Mountains and Rabbit Holes.

[Anaheim, daytime, outside the gates of Disneyland.  A small but not insignificant group of protestors has gathered]

Protestors: “DON’T CHANGE SPLASH MOUNTAIN!  DON’T CHANGE SPLASH MOUNTAIN!  DON’T CHANGE SPLASH MOUNTAIN!”

[The gate opens a little and a hand hastily pushes our resident Fairy Tale Geek out.  Gate closes and locks behind him]

FTG: [to unseen gate person] “Gee, thanks.” [brushes self off] 

                [To Protestors] “Hello, my name is Adam, sometimes known as the Fairy Tale Geek, and I’ve been commissioned by the Walt Disney Company to talk to you about the upcoming changes to your favorite ride.  First, I’d like to thank you all for being here while there are many, many, many, MANY more important protests you could have attended . . . “

Protestor 1: “Cut out the glad-handing!  Say what you need to say!

Protestors 2-26: “YEAH!”

FTG: “Well, it’s not as simple as all that.  Before we get talking, we need to go over some history . . . “

All Protestors: [GROOOAN!]

FTG: “This all starts with a man named Joel Chandler Harris.  Well, actually, it starts with folk tales being told in West Africa for hundreds of years . . . But let’s start with Harris instead.  Harris was a writer living in the American South, specifically Georgia, during the 19^th Century.  When he was working at a newspaper located on a plantation, he struck up a friendship with some of the slaves living on the plantation and heard them tell stories about animal characters like Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox.  These stories were regional adaptations of African stories about the African Hare, who was often depicted as a trickster figure.  Because of certain quirks of his upbringing like his lack of a father and chronic shyness, Harris often felt like an outsider and would feel a kinship with the Black slaves even though their situations couldn’t be more different.  After the Civil War, he actually supported regional and racial reconciliation.”

Protestor 2: “So, he was anti-slavery?”

FTG: “Oh, hell no!  While slavery was still going on he was all for it, even though he considered himself a friend to slaves.  You’d be amazed what kind of contradictory things the human mind can reconcile.

Anyway, years later he would transcribe those stories that he heard in the slave cabins and build a framing sequence around them using a Black character named Remus that he developed when working at a different newspaper.  Originally, Remus was a comical figure, but as Uncle Remus he became a sort of homespun sage who passes wisdom on to the child of the plantation’s white owner.  The books were a huge hit and would remain so for years and years even into the early 20^th Century and the Midwestern childhood of one Walter Elias Disney.”

Protestor 4: “What does any of this have to do with Splash Mountain?!”

FTG: “Well, I’m getting to the point where I explain the history of Song of the South.”

Protestor 13: “What’s Song of the South?”

FTG: “[SIGH] Well, anyway.  It’s safe to say Walt Disney was a fan of those stories.

So, in 1946 Walt Disney released a live action/animation hybrid film based on Harris’s Uncle Remus books titled Song of the South.  It featured young Bobby Driscoll as Johnny, the little boy from the stories and James Baskett as Uncle Remus.  It also featured various animated segments starring Brer Rabbit, Brer Fox and Brer Bear that were supposed to represent the stories Uncle Remus was telling Johnny.  The script had been written by Dalton Reymond, a White writer.  Disney then hired African-American writer and performer Clarence Muse to consult on the screenplay, but Muse left the project when Reymond refused to listen to any of his suggestions.  The movie itself met with mixed reviews even then.  Critics generally said it was boring, especially the live action parts.  Looked upon more favorably were the short animated segments and the song “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” (which you should know has a racist history all its ownthat I can’t explain right now).  Even then, there were concerns about racial stereotyping and depicting the reconstruction South in an overly positive way.  Heck, there were even protestors like yourselves.  One of the biggest things was that James Baskett wasn’t even allowed to attend the premiere because it was held in a Whites-only theater in Atlanta, Georgia.”

Protestor 13: “Ohhhhh . . . .”

