Disney TV (review)

A fascinating corner of American culture is the industrialisation of images, a twentieth-century artefact of cinema and television. A powerful and defining player in this phenomenon is Walt Disney and the company that bears his name. In his short study in the TV Milestone Series, J. P. Telotte has produced a useful examination of how the studio used television to transform itself into the near ubiquitous giant of contemporary visual culture. Telotte argues that Disney’s innovative use of television through its network programme Disneyland (1954–58) and its many successors enabled the company to broadcast its products into every venue of American life. He charts an evolution that begins with the programme’s initial promotion of the original Disneyland theme park, culminating in the company’s current incarnation as the controller of vast resources in cable television and online, in the cinema and on traditional network television. It is a striking story that illustrates how Team Disney garnered success by creating a wide range of visual and material products. This horizontal strategy transformed a small animation studio into a major cultural force.

Telotte focuses his attention on how the anthology format that Disneyland established in its early years, following the themed divisions of the park into Frontierland, Adventureland, Fantasyland and Tomorrowland, gave the studio a flexible way of presenting and promoting its various projects. Tracing the evolution of the programme through its formal innovations (including the introduction of colour) and preferred narrative content (which ranged across different genres), Telotte offers a solid survey of the qualities that made the programmes a long-running success. Thus Disney TV develops an analysis of what we might call the Disney vision, what Telotte identifies as a Paul Virilio ‘vision machine’ (91). Telotte himself argues convincingly that Disney’s innovations in television helped the company create ‘a shared realm of understanding’ (25), a regime that concretises a particular vision of the United States and the global order it authorises. In the context of the company’s long history of architectural patronage and city planning (some of it in collaboration with architect Robert A. M. Stern) this makes perfect sense.

Telotte’s chapter on Disney’s early reinterpretation of the American past, ‘Stories of a Mythic Past’, is a fascinating excursion into how the company built its cultural and commercial presence by recreating the American frontier as a light-hearted romp. His account of the ‘Crockett craze’ describes Disney’s mode of operation as the studio exploited the popularity of Davy Crockett (1954–55), its live-action frontier adventure series, to project itself into nearly every aspect of national consumption. A nation made anxious by the implications of its post-war power found both solace in the ‘Disneyfication’ of its past (28) and inspiration in the earnest heroes of this new televisual past. Through Fess Parker’s Davy Crockett and Robert Loggia’s Elfego Baca (The Nine Lives of Elfego Baca (1958)), fictionalised versions of historic figures, America is confirmed asFrontierland and its people as resolute pioneers of democratic order.

Telotte notes that one of the benefits of Disney’s anthology series was its ability to cover the future as well as the past. While the Frontierland episodes created fictions of the Wild West (in line with the then dominant popularity of the Western), the Tomorrowland segments opted for a documentary format to enhance the credibility of the show’s futurism. Telotte points out that Walt Disney wanted to open ‘up this world to people’ (47). With this in mind, he documents that Disney deliberately turned away from the dominant televisual mode of presenting the future only as space opera or children’s entertainment. Doing this raised a significant formal problem. How do you instruct audiences about spaceflight as an actual, near-term capability while retaining their engagement? Telotte argues that, in the ‘Man in Space’ series (1955–57), Disney’s solution contributed significantly to ‘the emerging intertextual and multimedia context of mass entertainment’ (47).

Through his account of the formal innovations in...