Disney's Most Notorious Film (31 page)

Yet the meanings attached to that same brand can also dissipate through textual variation across the “Disney universe.” Like transmedia storytelling and convergence, branding is part of a longer history involving Hollywood’s love affair with seriality. Entertainment giants have always tried to repeat, expand, and even revise the experience of popular texts. The primary motivation then and now has been one form of branding or another. It is less about creating a coherent diegetic world and more about finding moderately new ways to resell the same piece of
intellectual
property. Scholarship thus far on such polycentric universes has privileged their utopian emphasis on extension—its reach to new audiences, new markets, new media platforms, new stories, and new characters. I wish to propose a space, however, not for expansion, but rather dissipation—
transmedia dissipation
. Old texts remain in an age of media convergence, but dispersed and watered-down. Like Ndalianis, I am not privileging an auratic original text that is lost amid proliferating copies. I am suggesting, rather, that some themes, characters, and story lines migrate more easily than do others. Major corporations can be actively, if quietly, invested in what does and does not survive, and in what forms.

The more “versions” of
Song of the South
across multiple media venues (some more permanent than others), the greater the
risk
involved for Disney in keeping a racist text in circulation. For a while, particularly in an anti–civil rights era, it was easy for the company to continue re-releasing the film every several years. It was always possible—worst-case scenario—to quickly withdraw
Song of the South
from theaters and lock it back up in the Disney vault, where it couldn’t threaten the Disney brand through further circulation. Angry letters and frustrated critics aside, there was really little financial risk involved in theatrical releases. But Disney was entering a new distributive period of emergent home video markets and, later, Internet circulation, which both expanded and threatened their tight control. In other words, as
Song of the South
faced the possibility of migrating into home video formats and theme park attractions, a new era of
permanence
emerged. Disney would no longer be able to restrict access to the film if countless video copies were out in circulation. Meanwhile, a major multimillion-dollar theme park ride was taking up a considerable chunk of real estate in the middle of Disneyland.

The result of this changing landscape was that
Song of the South
would have to change. The company limited home video releases to excerpts from the film, and it fundamentally altered the narrative of the film’s story in Splash Mountain. Uncle Remus was completely removed, as were the other “real” human characters. The plantation narrative was replaced with a fantastical journey through an ambiguous cartoon bayou. Only Brer Rabbit, Brer Fox, and Brer Bear, and the songs, remained from the original film. More interesting was the decision to replace the “Tar Baby” in
Song of the South
with a pot of honey as the means through which Brer Rabbit is captured. As Jason Isaac Mauro writes in the strongest critical discussion of Splash Mountain, Disney’s decision to erase the Tar Baby “acknowledges that they have structured
the
entire multimillion-dollar ride around a narrative that they regard as fundamentally racist.”
⁵
Disney’s decision not to release the film any further, for any U.S. markets, and to limit its exposure through other media means, was also such an acknowledgment. While
Song of the South
was still profitable in 1986, it was not a title Disney felt comfortable with in the long term. This is only confirmed by the fact that the film still hasn’t been released. The Eisner era of media convergence for Disney was not about reliving the glory days of the 1950s, but rather only about commodifying and rebranding it. It was all about repositioning the company for sustained, future success in a new era of global capitalism. Unlike
Song of the South
, it simply was not possible—physically or symbolically—to put Splash Mountain, once built, back into the Disney vault.

Indeed, the physical nature of the Disney theme parks requires a different method of “textual” analysis—one more closely attuned to how much the body is literally put in motion. Many scholars have noted that these parks, by adapting films into rides, are heavily narrativized spaces. Visitors do not just experience a thrill; they experience a story. In
Remediation
, Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin discuss how Disney parks were especially effective in remediating older texts (films, songs, and characters) into rides. “By recalling Disney films and their characters,” they write, “the parks offer visitors the opportunity to enter into these films either by taking rides that reenact moments of a film . . . or by meeting the incarnations of famous characters from the animated films.”
⁶
Disneyland also offers renewed possibility in excess of those films and narratives. Visitors not only reuse a cinematic or televisual text, but they rewrite it and reexperience it. As Scott Bukatman writes, reenacting a film,
embodying
a film, means something very different from simply watching it.
⁷
Aside from greater physical space for contingency and the unexpected, the concept of affect takes on a different meaning in the parks. One’s whole body is literally immersed, and in transit, in the narrative of a ride such as Splash Mountain.

This chapter focuses on the tension between
Song of the South
’s lingering presence in the 1980s and 1990s, and Disney’s careful dissipation of it in a new era of media convergence.
Song of the South
remained a tricky but potentially rewarding brand to exploit, but also a long-term risk to the future-oriented company. I begin by expanding on the question of Disney’s new status in the Eisner era and its ambivalent investment in
Song of the South
. Then I will take a closer look at the film’s most prominent remediation—the theme park attraction Splash Mountain. It reflected a new version of an old film the company otherwise had no
interest
in rereleasing. Using material from the period and from Internet discussions of the ride today, I will look at how Splash Mountain quickly acquired a life of its own in excess of
Song of the South
. Building off that, I then examine how Disney also repackaged the centerpiece song “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” in other media platforms. The Oscar-winning tune continues to circulate in home video “sing-along” collections, compact discs, and digital downloads to this day. Finally, I provide more historical context by exploring other ways in which
Song of the South
lingered in popular culture, including non-Disney films. To a degree, this helps us understand how ubiquitous the film was by the 1980s, and why Disney would be reluctant, or unable, to completely dissociate itself from it. As
Song of the South
disappeared from theaters permanently, Splash Mountain, “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah,” and other Disney products quietly took its place. They became the fragments, to use Ndalianis’s term, that stood in for the whole of
Song of the South
as a corporate asset and as an alternate reception history.