FTG: “Moving on, decades after the movie was made and rereleased in theaters a number of times, we get to the late ‘80s.  And at this point in the ‘80s, imagineer Tony Baxter has a handful of problems.  One, the Bear Country part of the Disneyland park is seeing a lot less traffic.  Two, An attraction called America Sings was closing and a number of animatronics designed by the veteran animator Mark Davis were potentially headed for the scrap heap.  Three, newly minted CEO Michael Eisner had told Baxter to come up with some more thrilling rides that would attract a teen and young adult audience to the parks.  And four, attractions supervisor Dick Nunis kept pushing to include an old-fashioned log flume ride in the Disney Parks.  The answer to all these problems was Splash Mountain, which he thought of while stuck in traffic.  Splash Mountain was a log flume ride with a thrilling drop.  It could be placed in Bear Country which would be renamed Critter Country.  And because Mark Davis was the lead animator on Song of the South, they could recast the various animal characters from America Sings as sort of extras in the world of Brer Rabbit and company without the designs looking too out-of-place.  There were a couple of hiccups.  The ride was going to be called the “Zip-a-Dee River Run” but Michael Eisner asked them to change the name to “Splash Mountain” because he wanted to use the ride to promote the new Touchstone Pictures movie Splash.  He also wanted them to add a mermaid character too for that purpose, which Imagineering pushed back against.  But the attraction was very popular and two more opened at Walt Disney World and Disneyland Japan. 

Now, we look back at all this history and we see all these names.  Joel Chandler Harris, Walt Disney, Dalton Reymond, Tony Baxter, Mark Davis, Dick Nunis and Michael Eisner.  Who does it seem like was mostly left out in the evolution of this ride that depicts characters from African-American folk tales?”

Protestor 18: “Um . . . “

Protestor6: “Uh . . . “

FTG: “ . . . Black people.  All the names I just listed were of White guys.”

Protestor 2: “What about that Basket guy?”

FTG: “James Baskett?  Who wasn’t even allowed to view his own movie at the premiere?  There’s also Clarence Muse whose input was ignored.  I didn’t even mention the slaves that Harris got the stories from like Uncle George Terrell, Old Harbert and Aunt Crissy.  People don’t even credit them as the storytellers, always crediting ‘Uncle Remus’ who was created by Harris.

Look, I’m trying to point out that the retheming of Splash Mountain to The Princess and the Frog has the potential to be a good thing in a number of ways.  The Princess and the Frog is a good movie with memorable music.  The retheme will allow them to give the ride a facelift after thirty years, including replacing the America Sings animatronics which are old, actually dating back to 1976.  And, most important of all, by getting rid of one of the last parts of Song of the South’s legacy, we can try to put a cap on that specific era of pop culture.  Now, Black writers and artists can have a little more elbow room to reclaim their own folk stories and reinterpret them in a way that’s meaningful to them in the modern era.  Heck, while maybe it’s not ideal, a big company like Disney could even help bring those visions to a wider audience.

Actually, they kind of already are . . . “

Protestor 5: “What?”

FTG: “Oh, well, it's not a movie thing or a theme park thing.  There’s a book titled Tristan Strong Punches a Hole in the Sky that’s by an African-American writer, Kwame Mbalia.  It’s from the Rick Riordan Presents line.  You know, Rick Riordan from the Percy Jackson series . . . “

Protestor 12: “I LOVE THE PERCY JACKSON BOOKS!”

FTG: “Okay . . . .

Well, anyway, it’s about a young Black boy from Chicago who ends up going into the world of African and African-American tales.  Among them are Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox.  Guess who published the book.”

Protestor 9: “Uh . . . Disney?”

FTG: “BINGO!  Disney-Hyperion Press!”

Protestor 1: “AGGH!  You guys are forgetting why we’re here!  We still have concerns about the ride!  Like, the placement of it.  Sure, at Disneyland they can extend New Orleans Square, but won’t it be weird in Disney World to have a Princess and the Frog ride in Frontierland?!”

FTG: “No weirder than it already is.  The Brer Rabbit stories were African stories that were transplanted to Georgia.  None of them have anything to do with the American frontier.”

Protestor 1: “But it’s just that . . . it’s my favorite ride and . . . it’s going to change . . . “

FTG: “Yeah, it is.  And change can be tough to deal with.  I know that.  But it’s got to happen.  It’s what Walt Disney would have wanted too.  It may sound strange coming from a guy who built an entertainment empire on nostalgia, but he always said that Disneyland would never be finished.  That as long as there was imagination, that it would always be growing and changing.  And this is a change that can be made to close a chapter on a troubled past and hopefully create a better future.  After all I said, you know it’s a good idea.”

Protestor 1: [dejectedly] “Yeah, I guess.”

