Tinker Belles and Evil Queens: The Walt Disney Company From the Inside Out (45 page)

90. Gomery, 74.

91. Kinney, 138.

92. Smoodin, 147.

93. Shale, 26.

94. Ibid., 19.

95. The films in which the above topics are covered are
Dental Health
(1945),
Ward Care for Psychotic Patients
(1944) and
A Few Quick Facts #7
(1944).

96. Lisa Cartwright and Brian Goldfarb, “Cultural Contagion: On Disney’s Health Education Film for Latin America,”
Disney Discourse: Producing the Magic
Kingdom,
Eric Smoodin, ed. (New York: Routledge, 1994), 170. Quote from “A Survey Conducted for the CIAA by the Walt Disney Studio on the Subject of Literacy,” Rockefeller Archives Center, Washington, D.C., Series, RG 4, Box 7, Motion Picture Division Folder.

97. Shale, 56.

N OT E S TO C H A P T E R 1

241

98. Cartwright and Goldfarb, 170.

99. Ibid., 175.

100. Ibid., 177.

101. Janice Delaney et. al.,
The Curse: A Cultural History of Menstruation
(New York: E. P. Dutton, 1976), 95–96. The quote misidentifies the sponsor as Kimberly-Clark instead of International Cellucotton.

102. Karl Cohen, “The Importance of the FBI’s ‘Walt Disney File’ to Animation Scholars,”
Animation Journal
3:2 (Spring 1995), 76 (Footnote 11). The quote is from a memo dated Jan. 25, 1961.

103. “
The Three Caballeros,
”
Time
(Feb. 19, 1945): 92.

104. “Mr. Disney’s Caballeros,”
The Saturday Review
(Feb. 24, 1945): 24.

105. Smoodin, 112. The ad referenced occurred in
The Saturday Review
(Feb.

24, 1945): 23.

106. An example of such a photo is included in the photo inset for Marc Eliot,
Walt Disney: Hollywood’s Dark Prince
(New York: Birch Lane Press, 1993), between 104–105.

107. Letter from Joseph I. Breen to Spencer Olin at the Walt Disney Studios, dated Mar. 7, 1946.

108. “
Make Mine Music,
”
Time
(May 6, 1946): 101.

109. Preston Blair recounts this anecdote in Maltin, 293.

110. Ollie Johnston and Frank Thomas state this when discussing the film in
The Disney Villain,
97–102.

111. Even then, after critics had become aware of Disney’s potential for lasciviousness in the 1940s, John Mason Brown of
The Saturday Review
(“Recessional,” [June 3, 1950]: 30) would unfavorably compare Disney’s Cinderella to Al Capp’s voluptuous Daisy Mae in the comic strip
Lil’ Abner.

112. Donald Crafton, “Walt Disney’s
Peter Pan:
Woman Trouble on the Island,”
Storytelling in Animation: The Art of the Animated Image,
Vol. 2, John Canemaker, ed. (Los Angeles: American Film Institute, 1988), 123–146.

113. Richard Shale’s research (112) indicates that, although the Educational Division continued to exist, no records of specific films produced exclusively for the 16 mm market can be found until 1964.

114. Shale, 112.

115. Derek Bouse, “True Life Fantasies: Storytelling Traditions in Animated Features and Wildlife Films,”
Animation Journal
3:2, (Spring 1995): 36.

116. Ibid., 20.

117. Ibid., 31.

118. The Production Code Administration files, held at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Library, often contain within the file for each film reviews from various publications. In the file for
The Vanishing
Prairie,
every mention of the calf birth in the reviews was underlined with a red pen.

242

N OT E S TO C H A P T E R 1

119. “Thousands of Crockett Fans Cheer Bowl’s Disney Night, “
Los Angeles Times
(July 15, 1955): B1.

120. It is interesting to watch this exhibit in the present day, as the edited speech does not refer to the importance of the union or the rights of minorities, but addresses as its main topic “internal subversion,” obviously referring to Walt’s personal involvement in ferreting out American Communist sympathiz-ers. Walt’s testimony to the House on Un-American Activities Committee can be found in “The Testimony of Walter E. Disney Before the House Committee on Un-American Activities,”
The American Animated Cartoon: A Critical Anthology,
Gerald Peary and Danny Peary, eds. (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1980), 92–98.

