I was musing today that Song of the South needs to be remade. It's been all but disowned by Disney because of the "happy slaves on the plantation" crap in the framing around the tales.
But the stories in all that were originally collected by Joel Chandler Harris, a newspaper publisher who was an abolitionist before the Civil War and an advocate of racial equality afterwards. The actor who played Uncle Remus, James Baskett, was originally supposed to just voice one of the animated characters in the movie. But Walt Disney was so impressed with his talent that he hired him on the spot to play Uncle Remus. Baskett would later earn a special Academy Award for his performance.
The stories of Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox in the movie are important African-American folklore, and don't deserve to be forgotten.
So..... I'm thinking just keep the folklore, but change almost everything else.
Set in the 1930s, "Uncle" Remus is a sharecropper. Having no family, he lives alone and makes extra money doing odd handyman jobs (I see him as being like the Teddy character on Bob's Burgers) The two ch1ldr3n of the local landowner are generally ignored by their parents, so they hang out at Uncle Remus' place where they learn things about growing up and life in general. And hear his stories of playing against a Negro Leagues barnstorming team, seeing Lincoln Perry (better known as Stepin Fetchit) in a vaudeville review, etc.
And, with no descendants of his own, he "adopts" the landowner's young as his own, and tells them the Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox (et al.) stories as he learned them from his father, who heard them from his, who was told them by......
Hey, it's pretty slow in the office these days.....