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Mickey Mouse Monopoly
52 min - documentary - big media, culture, media literacy 1228 views - website

The Disney Company's massive success in the 20th century is based on creating an image of innocence, magic and fun. Its animated films in particular are almost universally lauded as wholesome family entertainment, enjoying massive popularity among children and endorsement from parents and teachers. Mickey Mouse Monopoly takes a close and critical look at the world these films create and the stories they tell about race, gender and class and reaches disturbing conclusions about the values propagated under the guise of innocence and fun. This daring new video insightfully analyzes Disney's cultural pedagogy, examines its corporate power, and explores its vast influence on our global culture.

Including interviews with cultural critics, media scholars, child psychologists, kindergarten teachers, multicultural educators, college students and children, Mickey Mouse Monopoly will provoke audiences to confront comfortable assumptions about an American institution that is virtually synonymous with childhood pleasure.

This is part 1 of 5, click the website link for part 2, or use the internal YouTube navigation after part 1 ends.

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Comments
Posted by Toplikar on Wednesday, May 20, 2009

This is such a waste of time.
Posted by Tim Hjersted on Thursday, May 21, 2009

Oh man, well ya gotta watch parts 2-5 (by clicking on the red website link).. It really gets into the substance past the beginning. The first part is just the intro. It won't really hit you till you've watched the whole thing I think.. It's a subtle but profound realization that you get by the end (my experience).

The main point for me was that Disney, being one of the largest multi-national corporations holding ownership in dozens of different media properties, holds a significant influence over the production of meaning in our culture. All media contains messages - values, beliefs, ideas, perspectives, prejudices, blindspots.. and when one corporation has sway over such a wide swath of our cultural/media landscape, the effect is homogenization of.. not just our ideas and beliefs and identities (which are being formed the most rapidly during childhood).. but also our imaginations. It's just more reasons why media literacy is so important, and why teaching media literacy skills to our kids is so important.
Posted by Toplikar on Sunday, May 24, 2009

I've watched the entire film now and still come to the same conclusion.

The thing is that Disney is hardly a monopoly when it comes to kids movies or children's media in general. I hope you haven't forgotten a man by the name of Jim Henson, and a little show he created called Sesame Street. There's also plenty of children's books, comic books, TV shows, and movies that have nothing to do with Disney. I could list some off, but just think about it for five seconds and you'll realize that you can't really call Disney a monopoly.

I'm not a big fan of the Disney corporation, but this film simplifies, over-generalizes, reads into, and exaggerates all based on theories in film criticism that really have more to do with the entertainment industry as a whole, rather than Disney as a company.

It's not as if the film doesn't have moments of truth, but some of the claims they make are as absurd as if I was to say that having Oscar the Grouch live in a garbage can teaches our children not to recycle.

I guess my main problem with this film is that it suffers from a bit of academic blindness. Art and entertainment will never reach the level of political correctness that academia has because if they did they would be as boring as a term paper. Storytelling is most definitely an art, and I guess I've always had a problem with non-artists trying to dictate how art is produced and consumed based on their own moral and political guidelines.


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