https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/tolkien-cs-lewis-disne...
Isn't that always the way?
What about the next Walt Disney?
It is somewhat hypocritical to lobby for removal of the same protections that enabled your own success.
I don't think "hypocritical" is the right word to use, I think it's completely reasonable for a company to want to lock out its competitors (even unborn competitors) even if it means shutting the same door that company used to achieve success. It's up to elected lawmakers to uphold the interests of common citizens, and we all know how that goes.
Corporations solely relying on legislators is not a reasonable thing to do at all.
I think acting immorally to turn a profit for your shareholders just because something is legal is, well,... immoral.
So if you managed to lobby and bribe politicians to make killing someone legal, it would be ok to kill people?
In some older interviews Bill Gates describes how he would fish the source code of programs from the trash to learn how they work. I probably do not need to describe his company's attitude towards open source on HN.
Star Wars is a fairytale of our days, yet no artist can retell the story or expand the universe.
I agree with the rest of that sentence, but this really isn't true. Disney's bowdlerized versions actually do harm and even displace the source material in public consciousness.
https://www.amazon.com/Complete-Grimms-Fairy-Tales/dp/039470...
Spoiler & trigger alert - the princess discovers the true nature of the Frog Prince not with a kiss, but by flinging him against a wall. Many of the other stories are equally blunt, forceful, or realistic for the times they came from.
Of note is the modern excision of the last phrase from the closing formula: "And they all lived happily ever after until they died."
I think this is true of English speakers. In German everyone knows the standard phrase "und wenn sie nicht gestorben sind, dann leben sie noch heute" ("And if they have not died then they are still alive today.")
It's a sufficiently well known meme that people use it regularly in jokes.
Edit: added quote for clarity
To me the most familiar closing formula is "und wenn sie nicht gestorben sind, dann leben sie noch heute", which is quite interesting to think about really: what does it tell or suggest to the listener?
Thank you both for the German formulas - there are examples from many languages at:
For example, in the Grimm Brothers version the stepsisters cut off toes and heels to fit into Cinderella's shoes and ride to visit the prince with blood dripping down on the ground. Later they were blinded. The already old version I read while growing up in the US in the late 1960s left that part out.
More interestingly, the Grimm Brothers themselves altered many of their own stories substantially in the 7 or so full editions of Grimms' Fairy Tales they published before 1857. Some of the originals were pretty crude.
The Disney Cinderella is based on Charles Perrault's version which was actually published earlier than the Grimms version. Both are recorded from oral versions. Perrault does not have the cutting off of toes, but have a fairy godmother and a magic pumpkin which is not present in the Grimm version.
Disney put their own slant on the stories of course, just like any other retelling.
Personally I grew up reading (and rereading) the Andrew Lang Fairy Books. They hew to the Perrault version of Cinderella. It would not be surprising if Walt Disney read those growing up. They were immensely popular and included wonderful Art Nouveau illustrations of characters in the stories. H J Ford was the artist for many of them.
(Sample: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Lang's_Fairy_Books#/med...)
You could easily level the same criticism against Grimm.
That he "displaced source material in public consciousness" is hardly a critique, in that case I guess we should stop making new music and literature as popular newcomers tend to displace what's previously popular in the public consciousness.
I watched Song of the South recently. And I have to say that aside from some racial stereotypes, that were not necessarily negative stereotypes, the movie seemed like an earnest effort to portray the black character (Uncle Remus) in a very positive light.
The movie did receive condemnation from the NAACP and others. But much of that was based on the erroneous assumption that the movie took place in the antebellum south and thus assumed Uncle Remus was a slave that was just cheerful and happy.
The movie does not explicitly identify the time period but the clothing and Disney themselves make it clear that it is post-civil war.
The only real controversy was that of a movie that portrayed rosy racial relations and some cliches in a time when racism was rampant and racial relations were poor.
But to me there are two schools of thought in regards to Hollywood portrayals like Song of the South. Some think you should tell only the truth and show how awful everything is so people will hopefully change. And others think you should show an idealic fiction that shows how things should be. I tend to think the latter is more effective.
There are certainly things to be criticized about both movies, but I think much of the criticism came from people who never saw them.
Walter Francis White's NAACP statement (quoted in the Wikipedia article linked above) is a good example. White didn't see the movie himself, but commented on it based on reports from staff members. As you mentioned, he mistakenly assumed that the film was set during the era of slavery.
The thing that sticks in my mind about Song of the South is that Uncle Remus is the hero of the movie.
To me, the real tragedy of this film - which portrayed people of different races as friends and companions - was that James Baskett, who played Uncle Remus and voiced a couple of the animated characters, couldn't attend the premiere festivities in Atlanta because it was a segregated city. But how could Disney be to blame for that?
And right now I'm regretting having given away my old laserdiscs of Song of the South and So Dear to My Heart. :-(
It's too easy for some Internet comment in a few words to write off the serious, long-held concerns of millions of people, not to mention scholars and many others. Great numbers of people have suffered very great and real harm for generations. Perhaps we should be very concerned about what they have to say, so that that harm can stop. The response of ignoring concerns has a long history, as long as the blatant stereotypes in the movie, and have reliably achieve very poor results and great harm.
