Go to Main Disney PageArticles Available on the Internet
"Once they have the control, the diversified cultures will unify into the dominant "Disney culture." Eisner will be its emperor. What once was a happy song in fantasyland will soon become reality, creating one very small world."
"How appropriate are Disney’s standards of safety, cleanliness and harmony for natural resource managers ? How willing should resource managers be to cater to universalized, commercial demands? There should be concern at the increasing use of manipulated environments and social experiences without full and open consideration of the values and objectives behind the constructions. The very uniqueness and public domain of our wildland resources, and the recreational opportunities they offer, are at threat."
"To test an expansion of its vacation business beyond theme parks and cruises -- and beyond Florida and California -- the Walt Disney Co. will begin offering weeklong guided tours later this year through the wilds of Wyoming and Hawaii."
"American extractive industry is quite capable of putting soldiers on street corners in third world countries in order to protect their interests, but the companies buying our networks are experts in putting soldiers inside our minds, always the preferred approach in democracies."
"Following the Reno conference one of its sponsors published a self-promoting book trumpeting the birth of the Wise Use Movement, and announcing The Top Twenty-Five Goals of the Wise Use Agenda. The lack of wisdom and transparent pro-industry slant in that agenda is amply demonstrated by inclusion of goals such as:... expanding national park concessions under the management of private firms with expertise in people-moving such as Walt Disney."
"'Fee Demo' allows federal land managers to charge citizens for the privilege of visiting their own federal lands! Why would the "environmentally conscious" Disney Corporation be involved in such a scam? Disney loves the message of 'man as consumer' and now the under-funded national parks and forests can be rescued by a 'Disneyfied version' of nature: along with concessions and user fees."
"In this article we focus on the movies and theme parks, which they specialise in, and look at the effect of Disneyfication - the process of turning the real, physical world into a sanitised, safe, 'entertaining', predictable but profitable 'hyper-real' replica."
"On June 3 The Nation showed in a foldout chart how most of the U.S. media are now owned by a handful of corporations. Several attractive octopi decorated the usually chaste pages of this journal. The most impressive of these cephalopod mollusks was that headed by Disney-ABC, taking precedence over lesser Times Warner, General Electric-NBC and Westinghouse Corporation calamari, from which dangle innumerable tentacles representing television (network and cable), weapons factories (G.E. aircraft engines and nuclear turbines) and, of course, G.N.A. and other insurance firms unfriendly to health care reform."
"A careful look at Euro Disney and Disney's America reveals that the entertainment company is a surprising environmental enemy that covers open space with pavement, shopping malls, golf courses and hotels; creates traffic problems that increase air pollution and encourage a psychological detachment from the natural world. Despite its environmental transgressions, Disney has received billions of dollars in bank loans and government subsidies to support its recent theme park projects."
"Representatives of the Sierra Club, who favor maintaining Mineral King largely in its present state, followed the progress of recreational planning for the valley with close attention and increasing dismay. They unsuccessfully sought a public hearing on the proposed development in 1965, and in subsequent correspondence with officials of the Forest Service and the Department of the Interior, they expressed the Club's objections to Disney's plan as a whole and to particular features included in it. In June 1969 the Club filed the present suit in the United States District Court..."
"Such pressures breed a phenomenon, often referred to as "Disneyfication," in which culture and history are insensibly transformed into "heritage," the authentic giving way to replicas and experience "themed" before it can be understood."
"Rather than serving as an indictment of Disney, Inside the Mouse should prompt readers to realize the power they hold as consumers, Willis says, and to be more conscious about the choices they make. "The majority of people don't think they have control about the choices they make, but this book is written as a way of saying, Yes, you do. You can go somewhere like Disney World without buying into all of it. I also hope it encourages people to struggle to understand capitalism, and some of its negative consequences."
"Even champions of globalization increasingly fret that it may damage or destroy the diversity that makes the human race so fascinating, leaving nothing but homogenized, least-common-denominator forms of creativity."
"Unlike the often hard nosed, joyless reality of schooling, children's films provide a high tech, visual space where adventure and pleasure meet in a fantasy world of possibilities and a commercial sphere of consumerism and commodification. The educational relevance of animated films became especially clear to me as my kids experienced the vast entertainment and teaching machine embodied by Disney. Increasingly as I watched a number of Disney films first in the movie theater and later on in video, I became aware of how necessary it was to move beyond treating these films as transparent entertainment to question the diverse representations and messages that constitute Disney's conservative view of the world."
