967 and he’d been plugging away in movies and TV shows without really breaking through. He began to gain momentum in the early 1970s, first as a hippie draftee trying to make it through boot camp in the TV-movie Tribes, then earning a Golden Globe nomination for his role in the film Going Home. Vincent was still trying to find his screen persona in 1973. Nanu is not the kind of role you take after you’re an established movie star. But he’d go on to star in such cult hits as White Line FeverDamnation Alley and Big Wednesday.

Sadly, Vincent went through a whole series of rough patches as he became more famous. He struggled with addiction throughout his life and found himself behind bars on more than one occasion. In 1992, he was involved in a near-fatal car accident, the first of three very serious car crashes in the 1990s alone. In 2012, his right leg was amputated after it became infected due to peripheral artery disease. Jan-Michael Vincent died on February 10, 2019, at the age of 74. It’s difficult to reconcile the perfect physical specimen we see in this movie with the drug-and-alcohol ravaged man he became.

Scheerer doesn’t waste much time setting up his movie. Coach Archer presides over the losingest teams in college athletics. All of them, from football to baseball to basketball. I’m no sports nut but perhaps they’d do better with individual coaches with particular specialties? Anyway, fed up after his latest loss, Coach abandons his post at Merrivale College (not to be confused with Dexter Riley’s Medfield College or Merlin Jones’ Midvale College) and goes on safari in Africa to get back to his roots.

When assistant coach Milo (Conway) points out that Archer was born in Cincinnati, Archer clarifies that his great-grandparents came from this part of Africa. And that is the extent of that discussion. It’s a Disney movie, so Archer’s ancestors were just regular old immigrants chasing the American dream like everybody else and let’s speak no more about it.

Archer catches sight of Nanu outrunning a cheetah and can’t believe his eyes. As he admires Nanu from afar, Archer envisions how easily his natural gifts could transfer to the various sports he coaches. He offers the jungle boy a full scholarship but Nanu is perfectly happy right where he is. Not willing to take no for an answer, Coach resolves to get Nanu out of Africa one way or another.

After he learns that tribal custom dictates a man who saves another man’s life becomes beholden to that person, Coach comes up with a scheme to get Nanu to “save” his life. Nothing works and, on one of these attempts, Nanu takes Archer to see the local witch doctor, his godfather Gazenga (Roscoe Lee Browne, a distinguished character actor known for dozens of film and television appearances but will forever be best known to me as the narrator of the album The Story Of Star Wars, a record I played into the ground in the days before VHS). Gazenga sees right through the coach’s ruse but allows Nanu to believe he must go with him anyway. Gazenga studied abroad himself and thinks it’s time for his godson to broaden his horizons.

Back home, Archer and Milo first have to figure out how to move Nanu and his pet tiger, Harri, into their no-pets-allowed boarding house under the nose of their landlady, Mrs. Peterson (TV legend Nancy Walker, who surprisingly did not appear in any Disney features after this one). Fortunately, Mrs. Peterson’s eyesight is so bad that simply dressing Harri in a trenchcoat and a hat is enough to persuade her that he’s just another student.

Next, Archer sets Nanu up with a tutor, comely coed Jane (see what they did there?). Model Dayle Haddon makes her film debut as Jane. When The World’s Greatest Athlete was in theatres, Haddon was also on newsstands on the cover of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue. Later that same year, she posed nude for Playboy, all of which may have something to do with why Haddon didn’t make any more movies at Disney. She hasn’t acted recently, today focusing on philanthropic causes like UNICEF and her own organization, WomenOne. She seems pretty awesome.

Nanu’s burgeoning relationship with Jane catches the jealous eye of the dean’s weaselly son, Leopold (Danny Goldman, whom you may recognize as the weaselly medical student who needles Gene Wilder about his grandfather’s experiments in Young Frankenstein and later went on to become the voice of Brainy Smurf). Leopold vows to get rid of his rival and arranges for Dr. Gazenga to deliver a guest lecture at the college.

