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Walter Lantz’s Swing Symphony series was possibly the most ‘politically incorrect’ one to ever exist in Hollywood animation. Every entry contains either racial stereotypes, sexy gals, booze drinking… And always great music and animation.

Shamus Culhane’s “Abou Ben Boogie” is no exception. I believe a piece of this film actually had the Miss X’s gyrations cropped out before release… It looks lifted from “Greatest Man in Siam” as the movements are almost exactly the same.

Much of the Miss X and Ben Boogie dancing I believe is animated by Pat Matthews. There is also a lot of Grim Natwick (I’m certain the guy who looks like Farmer Alfalfa is his) and Emery Hawkins in this clip.

As you can tell, my copy of this cartoon is in pretty sorry shape, and I would grateful if someone could help me find a better one. (Preferably one with no audio dropout in the first half!)

Here’s a segment from one of my all-time favorite cartoons, “Much Ado About Mutton”. This scene looks like it’s animated by Marty Taras mainly by the way the characters move and look. This was right before the cartoons at Famous became more ‘refined’ with cleaner animation but more stock poses and gestures.

I like the Famous Studios cartoons and think they’re underrated. I definitely like the cartoons of the 40s better than anything Terry did and they are on average better than the last few years of Fleischer output (1940-42 roughly). All of the Blackie the Lamb cartoons are hilarious and feature wonderful animation by Taras, Tendlar, and Gent, and I hope to highlight them in the near future.

There’s three animators that have a really stylized way of moving their characters in the classic cartoons… Art Davis under Frank Tashlin’s direction, Carlo Vinci at Terry’s, and Mike Lah at MGM. This kind of animation was essentially a predecessor to television’s limited animation, but it still has all the benefits that make full animation great.

Mike Lah has a long history with the MGM studio. He was first in George Gordon’s short-lived unit at the studio in the early 40s. He then went to Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera’s unit as a brief replacement for Irv Spence. He and Preston Blair were assigned to direct three Barney Bear cartoons before being knocked back down to an animator again for Tex Avery.

This scene, though, is not from an Avery short, but one of Dick Lundy’s best Barney Bear shorts, “The Impossible Possum”. This is the kind of animation I like best, when it’s timed perfectly to the music, but you can watch it with the sound off and the it is still perfect. Few animators even in the Golden Age were capable of making their animation special and in a class of its own, and Lah was certainly one of them.

Here’s the final (and shortest) animated segment from Song of the South, “Brer Rabbit’s Laughin’ Place”. While the other segments play more on a battle of wits, this one just goes for the big belly-laughs, particularly the bees going through Brer Bear’s nose and out his mouth when he says “beeeeeeezzzzzzz”. I honestly have no clue who animated what in this scene.

This segment is available (in black-and-white) on the Disney Treasures: Disneyland USA set, which is out of print but you can get it if you look hard enough.

I actually did watch the whole movie through for the first time in awhile (my earlier comments were made from memory), and it’s not as bad as I remember it being. As I said, it’s tripe, but inoffensive tripe. I really think the only people who will find it offensive are those who think sappy Disney movies about little kids and puppies are offensive.

Parents can also put another tolerance lesson on it, one to teach kids to be respectful of other kids of different social and economic backgrounds. Johnny’s mom doesn’t want him playing with the little girl Ginny, who is basically the equivalent of modern poor white trash. Tell your kids “Treat others the way you want to be treated,” or something of that mantra.

This movie is not Birth of a Nation, and since that movie is available on mainstream DVD without heads rolling in the street, I’m sure Disney could get away with releasing it without much protest. FYI, it’s only verboten in North America, so that tells you how much progress we’re making in educating youngsters about the entertainment industry’s golden age.

But we won’t see Song of the South anytime soon, thanks to Robert Iger, who was hailed as some sort of God by the online community earlier this year just because he bought Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. He sat down and watched the film and saw a bunch of things that weren’t there, then made the announcement that it would remain unreleased. I sure hope people know it was originally slated for a Disney Treasures release this year until his hare-brained decision.

The second animated segment, “Brer Rabbit and De Tar Baby”, seems to be the one that gets the most criticism. By not recognizing that the Tar Baby is one of Brer Fox’s traps, Brer Rabbit is deemed as a “dumb negro”. That criticism makes no sense whatsoever, as without getting into the actual moral of the story, Rabbit not recognizing a trap is no different than Rocky & Bullwinkle not recognizing Boris in one of his lame disguises.

Mike Barrier states in his book that Marc Davis handled Brer Fox and Brer Bear in the cave, and Milt Kahl animates Brer Rabbit with the Tar Baby.

This segment is the longest of the film, and not wanting to mess with continuity, I left in the live-action portion towards the end. The highlight of this piece for me is Fox and Bear’s mock rendition of “How Do You Do?”

This segment is not currently available on any North American home video release.

One of the biggest disappointments of the year for classic animation fans was the announcement that the live-action/animation hybrid feature Song of the South would not only remain unreleased for its 60th anniversary, it’s not being released anytime soon under any circumstances.

I don’t think anyone is losing sleep over the fact the garbage that is the live-action portion is remaining in the “Disney Vault”, but the Brer Rabbit segments remain some of the best things the studio did. The trouble is, the problem isn’t the animated portions, but the stereotypical live-action portion. The P.C. Squad seem to brand the plantation workers in the movie as “happy-go-lucky slave negroes”, though with minor research, they’d see that the movie takes place well after the Civil War!

Though the ‘politically incorrect’ 2/3 is the usual tripe to come from live-action Disney, it’s really inoffensive tripe. Parents can even spin it to turn it into a lesson about prejudice. “Look how Johnny’s mom is being really mean to Uncle Remus and he wants to leave the plantation, you shouldn’t treat others like that.”

This first segment, “Brer Rabbit Runs Away”, contains the famous Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah. Michael Barrier has posted the animators’ draft to it. It’s interesting to see that it’s Ollie Johnston handling some really strong, maniacal animation of Brer Fox, as he is always associated to smaller, timid characters like baby Bambi and Mr. Smee. Marc Davis does some wonderful animation of Brer Rabbit at the beginning when he’s leaving his briar patch.

I am disappointed that the drafts didn’t show who animated Uncle Remus though. Maybe Ub Iwerks did that with stop motion or animatronics?

This segment is available on the Alice in Wonderland DVD, which I highly recommend getting.

I’ll be posting all three animated segments from “Song of the South” this week, so keep checking back before they’re taken down.