> idealic
Ideal for white people - that's always true; race relations have always been ideal (or much closer to it) for white-skinned people. Generally speaking, the predictive model of white-skinned people's view of race relations depends on whether the problems are kept out of sight: If people complain too much about racism, that gets a big backlash; white people become angry. The legal system's abuses, the poverty, the unfunded schools, the lack of services, and African-American people themselves are hidden in separate neighborhoods. As long as it's not bothering white-skinned people, then race relations are good!
Films like Song of the South fulfill many white-skinned people's ideal of African-Americans and of race relations. African-Americans have a long history of being defined by white-skinned people rather than by themselves (as do many excluded groups); almost every one you see is filtered through white screenwriters, journalists, researchers, political commentators, politicians, Hacker News commenters[0], etc. Notice the high proportion of African-Americans in fictional media who are criminals, who are poor, and who speak with a heavy urban slang. Believe it or not, those things are not true of the vast majority of African-Americans; most are ordinary people with ordinary jobs and lives, and speak standard English. Having lived in African-American neighborhoods, watching the portrayal on TV and films can be bizarre - it's an alternate reality written by people who have little experience and just toss in stereotypes.
Characters like Remus are objects, not people with their own priorities but things that exist to make white people happy and comfortable, both the fictional characters in the films and (especially, of course) the real people who buy tickets. Finally, in that film the long-repeated stereotypes are particularly obvious and overwhelming (IIRC, and many others agree). If the parent doesn't recognize them, I encourage them to learn about the issue.
[0] HN's lack of African-American voices is a serious impediment to discussion. It's very rare that any commenters can speak from that point of view. Note that African-Americans are almost always discussed int he third person - 'they' and 'them'.
I was referring to the official dissent of the NAACP, which I clearly specified. The official NAACP remarks are as follows:
"The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People recognizes in "Song of the South" remarkable artistic merit in the music and in the combination of living actors and the cartoon technique. It regrets, however, that in an effort neither to offend audiences in the north or south, the production helps to perpetuate a dangerously glorified picture of slavery. Making use of the beautiful Uncle Remus folklore, "Song of the South" unfortunately gives the impression of an idyllic master-slave relationship which is a distortion of the facts."
As you can see, the entire argument rests on the, as I stated, erroneous assumption that the movie is depicting slavery.
I did not say there were no valid criticisms as there obviously were and are. But that specific and most famous criticism is not.
I don't really have a comment on the rest of your history lesson on racism except that I agree and that this movie does not seem to apply. But good work with the virtue signaling.
I'll have a sit down with my African American wife (with whom I watched Song of the South) and explain to her why she should have been more offended.
> It's too easy for some Internet comment in a few words to write off the serious, long-held concerns of millions of people, not to mention scholars and many others.
Well the fact of the matter is that SotS have been erroneously criticized for depicting a "happy slave" which is simply not correct. The amount of real suffering does not really change this fact. There are legitimate criticisms, but this is not one of them.
> the movie disneyfies African-American folktales like they have done to european folktales
An absurd comparison. The U.S. is not filled with Europeans suffering widespread, systematic and brutal discrimination - including, at the time, segregation and lynchings - based on racial stereotypes and prejudice.
Obviously he should have. Disney's work is at least as objectively important to an understanding of modern western society as Tolkien's or Lewis's is.
Still, if your life's love labor was to have crafted a history and arc detailing in great precision the tales of the seven houses of the children of Aulë, "Hi Ho!" might have been a bit much to take.
Also the whole thing about copyright, the famous "eternity + 1 day", so there's that.
That wasn't Disney, it was Jack Valenti, and it was less one day, as to "comply" with the restriction in the Constitution that the term must be limited.
About as far from "without doing any real damage" as it's possible to get.
You are wrong. It's very same character that just got a distorted spelling over time. And one became a pagan version thru the process, but they are very much the same character. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Claus
> Santa Claus, also known as Saint Nicholas, Kris Kringle, Father Christmas, or simply Santa, is a legendary figure originating in Western Christian culture who is said to bring gifts to the homes of well-behaved ("good" or "nice") children on Christmas Eve (24 December) and the early morning hours of Christmas Day (25 December).[1] The modern Santa Claus grew out of traditions surrounding the historical Saint Nicholas (a fourth-century Greek bishop and gift-giver of Myra), the British figure of Father Christmas and the Dutch figure of Sinterklaas (himself also based on Saint Nicholas). Some maintain Santa Claus also absorbed elements of the Germanic god Wodan, who was associated with the pagan midwinter event of Yule and led the Wild Hunt, a ghostly procession through the sky.
Now, the fact that people know think it's two different characters is beyond the point: they just don't realize where it is coming from.
Those Coca-Cola ads really didn't change the popular idea of Santa Claus. Here's a good explanation: “Did Coca-Cola Invent the Modern Image of Santa Claus?”
Coca Cola's interpretation of the tradition is as valid as anyone else's.
(I fear the upcoming Amazon Middle-Earth series will be a GoT-style abomination that tries to fit Tolkien into something it simply isn't.)