When more than 10 million people signed up for Disney Plus this week, acquiescing parents, Star Wars die-hards, and nostalgia-driven college students united to catapult the streaming service to the cultural significance Netflix and Hulu have enjoyed for years.
Disney Plus launched to much fanfare on Tuesday, finally delivering thousands of classic films and television episodes to millions of subscribers. But Disney isn’t letting everything out of its vault.
The company has punted at least one film that passed by without comment in the early 20th century but doesn’t fly with viewers today. Continuing a longtime decision, Disney won’t be releasing supposedly pro-plantation Song of the South. For years, the company has discussed releasing the film, which inspired Disneyland’s Splash Mountain, on DVD. Whoopi Goldberg, for one, supported its release a couple of years back.
“I’m trying to find a way to get people to start having conversations about bringing Song of the South back, so we can talk about what it was and where it came from and why it came out,” she said.
But Disney sees it as a liability. Disney also opted not to include an episode of The Simpsons featuring the voice of Michael Jackson.
Films that made it onto Disney’s streaming platform but still weren’t quite politically correct got slapped with disclaimers. Before Dumbo and Peter Pan, for example, viewers are warned that the films might contain “outdated cultural depictions.” Then again, so do most films made in the past. Why not put a disclaimer on everything?
The problem with Disney’s decision, in part, is that it is made to appease a particular politically correct crowd. And they’re still not happy. The Washington Post reports that some “experts” in diversity say Disney’s wording is dismissive.
“It really feels like a first step,” said Michael Baran, of the diversity and inclusion consulting firm InQUEST Consulting. “I think that they could be so much more forceful in not only what they are saying, in the warning, but also in what they’re doing.”
Baran added that Aladdin should have a disclaimer too, and that the warnings shouldn’t stop there. Other films, not just those with racial problems but also those with “problematic” depictions of gender and sexuality, ought to come with disclaimers.
Shilpa Davé, a professor of media studies and American studies at the University of Virginia, took a different approach. She suggested that Disney not simply try to clean up its old stuff, but make new movies instead. Why not “create new stories with new people and new animals?”
It’s a good suggestion. Disney will continue to struggle in the coming years with rebranding, as it chooses which scenes and films to apologize for, which ones to ignore, and which ones to scrap altogether. The upcoming live-action remake of Lady and the Tramp, for example, will cut the Siamese cat song.
But Davé is right that if Disney really wants to escape its tremulous place in the eyes of a critical public, it should stop looking to politically correct sequels for its redemption.
That’s an observation that most fans can get on board with, and not just because the pursuit of political correctness can go to infinite lengths. When Tom Hanks is hinting that there could be a Toy Story 5, it’s clearly time for Disney to stop coasting on each existing franchise and start making more original content.
