Could someone explain the Splash Mt. Story to Me

[TAKitty]

I love Splash Mountain, but I don't understand the story. Why is he going to the laughing place? What is the laughing place? I just don't get it.

 

[WVParkfan]

Have you ever read the book or have you ever seen the movie, "Song of the South?"

Without going into great detail, a gentleman named Uncle Remus tells stories to children, and the characters that he makes up include Brer Rabbit, Brer Bear, and Brer Fox. Brer Rabbit is the "hero" of the stories, and is a crafty fellow. The "Laughing Place" is the brier patch, where he feels safe.

Here is a link to some stories:
http://www.americanfolklore.net/brer-rabbit.html

Song of the South is not available on DVD because (at least what we've been told) some people feel that the movie contains racial undertones. If I remember correctly, Uncle Remus is a slave, or was recently a slave. (I haven't seen the movie in 30 years, so I don't really remember). Here is some info about the movie:
http://www.songofthesouth.net/movie/overview/index.html

Regardless, the theming for Splash Mountain is absolutely fantastic.

 

[Ratpack]

Yep, everything pretty much comes from Song of the South. That was one of the great classics from Disney when I was a child. If you would like to see it, search around, you can find copies of it from time to time. I have the DVD and my kids love to watch it. If you do find a copy, it most likely won't be an original as it was pulled from the shelves many years ago because it had slavery in it. But compared to what you see on TV and movies today, it should be allowed to be produced again.

 

[goofyernmost]

Have you ever read the book or have you ever seen the movie, "Song of the South?"

Without going into great detail, a gentleman named Uncle Remus tells stories to children, and the characters that he makes up include Brer Rabbit, Brer Bear, and Brer Fox. Brer Rabbit is the "hero" of the stories, and is a crafty fellow. The "Laughing Place" is the brier patch, where he feels safe.

Here is a link to some stories:
http://www.americanfolklore.net/brer-rabbit.html

Song of the South is not available on DVD because (at least what we've been told) some people feel that the movie contains racial undertones. If I remember correctly, Uncle Remus is a slave, or was recently a slave. (I haven't seen the movie in 30 years, so I don't really remember). Here is some info about the movie:
http://www.songofthesouth.net/movie/overview/index.html

Regardless, the theming for Splash Mountain is absolutely fantastic.

Song of the South IS available on DVD. I know because I just bought one. There are racial stereotypes depicted in the movie but for the most part it is the "White folk" that come across clueless and in need of lesson teaching. Not being black I cannot understand what about the movie is offensive to the degree that it isn't explainable by the time of the original movie (1946). There is, of course, the inevitable separations of wealth (white...rich, black...poor) but spiritually and sensitively the rich white people really look bad in this movie. I think I bought mine of E-bay! It is indeed a Disney classic.

 

[JzeroT1437]

Watching Song of the South makes the ride make a lot more sense. You should look around and watch it.

 

[SnackyStacky]

Br'er Rabbit has become fed up with his life in the briar patch. So he decides he's gonna pack up his stuff and go seek adventure.

Along the way, Bre'er Fox and Br'er Bear thinks he looks like a tasty meal. So they try and trap him so they can eat him. They set up a trap, and Br'er Bear ends up getting caught in it. Then, they follow Br'er Rabbit to his "Laughing Place", which happens to be a cave with a bee hive. Br'er Bear ends up in a huge mess with a bunch of bees. While Br'er Rabbit is laughing at him, Br'er Fox sneaks up behind him and grabs him. In an attempt to avoid certain death, he tells Br'er Fox he can skin him, cook him - to do what he must - just to NOT fling him into the briar patch. Br'er Fox flings him into the briar patch, and you follow him. (That would be the last drop)

He ends up at back at home, and all live happily ever after.

That's it in a nutshell.

 

[SnackyStacky]

Song of the South IS available on DVD. I know because I just bought one. There are racial stereotypes depicted in the movie but for the most part it is the "White folk" that come across clueless and in need of lesson teaching. Not being black I cannot understand what about the movie is offensive to the degree that it isn't explainable by the time of the original movie (1946). There is, of course, the inevitable separations of wealth (white...rich, black...poor) but spiritually and sensitively the rich white people really look bad in this movie. I think I bought mine of E-bay! It is indeed a Disney classic.

It's not available on commercial, legitimate DVD in the United States. Some overseas places sell it, and you can find copies on EBay. But Disney has refused to commercially release it.

What makes the movie so politically incorrect was that it showed an amicable, almost family-like relationship between slaves and owners. It's a HORRIBLY inaccurate picture of what happened. Further, if you listen to the way that the black people speak - it's that tremendously racist dialect. Things like "massah" instead of master? It's hard to explain. For a better idea, listen to the way Butterfly McQueen, Oscar Polk, and Hattie McDaniel speak in Gone With the Wind. Which by the way is about the same level of political incorrectness as Song of the South. "Classic" status aside, I'm not sure why that one's okay to release, but Song of the South isn't.

