“Stories Matter” But Facts Don’t: On Disney’s Shameful, Insulting, and Condescending Revisionism of its Own History

By Matthew Anscher

The Walt Disney Company has a long, shameful history of reinforcing racist ideas and attitudes, according to… The Walt Disney Company! Their official website now has a page called “Stories Matter” where they explain their rationalization for why the Disney+ versions of certain movies and TV shows, such as Peter Pan, Dumbo, The Aristocats, Lady and the Tramp, and Swiss Family Robinson, must now come with warning labels similar to the ones they put on rap and rock CDs in the 1990s for “explicit content.” Not only this, but they have made these films and shows inaccessible to viewers under the age of seven!

None of this justifies the excuses for why these movies get off with a warning but Song of the South must be stricken from the record altogether like a homophobic family disowning a gay son or daughter. In fact, the website itself says:

“As part of our ongoing commitment to diversity and inclusion, we are in the process of reviewing our library and adding advisories to content that includes negative depictions or mistreatment of people or cultures. Rather than removing this content, we see an opportunity to spark conversation and open dialogue on history that affects us all. We also want to acknowledge that some communities have been erased or forgotten altogether, and we're committed to giving voice to their stories as well.”

This begs even more questions. First, to whom were Darryl Hannah’s buttocks in Splash offensive enough to require giving her shoddy and unconvincing digital hair extensions that wouldn’t have been possible in 1984? More importantly, why should we care what people who support that kind of censorship think? We’re adults. We know what’s under there. Some way to repay a woman who arguably saved the studio by starring in their biggest commercial success since The Love Bug.

Second, how is it not homophobic to call a Tommy Kirk movie racist, especially when his prominence on the covers of home media releases of Swiss Family Robinson over the years have downplayed his character of Ernst Robinson with each new format since DVD? Based on that, how is it also not homophobic (and xenophobic) to keep censoring Roddy McDowall movies, be they Bedknobs and Broomsticks (demoted back to a virtually McDowall-less 2-hour cut since 2014) or The Adventures of Bullwhip Griffin? Racism is more than just hating people who look different from you. It also requires the power to hurt those people for that reason. This is not something LGB people have. There are still many countries where it is illegal to be gay but none where it's illegal not to be.

Third, why were seven minutes cut from Disney+’s version of The Bears and I, a 1974 release mainly noted because John Denver sang its theme song and still performed it in concert at least as late as 1994? Considering that I have never seen this film, what was so objectionable about the content that it needed to be removed, especially when the film only ran a mere 89 minutes to begin with? This really brings it full circle; in the 1980s, when people like future Second Lady Tipper Gore spoke out about content in popular music that they considered vulgar or obscene, Denver spoke out against the potential negative consequences of the actions of her and others like her.

Thank God I'm a Country Bear: Disney excised 7 minutes from the G-rated 1974 film to which the late singer/songwriter and anti-censorship advocate John Denver lent his voice

Fourth, why does … get off the hook, especially when  The Aristocats, which also has Sherman Brothers songs in them, didn’t? In an instance of a stopped clock being right twice a day, The New York Times called the film “flirting with blackface” and pointed out that the phrase “Hottentots,” as spoken by Reginald Owen while shooting fireworks at them out of a cannon, is a derogatory term for the Khoekhoe tribe of Africa. It does not help that these blacked-up chimney sweeps, who should barely be able to breathe let alone sing, are constantly singing “step in” which sounds like Stepin Fetchit, an actor whose name is now considered shorthand for racial stereotyping if he is considered at all. Except he was really Black. That’s the least of this obscenely overpraised film’s problems. The staging itself looks derivative of the “America” number from West Side Story. The irritating songs do not advance the poorly structured plot which ambles clumsily from set piece to set piece with an ever-changing tone that gracelessly switches from dorky to maudlin to just plain tedious until it reaches its unconvincing and troubling conclusion. Even so, the whole idea that a woman with all these magical powers would use them to be nothing more than a glorified domestic is not just absurd, even in the context of a fantasy musical, it’s classist. Also, how is it not both racist and sexist for a white woman to declare herself “practically perfect in every way” when it all but states outright that being Black and/or male is a character flaw? And how is it not sexist to sing

“Although we adore men

individually, we agree as a group

they’re rather stupid,” 

especially when that line was written by heterosexual men (disclaimer: I have met Richard M. Sherman and his wife) and has the effect of making women’s rights activists look like a bunch of silly man-haters? And considering homosexuality was still illegal in England for men when it was never technically banned for women, talk-singing “it’s grand to be an Englishman in 1910” seems more than a little homophobic, while “I sang this song to me girl, and now me girl’s me wife” comes off as heterosexist. The title character not having any relationship just doesn’t cut it anymore; it sends the message that your options are heterosexuality or nothing, especially when Disney would rather make Princess Elsa’s grandparents land robbers than make her a lesbian. Not to mention how criminally negligent it is to sing about the virtues of sugar now that obesity rates are through the roof in the developed world, even among children. And why should we care about characters whose lifestyle is enabled by usury, which is a sin in all three Abrahamic religions?

