Mony-Dorfman, Eco

On the seventh day, the Lord said: "I'm pooped. You build the theme park."
--Advertisement for "Theme Park"- The Video Game

“Welcome to the laughing place, laughing place, laughing place.”

This is the song that is pierced into your ears as you travel through the “briar patch”, the magical land where Brer Rabbit and Brer Bear reside on Disney’s Splash Mountain. I used to love the singing chipmunks, dancing flowers, and chipping birds in bonnets. I’m not one for cute, but this ride is pretty darn cute, especially since I was only ten when I first “experienced” Splash Mountain. I used to dream about living in a land were animals would sing and dance. Disney was my dream world on earth. Plus, watching singing creatures sure beat playing with my dog “Pepsi” who was cross eyed and incontinent, Eco was right “ Disney tells us that technology can gives us more reality than nature can” (203). Screw my dog and hamsters-give me Mickey and Pluto, at least they talk.

Five years later at a garage sale, I found a copy of the 1986 re-release of the 1946 film The Song of the South. I thought I could reminisce about the “laughing place” while enjoying the wonderful stories of Joel Chandler Harris’s “Uncle Remus”. Tragically, I was not prepared for what I did end up viewing - a horribly racist film where slaves sing “Zip-a-dee-do-da” while dong their chores, and where the U.S. is titled “The United States of Georgia”. Uncle Remus does tell stories of Brer Rabbit and Brer Bear to two little white kids, but disregards the black kid Toby who wants to hear the stories too. The actor James Barkel, who plays Uncle Remus, was actually nominated for an award in Georgia when the film came out, but couldn’t receive it because he could not find a desegregated hotel. Ahhhh.

Did Walt Disney understand the extent of the prejudice contained in this film? I guess it was overlooked in order to make a pretty penny, or as Dorfaman said “Disney has been exalted as the inviolable common” and that’s why this video is still sold (overseas of course) to thousands of people a year. And why would the Disney cooperation even think about centralizing a ride around this movie?


Help! I hope that foreigners don’t believe that this is America’s view of slavery. This is no “laughing place”.