Lecture Disneys Golden Era

In this lecture, we’ll explore the biography and impact of Walt Disney. His transformation of the tale from the popularity of the Grimms and it’s furthering of the moralizing of the Perrault circle. Before Disney, we’ll examine the growing popularity of fairy tales as a form of mass entertainment and influence, then peer into the first animated tales and the innovative techniques Disney applied to overwhelm audiences. The form of the fairy tales that we know we own in large part to Walt Disney and their popularization, and in this way, they have become a basic common background upon which new values could be performed for audiences (first with the Grimms and then with Disney). We’ll track the transformation from socially responsible, communal tales to those that support authoritarian, patriarchal schemas and the growing manufacture of the cult of personality through its new medium: film.

[Music] Hi. In this lecture, we’ll explore the biography and impact of Walt Disney,

his transformation of the tale from the popularity

of the Grimms and it’s furthering of the moralizing of the Perrault circle.

Before Disney, we’ll examine the growing popularity of fairy

tales as a form of mass entertainment and influence,

then peer into the first animated tales and the

innovative techniques Disney applied to overwhelm audiences.

The form of the fairy tales that we know we owe

in large part to Walt Disney and their popularization,

and in this way, they have become a basic common background upon

which new values could be performed for audiences

(first with the Grimms and then with Disney).

We’ll track this transformation from socially responsible,

communal tales to those that support authoritarian,

patriarchal schemas and the growing manufacture

of the cult of personality through its new medium: film.

[Music] Walt Disney has had a tremendous impact on the

reception and perception of fairy tales in the world today.

With the ability of film, mass production,

and the distribution into a global market,

Disney has come to dominate the world of entertainment,

and through subsidiaries, has gone far beyond the screen.

With early application of total marketing – which means selling not just the film,

but licensing the brand and characters to lamps,

wristwatches, glasses, cups, pillows,

clothing, Disney was able to capitalize already on the

earliest opportunities to expand the entertainment

market into people’s homes and everyday lives.

Disney has become so predominant that his films,

or the films of the corporation,

just like the Grimms’ stories of the 19th century,

have come to be part of a shared cultural heritage

and have instilled values that are fundamental to many of our identities.

And this is a worldwide phenomenon,

not just restricted to the United States,

because of the reach and associations a global market has with the brand.

How does he appeal to so many different cultures?

The focus of his early animated features veer away from story,

plot and challenging the status quo,

and instead present viewers with spectacle and a string of sight gags,

collection of sketch comedy routines,

and musical numbers. By using fairy tales as the basis for story,

the well-known plots serve to frame our expectations

and keep the thread of the narrative intact while

the animators present us with many uncoordinated gags and visual effects.

However, this style and production has been criticized by many theorists including Bruno Bettelheim,

who considers the tales to be too sanitized to

provide children psychological insight into the dangers of the world,

nor the safety of finding just and harsh retribution for wrong-doing.

Marie Louise von Franz criticizes the tales for

robbing viewers of the fundamental psychological work of individuation,

focusing on a narrow batch of story arcs that

replaces the symbolic language of our psyche

for the spectacle and sales pitches of the animation.

And, Jack Zipes also criticizes Disney for producing

and furthering a strict hierarchical ideology

that supports and doesn’t question the capitalist exploitation of labor,

selling fantasies, while ignoring the harsh reality that Disney used to push his own Utopic vision,

much like that of a dictator.

So, we’ll take a closer look at these theories as

we recount the history of Disney from his earliest years up to today during this week.

Disney revolutionized the way fairy tales were told.

While we shouldn’t discount the early animation work of Lotte Reiniger,

who pioneered the techniques that Walt would use to create depth,

he continued to revolutionize techniques,

while Reiniger maintained her distinct style throughout her career.

Disney was interested in how the images would

become ever more lifelike through the application of technology.

Technologies allowed for mass production and global distribution of his product,

and thereby also standardized the images of the

fairy tale characters for children around the world.