FTG: “So, since we’re all still here, this seems like a good opportunity!  Why don’t we all just have a frank discussion right here about the effects of cultural appropriation in adapting folk stories for family entertainment?”

[Protestors drop their signs and start walking away]

“Hey!  Where are you all going?”

[A man in a suit walks out of the gate and comes up to the Fairy Tale Geek]

FTG: “Okay, so I did what you hired me for. “

Man-in-Suit: “Very good.  The Walt Disney Company thanks you. “

FTG: “And my compensation?”

Man-in-Suit: “Right!  Right!  Keep an eye on your mailbox.  We’ll send you a check and maybe a Disneyland t-shirt or something!”

FTG: “We talked about this.  I told you I want tickets to the press screening of Mulan.”

Man-in-Suit: “Yeah . . . we’ll see.”

[Man-in-Suit walks back in the gate and locks it behind him.]

FTG: “Hmm!  ‘We’ll see’ probably means ‘not a snowball’s chance in Orlando’.  Oh, well.

[FTG walks away humming “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah”, silently cursing to himself that the song is so catchy]

Fairy Tale Media Fix: Hanna-Barbera's Jack and the Beanstalk.

In the history of TV animation, there are few bigger names than Hanna-Barbera.  A company founded by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, who created Tom & Jerry for MGM, they created a number of tricks and methods that made producing animation for TV a viable option.  They then went on to create a number of popular characters and series like Yogi Bear, Huckleberry Hound, The Flintstones, The Jetsons, Jonny Quest, Space Ghost, Scooby-Doo and many more.

Why do I bring this up?  Because almost every major animation studio will take a crack at a popular fairy tale at some point.  Hanna-Barbera did it (for probably not the only time) for a 1967 telefilm production of Jack and the Beanstalk.

The film is a hybrid of animation and live action.  It stars Bobby Riha as Jack, Ted Cassidy (aka Lurch from The Addams Family) as the voice of the animated giant, Janet Waldo as the voice of Princess Serena (aka the Harp) and the one and only Gene Kelly as the peddler Jeremy Keen.  I should also note that Gene Kelly also produced and directed the movie.

The movie starts with Jack coming down the road with his cow and meeting Jeremy the peddler.  There’s a song and dance number (these happen quite often in this movie) and Jack walks away having traded the cow for some magic beans.  Jack goes back home and then we see him telling his mother about how he messed up.  Jack’s mother doesn’t actually say anything herself and we don’t even see her face (there’s a reason for this and I’ll get back to it later).  Jack then disposes of the bean and goes to bed only to find it grown into a giant beanstalk.  He goes out to find who else but Jeremy and Jack’s ex-cow.  Jeremy had come by to check on Jack after their trade.  Instead, he found a giant beanstalk which both he and Jack would both climb. 

That’s right.  Jack isn’t alone on his adventure.  Because when you sign Gene Kelly to your movie, you don’t relegate him to a bit part.

Anyway, they go up the beanstalk where they encounter a giant, a golden harp that’s actually a cursed princess, a couple of woggle-birds, a colony of scared mice and engage in many, many song and dance numbers (because Gene Kelly) and also engage in some strange but amusing wordplay (it’s hard to describe, you’ll just have to hear it for yourself).

This isn’t the first time Gene Kelly worked with Hanna and Barbera or their characters.  As you may recall, he danced with Jerry the Mouse in 1945’s Anchors Aweigh.  He acquits himself about as well here.  Though, between his producing, directing and the expanded role of his character, his role here might seem a bit outsized.

