![]() But the new Criterion release-with an insightful director’s commentary recorded in 2001, a “making of” documentary, and a bevy of new features including an interview between Lee and critic Ashley Clark-makes a keen case for the movie’s urgency, even necessity. This is an occasion that calls for deep reconsideration: Bamboozled is, after all, thought to be a notorious bomb (financially, artistically, politically). This is the subject of Spike Lee’s audacious, vibrant, unsurprisingly maligned but frequently brilliant Bamboozled, which was finally released on Blu-ray last week, in a glossy new transfer by the Criterion Collection. What Disney doesn’t want to confront isn’t only the embarrassment of the movie itself, but also the embarrassing fact that so many people-still, in 2020-would be willing to look past it. The most important disclosure Iger made at that 2011 meeting wasn’t that his company would continue to keep Song of the South locked in a vault-it was that he knew “there would be some financial gain” in rereleasing it, should Disney do so. Yet when Song of the South was originally rereleased in 1986-well after we all should have known better-it made enough money, and stoked enough nostalgia, to make clear that certain lessons-about America’s racial history, about our knowledge and awareness of the dangers of racial caricature-had not been learned. CEO Bob Iger had reportedly already said as much previously at the company’s 2011 annual meeting, explaining that the movie “wouldn’t necessarily sit right or feel right to a number of people today.” Indeed, Song’s rollicking sense of apologia for slavery and crude reimagining of racial harmony in the post–Civil War South would probably not look so hot alongside Disney+’s girl-powered, Black Panther’d slate of Marvel movies and Frozen sequels.įair enough. It was announced that the 1946 Disney film Song of the South-that experiment in live-action and animated filmmaking inspiration for Disney World’s Splash Mountain source of the Oscar-winning song “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” and notoriously outdated treatment of the post–Civil War South- will never be available to stream on Disney+. On March 11, something that had long seemed inevitable was finally confirmed.
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