Gazenga arrives, acting more like he’s workshopping material for a gig in the Catskills than a visiting scholar. (A typical exchange goes something like this: “We don’t have as many doctors in Africa as we would like but we are currently building new facilities to attract more.” “Oh, more hospitals?” “No, more golf courses.” Gazenga, ladies and germs! He’ll be here all week!) Leopold corners the witch doctor and expresses his concern that Archer and his publicity machine are having a bad influence on poor Nanu.

After temporarily shrinking Milo down to three inches in a hotel bar for reasons so contrived I can barely remember why it happened, Gazenga finally tracks down Nanu and exposes Archer’s lie. Nanu is so disillusioned that he’s ready to walk away from the NCAA Track & Field Championship, where he’s poised to make history competing in every event. But after Archer gives him a pep talk comparing him to Jim Thorpe (someone Nanu definitely has never heard of), Nanu agrees to give it the old college try.

Nanu immediately wins his first few events, with Jane and Harri (in his person disguise) cheering him on from the stands (and Disney regular Vito Scotti throwing popcorn all over the place behind them). But Leopold convinces Gazenga that Nanu must lose if he ever wants him to set foot in Africa again. So Gazenga uses his occult powers to throw some bad juju at Nanu, who begins losing spectacularly.

Archer and Milo realize who must be behind all this and begin searching the grandstand for Gazenga. They’re unable to track him down and things look grim until Milo remembers he’s carrying a voodoo doll Nanu made earlier. Sticking a feather in it to turn it into a mini-Gazenga, they turn the tables on the witch doctor. Free of the curse, Nanu wins the final race, then keeps going to re-do all the other events one right after the other. Nobody is more impressed than the announcers in the booth, Howard Cosell (giving one of the funniest performances in the film as himself) and Buzzer Kozak (played by Joe Kapp, who was a real-life pro football player but evidently not famous enough to play himself).

Nanu and, by association, Coach Archer appear to be set for life. But Nanu doesn’t get what the big deal is. He’s had a taste of fame and found the whole thing hollow and meaningless. He gives Archer a call, letting him know he’s decided to return home to Africa. Archer and Milo race to the airport but Nanu’s mind is made up. He, Jane and Harri leave Merrivale for good, while Archer does what he always does in times of stress: grab Milo and board the first plane that’ll take him the farthest possible distance. This time, they end up in China where Archer spots another young man outrunning another wild animal. Here we go again!

On the one hand, I have to admit that I’m relieved that the fact that The World’s Greatest Athlete blithely ignores the racial dynamics of its story isn’t a bigger issue than it is. There’s a time and a place for everything and I recognize that a G-rated Disney comedy probably isn’t the venue for a nuanced look at the history of slavery or the exploitation of college athletes. There is an interesting and funny movie to be made about a Black man who exploits a promising white athlete he discovered in Africa. This is not that movie and that’s OK.

However, the casting of John Amos or Godfrey Cambridge or any African-American actor in the role of Coach Archer does feel like an attempt to kill any conversation about race rather than start one. It’s easy to imagine how badly a movie about a white coach recruiting a Black player from Africa would go. Actually, you don’t even have to imagine it. Just watch the 1994 Kevin Bacon flop The Air Up There from Disney subsidiary Hollywood Pictures (or, better yet, don’t). The World’s Greatest Athlete presumes that making the coach a Black guy makes everything OK. The movie is so naïve about these issues, it’s almost cute.

As I said at the outset, the bigger issue here is the lack of laughs. If one of the funniest performances in a comedy comes from Howard Cosell, you may have a bit of a problem. Incidentally, Cosell is just one of several real-life sportscasters who appear, including Frank Gifford, Jim McKay, Bud Palmer and Olympian Bill Toomey. The announcers all work for UBC, the chimp-run network from The Barefoot Executive. If this movie had taken place at Medfield College, it would have blown the whole shared Disneyverse wide open.

Considering this is a movie about sports, there’s a surprising lack of actual sportsmanship on display. Scheerer relies heavily on montage, which is standard operating procedure for most sports movies. But they’re all very quick and don’t do a great job selling Nanu as the world’s greatest athlete. It’s even worse during the championship sequence when Nanu starts losing. Scheerer obscures everything with optical effects showing the action in the stands, making it difficult to even figure out what’s happening on the field. Robert Stevenson did a much better job staging his slapstick track meet in Blackbeard’s Ghost.

