Song of the South and "cancelling" problematic media 

• Walt Disney Pictures

Those who know me at all, or who have followed my writing for a sufficient length of time, know that one of my passions—aside from the arts—is Disneyland. As a native Californian, I grew up going to the park, rekindled my affection for it as a parent bringing his own children, and became interested enough in the phenomenon of "Disney adults" that I wrote a book about them. So it's always a notable occasion for me when Disneyland opens a new attraction—as will happen on Nov. 15, when Tiana's Bayou Adventure welcomes guests to a flume ride based on The Princess and the Frog.

This particular ride, however, appears with some controversy among the Disney Parks faithful. In park parlance, it's a "re-skin"—something that takes an existing ride system and changes the theme. Tiana's Bayou Adventure will occupy the place once home to Splash Mountain, a ride themed to the 1946 Disney feature Song of the South. While Disney will never acknowledge as much publicly, the reason for that change is well-understood: Song of the South has been buried by the company for decades now—last released on VHS in 1986, and withheld from either digital home media or streaming platforms once it became clear that the movie's racial politics representing the American South were ... let's just say "problematic."

Now, whenever anything changes in Disney Parks, a certain segment of the fan base loses its collective mind. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug, and losing something associated with happy childhood memories is understandably difficult. In this case, the consternation was magnified by those who threw a fit because Song of the South—and by extension, Splash Mountain—had become yet another sacrifice at the altar of "cancel culture," that all-purpose conservative bugaboo that generally means "I said or did something terrible, and how dare I actually be held accountable for it."

As it happens, though, the term actually kind of applies here. Song of the South genuinely has been cancelled by the Disney company, in the sense that they're making it impossible to experience. And here's where I'm going to get myself into trouble: I wish that weren't the case.

Full disclosure: I'm pretty sure I've never seen Song of the South in its entirety, in large part because of the aforementioned lack of access. It could be the most genuinely offensive thing ever drawn or committed to celluloid—but I doubt that's the case, because I've seen some of the things Disney did eventually release on DVD. We're not even talking about Dumbo (the Jim Crow crows), Peter Pan (the Native American representation) or Lady and the Tramp (the buck-toothed Siamese cats), but some of the short cartoons released in the Walt Disney Treasures collections of the early 2000s. Many of them included introductions by film historian/critic Leonard Maltin, alerting viewers to potentially offensive racial stereotypes. It was an opportunity to provide historical context without pretending these films never existed.

I've watched a lot of movies in my lifetime, and many of the ones I hold most dear include elements that are pretty indefensible. Just as one example, I fell in love with Marx Brothers movies as a kid—particularly Duck Soup, in which Groucho makes a joke about "darkies" based on an era-specific popular song. Is it possible to enjoy the movie if that single gag were edited out, or the offending word "bleeped?" Of course. I'm just not sure that's the best way to address history, particularly the history of a creative work.

Movies are certainly not the only artistic form to face such challenges; books like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn have been removed from libraries because of its use of the n-word, just as one noteworthy example. And in none of these cases do I think society is done any favors by pretending that the works don't exist. Providing context—the way those aforementioned Leonard Maltin introductions did—allows for a realization that our collective sense of right and wrong is always evolving, and therefore might still need to evolve even further. Plus, if this election year has taught us anything, it's that sanitizing the history of American racism hasn't exactly made American racists disappear.

I'll enjoy Tiana's Bayou Adventure when I eventually get a chance to ride it, and I'll be just fine if I live my whole life never seeing Song of the South. I just believe the fight for justice is better served by understanding everything we've fighting for—and against. That's something worth singing "Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah" over.