The Jim Crow film that just won’t die, “Song of the South”
Racially segregated movie theaters and whites-only water fountains disappeared decades ago after court rulings struck down the legal framework of Jim Crow America, but another element of the era just won’t die: Walt Disney’s 1946 movie “Song of the South.” With racist stereotypes and Old South tropes, the film isn’t available to the millions of subscribers of the company’s new Disney Plus streaming service, and it hasn’t been released in theaters in decades. Yet the movie, still beloved by many, lives on. “Song of the South” is easily viewed on the internet either in whole or in pieces, and numerous websites offer versions of the movie or memorabilia for sale. Animatronic characters and music from the movie are even featured in a ride at Disney World in Orlando, Florida, minus the racist context. The movie — a mix of live action, cartoons and music featuring an old black plantation laborer named Uncle Remus who enchants a white city boy with fables of talking animals — is like a zombie that keeps popping up seven decades after it was first released. While many find it racist and offensive, others see it as endearing. “Yay! Have been looking for a good copy for years, kids really enjoyed it! Thank you,” a reviewer wrote recently on the online marketplace Etsy, where multiple versions of the movie are for sale. Groups including the NAACP protested the film’s initial release, and arts professor Sheril Antonio said the continuing problem with “Song of the South” is that some just don’t see anything wrong with it. “Most of the harm of all of this is not acknowledging our shared history, all the good and bad of it. The harm comes from ignoring it and not talking about it truthfully and fully,” Antonio, a senior associate dean of arts at New York University, said in an interview conducted by email. Released the year after World War II ended, “Song of the South” premiered in Atlanta, where the Civil War epic “Gone With the Wind” made its debut a few years earlier. Set in post-Civil War Georgia, the Disney film featured stories that white newspaper writer Joel Chandler Harris heard from one-time slaves and published starting in 1876, according to The Wren’s Nest, Harris’ one-time home and now a museum in Atlanta. Actor James Baskett was presented an honorary Academy Award for his portrayal of Uncle Remus, but the movie was perhaps best known for its Oscar-winning song “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah.” The tune is part of the soundtrack at Disney World’s Splash Mountain ride, which also features Remus characters including Br’er Rabbit. Yet while Disney Plus added a disclaimer to “Peter Pan,” “Dumbo”” and other vintage movies because they depict racist stereotypes, the company kept “Song of the South” locked away in its vault. Disney last screened the movie in 1986, its 40th anniversary, despite years of complaints that it showed blacks as subservient to whites, and it never released “Song of the South” for home video sales in the United States. Foreign versions of the movie are among the editions available for sale on the internet. “To be honest, I’ve lost track of how many people sell DVD bootlegs now,” said Christian Willis, who has run a website dedicated to the movie for about two decades. Jason Sperb, who wrote a book about the movie and its legacy, said “Song of the South” received a lukewarm reception when it first opened but was a “huge hit” financially when it was released in the 1970s and ’80s. “Disney had become more of a cultural institution by then. All the old films, whether successful or not upon its original release, were now being rebranded as ‘classics,”’ said Sperb, author of “Disney’s Most Notorious Film: Race, Convergence, and the Hidden Histories of Song of the South.” The continuing fascination that some have with the movie is likely more about the fact that Disney made it than its actual contents, he said in an email interview. “I think if anyone else in Hollywood had made that movie it would have been almost completely forgotten about by today except for only the most hardcore animation history buffs who would note in passing its role in helping to shape the possibilities of hybrid animation,” said Sperb. Willis, who runs the “Song of the South” website, said he was enamored with the movie after seeing it as a child in 1986 at age 6. He hopes the movie is released to the public again someday, and in the meantime he plans to keep adding to his online repository about the film. “I think burying history is the wrong approach,” he said. Some have reinterpreted old, racist films in a new way rather than simply screening them in their original format. Antonio, the NYU professor, cited DJ Spooky’s remix of the 1915 movie “Birth of a Nation,” which glorified the early Ku Klux Klan. In “Rebirth of a Nation,” DJ Spooky (whose birth name is Paul D. Miller) trimmed the original film and applied new graphics and music he composed. In a live performance during the 2016 presidential campaign, he spliced together the original film with scenes from the civil rights movement and post-9/11 wars. Antonio said she was “forever changed” by watching “Rebirth.” “As you can see I am an educator, and in these cultural artifacts there is always value,” she said. Republished with the Permission of the Associated Press.