 

[laurie31]

What makes the movie so politically incorrect was that it showed an amicable, almost family-like relationship between slaves and owners. It's a HORRIBLY inaccurate picture of what happened. Further, if you listen to the way that the black people speak - it's that tremendously racist dialect. Things like "massah" instead of master? It's hard to explain. For a better idea, listen to the way Butterfly McQueen, Oscar Polk, and Hattie McDaniel speak in Gone With the Wind. Which by the way is about the same level of political incorrectness as Song of the South. "Classic" status aside, I'm not sure why that one's okay to release, but Song of the South isn't.

Just wanted to point out that the movie is set during the Reconstruction (after the Civil War) so there are no slaves, just servants. Not that that's much better...but Uncle Remus choses to leave the plantation of his own free will near the end. I'm sure 99.9% of slaves turned servants did not have such a nice relationship with their former masters, though But Disney movies are always warm and fuzzy and not so much cold hard reality.

As for the language, if I'm not mistaken, that is how they spoke. I'm reading the Uncle Remus stories to my children now and it's almost impossible to read the words as the book is written in that dialect. The kids love them, though. We checked the book out from the library.

The thing with the Briar Patch, is that Br'er Rabbit is tricking Br'er Bear and Br'er Fox into throwing him in there. He makes them believe it's the worst possible thing they could do to him. They want to boil him, eat him, etc, and he say he doesn't care if they do that, just so long as they don't throw him in the briar patch. So they finally decide to do just that. Well, the briar patch is his home, he's very happy to go there - and escape his fate of being dinner!

 

[PanamaMike]

HORRIBLY inaccurate picture of what happened. Further, if you listen to the way that the black people speak - it's that tremendously racist dialect.

Will people 100 years from now be saying the same thing about this period in history?

"Surely they didn't really speak that way? Everybody knows that it is:
ask, not axe
with you, not wit chu
alright, not aiight
business, not bidness."

 

[wilde_oscar]

It's not available on commercial, legitimate DVD in the United States. Some overseas places sell it, and you can find copies on EBay. But Disney has refused to commercially release it.

What makes the movie so politically incorrect was that it showed an amicable, almost family-like relationship between slaves and owners. It's a HORRIBLY inaccurate picture of what happened. Further, if you listen to the way that the black people speak - it's that tremendously racist dialect. Things like "massah" instead of master? It's hard to explain. For a better idea, listen to the way Butterfly McQueen, Oscar Polk, and Hattie McDaniel speak in Gone With the Wind. Which by the way is about the same level of political incorrectness as Song of the South. "Classic" status aside, I'm not sure why that one's okay to release, but Song of the South isn't.

the more recent referance to the slang would be Jar Jar Binks in the new Start Wars movies.

 

[SnackyStacky]

I won't get into a debate about it - because that's not what this forum is for, nor is it what the OP asked for.

Having said that - I'm telling you what my wife told me. My wife is black. We've had this discussion because I didn't understand why it was offensive. Her response:

SnackyStacky: Why do you find Gone with the Wind and Song of the South offensive? Is it because of the inaccurate portrayal of slave/owner relationships and the way they had the black people speak - or am I remembering wrong?

Mrs. Snacky: Yeah kinda. My issue is that the black characters are portrayed as these caricatures. Wide eyed, jolly, (often bumbling fools).

Whether or not you choose to agree with that - that's your decision. But I think we can clearly agree that someone who is black is going to have a different perspective on the issue. And that's why Disney is so reticent to release it.

 

[MEM]

Actually, the Disney Company is considering re-releasing it...
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17819312/

 

[disnut8]

*waiting for someone to send the original poster's question to Disney*. Best reason for re-releasing Song of the South. I had to explain the attraction to my then-nineteen year old niece when we rode it together.

 

[SnackyStacky]

*waiting for someone to send the original poster's question to Disney*. Best reason for re-releasing Song of the South. I had to explain the attraction to my then-nineteen year old niece when we rode it together.

I still don't think the Br'er Rabbit scenes are a huge contigent of Song of the South. It's such a bit part of the movie - they're just the stories told to the kids. They do absolutely nothing to further the story of Song of the South.

AND - I could be remembering wrong - but don't they also do Br'er Rabbit and the tar baby in Song of the South? THAT is also HIGHLY, HIGHLY, HIGHLY racist and offensive. "Tar baby" is right up there with the "n" word and a few other choice racial slurs.

ETA: I think Disney was going for storytelling within the ride itself on Splash. Walt and the Imagineers didn't have the technology available today to set up a storyline. Think Tower of Terror and the library pre-show - you don't see that kind of setup in the rides from the later days of Disneyland and the early days of Disney World. I think that Splash is kind of a throwback to Pirates, Mansion and Jungle Cruise - ALL of the storytelling was done in the attraction itself. He set mood in the queue, but he didn't really setup a story. Just my $.02!

