So I sat down with the kids, ignored their wails as I scrolled past all the movies they recognised, and introduced them to old Disney.

My twin boys are six and my daughter is three so I pretty much live with a Disney test audience. The main reason I agreed to do the podcast was this sounded like a rare job with which my children could help me. I also learned that old Walt himself was no slouch when it came to stiffing his workers.īut, really, I learned about the movies. And I learned a lot while working on the series, including about the history of cryonics. He was cryogenically frozen? And had a real-life mouse named Mickey? So I said yes, partly out of curiosity. Despite my lifelong history of watching Disney movies, and a subscription to Disney+ that I came to value during lockdown at least as much as my access to clean water, I knew almost nothing of Walt himself. It tells the life of Disney through the films made during Walt’s lifetime, with each episode dedicated to one film, from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) to The Jungle Book (1967). Given the Disney corporation’s energetic promotion of their founder’s image as a twinkly eyed benevolent genius, what would he think of the world he created?Ī few months ago, the podcast company Novel asked if I would narrate its upcoming 10-part series, Life and Death in the Magic Kingdom, written by Al Horner. Or maybe it’s the history of allegations from Disney park employees that they are so badly paid they can barely cover living costs. Or maybe it’s harassed parents forking out $50 a head so the family can eat breakfast with someone in a Goofy suit at the theme parks’ (in)famous Character Breakfasts. Maybe it’s your three-year-old singing We Don’t Talk About Bruno for the 752nd time in two days, making you want to tear off your own ears and eat them. By now, the Walt Disney Company owns – as far as I can tell – every last bit of entertainment that isn’t Amazon or Netflix, and we live in a Disneyfied world, with little girls wearing Elsa fancy dress and boys opting for Captain Jack Sparrow. When I get on my highest of horses, I will argue that Disney has done to pop culture what McDonald’s has done to fast food: homogenising it and boiling it down to the most quickly digestible basics, dealing in broad strokes and gender stereotypes. At other times, I feel less positively inclined. I watched the films on a VHS, my children stream them, but the effect is the same: just one glimpse of the Magic Kingdom icon at the start of a Disney film acts like a stun gun on them, silencing them mid-argument then pinning them to the sofa.Īt moments like that, man, I love Disney. Every generation has their Disney, and just as I grew up singing along to Ariel in The Little Mermaid and Mrs Potts (so superior to Belle) in Beauty and the Beast, so my children are regularly babysat by Frozen and Encanto. P rincesses, overpriced theme parks and a rapacious commercialisation of childhood: these would have been my suggestions if I’d been asked six months ago what I thought were Walt Disney’s legacies.

Pinocchio story book with pictures