2

THE WORLD ACCORDING

TO DISNEY

Originally designed for Pepsi at the 1964 New York

World’s Fair, Disneyland’s It’s a Small World provides
a water-based fifteen-minute journey across the globe.
Three hundred audio-animatronic children chant the
ride’s title song in their “native” language, a Sherman
Brothers message of peace crafted in response to the
Cuban Missile Crisis. The song is arguably the most
played music in history. It’s a Small World underlines the
common values of humankind and a shared destiny on
this planet. It also situates Disney at the core of those val-
ues, the force that binds the world together and makes it
small. Disney Culture is a powerful force connecting the
United States and the world. It communicates across ter-
ritorial, religious, political, and cultural divides. The stu-
dio often does this by a process of assimilation, whereby
it takes a multitude of stories and adapts (or Disneyfies)

52
 THE WORLD ACCORDING TO DISNEY • 53

them for an international audience. Disney remains a

major culture producer for the globe.

DISNEY AND EUROPE

European influences can be seen across myriad Disney

cartoons and live-action productions. Applauded as “a
modern Hans Christian Andersen” in one 1937 interview,
Walt Disney replied, “Oh no, Andersen was the origi-
nator. We’ve only taken the memories of our childhood
and recreated them for the screen” (Schallert). His ear-
liest cartoons such as the Alice Comedies proved heav-
ily indebted to the European market. Disney’s Skeleton
Dance (1929) appeared inspired by the stop-motion film
Le squelette joyeux (1897) by the French Lumière broth-
ers. Most studio hits, especially in the Walt Disney era,
proved conversions of popular European stories. Snow
White came from the Brothers Grimm (Germany 1812),
Alice in Wonderland from Lewis Carroll (England 1865),
Peter Pan from J.  M. Barrie (Scotland 1902), Pinocchio
from Carlo Collodi (Italy 1883), Cinderella from Charles
Perrault (France 1697), and The Hunchback of Notre
Dame from Victor Hugo (France 1831). In the live-action
realm, 20,000 Leagues under the Sea originated from Jules
Verne (France 1870), Robinson Crusoe from Daniel Defoe
(England 1719), Swiss Family Robinson from Johann David
54 • DISNEY CULTURE

Wyss (Germany 1812), and Treasure Island from Robert

Louis Stevenson (Scotland 1883).
An expert on the studio’s European links, Robin Allan
contends, “The Disney product is indebted to an older
cultural heritage; Disney absorbed and recreated that her-
itage for a new mass audience” (1). Walt Disneyfied his
European source material: simplifying narrative, adding
new characters and creatures, introducing comedy and
music, and highlighting the sentimentality. He trans-
formed tired and overfamiliar stories into spectacular and
exciting movies. Disney fed the Hyperion and Burbank
studios with European folklore, and out came cartoon
blockbusters. For Allan, this process amounted to a “new
art form” (xv).
European example also factored into the design, devel-
opment, and expansion of Disney theme parks. Early
plans for Disneyland (first labeled “Mickey Mouse Park”)
drew on European precedents of recreation first refined
at Hampton Court and Versailles. While the home-
grown Coney Island, with its tawdry look and criminal
vices, depressed Walt Disney, European parks inspired
him to create Disneyland. On visiting Tivoli Gardens in
Copenhagen, he enthused, “Now this is what an amuse-
ment place should be!” (Thomas 251). European folklore
similarly determined the park’s content. Studio promot-
ers described a trip to Disneyland as “like Alice stepping
 THE WORLD ACCORDING TO DISNEY • 55

through the looking glass” (brochure 1953). With rides

based around King Arthur, Snow White, Peter Pan, and
Pinocchio, Disneyland’s Fantasyland in particular pro-
vided an exploration of fantasy Europe.
Through such projects, the studio not only reengi-
neered European folklore but produced a fictional, highly
Disneyfied, and highly Americanized Europe that proved
popular on both sides of the Atlantic. In the case of the
movie Pinocchio, animators added a chatty insect with
Chaplinesque behaviors, Jiminy Cricket, to guide the Ital-
ian puppet-boy. A wish-granting Blue Fairy resembling
Jean Harlow referenced US glamor girls of the period.
London’s Observer called the studio’s 1953 adaptation
of Peter Pan simply “Pan-American” (Allan 222). The
pirate Long John Silver (played by Robert Newton) in
Disney’s Treasure Island (1950) spoke with a distinctive
American-English patter that quickly became the stan-
dard movie “pirate voice.”
With Mary Poppins (1964), the studio showcased a
fantastical London awash with colors, clouds, and visual
spectacle. Variety adored the “dream-world rendition”
(Williams). With its Georgian townhouses and red pillar
letterboxes, the movie offered a veritable treasure trove
of London architecture. The British capital oozed with
romance and history. It also suffered serious smog and
seemed decidedly class ridden. Highlighting Disney’s
56 • DISNEY CULTURE

