I'll admit that, of the trinity of Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, and Spaceballs, Spaceballs is definitely the weak sibling. It's good, but it's nowhere near those two. The reason is pretty obvious: To parody something WELL, to really do it perfectly, you need to actually LIKE the thing you're parodying. In fact, you need to love it, preferably. In the same way that your best friend will always insult you better then anyone else could, a lover of the subject is needed for a good parody. And Mel Brooks loved Westerns and the Universal Horror movies. Star Wars? Not so much. Quite frankly, from what I understand, he didn't give two piping-hot schmucks. Spaceballs is a good movie, but it's not up to snuff with his other work, and that's why.
A Hippie in the House of Mouse (Jim Henson at Disney, 1980)
- Thread starter Geekhis Khan
- Start date
- Status
He could always parody the serials which inspired Lucas and Star Wars instead, if he wanted to have a film to more easily put his heart in, assuming he likes Buck Rogers.
I can already see the movie poster for Red Ball Express: painted, in a clear minicry of the 1960s war movies this film is a sendup to, depicting Richards/Kaminsky looking terrified behind the wheel of his truck as explosions thunder around him; the title in big, blocky letters with the subtitle "He's going to survive this war, or DIE trying!"
IIRC Weird Al is a big Star Wars fan so maybe Mel Brooks could work with him to get it on par with the other two and later Mel could help with UHF.
Now THAT would be a collaboration I'd pay money to witness!
And now I'm wondering what Mel Brooks would've come up with had he sunk his teeth into Star Trek. Maybe Spaceballs could include a character that's basically Brooks's take on Zapp Brannigan. A whole lot of material in mocking Shatner's ego-tripping.
I always thought Spaceballs especially the Lone Starr side of things relied too much on the spoof aspect for the comedy. Dark Helmet and the Arseholes are funny even if you've never seen Star Wars but Lone Starr and Barf and the Princess and the Droids you really have to be in on the joke to get much more than a weak chuckle.
Not only that, but get the folks behind Hardware Wars onboard and you could have a REALLY solid Star Wars parody right there. I could see "Chewchilla the Wookie Monster" fitting in far better than "Barf the Mawg" - much as I love John Candy, that was just terrible in retrospect.
Addendum: I found out Ernie Fosselius, the guy behind Hardware Wars, actually was involved with Spaceballs IOTL (albeit as a sound designer). Perhaps if Weird Al does get involved with TTL's Spaceballs (I could see him cast as a more proper Luke expy, a bit that was ill-fitting for Lone Star), maybe Fosselius is more of a creative consultant, working with Al to get the "parody" aspect right and reigning in Mel's odder/lazier ideas (Pizza the Hutt and "the Schwartz" for example).
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they have a go at shatner in airplane 2 (but that was just slight parody, since it included shatner himself)
If were going to go the way of Hardware Wars how about just turning that into a complete film, parodying all three films at once.
The problem with doing that is you can only go so far with the jokes Hardware Wars provides - expanding it into a full film might just kick off Mel's creative downfall years earlier.
On a similar note to UHF, Joel Hodgson was supposed to have a role in it as Philo, but had to turn it down because he was working on MST3K at the time (I believe it was still on the KTMA station at the time); maybe he does accept the role, and depending on how Red Ball Express acting as Michael Richards' breakthrough role affects it, perhaps Jerry Seinfeld accepts Joel's offer to become MST3K's host (which he had to turn down because he was working on what would become his eponymous show) - hell, Disney could buy MST3K once the "local" run ends in 1989.
On that note, maybe MST3K's original premise - where Joel built the Satelite of Love himself and shot himself into space - is kept, making for a somewhat different show.
On that note, maybe MST3K's original premise - where Joel built the Satelite of Love himself and shot himself into space - is kept, making for a somewhat different show.
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Hang on, Seinfeld was offered a job on the SOL? Is Joel the real mad scientist here?!
I wouldn't touch MST3K personally (although the idea of Jerry Seinfeld as an alternate TV's Frank is amusing). The combination of talents that made that show special is such lightning-in-a-bottle I fear making even small changes might lose the magic.
I wouldn't touch MST3K personally (although the idea of Jerry Seinfeld as an alternate TV's Frank is amusing). The combination of talents that made that show special is such lightning-in-a-bottle I fear making even small changes might lose the magic.
Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah
Chapter 10: Zip-a-dee-doo-dah in Deed
Post from the Riding with the Mouse Net-log by animator Terrell Little.
Any time my friends and family back in Lower Alabama heard about my plans to do animation for Disney in the other LA, inevitably two things came up. One was the crows from Dumbo. The other was Song of the South. Now, chances are that unless you own a copy of the special edition VCD you’ve never seen the original Song. I have. It ain’t pretty[1].
Available now in our timeline on video anywhere except the US, where we pretend that it never happened…
Now, don’t get me wrong, Mr. Jim Baskett did the best he could, times being what they were, and good on Walt for getting him that special Oscar, but until you’ve heard Minstrel Show Winnie the Pooh talking[2] you have no idea how bad things could be back in the day.
Chris Ishii, seated (Image source “cartoonbrew.com”)
As an aside, the Dumbo crows are worse than you think too. The animator who drew them, Chris Ishii, was rewarded for his efforts with an all-expenses-paid trip for him and his family to the Santa Anita Nisei internment camp in ’42. History is fucked up.
But sometimes things can change. When Song was coming up for re-release in ’86 for its 40th anniversary, Jim Henson was having none of it. He later told me that he’d seen it and had liked it as a kid, but as he grew up it became “painful to watch” for him. I told him “How do you think it feels for me?” Despite pushback from some of the old timers, he made the decision to revamp and “update” the film for modern, more race-conscious audiences. Rumor has it that he was met by shocked disbelief when he suggested it. To take Disney the company in new directions was one thing, but to change something that Walt himself had made? Heresy on the highest!
Jim persisted, though. He ultimately convinced a reluctant Roy Disney to support the move. Rumor has it that it was Roy’s daughter Abigail that pressed the issue. Once an actual Disney was on board, even Ron Miller had a hard time opposing it. Jim and Roy maintained that Walt would want to move forward with society. Song was controversial even back in its day, after all, with the NAACP calling it out at the time for perpetuating dangerous whitewashed assumptions of an idyllic life in the segregated south, which they pointed out was due to “an effort neither to offend audiences in the north or south.” And yet in 1986 the shoe was on the other foot, and now most audiences, regardless of race, were made uncomfortable by the outdated portrayals. After a test screening of the original with a mixed-race, mixed-age audience proved highly divisive, the board relented and Jim was given the chance to make a new Song.
Jim first called up Floyd Norman to be the lead animator on the project, an old Disney animator and personal hero of mine whom Jim knew through Sesame Street. To Jim’s surprise and mine, Floyd turned him down[3]! Floyd sided with the Old Disney folks. He liked Song and thought it was a masterpiece as it was. He too considered it heresy to change Walt’s vision. Jim politely thanked him and moved on. Jim very specifically wanted it to be made, where possible, by Black artists since they were originally Black stories[4]. I liked that about him, that he even thought about things like that. Most white people at the time didn’t. Many don’t even today.
The problem, of course, was that there weren’t that many Black animators at Disney at the time, which seemed to embarrass Jim. Ultimately, this translated as me, Louis Tate, Carole Holliday (whom they poached from Hanna-Barbera just for this job), and a handful of others, mostly short-term inbetweeners and ink-and-painters, almost none of whom had worked together before. This was an inauspicious start for sure, but together we hand-picked our own coworkers, regardless of their race. I brought in my old collaborator Steve Hulett, since he’d worked with me on Boudreaux’s Kitchen and had worked earlier on the ill-fated Catfish Bend, which was naturally associated in the studio with Remus due to the southern thing[5]. The original film was a hybrid animation, so we brought in Don Hahn as Production Manager, who had worked on Pete’s Dragon back in the day.
Jim brought in his friend Harry Belafonte to do the music. Belafonte, in turn, recruited his friend Sidney Poitier to direct. Sidney didn’t have any animation direction or integration experience, but Don was happy to assist there. Harry, who started referring to us all as “modern American Griots” and described the project as “something Holy”, was our spiritual guide throughout the production and became so engaged with the picture that they ultimately gave him a Producer credit.
