Scrooge Mcduck Is Our Culture Czar
Well, I’ll be a Minnie Mouse. Conservative Southern Baptists and I actually agree on something: Neither of us likes old man Walt’s company. It’s a small world after all.
But where the Baptists, who voted to boycott Walt Disney Co., its subsidiaries and products, object to Disney’s “gay friendliness,” I have another complaint. I’d like to cut off the nine heads of this corporate Hydra before it makes homogenized mush of everybody else’s heads, especially kids’.
Magic Kingdom, indeed.
Remember when culture used to be something other than “popular”? When “family” entertainment meant an impromptu skit in the basement, not an overhyped movie, a McDonald’s Happy Meal, a plush toy, and glazed video eyeballs?
Lest you think that Disney, in offering health benefits to partners of its gay employees, is a magnanimous, forward-thinking company, think again. It was among the last major Hollywood studios to provide such insurance. To compete, it had to follow suit.
As for Disney World’s annual Gay Day, Disney never sponsored it and regularly disclaimed it until the profit potential became too much to resist. A grass-roots event that opened in 1991 with about 2,500 attendees, Gay Day this year was a three-day weekend that drew 60,000 celebrants - with beaucoup money to spend. Beaucoup.
“In its voracious consumption of the American entertainment dollar,” wrote Kelly L. McQuain in The Philadelphia Gay News in July 1996, “Disney has integrated us into its market.”
And that market is the entire “free” world. Tokyo Disneyland and Euro-Disney are just the beginning. The company grossed $21 billion last year.
It’s a little late in the game for even the Baptists to “just say no.” Disney chairman Michael Eisner, who has increased revenues 19-fold since taking over in 1984, doesn’t take “no” for an answer. That Virginians beat back a Mickey Mouse version of Jamestown in 1994 is nothing short of miraculous.
Across the United States, Disney has metastasized like a cancer: two theme parks, more than 535 stores (mall-rat traps), television channels (Disney, ABC and stakes in ESPN, A&E and Lifetime), movie studios, sports teams, newspapers, magazines, real estate, publishing houses, etc., etc. Tough-minded parents, weary of the “I want! I want!” chant from their Disneytized tykes, can’t begin to impede its progress.
“Beauty and the Beast,” the play, is actually running on Broadway - Broadway, not a children’s theater in Middle America. Disney’s summer kid-buster movie, “Hercules,” opened last week at the old New Amsterdam Theater, at Broadway and 42nd Street, which was purchased, restored and remodeled by - guess who?
“The Lion King,” the play, waits in the wings.
The “Great White Way” has been in great decline for years now. But from where I sit, Disney’s gaudy, all-lights-upon-us parade down 42nd Street touting the animated labors of Hercules took it down another notch. Is there no limit to bad taste? (Don’t answer that.) Eisner and company touche-ed the French with “The Hunchback of Notre Dame”; Ahab-ed the Arabs in “Aladdin”; and dissed colonial history with the love song of “Pocahontas.” Now, with “Hercules,” they tweak the Greeks, do unto the Romans.
What do Americans know from mythology, anyway?
Hint: If the strong man gets “the girl” and lives happily ever after, without his flesh being eaten away by poison and his body being burned on a funeral pyre, then you’re getting the Disney version.
Boycotting Baptists argue that, with its Gay Days, gay-health benefits and lesbian Ellen DeGeneres’ national-TV coming out, Disney has been “promoting immoral ideologies.”
They also protest the sexual provocativeness and violence that have crept into Disney’s films, animated and otherwise. No question Eisner is pushing the envelope on family entertainment. But to include morality among Disney’s motivations is to miss the point. It has no interest in gay lifestyles, much less gay rights. The only ideology the conglomerate promotes is the ideology of profit.
Disney doesn’t give a Mighty Duck about anything but the almighty buck.
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