Disney is beginning a new streaming service that will stream the entire Disney library, with one notorious exception. The one film that won’t be streamed is Song of the South, set in the Reconstruction. That film is the subject of the wldly popular You Must Remember This podcast this year.
I saw Song of the South as a little boy and left the theater singing “Zip-a-dee-dooh-day” all the way home. The Disney theme park ride Splash Mountain is inspired by the film, but Disney has never distributed it on home video.
“You Must Remember This is the podcast dedicated to exploring the secret and/or forgotten histories of Hollywood’s first century,” according to its creator Karina Longworth. The first of six episodes has been released. According to Longworth, the series aims to adress: “What is Song of the South, why did Disney make it, and why have they held the actual film from release, while finding other ways to profit off of it? Across six episodes of our new season, we’ll dig into all facets of Song of the South’s strange story.” You can listen to it using the player below.
For those of us white folks who saw Song of the South as kids, the movie could seem like an introduction to vernacular black folk tales. However, whatever good could have been achived by the film was destroyed by its racist framing and its distorted depiction of slavery and Reconstruction.
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