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More like Disney minus.
Months after flagging classic flicks over stereotypical portrayals, Disney+ has now decided to go whole hog and drop several of the once-loved, now-controversial titles from their kids’ menus.
Per the initiative, children under 7 will be forbidden from watching “Dumbo,” “Peter Pan” “Swiss Family Robinson” and the “The Aristocats.” Settings on the app will prevent the movies from even showing up on the young viewers’ profiles. Disney explained its rationale behind each film’s removal on the kid-focused Stories Matter section of their website.
They cited “Dumbo’s” (1941) infamous singing crows, which “pay homage to racist minstrel shows, where white performers with blackened faces and tattered clothing imitated and ridiculed enslaved Africans on Southern plantations.”
“The leader of the group in Dumbo is Jim Crow, which shares the name of laws that enforced racial segregation in the Southern United States,” per the site.
“Peter Pan,” and the “Swiss Family Robinson,” were axed, meanwhile, for their negative portrayals of native Americans and foreigners, respectively.
Even “The Aristocats” — a flick about musically-inclined felines — was deemed problematic due to the Siamese cat’s “exaggerated stereotypical traits” such as “slanted eyes and buck teeth.”
They added that the cat “sings in poorly accented English voiced by a white actor and plays the piano with chopsticks.”
Adults will still be able to access — and thereby show their children — the taboo movies with disclaimers warning viewers of “negative depictions and/or mistreatment of people or cultures.”
“These stereotypes were wrong then and are wrong now,” the advisories read. “Rather than remove this content, we want to acknowledge its harmful impact, learn from it and spark conversation to create a more inclusive future together.”
The move follows a nationwide cancellation campaign that heated up recently with the Dr. Seuss company discontinuing six titles over alleged racism. The books were subsequently dropped by Ebay and other literature purveyors, much to the chagrin of online pundits, who analogized the measure to book burning in Nazi Germany.
The “Space Jam” sequel, meanwhile, is on shaky ground after an outcry over stereotypically Mexican mouse Speedy Gonzalez, and Pepe Le Pew, whose handsy antics have been accused of fostering rape culture.
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