The two pieces of media I am analyzing are the original 1941 Dumbo and the 2019 Dumbo film.
Ideology
Whenever I watched the original 1941 Dumbo as a child, I honestly never noticed the racist crows with their altered and forced ‘jive’ songs or even that the main crow was literally named Jim Crow. Watching it now and listening to the “Song of the Roustabouts”, comment on slave labor and black stereotypes hiding in a seeming less harmless song in a children’s movie is eye opening for me.
“Song of the Roustabouts”
“Hike! Ugh! Hike! Ugh! Hike! Ugh! Hike!
We work all day, we work all night
We never learned to read or write
We’re happy-hearted roustabouts
Hike! Ugh! Hike! Ugh! Hike! Ugh! Hike!
When other folks have gone to bed
We slave until we’re almost dead
We’re happy-hearted roustabouts
Hike! Ugh! Hike! Ugh! Hike! Ugh! Hike!
We don’t know when we get our pay
And when we do, we throw our pay away
(When we get our pay, we throw our money all away)”
Thankfully the 2019 Tim Burton Dumbo is not blatantly racist, probably considering a lot of the plot line was changed as a whole. Influential scenes such as Dumbo getting drunk with the mouse and seeing the pink elephants are gone which left many people upset about the remake. It feels as more of an adaptation that a pure remake.
Social History
Most of the staff on the original Dumbo went on strike, because Disney simply did not want to sign with the Screen Cartoonist’s Guild. Labor unions at the time were taking over Hollywood. “Disney elicited some petty revenge on the people he deemed responsible by inserting their caricatures into Dumbo as a group of maniacal circus clowns.” (Gullickson)
V.A. Vandevere in the 2019 Dumbo is said to be seen as a stab at Walt Disney, showing the actual side of the man behind the company. I wasn’t aware that he was a disliked or cold man, but in the film he brings upon his own destruction of his legacy and “Dreamland”.
Comparison
In the original Dumbo, all of the people are evil and honestly even the majority of the animals are also. Dumbo is treated horribly by everyone throughout the film and is only rewarded at this end once his talent of flying is exposed. In the 2019 version, Dumbo is honestly treated fairly by both children and some characters in the film, this may not seem as much but he was very ostracized by mainly all in the 1941 version. He is also given a more positive ending in this version, considering Dumbo is released with his mother back into the wild. But what do these changes mean? Both films are supposed to be during war times, with the first being in WW2 and the second is set during 1919 which is the end of WW1.
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