Disney TV

2. Stories of a Mythic Past

27 Disneyland’s only completely new programming during its first season sprang from a project that had earlier been discussed and put aside, a three-part narrative on the life of frontiersman Davy Crockett. Originally conceived as part of a series on legendary American characters like Paul Bunyan, Johnny Appleseed, and Bigfoot Wallace, the Crockett episodes were, according to producer Bill Walsh, almost “a fortuitous accident” (Cotter 62), a nearly random choice from those folklore subjects. Yet that “accident” would dramatically affect the studio’s fortunes, precipitate a national craze, and heavily influence subsequent programming. The Crockett stories set in motion what has been estimated as a $300 million industry that developed around the figure and his various symbols—coonskin cap, rifle, leather-fringed jacket, theme song—an industry that helped solidify Disney’s finances in the mid-1950s, even as Walt continued to spend every available dollar developing his theme park. And as the craze passed, the Crockett shows left a legacy, as Disney developed other western and frontier series to reprise their popularity, before largely abandoning the Frontierland theme in later seasons. As Disneyland’s first effort at Frontierland programming, the Crockett shows had to bear the weight of the anthology’s C h a p t e r 2 Stories of a Mythic Past ”Tall tales and true from the legendary past.” 28 announced trajectory. They would be the first examples of what the series’ introduction termed a selection of “tall tales and true from the legendary past” of America. As such they would come to embody a kind of paradox—tall and true, legend and history —that would at times confound or irritate critics, leading them to complain about our history’s “Disneyfication” (King 144), its molding into an untroubling form for mass entertainment . Of course, such popularized representations have often resulted in compromises and, as in the case of George Washington, even a kind of cultural deification. But such combinations do seem emblematic of Disney, specifically of its ability and even predilection for mixing the tall and the true, for producing what we might term hybrid narratives. The character that Disneyland would offer to audiences over three episodes in its first season and, after gauging the unprecedented viewer response, for two more in its second year, was, like the real Crockett, both fantastic and factual but also in keeping with the series’ spirit. In fact, what should have immediately struck any viewer, including those who criticized the series’ portrayal of the frontiersman , is the rather liminal nature of the Davy Crockett narrative , that is, the way it repeatedly underscores that amalgam. For it constantly emphasizes how much the figure of Crockett represents a kind of American mix of the real and the mythic, looks toward the Disney world, and even suggests Walt Disney’s own place as an inheritor of the Crockett tradition—both equally adept at educating and entertaining audiences and at combining the tall and the true. The narrative, after all, is framed with the opening and closing of Davy Crockett’s Journal, a book supposedly written “by himself”—and a reminder of the multiple spurious “autobiographies” of Crockett, including one work published after his death, Col. Crockett’s Exploits and Adventures in Texas . . . Written by Himself. And the show’s narrative incorporates multiple exaggerated sketches, its original storyboards, which hint of how near this tale is to the animated fantasy world that had made Walt Disney popular and Chapter 2 29 Disneyland a possibility. This show thus well demonstrates the crossbred and intertextual character of the Disney universe and is a fitting marker for its trajectory of success. We earlier noted the growing popularity of the western on national television and particularly ABC’s success with The Lone Ranger, its first top-ten series. Another western series, Hopalong Cassidy, had been one of the first phenomena on national television , when William Boyd, who had played Hopalong in Bwesterns since 1935, packaged his feature films for television play and, after they proved successful, created a new television series that ran on NBC from 1949 to 1951. Like Disney, Boyd had shrewdly negotiated for subsequent rights to his character, letting him merchandise Hopalong Cassidy much in the Disney fashion, licensing a comic strip and books, an array of western wear and toys, and a radio series, all of which established Hopalong Cassidy as a model for other western series.1 In light...