Disney's Most Notorious Film

Disney’s Most Notorious Film: Race, Convergence and the Hidden Histories of Song of the South (University of Texas, 2012) does more than dissect a film and the pros and cons around it. In its own way, it reveals that Song of the South, more or less by accident, holds a mirror to American views on race, with beauty or the lack thereof completely in the eyes of the beholder. ~PopMatters

This study is meticulously researched and current on contemporary research, and though it reads slowly…the payoff is worth the work. Summing Up: Highly recommended. ~S. R. Kozloff, Vassar College, Choice

This excellent study of the controversy surrounding Disney’s Song of the South is an insightful and thought-provoking analysis of one of the studio’s most controversial films…Jason Sperb has produced an important analysis of one of popular culture’s most hotly debated products. ~The Historian

Jason Sperb’s Disney’s Most Notorious Film quickly overcomes any concern that there might be nothing new to say about Song of the South by demonstrating how surprisingly “persistent” the film has been. ~The Journal of American History

While Sperb's conclusions of conscious racism are debatable, his meticulous documentation of Song of the South merchandising through sixty years and its other cultural references…make Disney's Most Notorious Film an essential reference tool to those interested in SotS-iana. ~Animation World Network

This book is extremely smart, painstakingly researched, and it ties together many concepts and issues that too rarely find themselves in the same book. Sperb is a gifted writer, who holds his reader’s attention with skill, and he provides a fantastic piece of work here, one that will serve multiple publics and that fills in important historical territory while also advancing discussions on race, convergence, Disney, film reception, textuality, and remediation. This is really quite a spectacular achievement. ~Jonathan Gray, Professor of Media and Cultural Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and author of Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts

Disney’s Most Notorious Film is a tremendously interesting, timely, provocative, and useful project. It is unique in studying reception and fandom through focus on a single, though also importantly dispersed and plural, text of nearly seventy years’ duration and circulation. On its own, Song of the South is a film demanding more analysis than it has received, and Sperb has given it the attention it deserves precisely by focusing on what’s most intriguing about it: Its controversial aspects, its unique place in the Disney canon and marketing work, its fans, and the ways its pleasure and affect connect with changing American ideas about race. Perhaps the most important finding of this book is that fan activity—which in contemporary scholarship is most often celebrated for creating new knowledge and engaged producer-consumers—is very complex as it unfolds over time, and that it can have undesirable outcomes. ~Arthur Knight, Associate Professor of American Studies and English, The College of William and Mary, author of Disintegrating the Musical: African American Performance and American Musical Film and coeditor of Soundtrack Available: Film and Pop Music