Chicken wings, movies and beer could get the most mileage out of driverless cars
When analysts at Morgan Stanley were trying to handicap the driverless car race, their thoughts kept turning to chicken wings. And the Disney film “Frozen.” And beer. Strange? Actually, it makes a certain kind of sense. The analysts concluded that it’s a fool’s errand to try to call at this point which tech outfits or automakers are on the road to building the best, most profitable autonomous models. Better to focus on the activities – and the companies selling them – that will fill our time when we’re hanging out in cars with no steering wheels to grip. Which is where the bank’s investment picks on snacking (Buffalo Wild Wings Inc.), movie-watching (Walt Disney Co.) and brews (Constellation Brands Inc.) come in. “If you never had to drive again, how much more would you drink?” said Adam Jonas, Morgan Stanley’s automotive analyst. “It’s all about the adjacencies. If you invest in that, you’re less likely to be buying an over-hyped situation.” When your car does the driving, you’ll spend the free time doing something, and that means an opportunity for a variety of companies. (Getty Images) As for the brands of the vehicles we won’t be driving, it’s not only the Morgan Stanley analysts who aren’t ready to definitively make that bet. Jonas and his crew like Tesla Inc. at the moment for its Autopilot feature, which has racked up millions of miles of real-world testing. Still, Jonas said, “it’s too early to call a winner.” Instead, as the bank said in a recent report, it’s smart right now to look at products and services that will benefit from a technology “that liberates hundreds of billions of consumer hours for monetization.” With so many companies, from General Motors Co. to Daimler AG to Volvo Cars, promising to have fully loaded self-drivers on the road within four years, it can seem like the competition is entering the homestretch. But none of the contenders has really broken from the pack. The finished product hasn’t hit the streets. Many players tend to be long on hype and short on details about their designs. And it’s a really crowded field. “There are at least 46 different companies building software to control autonomous vehicles, including automakers,” said Mike Ramsey, an analyst for researcher Gartner Inc. “There’s no way to actually assess the capabilities of the companies. People are doing it by marketing, employment numbers and how many vehicles they have on the road – which are not very good metrics.” It’ll be a while before better ones emerge. Autonomous autos will arrive timidly, in fits and starts, with a few robo-taxis here, some airport shuttles there, a smattering of buses on college campuses. “There’s no clear way to tell who is going to be the winner right now for something we’re not going to have full clarity on for a long period of time,” said Barclays analyst Dan Levy. Investors love a horse race, though, which explains all the speculation about the winning robot-ride strategy and the response when there’s a new development. Recently, fusty old car-rental companies Avis Budget Group Inc. and Hertz Global Holdings Inc. became Wall Street darlings after they did deals to manage driverless fleets for Alphabet Inc.’s Waymo and Apple Inc. The thing is, early leaders in any emerging technology often fade away when rivals improve on their innovation. Just ask BlackBerry, once the most prominent smartphone vendor, or Netscape, the web browsing pioneer that went from dominance to decline in less than a decade. ‘Not that simple’ “The history of technological innovation is littered with these stories,” said Mark Wakefield, managing director and head of the automotive practice at consultant AlixPartners LLP. “When a new thing comes in, it’s pretty difficult up front to predict who is going to be the winner.” Brian Johnson, Barclays auto analyst, compares it to trying to pick the next miracle drug. “You could have a promising early lead, and then realize it can’t get through testing.” That’s why the safest plays now may be on the margins. Johnson advises clients to look at suppliers, such as Delphi Automotive PLC. Besides beer and wings, Morgan Stanley recommends electric utilities that will support battery-powered driverless cars and chipmakers like Intel Corp. and Nvidia Corp. that provide super-computing power and artificial intelligence. The bank also suggests Facebook Inc. and Amazon.com Inc., figuring we’ll be busier with social media and shopping when we have a whole bunch of new time on our hands – by some estimates, 600 billion hours of it a year. Morningstar Inc. analyst David Whiston sees gold in abandoned lots on the outskirts of big cities. Autonomous cars are expected to be battery powered and will need places to recharge and recuperate after rush hours, so unsightly real estate on the edge of town could end up a good investment as future car parks and charge stations. “People think it’s just very black and white, ‘Do I buy Google or do I buy the automakers?”’ Whiston said. “That may seem sexy, but it’s not that simple.” If there’s a favorite among prognosticators, it would be Waymo, formerly known as Google’s self-driving car project. It appears to have the most experience developing the algorithms for the sensors that allow the car to “see” its surroundings. But in the Darwinian driverless race, today’s killer app could be tomorrow’s road kill. Waymo’s expertise could be overtaken as systems are perfected to allow vehicles to communicate with each other and roadway infrastructure. “The technology is changing so fast,” Wakefield said. “In 10 years, there will be nothing left of that algorithm people are spending tons of money on today.” It’s hard to keep up. In April, researcher Navigant crowned Ford Motor Co. No. 1 on its autonomous Leaderboard for having the most advanced approach. A month later? Ford’s board of directors ousted Chief Executive Officer Mark Fields for not moving fast enough. Republished with permission of Alabama NewsCenter.