political agenda, the movie offered incisive class com-

mentary, exposing the viewer to the upper-class world
of ruthless business via the financier George Banks
(singing, “It’s great to be an Englishman in 1910”) and
the lower-class world of begging, dancing, and pigeon
feeding via the chimney sweep Bert (played by Dick Van
Dyke). Disney’s movie consistently trumpeted the under-
class. A jab at British hunting culture, one scene showed
Banks’s rebellious children aiding a distinctly Irish-voiced
fox escape killing. The author P. L. Travers expressed huge
disappointment with the movie. The Disneyfied London
reemerged in a surfeit of movies, including Bedknobs and
Broomsticks (1971).
The Disneyization of so many European stories re-
flected Walt Disney’s own interest in European travel
along with his avid collection of storybooks. For Umberto
Eco, the studio’s popular reproduction of European folk
stories revealed something much bigger and more wor-
rying: a country desperate to establish itself on a cul-
tural stage. According to Eco, Americans wanted their
own towering castles and Old World inheritance, and
awash with cultural anxiety, “the ideology of this Amer-
ica wants to establish reassurance through imitation”
(23). Rather than an “American original” as claimed by
Bob Thomas, Walt Disney seemed a pretend hero, and
his stories amounted to simplistic rehashes of European
 THE WORLD ACCORDING TO DISNEY • 57

history. However, Eco missed how far Disney trans-

formed European story into American story and how the
stories changed. The success of Disney highlighted the
rise of American culture, not its duplicity. As Yosemite
and Yellowstone competed with European cathedrals for
world attention, Disney World’s Cinderella Castle rivaled
the ancient citadels across the pond. The same vignette of
cultural nationalism that led the nature writer John Muir
to proselytize the wonders of Yosemite equally applied to
Walt Disney and Disneyland.
The response of Europe to Disney’s creations proved
initially hopeful. In the 1930s, Europeans welcomed
Mickey Mouse as if one of their own. Mickey proved
especially popular in Paris. The French newspaper Le
Figaro adored the rodent. In 1935, the League of Nations
awarded Walt Disney a medal. The early success of the
studio in Europe owed much to Disney selling Europe to
itself: the retelling of homegrown folklore aiding transla-
tion and popularity. Residents happily consumed Disney
Culture. Mickey Mouse had become the new cultural
ambassador for the United States. Alva Johnston, writ-
ing for Woman’s Home Companion, proclaimed, “Charlie
Chaplin and Mickey Mouse are the only universal char-
acters that have ever existed,” and “Mickey Mouse is not a
foreigner in any part of the world.” In a 1937 piece, the New
York Times exalted Mickey as both “an internationalist”
58 • DISNEY CULTURE

and an all-conquering “emperor of the world” (Russell).

With the backdrop of approaching war, the Times pre-
sented Disney’s rodent as a commanding leader, a cultural
hero ready to scupper any nefarious plans: “The air arma-
das of Europe, the plunging submarines, the skittering
destroyers and dignified battleships cannot compete with
the creatures which Mickey can call forth to battle if he
chooses. He can scuttle a pirate with the aid of a sawfish
and turn tortoises into tanks.” Seven years later, the Allies
used “Mickey Mouse” as the password for the D-Day
invasion of Normandy.
The growth of the Walt Disney Company in the post-
war period nonetheless spawned fears of a different kind of
invasion: of American takeover. Disney’s expansion into
Europe proved particularly contentious in the case of Dis-
neyland Paris in the 1990s. CEO Michael Eisner initially
declared France the “most enthusiastic of all countries
toward Disney, its merchandise, its culture,” highlighting
how “Mickey Mouse is a star in France” (“Disneyland
Gang”). Disney’s Robert Fitzpatrick related, “My biggest
fear is that we will be too successful” (Greenhouse). The
hubris proved misplaced. On arrival in France, Eisner was
met with eggs, ketchup, and “Mickey Go Home” placards.
With illusions to the 1986 nuclear accident in Ukraine,
project opponents nicknamed Disneyland Paris a “cul-
tural Chernobyl” (Kehr). Once welcomed by the French,
 THE WORLD ACCORDING TO DISNEY • 59