"... the Club found many features of the Disney plan objectionable. First, it was too big. Second, it required upgrading the only road into the valley, a road that passes through Sequoia National Park. Third, it seemed a dubious proposition to devote so much public land to the profit of private enterprise. And fourth, Mineral King was designated a game refuge, and a giant resort was incompatible with the idea of preserving wildlife. While the Club mounted a campaign to preserve the valley through legislative action, it also sought ways to halt the proposed development..."
"The Forest Service and six other government agencies have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the Walt Disney Company under which all will work together to promote public awareness, knowledge, and commitment to sustaining natural resources.
Under the MOU, the participants will focus particularly on coordinating environmental education (EE) efforts for urban and disadvantaged youth, as well as joint research, information exchanges, training opportunities, and efforts to provide access to facilities for Americans with disabilities."
"Far from being a model of moral leadership and social responsibility, Disney monopolizes media power, limits the free flow of information, and undermines substantive public debate. In doing so, it corporatizes public space and limits the avenues of public expression and choice. Disney does not have the power to launch armies, dismantle the welfare state, or eliminate basic social programs for children. On the contrary, Disney's influence is more subtle and pervasive in its ability to shape public consciousness in its own image through its enormous economic holdings and cultural power...
As one of the most powerful media conglomerates in the world, Disney works endlessly to promote cultural homogeneity and political conformity while waging an ongoing battle against those individuals and groups who believe that central to democratic public life is the necessity of democratizing cultural institutions, including those of the mass media. Extravagant feature-length animated films, theme parks, and the Disnification of West 42nd Street certainly may have entertainment and educational value, but they cannot be used as a defense for Disney's strangulating hold on the message and image business, its stifling of unpopular opinions and dissent, or its relentless corporatizing of civic discourse-all of which undermine cultural and political life in a vibrant democratic society.
Disney's threat to civic life comes from its role as a major communications industry capable of exercising harmful and damaging amounts of corporate power and ideological influence over vast segments of the American cultural landscape."
It's a boiling day at Disneyland, and some poor guy is sweating it out in a Goofy costume. No matter how faint or queasy he gets, if he takes off the mask, he loses his job. Whether or not he gets to keep his job, it is quite clear that no matter how long he endures the costume, he will never retire on Disney stock. As an hourly employee, the only money going into the 401K plan is his own.
"Revulsion is good. Revulsion is healthy. Each of us has limits, unarticulated boundaries of taste and tolerance, and sometimes we forget where they are. Peep Land is here to remind us; a fixed compass point by which we can govern our private behavior. Because being grossed out is essential to the human experience; without a perceived depravity, we'd have nothing against which to gauge the advance or decline of culture; our art, our music, our cinema, our books. Without sleaze, the yardstick shrinks at both ends. Team Rodent doesn't believe in sleaze, however, nor in old-fashioned revulsion. Square in the middle is where it wants us all to be, dependable consumers with predictable attitudes. The message, never stated but avuncularly implied, is that America's values ought to reflect those of the Walt Disney Company, and not the other way around."
"Create a perfect, corporate reality that provides crime free, clean fun. Like the triumph of McDonaldization, Disneyfication of existence promises certainty, predictability and wonderfully sanitary conditions. Few will worry about soil loss or global warming or an overcrowded world haunted by hungry people if they are infantilized and soothed."
"The Walt Disney Company had been effectively portrayed as an enemy of American history and a plunderer of sacred ground." (A Large Collection of Disney Materials)
"The Walt Disney Company has had its eye on America’s public lands at least since the Sierra Club beat back their bid for a massive ski resort at Mineral King in the High Sierra, twenty some years ago. This time around, with a lot of careful planning and years of hard work, their goal is clearly to gain access to profit-making opportunities on all of America’s public lands."
"From the outset Disney’s nature films have supported the notion that the natural world’s chief value lies in the profit that industrial society can extract from it. At first this support took the form of simple paeans to the righteousness of logging, mining and urban development. Now, amidst the increasing commodification of everything from tribal myth to basmati rice, the value extracted from nature is the right to define nature. Disney covets that right and will gain it at our peril."
|
From: Nature By Design Cartoon Appeared in New Internationalist (Dec. 1998) "It doesn't matter whether it comes in by cable, telephone lines, computers, or satellite. Everyone's going to have to deal with Disney," Disney Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Michael Eisner
|
Articles on the Lighter Side
"The Walt Disney Corporation announced Monday the successful completion of a hostile takeover initiative for the State of Florida, along with plans to establish a new 40,000 square mile theme park: Geriatric Peninsula."