At least Tim Conway scores some laughs with his deadpan physical comedy. But the elaborate setpiece where Milo is shrunk down is strangely not Conway’s funniest scene. The special effects and oversized props are impressive but they literally overshadow Conway’s performance. He’s funnier in quieter scenes, like when he’s slowly submerged in quicksand or flown around the background of a scene thanks to Nanu’s voodoo doll.

Most critics did not have a good time with The World’s Greatest Athlete but audiences sure seemed to. It went on to become one of the most popular movies of 1973 and the Disney studio’s second highest-grossing film of the year. (We’ll get to their biggest hit of ’73 in a few weeks, which means we’ve got a couple of potential duds to get through first, so hang in there.) In 1974, it was re-released as a double feature with last week’s movie, Snowball Express. Somewhat surprisingly, Disney has never attempted to remake it, even during that window in the 90s when they seemed obsessed with redoing their entire live action catalog for TV. Probably just as well. I do think the right filmmaker could make something smart and funny from this material but I have no faith that Disney would allow it to happen.

Most of the folks involved with The World’s Greatest Athlete were one and done with Disney after this. Even longtime stalwarts like producer Bill Walsh were getting close to the end of their Disney careers. The one exception, of course, was Tim Conway. After several years of flops, Conway had finally landed a hit. In 1975, he cemented his star status when he officially joined the cast of The Carol Burnett Show, a series he’d been a popular guest star on since 1967. That same year, he returned to the Disney lot. We’ll see him again soon.

VERDICT: Three or four laughs do not a Disney Plus make. It’s a Disney Minus but at least not for the reasons I feared it would be.

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Disney Plus-Or-Minus: Song Of The South

Song Of The South theatrical release poster

I’ll bet some of you thought I was going to skip Song Of The South, didn’t you? If anyone who actually works at Disney reads these columns, they were probably hoping I would. Song Of The South is the studio’s not-so-secret shame, the one movie above all others they wish would just go away. Whether or not it deserves this reputation is another story and, as far as Disney is concerned, kind of beside the point. They appear to have made their corporate mind up on the subject. In the process, they’ve given the film a horrible reputation it doesn’t entirely deserve but is now impossible to live down.

Song Of The South‘s journey to the screen was almost as turbulent and controversial as its journey away from it. After the success of Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs, Walt Disney went on a bit of a spending spree, buying the film rights to a wide array of properties. One of these was Uncle Remus, a collection of black oral folktales codified, collected and adapted by Joel Chandler Harris, a white journalist from Atlanta. Harris himself is a fascinating and divisive figure. But since the name of this column isn’t Harris Plus-Or-Minus, you’ll have to find his story another time.

At first, Walt wasn’t entirely sure what he wanted to do with Uncle Remus. He considered making a series of Br’er Rabbit shorts and even a full-length animated feature. But Roy Disney, Walt’s brother and business partner, wasn’t convinced. He thought Harris’ original stories were too slight to justify the expense of a feature film. Roy successfully lobbied for a more limited use of animation.

Since the film would now be primarily live-action, Walt decided to find someone other than his usual team of cartoon story-men to write the script. He hired a writer named Dalton Reymond who had never written a screenplay before and never would again. His primary qualification seems to be that he was from the South. He had kicked around Hollywood for a few years, serving as “technical advisor” on such Tales of the Deep South as Jezebel and The Little Foxes.

Reymond’s treatment left a lot to be desired. For one thing, it wasn’t a shooting script. For another, it went a lot farther with its language and its racial stereotyping than the Hayes Office would allow. Walt knew Reymond needed help. His first choice was Clarence Muse, the distinguished African-American actor who had made a name for himself on vaudeville and Broadway. Muse was also a writer, having co-written the film Way Down South with the poet Langston Hughes.

Muse and Reymond did not get along and Muse quit the project in frustration over Reymond’s refusal to accept his suggestions. Muse then became an outspoken opponent of the film, writing against Disney and Reymond in the black press. Walt had another take on the subject, claiming it was all just sour grapes after Muse didn’t land the role of Uncle Remus. Whatever the case, Muse apparently got over it enough to appear in a couple of other Disney productions later in life.