Mickey Mouse had become a symbol of uncultured cap-

italism. Despite attempts to “Frenchify” the theme park,
early attendance figures proved disappointing, with debts
almost leading to closure in March 1994. As Fitzpatrick
admitted, “Europe isn’t North America” (Greenhouse).
Disneyland Paris revealed that despite hopes of
“a small world,” regional differences still remained.
As Allan relates, “The overlay of American virtues of
self-sufficiency, wish fulfillment—‘when you wish upon
a star’—and the attainment of a materialist happiness, sits
uneasily upon a much older European moral tradition”
(70). Europeans gradually came to fear the Disneyfica-
tion of home and the rewriting of folk stories. European
reactions to Disney also reflected attitudes to American
businesses more broadly. Just like Coca-Cola, McDon-
ald’s, Starbucks, and Microsoft, the Walt Disney Com-
pany was a US giant that threatened local businesses and
native culture. Disneyfication seemed much the same
as Cocacolanization or McDonaldization: the selling of
the American Dream in a can, burger box, or caricature
made little practical difference to European consumers.
The golden arches, Coca-Cola script, and mouse ears
attested to the same process of American goods taking
over. The Burbank studio offended because it exported
the New World to the Old World. Fear of Disneyfica-
tion jelled with greater fears of American capitalism.
60 • DISNEY CULTURE

Americanization and Disneyfication appeared synony-

mous and indistinguishable.
Testament to the might of Mickey Mouse, Michael Eis-
ner once claimed that the Walt Disney Company helped
break down the Berlin Wall by its promotion of Western
ideology through entertainment. By contrast, for Giroux,
the studio instead threatened the creation of a “national
entertainment state” (46), led by an invasion force of
Mickey Mouse Clubs. A force for liberation or contain-
ment, Disney remains part of a broader cultural exchange.
Mickey Mouse is caught in a process of cultural conver-
sation, assimilation, and counterassimilation. While the
Burbank studio has assimilated and transformed world
stories, so too have people around the world appropri-
ated both Mickey Mouse and the Disney brand for their
own uses, as in the case of the English constable’s use of
Snow White’s seven dwarfs in his road-safety campaign
(see chapter 1). Like McDonald’s, Disney has embraced
cultural sensitivity and now adapts its products for local
markets, introducing wine at Disneyland Paris, feng shui
at Hong Kong Disneyland, and Mickey Mouse kimonos
at Tokyo Disney Resort. While some people may long
for the return of European stories to Europe, Disney has
ultimately used European folklore as a route toward truly
universal storytelling. Entering the twenty-first century,
the Disney story increasingly seems not so much about
 THE WORLD ACCORDING TO DISNEY • 61

America or Europe but about crafting a cohesive Disney

world. Tied to neither Old World nor New World ideas,
the corporation increasingly focuses on its own legacy
and mission. This marks Disney as something beyond
geographic borders. As the Disneyland ambassador
(and former Miss Disneyland) Connie Swanson-Lane
remarked, “I find that happiness is more or less inter-
national” (Mouse Clubhouse).

DISNEY AND AMERICA

A perimeter line marks the border between Disneyland,

Anaheim, and the hustle and bustle of Los Angeles. Local
residents travel from their gated communities to a world
of limitless possibilities. Inside the park, they engage with
all kinds of folktales, but most of all, they interact with one
man’s story. Disneyland is Walt Disney’s story of Amer-
ica. With his Anaheim project, Walt re-created “America”
as a Disneyfied theme-park experience, a DisAmerica.
He set out his premise: “Disneyland will be based upon
and dedicated to the ideals, the dreams, and the hard
facts that created America” (Pryor, “Land of Fantasia”).
Disneyland represented a shrine to the nation, a Mickey
Mouse totem. As Walt confided, “I believe in emphasiz-
ing the story of what made America great and what will
keep it great” (Giroux 35). For Rojek, Disneyland “is a
62 • DISNEY CULTURE

