Disney's Most Notorious Film by Jason Sperb Read Free Book Online Page A

about the interaction between media industries and platforms. They were particularly apt at crafting what Gray recently called media’s “paratextuality,” 40 a film or television show’s ubiquitous presence throughout a universe of ancillary material (books, records, and so forth), which were traditionally seen as doing little more than highlighting and promoting a given text’s release. Since its inception in the early decades of the twentieth century, Disney carefully exploited ancillary markets and dedicated fan bases while shrewdly reusing old material. “An intrepid entrepreneur as well as a story teller,” observes Patricia Turner, “Disney delivered much more than the stories themselves. This dimension of his influence began in the 1930s, when he signed an agreement allowing a manufacturer to inscribe Mickey Mouse’s image on a note pad. Today the mouse reigns over a battalion of Disney-spawned items.” 41 Disney understood early on the power of expanding its media reach across every possible media platform available, as a means to both expand and exploit its rich vault of entertainment stories. Most famously, in the 1950s Disney was able to parlay its library of feature-length and short subject films into an agreement with ABC for
Disneyland
(1954), a television program that also paid for the famous theme park of the same name in Southern California. The ABC show was also one of the first venues the company used to recycle its wide variety of old content for a new audience (
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice
,
Seal Island
, clips from feature-length films, and so forth)—another twist on Disney’s successively selective distribution practices. “Long after many of the major studios had sold TV rights to their films,” writes Anderson, “the Disneys boasted that they still owned every film they made.” 42 With the exception of low-budget live action pieces such as the
Davy Crockett
phenomenon and “Uncle” Walt’s introductions, much of the show was repurposed archival material. These parks and TV shows pushed traditional boundaries of film studies “toward a more pervasive sense of textuality,” and offer an early glimpse into histories of convergence.
    In particular, the media giant’s success since the 1920s has been based on two premises that are today the cornerstones of studies in convergence: technological innovation and extensive cross-promotion among numerous texts. On one trajectory, as J. P. Telotte most recently explored, Disney long positioned itself at the cutting edge of experimentation in film technologies. The company, “in order to survive in an increasingly competitive environment,” he writes, “repeatedly had to innovate or adopt new technologies or move into new media forms.” 43 This included advances in music and sound synchronization (
Steamboat Willie
, 1928), three-strip Technicolor (
Flowers and Trees
, 1932), character animation (
Three Little Pigs
, 1933), the multi-plane camera (
The Old Mill
, 1937), theatrical exhibition surround sound (
Fantasia
, 1940), hybrid animation (
Song of the South
, 1946), widescreen CinemaScope (
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
, 1954), television synergy (
Disneyland
, 1954), computer-generated imagery, or CGI (
TRON
, 1982), subscription cable television (Disney Channel, 1983), and computer-aided animation production (
The Rescuers
, 1990). More important, even when the newness was overstated, such as with
Steamboat Willie
or
20,000 Leagues
, the company was aggressive in promoting itself and the perceived novelty of these various new technologies and multimedia advances. While the company is viewed today largely as a media empire built on nostalgia and conservatism, at its core is an impressive, if also often accidental, history of future-oriented technological and economic innovations.
    At first, Disney relied on partnerships with other companies to help spread its brand and its merchandise, since its modest revenue allowed for little