As we looked at the critique brought by the culture industry,

this standardization brought with it a restrictive

standardization that robbed the oral storytelling

of its ability to take up specific problems of local regions,

or even adapt the tale to the audience that was

hearing it – instead it was a type of Model T of the entertainment industry,

one size is made to fit all, and in order to accommodate such varied audiences,

only the most generic and uncontroversial elements would remain.

And what remains is an infantilization of the audience with a focus on cute,

adorable characters and plotless collections of sight gags and visual spectacles.

At the same time, a continuing impulse found in the animation of Disney is a focus on cleaning up,

sometimes obsessively, so that there is a demand for controlling the

environment – transferred by the artist boss

to the very animated characters themselves – a desire to continually sanitize,

and with this comes a continual degeneration

of the original material and its psychological depth into a surface,

visual spectacle that no longer examines or hints at the complex disparities of the world.

[Music.] Disney’s rise is part of a larger, longer development

that led to the breakthroughs in technology that

both has atomized (or isolated) individuals while

broadening the reach of reception and connecting audiences to each other.

The impulses to adapt fairy tales towards didactic

goals was already present in Perrault’s versions

while the tales became institutionalized as part of their socialization process.

While the Grimms’ enjoyed success in Germany,

many Americans felt that the tales could be harmful

for children – given the penchant the brothers

had for writing in gruesome details and harmful stereotypes.

The rise tale, first penned in Italy,

was part of the attraction of the economic system of capitalism and the U.S.A.

was seen as a land of new beginnings,

starting over, and the expectation that with hard work,

one could elevate one’s social status.

In the early 20th century, when Disney was a child himself,

there was a sense of elitism – as if America

was a promised land with a chosen people – and

that by God’s grace they would be blessed as an honest,

hard-working individual could,

through meritocracy, epitomized in the story of Horatio Alger,

who is a young man who picked himself up by his

bootstraps and made his fortune and brought himself out of poverty,

that with hard work one could elevate one’s social status.

With the adoption of reading,

as an institutional education for the masses,

and easier access to the means of publication,

the fairy tale underwent a transformation from the oral telling to the printed page.

The Grimms’ ability to distribute and spread

their version of the tales ceded them legitimacy – as being the official version of the tales.

As these were adopted in schools,

they were also adapted more towards children.

The tales helped to reinforce the patriarchal order,

demonstrate the positive values of the heroes

and heroines that children should strive to emulate.

And, as they were adapted to American audiences,

there was a healthy dose of optimism infused into the tales.

Tales were also given a happy end and plot closure,

abolishing the gruesome punishments,

and the tales were also made into plays that

became part of Christmas traditions in schools everywhere.

[Music] It was first in Kansas City in the early twenties

that a very young Walt Disney sought to bring

his animation company and career to life with several partners,

the most renown of those being Ub Iwerks.

Most of the early investing was through corporate sponsorship,

and businesses were – Most of the early investing was through corporate sponsorship,

and business was incredibly difficult.

The early cartoons – the laugh-o-grams – had their fill of stereotypes,

but also they incorporated progressive elements

that demonstrated social insight into the conditions of different social classes.

The tales were regressive in their emphasis on spectacle over plot,

and they all had titles of well-known fairy tales,

but were in many cases, barely recognizable as such tales.

In the earliest cartoons, a character that looked a lot like a young Walt

Disney attempting to get the girl and that was the basic plotline of the shorts.

He was accompanied by Julius the Cat,

which was the earliest version of the humorous animal that accompanied the protagonist.

These characters would eventually merge into

one figure that would become known as Mickey Mouse.

The Tales included takes on Little Red Riding Hood,

Four Musicians of Bremen, Cinderella,

and Puss–n-Boots. And, Disney used techniques that were pioneered in the Expressionist films of the era,

and made those films so that he invited audiences

to become immersed in a fantasy world of the artist,

where the constraints of the real world no longer weighed upon them.

For example, Alice’s Wonderland was one of his most innovative and ambitious films,

a film that would bankrupt his studio,

but remain a technological wonder of the time.