After Muse’s departure, Walt hired screenwriter Maurice Rapf, a Jewish, pro-union liberal and card-carrying Communist, to help temper Reymond’s white southern sensibilities. The notoriously anti-union, anti-Communist Disney and Rapf sound like strange bedfellows but according to Rapf’s autobiography, they got along quite well.

After Reymond inevitably had another blow-up, Walt took Rapf off the project and assigned him to work on another feature in development, Cinderella. Unfortunately, Rapf was never credited for his work on that film. By the time Cinderella was released, his career was essentially over thanks to the House Unamerican Activities Committee. The screenplay for Uncle Remus, which would soon be retitled Song Of The South, was completed by journeyman screenwriter Morton Grant.

Disney considered several actors as Remus (including Paul Robeson, which is wild to think about) before settling on James Baskett, who had actually answered an ad looking for voice talent. Baskett also came out of the Broadway scene where he had appeared alongside the likes of Bill “Bojangles” Robinson and Louis Armstrong.

In Song Of The South, he gives the kind of instantly iconic performance that makes it impossible to imagine anyone else in the role. It’s a warm, folksy, magnetic appearance. It would also be his last. In 1948, James Baskett died of heart failure due to diabetes. He was just 44 years old.

Roy Disney had hoped that switching to live-action would help keep the costs of the film down. But so far, the studio had very little experience with live-action. Most everything they had shot was either limited to a soundstage (as in the musical performances in Fantasia and the documentary sequences of Victory Through Air Power) or just strolling around the Burbank lot (The Reluctant Dragon). This was their first time shooting on location, building period costumes and assembling a large cast of actors, so it was hardly a surprise when the project went over-budget.

But Disney was aware that audiences had been disappointed by the lack of animation in features like The Reluctant Dragon and Saludos Amigos. This time, he decided to get ahead of any possible complaints by playing up the live-action aspect in some of the initial advertising for the film. This original poster makes the movie look more like Gone With The Wind than any Disney movie to date.

Original 1946 theatrical release poster for Song Of The South

In the end, Walt contented himself with just three main animated sequences, less than half an hour of the 94 minute film. A few of these fully incorporate Uncle Remus into the animated world. Baskett’s entrance into that world at the beginning of the “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah” number is a great, unforgettable movie moment.

The mix of animation and live-action in Song Of The South is a huge step forward from what Disney had accomplished just a few years earlier in The Three Caballeros. MGM had already advanced the state-of-the-art by having Gene Kelly dancing with Jerry Mouse in 1945’s Anchors Aweigh. For my money, the work in Song Of The South is even more impressive. One of the best examples finds Uncle Remus sitting down for a spot of fishing next to Br’er Frog. Bassett strikes a match, lights Br’er Frog’s pipe, then lights his own with the cartoon flame, and puffs out square animated smoke rings. The level of subtle detail in this simple action is extraordinary.

Of the three animated sequences, the most controversial is certainly the Tar Baby. For those of you who don’t know the story, Br’er Fox crafts a vaguely humanoid looking creature out of tar in an attempt to capture the gregarious Br’er Rabbit. Sure enough, Br’er Rabbit gets annoyed that the Tar Baby doesn’t respond to his friendly greetings and gets stuck. The more he struggles, the more stuck he gets. He frees himself by pleading with Br’er Fox not to throw him into the treacherous Briar Patch. Sadist that he is, Br’er Fox hurls him in, only to realize too late that Br’er Rabbit lives there. As fables go, it’s a pretty good one.

The problem is that the term “tar baby” has come to be used and taken as a racial slur. How this happened is absolutely beyond me. The story has roots in African folklore, specifically in stories of the trickster god Anansi. But at a certain point, “tar baby” came to be considered offensive mainly because it feels like it should be offensive. But there’s absolutely nothing racist or offensive about the actual Tar Baby story. Disney’s Tar Baby can’t even be considered a racial caricature. There are plenty of offensive African-American caricatures throughout animation and the Tar Baby shares none of their characteristics. But today, the expression is offensive because ignorant people decided to weaponize the phrase and people who should have known better didn’t fight to keep it.

