Disney: When Mice Get Too Big

When is the last time anyone actually saw a Mickey Mouse cartoon? He made very few of them after the 1930’s. The ones he did make seem to be historical relics, too precious for human consumption. I remember watching The Wonderful World of Disney on TV when I was a kid, and they never showed more than a few seconds of any Mickey Mouse cartoon.

Yet Mickey Mouse was plastered everywhere. The cartoon rodent is recognizable the world over. People think Mickey Mouse is a cartoon character. They’re wrong. He used to be. But now he’s a corporate icon. To be a successful cartoon character, one needs to have a personality. Once Disney started using Mickey Mouse as their corporate logo, they didn’t dare to let him do anything naughty or negative. In other words, they didn’t dare to let him have a personality. Eventually they didn’t even show the existing cartoons.

Today’s Mickey Mouse has no personality. People project their own fantasies onto him. Most of the children who beg their parents to take them to Disney World or Disneyland or any of the other Disney theme parks around the world have never seen a Mickey Mouse cartoon. They’re thrilled when they finally see Mickey at the park, a Mickey who is not allowed to speak. A Mickey who stands there silently, waving at strangers, glad to see everybody, posing for photographs. The celluloid Mickey had more dimensions. The three-dimensional Mickey is flat.

I guess Mickey is more useful as a corporate icon than as a cartoon character, since his face sells $4.5 billion worth of merchandise every year (“Disney Icon Mickey Mouse Turns 75”). Disney is going to get as much money out of the mouse as they can.

The folks at Disney started to get worried in 1998 when they realized that Mickey Mouse’s copyright was going to expire in 2003. If they didn’t do something to prevent that from happening, their corporate icon would suddenly belong to the public domain, and they wouldn’t be raking in $4.5 billion off the mouse anymore. So they did what any huge American corporation would do. They gave millions of dollars in campaign contributions to some Congress members, told them what they wanted the law to say, and voila, the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (“The Mouse That Ate The Public Domain”). Now Mickey Mouse is copyrighted for several more years. Somehow I suspect there will be another law change extending the copyright again when the time comes. Me, cynical?

Now, I am generally a fan of copyright. Though I am not making any money off of my writing (it’s all here for you to read for free), my work is all copyrighted. You’re free to print off a copy of any of my rants for your own personal use, e.g., if you want to read it over lunch or you want to mail it to your mother who doesn’t have a computer. But you’re not free to publish any of my work elsewhere. You’re not free to sell my work. You’re certainly not free to put your name on my work and claim it as your own. It’s mine.

But at some point after somebody’s death, their work should enter the public domain. It used to be 50 years. Now it’s 70. 50 years is a long time. I think it’s long enough. I think the folks at Disney are just greedy. They’re fans of public domain when it suits them.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Sleeping Beauty. Alice in Wonderland. The Little Mermaid. Beauty and the Beast. Pinocchio. Robin Hood. Peter Pan. Winnie the Pooh. The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Tarzan. The Prince and the Pauper. Cinderella. Mulan. The Jungle Book. Aladdin. See a pattern? All of these are Disney films based on public domain books, stories, or legends. The Disney versions are of course copyrighted. And then the film-related merchandise is produced and sold. I looked at a copy of a book called Disney’s Alice in Wonderland. Nowhere on the outside cover nor anywhere inside could I find any mention of Lewis Carroll. You remember Lewis Carroll, don’t you? The man who wrote Alice’s adventures in Wonderland and Through the looking-glass and what Alice found there? He wrote the material they had based their film on, and their book on that, and they were happy to pretend he had never existed. They were happy to let children reading the book believe that Alice was a character created by Disney.

Just because a work is in the public domain does not negate the fact that its creator created it. Disney did not create Alice. Lewis Carroll created Alice. For Disney to sell a children’s book called Disney’s Alice in Wonderland with no mention of Lewis Carroll anywhere is simply wrong. It’s dishonest. It’s a kind of theft, not of money, but of credit. Kids shouldn’t grow up thinking Disney wrote Alice in Wonderland and not have any idea who Lewis Carroll was. We hear of identity theft and we think of somebody using someone else’s credit cards, but Disney seems to be one of the original identity thieves. They stole Lewis Carroll’s identity. The man’s long dead -- it’s not like they have to give him any money. Would it kill them to give him the credit he’s due?

Then again, that would be ethical. I’m talking about a company run by Michael Eisner. Never mind.

Eisner cares only about profits, not about ethics. In his tenure as CEO, many people have criticized his unethical business practices. He has come under fire for employing slave labor while he himself was living quite comfortably on his $8.7 million salary, not including the $181 million stock option he granted himself in 1996. Oh, pardon me -- they’re not technically slaves if you’re paying them 8¢ an hour (“The Wonderful World of Disney Uncovered”).

Eisner has made it very clear where his priorities lie. He wrote in a 1981 staff memo “We have no obligation to make art. We have no obligation to make a statement. To make money is our only objective.” (“This Old Mouse”) In his first 10 years as CEO, Disney’s stock rose by a factor of 47. At first he was making some valuable improvements in the company. But later stock rose because costs were cut, e.g., he closed an animation studio. Throw in some bad business decisions, some stock options and some conflicts of interest (Eisner stacked the board with a bunch of his cronies who owed their loyalty to him personally, not to the company and not to the shareholders), and “as his shareholders suffered, Eisner’s fortune swelled. From 1990 to 2002, Disney’s investors earned a lower rate than they would have on a Treasury bond, while Eisner, over that span, pocketed more than $800 million.” (“Eisner has become a bad example”) Several people are calling for Eisner’s resignation, most notably Roy Disney, Walt Disney’s nephew, the last remaining family member with the company who resigned in disgust in late 2003 and started a website, www.savedisney.com, urging shareholders to vote against Eisner at the annual meeting.

