Posted by Bernie Woodham on 03/12/06 07:08

"unclejr" <watsona@kenyon.edu> wrote in message
news:1142118102.693187.34320@z34g2000cwc.googlegroups.com...
> Sigh...
>
> <http://www.laughingplace.com/Latest.asp?I1=ID&I2=1073>
>
> -Junior
>

Here is the full question/answer quote as posted on www.songofthesouth.net:

"My name is Howard Cromer. I live in Cypress, I'm a Disney shareholder. I'm
actually delivering a message from my son, 10. He wants to know in recent
years, in the midst of all your re-releases of your videos, why you haven't
released Song of the South on your Disney Classics?" [Applause] "And, he
wonders why. Frank Wells told me many years ago that it would be coming out.
Well obviously Frank Wells isn't around anymore, so we still wonder why. And
by the way, Mr. Iger, he thinks it was a very good choice when they made you
CEO of Disney." [Applause]


Iger: "Thank you very much. You may change your mind when I answer your
question, though. Um... we've discussed this a lot. We believe it's actually
an opportunity from a financial perspective to put Song of the South out. I
screened it fairly recently because I hadn't seen it since I was a child,
and I have to tell you after I watched it, even considering the context that
it was made, I had some concerns about it because of what it depicted. And
thought it's quite possible that people wouldn't consider it in the context
that it was made, and there were some... [long pause] depictions that I
mentioned earlier in the film that I think would be bothersome to a lot of
people. And so, owing to the sensitivity that exists in our culture,
balancing it with the desire to, uh, maybe increase our earnings a bit, but
never putting that in front of what we thought were our ethics and our
integrity, we made the decision not to re-release it. Not a decision that is
made forever, I imagine this is gonna continue to come up, but for now we
simply don't have plans to bring it back because of the sensitivities that I
mentioned. Sorry."

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