During the question and answer session at Disney’s 2006 Annual Meeting of Shareholders in Anaheim, CA, the question was raised by a Disney shareholder why Song of the South has not been released. Here is a transcript:
- “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.”
And with that, folks, it doesn’t look like we’ll be seeing a 60th anniversary of Song of the South either. If you’d like to listen to the audio of this, please click here to visit Disney Corporate. The question is asked about 1hr. 43min. into the presentation. Thanks to everyone who informed me of this. And if you haven’t signed the petition yet, you know what to do.