The game: a marble “Zip” for the Briar Patch
Walt Disney’s Uncle Remus Game was a bagatelle, the marble-launching tabletop format that sits midway between pinball and a board game. A player draws back a simple metal lever and sends marbles up and around the inclined playing field, trying to settle them into scoring holes. Parker Brothers, working from its longtime home in Salem, Massachusetts, dressed the field in character lithography drawn from the Uncle Remus stories: Brer Rabbit, Brer Fox and Brer Bear, the trio at the heart of the tales.
The game carried the single-word trademark “Zip” across the box and field. The name nodded to the film’s signature tune, “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah,” while doubling as a fitting description of marbles zipping around the board. It belongs to the same family of inexpensive skill-and-luck amusements Parker Brothers and its rivals turned out in volume in the 1940s, alongside marble games like Whitman’s Pinocchio-themed Pitfalls marble game and later bagatelles such as the Mickey’s Haunted House pinball-bagatelle.
The film tie-in: Song of the South
The game existed because of a film. Song of the South premiered at the Fox Theatre in Atlanta on November 12, 1946, in a gala staged near the home ground of the source material. The picture combined live action with animated sequences and drew on the Uncle Remus folk tales as collected and adapted in the late nineteenth century by Georgia journalist Joel Chandler Harris. Disney had acquired rights to the Harris stories in 1939, and on screen the character of Uncle Remus was played by James Baskett.
The film’s later legacy is complicated. Disney never gave Song of the South a home-video release in the United States, and the company has kept it largely out of circulation over concerns about its portrayal of the post-Civil War South. At the same time, its animated Brer Rabbit segments supplied the story and characters for Splash Mountain, the log-flume attraction that opened at Disneyland on July 17, 1989, and was later built at other Disney parks. The combination of a withdrawn film and a long-running ride has kept the Uncle Remus characters in an unusual middle ground in Disney history. For more on the author behind the tales, see The “E” Ticket’s coverage of Joel Chandler Harris.
Parker Brothers and Disney licensing in the 1940s
By 1946 Parker Brothers was a familiar Disney licensee. The company had already issued a string of “Walt Disney’s Own Game” titles in the 1930s, including Ferdinand the Bull, and it would continue producing Disney games for decades. The broader system that made these tie-ins possible traced back to the character-merchandising program built in the 1930s, the work of figures like Kay Kamen, the licensing strategist behind Disney’s merchandise empire. A 1946 Uncle Remus bagatelle fit the studio’s standard pattern: time a licensed game to a theatrical release, attach a recognizable manufacturer, and put the film’s characters in front of children at home. Disney had used the same approach for earlier features, including the Pinocchio target game released around that film’s debut. The Uncle Remus “Zip” game is a small surviving artifact of that licensing machinery, and of a film Disney itself would later set aside.
