HBO removes Gone with the wind.

[Rev. Rye]

Yeah, it should definitely be kept in mind that the film was made in an era when racist assholes in the South were actually considered a key demographic for studios. There was an early adaptation of Brewster’s Millions a few years after this movie came out that got banned in Memphis because the black servant character was treated too well. Studios had to relegate black actors to playing servants because anything else would be seen as an abomination to the natural order. Either that or they were black entertainers doing their act in such a way that it could easily be cut from the film if the local censorship boards decided it shouldn’t be shown. As much flak as Song of the South gets, the mere act of a major studio making a film about a black protagonist was actually fairly radical for the era, even if the 13th Amendment was the only thing keeping him from just being a slave. And it seems like the benign portrayal of the culture of the era, a world where Uncle Remus can easily accept (and likely even enjoy) a lot in life that isn’t much better than slavery and possibly even worse in a few, was probably the spoonful of sugar that helped it go down at the time.

This is also why so many Civil War films from this era had a pretty heavy pro-Confederacy slant and so few were pro-Union; not necessarily because they believed it (though, of course, they may well have), But because to make a Civil War film that sided with the Union in that time would have been commercial suicide. It’s sort of analogous with Hollywood’s relationship now with the People’s Republic of China today. So, yes, the reason films like this tended to favor the Confederacy over the Union is more or less the same reason they changed Dr. Strange’s master from a Tibetan monk to a Celtic one.

And, despite some small progress in the 1950s and early 1960s (mostly from Sidney Poitier putting a “respectable” face on a black protagonist) it pretty much stayed that way until about 1967, when Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner was released to great success (and surprisingly little backlash at that point) and Hollywood finally learned to stop worrying about the Wrath of the South. If you watch a film from that era where black people appear or should theoretically play a non-negligible role, this is what you have to bear in mind. I know it’s fucked up, but that doesn’t change the fact that that was how it went in those days.