TEAM DISNEY AND CORPORATE RISK

Song of the South
changed in the 1980s because Disney changed too. The Uncle Remus film had succeeded through multiple rereleases in part by appealing to nostalgia for the earlier days of the company. The post-Walt, 1970s business model simply repeated that which had always worked. Much of that approach certainly remained in place throughout the 1980s, even after Eisner, Wells, and Katzenberg took the company in new directions. Janet Wasko and Douglas Gomery have each pointed out that it is easy to give too much credit to this new leadership. “They took a company which was underperforming,” writes Gomery, “and began to exploit its rich assets during one of the greatest peacetime expansions on record.”
⁸
The new team understood that this Disney brand would be a powerful weapon for dominating new venues for ancillary markets, new opportunities for corporate synergy, and a new generation of cultural ubiquity unparalleled since the emergence of Disneyland in the mid-1950s. While Disney was shrewd enough to create one of the earliest transmedia empires during that earlier period, it had started to slip behind the curve by the 1980s.

Eisner, Wells, and Katzenberg began to exploit the possibilities of building Disney into a multinational corporate empire. One of their key innovations was to both restore and heavily promote the Disney brand
of
family values, wholesome entertainment, and nostalgia for simpler times. This commodification of the past was mobilized for the future, as it moved the company into a new era of horizontal integration. While the company had long engaged in cross-promotional projects with others, Team Disney was especially aggressive, as Wasko documents; this included more corporate alliances (AT&T, McDonald’s, General Motors, Bank of America, Delta Air Lines, etc.); limiting the exposure of Disney’s own financial investment, with others taking on a considerable share of the funding; diversified expansion into ever more markets; and corporate synergy to ensure that more companies and products would carry the “Disney” brand.
⁹
During this time, Disney also expanded its reach into sometimes quite ambitious examples of convergence, such as building its own planned community in Florida, “Celebration.”

But where did this all leave
Song of the South
? On the one hand, it benefited from this nostalgic celebration of the old Disney. But appeals to Uncle Walt were just a marketing ploy, a brilliant means to re invent the company without changing its core image, and to capitalize on fifty years’ worth of consumer nostalgia. Moreover, the new leadership team understood the long-term implications of reusing its intellectual property. Given its success over four decades, there would be a place for
Song of the South
, as with every film locked up in the vault that retained even the slightest bit of remaining worth. Despite its controversies, the film had as much value as any old Disney film, with “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” and the Brer Rabbit children’s books. Yet, even amid the Reagan era, there was only so much Disney could continue to do with a 1946 plantation musical. Hence
Song of the South
would be
re
branded, and carefully mined for what potential profit it still possessed. Those excavated fragments would be exploited for their greatest use while the other parts would be quietly left behind. As such, for all its problems,
Song of the South
remains to this day in polycentric form. These were excerpted versions of the film that largely focused on and maximized its affective potential—the songs and animation. And these fragments would take on a reception history all their own.

In the corporate world, the act of branding is about protecting oneself from risk. This is usually meant in the financial sense. The more ancillary markets available for redistributing one piece of intellectual property, the more the same basic formula can be repeated through some form of seriality, the less monetary risk involved in investing in a particular title. The dispersion of an asset across multiple platforms “can be understood not simply as a matter of increasing and exploiting the earning
potential
of particular intellectual properties,” adds Grainge, “but, more precisely, as a strategy for managing risk.”
¹⁰
In a transmedia age of careful corporate control over intellectual property, the question of risk can be expanded to include other factors as well. To a certain degree, the Disney family brand of innocence and magic for some people protected
Song of the South
from attacks on its racial imagery, particularly in the 1980s and 1990s. There is no question that, for a while,
Song of the South
became
more
defended as Disney’s own carefully constructed image as innocuous family entertainment strengthened across the American landscape. In that vein,
Song of the South
’s general theatrical fortunes throughout the 1970s and 1980s profited from Disney’s own critical reconstruction as an American institution. As the twentieth century drew to a close and a new era for Disney began, the old Uncle Remus title was now a risk for that same brand from which it had benefited for so long. The biggest gamble in this regard would be Splash Mountain.

“ZIP-A-DEE RIVER RUN” AND THE MARKETING OF THE BODY

Even with its controversy in mind, it is unsurprising that Disney would eventually adapt
Song of the South
into a theme park attraction, as the company had done with every other remotely successful property. Disney theme park attractions distinguish themselves from other amusement parks by focusing resolutely on narrative. Even Tony Baxter, Splash Mountain’s lead designer, described the heavily visceral ride as “the closest to literal storytelling that we have.”
¹¹
Adapting well-known films and television shows is the easiest way to give a narrative backbone (and preexisting audience) to a thrill ride. Splash Mountain had been on the “Imagineering” drawing board as early as 1983, though it was sidelined at first in favor of another early transmedia project, George Lucas’s “Star Tours,” a flight simulation ride that expanded the narrative universe of the widely successful
Star Wars
films.
¹²
Prominent theme park rides are nearly as central to the Disney brand as are feature-length films. Using
Song of the South
at all makes sense given that many of the classic features in the Disney vault had already been remediated into specific physical sites of amusement. After forty years and five theatrical appearances,
Song of the South
had developed a strong cultural ubiquity, deep affective roots with various audiences, and recognizable songs. The ride was even originally called “Zip-a-Dee River Run” in
early
preproduction. This capitalized on the recognition of the brand’s most famous asset, while also removing it further from the original Uncle Remus film.