It's delightful, it's delicious, it's dlevy!
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- Catey Sullivan: What do you hope the audience in general takes away from the musical?
- Mary Zimmerman: That’s a capitalist question. I feel like it’s enough for shows to be experiences. There is no object that you take. I hope what audiences have at the end is a sense of the incredible wonderment of being a child. Children have one foot in reality and one foot somewhere else.
YOU GUYS!!!!!
I can’t believe that Nell Carter singing “Friend Like Me” hasn’t already been shared here. Seeing this unfold on the Academy Awards was one of my biggest WTF moments of my teenage years.
Set your magic carpets on a course for New York City: Disney’s Aladdin is coming to Broadway in 2014.
WAIT. Is Andrew Keenan-Bolger wearing bronzer and playing a monkey?
they cut the monkey. he’s playing a sidekick. like crutchy without crutches.
Have I mentioned how excited I am for this? Like, remember how excited Sarah and the Craptacular were when Newsies was announced? Yeah. When I was in high school, Aladdin was my everything. My room was Aladdin. I saw it seven times in the movie theater. I had a home-made Aladdin costume. I am all over this.
Now playing: the making of Mickey’s Christmas Carol.
It is interesting that the film Disney chose to suppress for its racial content is the one that features actual genuine black actors in the flesh. How long after Song of the South was it before Disney had a film with black lead characters again? The World’s Greatest Athlete in 1973, 27 years later?
And speaking of Song of the South and the tar baby, I definitely grew up with this read-along book and cassette.
In 1980, when I was two years old, my very first trip to the movies was to see Song of the South. All I remember was being bored and running up and down the aisles. I don’t believe I’ve seen the film since; its only other rerelease in my lifetime was in 1986, and the film has bever been put on home video in this country. The film has been suppressed by Disney because of discomfort with the racial content of the movie, despite the film’s Academy Award (best song: “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah”) and the major theme park attraction (Splash Mountain) based on it.
I picked up a bootleg (European?) copy on my recent trip to San Francisco, and tonight I finally got around to watching it again. I wanted to see for myself.
I guess i was ready for something much worse, because frankly, the film’s storytelling deficiencies are far worse than its racial insensitivities. The biggest problem is that despite taking place in antebellum Georgia, the slaves are portrayed a happy poor neighbors to the white plantation owners, with Uncle Remus coming across as an Uncle Tom type character. (From what I understand, this is true to the problematic Uncle Remus stories upon which the film is based.) There’s also some discomfort around the Tar Baby scene, but I think that’s somewhat misplaced. The scene is a retelling of a folktale, and the problematic usage of the term to refer to black people isn’t at all invoked. I’m not sure erasing this story undoes the harm of the term, but I fully acknowledge that I’m not in a position to judge.
But here’s the thing: there are far more popular Disney films with considerably more problematic depictions of race: Dumbo’s crows and Peter Pan’s Indians both immediately spring to mind. Part of me suspects that Disney continues to suppress Song of the South so they can point their fingers at that effort as a way of “proving” they’re not racist, drawing attention away from the more problematic but more “classic”—and therefore more profitable—other films.
What do you think?
I don’t know how many of y’all care about Star Wars, but it’s one of the fandoms I’ve wandered in and out of over the years.
I see a lot of people freaking out over today’s news that Disney has acquired Lucasfilm as though it’s some kind of sign of the End Times.
Let’s remember that Lucasfilm has been in creative freefall since at least the mid-90s, with the release of the special editions of the original trilogy. In fact, the only great Star Wars live-action product to come out of the company since Return of the Jedi was Disney’s Star Tours. Sure, the comics and cartoons have been great, but there’s no reason to expect them to be anything less now owned by the world’s best cartoon company which just so happened to have purchased the world’s best comics company in the recent past. You know, that company that produced the original Star Wars comics.
Let’s also remember that Disney has proven to be excellent stewards of Pixar, Marvel, and The Muppets.
So in a worst-case scenario, this is a value-neutral transaction, but all signs point to this being at least moderately positive. So calm yo tits, y’all.
