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

ambition beyond animated films. As early as the late 1920s, the company was licensing the rights to Mickey Mouse’s likeness to a variety of businesses—a move that was largely motivated by the need for money to offset Walt’s often-reckless investments in film production. The same economic logic motivated Disney’s agreement with ABC on
Disneyland
, as well as with Golden Books and others, in the 1950s. The goal was as much to pay the theme park’s spiraling costs as to spread the company’s brand recognition. Another key early business innovation involved Disney’s partnership with Capitol Records to circulate and promote its various film soundtracks and other kid-marketed records in the 1940s. This was a time when, as Jacob Smith has documented, “children’s records experienced a remarkable surge” in general. 44 Notable as well was their subsequent collaboration with the NBC network and RCA Television in the 1960s to exploit Disney’s desire for color broadcasts, beginning the notable run of
Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color
(1961). By the time Disney was dominating the television landscape, the company had become self-sustaining enough to control its own ancillary revenue streams, operating its own distributor for theatrical exhibition (Buena Vista) and for books and records (Disneyland). This emergent ubiquity planted the seed early on for a U.S. cultural environment in which Disney was now perceived as having “always” been “everywhere”—a socially constructed logic of media consumption that paid off for the company in the long run, and continues to do so.
    Through these ancillary channels, retrospectively, Disney increasingly promoted its own revised studio history as a landmark in the annals of classic Hollywood, further cementing its cultural status as an American institution. This prominence, plus its long history of cross-promotional ambitions, paid huge dividends by the time Michael Eisner, Frank Wells, and Jeffrey Katzenberg took over in the 1980s. A central goal of “Team Disney” was to further exploit revenue streams such as home video platforms (VHS) and new theme parks and attractions (Tokyo Disneyland), and increase corporate partnerships with companies such as Delta Air Lines and McDonald’s. Another key business strategy in the 1980s was to idealize Disney’s own studio history, and the larger history of classic Hollywood that images of Uncle Walt and
Fantasia
Mickey inevitably evoked. There was perhaps no bigger embodiment of this strategy than the building of Disney-MGM Studios in Florida at the end of 1980s (now called “Disney’s Hollywood Studios”). The third Orlando theme park spatialized Disney’s desire to memorialize and idealize its own history, so crucial to the company’s nostalgic appeal. It also rewrote Hollywood’s heyday as being largely defined by the presence of Disney.
    Ironically, the park’s depiction of the “golden age” of Hollywood is completely inaccurate. Disney mostly struggled to stay alive through the 1940s and early 1950s—the generic time period that becomes historical pastiche as the overall mise-en-scène of Disney’s Hollywood Studios. The 1940s was not a period of prosperity, but rather one of deep financial struggles, marked in particular by the terrible labor strike in the studio and the disastrous theatrical fortunes for
Fantasia
. There is no shortage of historical irony in the fact that a grotesquely large version of the Mickey sorcerer’s hat now serves as the central image of promotion for Disney’s classic Hollywood–themed amusement park. The cap evokes memories of Walt Disney’s biggest theatrical fiasco, the movie that—had it not been for government funding of the studio during World War II—would have bankrupted the Disney company and sent most of their work to the dustbin of film history. Even at the height of its early phenomenal success in the 1930s, Disney was never more than a minor studio—a cottage