Disney's The Princess and the Frog was the first to feature a black heroine, but the film still raised some eyebrows. The studio is no stranger to controversy—here are 10 scandals from its past.
Even when the 86-year-old media conglomerate tries to right decades of stereotypes in its animated movies, Disney can still manage to miss the mark. The Dec. 11 nationwide release of The Princess and the Frog marks the first time Disney portrays an African-American heroine on the big screen — about time. Still, the film has not escaped controversy. While studio execs agreed to use a more ethnic-sounding name (“Tiana,” instead of the originally scripted “Maddy”) and make her the head chef for an affluent white family (rather than her original job as a maid), critics had a few doubts. Why was Tiana’s prince given an ambiguous name and suspiciously light skin? Why set the film in New Orleans, home to a largely black community still reeling from Hurricane Katrina? What’s with the voodoo theme? In the end, however, the film has garnered some positive reviews: “Going into this movie, I thought the princesses in pop culture, especially Disney princesses, could exist only in stories in which helpless young women are saved by handsome young men,” Washington Post columnist Sara Sarasohn wrote about seeing the movie with her young daughter. “But Tiana is the princess I didn’t know I had been waiting for my whole life.”
The lyrics of Disney’s cartoon musicals aren’t generally known for their edginess, but the opening song of 1992′s Aladdin left some viewers steaming. As the movie begins, a character describes his Arabian home as a place “where they cut off your ear/ If they don’t like your face,” and concludes, “It’s barbaric, but hey, it’s home.” Arab-Americans said the line played on stereotypes and asked that it be removed. “Can an Arab-American child feel good after seeing Aladdin? The answer is no,” an official with the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee told Variety. (Critics also objected to a scene in which an Arab merchant attempts to slice off Princess Jasmine’s hand.) Disney defended the movie, calling it the first film in years to feature an Arab hero and heroine, but the company agreed to change the lyric in the home-video and CD versions (the new version: “Where it’s flat and immense/ And the heat is intense”). To the dismay of critics, however, the “barbaric” line remained. In a 1993 editorial titled “It’s Racist, But Hey, It’s Disney,” the New York Times countered, “To characterize an entire region with this sort of tongue-in-cheek bigotry, especially in a movie aimed at children, borders on barbaric.”
Richard Dawson, the wisecracking British entertainer who was among the schemers in the 1960s sitcom “Hogan’s Heroes” and a decade later began kissing thousands of female contestants as host of the game show “Family Feud” has died. He was 79.
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