story of the moral and economic superiority of the Amer-

ican way of life and it presents history as intrinsically
progressive” (126).
Adamant that “this is not an amusement park” (Thomas
283), Walt Disney presented Disneyland as something
altogether new and exceptional. In reality, the park con-
nected with a long history of American entertainment.
Influenced by a sizable knowledge of the US amusement
industry and world’s fairs, Walt conceptualized the park as
a unison of existing types of attractions: “Disneyland will
be something of a fair, an exhibition, a playground, a com-
munity center, a museum of living facts, and a showplace
of beauty and magic” (Mosley 221). Despite his personal
antipathy toward Coney Island, Walt’s own park mim-
icked traditional fairgrounds. When Disneyland opened,
it featured a range of arcades, penny machines, and carou-
sel horses (the horses from Coney itself). A planned Lil-
liputian land resembled Coney Island’s Lilliputian village
of the 1900s.
Disneyland also functioned as a celebration of America
of time gone by. It provided an interactive realm steeped
in nostalgia, history, and romance. As a child, Walt Disney
lived on a small farm in Marceline, Kansas. In a letter to
the town crafted in 1938, Walt related his fond memories
of childhood and his enthusiasm for home: “Everything
connected with Marceline was a thrill to us. . . . I’m glad
 THE WORLD ACCORDING TO DISNEY • 63

I’m a small town boy and I’m glad Marceline was my town”
(Allan 2). This love for Marceline filtered into Walt’s plans
for the park, in particular its central thoroughfare. Walt’s
granddaughter Disney Diane Miller explained, “Main
Street in Disneyland is his dreamlike recreation of Marce-
line Main Street as he remembers it.” Disneyland also
peddled in nostalgia for a lost frontier. The themed land
of Frontierland celebrated the old Wild West captured
in film, a fictional kingdom of stagecoaches, river rapids,
cowboys, and Indians.
The Walt Disney Company turned history into inter-
active entertainment that helped Americans feel good
about themselves. Audio-animatronic figures reanimated
history for audiences; former presidents of the United
States spoke to the crowds. The studio breathed life into
lost, dead, and departed historical objects. Disney tapped
nostalgia for historic America and reminded visitors
of “the good old ways.” Perpetually producing positive
images of where the nation had come from, the park thus
operated as a timely propaganda machine. As Rojek sees
it, Disneyland was “calculated to give a reassuring impres-
sion of history” (128) and only had room for positive his-
tories. Disneyfied history thus meant “good history,” with
difficult topics such as slavery kept outside the berms.
Mike Wallace contends, “It is possible that Walt Dis-
ney has taught people more history, in a more memorable
64 • DISNEY CULTURE

way, than they ever learned in school” (Fjellman 59). As

a popular purveyor of the past, the Burbank studio has
educated the masses in the story of the “buckskin Bar-
bie” Pocahontas, the frontiersman Davy Crockett, and
the American revolutionary Johnny Tremain. On televi-
sion, at the movies, and in the parks, Disneyfied history
has promoted a fun and triumphant understanding of the
nation. Only occasionally has this proved controversial.
In November 1993, the company proposed an
American-history-themed park in Haymarket, Virginia,
“celebrating the nation’s richness of diversity, spirit, and
innovation” (Walt Disney Company). Disney’s Bob
Weis, who headed the development, labeled it “an ideal
complement” to a history-rich area, located near the
First Battle of Bull Run and just thirty-five miles south-
west of the White House (Walt Disney Company). The
park promised an intimate and realistic experience of key
events of America’s past. A Civil War–era village served as
hub, leading out to a Native America world (navigated by
a Lewis and Clark rapids ride), Presidents Square, Civil
War Fort, Monitor versus Merrimack fight, Ellis Island,
“Enterprise” town (complete with a roller coaster named
the Industrial Revolution), a “Victory Field” of World
War II airplanes, and finally a Coney-style fair. “Dis-
ney’s America” promised a more nuanced, serious, and
education-based Disney experience: “a venue for people
 THE WORLD ACCORDING TO DISNEY • 65

