Its a Small World After All

Christopher Angell, 2014

I am tracing contours of industrial smoke and mirrors. This is a necessary
rebuke of the times, a cartoon criticism of a cartoon world. I was a kid too once, and
I am troubled by the way the world of my childhood is being recycled.
A misleading WELCOME HOME! hits the stands just before Black Friday, the
headliner for the December 2014 issue of Marvel Preview (No. 28, Issue 22).
Underneath the inviting exclamation, a dramatic composition of characters from the
original Star Wars film echoes the martial monuments hewn of Europes stone:
heroes returning from battle, no trace or pulse of mens blood. It is the proud
display of the redundant Manichean vision of the galaxy a symmetrical, classical,
machined, sexless, puppet galaxy. Underneath the iconic logo STAR WARS with
and , we find the familiar Lucasfilm Ltd. All rights reserved.
Flipping to the editors note, I find Axel Alonso, Editor in Chief of Marvel
Comics, in semi-religious ecstasy. He is excited to welcome the Star Wars license
back to Marvel coinciding with the films theatrical release in 1977 Marvel
produced the comic book accompaniment. Now, in 2014, Star Wars has come
home and Marvel Comics returns to a glorious past; a Return to Order: to The Way
Things Should Be. There is a new generation to entertain, a new market to develop.
If this is beginning to smell like shit thats because it is shit. Lets get our
elbows in it.
Marvel Studios produces comic books for readers of all ages, primarily in the
market for superhero stories and science fiction. Marvel Studios is perhaps best
known for its Avengers franchise, which has been developed into a massive multifeature film campaign employing a diverse range of media artists. However, this
belays mention of The Walt Disney Company. The Company purchased Marvel
Studios creative licensing in 2009 and has created a successful film franchise with
international appeal; those Lucasfilm Ltd rights reserved under the logo? The
Company reserved those rights in 2012; the attributive tag is a reassuring coddle,
printed to whispering scale a soft hush, a gentle lull, a little white lie.
The Avengers and Star Wars franchises are now part of the legal cadre with
which the Walt Disney Company micro-tunes the American experience of reality,
and a new generation of people are poised to experience a simulation of childhood
many orders removed from the humanistic education we convince ourselves our
children receive. By controlling the contexts and content of these historically
significant characters, the Walt Disney Company is poised to shape national and
international identity. Mickey Mouse is Darth Vader The Walt Disney Company is
Empire.

American childhood is bright colored plastic little plastic microwaves and

little plastic guns, little plastic cars and little plastic hamburgers. American children
wear bright colored cotton with screen-printed superheroes, princesses, animals,
sports equipment; on their shirts and hats, sunglasses and shoes; kids meals, dolls.

American children learn about adult life during playtime. American children
construct the identities they will use as adults from the images they encounter.
American children are colonized by brands, indoctrinated into a network of
consumption through franchise industries as diverse as figurines, fast food, fabrics,
and films, far before they experience the de-centering of puberty. The television set
creates an emotional connection between a character and child, and that child will
encounter that character at the grocery store, the department store, the gift shop.
Children are trained to have emotional relationships with products. Disney eases the
transition into adult purchasing patterns.
I remember watching Saturday morning cartoons on the ABC Family
Broadcasting Company. I remember watching cartoon salesman advocating cereal
brands between the serialized cartoon programming. I remember vomiting up bowls
of cereal before school, nauseous from so much sugar. The ABC Family Broadcasting
Company is a local television station content provider just one of the many
subsidiaries for the Walt Disney Company.
The ABC Family; its linear, rational, uniform, but most importantly
combinatory the combination of letters is how any meaning is constructed. Just
like moveable type, an ABC Family can be arranged within society to the optimum
position, keeping clean margins, maintaining a high contrast for legibility; serif or
sans, these are the new romans. Any member of any ABC Family has meaning only
in groups, and these groupings are necessarily interchangeable.
The real product that The Walt Disney Company produces is the cartoon
citizen, pre-programmed for optimum performance in the cartoon world. The Disney
Channel provides 24 hour childrens television programs the inference being that
Disney programs children. The programming, or cartooning, of childhood prepares
people for adult roles in a cartoon world of exchange where adulthood is simulated
but infantilism pervades comfort comfort pleasure. Entertain me. Towards this
end it is relentless and resorts to subterfuge, subversion, what amounts to public
espionage. The term Disney is merely shorthand for highly controlled networks of
information technology which disseminate content choices to persons trained
from childhood to await their purchasing options from their content providers.
Everyone is content with this system of ideological exchange.