Sooner or later, they're finally gonna be coming around.

If any Disney movie should have been called out for promoting bad and even evil ideas, it’s this one. Yet there is no warning of racist, sexist, or homophobic content in the film’s Disney+ listing. Even the name of the film is offensive—“Mary” is an outdated slang term for a gay man, and to pop someone means to hit them. So the film’s title literally means “beating up gay men.” This makes Rob Marshall, who is openly gay, a sellout and an Uncle Tom for directing a sequel that was as unnecessary as his terrible remake of Annie. Compare this to “The Beautiful Briny” in the far superior Bedknobs and Broomsticks, one of the songs written during the film’s early 1960s pre-production period when Walt was still alive:

“Far from the frenzy

Of the frantic world above,

Two beneath the blue

Could even fall in love.”

Despite being sung by a man and a woman, this could theoretically refer to any combination of the sexes. The real-life equivalent of the Nazis that Eglantine Price and Emelius Browne used magic to fight back against (and Reginald Owen shot at along with the soldiers of the old Home Guard) killed homosexuals in addition to Jews. A lot of the cuts made to the film were things that implied, unintentionally or otherwise, homosexuality: during the “Portobello Road” dance number, an uninterrupted 8-second shot of two women dancing arm in arm, along with a subsequent shot of a man lifting another man and carrying him around his waist, exist only as worn faded work print footage that needed extensive digital restoration to be put back into the film and match the rest of it, only to be taken out again for no good reason along with most of Roddy McDowall’s role as the smarmy Rev. Jelk.

A step in the wrong direction: Roddy McDowall's work at Disney has been the subject of multiple acts of cutting and censorship. Did I mention his last film there was A Bug's Life, which also had Kevin Spacey?

Fifth, if Peter Pan is tagged for an inauthentic depiction of Native Americans (how can you be authentic to a place that is only make-believe anyway?), why not Pocahontas as well?  She was real, but the Disney version of her life was a lightning magnet for protests when it came out in 1995 (even though another Mel Gibson movie, Braveheart, got off the hook for its historical inaccuracies to the tune of a Best Picture Oscar the same year). But with the earlier film, such glibly reductive analyses require you to ignore huge chunks of the film from major plot points, like the Neverland Indians being allies of Peter Pan and the Lost Boys against the very white Captain Hook and his equally white pirates, to minor character moments such as the interracial nose-kiss between Peter Pan and Tiger Lily. This was in 1953 when huge swaths of the country were still racially segregated. Now this is off limits to anyone under seven. (Author’s note: I was six when I first saw the film in its final US theatrical reissue in 1989).

Sixth, the studio’s pathological need to label everything and anything from the past as potentially problematic despite actually having artistic merit has claimed the least likely victim, The Muppet Show, on Disney+ as well. This the same “Stories Matter” disclaimers have been added to the show in an effort to warn people about 18 episodes, one of which has Jim Nabors, one of the few Andy Griffith Show cast members Disney never hired to appear in a movie, in it. This comes off as a slam against Jim Henson—a white Southerner who held absolutely no hatred in his heart towards anyone and tried to unite all the peoples of the world, like Walt Disney did! Another case of heartless radicals not knowing their history and causing Jim Henson’s mission “to leave the world a little better for having been there” to be declared a failure and the spirit and values taught by The Muppet Show, Sesame Street and Fraggle Rock to be wrongfully thrown away in favor of more wars, misunderstandings and stupidities! On the other hand, a warning is not worse than what the Chris Langham episode got. Though he has paid his debt to society for a truly awful crime against children, the youngest of whom already can no longer even see certain other episodes, Disney believes he should be punished some more by omitting his episode from Disney+ altogether. Langham wrote for the show in addition to performing, and he only performed on the show in its fifth and last season because Richard Pryor’s cocaine habit literally blew up in his face. So we can’t see him but we can see however much of his scripted material made it to air. This makes it all the more ironic that in trying to sidestep one scandal, they stumbled into another one years after the fact.