It was after this bankruptcy that Walt thought

it a good idea to leave town and head for Hollywood,

where his talents as a film editor and animator would certainly be in higher demand.

[Music.] Walt convinced his brother Roy to invest in the

Disney Brother’s Studio and in 1923 they set up their business,

where they worked with the young star of the

last Alice’s Wonderland for six more shorts that they sold to theaters,

but it didn’t do very well. In 1926,

the studios would move and change names again into the Walt Disney Studios.

It was here that they would develop the character of Oswald the Rabbit,

another precursor to Mickey Mouse,

but a bit more wild in his adventures.

And, it wasn’t too much later that Steamboat Willie was introduced,

so that with the addition of sound,

the animated character sprung to life and one

of the total – and was also part of the total marketing scheme.

The Mickey Mouse wristwatch with Mickey’s hands pointing out the time,

became a new must-have item for audiences.

Over the course of the 1930’s we could see a distinct transformation from pro-social values,

where their heroes are a collective group of

gnomes who rescue two babes in the woods. The woods are also depicted as dark and scary,

and while the gnomes are industrious,

there is not an over-emphasis on cleaning,

or work for work’s sake, but rather the houses seem rather unkempt,

and the creatures that the children have turned into are rather monstrous.

It is first in the following year that with The

Three Little Pigs (1933) that we see that the

Protestant work ethic is what keeps the wolf at bay,

specifically those pigs who have leisure time,

end up at the mercy of the wolf,

who comes and blows their door down.

They have to turn towards the industrious leader,

who made his house of brick. The song was also a hit for its audiences.

In 1934, The Flying Mouse even goes so far as to challenge dreaming itself,

the mouse who thought he could fly,

turns into a bat and is ostracized,

kicked out from his family and home,

until he has learned his lesson and has to return home dismissing his dream forever.

[Music.] The success of Disney would soon come in the form

of feature films that in order to create the next film,

typically, Disney would invest all of his profits back into the business.

With one flop, the Studio would risk incurring irreparable losses.

Films like Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (1937)

amazed audiences across the world with its smooth

animation taken from tracing over actors with sound and bright colors.

These innovations continued to provide audiences new visuals as the technology allowed it.

A series of modestly unsuccessful films were

then released in the years following like Pinocchio in 1940,

Dumbo in 1941, and Bambi in 1942,

all considered classics today,

but at the time compounded the economic situation for Disney,

so that he took to making films about South America

to aid in travel and tap into other markets.

Cinderella in 1950 provided another success,

and as the Disney brand became recognizable with

television programming and films that fed into a vision of his parks,

films such as Treasure Island and Peter Pan were

both created to incorporate as part of this total

strategy of marketing as theme rides for his park as well.

Disney had been interested in marketing these

other products to accompany his films for a long time,

and the first items were things such as buttons,

stencil sets, and chocolate covered marshmallows,

and he had a hit with Mickey Mouse watch in 1929

He was able to generate more income from renegotiating

his initial royalty licensing agreement with Borgfelt & Co.

At that time his proceeds rose from 2 percent to 5 percent of those things sold,

but then he struck it rich with a 50 percent

royalty deal with Herman “Kay” Kamen who agreed to that in 1933 so that he could sell napkins,

books, wallpaper, phonographs,

hairbrushes, toys, etc. So, one of the most sought after items today still

is an original Ingersoll timepiece that is now valued between 1,500 and 2,500 dollars.

[Music] In the 1950s, Disney began to not only dominate family entertainment on the screens,

but also introduced Little Golden Book picture books,

further solidifying and standardizing the global vision of fairy tale characters.

One of the first books was an adaptation of the Italian Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio from 1883.

[Music] In the original Pinocchio is a jerk.

He’s not so cute He’s an angry,

violent and rude stick that eventually badgers

a browbeaten Gepetto into carving him into life.

He even betrays his “father” once by lying to

a police officer that throws Gepetto in jail for being abusive.

While Gepetto is in jail, Pinocchio starts to regret this decision as he’s starving.

