5 Early Disney Films They Wish Would Have Never Left the Vault

5 ‘The Reluctant Dragon’ (1941)

Judging by its title, this sounds like a Pixar short meant to hold diehards over while overseas animation sweatshops churn out storyboards for the next Inside Out. In actuality, it was Disney’s first flop — a disjointed, uninspired work of exhaustion and desperation. After dropping a trio of all-time great animations from 1937 to 1940 — Snow White, Pinocchio and Fantasia — Disney had clearly run out of steam. The Reluctant Dragon was an oddly meta story about a guy trying to sell an idea to Walt Disney, that only included four short vignettes about the titular dragon.

Contemporary audiences left the film feeling duped — Disney had stretched 40 minutes of animation into a feature-length naval-gaze-a-thon. But modern audiences have noted another uncomfortable observation: the dragon was obviously queer-coded, and it’s unclear whether Disney’s intentions were to normalize or vilify. On one hand, the dragon’s whole thing is that he’s peaceful, and only wants to drink tea and recite poetry. But on the other, his prancing, mincing and fondness for drama are clearly played for laughs, and he’s only accepted into society after being forced to play the role of the bloodthirsty dragon. The apparent lesson being: Be yourself! But only after cowing to society’s violently enforced gender roles.

4 ‘Victory Through Air Power’ (1943)

It’s a little jarring to see military propaganda so overtly packaged and titled. These days, the U.S. Army needs to fund two decades of Tom Cruise’s dental surgery in order for producers to make a two-hour montage of how frickin’ rad war can be. But the entire military-cinematic complex began with this one little pet project of Walt Disney’s. After reading Victory Through Air Power, a book about how the U.S. could only maintain its status as the global superpower by having the best airplanes and bombs, Disney self-funded the animated version of the bellicose screed.

And boy, did it work. The film convinced Winston Churchill of the importance of carpet bombing uncontacted tribes the world over. And while FDR had already been on board with the idea of big ol’ airplane guns, it convinced him of something almost just as sinister: that movies were a great way to whip the American public into a seething frenzy of patriotism. This film kicked off a long and lucrative string of Disney-produced propaganda, which in turn laid the groundwork for Hollywood to stick America’s most popular comedic actors into long, expensive Army commercials.

This movie also got a goddamn bomb named after Walt Disney. The British saw a fictional bomb as depicted by Disney animators — a rocket that could pierce concrete — and decided they needed to make it real. They called the resulting bunker-penetrating mass murder weapon the “Disney Bomb.”

3 ‘Song of the South’ (1946)

This is kind of the holy grail of Disney racism. Most of his other embarrassments pack a lifetime of internalized bigotry into a single centaur or offensive song, like an ingrown hair of hate and white supremacy. But Song of the South is essentially a 94-minute timeshare presentation for the entire institution of slavery. A kindly older Black man, Uncle Remus, tries to protect and educate the white kids who live on and visit his plantation, through the power of storytelling, song and smiles. There are no sinister power dynamics at play, and everyone gets along as equals — you know, just like during slavery.

From the get-go, Disney’s defense has been that the story actually takes place shortly after the Civil War. These characters are technically “sharecroppers,” not “slaves,” so how could the disturbing implications of slavery possibly apply to ol’ Uncle Remus and his owners employers? Despite his chipper demeanor, Uncle Remus is clearly toeing a fine line: In his efforts to take care of the feral white kids running around the farm unattended, he occasionally finds himself at odds with their parents. It gets so bad that, even in what Disney swears is a post-slavery world, Uncle Remus packs up and tries to escape to the North.

Protest and discourse erupted when the movie came out in 1946, with Disney taking their characteristic stance that racism is over, and we as a society must simply move on. But nothing speaks louder than the fact that actor James Baskett, who played Uncle Remus, wasn’t allowed to attend the premiere because he was Black.

2 ‘The Story of Menstruation’ (1946)

Disney got into war propaganda for the love of the game, but he got into menstruation cinema for the big bucks. In 1946, he produced this 10-minute video teaching young women the basics of menstruation. Chiefly:

1. Having a period is totally fine and normal as long as you pretend it’s not happening.
2. Period blood is as white as snow.
3. Tampons are icky, and you should never use them. 

They even hired a (male) gynecologist to ensure scientific accuracy, and Good Housekeeping gave it its coveted Seal of Approval. So what’s the problem, exactly? This film only exists because Disney was hard-up for cash, and accepted a sizable bribe from maxi pad company Kotex, who was struggling to compete with tampon company Tampax. They asked Walt to wrap their anti-tampon propaganda in a bit of scientific jargon, and ship it off to high schools across America for half a decade.

Unexpected progressive win: It’s thought to be the first film from a major studio to say the word “vagina.”

1 ‘White Wilderness’ (1958)

Okay, a nature documentary. And an Oscar-winning one at that! Even the New York Times, that perennial moral compass of the nation, raved that “Mr. Disney has assembled a fine, often fascinating color documentary on animal life in the North American Arctic.” It’s hard to imagine Disney greenlighting something deeply, cruelly sinister for the sake of a dry-ass nature documentary.

Actually, it’s easy if you try! What’s the one fact most people know about lemmings? It’s that they’ll eagerly follow each other over a cliff in a mass-suicide stampede, right? If you think about it for exactly one second, you realize that makes no sense, biologically or evolutionarily. And yet, this very documentary provides documented video proof of the cowardly lemming’s death drive.

In 1982, more than 20 years after White Wilderness premiered, it came out that producers actually kidnapped a bunch of lemmings, transported them to a cliff overlooking an icy river, then confused and agitated them to instigate a mass suicide event. When that didn’t work, they rolled the cameras and straight-up hucked ‘em off the cliff. 

If we squint, we can barely justify that kind of treatment for the bros on Love is Blind. But lemmings? C’mon, Walt!