Under Eisner, Disney grew considerably. As media become more and more concentrated in the hands of fewer owners, the public is less likely to hear diverse viewpoints, and less likely to hear anything to upset the status quo. What looks like several different companies is in fact only one company, and one branch is unlikely to say anything very critical of another. Columbia Journalism Review compiled a list of what Disney owns. As of 2003 (the date on the list), Disney owns three book publishing imprints, five magazine subsidiary groups (publishing at least 16 magazines), one television network, 10 television stations, 66 radio stations in 38 cities (in some cities, are there any non-Disney stations?), 12 cable television networks, 13 international channels, 4 television production and distribution companies, 8 movie production and distribution companies, partial interest in a crude petroleum and natural gas production company, a retail store, 19 websites, 5 record labels, a theatrical production company, two professional sports franchises, 15 theme parks and resorts, and a partial investment in TiVo. Freedom of choice? Hardly. All of the major media in the US are owned by just a few companies.

Not surprisingly, they all advocate a similar viewpoint. Since they are all immensely huge corporations, they will do what benefits immensely huge corporations, not the public interest. They will represent the very wealthy. There is an enduring myth of “the liberal media” but liberal viewpoints don’t stand a chance of getting onto TV news shows. They’re nothing but pro-corporate and pro-government propaganda.

I have to admit though that before I ever even heard of Michael Eisner, and years before I began considering the ramifications of corporate media and concentration of the media in the hands of only a very extremely wealthy few...Disney still gave me the creeps. In addition to being offended by their denial of Lewis Carroll’s existence and thinking that way too many of their films are based on other people’s stories (can’t they write their own?), it seemed that all of their heroines were impossibly thin. They were choosing to make films based mostly on fairy tales where the primary goal of women was to attract a husband, and the way to do this was to be beautiful. Ugh.

There’s nothing wrong with wanting to get married someday if the right person comes along, but if attracting a husband is your only interest in life, you need another hobby because frankly, you’re pathetic. Probably no man would be interested in marrying such a pathetic loser. Get a life.

The idea that a man would want to marry a woman he’s just met and doesn’t even know simply because he thinks she’s pretty when he knows nothing of her personality, and that she would want to marry him simply because he’s a handsome prince -- this is not an idea that should be encouraged. These are not people likely to “live happily ever after.” These are people likely to end up divorced two years later, or on the covers of the supermarket tabloids until one of them dies a sordid death. People should get married because they truly know each other and are compatible; only then is true love possible. You can’t love someone you just met. You don’t know someone you just met! But Disney has made countless films to perpetuate the “storybook romance” myth.

Disney films convey the ideas that all beautiful women are thin (and they have gotten thinner over the years, it seems), that good people are attractive and bad people are ugly and fat. These are children’s films. We now have five-year-olds on diets. There are children who are overweight (advertising encourages people to eat junk instead of healthy food (you don’t see commercials for lettuce or carrots), and our culture of fear has greatly decreased the number of kids walking or cycling to school, so this shouldn’t be surprising), but even children who are at a healthy weight or even underweight think they are fat. Disney heroines look anorexic. We don’t want kids to overeat, but they do need to eat and grow! They’re kids! They’re growing! Nobody should be trying to look like an anorexic, but I find it especially disturbing when a 5-year-old wants to.

The other thing that I found really creepy was how overboard Disney went with the merchandising. When I was a kid there was merchandising, of course. There were Mickey Mouse watches. If you went to Disney World or Disneyland, you could buy the mouse ears or a Mickey Mouse T-shirt or countless other souvenirs. But in recent years, things got weird.

Every time a movie would be released, characters from the movie would be plastered on every item imaginable. Now surely the purpose in wearing bright pink boots with Pocahontas’ face on them was not to identify with Pocahontas? I do not believe Pocahontas wore bright pink boots, especially not with pictures of herself on them. What then? To simply remember the experience of seeing the film? Is that really necessary when one also has the T-shirt, the jacket, the pajamas, the tote bag, the dolls, the books, the CD and the video?

Does Disney even consider making a movie that does not have huge merchandising potential? Disney made $3-4 million from The Lion King in global box office receipts. They made more than $1 billion from merchandise from that movie (The Disney Money-making Complex). You do the math. The movie is really nothing more than a commercial to sell all of that merchandise.

Also, I would see commercials, but they were confusing. It was an ad for a movie, except it was an ad for a fast food place, but...huh? Just what were they trying to sell me? It didn’t really matter. I had no intention of seeing the movie or eating the fast food. It just seemed even more sinister than usual somehow. Was the fast food place pushing the movie or was the movie pushing the fast food place? It was impossible to tell.

Sometimes when I’m working at the computer in my basement, I catch a little motion out of the corner of my eye and I glance up. There’s a little mouse sitting on the edge of the cinder block wall up near the rafters. I know a lot of people would put out a mouse trap and either try to kill it or catch it and release it outside. I certainly don’t want to kill it. It has a right to exist. And trying to catch it to release it outside seems sort of pointless. My townhouse may be small, but it’s big enough to share with a little mouse. If I put it outside, I’m sure it would find its way back inside anyway. I’m sure to keep any food in containers the mouse can’t get into, so I don’t see any overwhelming reason it should be forced to leave. I told it, “Just don’t show up unexpectedly right where I’m about to put my hand and make me say ‘aaauugh!,’ and then you can stay, ok? Live and let live.” It sure is a cute little thing.

But it’s little. Mickey Mouse has gotten way too huge. He’s not cute anymore. He’s the face of unbridled greed and harmful stereotypes. Disney gives me the creeps.