Uncle Remus and His Tales of Br'er Rabbit is an American Disney comic strip that ran on Sundays from October 14, 1945, to December 31, 1972.
[2] The Uncle Remus strip began as a "preview" of the Walt Disney Productions film Song of the South, which premiered a year later, on November 12, 1946.
[4] In 1881, journalist, fiction writer and folklorist Joel Chandler Harris published Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings: The Folk-Lore of the Old Plantation, a collection of animal stories, songs and folklore collected from southern black Americans, told in a Deep South Negro dialect.
In the books, Uncle Remus, a kindly former slave, tells stories to a group of children, passing on the folktales of his culture.
[6] In 1939, Walt Disney began developing Uncle Remus as a full-length animated feature film, although it took seven years to reach the screens.
[5] Uncle Remus and His Tales of Br'er Rabbit launched on October 14, 1945, a year before the film's release.
It was written by Bill Walsh, who had joined the studio in 1943 and was writing the Mickey Mouse comic strip with artists Floyd Gottfredson and Dick Moores.
[5] Paul Murry left the Disney studio in July 1946, leaving Moores as the artist of the strip for the next five years.
[1] Reflecting on the strip's last decade, comics historian Maurice Horn writes, "In 1962 John Ushler brought in the rear (in a stylistic as well as a chronological sense) in a succession of limp Uncle Remus pages until the series' end on December 31, 1972.
In 2016, IDW Publishing's WDC&S #731 (May 2016) included a short Br'er Rabbit story, "Petrified Perfection," reprinting the Uncle Remus strip from May 17, 1953.