"In the year 2010 the Walt Disney Corporation proposed to buy out the entire peninsula of Florida from the United States of America for approximately 275.83 billion dollars. Because the national debt at the time was so uncontrollably high, the U.S. conceded to what would come to be known as the Disney Deal of 2010."
"Code-named AZCOT, the plan appears to be a 21st-century version of Disney's EPCOT (Experimental Community of Tomorrow) Center in Orlando, Florida. Under the proposal, Disney would acquire title to roughly 600 square miles in Kokopelli (see map, page 17). Kokopelli County supervisors would then relinquish control of the area to an "Entertainment Improvement District" (EID) controlled by a three-member board of directors that would be appointed by the Disney Corporation."
"We eavesdrop as self-described mouse freaks trade esoteric tips for milking the most fun from every Mickey moment. We meet families who never vacation anywhere non-Disney. We learn of couples who get married here and ride in Cinderella's coach. With resolve that is nothing short of heroic, I fight the mind control."
Books and Articles NOT available on the Internet
"Amusement is the commodified negation of play. What is play but the spontaneous coming together of activity and imagination, rendered more pleasurable by the addition of friends? At Disney World, the world's most highly developed private property 'state' devoted to amusement, play is all but eliminated by the absolute domination of program over spontaneity."
"Optimism is a sound economic decision. Optimism brings in the corporate consultancies, the two-million-dollar book advances, the forty-thousand-dollar lecture fees. Optimism sells. (This is a principle that Disney understands better than anyone.) A corporate audience wants to know that it can master the future, and it wants to know how."
"I want, then to suggest some things about Disney and nature. I will take a look at messages presented at Horizons, The Land, and the Living Seas at Future World. As with the other major areas of interest examined so fat, Disney tells stories that propose a particular set of relations among human beings, corporations, and the natural world. At The Land, Horizons, and The Living Seas in particular, Future World shows us a nature with contradictory aspects. It is harsh and hostile on the one hand, an adversary to be conquered with engineering and will. If so controlled, we will find that nature is full of 'gifts' for us that are ready for the taking. The environment is like a wild horse - to be broken, tamed, and ridden where we will. The wranglers who help fulfill the utilitarian dream and who protect us from the hooves are corporate scientists and technicians."
"Americans can skip Europe to go to EPCOT, but if Europeans try to skip America, they are missing out on what the future has in store for them in the American replacement of nature."
"... What was only toyed with in General Electric's Carousel of Progress at the old Disneyland is now a full-scale celebration of corporate America, a commercial from which there is no escape, for this is indeed the prototype community in which entertainment and not education molds the voter of tomorrow."
{This books provides a truly outstanding overview covering the subjects of commercial tourism, industrial recreation and our changing views of nature.} "Advertising and promotion about nature are not restricted to government agencies. The history of corporate advertising also has much to tell us about the contradictory ideas of nature that have flourished in contemporary culture over the past forty years. Until well into the 1970's, the private sector flaunted its capacity to extract materials from the earth. By the end of that decade, however, corporate publicity had shifted towards a more conservationist, resource-management model. Environmental advocacy advertising became common, particularly among oil and petroleum companies. Today many of these campaigns are part of 'image enhancement' and 'damage control' initiatives launched by newly expanded public relations departments."
"Images in many cases have replaced reality and truth. The situation worries some critics, who see our landscapes and culture becoming parodies and exaggerations, mirroring "theme parks," like Disneyland and Disney World. Sorkin notes [see ref. below] that indirect commodification is a process by which non-salable objectives, activities, and images are purposely placed in the commodified world. Although nature is being repackaged, the intention is to reframe reality. As merchandising proliferates, it becomes cliché, managed and staged. The original (a mountain, a lake, or an endangered species) is replaced by a visual recreation, captured in a time frame, and with a purity that compensates for present-day failures and possible future degradation."
(Michael Sorkin, "See you in Disneyland: the New American City and the End of Public Space, in Variations on a Theme Park, Noonday Press 1992, 205-32)
Disney's Education and Natural Resource Ventures
"Ms. Moss Warner [Director, Disney's Horticulture and Environmental Initiatives, Walt Disney World] outlined the size and success of the Walt Disney Company and pointed to how this success provided the opportunity to develop a partnership with the World Bank. The Disney Company is constantly seeking new audiences and realizes the potential of communicating important messages in collaboration with key partners, such as the World Bank. It was within these parameters that a partnership developed between the Walt Disney World Company and the World Bank."