How did Disney cripple Remus> Cultural tales pass on important values at the time, offer a window into living in a time gone by. Look again at the real Uncle Remus. That is difficult because the original stories, by Joel Chandler Harris, are in a dialect that is hard to follow and the culture has accepted Disney's pap instead. Translations, including the books for children we find, and others used by Walt Disney, sanitize and reshape the characters to fit an agenda of White Walt -- so we are doing our own translations. We look up meanings, do our best to transliterate from the dialect without adding other meaning, and look what we find. A community of characters, roles, reality, interspersed with a testy, crafty, bright, survivor Uncle Remus who gets his due back from Aunt Sally and her ilk, in his way. Walt hides from that.
Go from Uncle Remus to the Brothers Grimm, and other sources of "fairy tales". How do the early versions present strong, even to the point of killing, getting back at other characters who seek to take advantage of them. How do those children, boys and girls, stand up for themselves, and the later ones show pablum. Track the changes. What roles does our culture not want little girls to take. What roles were encouraged by the stories before.
Uncle Remus' Heritage: Protest, Creativity, Story Line
Uncle Remus has been so watered down, that we forget his original bite. The role of expanding a mind -- for Remus, it was the little boy who immediately benefitied from Remus' perspective -- of preserving a heritage, of alerting regular people to manipulation for agenda purposes, remains. Find here samples of black poetry, examples of Jim Crow still with us in mainstream media, and populist expression. Creativity still untapped.
