[Jeffrey]

Has Disney been good for American culture?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzyLZYYb2qk

The modern wizard (literally, not figuratively) Alan Moore once weighed in that he felt there was once some magic at the roots of Disney, particularly the hundreds of Anaheim citrus groves bulldozed at once to make Disneyland. But Disney magic arises from boardroom calculations, from the brilliant voodoo econ of its Imagineers that has as much in common with ancient magic as anything else in our culture.

I have many friends who love to wax cynical on anything except Disney. Disney's movies and mythos stands for many pop cynics as something that cannot be questioned.

I, too, grew up on the Disney films, and I still have fond memories of them. I never liked Disneyland, even as a kid. It was too fake, and when I discovered the better rides at Six Flags, well...but I'll never forget seeing Robin Hood, The Lion King, Pete's Dragon.

Of course, then I found out that The Lion King was an unacknowledged wholesale borrowing of a classic 20th century Japanese cartoon. My childhood died then.

So I had mixed feelings with the clips above. On the one hand, I admire the cost-saving techniques. On the other...

I wonder if a lot of the bile directed at Disney's past decade or so of non-Pixar films is because as kids we were too dumb to see the weak spots in Disney's classics, yet now as full-grown cynics we assume that Disney's lost a Golden Age.

Disney has reshaped the American awareness of our cultural heritage, recasting Grimm's fairytales and the Arthur cycle and the myths of Hercules (Hades is not a Devil figure, unless all you know of Greek myth comes from Disney) and even our own American founding.

Has Disney been good for American culture?

[penguinofwar]

Do you think its been bad for American culture? I don't really see how it could be in any ways.

[Andrew]

I don't think mindless entertainment is healthy for the human psyche, so I would argue that Disney has been very destructive to the development to the minds of American children, as well as to the continued complacency of adults. (not to say I am not guilty of consuming mindless entertainment)

Also, rewriting early america is not a healthy thing for our children. After reading dozens of biographies on the founding fathers, it is very difficult for me to have a happy picture of what really happened. That said, the average child thinks "Whoa, the founding fathers were role-models and demigods of morality!" when these things just are not true.

So I think you bring up a valid point here. I hate a lot of what modern television and even novel writing does to our culture. When someone calls me a nerd because I read the "Foundation" anthology, I just lose all hope for the speaker.

Imagination and the ability to read something that requires more than surface level attention is nearly dead.

[rock_show_host]

Originally Posted by Andrew

I don't think mindless entertainment is healthy for the human psyche, so I would argue that Disney has been very destructive to the development to the minds of American children, as well as to the continued complacency of adults. (not to say I am not guilty of consuming mindless entertainment)

Originally Posted by Andrew

Imagination and the ability to read something that requires more than surface level attention is nearly dead.

Disney films are mindless and unimaginative?

[Andrew]

Originally Posted by rock_show_host

Disney films are mindless and unimaginative?

Absolutely! They are just ripped off versions of pre-existing material. There is nothing more mindless than ripoff.

[Rainer.]

Originally Posted by Andrew

Absolutely! They are just ripped off versions of pre-existing material. There is nothing more mindless than ripoff.

Does repeating a story make that story any less valuable?

[Andrew]

Originally Posted by Rainer.

Does repeating a story make that story any less valuable?

If they were actually repeating, as opposed to rewriting, then no. They make happyhappydisney versions of real source material.

[rock_show_host]

Originally Posted by Andrew

Absolutely! They are just ripped off versions of pre-existing material. There is nothing more mindless than ripoff.

Shakespeare did it. Romeo and Juliet, Twelfth Night and A Midsummer Night's Dream (to name a few) were all heavily lifted from pre-existing material.

Originally Posted by Andrew

If they were actually repeating, as opposed to rewriting, then no. They make happyhappydisney versions of real source material.

"Real source material" as opposed to what? Many of the Disney classics (Beauty and the Beast, Snow White, Robin Hood) were based on folklore and legends, stories which had inspired numerous different cultural interpretations long before Disney got hold of them. By your logic, even the earliest authors to publish versions of these stories would be plagiarizing, since some of the tales had been around for ages by the time anyone decided to commit them to paper.