Mouse Droppings

At the base of the flagpole, that marks the beginning of Disneyland's Main Street in Anaheim, California, rests an unobtrusive plaque. It reads: "Disneyland is youth land. Here age relives fond memories of the past and here youth may savor the challenge and promise of the future. Disneyland is dedicated to the ideals and the dreams and the hard facts that have created America with the hope that it will be a source of joy and inspiration to the entire world. July 17, 1955"(Linton). These are the words with which Walt Disney opened his remarkable experiment in entertainment half a century ago. For adults, Disney's theme parks offer an invitation to adventure, a respite from the drudgery of work, and an opportunity to escape from the alienation of daily life. For children, Disney is a wish-landscape that combines fantasy, fun, and the opportunity to enter into a more colorful and imaginary world. Its animated films usher children into terrains that are exotic and filled with the fantasies of escape, romantic adventures, and powerful emotional themes about survival, separation, death, and loss - and provide points of identification and the capacity to mediate and experience in fantasy form realities that children have not yet encountered. Disney offers children the opportunity to dream, vindicating the necessity of fantasies that contain utopian traces and that offer an antidote to the brutality and emptiness of everyday life. According to the Disney's they believe in "a family park where parents and children could have fun- together." But Disneyland is not just a park, it is a kingdom. Disneyland is, in fact, a kingdom celebrating American optimism. It has become such a part of American culture because it celebrates--more eloquently than any other institution of the postwar period--the notion of the American Dream. Walt's vision of Disneyland wasn't as much an amusement park as a morality tale. Remarkably, when it opened there were no thrill rides at all-the Matterhorn bobsleds weren't added until the 1960s (Linton). Instead there were attractions about Snow White and Mr. Toad and Peter Pan, in each of which the visitor experienced the story through narrative, architecture, music, and technology (Linton). The stories always taught something--like the lesson that outward beauty or ugliness could be deceiving (as with the stepmother and the dwarves in "Snow White"). And good always triumphed. The morality tale extended to American history. Linton also adds that on the paddle wheeler, Mark Twain, a visitor was floated past frontier woodlands. A mine train took visitors through the arid southwest. There was the "house of the future", and freeways where kids could drive without traffic jams, and rockets to fly to the moon. The past was something Americans could be proud of--and the future was bound to be even better. Walt had hailed the American capitalism as the best system in the world, but the entertainment empire he had constructed became endangered by a series of bad movies and management decisions by Walt's successors, who maintained his high standards of excellence without his creative gifts (Hall). The ability to make a profit became prized more than creating wonderful stories. The theme parks that Walt wanted every American to visit have become expensive cash cows beyond the means of many. Today, Walt Disney's animation/motion picture studios and theme park have developed into a multi-billion dollar television, motion picture, vacation destination and media corporation that carry his name. According to Michael Ovitz, a former Disney executive, Disney ranks fifty-first in the fortune 500 companies. The Walt Disney Company today owns, among other assets, five vacation resorts, eleven theme parks, two water parks, thirty-nine hotels, eight motion picture studios, six record labels, eleven cable television networks, and one terrestrial television network (Wikipedia). In a short piece of literary work, The Mouse that Roared: Disney and the End of innocence, Henry Giroux charges that Disney is in fact a powerful corporation whose ideology largely predicated on getting the consumer to buy Disney products is far from innocent, which is the general idea of Disney. Giroux describes his proposed strategy early on: "I am suggesting a very different approach to Disney, one that highlights the pedagogical and the contextual by raising questions about Disney itself, (1) what role it plays in shaping public memory, national identity, gender roles, and childhood values; (2) in suggesting who qualifies as an American; and (3) in determining the role of consumerism in American life" (10). Rather than try to figure out what the constituent products mean, he advocates a more holistic approach to Disney (the parks, the merchandise, the media, and the corporation) and its place in our culture. In other words, Giroux thinks that we should question popular culture and teach our kids to question it as a part of a "democratic" education. Because "Disney has always understood the connection between learning and power and their relationship to culture and politics" (p. 156-157), Giroux argues that educators, cultural workers, and concerned parents must also understand this connection. Giroux argues that as "noncommodified public culture comes under assault, we are faced with a growing commercial sphere that profoundly limits the vocabulary and imagery available for defining, defending, and reforming the state, civil society, and public culture as centers for critical learning and citizenship" (p. 12). Giroux shows how Disney attempts to hide behind a cloak of innocence and entertainment, while exercising its influence as a major force on both global economics and cultural learning. For Giroux, "innocence" operates as a multiple signifier. On one level, "innocence" describes Disney's image as simply an entertainment company that exists in a vacuum apart from economic, political, and cultural power. Giroux illustrates that behind Disney's innocent corporate image is a political player that flexes its muscle to secure its goals. On a second level, "innocence" captures how Disney's products are simply good, clean entertainment for families and for children. While its products may indeed entertain, Giroux argues that "Disney's view of children as consumers has little to do with innocence and a great deal to do with corporate greed and the realization that behind the vocabulary of family fun and wholesome entertainment is the opportunity for teaching children that critical thinking and civic action in society are far less important to them than the role of passive consumers" (p. 158). By actively marketing to children under twelve, who market researcher James McNeal observes "shell out