A different time and place

Since discovering the wonders of YouTube, I've spent some of my time looking for lost relics, just to see what I can find. It happened that I found one such relic that had intrigued me since I discovered the site anomalies-unlimited: Sunflower.

Disney's Fantasia was released in 1940 and featured a number of famous classical scores, with animation to accompany them. The segment with Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony features two groups of centaurs (male and female), and their romantic interludes. Originally, one of the female centaurs (a beautiful, blonde one) has a young, black, female servant named Sunflower, who is drawn in the classic 'black-face' style, with pigtails and exaggerated features.

For obvious reasons, Sunflower was subsequently edited from the film in later releases. After renting the 50th Anniversary release (from 1990), I discovered that to avoid throwing the soundtrack off (which they may have done in earlier edits of the film) Disney zoomed in to the blonde female centaur for the parts with Sunflower. The zoom is rather obvious unfortunately, as those parts are rather grainy.

But thanks to the restless masses, and the wonders of YouTube, Disney can hardly keep this skeleton in the closet:







Disney apparently denies this character ever existed, which is sad. Things like "Song of the South" and the worker song from Dumbo speak of a different time and place, where people weren't so equal and things weren't quite the same as they are now. These sorts of relics can give a cultural basis for comparison that no textbook can.