"Have you ever been peed on by a genius? I have."
Excerpts from my conversation with a Disney historian!
I’m not sure exactly when my big piece will be published — sometime in July or maybe early now August — but it relates to the Kimye Brand and the Disney conglomerate. This deep dive required some conversations with social historians about the American nuclear family, media representations of black fathers, and the storied history of Walt Disney himself.
Over the next few days I’ll share some highlights from my interviews with four different experts. I couldn’t bear to leave them on the cutting room floor!
Aaron Goldberg is a University of Pennsylvania-trained, self-defined historian of Disney. He’s written several books on the topic, including Buying Disney's World: The Story of How Florida Swampland Became Walt Disney World and The Disney Story: Chronicling the Man, the Mouse and the Parks.
On the Disney dress code: It's always fascinating to me to go look at pictures from Disneyland in the '50s through the '60s. Everybody's wearing a suit, women are in dresses, and that was sort of expected. Men couldn't have facial hair, they had to be groomed, they had to be neat. And then it took 50 years, but Disney finally dropped that. I mean, up until the early 2000s, if you had tattoos, you were to cover them. You still had to fit whatever image Disney wanted you to fit, which is antiquated and old because, I mean, who doesn't have a tattoo? Who doesn't want to have a piercing? Who doesn't want to dye their hair? They finally let go of that, but it took them up into the 2000s to do that.