Today I finally got to see the “infamous” Disney movie Song of the South. As it’s never been released on video (many speculate that this was due to complaints by the NAACP over the depiction of blacks in the film), the Snook managed to download a copy from Kazaa for me. Personally, I didn’t find it offensive at all. In fact, I didn’t realize til afterwards that the movie is set after the Civil War, and thus none of the blacks in it are supposed to be slaves. For a film made in the 1940’s, Disney treated the subject just about as sensitively as he could, I think. The result is actually a surprisingly boring film. I was expecting an animated version of Birth of a Nation, but instead it was more like Old Yeller (in the blandness of the live-action footage and story). The animated sequences were great, but they only constituted about 10% of the film. (They gave me crazy nostalgia though. I’m pretty sure I had a Brer Rabbit Little Golden Book as a child, because – though I hadn’t seen the movie before – I could practically recite the cartoon dialogue.) At any rate, I found a great fan site with loads of information about the film. It’s really well designed too. You should check it out, if only to see how all fan sites should be done.