Song of the South: the difficult legacy of Disney’s most shocking movie
The 1946 film won’t be showing up on Disney+, but its insidious racism serves as an important reminder of the company’s dark history
For all the uncertainty surrounding the streaming wars – even for a dominant company like Netflix, which is still hemorrhaging billions of dollars – there’s reason to believe that Disney+ is a safe bet. Even if every one of its original launch titles landed with a thud, Disney just needed to crack open the vault and allow viewers to dive, Scrooge McDuck-like, into its riches: 80 years of peerless animation, from early classics like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Bambi to renaissance titles like The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast to recent hits like Frozen and Moana. And that’s to say nothing of Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars and a mule who kicks 100-yard field goals.
Related: Disney+ attaches warnings of ‘outdated cultural depictions’ to classic films