Well, gaw-LEE! 18 episodes of the classic Jim Henson sketch comedy, including one featuring Jim Nabors, are now considered inappropriate for children under seven.

Finally, and most importantly, why does this “open dialogue” spiel not apply to Song of the South? As long as that movie remains under lock and key and as long as that film’s characters are in danger of being Stalinized from the Magic Kingdoms altogether, this reveals them to have a double standard, without which they would have no standards at all. If they were at all serious about conversation or dialogue, then the film never would have disappeared and Splash Mountain, the ride based on it would not be in danger of getting any kind of re-theme. It is an insult to most peoples’ intelligence to expect the majority of audiences to believe that they care about improving race relations when they cooperated with a Chinese agency that operates concentration camps during production on the live-action version of Mulan. You can’t spark conversation or open dialogue while engaging in corporate censorship, collaborating with war criminals, and restoring cuts to executive pay while firing rank-and-file company employees and theme park cast members.

So who are Disney’s partners in condescension? One of them is Geena Davis Institute on G*nd*r in Media. Fighting sexism by promoting an outdated and mildly offensive word that embodies soul-crushing sexual stereotypes of both men and women. Was Susan Sarandon busy? Another is the USC Annenberg Norman Lear Center. Yes, that Norman Lear, who produced such long-running 1970s sitcoms as All in the Family, Maude, Good Times, and The Jeffersons. Lear’s shows faced accusations of racism, too; some of them even came from within when Good Times star John Amos went to Ebony Magazine to call the J.J. character a bad influence; they responded by firing Amos, effectively sentencing the show to a slow and painful death. And that was after the Black Panthers stormed Lear’s office asking to see “the garbage man.” Many years after the fact, Good Times co-creator Eric Monte, whose movie Cooley High was later adapted by one of Lear’s partners without Lear or Monte into the mostly apolitical sitcom What’s Happening!!, called Lear “a racist, a liar, and a thief.” And after two complete DVD series releases of Good Times by two different companies, Jimmie “J.J.” Walker allegedly fired a gay black comedian named Sampson who opened for him during the 2010s; however, Sampson did not do himself any favors by putting the Q-word on his Twitter profile. (Author's disclosure: I saw Jimmie Walker perform live when he came to my home town because it is doubtful people higher on the celebrity totem pole than he is are going to do so. Not once did he mention homosexuality, and the opening act was a heterosexual Hispanic man who mentioned the three most sacred figures to white, Black, and Latino audiences.)

Sha-la-la-la: Geena Davis tries to fight stereotypes using a word that embodies them

Should these shows also be slapped with warning labels or even be given the same treatment as Amos ’n’ Andy, which CBS Films (the precursor to Viacom, now ViacomCBS) pulled from syndication (presumably) permanently in the mid-1960s once segregation was effectively over? That’s already starting. A UK Blu-ray release of John Cleese’s sitcom Fawlty Towers has a warning about “racist language” even though it is only included to make the man uttering it look like a doddering old fool. And as of this writing, Canada’s CTV has gained the rights to complete runs of such shows as Sanford and Son, Good Times, and The Jeffersons … with the following caveat:

“This program is presented as originally created. It may contain language, attitudes, cultural depictions and racial prejudices which may cause offence [sic].” 

I am not offended by the show per se, just the condescending way the content is labeled. George Jefferson’s prejudices are reflexive of having grown up in a world where white supremacy was not only normalized, but enshrined into law. It offends me when anyone tries to equate his verbal retaliation against systemic racism with that same systemic racism, even his own wife. To be honest, my single biggest reservation about All in the Family has less to do with their insinuation that Archie’s racism is somehow representative of American conservatism — it isn’t, it’s just Norman Lear projecting his father’s anti-Blackness and the classism of the British inherited from Till Death us do Part onto the American working class — but the fact they don’t do enough to call out Mike Stivic for his sexism and homophobia. Yes, I said homophobia because after he and Gloria had Baby Joey, he said overprotective parenting causes homosexuality. This is a man with a college degree who still never got any job not related to the field of academia, and he says something this stupid, pseudoscientific, and not only homophobic, but sexist as well. Lionel Jefferson was cool. Mike was a meathead. Steve, the actually gay one-shot character in the 1971 episode “Judging Books By Covers” that made President Nixon angry (for reasons Archie likely would have agreed with) was never in a scene with Mike; he was a patron at Kelcy’s Bar, one Archie would later own and answer the phone by saying “we cater to straights [sic].” And worst of all, in the four-season sequel series Archie Bunker’s Place, Mike had successfully turned Archie against his own daughter after their divorce. Archie said to her: “I never thought I’d say this, but he’s too good for you.”

