Posted by Derek Janssen on 03/13/06 00:45

Bernie Woodham wrote:

> "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."

From this, one may note:

- Cromer, being rather (ahemidiot) naive, asked whether it would be a
Disney CLASSIC--Whereas, up to this point, many video fans had
automatically assumed it would be Disney TREASURES, where rare obscure
collector material goes, and where the WWII producer would have probably
gotten charge of "historical context", as he'd hoped. Slight difference.
Thanks to the blunder, Iger answered the question of whether Disney
would lavish an expensive hi-profile 2-disk on it in Wal-Mart stores
everywhere, of which we can guess that the answer would probably likely
have been "no".

- Note the deep level of detail in Iger's response:
"Well, we...talked about it, and...there was bad stuff, and...we decided
bad stuff wouldn't make money...Although it probably would, we thought
it wouldn't, and..."
Although it HAS gotten "heavy discussion" in the boardoom since last
year, it sounds as if Iger wasn't privy to most of it--He didn't seem to
be aware of the Classics-vs.-Treasures question, couldn't say whether it
would have the "Black History" intro, and I'd wager we know what answer
Bob would give in Trivial Pursuit if we asked him whether Remus was a
slave or a sharecropper...

Simply put--Think he was ambushed with this question. His mind has been
on other and bigger corporate issues these last three months; he thought
a simple proclamation would quiet an "obscure" fan-geek question, hadn't
quite read the memos from last year, and thought a word from the top
would end the discussion.
Most likely it's NOT "a decision that's going to be made forever", now
that somebody's noticed a lot of people who know more about it than he does.

Derek Janssen (trying to be realistic, and fighting down old fervors
from the Miyazaki Wars)
ejanss@comcast.net

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