of all ages, especially the young, to debate and discuss the

future of our nation and to learn more about its past by
living it” (Walt Disney Company).
The response proved unexpectedly hostile. Haymar-
ket residents feared a “new Orlando” on their doorstep,
highlighting the sprawl of housing, hotels, and pollution
associated with the project. Citizens feared a historic
region being “obscured and overrun by neon and fran-
chises” (Kotz and Abramson). Concern centered on the
park’s content: specifically the notion of a Disney history
park. The company’s plan to create its own history proj-
ect threatened the real American history on display. The
documentary maker Ken Burns railed, “the area doesn’t
need any more history superimposed on it, especially of
the intoxicatingly distilled kind Disney is proposing.” The
Virginia resident Graham Dozier rallied, “the real his-
tory is what draws people, not some silly plastic version
of our past,” confiding, “I have nightmares of Mickey and
Donald wearing the blue and grey” (“Historians vs. Dis-
ney”). Supported by over two hundred academics and
historians, including the Civil War experts Shelby Foote
and James M. McPherson, Protect Historic America
(PHA) launched an effective campaign against the Walt
Disney Company. Members criticized the company’s
educational content, its financial motivations, its “sacha-
riny sentimentality,” and its inability to tackle serious
66 • DISNEY CULTURE

issues (“Historians vs. Disney”). The novelist William

Styron wrote to the New York Times, “I have doubts
whether the technical wizardry that so entrances children
and grown-ups at other Disney parks can do anything but
mock a theme as momentous as slavery” (Perez-Pena).
Robert Spore cried, “I don’t want to see any more genera-
tions fed the cleaned up Disney version of history” (“His-
torians vs. Disney”). Protesters shrewdly pitted “History”
versus “Disney.” They argued that ultimately the corpora-
tion could not be trusted with the nation’s past and that
history would be lost to Distory.
The reaction shocked the Walt Disney Company. Eis-
ner, who was hoping for the park as one of his legacies,
was stunned by the negativity. In a defiant mood, the
CEO charged, “If the people think we will back off, they
are mistaken,” and “The First Amendment gives you the
right to be plastic” (Powers). Arguably, much of Disney’s
America had already been accepted in other media and
formats, with many other popular versions of history out
there. However, “Distory Park” offended because of its
unusual combination of geography, local competition,
and intention of “doing serious history.” In September
1994, the studio dropped the project. Looking back, Eis-
ner lamented how “the Walt Disney Company had been
effectively portrayed as an enemy of American history
and a plunderer of sacred ground” (337).
 THE WORLD ACCORDING TO DISNEY • 67

DISNEY AND THE 1950S

Opening Disneyland in July 1955, Walt Disney’s claim in

brochures, “You will find yourself in the land of yester-
day, tomorrow, and fantasy. .  .  . Nothing of the present
exists,” underscored the sense of temporal distortion and
escape offered by Anaheim’s theme park. Disneyland
offered a liminal space: a realm of time travel and shift-
ing dreamscapes. Disney exceptionalism (the idea of the
studio being quantifiably unique) underscored the idea
of the park as separated and isolated from the real world.
However, the park very much related to the contempo-
rary period. Disney Culture mimicked American culture.
The park’s design incorporated new technological fasci-
nations, corporate visions, and political ideas. The studio
pandered to suburbanites and baby boomers. A popular
zeitgeist shaped the parkscape. Disneyland provided a
“1950s take” on American past, present, and future.
First and foremost, Disneyland was a Cold War park.
The park resounded with Cold War values, celebrated
the space race, and exhibited a range of American tech-
nologies and businesses. The park showcased Ameri-
can consumption and recreation in a similar vein to the
American National Exhibition that ran in Moscow in
1959. On a state trip to the United States, Soviet Premier
Nikita Khrushchev related great interest in Disneyland.
68 • DISNEY CULTURE

When he was denied access on security grounds, an

angry Khrushchev challenged, “Why not? What is it,
do you have rocket-launching pads there?” (“Premier
Annoyed”). The Disney way—consumerist, capitalist,
and individualist—stood as a populist antithesis to the
Marxist/Soviet way. An architectural and highly symbolic
statement of the American Dream, Disneyland exuded a
highly exportable form of cultural nationalism. The park
provided a bulwark of US cultural capital against Cold
War communist aggression.
Disneyland also offered temporary refuge from the big-
gest fear of the Cold War: Armageddon. Prior to the 1950s,
parks typically offered fleeting reprieve from the ardors of
city life and urban pollution. The notion of escape took
on a new totality and drama with the nuclear age. Fear
of annihilation affected all kinds of building projects,
inspiring covered shopping malls and home-built bomb
shelters. Timothy Mennel argues that “utopian sites were
shaped as much by Cold War concerns as by capitalist
dreams” (116). Enclosed, controlled spaces provided sym-
bolic protection from atomic attack. Disneyland offered a
psychological bomb shelter for the masses: a duck-and-
cover experiment with Mickey Mouse in the place of Bert
the Turtle. Its berms divided fantasy America from apoc-
alyptic America. Disney Culture fundamentally offered a
culture of Cold War reassurance.
 THE WORLD ACCORDING TO DISNEY • 69

