Comments | moralimperative: my most recent blog response to cultural heritage discussion

moralimperative

my most recent blog response to cultural heritage discussion

Apr 11, 2010 23:17

Q: Drawing on your readings for this week--especially the discussions of museum's need to reach a wider audience, discuss whether you think that the Disney Corporation should have been allowed to build the new Disney History Museum outside of Washington DC? Why or Why Not?

( a most cathartic response on just why i can't really handle disney anymore )

Comments 7

diemme April 12 2010, 04:58:53 UTC

Re: Princesses barely existing w/o their princes. To be fair Disney is drawing on fairytales where the fair, delicate maiden saved by the dashing prince is already established. Disney didn't create that. They do reduce every princess, regardless of ethnicity to a carbon copy of all the rest appearance wise though.

moralimperative April 12 2010, 05:03:25 UTC

that's not true either! the stories they're based on are far more vicious and far more dramatic than the disney versions! -actually, i have to look it up, but i would bet my bone marrow on it being a disneyfied version of the story. just look at little red riding hood, nobody knows that she was raped by the wolf anymore.

diemme April 12 2010, 05:18:27 UTC

Well naturally all the viciousness is ironed out - that's pretty typical of American "think of the children" culture. But the theme of innocent yet persecuted womanhood rescued by prince is in the fairytales themselves. If they were evil, naturally, they were on their own. Hmmm, now I'm wondering if there's a connection between princess and passivity and ordinary girl and action. Gretel and Margery of the Juniper Tree seem to manage fairly well alone.

iiiskaaa April 12 2010, 15:03:36 UTC

I've always been a lot less bothered by Disney's classic fairytale movies, ones like Cinderella and Snow White (which are nevertheless still highly problematic in their own ways), than I have been by some of its movies that don't quite fit that mold. Hercules was an appalling bastardization of Greek mythology, and they ruined the story of the Hunchback of Notre Dame. Both of these are pretty dark stories to begin with. It set my teeth on edge to see them made over for an audience of five year olds. And then Disney had a go at history with Pocahontas, and The Emperor's New Groove was pretty skeevy from the racial/cultural stereotype angle... Disney just makes a mess of everything it touches. If they want to have a history museum now, what's the next step? Textbooks?

moralimperative April 13 2010, 03:08:42 UTC

you know, i'm gonna bring that up in class, i like that. they're just becoming this entity unto themselves and it's pretty damn scary. watch, soon they might just start publishing textbooks.. and then when we least expect it, they'll start inserting their own people into history. jefferson's already out of them, did you know? i thought that was so absurd, he wrote the freaking declaration of independence! americans ought to be proud of him, not hide him for his racism.

dude, i couldn't even stand the hunchback! that was a grating movie for pete's sake! i don't even remember what the hell happened, i left as quickly as i could. the only character in that movie i remember liking was the goat!

iiiskaaa April 13 2010, 13:35:13 UTC

That's pretty ridiculous, about Jefferson. They might as well not teach early US history at all since half of those guys were slave owners.

i don't even remember what the hell happened

Phoebus and Esmeralda live happily ever after. The Parisian mob decides Quasimodo is a really cool guy. And apparently, there was a sequel.

moralimperative April 13 2010, 13:44:00 UTC

they ought to just own it. "YES WE HAD SLAVES, BUT CAN YOU BLAME US? IT'S HARD WORK, THAT!"

oh for fucks sake. for fucks sake. as IF the parisians would EVER accept someone like quasimodo. they can barely accept americans!