June 16, 2003
Hiding from Mickey Mouse, Zippety doo-dah.
In 1986 a doofus at
Walt Disney, for reasons unknown, withdrew its
1946 film Song of the South from theatrical distribution.
(That was the year my kiddies saw it, and they loved it as much as their
mother and I had.) It remains the only Disney feature film never
released on video format -- in the United States. The thinking
is
that objections, from the easily offended and professionally aggrieved,
that the film sugar coats slavery ??? prompted the oh so PC Disney Corp.
to make the move unilaterally. Tapes were, however, distributed
in Europe (before Disney realized there are airplanes, ocean liners
and overseas mail services?). For several years, then, there has been
a lively underground market in these Euro tapes. A problem was that
Europos use a PAL video format that is incompatible with American
video players, so that once acquired the coveted tape had to be converted.
With the emergence of E-Bay, traffic in the tapes increased, as did
conversion services. All this set off alarm bells in Michael Eisner's
fuzzy brain, so in December, 2001, the film was withdrawn from sale everywhere.
I "bought" a copy from E-Bay about five years ago ($75), but the seller, inexplicably, never shipped (or cash my check). Anyway, that brings us to Father's Day - yesterday. Guess what someone I know got from Greeper? Yeppir! He too bought it on E-Bay, and this is how it went. As soon as the auction ended Greeper received threatening e-mail from Disney lawyers, and from E-Bay telling him what a bad boy he was for buying forbidden merchandise. E-Bay deleted the entire transaction from its site, so Greep had no way of contacting the shipper (who honored the contract anyway and fled the country, one might speculate, immediately afterwards). Disney has become so insane over SOS
that they've even demanded that the web site songofthesouth.net be shut down. Remember, these are not tapes surreptitiously recorded by video camera off a movie theater screen, they are tapes sold by Disney,
and royalties received. I'd like to know what possible legal right
they have to thwart the international trade of that product? Anyway,
I've got mine and I love it. Thanks Greep. Oh, for the record.
I burned the illicit material as soon as we got home.
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PC run amok!
BTW Rodger you're lucky Janet "I'm only doing it for the children" Reno is no longer Attorney General. You might find yourself waking up to this.
Wait, do you have an original or a copy? If the latter, then I'd think Disney's rights in this regard would be pretty clear.
Posted by: Spoons on June 16, 2003 09:35 AMI have neither. Like I said, not wishing to offend, I burnt it up.
Posted by: Rodger Schultz on June 16, 2003 09:49 AMAnd FWIW, the Disney people have no way of knowing that answer either. Greep too is a lawyer.
Posted by: Rodger Schultz on June 16, 2003 09:50 AMIf they don't like songofthesouth.net, wait 'til they see thesoungofthesouth.com.
Posted by: Cracker Barrel Philosopher on June 16, 2003 10:49 AMWhoa! Great sleuthing Cracker.
http://www.thesongofthesouth.com/html/index.html
Posted by: Rodger Schultz on June 16, 2003 11:20 AMHello Folks,nice site youre running!
Posted by: Preteen on October 12, 2003 01:15 PMVery nice blog
Posted by: Steven on October 23, 2003 08:02 AMNice site you have!
Posted by: lolita on November 4, 2003 04:43 AM