Listen, I don’t want to sound authoritarian, but I hereby announce that the coming week is “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah Week” and that everyone 16 or older is required to sing its lyrics in public at least once a day. After all, the oomph of this delightful ditty has been making millions feel bubbly for decades, and now its Disney owners are banning it from their domain.
The Disney bosses featured the song in two “Magic Happens” parades a day in Disneyland until the COVID-19 virus hit hard. They are now finally restoring the parades using a Peter Pan song as a substitute. The reasoning is that the snappy, peppy "Zip" tune and lyrics were first sung in a 1946 Disney movie, “Song of the South,” which was racist.
The singer, however, was James Baskett, the first Black actor to win an Oscar. He was not racist and neither is the song, which won an Academy Award. What’s more, few likely know much if anything about the 1946 movie and wouldn’t think the song objectionable if they did. At the end of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln told some musicians he wanted to listen to the Confederacy-boosting song “Dixie,” one of the best tunes he had ever heard, he said. What’s next for dizzy Disney? Cutting off the ears of Mickey Mouse as a signal to never listen to the "Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah" merriment?
