Mickey Mouse Monopoly

The Walt Disney Company is a powerful force in creating childhood culture all over the world. Presenting a worldview based on innocence, magic, and fun, its products are endorsed by parents and teachers, and are enthusiastically embraced by children.

*Behind the images of innocence and fantasy, however, is a transnational media corporation owning media production companies, studios, theme parks, television and radio networks, cable TV systems, magazines, and internet sites. Disney is now one of the six or seven largest media corporations that dominate control most of the mass media in the world.

*A troubling question concerns the extent to which our view of the world may be skewed by such a concentration of power in these corporations that mediate images of our world to us, and the resulting impact on informed participation in our democratic society.

*Disney’s impact is especially worrisome in view of its role as a major purveyor of the stories that will be used to construct children’s imaginary worlds as well as their notions of the real world.

*Gender representations: The female characters in Disney movies present a distorted version of femininity�highly sexualized bodies, coy seductiveness, always needing to be rescued by a male. Snow White cleans the dwarfs’ cottage to ingratiate herself; Ariel gives up her voice in order to win the prince with her body in The Little Mermaid; Mulan almost single-handedly wins the war only to return home to be romanced; and Beauty and the Beast’s Belle endures an abusive and violent Beast in order to redeem him.

*Representations of race and ethnicity: Representations of race and ethnicity in Disney animated features are notable for their general scarcity, and when they do appear, they tend to reinforce cultural stereotypes about these groups (for example, Latinos as irresponsible chihuahuas in Lady and the Tramp and Oliver and Company; African-Americans as jive crows in Dumbo, as human-wannabe orangutans in Jungle Book, and totally absent in Tarzan’s Africa; Latinos and African-Americans as street-gang thugs in The Lion King; Asians as treacherous Siamese cats in Lady and the Tramp; Arabs as barbarians in Aladdin; and Native Americans as savages in Peter Pan and Pocahontas).

*Commercialization of children’s culture: The stories Disney tells in its movies seem to be secondary to their being used as vehicles for the merchandising of videos, toys, clothing, video games, etc. Similarly problematic is the pervasive power of these Disneyfied versions of cultural narratives to displace children’s spontaneous creative play in favor of merely replicating the ready-made Disney versions. Such commercialization should not be surprising in light of Disney CEO Michael Eisner’s pronouncement: “To make money is our only objective.” — http://www.mediaed.org/videos/CommercialismPoliticsAndMedia/MickeyMouseMonopoly/studyguide/html