In Her First Act As A Disney Legend, Whoopi Goldberg Tells Disney To Stop Hiding Its History

Goldberg believes that it’s time the film was made available again to American audiences in its entirety. “I’m trying to find a way to get people to start having conversations about bringing Song of the South back, so we can talk about what it was and where it came from and why it came out,” she told Yahoo Movies.

In the same interview, which can be seen below, she goes on to say that she wanted to see new merchandise featuring the jive-talking crows from Disney’s 1941 classic Dumbo. “I want people to start putting the crows in the merchandise, because those crows sing the song in Dumbo that everybody remembers [“When I See an Elephant Fly”]. I want to highlight all the little stuff people sort of maybe miss in movies.”

It’s not inconceivable that Goldberg’s involvement could someday pave the path for an American release of Song of the South. Goldberg is a well known fan and advocate of classic Hollywood animation (including certain cartoons that are now considered racially insensitive), and she has previously helped clear the way for other corporations, like Time Warner, to release classic cartoons that may have otherwise been edited or kept out of circulation.

A little over a decade ago, Goldberg appeared at the beginning of Looney Tunes dvds, to deliver the message that it’s possible to enjoy the Warner Bros. cartoons, without necessarily endorsing their outdated characterizations. In that video, she says:

“Some of the cartoons here reflect some of the prejudices that were commonplace in American society, especially when it came to the treatment of racial and ethnic minorities. These jokes were wrong then and they are wrong today, but removing these inexcusable images and jokes would be the same as saying they never existed, so they are presented here to accurately reflect a part of our history that cannot and should not be ignored.”