121. Max Rafferty, “The Greatest Pedagogue of All,”
Los Angeles Times
(Apr. 19, 1965): B5.

122. The studio’s preoccupation during Walt’s life with controlling the body might have also influenced the very popular legend that Walt’s body was cryogenically frozen until a cure for cancer could be found.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 2

1. Vito Russo,
The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies
(New York: Harper and Row, 1987), 48.

2. Chauncey, 16–20, recounts the development of the term “gay” in homosexual culture of at least one urban environment.

3. Personal interview with Allan Berube, Minneapolis, MN (April 1994).

4. “Box-Car Bertha,” as told to Dr. Ben L. Reitman,
Sister of the Road: An Autobiography
(1937; reprint, New York: Harper and Row, 1975), 65–67. Quoted in Faderman, 106.

5. If Porter was using the term “Mickey Mouse” to refer to homosexuality, it seems to have been coded enough to be included in the official lyrics, for Porter also wrote a complete alternate lyric that stressed the bawdy nature of considering one side of romantic duo “the top” and the other “the bottom.”

Amongst the lines are “You’re the breasts of Venus, you’re King Kong’s penis, you’re self-abuse” and “I’m a eunuch who has just gone through an op.” See Robert Kimball, ed.,
The Complete Lyrics of Cole Porter
(New York: Knopf, 1983), 120–121.

6. A possible modern allusion to using “Mickey Mouse” as a signifier of homosexuality can be found in the Hong Kong film
The Killer
(1989), directed by John Woo. In the film, the highly charged chemistry between the two main male characters (a hired assassin and a police detective) is accented by their nicknaming each other “Mickey Mouse” and “Donald Duck.”

7. Michel de Certeau,
The Practice of Everyday Life,
trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 174.

8. Stuart Hall, “Encoding/Decoding,”
Culture, Media, Language.
Stuart N OT E S TO C H A P T E R 2

243

Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe and Paul Willis, eds. (London: Unwin Hyman Ltd., 1980), 128–138.

9. Henry Jenkins,
Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture
(New York: Routledge, 1992), 23.

10. Doty, xii.

11. Jenkins,
Textual Poachers,
26. The quote is from de Certeau, 175.

12. de Certeau, 174.

13. Jenkins,
Textual Poachers,
45.

14. Although Jenkins does not explicitly tackle this issue within his discussions of media fandom, he does discuss the appearance of “slash” literature and art (focusing on homosexual liaisons between male characters on favorite TV series) in fan culture in
Textual Poachers.
In “Out of the Closet and Into the Universe: Queers and
Star Trek,
” in
Science Fiction Audiences: Watching Dr. Who
and Star Trek,
John Tulloch and Henry Jenkins, eds. (New York: Routledge, 1995), 237–265, Jenkins specifically examines how queer viewers of the various
Star Trek
TV series have lobbied to have a gay or lesbian character introduced into this future universe.

15. Jack Babuscio, “Camp and the Gay Sensibility,”
Gays and Film,
Richard Dyer, ed. (London: British Film Institute, 1977), 40.

16. This is one of the main tenets of Chauncey’s study of New York City homosexual cultures. See in particular chapters 2–4.

17. Lillian Faderman discusses these “intense friendships” in chapter 1 of
Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers.
See especially 31–34.

18. Richard deCordova, “The Mickey in Macy’s Window: Childhood, Consumerism, and Disney Animation,”
Disney Discourse: Producing the Magic Kingdom,
Eric Smoodin, ed. (New York: Routledge, 1994), 207.

19. For example, “Disney-Time: Not-So-Silly Symphonies,”
Theatre Arts.

20. Thomas M. Pryor, “The Screen Grab-Bag,”
New York Times
(Nov. 10, 1940): Sec. 9, 5.

21. E. M. Forster, “Mickey and Minnie,”
Spectator
(Jan. 19, 1934): 81.

22. According to photos of Sergei mugging with Walt and a cutout of Mickey, Sergei was at the Disney studio in October of 1930.

23. Forster, 81.

24. E. M. Forster, “Story of a Panic,”
Collected Tales
(New York: Knopf, 1952), 8–9. Cited in Klein, 35.

25. E. M. Forster,
Aspects of the Novel
(New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1927), 162.

26. Ibid., 160.

27.
Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary
(Springfield: G. and C. Merriam Co., 1979), 719.

28. Sylvia Cole and Abraham H. Lass,
The Facts On File Dictionary of 20th
Century Allusions
(New York: Facts On File, 1991), 179.

244

N OT E S TO C H A P T E R 2

29. Peter Blake, “The Lessons of the Parks,” in Christopher Finch,
The Art
of Walt Disney
(New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1973), 425–429.