1970s re-release poster for Song Of The South featuring the Tar Baby

In a way, this is the problem with Song Of The South in general. On the surface, it feels like it might be kind of racist. Therefore, it must be because digging any deeper might expose a minefield and nobody at Disney wants to deal with that. They aren’t in the business of building conversations. Their entire reputation is built around escapist fantasy. Anything that challenges that is considered taboo, even if the cause turns out to be relatively benign.

For example, take the songs performed by the plantation workers, all versions of traditionally African-American music from the Deep South. There’s the call-and-response of “That’s What Uncle Remus Said”, there’s “Let The Rain Pour Down” (based on the blues classic “Midnight Special”), and there’s a spiritual (“All I Want”). Every time I’ve seen this film, I’ve thought that these are some of the most white-bread, Lawrence-Welk-style versions of black music I’ve ever heard.

Imagine my surprise to discover that these songs were performed by the all-black Hall Johnson Choir. Hall Johnson himself was one of the most renowned arrangers of African-American spirituals in the world and an early inductee into the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame. By assuming these songs were performed by a white chorus, I was displaying my own ignorance and buying into a stereotypical idea of what “black music” should sound like. Be that as it may, it should also be pointed out that most if not all of the music was written by white songwriters. These songs could have been made a lot more authentic simply by hiring black musicians to write them.

At worst, Song Of The South is guilty of sending mixed messages and a lot of that is Walt Disney’s fault. To his credit, he was aware of how delicate this subject matter was, even in the pre-Civil Rights era, and clearly did not want to make a movie with an explicitly racist agenda. Granted, that’s a super low bar to set for yourself but still. The problem is that Walt was a lot more afraid of offending white Southern audiences than he was of what African-Americans might think.

Because of this, a lot of material that would have helped put the movie in context was dropped. For instance, it’s never explicitly stated when it even takes place, which has led a lot of people to assume that the plantation workers are slaves. They’re not. They’re sharecroppers. Song Of The South takes place during the Reconstruction Era after the Emancipation Proclamation and the end of the Civil War but the audience is left to figure that out for itself.

At one point, Uncle Remus leaves the plantation entirely. Eventually we come to realize that he went to Atlanta to bring back little Johnny’s absent father (more on this guy in a minute). The movie wants to build suspense and make us think he’s leaving for good and that something might happen to him. From a dramatic perspective, that makes sense. But if the filmmakers left in dialogue about Remus being a “free man”, able to come and go when he pleases, the intent would be clearer and Uncle Remus would come across as a stronger, more independent character.

The entire set-up of Song Of The South is unnecessarily shrouded in mystery. As the film begins, young Johnny (played by Bobby Driscoll, who will be back in this column several times) arrives at his grandmother’s plantation with his parents for what he assumes will be a short vacation. But something’s up between mom (Ruth Warrick) and dad (Erik Rolf). There’s tension between them and it turns out that they’ll be separating. Dad’s going back to Atlanta while Johnny and his mother stay with Grandmother (Lucile Watson) and Aunt Tempy (Hattie McDaniel).

Now, because the tension between the parents is so palpable and no other real reason for it is offered, you’d be forgiven for assuming that Father is going off to war. You need to pay attention to the opening dialogue to realize that John Senior is a newspaper editor in Atlanta and apparently the center of some controversy. Since Uncle Remus creator Joel Chandler Harris worked as an associate editor under Henry W. Grady at the Atlanta Constitution during the time the movie is set, it’s probably fair to assume that John Senior is based somewhat on one or both of them. Both Harris and Grady supported a vision of the “New South”, stressing industrialization and reconciliation. Of course in real life, their politics were more complicated. But for a Disney-fied version of the New South, sure…John Senior was a unifier. Not that you would know any of that from the information supplied by the film itself.

Song Of The South does itself no favors by playing coy with this material but there are some problems that are built in to the film itself. Uncle Remus is basically the template for every Magical Negro character that followed. With his ability to converse to cartoon animals, he is literally magical. But is that this movie’s fault? Or is it the fault of all the other filmmakers and storytellers who later decided to pick up the ball and run with it? Stereotypes don’t become stereotypes without repetition and the first example is rarely the worst.