In  fact, one could argue that the movie is more like “Jeremy and the Beanstalk” with Jack as Jeremy’s sidekick.  The reason being that Jeremy is given a love story in the movie with Princess Serena aka the Singing Harp.  The payoff is something else though, but describing it involves MAJOR SPOILERS.  So, be warned.  You see, Serena is under a spell by an ogre that bonds her to the rest of the harp.  The spell can be lifted with a kiss (because animated fairy tale).  This kiss being quite naturally accompanied by a song and dance number (again because Gene Kelly).  Jeremy had fallen  for her at first sight, and apparently her for him.  But getting to her proves difficult.  Eventually it does happen, with the kiss and the song and dance and all that.  They escape the giant and Princess Serena wants Jeremy to stay with her.  And he sends her away because (and I’m paraphrasing) they’re from two different worlds.  She’s a princess and he’s just a peddler.  Now, they get back home and dispose of the beanstalk and Jack’s mother comes out to meet them.  Okay, so remember how I said we didn’t see Jack’s mother’s face or hear her speak, to the extent that Jack basically scolded himself?  Well, she shows up and SHE LOOKS JUST LIKE A LIVE ACTION VERSION OF PRINCESS SERENA.  Maybe a little bit older, but still clearly the model for the animated character.  And Jack’s mother isn’t a worn down middle-aged peasant woman.  In this case she’s a middle-aged but still quite lovely woman played by 1957 Miss America beauty contest winner Marian McKnight.  So, that’s the “happily ever after” here: the peddler marrying Jack’s mother.  I know  I usually come across as a bit of a traditionalist about “Jack and the Beanstalk”, but as someone who’s not exactly a spring chicken myself anymore, I have to applaud a fairy tale production where the older people get the happy ending (sidenote: has anyone ever compiled a collection of folk and fairy tales specifically aimed at the over 35 crowd?).  It is a bit strange from a technical standpoint though.  Because even though Princess Serena may have been modeled to look like McKnight, she wasn’t voiced by her.  Princess Serena’s speaking voice was provided by Janet Waldo and her singing voice by Marni Nixon.  I’m not sure why.  Was it the standard for physical acting and voice acting to be two separate things back then?  And why did they avoid letting Jack’s mother speak earlier?

Anyway, it’s not too bad.  Certainly not my least favorite “Jack and the Beanstalk” adaptation.  Though, I’m not sure which would be my most favorite.  It did win some accolades in its day.  It won the '67 Emmy for "Outstanding Children's Program".  Is this one the definitive cinematic adaptation of "Jack and the Beanstalk"?  No, but “Jack and the Beanstalk” doesn’t really have one, and I’m actually kind of glad it doesn’t.  It means that no Hollywood version can dictate expectations for this specific story and how it’s adapted.  Literary versions might still dictate them, but a movie won’t.

I feel like of the popular fairy tales, “Jack and the Beanstalk” can inspire a bit of confusion and debate.  The fact that it’s basically about a young trickster thief who gains his happy ending by robbing another character has caused people to question its appropriateness, its message and where it could have possibly come from.  It’s led to lots of “Jack was really the bad guy the whole time” hot takes and theories that the whole thing is really a metaphor for colonialism (these people would probably have had a field day with Disney’s Gigantic if it had ever been made).  And going back to the earliest printed version only seems to make things more confusing.  Personally, maybe it’s just me, but I think it’s mostly just a power fantasy for pre-Industrial English peasants.  Let’s just say that the giant in this case is a metaphor for the rich and powerful.  The royalty, gentry, landowners, etc.  Wouldn’t your average story listener in ages gone by appreciate the story of little Jack getting the best of the giant, no matter the method?  I know it’s not a very attractive answer for many people.  The idea that this story is basically the equivalent of a dumb superhero comic or summer action movie and that the subtext is as simple as “giant=rich and powerful”, but it is a possibility.  But then, like I’ve said twice, maybe it’s best we don’t have any grand insight into this story.  Let everyone’s interpretation stand on its own.  Let human beings create their own meaning and fill in the gaps. Then we can see how the next adaptation surprises us.  Until then, if you want to watch this version, it's on the Boomerang streaming service and available on DVD from Warner Archive.

Until next time.

Fairy Tale Media Fix: The Adventures of Brer Rabbit.

So . . . it’s almost Easter.  Things are still quarantined from the Coronavirus.  Not a lot of places to go to get holiday-appropriate material to blog about.  Even my resources are limited, but I’ll see what I can find.

A quick search of Amazon Instant Video later . . .

Well, it’s folk story relevant and it has a rabbit in it.  That’s good enough for an Easter post, right?

Now, I’ve talked about Brer Rabbit before and his troublesome connection to misrepresenting the racial situation in the Reconstruction era South and cultural appropriation.  I may have even mentioned the Disney movie Song of the South and the Walt Disney World ride Splash Mountain, which both complicate the whole thing.  So, maybe we should move on to the film itself.

The film is based on a book titled The Tales of Uncle Remus: The Adventures of Brer Rabbit written by Julius Lester with illustrations by Jerry Pinkney published in 1987.  The book won both the Coretta Scott King Book Illustration Award for 1988 and was the 1988 Horn Book Fanfare Book.   