Disneyland also connected with new dominant

trends of the period. An appendage to the rise of white
middle-class suburbia, Disneyland offered a place where
Americans fundamentally prospered. It provided a new
consumer playground alongside Route 66 drive-ins and
bustling department stores. The sociologist C. Wright
Mills’s research into white-collar work and “the salesman
ethic and convention to pretend interest” equally applied
to cast members on Main Street acting from scripts (82).
Disneyland operated as a figment of white middle-class
performance and consciousness.
The success of Disney projects in the 1950s reflected
the synchronicity of Walt’s ideas with the priorities of the
decade. A committed anticommunist and conservative,
Walt echoed many of the values prevalent in the period.
With a mutual emphasis on conformity, control, con-
sumption, idealism, conservatism, and naiveté, Disney
Culture and American culture matched. One comple-
mented the other. The 1950s represented the heyday of
Disney Culture.

FUTURE AND DIS-TOPIA?

Postwar Disney Culture also proved successful because

it captured a growing romance with utopian living, white
cities, and new technology. Disney mapped out not just
70 • DISNEY CULTURE

America of the past but America of the future. Tomor-

rowland and later EPCOT transported visitors to a para-
dise just around the corner. A technological idealist, Walt
Disney committed WED Enterprises to create four exhib-
its for the 1964 New York world’s fair, one each for Pepsi,
Ford, General Electric, and the state of Illinois. Walt
referred to WED as his “backyard laboratory”: “I can do
things with WED without asking anyone, even my wife”
(Stroud). He deployed a range of studio technologies
(including audio-animatronics) to formulate the exhibits.
Along with Pepsi’s It’s a Small World, Disney created an
automotive-based future for Ford and a mechanical Abra-
ham Lincoln guide for the state of Illinois. For General
Electric, Disney constructed the Carousel (or Theater)
of Progress, a rotating six-stage story assembled out of a
decrepit dinosaur-themed exhibit. The Carousel showed
how electricity made life easier across the decades.
Throughout the ride, a Sherman Brothers song repeated,
“There’s a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow.” The Carousel
epitomized the technological utopianism of Disney.
Disney linked new technologies to a new world. Caught
up in excitement over nuclear energy (what one CBS
radio broadcast labeled the “sunny side of the atom”),
like many corporations, Disney indulged in the unfold-
ing atomic gold rush. Walt firmly declared on television
that “the atom is our future” (Walt Disney Studios, “Our
 THE WORLD ACCORDING TO DISNEY • 71

Friend the Atom”). Disneyland featured “atomic subma-

rines” and the Monsanto-sponsored House of Tomor-
row, a futuristic living space complete with an “Atoms
for Living Kitchen.” Distributed widely at schools, Dis-
ney’s educational film and book Our Friend the Atom tied
nuclear developments to the ushering in of a brave new
world. The program’s guide, Dr. Heinz Haber, presented
the discovery of the atom as akin to a fisherman finding
a genie in a bottle. Haber situated nuclear power as part
of a grand narrative of history, connecting the atom with
scientists such as Aristotle and the recent advent of space
exploration. The fully Disneyfied atom seemed “almost
like a fairytale,” a gift of “magic power” capable of saving
the world (Walt Disney Studios, “Our Friend the Atom”).
Such positivity reflected a broader aspect at work
within the studio: the selling of an American future and
a timely updating of the American Dream. The Walt
Disney Company broadcast an American Dream for the
twentieth century built around family, technology, con-
sumerism, and convenience. Disney’s articulation of the
American Dream proved eminently persuasive in its car-
toon packaging and Technicolor glow. “When You Wish
upon a Star” served as a Disneyfied American anthem.
The Burbank studio offered hope to the masses and a
model of the future that was very different from Cold War
scares or science fiction that depicted termination. The
72 • DISNEY CULTURE