But, then when Gepetto is finally released and comes home with food,

Pinocchio thoughtlessly gobbles up everything that he offers.

He even kills Cricket, his conscience,

and the Fox and the Cat that he trusts,

they hang him and get bored when he doesn’t seem to suffocate as quickly as they thought.

He even bites off the cat’s paw,

and when he is resuscitated by the fairy with the blue hair,

he is greedy and takes all the sugar and medicine,

and treats her dismissively. So,

many of the early horribly self-centered behaviors

that Pinocchio exudes eventually subside through his education,

and then there’s a recognition by him of the people who sacrificed for him,

and that’s sort of his transformation.

[Music] In our film by Disney,

all of the early bad behavior is avoided by Pinocchio already from the outset,

and he looks entirely too human,

cute, and naïve, rather than fundamentally selfish.

Akin to the original, the Disney puppet wishes to be a real boy,

and must prove himself brave,

truthful, and unselfish. What makes him good is that he abides by the

work ethic and requires little in return except the approval of the father figure,

the leader. As he tries out the vices of the adult world,

which is cigars, gambling, idleness,

he turns into an ass like all the other boys.

It is interesting then how this early focus on

the Protestant work ethic and Pleasure Island or Toyland as a corrupting influence,

that Pinocchio is in the very same entertainment that he is being,

uh – basically, Pinocchio is the very same entertainment that he represents to his audience.

Even further along, the Toyland and Pleasure Island that corrupts

provides the basis for the idea of Disneyland

that opens up that very same year as the film is released.

[Music] The Swiss environmentalist classic Bambi,

A Life in the Woods, by Felix Salten,

published in 1923 is a brutal look at the brief

and dangerous life of the creatures of the forest.

The book often introduces characters as naïve,

empathetic, and curious of the world,

only to graphically depict their demise a few pages later.

Some of the characters are treacherous,

like Gobo the dog, who befriends then kills the fox on the Hunter’s command,

blindly following orders. The book was seen as supporting a pacifist agenda,

as it even laid bare the gruesomeness of nature

as it lifted the veil of life as struggle mentality

of the Nazi Party and was summarily banned during the regime’s rule.

[Music.] In order to adapt the novel,

and make it palatable to audiences that included small children,

most all of the danger and ever present sense of terror and death were removed.

If we look at the Little Golden Book,

we see that safety is emphasized… “Then she

nudged her sleeping baby gently with her nose…she licked him reassuringly.

” There is an emphasis of friendship and fun,

not lurking threats, or constant struggle for survival and deception.

Many of the images are cleaned up.

Those tragic figures who are introduced and then dispatched in a horrific manner,

they stick around and live without a care.

Humans become the enemy, with their fire and guns,

and winter becomes hard. Even the death of the mother is handled out of sight,

in a very touching and endearing way,

lacking the brutality and abruptness of the original.

Bambi is able to escape and establish his own family,

in a fairy tale like fashion,

while in the original, he is aware that his time is short,

and he needs to both mentor and fight his competitors,

in addition to all of the threats that are out there.

The Disney method strips the originals of their

danger in order to make them safe for children.

Peter Pan - Pan, you may know,

is a God of chaos and sexuality,

so that Peter Pan exhibits and epitomizes those characteristics in the early play by J.M.

Barrie. It was with this concept in mind that he introduced

the character in the play Little White Bird in 1902,

where a man wants to steal a child away from their mother by making up the story of Peter Pan,

who in the story, is abandoned and replaced by his mother by another child.

“It was a scheme conceived of in a flash,

and ever since relentlessly pursued –to burrow under Mary’s influence with the boy,

expose her to him in all her vagaries,

taken him utterly from her…Mary remains ‘culpably obtuse to my sinister designs.

” The character returns again in the play Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens in 1904,

and that would eventually turn into the book Peter and Wendy in 1911,

Transferred Now to a Never Never Land.