 

[TAKitty]

Goodness, I never knew this would start such a debate. I love riding splash and I knew that they were after the rabbit, but the rest was sort of lost on me. I didn't realize that the bear was trying to eat the rabbit. Thanks for all of your help!!

 

[goofyernmost]

I think that Disney has released it because I have seen it offered on some legitimate Disney Boards. I don't think they would do that without Disney's blessing and support.

 

[disneygoof]

Claim: The film Song of the South has never been released on home video in the USA.

Status: True.

Origins: Song
of the South, a 1946 Disney film mixing animation and live action, was based on the "Uncle Remus" stories of Joel Chandler Harris. Harris, who had grown up in Georgia during the Civil War, spent a lifetime compiling and publishing the tales told to him by former slaves. These stories -- many of which Harris learned from an old Black man he called "Uncle George" -- were first published as columns in The Atlanta Constitution and were later syndicated nationwide and published in book form. Harris's Uncle Remus was a fictitious old slave and philosopher who told entertaining fables about Br'er Rabbit and other woodland creatures in a Southern Black dialect.

Song of the South consists of animated sequences featuring Uncle Remus characters such as Br'er Rabbit, Br'er Fox, and Br'er Bear, framed by live-action portions in which Uncle Remus (portrayed by actor James Baskett, who won a special Oscar for his efforts) tells the stories to a little white boy upset over his parents' impending divorce. Although some Blacks have always been uneasy about the minstrel tradition of the Uncle Remus stories, the major objections to Song of the South had to do with the live action portions. The film has been criticized both for "making slavery appear pleasant" and "pretending slavery didn't exist", even though the film (like Harris' original collection of stories) is set after the Civil War and the abolition of slavery. Still, as folklorist Patricia A. Turner writes:


Disney's 20th century re-creation of Harris's frame story is much more heinous than the original. The days on the plantation located in "the United States of Georgia" begin and end with unsupervised Blacks singing songs about their wonderful home as they march to and from the fields. Disney and company made no attempt to to render the music in the style of the spirituals and work songs that would have been sung during this era. They provided no indication regarding the status of the Blacks on the plantation. Joel Chandler Harris set his stories in the post-slavery era, but Disney's version seems to take place during a surreal time when Blacks lived on slave quarters on a plantation, worked diligently for no visible reward and considered Atlanta a viable place for an old Black man to set out for.
Kind old Uncle Remus caters to the needs of the young white boy whose father has inexplicably left him and his mother at the plantation. An obviously ill-kept Black child of the same age named Toby is assigned to look after the white boy, Johnny. Although Toby makes one reference to his "ma," his parents are nowhere to be seen. The African-American adults in the film pay attention to him only when he neglects his responsibilities as Johnny's playmate-keeper. He is up before Johnny in the morning in order to bring his white charge water to wash with and keep him entertained.

The boys befriend a little blond girl, Ginny, whose family clearly represents the neighborhood's white trash. Although Johnny coaxes his mother into inviting Ginny to his fancy birthday party at the big house, Toby is curiously absent from the party scenes. Toby is good enough to catch frogs with, but not good enough to have birthday cake with. When Toby and Johnny are with Uncle Remus, the gray-haired Black man directs most of his attention to the white child. Thus Blacks on the plantation are seen as willingly subservient to the whites to the extent that they overlook the needs of their own children. When Johnny's mother threatens to keep her son away from the old gentleman's cabin, Uncle Remus is so hurt that he starts to run away. In the world that Disney made, the Blacks sublimate their own lives in order to be better servants to the white family. If Disney had truly understood the message of the tales he animated so delightfully, he would have realized the extent of distortion of the frame story.

The NAACP acknowledged "the remarkable artistic merit" of the film when it was first released, but decried "the impression it gives of an idyllic master-slave relationship". Disney re-released the film in 1956, but then kept it out of circulation all throughout the turbulent civil rights era of the 1960s. In 1970 Disney announced in Variety that Song of the South had been "permanently" retired, but the studio eventually changed its mind and re-released the film in 1972, 1981, and again in 1986 for a fortieth anniversary celebration. Although the film has only been released to the home video market in various European and Asian countries, Disney's reluctance to market it in the USA is not a reaction to an alleged threat by the NAACP to boycott Disney products. The NAACP fielded objections to Song of the South when it premiered, but it has no current position on the movie.

Perhaps lost in all the controversy over the film is the fact that James Baskett, a Black man, was the very first live actor ever hired by Disney. Allegedly, though, Baskett was unable to attend the film's premiere in Atlanta because no hotel would give him a room.

