Disney is finally releasing Song of the South on DVD next year. When I was a kid I had a Brer Rabbit record that I listened to all the time, and was always bummed I never had a chance to see the film. Loathe to pay $50 for a bootleg copy, I finally tracked down and downloaded a copy online a couple years ago. As the article I linked to above points out, most of the movie is pretty yawn-inducing, although the cartoons are as fresh as ever — aside from the whole condescending-racist-stereotype aspect, of course.

The DVD release will apparently include a raft of special features designed to reassure modern viewers that, yes, Disney is much more racially sensitive today. And that’s fine, really, although it’s hard to imagine modern viewers aren’t savvy enough figure out on their own that old films will often have radically different sensibilities that don’t reflect modern piety.

I always think it’s a good move to make this kind of material available, and not just in the sense that parts of the movie are still worth watching. Critics as cultural gatekeepers, and businessmen worried about a financial backlash, always seem worried that the unwashed masses aren’t bright enough to take non-PC culture from our past in stride for what it is, a cultural artifact — instead assuming that we’ll either succumb to the less-enlightened views of our forebears or accuse the companies who rerelease movies like Song of the South of profiting from racism. And, granted, these concerns aren’t entirely unfounded in a culture that sometimes can’t distinguish between racist humor and satire about racist attitudes.

But I think suppressing distasteful examples of pop culture from previous eras is more likely to make us forget some of our history, causing us to repeat it in clueless new ways. We can find value in movies like Song of the South both by recognizing their artistic merits, and their cautionary examples.