Not wanting to recast Uncle Remus, leaving Jim Baskett with this legacy, they instead cast Whoopie Goldberg as his widow “Aunt Nancy”. And rather than just refilm an entire “live action” story punctuated by animated Shorts, we decided to make the Shorts the focus and turn the live action Aunt Nancy parts – where she tells the animated stories to her nephew Jimmy, niece Bassie, and a poor white neighbor kid named Kitt – into an extended framing device with its own lessons on enduring hardship through tough times. The picture of the South would not be an entirely pretty one, with Jimmy and Bassie’s sharecropper father facing a tough and segregated life and Kitt’s poor widowed mother equally desperate, but the ultimate message would be a hopeful one.
(Image source “cinemablend.com”)
As to the Shorts, in addition to redubbing the classic Br’er Rabbit Shorts with modern voice actors and a more authentic period dialect (and renaming and recoloring the “tar baby” into a “gum baby[6]”), we would produce several new Shorts. There were two Shorts from Catfish Bend, a new Emmet Otter Muppet Short, a Muppet short featuring some Muppet bluegrass musicians[7], two stop-motion animation Shorts by Tim Burton and Stephen Chiodo that told some traditional Anansi the Spider stories, and a cutout-animation Short based upon the Caldecott-winning children’s book Why Mosquitoes Buzz in People’s Ears.
(Image source “teresajusino.com”)
And in addition to keeping in the original Jim Baskett “Zipadeedoodah” number at the beginning of the show, the movie ended with a reprise by Aunt Nancy, who then (once the kids are gone) transforms into her true form as Anansi the Spider, all thanks to some spooky stop-motion special effects courtesy of Tim and Steve!
We were quite happy with it all. We got some awards nominations and even won three Image awards for Outstanding Writing (team effort), Outstanding Director for Sidney, and Outstanding Motion Picture. Whoopie got her second Best Actress Image nomination in a row after winning the previous year for The Color Purple. Whoopie actually won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress, though most think that this was reimbursement for snubbing her for The Color Purple. We spent about $8 million total and made a good $35 million[8] at the box office, which was far, far higher than the original saw the last time it was released. Some of this was surely the curiosity about the remake, but I’m sure to my bones that the controversy drove a lot of those sales.
Jim was surprised by the backlash. He shouldn’t have been. Not only was he messing with a Disney “classic”, but he was messing with a lot of people’s childhood memories, and also (let’s face it) lots of people’s ingrained racism. The “Lost Cause” myth just won’t die, even today, and there are a lot of powerful, wealthy people who seem to have a vested interest in keeping that myth alive.
Needless to say, there were protests and boycotts by the Sons and Daughters of the Confederacy and the like. They called it “revisionist history”. I’d call it “anti-revisionist”, a push back at a persistent Jim Crow era lie. When someone in the press asked Floyd Norman about it all, he spoke honestly about his preference to see the original maintained, though he complimented us on what he considered a “good movie in its own right”. And also, needless to say, the press exploded this passing comment into all kinds of “Disney’s original Black animator lashes out against Br’er Rabbit remake” stories, almost all of which were wrong in most respects. Floyd tried to clarify, but it was too late: the haters used his words as ammunition against us.
Floyd later confessed his embarrassment to us about the whole thing. He just wanted to honor his friend Walt, who he maintains had always treated him with love and respect. Floyd and I come from different times and different worlds, but we do share some unique experiences. He and I can disagree on the original Song, but in the end, we share a mutual love and respect for each other’s lives and accomplishments.
Maybe that is the ultimate lesson in this all, that we can all have different opinions and different experiences, but more than anything else it’s love and respect that are needed right now. And so, I’m unapologetically proud for contributing to the Song remake, which for me will always be about love and respect for all people.
[1] Song of the South isn’t quite as bad and racist as the internet makes it seem (it’s an order of magnitude better than, say, Coal Black and de Seben Dwarves) but it’s far from enlightened even by 1940’s terms and leans heavily into Lost Cause territory and idealized representations of race in the south and stereotypical representations of southern Black dialects. It also brought the world the first Magic Negro stereotype, at least to the best of my knowledge.
[2] Mr. Little is mistaking Johnny Lee (voice of Br’er Rabbit) with the somewhat similar sounding Sterling Holloway (voice of Disney’s Winnie the Pooh).
[3] Floyd Norman, Disney’s first African American animator, has been very clear and consistent in his defense of both Song of the South and the crows in Dumbo, among other more infamous portrayals of African peoples in Disney products from the Walt era. In one of those weird coincidences Jim Henson and Floyd Norman worked together on Sesame Street, where Norman did animated sequences.
