From Walt to Woodstock

00-T2939-FM 3/15/04 11:34 AM Page i FROM WALT TO WOODSTOCK G&S Typesetters PDF proof 00-T2939-FM 3/15/04 11:34 AM Page ii FROM WALT TO WOODSTOCK Douglas Brode G&S Typesetters PDF proof 00-T2939-FM 3/15/04 11:34 AM Page iii How Disney Created the Counterculture UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESS, AUSTIN G&S Typesetters PDF proof 00-T2939-FM 3/15/04 11:34 AM Page iv Copyright © 2004 by the University of Texas Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First edition, 2004 Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to Permissions, University of Texas Press, P.O. Box 7819, Austin, TX 78713-7819. ᭺ϱ The paper used in this book meets the minimum re- quirements of ansi /niso z39.48-1992 (r1997) (Perma- nence of Paper). Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Brode, Douglas, 1943– From Walt to Woodstock : how Disney created the counterculture / Douglas Brode.—1st ed. p. cm. isbn 0-292-70924-2 (cloth : alk. paper)— isbn 0-292-70273-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Walt Disney Company. 2. Counterculture—United States—History—20th century. I. Title. pn1999.w27b76 2004 741.5Ј8Ј0973—dc22 2003025801 G&S Typesetters PDF proof 00-T2939-FM 3/15/04 11:34 AM Page v For Walt Shepperd Another Walt who helped conjure the counterculture G&S Typesetters PDF proof THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK 00-T2939-FM 3/15/04 11:34 AM Page vii Contents Acknowledgments viii Introduction Disney’s Version/Disney’s Vision The World According to Walt ix 1 Sex, Drugs, and Rock ’n’ Roll Disney and the Youth Culture 1 2 Little Boxes Made of Ticky-Tacky Disney and the Culture of Conformity 27 3 The Man Who Says “No” Disney and the Rebel Hero 53 4 Toward a New Politics Disney and the Sixties Sensibility 77 5 My Sweet Lord Romanticism and Religion in Disney 103 6 Gotta Get Back to the Garden Disney and the Environmental Movement 128 7 “Hell, No! We Won’t Go!” Disney and the Radicalization of Youth 151 8 Providence in the Fall of a Sparrow Disney and the Denial of Death 175 Conclusion Popular Entertainment and Personal Art Why Should We Take Disney Seriously? 201 Notes 229 Index 231 G&S Typesetters PDF proof 00-T2939-FM 3/15/04 11:34 AM Page viii Acknowledgments All photographs/stills included in this volume were either mailed or hand-delivered over the years to the author, in his longtime capacity as a professional commentator on movies, television, and the media, by publicity people representing Walt Disney Productions, Buena Vista Releasing, and/or RKO Motion Pictures. This was done with the understanding that, under the existing rules of fair usage, the author would then employ all such unsolicited visual properties in order to positively publicize the films of Walt Disney in various print forms. It is with such an understanding firmly in mind, and to that purpose alone, that they are included in this current academic analysis of Walt Disney and his life’s work. viii G&S Typesetters PDF proof 00-T2939-FM 3/15/04 11:34 AM Page ix Copyright Walt Disney Productions; courtesy Buena Vista Releasing. A RECURRING IMAGE. Numerous Disney films—including Song of the South (1946), Pollyanna (1960), Follow Me, Boys (1966), and (seen here) So Dear to My Heart (1948)— open with the image of a vehicle that transports denizens of progressive big cities into tradi- tionalist small towns; the ensuing give-and-take between those elements allows for a por- trait of America in transition. Introduction Disney’s Version/Disney’s Vision The World According to Walt DEEPER MEANING RESIDES IN THE FAIRY TALES TOLD ME IN MY CHILDHOOD THAN IN THE TRUTH THAT IS TAUGHT BY LIFE. —Schiller, The Piccolomini, 111.4 THANK YOU FOR INDIVIDUAL PERCEPTION. —Mort Sahl, 1968 Woodstock; Summer 1969. What follows is a modern urban legend that, if only apocryphal, remains true in spirit. One longhair, passing a toke to a companion, studiously observes the sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll around him. Smiling wryly, he sarcastically comments: “Can you believe these kids were raised on Disney films?” His friend, while attempting to inhale, chokes on his own laughter. ix G&S Typesetters PDF proof 00-T2939-FM 3/15/04 11:34 AM Page x End of story; beginning of book . My purpose with From Walt to Woodstock: How Disney Created the Counterculture is to remove any trace of humor from that statement. The argument here is that Disney was anything but what he is generally considered by most fans and foes alike: the most conventional of all major American moviemakers. This position will be advanced through three strategies, presented simultaneously: a close textual analysis of individual films, a concurrent relating of the movies to one another as an oeu- vre that expresses the