Uncle Remus

The name had also appeared in pejorative “Uncle Remus” stories, and ads from the 1920s depicted the mascot as barely literate.

The closest comparable decision to NBC’s call is Disney’s decision to disappear “Song of the South,” its 1946 adaptation of white journalist Joel Chandler Harris’s collection of the Uncle Remus folktales set in Reconstruction-era Georgia.

It was Ezra Pound, calling himself Brer Rabbit, who gave Eliot the nickname Old Possum, another moniker borrowed from Joel Chandler Harris’s “Uncle Remus” collection of African-American folklore.

Eliot was given the nickname Possum by Ezra Pound, who got it from “Uncle Remus,” Joel Chandler Harris’s compilation of plantation folktales, which was published in 1880.

It was never a question, for instance, whether Disney Plus subscribers would have access to the 1946 Disney musical “Song of the South,” in which a former slave, Uncle Remus, recounts African folk tales.