[4] Jim Henson, from everything I’ve read, had very progressive ideas about race and representation for his time, and even in many regards for our time. I believe that this is how he’d react here, but I admit it is an assumption.
[5] In our timeline the last vestigial reminder of Catfish Bend is a sign referencing it on the Splash Mountain ride.
[6] The Br’er Rabbit and the Tar Baby story evolved from African stories such as an Anansi story where the Trickster-Spirit Spider builds a gum-covered doll to trap the fairy Mmoatia. Since “Tar Baby” has become a derogatory slur in some places (including the US) they decided to go with “Gum Baby” instead.
[7] The guys from the “Mississippi Mud” sketch on the Muppet Show.
[8] In our timeline the original version was released in November of 1986 and made about $16 million at the box office.
Post from the Riding with the Mouse Net-log by animator Terrell Little.
Any time my friends and family back in Lower Alabama heard about my plans to do animation for Disney in the other LA, inevitably two things came up. One was the crows from Dumbo. The other was Song of the South. Now, chances are that unless you own a copy of the special edition VCD you’ve never seen the original Song. I have. It ain’t pretty[1].
Available now in our timeline on video anywhere except the US, where we pretend that it never happened…
Now, don’t get me wrong, Mr. Jim Baskett did the best he could, times being what they were, and good on Walt for getting him that special Oscar, but until you’ve heard Minstrel Show Winnie the Pooh talking[2] you have no idea how bad things could be back in the day.
Chris Ishii, seated (Image source “cartoonbrew.com”)
As an aside, the Dumbo crows are worse than you think too. The animator who drew them, Chris Ishii, was rewarded for his efforts with an all-expenses-paid trip for him and his family to the Santa Anita Nisei internment camp in ’42. History is fucked up.
But sometimes things can change. When Song was coming up for re-release in ’86 for its 40th anniversary, Jim Henson was having none of it. He later told me that he’d seen it and had liked it as a kid, but as he grew up it became “painful to watch” for him. I told him “How do you think it feels for me?” Despite pushback from some of the old timers, he made the decision to revamp and “update” the film for modern, more race-conscious audiences. Rumor has it that he was met by shocked disbelief when he suggested it. To take Disney the company in new directions was one thing, but to change something that Walt himself had made? Heresy on the highest!
Jim persisted, though. He ultimately convinced a reluctant Roy Disney to support the move. Rumor has it that it was Roy’s daughter Abigail that pressed the issue. Once an actual Disney was on board, even Ron Miller had a hard time opposing it. Jim and Roy maintained that Walt would want to move forward with society. Song was controversial even back in its day, after all, with the NAACP calling it out at the time for perpetuating dangerous whitewashed assumptions of an idyllic life in the segregated south, which they pointed out was due to “an effort neither to offend audiences in the north or south.” And yet in 1986 the shoe was on the other foot, and now most audiences, regardless of race, were made uncomfortable by the outdated portrayals. After a test screening of the original with a mixed-race, mixed-age audience proved highly divisive, the board relented and Jim was given the chance to make a new Song.
Jim first called up Floyd Norman to be the lead animator on the project, an old Disney animator and personal hero of mine whom Jim knew through Sesame Street. To Jim’s surprise and mine, Floyd turned him down[3]! Floyd sided with the Old Disney folks. He liked Song and thought it was a masterpiece as it was. He too considered it heresy to change Walt’s vision. Jim politely thanked him and moved on. Jim very specifically wanted it to be made, where possible, by Black artists since they were originally Black stories[4]. I liked that about him, that he even thought about things like that. Most white people at the time didn’t. Many don’t even today.
The problem, of course, was that there weren’t that many Black animators at Disney at the time, which seemed to embarrass Jim. Ultimately, this translated as me, Louis Tate, Carole Holliday (whom they poached from Hanna-Barbera just for this job), and a handful of others, mostly short-term inbetweeners and ink-and-painters, almost none of whom had worked together before. This was an inauspicious start for sure, but together we hand-picked our own coworkers, regardless of their race. I brought in my old collaborator Steve Hulett, since he’d worked with me on Boudreaux’s Kitchen and had worked earlier on the ill-fated Catfish Bend, which was naturally associated in the studio with Remus due to the southern thing[5]. The original film was a hybrid animation, so we brought in Don Hahn as Production Manager, who had worked on Pete’s Dragon back in the day.