Barrie, a celibate husband of Mary Amsel,

actress who he wrote plays for,

was infatuated with the young neighbor boys and

their family has led – which has led to speculations

that the book is based on his exploits and manipulation and abuse of that family.

The original title for Peter Pan,

or the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up was originally called The Boy Who Hated Mothers.

There are several very disturbing moments in the book,

such as the psychopathic thinning out of the

Lost Boys whenever they seem to switch sides or allegiances away from Pan.

Pan is in his earliest iteration depicted as a demon child who steals children,

and Tinkerbell alludes to the possibility of fairy orgies.

Barrie’s own infatuation with the neighbor family

grows even more intense after their father dies and he befriends Sylvia,

the mother. His own wife eventually cheats on him after years of celibacy,

and he quickly moves on to act the part of the father to the young boys Peter,

John, Michael, Nicholas, and George Llewelyn Davies.

His notebooks even reveal a dark,

sinister plot hatching within Barrie’s writing,

To undermine the role that his ex-wife initially

had in being charged with the care of the neighbor’s boys.

He even went so far as to tell the boys that he and Sylvia were to be married,

and upon her passing, he forged her will that specifically asked that the boys go to live with their aunt,

and set himself up as their sole custodial guardians instead.

His overly affectionate letters became embarrassing to the boys,

and many of them had mentioned that they had destroyed these as they became older.

Each of the boys in his charge lived short,

tragic lives, including two suicides.

So, the world of Never Never Land is both nightmare and fantasy,

tragic and hopeful. It is often associated with the curse of J.M.

Barrie. [Music.] With Disney’s version,

Peter and Wendy both look to be older and on the cusp of taking on adult responsibilities.

Peter is unable or unwilling to,

remain – and, he remains playful in the land of fantasy that he himself brings people to,

luring Wendy and her brothers.

Wendy is not Peter’s only love interest,

however. Tinkerbell and Tiger Lilly both vie for his affection.

He seems sort of like a delusional player,

who only has younger, more foolish people following him.

And, while it was interesting for a time,

Wendy then eventually leaves him behind.

And, just like the only true enemy,

the only adult, Captain Hook,

is haunted by the clicking of the clock,

or the ticking of the clock that represents aging,

and his brush with death in the form of the crocodile.

So, Peter Pan represents an attitude of many American

male dreamers who not only want to find a Wendy to take care of their progeny,

but also themselves, seeing her as an ersatz mother,

and we can see that she has to take care of the boys,

tuck them in, carry firewood in with the other women at the Indian encampment,

while he plays with his sidekick,

the jealous fairy, Tinkerbell,

who represents a lusty pin-up model.

The problem with Peter Pan and Pinocchio as popular

models of behavior for young boys is that their aspirations keep them childish,

never taking on adult responsibility.

Pinocchio’s wish is to be a real boy,

not to be a man, and Peter Pan desires to forever be a childlike boy.

So, these undercurrents damage the image of adulthood

as the goal of the maturation process and offer young men,

who before were turned into Jackasses in Pinocchio,

for spending too much time playing around,

it offers them a new vision of that same pleasure land or Toyland,

in the Never Neverland of Peter Pan,

where nothing will ever be required of them again.

Peter Pan, the pied piper of children calls them to live the same fantasy escapism at the theme park.

[Music.] So, in this lecture,

we looked at the development of mass media and

technology that provided Walt Disney his platform

and the consequences of becoming the predominant purveyor of fairy tales.

We also examined the transformation in his animated

tales from his early years to the golden era

with specific attention paid to the sanitizing of originals like Pinocchio,

Bambi, and Peter Pan. Disney has retooled tales of maturation into tales of endless childhood,

peddling the fantasy through total marketing and the realization of this Utopia,

his own Never Neverland, in Disneyland.

And, that’s it for today. We’ll take on,

then, the further history of Disney with the Renaissance

that happens in the ‘80s and ‘90s that really

catapults this brand into this megalithic – catapults

this brand into this monolith of the entertainment industry.

And, that’s it for today and we’ll see you next time. [Music.]