Dis­ney has added cul­tur­al depic­tion warn­ings to some stream­ing titles

It’s hard­ly a secret that Dis­ney, the hap­pi­est friend­liest smi­li­est cor­po­ra­tion on Earth, has some skele­tons in their clos­et. Their films repro­duce the hege­mon­ic ide­ol­o­gy of the era of their pro­duc­tion, which is just a cin­e­ma-major way of say­ing that their library con­tains some eth­nic stereo­types shock­ing to a present-day view­er but not so out-of-joint with a less-enlight­ened time.

When the com­pa­ny first announced that they’d make their full cat­a­logue of titles avail­able via the Dis­ney+ stream­ing ser­vice, about five sec­onds elapsed before some­one won­dered if that would include their ear­li­er, rosi­ly racist work as well. Now that Dis­ney Plus is up and (for the most part) run­ning, the ques­tion of how the stu­dio will reck­on with its own past has been answered, though not to everyone’s satisfaction.

For starters, Song of the South has been giv­en the heave-ho, along with a Simp­sons episode already pulled from cir­cu­la­tion. That episode, ​‘Stark Rav­ing Dad’, fea­tures a depic­tion of Michael Jack­son made regret­table by the recent pedophil­ia alle­ga­tions against him; Song of the South shines kind­ly on the evils of slav­ery and plays on the Uncle Remus stock char­ac­ter, seen as demean­ing to the black com­mu­ni­ty by many critics.

Far more com­mon is a brief dis­claimer, two sen­tences and tacked on before the first frame: ​“This pro­gram is pre­sent­ed as orig­i­nal­ly cre­at­ed. It may con­tain out­dat­ed cul­tur­al depic­tions.” Both in phrase­ol­o­gy and its appli­ca­tion, Disney’s pro­to­col here has left some­thing to be desired.

The con­di­tion­al unsure­ness of the phrase ​“may con­tain” should raise an eye­brow; is the sug­ges­tion that the bla­tant­ly Ori­en­tal­ist-designed Siamese cats of Lady and the Tramp ​‘may’ qual­i­fy as ​‘out­dat­ed’ and that they ​‘may’ not? What’s more, this large­ly per­func­to­ry sen­tence does noth­ing to artic­u­late, clar­i­fy, or oth­er­wise con­tex­tu­al­ize the sub­ject at hand.

It wasn’t so long ago that Warn­er Bros attached a thor­ough and thought­ful caveat to some of their dici­er car­toons, explain­ing that racial prej­u­dice was com­mon­place in this age of Amer­i­can soci­ety, and that while the stu­dio does not endorse this mate­r­i­al at present, it would his­tor­i­cal denial­ism to erase them com­plete­ly. Dis­ney has tak­en a less nuanced approach, tak­ing out the racial ele­ment entire­ly to cast the faults as an old ver­sion of art that sim­ply requires a new patch download.

The selec­tion of titles to which Dis­ney has attached this warn­ing also seems a tad telling. While Dumbo’s ​“Jim Crow”, Lady and the Tramp’s Siamese cats, and Peter Pan’s car­i­ca­tured Native Amer­i­cans all mer­it­ed the dis­claimer card, the recent Aladdin (pil­lo­ried by some Mid­dle East­ern detrac­tors for Agrabah’s stereo­type-informed depic­tion of the region) does not. There’s an under­ly­ing impli­ca­tion that racism was some­thing that hap­pened before civ­il rights and then end­ed, leav­ing the ​’90s a moral­ly upstand­ing time, when in actu­al­i­ty there was still plen­ty of matur­ing to be done.

The wax of dig­i­tal media and the wane of the phys­i­cal means that stu­dios hold more pow­er and con­trol over how their films are seen than ever. It’s absolute­ly essen­tial to keep the true mem­o­ry of his­to­ry alive, because every year, it’s just going to get eas­i­er and eas­i­er for those in author­i­ty to rewrite it.