Jim brought in his friend Harry Belafonte to do the music. Belafonte, in turn, recruited his friend Sidney Poitier to direct. Sidney didn’t have any animation direction or integration experience, but Don was happy to assist there. Harry, who started referring to us all as “modern American Griots” and described the project as “something Holy”, was our spiritual guide throughout the production and became so engaged with the picture that they ultimately gave him a Producer credit.
Not wanting to recast Uncle Remus, leaving Jim Baskett with this legacy, they instead cast Whoopie Goldberg as his widow “Aunt Nancy”. And rather than just refilm an entire “live action” story punctuated by animated Shorts, we decided to make the Shorts the focus and turn the live action Aunt Nancy parts – where she tells the animated stories to her nephew Jimmy, niece Bassie, and a poor white neighbor kid named Kitt – into an extended framing device with its own lessons on enduring hardship through tough times. The picture of the South would not be an entirely pretty one, with Jimmy and Bassie’s sharecropper father facing a tough and segregated life and Kitt’s poor widowed mother equally desperate, but the ultimate message would be a hopeful one.
(Image source “cinemablend.com”)
As to the Shorts, in addition to redubbing the classic Br’er Rabbit Shorts with modern voice actors and a more authentic period dialect (and renaming and recoloring the “tar baby” into a “gum baby[6]”), we would produce several new Shorts. There were two Shorts from Catfish Bend, a new Emmet Otter Muppet Short, a Muppet short featuring some Muppet bluegrass musicians[7], two stop-motion animation Shorts by Tim Burton and Stephen Chiodo that told some traditional Anansi the Spider stories, and a cutout-animation Short based upon the Caldecott-winning children’s book Why Mosquitoes Buzz in People’s Ears.
(Image source “teresajusino.com”)
And in addition to keeping in the original Jim Baskett “Zipadeedoodah” number at the beginning of the show, the movie ended with a reprise by Aunt Nancy, who then (once the kids are gone) transforms into her true form as Anansi the Spider, all thanks to some spooky stop-motion special effects courtesy of Tim and Steve!
We were quite happy with it all. We got some awards nominations and even won three Image awards for Outstanding Writing (team effort), Outstanding Director for Sidney, and Outstanding Motion Picture. Whoopie got her second Best Actress Image nomination in a row after winning the previous year for The Color Purple. Whoopie actually won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress, though most think that this was reimbursement for snubbing her for The Color Purple. We spent about $8 million total and made a good $35 million[8] at the box office, which was far, far higher than the original saw the last time it was released. Some of this was surely the curiosity about the remake, but I’m sure to my bones that the controversy drove a lot of those sales.
Jim was surprised by the backlash. He shouldn’t have been. Not only was he messing with a Disney “classic”, but he was messing with a lot of people’s childhood memories, and also (let’s face it) lots of people’s ingrained racism. The “Lost Cause” myth just won’t die, even today, and there are a lot of powerful, wealthy people who seem to have a vested interest in keeping that myth alive.
Needless to say, there were protests and boycotts by the Sons and Daughters of the Confederacy and the like. They called it “revisionist history”. I’d call it “anti-revisionist”, a push back at a persistent Jim Crow era lie. When someone in the press asked Floyd Norman about it all, he spoke honestly about his preference to see the original maintained, though he complimented us on what he considered a “good movie in its own right”. And also, needless to say, the press exploded this passing comment into all kinds of “Disney’s original Black animator lashes out against Br’er Rabbit remake” stories, almost all of which were wrong in most respects. Floyd tried to clarify, but it was too late: the haters used his words as ammunition against us.
Floyd later confessed his embarrassment to us about the whole thing. He just wanted to honor his friend Walt, who he maintains had always treated him with love and respect. Floyd and I come from different times and different worlds, but we do share some unique experiences. He and I can disagree on the original Song, but in the end, we share a mutual love and respect for each other’s lives and accomplishments.
Maybe that is the ultimate lesson in this all, that we can all have different opinions and different experiences, but more than anything else it’s love and respect that are needed right now. And so, I’m unapologetically proud for contributing to the Song remake, which for me will always be about love and respect for all people.
