"He knew that people would respond even if they didn't quite know what they were responding to."
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!
The next two interviews — this one, and another I plan to post on Monday — are particularly interesting because both are with Disney scholars, and yet both interviewees answered certain questions in very different ways. Snow felt that Disney’s reputation as an “American Values” obsessed moralist was total myth, while the other scholar disagreed. History isn’t only about who had the power to document it — sometimes it’s also about who interprets it.
Richard Snow is an American writer, historian, and former editor of American Heritage Magazine. He’s the author of several books, including Disney's Land: Walt Disney and the Invention of the Amusement Park That Changed the World, Iron Dawn: The Monitor, the Merrimack, and the Civil War Sea Battle that Changed History, and A Measureless Peril: America in the Fight for the Atlantic, the Longest Battle of World War II.
On Disney Being as Much for Adults as for Kids: Disney, I don't think he was much of a moralist. His cartoons from the very beginning always appealed to adults as much as they did to children. If you look at his first full-length cartoons, there's plenty of scary stuff in there.
He knew what peril felt like — and knew that people like to jump from peril to comfort. And even when the Mickey Mouse Club came on, the guy who produced it was astounded to go into a bar a year after it opened and find when it came on everybody got silent and then sang the Mickey Mouse Club song.
On Walt Disney’s Obsession with Detail to the Point of Hyperreality: What made Disneyland so successful was Walt’s utter fascination with taking complete pains with everything.