30. Sergei Eisenstein, “Film Form: New Problems,”
Film Form,
trans. Jay Leyda (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1949), 144–145.

31. Sergei Eisenstein,
Eisenstein on Disney,
Jay Leyda, ed., trans. Alan Upchurch. (London: Methuen, 1988), 10.

32. A more rigorous examination of how Eisenstein’s interest in the “ec-stasy” of Disney’s “plasmaticness” coincides with his interest in theories of collision can be found in Anne Nesbit, “Inanimations:
Snow White
and
Ivan the Terrible,
”
Film Quarterly
50:4 (Summer 1997): 20–31.

33. Eisenstein,
Eisenstein on Disney,
21.

34. For a history of Cohl’s work, see Donald Crafton, Emile Cohl,
Caricature and Film
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), and Crafton,
Before
Mickey,
59–88.

35. Eisenstein,
Eisenstein on Disney,
10.

36. Amongst these critics are Richard Schickel, and Arthur Asa Berger, “Of Mice and Men: An Introduction to Mouseology or, Anal Eroticism and Disney,”

Journal of Homosexuality
(1991): 155–165.

37. Examples of this type of criticism can be found in Frances Clarke Sayers, “Why a Librarian Deplores Some of the Works of Walt Disney,”
The National
Observer
(Feb. 14, 1966): 24; “The Magic Kingdom,”
Time
(Apr. 15, 1966): 84; and Jill P. May, “Butchering Children’s Literature,”
Film Library Quarterly
11:1–2

(1978): 55–62.

38. Bruno Bettelheim,
The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance
of Fairy Tales
(New York: Penguin, 1976), 24.

39. Ibid., 24.

40. Michael Bronski,
Culture Clash: The Making of a Gay Sensibility
(Boston: South End Press, 1984), 41.

41. Ronald Bayer,
Homosexuality and American Psychiatry: The Politics of Diagnosis
(New York: Basic Books, 1981), 23.

42. Karl Menninger, “Introduction” to the authorized American edition of
Great Britain Committee on Homosexual Offenses and Prostitution, The Wolfenden
Report
(New York: Stein and Day, 1963), 7. Ironically, the British report works to repudiate many of the era’s commonly held notions of homosexuality as a “deviancy,” yet the added introduction for the United States edition counters these findings.

43. Bayer, 20.

44. Charles Socarides,
Beyond Sexual Freedom
(New York: Quadrangle Books, 1975), 11.

45. Bettelheim, 12.

46. Ibid., 6.

N OT E S TO C H A P T E R 2

245

47. Cassandra Amesley, “How to Watch
Star Trek,
”
Cultural Studies
3:3

(Oct. 1989): 334.

48. Bronski, 54–55.

49. J. M. Barrie,
Peter Pan; or The Boy Who Would Not Grow Up
(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1956), 94.

50. Susan Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp,’”
Against Interpretation and Other Essays
(New York: Doubleday, 1966), 277.

51. Sontag, 280.

52. Babuscio, 44. The anthology
The Politics and Poetics of Camp,
Moe Meier, ed. (New York: Routledge, 1994) also strongly emphasizes the importance of acknowledging homosexual culture when discussing camp.

53. Alan Cholodenko, “Introduction,”
The Illusion of Life: Essays on Animation
(Sydney: Power Publications, 1991), 15–16.

54. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick,
The Epistemology of the Closet
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 1.

55. Butler,
Gender Trouble.

56. Maltin, 56.

57. Johnston and Thomas,
Disney Animation,
36.

58. Laura Mulvey’s article, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,”
Film
Theory and Criticism,
Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen, eds. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 803–816, describes how classic Hollywood cinema constantly recreates a viewing subject that is engendered male, with the female as a fetishized object, presented with enormous “appeal” to the heterosexual male gaze.

59. Grim Natwick, quoted in Maltin, 56.

60. This is not to intimate that Disney is exclusive in this regard. Most U.S.

animation studios which attempt “realistic” animation recreate the same scenario described here.

61. Other works that are appreciated from a camp viewpoint specifically because the texts don’t seem to realize how absurd they are would include Maria Montez’ “Arabian Nights” films for Universal in the 1940s, the TV series
The Brady Bunch
and the film
Showgirls
(1996).

62. Frank Browning,
The Culture of Desire: Paradox and Perversity in Gay
Lives Today
(New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 72–73.

63. Mary Ann Doane, “Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator,”
Screen
23:3–4 (Sept./Oct. 1982): 74–87.