This won’t come as much of a surprise given that the studio has never released the film on any form of home media in the U.S., but it has been confirmed by Disney CEO Bob Iger that the controversial 1946 movie Song of the South will be absent from the Disney+ streaming service.
As reported in THR, Iger had previously explained the decision to keep Song of the South locked in the Disney vault, stating that he felt it “wouldn’t necessarily sit right or feel right to a number of people today [and] it wouldn’t be in the best interest of our shareholders to bring it back, even though there would be some financial gain.”
Based on the Uncle Remus folktales, the live-action/animated hybrid Song of the South takes place during the Reconstruction Era shortly after the abolition of slavery and follows a young boy who moves to his grandmother’s plantation where he befriends Uncle Remus, played by James Baskett. Widely criticised for its depiction of its African-American characters and their lives on the plantation, Disney has kept the movie under wraps since its 40th anniversary re-release in 1986.
In addition to Song of the South, Disney has also made the decision to remove the Jim Crow sequence from the 1941 animated movie Dumbo, another scene which has been heavily criticised as featuring racist caricatures.