[1] Song of the South isn’t quite as bad and racist as the internet makes it seem (it’s an order of magnitude better than, say, Coal Black and de Seben Dwarves) but it’s far from enlightened even by 1940’s terms and leans heavily into Lost Cause territory and idealized representations of race in the south and stereotypical representations of southern Black dialects. It also brought the world the first Magic Negro stereotype, at least to the best of my knowledge.
[2] Mr. Little is mistaking Johnny Lee (voice of Br’er Rabbit) with the somewhat similar sounding Sterling Holloway (voice of Disney’s Winnie the Pooh).
[3] Floyd Norman, Disney’s first African American animator, has been very clear and consistent in his defense of both Song of the South and the crows in Dumbo, among other more infamous portrayals of African peoples in Disney products from the Walt era. In one of those weird coincidences Jim Henson and Floyd Norman worked together on Sesame Street, where Norman did animated sequences.
[4] Jim Henson, from everything I’ve read, had very progressive ideas about race and representation for his time, and even in many regards for our time. I believe that this is how he’d react here, but I admit it is an assumption.
[5] In our timeline the last vestigial reminder of Catfish Bend is a sign referencing it on the Splash Mountain ride.
[6] The Br’er Rabbit and the Tar Baby story evolved from African stories such as an Anansi story where the Trickster-Spirit Spider builds a gum-covered doll to trap the fairy Mmoatia. Since “Tar Baby” has become a derogatory slur in some places (including the US) they decided to go with “Gum Baby” instead.
[7] The guys from the “Mississippi Mud” sketch on the Muppet Show.
[8] In our timeline the original version was released in November of 1986 and made about $16 million at the box office.
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Huh. Yeah, the original Song of the South...It's just...There are some periods that are amicable to Disney-fication. The Reconstruction-era South is not one. There's too much damm history there, history that Disney was simply incapable of addressing. Honestly, I wish they'd gone with the original title, "Uncle Remus's Tales", because then the movie is about what it is: Uncle Remus, telling his tales. By calling it Song of the South, it makes it about, well, the South. This is Walt Disney's Song Of the South, this is Walt Disney saying "this is what the South was like back then" and it just wasn't. The racism of the period isn't something the Disney style can work with. Honestly, I wish Disney would release the damn thing on DVD, because then, they wouldn't be trying to erase their history. TALK ABOUT IT. Put it out with a big DVD filled with interviews with Black historians and academics, and talk about it. Talk about the good: James Baskett won an OSCAR for this, that was a HUGE step-forward for Black actors. Talk about the bad: He couldn't attend the premiere, because it was in Atlanta, which was segregated at the time. Don't try to paper over your past and pretend it never happened, but don't just accept it uncritically either.Chapter 10: Zip-a-dee-doo-dah in Deed
Post from the Riding with the Mouse Net-log by animator Terrell Little.
Any time my friends and family back in Lower Alabama heard about my plans to do animation for Disney in the other LA, inevitably two things came up. One was the crows from Dumbo. The other was Song of the South. Now, chances are that unless you own a copy of the special edition VCD you’ve never seen the original Song. I have. It ain’t pretty[1].
Available now in our timeline on video anywhere except the US, where we pretend that it never happened…
Now, don’t get me wrong, Mr. Jim Baskett did the best he could, times being what they were, and good on Walt for getting him that special Oscar, but until you’ve heard Minstrel Show Winnie the Pooh talking[2] you have no idea how bad things could be back in the day.
Chris Ishii, seated (Image source “cartoonbrew.com”)
As an aside, the Dumbo crows are worse than you think too. The animator who drew them, Chris Ishii, was rewarded for his efforts with an all-expenses-paid trip for him and his family to the Santa Anita Nisei internment camp in ’42. History is fucked up.
But sometimes things can change. When Song was coming up for re-release in ’86 for its 40th anniversary, Jim Henson was having none of it. He later told me that he’d seen it and had liked it as a kid, but as he grew up it became “painful to watch” for him. I told him “How do you think it feels for me?” Despite pushback from some of the old timers, he made the decision to revamp and “update” the film for modern, more race-conscious audiences. Rumor has it that he was met by shocked disbelief when he suggested it. To take Disney the company in new directions was one thing, but to change something that Walt himself had made? Heresy on the highest!