Song Of The South‘s depiction of African-American stories and characters absolutely received some criticism at the time of its release from both black and white critics. Protests were organized by the National Negro Congress, while the NAACP expressed its frustration that such a technically well-made picture could incorporate so many objectionable elements. But the movie also had its champions on both sides. Herman Hill, writing in the respected black paper The Pittsburgh Courier, said that the movie would “prove of inestimable goodwill in the furthering of interracial relations”. His response to the movie’s critics was essentially, “Lighten up.”

Perhaps what’s most objectionable about Disney’s treatment of Song Of The South is their apparent desire to pick and choose what elements of the movie they want to acknowledge. The Oscar-winning song “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah” is still an integral part of the Disney Songbook. It has never not been included on one of their many compilation albums. It’s still used on Splash Mountain in the Disney theme parks, as are Br’er Rabbit and the rest. To the best of my knowledge, there has never been even a suggestion that the ride needs to be redesigned.

Also lost in Disney’s rush to disown the film is the fact that James Baskett won an Honorary Academy Award for it, becoming the first black male performer to win an Oscar. Walt Disney personally campaigned for the award, although why it was an honorary award instead of just a regular nomination for Best Actor, I’m not quite sure. The Academy certainly had a history of singling people out for individual achievements that didn’t fit their conception of what movies are supposed to be like. Regardless, Baskett’s untimely death prevented him from capitalizing on his win during his lifetime. Disney’s subsequent treatment of the film prevents his legacy from being celebrated or even acknowledged.

1980s theatrical re-release poster for Song Of The South

Even with the controversy, Song Of The South proved to be a sizable hit for Disney and not just in 1946. I’m old enough to remember seeing it during its re-release runs in the 1970s and 80s. It was back in theatres as recently as 1986, when it brought in over $17 million in basically free money for the studio.

The truth is that Disney’s moratorium on Song Of The South is entirely self-imposed. Nobody has actually banned the movie. Disney is simply afraid of how the film might be perceived by modern audiences and can’t be bothered to put it in any sort of context that would help explain it. Whoopi Goldberg, for one, has urged the studio to release the film in an edition with supplementary features for context. Ironically, one of the voices who argued stridently against the film ever being seen again was America’s disgraced former dad, Bill Cosby.

No one is going to argue that Song Of The South doesn’t have a complicated legacy. It is in no way a perfect film. Walt Disney could have done any number of things differently that would have made it better. But pretending it doesn’t exist does a disservice to both the filmmakers and their work. With no evidence to the contrary, an entire generation has grown up believing that Walt Disney was nothing short of a white supremacist who made an animated Birth Of A Nation. Walt’s politics and beliefs may not have entirely lined up with mine or yours but it’s unfair to characterize him in such a negative light.

For the animators and effects team, Song Of The South represented some of their very best work of the 1940s. The combination of live-action and animation is stunning. It wouldn’t be topped until Who Framed Roger Rabbit came along nearly 40 years later. This work deserves to be restored and seen by an appreciative audience.

Perhaps the biggest loser in all this is James Baskett. He’s a tremendous screen presence. It’s unfortunate that he never became a bigger star. It’s a tragedy that his most iconic performance has become a flashpoint in the ongoing debate over racial representation on screen. It’s a conversation that’s almost impossible to have when you can’t see what exactly you’re arguing over.

In a way, I think Disney even realizes that Song Of The South deserves to be seen. They just don’t want to be the ones who let you see it. It’s very, very easy to find bootleg DVDs, typically sourced from a Japanese laserdisc release, on eBay or other online sources. Disney has a long reach. If they wanted to, they could shut these unofficial operators down in a snap. The fact that they haven’t suggests to me that the studio doesn’t want to get rid of the movie altogether. They’ve just thrown it into the Briar Patch. Like Br’er Rabbit, you’re welcome to jump in after it.

VERDICT: It’s a mixed bag, to be sure. But in the end, the good outweighs the bad. Disney Plus.

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