The least racist white people in Norman Lear's world are on The Jeffersons. Of the principal characters who are white — Tom Willis, Harry Bentley, and Ralph the Doorman — whom do they hate? No one I can recall. But who, magic mirror, is the most racist of them all? Archie Bunker? Too obvious, and he changes over time to the point where he chases the KKK out of Queens and punches a guy out for calling him a "n----r lover." Maude's Dr. Arthur Harmon? No, he has more of a problem with gays despite an affinity for musical theater. No, the most racist one of all is the least one you'd expect: Maude Findlay. Her third housekeeper, Victoria Butterfield (Marlene Warfield, who also played revolutionary-turned-sellout Laureen Hobbs in Network) was a Caribbean immigrant, and Maude acted shocked and even hurt that she liked Andy Williams better than Harry Belafonte. Neither of them must have listened to Petula Clark, a name Norman Lear dropped in the All in the Family 200th Episode Special in 1979, because otherwise they might have seen her separate TV specials with Harry on NBC in 1968 (the target of attempted censorship by the network that boasted of being "in living color") and with Andy on ABC in 1970. Despite being white, she still felt she had the right to tell a Black woman what to listen to.

Nixon's the One: The 39th President accused All in the Family of promoting homosexuality. Wait'll he sees Silver Spoons!

There is a difference between being racist and making fun of people for being racist. Despite claiming to know the difference, seeing racist incidents in the present day make me wonder about whether TV has an effect on it. Though I used to doubt them, I’m starting to believe the accusations of racism against Norman Lear if for no other reason than the fact that his now-defunct Embassy Television production company gave Tony Danza, the embodiment of the Stupid White Male stereotype, his own show after Taxi, which could be funny when they focused on anyone other than him, was canceled, and what he got was a horrifically unfunny all-white ABC knockoff of the hilarious NBC sitcom Gimme A Break! That show’s creators, Mort Lachman (formerly of All in the Family) and Sy Rosen (formerly of The Jeffersons), left Embassy, then known as T.A.T. Communications Company, to produce it for Alan Landsburg, producer of In Search Of…, That's Incredible, and (for some reason) the last two Jaws movies. Meanwhile, Archie Bunker got a much skinnier Black housekeeper, Mrs. Canby, around the same time.

The ripoff paradoxically got better ratings than the superior (and racially integrated) predecessor which came three years earlier. Okay, so domestic help has been part of the TV landscape since as far back as Beulah and part of drama and literature since at least the Roman Empire, but it’s no coincidence that on NBC's show, Nell Carter’s character’s ex-husband was named Tony, one of the daughters was a tomboy named Samantha, and another daughter eventually married a man named Jonathan. All those names were characters ABC's show, which premiered three years later, used. And whatever they didn’t steal from that show they stole from Cheers, one of NBC’s most acclaimed and beloved sitcoms ever. It couldn’t possibly be a coincidence that Ted Danson has the same initials and that both of them played ex-athletes who blur the line between work and play in their less glamorous new jobs. This makes the accusations that Lear is a thief even easier to believe. The show premiered in 1984 literally 30 minutes after The Cosby Show premiered on NBC, and Lear sold Embassy to Coca-Cola, then owner of Columbia and TriStar Pictures who would also buy out Merv Griffin’s company among others, in 1985, so he only had involvement in one season out of an inexplicable eight, and even then it was on a corporate level at best. But it shows how far his standards had dropped in the 13 years to that point from the beginning of All in the Family, not to mention wasting the talents of Katherine Helmond who was put to much better use on Soap (created by Lear protege Susan Harris without him for her own company which later co-produced The Golden Girls, itself the recent target of a censorship brouhaha, with Touchstone Television) where she received an Emmy nomination (three of her co-stars won), and in films such as Brazil and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. That actually funny groundbreaking classic now has a warning label. The inferior show she squandered eight years of her life on does not. The former was the one that had Black people on it. One of them even got a spinoff: Benson, which was not as edgy but no less well-written and acted. That’s up and it doesn’t have a warning label. It also has edited episodes for seasons 6 and 7, the former of which earned Robert Guillaume a second Emmy; his first was for playing the same role on Soap.

One of these things is not like the other. Several of these shows are classics but one is a festering piece of garbage.