Jim persisted, though. He ultimately convinced a reluctant Roy Disney to support the move. Rumor has it that it was Roy’s daughter Abigail that pressed the issue. Once an actual Disney was on board, even Ron Miller had a hard time opposing it. Jim and Roy maintained that Walt would want to move forward with society. Song was controversial even back in its day, after all, with the NAACP calling it out at the time for perpetuating dangerous whitewashed assumptions of an idyllic life in the segregated south, which they pointed out was due to “an effort neither to offend audiences in the north or south.” And yet in 1986 the shoe was on the other foot, and now most audiences, regardless of race, were made uncomfortable by the outdated portrayals. After a test screening of the original with a mixed-race, mixed-age audience proved highly divisive, the board relented and Jim was given the chance to make a new Song.
Jim first called up Floyd Norman to be the lead animator on the project, an old Disney animator and personal hero of mine whom Jim knew through Sesame Street. To Jim’s surprise and mine, Floyd turned him down[3]! Floyd sided with the Old Disney folks. He liked Song and thought it was a masterpiece as it was. He too considered it heresy to change Walt’s vision. Jim politely thanked him and moved on. Jim very specifically wanted it to be made, where possible, by Black artists since they were originally Black stories[4]. I liked that about him, that he even thought about things like that. Most white people at the time didn’t. Many don’t even today.
The problem, of course, was that there weren’t that many Black animators at Disney at the time, which seemed to embarrass Jim. Ultimately, this translated as me, Louis Tate, Carole Holliday (whom they poached from Hanna-Barbera just for this job), and a handful of others, mostly short-term inbetweeners and ink-and-painters, almost none of whom had worked together before. This was an inauspicious start for sure, but together we hand-picked our own coworkers, regardless of their race. I brought in my old collaborator Steve Hulett, since he’d worked with me on Boudreaux’s Kitchen and had worked earlier on the ill-fated Catfish Bend, which was naturally associated in the studio with Remus due to the southern thing[5]. The original film was a hybrid animation, so we brought in Don Hahn as Production Manager, who had worked on Pete’s Dragon back in the day.
Jim brought in his friend Harry Belafonte to do the music. Belafonte, in turn, recruited his friend Sidney Poitier to direct. Sidney didn’t have any animation direction or integration experience, but Don was happy to assist there. Harry, who started referring to us all as “modern American Griots” and described the project as “something Holy”, was our spiritual guide throughout the production and became so engaged with the picture that they ultimately gave him a Producer credit.
Not wanting to recast Uncle Remus, leaving Jim Baskett with this legacy, they instead cast Whoopie Goldberg as his widow “Aunt Nancy”. And rather than just refilm an entire “live action” story punctuated by animated Shorts, we decided to make the Shorts the focus and turn the live action Aunt Nancy parts – where she tells the animated stories to her nephew Jimmy, niece Bassie, and a poor white neighbor kid named Kitt – into an extended framing device with its own lessons on enduring hardship through tough times. The picture of the South would not be an entirely pretty one, with Jimmy and Bassie’s sharecropper father facing a tough and segregated life and Kitt’s poor widowed mother equally desperate, but the ultimate message would be a hopeful one.
(Image source “cinemablend.com”)
As to the Shorts, in addition to redubbing the classic Br’er Rabbit Shorts with modern voice actors and a more authentic period dialect (and renaming and recoloring the “tar baby” into a “gum baby[6]”), we would produce several new Shorts. There were two Shorts from Catfish Bend, a new Emmet Otter Muppet Short, a Muppet short featuring some Muppet bluegrass musicians[7], two stop-motion animation Shorts by Tim Burton and Stephen Chiodo that told some traditional Anansi the Spider stories, and a cutout-animation Short based upon the Caldecott-winning children’s book Why Mosquitoes Buzz in People’s Ears.
(Image source “teresajusino.com”)
And in addition to keeping in the original Jim Baskett “Zipadeedoodah” number at the beginning of the show, the movie ended with a reprise by Aunt Nancy, who then (once the kids are gone) transforms into her true form as Anansi the Spider, all thanks to some spooky stop-motion special effects courtesy of Tim and Steve!
We were quite happy with it all. We got some awards nominations and even won three Image awards for Outstanding Writing (team effort), Outstanding Director for Sidney, and Outstanding Motion Picture. Whoopie got her second Best Actress Image nomination in a row after winning the previous year for The Color Purple. Whoopie actually won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress, though most think that this was reimbursement for snubbing her for The Color Purple. We spent about $8 million total and made a good $35 million[8] at the box office, which was far, far higher than the original saw the last time it was released. Some of this was surely the curiosity about the remake, but I’m sure to my bones that the controversy drove a lot of those sales.