 There was a play called The Adventures of Brer Rabbit that was also based on the book that opened in 1977 and played at the California Theater Center in Sunnyvale, California for twenty years.  The animated film adaptation was released straight-to-DVD in 2006.  It features the voices of Nick Cannon as Brer Rabbit, Danny Glover as Brer Turtle, D.L. Hughley as Brer Fox, Wayne Brady as Brer Wolf and Wanda Sykes as Sister Moon among others. It was nominated for the Best Home Entertainment Production Annie Award.

Unlike the Joel Chandler Harris version (or Disney’s), Uncle Remus and the infamous plantation he lived on are nowhere to be seen.  Instead, we’re introduced to Janey.  Janey is a young African American girl who is feeling pushed around by her family, particularly her older brother.  Sent outside to play by her mother, Janey runs into Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox.  An altercation between the two results in Brer Fox being tricked into being stuck at the bottom of a well.  After this, Janey meets Brer Turtle who introduces her to the world of the animals and tells her various stories about Brer Rabbit.  The story choices in this movie include a number of familiar ones and some not so familiar ones.  Brer Fox getting caught down the well, I already mentioned.  But they also have the one where he tricks Brer Bear into taking his place in a trap.  They have the one about Brer Rabbit’s Laughing Place.  They even have the one about the Tar Baby, which I did not expect to see.  I believe there’s an issue with the phrase “tar baby” being used as a racial slur.  Though, the one that probably surprised me the most is a story about how all the animals used to live in the sky with Sister Moon and how Brer Rabbit convinced them all to move to Earth.  That story puts the Brer Rabbit stories on a much more cosmic, mythological scale.  Or, at least on the scale of a por quois story.

From a technical standpoint, this straight-to-video animated movie looks like a straight-to-video animated movie.  It doesn’t have the polish of a theatrical film and story-wise it’s pretty much just a string of short stories put together with a loose framing sequence.  The music isn’t super memorable except for one really fun gospel number towards the middle.  The acting maybe isn’t the best, though there are some talented people in the cast.  However, from a cultural standpoint, this adaptation feels better than a lot of the past versions of the Brer Rabbit stories I’ve encountered.  As I said before, there’s no plantation and no Uncle Remus playing the role of “magical negro”.  There is kind of a “magical turtle” I guess.  Brer Turtle isn't necessarily trying to solve anyone's problems though, he's just telling the stories.  And the child listening to the stories is actually part of the culture the stories come from this time.

This time, compared to Song of the South or Joel Chandler Harris’s books, this movie feels less like it’s full of stories that white people like myself . . . y’know . . . stole.

I mean, I’m sure it’s not perfect on that front.  The movie was made by Universal Animation, and almost any film made by a major studio is going to have some rich, white voices influencing.  But still, it seems better.

One thing I’m going to have to say is that some fans of the material and folklorists may still take issue with this adaptation.  The thing is that some folks really love how violent and brutal these stories can be (I believe one Brer Rabbit story involved Brer Rabbit boiling Brer Fox alive).  There’s frequently talk about their visceral quality and how the brutality reflected the lives of the African American slaves that first started circulating these tales.  Well, I regret to inform you that the stories in this movie are not that dark and brutal.  The thing is that there’s a difference between how you can tell stories when they’re written in a book or being told by the hearth and when you render them into visuals for a movie.  Some things can be left to the imagination and some things can’t.  This is especially the case if you want children to watch the movie.  And if you want tales like these to have a lot of cultural penetration, children are probably going to be a key demographic.  As was shown with Song of the South, the answer is usually to turn the violence into cartoonish slapstick.  That’s essentially what happened here.  Brutal folkloric violence becomes roughly the stuff of Looney Tunes cartoons (or, since this is a Universal production, a Woody Woodpecker cartoon).  I’m afraid them’s the breaks, though.  If it had been more realistic, they would have lost out on their target audience and I’m not sure that most adults would have wanted to watch an R or hard PG-13 movie about Brer Rabbit.  Though, even with the cartoonier violence, parents might still not be crazy about the fact that the ultimate takeaway in this story is Janey learning how to trick people.

This is a flawed movie.  Certainly not a masterpiece.  However, I think it was a noble attempt at something that people have been struggling with the adaptation of for a long time.  And sometimes it’s better to see the strengths of a flawed film than to look for something perfect.  If you have the off chance, give it a look and judge it for its flaws and strengths yourself.