Now nearly 100, Lear is spending the remainder of his career repeating past successes. One Day at a Time ran nine seasons on CBS in the 1970s and 1980s with a white family of Italian and WASP extraction, then they came back for four seasons in streaming as Cuban-Americans. But the shows with Black actors only got one-time Jimmy Kimmel specials. If Black lives really mattered to Lear, then he would be bringing back Silver Spoons (where a now-deceased gay Black actor named Franklyn Seales played a non-domestic professional role) and the Emmy Award-winning 227; Sony also inherited both of these shows from Embassy, and both ran five years each without Lear’s name in the credits. A Black Lady Sketch Show’s reboot sketch will have to do until then. Lear already sold Embassy by the time 227 began, but many of the writers, producers, and directors who worked under him stayed around. Both of them are on CTV but the former is edited for syndication, missing two minutes from every episode. And Silver Spoons had Alfonso Ribiero before he was Carlton Banks, so that alone justifies its inclusion and presence in its entirety on DVD, where no season after the first is available. 227 also only got a single season DVD release in the 2000s that tried to cram 10 episodes onto a single disc. The second season, the one Jackée Harry won the Emmy for, cannot be purchased on disc nor any subsequent seasons. Concurrent shows that Lear actually got credited for such as Palmerstown USA and aka Pablo flopped, as did all the new shows he tried to launch via Act III Communications after Sony bought Columbia from Coca-Cola and with it the rights to his older shows, and were quickly forgotten. Sunday Dinner and 704 Hauser couldn’t beat actual All in the Family reruns in the ratings, while his attempt to get into animation with Channel Umptee-3, flopped despite having Mark Evanier, who wrote seven highly-rated seasons of Garfield and Friends for CBS and Film Roman (and the sole season of Disney's The Wuzzles), on board with it. But with his hit shows still in reruns, it’s odd to see Lear’s name attached to this finger-pointing campaign while the finger is being pointed at his legacy similarly, and also for the wrong reasons.

Another one of these groups is GLAAD: The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation. Truth be told, the days when they actually focused on gay and lesbian issues are gone with the wind — I still remember the early 2000s protests against Dr. Laura and Eminem — and tr-ns issues have taken the forefront. Of all people, you’d think they would have felt at least a twinge of sympathy for Johnny, Bobby Driscoll’s character in Song of the South, when the Favors brothers bullied him by singing “look at the little girlie” because of the lace shirt collar his mother made him wear. This sort of teasing still goes on to this day! This author has had personal experience with that. But no. They still refuse to budge. Instead, you get Katie Couric pushing tr-ns propaganda and hiding behind the legacy of National Geographic to justify it! Norman Lear was ahead of this particular curve; one of his flops was a 1977 syndicated soap opera called All That Glitters, and one of the cast members was Linda Gray (later Dallas’s Sue Ellen Shepard Ewing Lockwood) as the recipient of a sex change in a parallel universe where women dominate men. It is after this point that Lear started to reduce his personal day-to-day involvement with sitcoms in favor of movies, many of them directed by Rob Reiner, who couldn’t get gay marriage legalized without one of George W. Bush’s Supreme Court lawyers.

Dr. Laura Schlesinger: Protested off TV by GLAAD. Those were the days.

Not only that, but Disney could not bring themselves to type the words “gay” or “lesbian” on their websites despite many gays, lesbians, and bisexuals having worked for the company over the decades. Yet another is a group I had never heard of called “Tanenbaum” which claims to be devoted to “systematically dismantling religious prejudice, hatred and violence while promoting justice and respect for people of all religious beliefs.” Tell that to the Uighur Muslims interned at the concentration camp in Xinjiang thanked in the credits of 2020’s Mulan.

Unless it is a one-way line of communication where fans and cast members talk and the company listens and does what we say, there will be no conversation or dialogue with Disney until Song of the South is back to stay, the Splash Mountain re-theme is completely abandoned, and the labeling and censorship of content made by marginalized groups is put to an end! If this is the hill on which Disney is willing to die, then this death can rightly be called a suicide. If Disney would rather lose $5 billion in a single quarter than make Song of the South legally available to anyone who wants it, then they will get what they asked for. If they continue to take their inability to make the Muppets great again out on one of Jim Henson’s crowning achievements, then they will face the consequences of attacking their fan bases. That’s the thing about Disney fandom: it’s basically a collection of fandoms of whatever IP they own the rights to at any given time. None of us, be they old-school Disney fans, Marvel aficionados, Star Wars fans, Muppet fans, or even 90s kids who just can’t let go of The Simpsons and Family Guy despite them both being years past their respective primes, will put up with being insulted or attacked this way or any other way.

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