singular imagination of an auteur, and a sociopolitical analysis of Walt’s work within its historical context. Disney was not, I hope to prove by book’s end, a person who, had he lived to see Woodstock (Walt died in 1966),1 would have been horrified at what oc- curred. More likely, if the movies express the man as I believe they do, he would have been thrilled. My aim is to show that Disney’s output—as experienced at the movies, on television, and in person at theme parks—played a major role in transforming mid-1950s white-bread toddlers into the rebellious teenage youth of the late sixties. No one, of course, can achieve such a lofty task alone; countless other artists, as well as people from other walks of life, played their roles in the metamorphosis of our world from Eisenhower-era mendacity to post-Woodstock iconoclasm. Still, no other single figure of the past century has had such a wide, deep, and pervasive influence on the public imagination as Walt Disney. He did, after all, reach us first (and, therefore, foremost), at that very point in our youthful development when either an individual or a generation is most receptive (and vulnerable) to such forces and ideas. The title of this tome, if admittedly exaggerated, holds true. More than any other influence in American popular discourse, Disney ought to be considered the primary creator of the counterculture, which the public imagination views as embracing values that are the antithesis of those that the body of his work supposedly communicated to children. Even daring to suggest such a reversal of long-held opinion is risky, some might say foolhardy. The term “Disneyfication” long ago entered into our idiomatic American English as a stigma. Whenever anything is said to have been Disneyized or Disneyfied, a harsh criticism is implied. Substance in the source has been eliminated, the original’s impact di- luted. This renders the work’s materials more easily accessible to modern mainstream families while removing all the dark edges and thematic depth, or so goes the claim. Disney’s films, according to such assump- FROM WALT TO WOODSTOCK x G&S Typesetters PDF proof 00-T2939-FM 3/15/04 11:34 AM Page xi tions, are awash in the worst sort of sentimentality. As a result, they prove garishly appealing to the lowest common denominator of audience in- telligence. Also, it is presupposed that the films contain and convey a set of values that is, politically speaking, simplistically rightist—moderately conservative to those who barely tolerate Disney, cryptofascist for oth- ers who perceive his work as insidious, even dangerous. This notion has been accepted for so long, particularly among aca- demics and intellectuals, that it no longer is considered a subjective opinion but has taken on the weight of irrefutable fact. The point is, none of this has any basis in the work itself. The demeaning reputation of Disney as superficial—compounded by the commercial success of his work more than thirty-five years after the man’s passing, which in some corners only adds to the reprehensibility of his image—fails to hold up under close scrutiny of his output. That no one has seriously challenged that perception of Disney merely attests that such a negative assessment is considered not a perception but reality. The myth (for this is the best word to describe such an ingrained false vision) of Disney as provider of pro-Establishment entertainment is remarkably widespread. When reviewers in the popular press noted any anti-Establishment values in a film, they felt a need to reconcile this supposedly “unique” movie with longstanding misconceptions. Such confusion can be detected in the opening sentence of Bosley Crowther’s positive critique of Moon Pilot (1962): “Of all people, Mr. Disney is mak- ing good-natured fun of the high-minded scientific project of firing a man around the moon” 2 (emphasis added). Time, also in a laudatory piece, revealed its critic’s prejudice: Sacred cows, if skillfully milked, produce tons of fun; but Hollywood usually avoids them because they often kick back. The more reason to be pleasantly surprised that Walt Disney, not particularly known for sociopolitical daring, should have herded three of these pampered critters—the FBI, the Air Force, and the astro- naut-program—into the same plot.3 (emphasis added) Disney’s films actually contain more “sociopolitical daring” than those of any other commercial filmmaker from Hollywood’s golden era. This element proves so consistent—from the earliest cartoon experiments to the most elaborate live-action projects—that no one who observes them closely (and without invisible blinders) can, like Time’s reviewer, claim to be “surprised” to find such stuff in any film.

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