Last updated: 9 May 2003

 

[mickeyluv'r]

edit

 

[allisonswonderland]

OK - if you actually get off the train over in Frontierland it tells you the story of Splash Mountain on a sign by the steps- take a look. The Stills overturn and there is a reason they are all laughing in the Laughing Place is because they are drunk to my understanding. Not exactly what I was thinking and they do not come right out and say it....

 

[Buzz Litebeer]

Song of the South IS available on DVD. I know because I just bought one. There are racial stereotypes depicted in the movie but for the most part it is the "White folk" that come across clueless and in need of lesson teaching. Not being black I cannot understand what about the movie is offensive to the degree that it isn't explainable by the time of the original movie (1946). There is, of course, the inevitable separations of wealth (white...rich, black...poor) but spiritually and sensitively the rich white people really look bad in this movie. I think I bought mine of E-bay! It is indeed a Disney classic.

"Song of the South" has never been released in the US by Disney Home Video. The versions found on eBay are either pirated copies, or copies from Asia or Europe. Disney has refused to release the film because of concerns that modern audiences may perceive the film to be racially charged (critics stated that the film gave an impression "...of an idyllic master-slave relationship"). In fact, the NAACP praised the film when it was released, and have stated they have no plans to protest the film should it ever be released on DVD in the US.

The following synopsis is from Wikipedia:

The setting is the Southern United States, shortly after the American Civil War. Seven-year-old Johnny is excited about what he believes to be a vacation at his grandmother's Georgia plantation with his parents, John Sr. and Sally. When they arrive at the plantation, he discovers that his parents are separating and he is to live in the country with his mother and grandmother while his father returns to Atlanta to continue his controversial editorship in the city's newspaper. Johnny, distraught because his father has never left him or his mother before, leaves that night under cover of darkness and sets off for Atlanta with only a bindle. As Johnny sneaks away from the plantation, he is attracted by the voice of Uncle Remus, telling tales of a character named Br'er Rabbit. Curious, Johnny hides behind a nearby tree to spy on the group of people sitting around the fire. By this time, word has gotten out that Johnny is gone and the servants, who are sent out to find him, ask if Uncle Remus has seen the boy. Uncle Remus replies that he's with him. Shortly afterwards, he catches up with Johnny who sits crying on a nearby log. He befriends the young boy and offers him some food for the journey, taking him back to his cabin.

As Uncle Remus cooks, he mentions Br'er Rabbit again and the boy, curious, asks him to tell him more. After Uncle Remus tells a tale about Br'er Rabbit's attempt to run away from home, Johnny takes the advice and changes his mind about leaving the plantation, letting Uncle Remus take him back to his mother. Johnny makes friends with Toby, a little black boy who lives on the plantation, and Ginny Favers, a poor white neighbor. However, Ginny's two older brothers, Joe and Jake, are not friendly at all. They constantly bully Ginny and Johnny. When Ginny gives Johnny a puppy, her brothers want to drown it. A fight breaks out among the three boys. Heartbroken because his mother won't let him keep the puppy, Johnny takes the dog to Uncle Remus and tells him of his troubles. Uncle Remus takes the dog in and delights Johnny and his friends with the fable of Br'er Rabbit and the Tar Baby, stressing how one shouldn't go messing around with something they have no business with in the first place.

Johnny heeds the advice of how Br'er Rabbit used reverse psychology on Br'er Fox and begged the Favers boys not to tell their mother about the dog, which is precisely what they do, only to get a good spanking for it. Enraged, the boys vow revenge. They go to the plantation and tell Johnny's mother, who is upset that Uncle Remus kept the dog despite her order, unbeknownst to Uncle Remus. She orders the old man not to tell any more stories to her son. The day of Johnny's birthday arrives. Johnny picks up Ginny to take her to his party. Ginny's mother used her wedding dress to make her a beautiful dress for the party. On the way there, however, Joe and Jake pick another fight. Ginny gets pushed and ends up in a mud puddle. With her dress ruined, Ginny refuses to go to the party. Johnny doesn't want to go either, especially since his father won't be there. Uncle Remus discovers the two dejected children and cheers them by telling the story of Br'er Rabbit and his "Laughing Place". When Uncle Remus returns to the plantation with the children, Sally meets them on the way and is angry at Johnny for not having attended his own birthday party. Ginny mentions Uncle Remus telling them a story and Sally draws the line, warning Uncle Remus not to spend time with Johnny any more. Uncle Remus, saddened by the misunderstanding of his good intentions, packs his bags and leaves for Atlanta. Johnny, seeing Uncle Remus leaving from a distance, rushes to intercept him, taking a shortcut through the pasture where he is attacked and seriously injured by the resident bull. While Johnny hovers between life and death, his father returns and reconciles with Sally. But Johnny calls for Uncle Remus, who had returned in all the commotion. Uncle Remus began telling a tale of Br'er Rabbit and the Laughing Place again, and the boy miraculously survives.