Disney's Most Notorious Film by Jason Sperb

Author:Jason Sperb [Sperb, Jason]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Published: 2012-09-17T07:00:00+00:00

Five

ON TAR BABIES AND HONEY POTS

Splash Mountain, “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah,” and the Transmedia Dissipation of Song of the South

Like ruins, which contain within them the memory of a past existence, . . . the meaning of the fragment functions as nostalgic remnant or emblem of the past, but it also reinvents itself as a unique whole that belongs to its own time.

ANGELA NDALIANIS, NEO-BAROQUE AESTHETICS AND CONTEMPORARY ENTERTAINMENT

In her study of “polycentric” texts in contemporary media, Angela Ndalianis inverts the hierarchical connotations usually associated with such transmedia franchises as Star Wars (1977), Jurassic Park (1993), and The Matrix (1999). Often, films are repurposed through ancillary media—television shows, video games, theme park rides, and so forth. The temptation is to see the other texts as pale imitations, interesting but insufficient copies of the “original.” That has often been the argument—with good reason—about the wide range of texts produced by the Disney Corporation. Yet, Ndalianis argues, each of the other texts is no less significant than the film that spawned it. A particular theme park ride not only expands the narrative universe of its cinematic cousin, but initiates a reception history all its own. In the 1980s, the full-length theatrical version of Song of the South began to fade from theaters. Ndalianis’s emphasis on the “unique whole” gains added importance for understanding how the film endured as Disney’s other media “fragments” took its place.

Despite continued box office success during this decade, the 1980s symbolically marked the end of the feature-length Song of the South’s visibility. Most notably, Disney stopped distributing it theatrically. More quietly, isolated fragments of the film—such as “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah”—took its place. Song of the South disappeared into other media formats throughout the decade: Disney home video and audiocassette, and such films as National Lampoon’s Vacation (1983), Splash (1984), Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), and Fletch Lives (1989). This latter presence reaffirmed the film’s quiet but considerable ubiquity after forty years of recirculation. Yet, despite the modest acceptance it had acquired relative to its first appearance, the film in many ways was quickly outliving its usefulness to the Disney Corporation. To say Song of the South disappeared after 1986 because of its controversial status is accurate, but also incomplete. By the end of the 1980s, almost all old Disney titles began disappearing from theaters. The company shifted its focus to the emergent VHS market for new forms of distribution that, in the short term, were more lucrative. Song of the South would not make it to home video formats in the United States, but Disney still kept pieces of the old film around. This involved radically different forms, which meant that Uncle Remus himself was largely left behind.

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