Ranting On...Disney Plus

I probably have too many streaming sites (I currently do Netflix, Hulu, and Criterion), and sort of force myself to justify paying for all of them by making myself go through at least a trio of titles on the queue each month.  On top of cable, I spend a lot of money on different avenues of ways to see random movies & television content, and was thinking about skipping Disney+ when it was announced.  After all, it's hard in this day-and-age to really want to support Disney full-throttle, what with it continually bankrupting its creative library with uninspired remakes (Beauty and the Beast, Lion King, Aladdin) and contributions to a culture where basically the same five companies appear to own everything on the planet.  But I also am a film buff who understands that if I want to, say, see every feature-length Disney movie as part of my cinephile completism, I'm going to have to partake in a streaming service like Disney+ for at least a little while.  But I wanted to discuss one of the potential controversies that the service will have-that it is trying to gloss over some of the most nefarious moments in the company's long history, particularly when it comes to race.

More than any other movie studio, Disney's business model and success is predicated on a need for constant nostalgia.  Disney is not remaking films like Lion King and Jungle Book because they feel a new audience needs to see them; they are doing so because they hope that the parents who grew up with these movies want to see these films as much as the children do.  As a result of this constant regurgitation and theme parks that ensure old titles never really die, films like Snow White, Fantasia, and Cinderella are more important for the studio's modern-day success than most older movies are to a studio like Universal or Paramount.  As a result, keeping those movies palatable to modern-day audiences is a necessity in a way that other studios wouldn't feel the need to consider (i.e. why MGM never felt the need to update Gone with the Wind).

One of the major films of Disney's early period, and one that is still celebrated today (having been remade earlier this year by Tim Burton) is Dumbo, arguably one of the best movies the studio ever made.  The original film is going to be part of the streaming platform, but it also features a scene that has been correctly attacked for being racist, with a bird named Jim Crow giving Dumbo a black feather in order to fly.  The scene has problematic racial connotations, enough so that Disney (famed for commodifying pretty much everything at their parks) does not sell the crows among their merchandise.  As part of the streaming platform, Disney is going to lift this scene out of the movie, essentially editing out the sequence for a new generation of filmgoers.

This isn't the only time that Disney has decided to change its pictures.  Toy Story 2 has, over its end credits, a sequence where the film's villain Stinky Pete is seen in a compromising situation with two Barbie dolls promising them a role in Toy Story 3 before he's discovered by Woody; in the era of MeToo, this felt inappropriate and was taken out of the recent home video release of the picture.  In 1993, Aladdin had two lines from the song "Arabian Nights" cut that were considered racist toward Arabic people (something I never realized before researching this article, because I am most familiar with my brother's copy of the CD which he bought at the time, which had the old lyrics).  And of course, there's Song of the South, a 1946 film that has never been released in the United States despite it being a cornerstone of Disney lore (it features the Oscar-winning song "Zip-A-Dee-Do-Dah" and is the inspiration of the DisneyLand ride Splash Mountain).  Song of the South is available in Europe, but you cannot see it in the United States, and it will not be part of the Disney+ release.

I understand why these films aren't readily available or edited.  It's something that children might not be emotionally equipped to understand while watching.  However, to completely erase this chapter in Disney history is wrong, both from a film history perspective as well as to show that racism and sexism did exist, even at a place as considerably "wholesome" as Disney.  It is wrong that Song of the South is not available, if for no other reason than academic purposes, for film historians to research it in the context of Disney's history or the history of the representations of black people in film.  James Baskett was the first black male performer to ever win an Oscar, but the work that won him that statue is not available for anyone in the United States to actually see.  It feels like Disney should either have the unedited versions of these films on their platforms alongside the edited ones or release the films with some sort of legal caveat in order to show the original product for context.  Warner Brothers has done this with the Tom & Jerry and Looney Tunes cartoons, having warnings at the beginning of some of their films, and even having a video you can see here from actress Whoopi Goldberg contextualizing why the films that you're about to see are shown as they were originally seen, but why we wouldn't make films like that at the time.  It'd be very easy for Disney to do something like this, and the fact that they would rather gloss over their history by pretending it didn't happen, rather than admit to their role in it and try to highlight how they have made mistakes and want to make representations of persons of color and women in their films more progressive is telling.  Disney is a company that wants to make money, first and foremost, but that it doesn't also see its responsibility to its own legacy, particularly as now the world's largest movie studio, is short-sighted & dangerous.