Jim was surprised by the backlash. He shouldn’t have been. Not only was he messing with a Disney “classic”, but he was messing with a lot of people’s childhood memories, and also (let’s face it) lots of people’s ingrained racism. The “Lost Cause” myth just won’t die, even today, and there are a lot of powerful, wealthy people who seem to have a vested interest in keeping that myth alive.
Needless to say, there were protests and boycotts by the Sons and Daughters of the Confederacy and the like. They called it “revisionist history”. I’d call it “anti-revisionist”, a push back at a persistent Jim Crow era lie. When someone in the press asked Floyd Norman about it all, he spoke honestly about his preference to see the original maintained, though he complimented us on what he considered a “good movie in its own right”. And also, needless to say, the press exploded this passing comment into all kinds of “Disney’s original Black animator lashes out against Br’er Rabbit remake” stories, almost all of which were wrong in most respects. Floyd tried to clarify, but it was too late: the haters used his words as ammunition against us.
Floyd later confessed his embarrassment to us about the whole thing. He just wanted to honor his friend Walt, who he maintains had always treated him with love and respect. Floyd and I come from different times and different worlds, but we do share some unique experiences. He and I can disagree on the original Song, but in the end, we share a mutual love and respect for each other’s lives and accomplishments.
Maybe that is the ultimate lesson in this all, that we can all have different opinions and different experiences, but more than anything else it’s love and respect that are needed right now. And so, I’m unapologetically proud for contributing to the Song remake, which for me will always be about love and respect for all people.
[1] Song of the South isn’t quite as bad and racist as the internet makes it seem (it’s an order of magnitude better than, say, Coal Black and de Seben Dwarves) but it’s far from enlightened even by 1940’s terms and leans heavily into Lost Cause territory and idealized representations of race in the south and stereotypical representations of southern Black dialects. It also brought the world the first Magic Negro stereotype, at least to the best of my knowledge.
[2] Mr. Little is mistaking Johnny Lee (voice of Br’er Rabbit) with the somewhat similar sounding Jim Cummings (voice of Disney’s Winnie the Pooh).
[3] Floyd Norman, Disney’s first African American animator, has been very clear and consistent in his defense of both Song of the South and the crows in Dumbo, among other more infamous portrayals of African peoples in Disney products from the Walt era. In one of those weird coincidences Jim Henson and Floyd Norman worked together on Sesame Street, where Norman did animated sequences.
[4] Jim Henson, from everything I’ve read, had very progressive ideas about race and representation for his time, and even in many regards for our time. I believe that this is how he’d react here, but I admit it is an assumption.
[5] In our timeline the last vestigial reminder of Catfish Bend is a sign referencing it on the Splash Mountain ride.
[6] The Br’er Rabbit and the Tar Baby story evolved from African stories such as an Anansi story where the Trickster-Spirit Spider builds a gum-covered doll to trap the fairy Mmoatia. Since “Tar Baby” has become a derogatory slur in some places (including the US) they decided to go with “Gum Baby” instead.
[7] The guys from the “Mississippi Mud” sketch on the Muppet Show.
[8] In our timeline the original version was released in November of 1986 and made about $16 million at the box office.
I'll be alright with Spaceballs being delayed, as long as John Candy is still Barf.
Rather disingenuously, Disney has released Song of the South: in Europe and Asia and other non-US markets. It's just in the US where they've tried to pretend that it doesn't exist, making it less of an "Old Shame we'd like to forget about" and more "we'll pretend that this never happened in one market where it could potentially hurt our reputation but still openly sell it for a profit in other markets," which is a level of cynical pragmatism so in obvious conflict with the central Disney narrative of "idealism and sincerity" even by the standards of Disney's reputation in this regard, that it's no wonder to me why so many people utterly hate Disney. I'd honestly have preferred if they had completely hid it all away in the vault forever more than this cynical "no one will notice" attempt to have their cake and eat it too. Best would have been what you described, in my opinion. It's not like other really bad portrayals of non-whites aren't being sold in the US (e.g. the Crows from Dumbo, the Siamese Cats from Lady & the Tramp and the "red Indians" from Peter Pan).
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