hope engine of America, Disney fulfilled child and adult

dreams alike.
The success of Disney Culture in the twentieth century
owed much to its alignment with the optimistic side of
American mass culture. The company symbolized a fun-
damentally good, traditional, and enlightened America.
For Brockway, Walt Disney was “attuned to the soul of
Middle America” (Myth 132). He instructed citizens on
values, goals, and aspirations in his weekly television pro-
grams. He was someone Americans could relate to. Dis-
ney served as the nation’s twentieth-century storyteller
and guide, a replacement for the likes of Benjamin Frank-
lin and Mark Twain. His cartoon avatar, Mickey Mouse,
came out “smiling through Depression, Wars, A-Bombs,
and H-Bombs” ( Jamison).
The Walt Disney Company was also something that
Americans could rely on. The studio served as a US insti-
tution, a cultural cornerstone, and a comfort blanket for
the nation. With generations of families taking their first
trip to Disneyland and watching their first Disney movie
together, Disney represented a collective cultural expe-
rience and a rite of passage. Benjamin Schwarz for the
Atlantic recounted, “for better or for worse, Walt Disney
(1901–1966) implanted his creations more profoundly
and pervasively in the national psyche than has any
other figure in the history of American popular culture.”
 THE WORLD ACCORDING TO DISNEY • 73

At times, Disney Culture and American culture seemed

almost the same. As the sociologist Robert Pettit argued,
“Disney does such a wonderful job of representing Amer-
ican culture, they’re almost synonymous with America”
(Hetter). In 1971, at the peak of countercultural pro-
test, the Los Angeles Times covered Grad Nite at Disney,
whereby 110,000 students visited the park to celebrate
college completion. Watched over by “our society’s super-
parent figure, Walt Disney,” the kids had a clean, drug-free,
alcohol-free, family-friendly night, the kind of “party that
would please a Southern Baptist convention” (Cartnal).
Americans flocked to Walt Disney’s sanitized and ideal-
ized version of their country. Schwarz concluded, “To be
a mainstream American in the American century was to
inhabit Walt Disney’s world.” There seemed nothing more
American than Walt Disney.

CRITICISM: DISNEY AND THE RUINATION

OF AMERICAN CULTURE

While for the vast majority, Disney Culture resembles

American Culture at its best, for a small but vocal minority,
the intersection between Disney and America proves less
welcome. Indeed, homegrown concern over the studio
dates back to the 1950s. In The Holy Barbarians (1959),
Lawrence Lipton coined the term “Disneyfication” when
74 • DISNEY CULTURE

writing “about the neon chrome artyfake Disneyfication

of America” (144). For his contemporary Julian Halevy,
Disney Culture threatened the ruination of American
popular culture. “Life is bright-colored, clean, cute, tit-
ivating, safe, mediocre, inoffensive to the lowest com-
mon denominator, and somehow poignantly inhuman,”
he wrote of Disney. Traveling aboard the Jungle Cruise,
Halevy came to the worrying and irrational conclusion
that “one feels our whole mass culture heading up the dark
river to the source—that heart of darkness where Mr. Dis-
ney traffics in pastel-trinketed evil for gold and ivory.”
By the 1970s, the corporation increasingly seemed
out of touch with national trends and growing diversity.
Theme parks resembled landscapes of the white middle
class, gated communities keeping out crime, class con-
flict, the disenfranchised, and the disempowered. Disney
arguably resembled an apartheid world. It misrepresented
the real America. Rather than adding to the nation, the
Burbank studio seemed to be taking away. As Janet Har-
bord argued, “Disney is a form of memory-wiping, an
amnesia in the face of a conflicted and violent twentieth
century, and a refusal of other experiences of the present”
(48). For Fjellman, the company offered “one version
of the United States and its view of the world” (21). In
December 2013, Walt’s grandniece Abigail Disney related
her disappointment with the brand: “What my family’s
 THE WORLD ACCORDING TO DISNEY • 75

business has done is to dumb down and middle-ify and

oversimplify (ok, ok disneyfy) so much, and while that
has rightly and admirably brought a lot of pleasure—joy
even—to a lot of people who needed it given that life can
be hard and pleasure hard to come by, it has also encour-
aged that most grim and American tendency to gloss over
the untidy complexities of life, sometimes at great cost to
the lived experiences of many others” (Feinberg). Argu-
ably, Disney Culture had damaged American culture on a
fundamental level.