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Introauction AFEW YEARS AGO, I accompanied my wife on an evening's visit to her cousin's house. This young woman met us at the door with her little boy, a cute tyke with a thatch of red hair who was full of curiosity and energy. He was trying to learn to talk, so we sat on the floor playing with him for a while and encouraging his verbal efforts. Right at the cusp of speech, he would look at us determinedly, screw up his face, and totter around, waving his arms as he tried to articulate a hilarious babble of sounds into words. But he couldn't quite manage the feat beyond the two, predictably, he had down cold: "mommy" and "eat."After a time, his mother slipped a video into the VCR as the adults settled back for a little conversation . I kept one eye on him, however. To my astonishment, as a cartoon flashed onto the screen, he said a single word, as clear as a bell: "Disney:' In a nutshell, that little incident frames the subject ofthis book. How and when did Walt Disney become such a powerful, pervasive presence in our culture that he exists at the level of language itself? What explains this entertainer's enormous popularity and enduring impact on generations of modern Americans, young and old alike? Why has "Disney" become so influential that, not only in this case but in countless others, it is something to be imbibed along with mother's milk? Answering these questions is no simple matter. Part of the difficulty lies in the sheer scope of the man and his work. Walt Disney has been, arguably, the most influential American ofthe twentieth century. Beginning in the late 1920S and with accelerating speed over subsequent decades, the multifaceted Disney enterprise flooded the United States and indeed much of the globe with short cartoons, feature-length animations, live-action films, comic books, records, nature documentaries, television shows, colossal theme parks, and consumer merchandise. From Chile to China, California to xx I Introduction Cannes, tens ofmillions ofpeople who never heard ofFranklin D. Roosevelt or William Faulkner or Martin Luther King, Jr., could identify Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck in an instant. Like Coca-Cola and baseball, this leisure empire presided over by an avuncular gentleman with a warm chuckle, a small mustache, and a large imagination became a universal symbol of the United States. Moreover, Walt Disney himself has become encrusted in myths that diverge sharply. On the one hand, his disciples venerate Saint Walt as a beloved purveyor of innocent imagination, uplifting fantasy, and moral instruction. On the other hand, his denouncers bitterly decry Huckster Walt as an artistic fraud, an imperialist, a cynical manipulator of commercial formulas, and a saccharine sentimentalist. Such divisions have muddied the waters and made detached assessment of his significance extremely difficult. He did little to clarify the situation - he simply denied that his work had any broader meaning. But this legendary entertainer in fact did much more than he knew. First of all, Walt Disney operated not only as an entertainer but as a historical mediator. His creations helped Americans come to terms with the unsettling transformations of the twentieth century. This role was unintentional but decisive. Disney entertainment projects were consistently nourished by connections to mainstream American culture - its aesthetics, political ideology , social structures, economic framework, moral principles - as it took shape from the late 1920S through the late 1960s. The socioeconomic trauma of the Great Depression, for instance, provided much of the grist for the Disney mill in its first great burst of popularity, in the 1930S. Two decades later, the aspirations and anxieties of the Cold War helped fuel a second great expansion ofthe studio's work. Second, Disney's creative work marked a clear arc as it blazed across the American cultural sky in the middle decades of the century. In its early stages, studio productions often carried a charge of social criticism. Although immersed in fantasy and sentimentalism, Disney's animated films often playfully provoked, pricked, and probed the conventional. They stood both inside and outside the cultural mythos of modern America, accepting its essential values while gently satirizing its weaknesses or excesses. Not coincidentally, this critical instinct flourished alongside the daring aesthetics of the "golden age" of the Disney Studio. Over the next twenty years, however , critiques of the social order gradually gave way to a powerful preservationist impulse. By the 1950S, the studio's work lost...

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