Despite coming of age in Britain during Michael Eisner's Disney “renaissance,” I had the full-length feature of Song of the South (1946) on VHS. Although officially withdrawn from North American circulation following its fifth and, thus far, final 1986 cinematic release, Song of the South has lived on through the Golden Books series, cassette tapes, excerpted clips on television and VHS compilations, the Disneyland ride Splash Mountain, the hit song “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah,” bootleg copies of the original feature, and an active and defensive fan community online. My own childhood-sanctioned European viewing stands as proof that the artificially constructed doors on the “Disney Vault” remain laxly guarded, even for this infamously racist film.

Jason Sperb's Disney's Most Notorious Film chronologically charts the history of Song of the South, both the reception of its cinematic releases since 1946 and its survival through ancillary consumer markets. Disney's official withholding of Song of the South since 1986 is seemingly tantamount to banning it. However, Sperb believes that the film's transmedia dissipation reveals that “Disney's universe both promoted and concealed, both expanded and dissipated, the text's problematic past” (111).

Based on the stories of Joel Chandler Harris, Song of the South depicts in live-action Technicolor a portrait of harmonious plantation life and the budding friendship between the young, rich and white Johnny (Bobbie Driscoll) and the old, impoverished and black Uncle Remus (James Baskett), whose fabled stories of Br'er Rabbit are shown through animated sequences.

Sperb is keen to refute claims that the film is a progressive story of interracial friendship. Contrary to Douglas Brode's sympathetic reading of Song of the South, Sperb discusses its stereotyped black characters and promotion of plantation myths. However, more detail in his rather brief textual analysis would be welcomed.

Sperb dismisses modern audiences' claims that Song of the South's racism is merely a product of its time. Detailing the film's reception in 1946, he illustrates that Song of the South was always received as racist by both black and white cultural commentators. This was largely due to expanded expectations for the depiction of black characters on-screen after World War II.

A critical and commercial disappointment, Sperb argues that Song of the South “only became timely thirty years into its existence” (87, italics in original) with extremely successful cinematic rereleases in the 1970s and 1980s. Particularly interestingly, Sperb details how both critics and supporters of the film publicly linked Song of the South's 1981 release to the political ascendancy of Ronald Reagan and the conservative impulse behind his “post-racial” political outlook. Indebted to the work of Svetlana Boym, Sperb views the late success of Song of the South as linked to a nostalgic impulse for a harmonious past that never was, further fuelled by Disney's aggressive deployment of nostalgia in its branding.

After detailing the paratexual appearances of Song of the South through which Disney has attempted to erase its controversies while continuing to mine profit, Sperb looks at current fan cultures within online message boards. With a far less utopian vision of participatory culture than Henry Jenkins, Sperb shows how online communities reveal that racism “is alive and well” (203) within their campaigns for the film's official release, foreclosing debate through labelling any mention of race regarding the film a racist act. Sperb shows how this “evasive whiteness” frames discussions about the film's potential rerelease in print journalism as well (127).

While Sperb illustrates how “the film's dispersed textual presence speaks to the awkward existence Song of the South continues to maintain in American culture” (198), one element of my own viewing is not addressed, namely the official existence of Song of the South on home-video markets outside America. The oversight stands particularly prominently considering the microscopic focus. While we are given hints of Song of the South's legal home-video copies in Canada, Europe and Asia, Sperb does not explore why Disney allowed this. Delving more fully into the intricacies of Disney's global strategy might in turn have revealed more about Disney's extremely ambiguous attitude toward (and exploitation of) its allegedly “most requested” film.

In the conclusion, Sperb offers his opinion that Disney should release Song of the South, despite its racism, because “its official absence plays to the heightened sense of loss necessary for nostalgia” (202). He hopes that an official release would allow the film to “eventually fade away right out in the open” (233). In the meantime, one can watch Song of the South and view its contested life on YouTube, where Disney's notoriously litigious attention to copyright violations are – as Sperb might suggest – tellingly absent.