In 1984, the company known as Walt Disney Productions was approaching

bankruptcy and Saul Steinberg, a Wall Street broker, announced his intention to
liquidate the entertainment enterprise. Walt Disney Productions persuaded its
stockholders to be patient and began massive interior restructuring. To diversify its
market shares and retain brand loyalty, the men who claimed power after the
restructuring decided to create entertainment aimed at a different audience under a
new company name: the result of that decision was Touchstone Pictures.
Touchstone Pictures was not the first time Disney relied on the power of
subsidiary branding to maintain a strict public face. In the 1970s, when Walt Disney
Productions began purchasing acreage of Florida swampland, they operated under
the auspices of the Reedy Creek Improvement District. As Carl Hiaasen explains in

Team Rodent: How Disney Devours the World, everybody in Florida knows Reedy
Creek is Disney and Disney is Reedy Creek. That was more than 40 acres of
amusement ago Disneyworld is not a natural swamp; it is an ornate animate
sarcophagi, a perpetual motion machine performed by actor and audience in an airconditioned Fantasia.
Marvel Studios, Lucasfilm Ltd, ABC Family, Touchstone Pictures, Reedy Creek
Improvement, the list is not exhaustive, but serves to illustrate the myriad guises
the Walt Disney Company adopts in order to ensure the right audience receives the
right product. Quoting Hiaasen: Disney touches virtually every human being in
America for profit. That is rapidly becoming true as well in France, Spain, Germany,
Japan, Great Britain, Australia, Mexico, Brazil, and China. The ultimate goal of the
whole enterprise is the establishment of World Order. The crowning centerpiece to
Walts weird little swamp kingdom is EPCOT, the Experimental Prototype Community
Of Tomorrow. The Experimental Prototype Community Of Tomorrow is no longer
experimental it is being implemented. The American landscape has become an
assemblage of interlocking units of the ABC Family; the combination spells Grand
Social Order, architected by collective obeisance to an abstracted animated rat.

Mickey Mouse is the product of organized labor the Mouse is the ultimate
abstract manifestation of the production line. The Mouse is machine: the
mechanimal exemplar: countless cells of celluloid blend into the movements of this
imaginary creature and give audiences the illusion of drawings with agency and
spontaneity. The whistling dancing mouse/man is the Pharonic dream of abstract
form manifested in nature there are many many many many camels for every one
pyramid. The Mouse body is truly incorporated, assembled like an automobile,
representative of an ideal a human being is a means to an end in this line of
production. The Mouse conflates agency and image, turns vitality into equity. The
Mouse exists to make money. The Mouse places dollar signs on childrens laughter
and childrens wonder.

The Experimental Prototype Community Of Tomorrow isnt a very XXth

century idea it is born out of a tradition of thought which says that humanity can
build a utopian society by advancing civilization through knowledge call it the myth
of the technological sublime. For men like Walt Disney, society could be improved
by improving technology: a perfect world was completely achievable, but it was
understood that some assembly would be required. This notion of assembly is
actually basic to all societies, in a spectrum of training, sculpting, making, molding,
forming, rearing, teaching a social being: social beings are not born, but undergo a
transformation, or an orientation if you will.
International media conglomeration is the Community Of Today it is the
redundant, classical, machined, sexless, puppet society of today. The public is the
result of individuals encountering each others thoughts without the consent of the
monarchy or papacy. The network of communication allows for generating concepts
such as the public, and the individual is a member of the public insofar as they

participate in the networks of communication, since the public is the product of

these networks and cannot be meaningfully distinguished from them. This also
means that the future of the internet is the future of the social person the internet
is the modern iteration of publication technology. American children click online and
earn experience points; their avatars earn shirts and hats, sunglasses and shoes;
American children clicking on superheroes and princesses, clicking on animals,
clicking sports equipment. Gimme the controller! a child screams the child is not
the Controller, we observe. American children click on.
The EPCOT is not simply a model for how society can function it is also a
design for how a human can behave. Disneys networks of images initiate children
into the ABC Family, the Grand Social Order. The Mouse is rehearsing his role as
world warden.

Disney offers idealized models of behavior. That is the purpose of a moral

nothing less than instruction, orientation, socialization. One such tale of social
initiation appeared in The Adventures of Pinocchio in 1883 when Caldo Collodi
published his manuscript. Some years later, in 1940, the public would encounter the
tale re-released as Walt Disneys second feature film. The progression of the
narrative has Pinocchio simulating a boys movements, speech, and social
expectations Pinocchio is learning to behave more like a real boy. Compared
with the other children who are magically transformed into donkeys, Pinocchio
exhibits idealized character traits of the human body, or at least more so than the
other children, who are now ungulate. Pinocchio frees himself of his own marionette
strings during a musical sequence, exhibiting self direction and free agency
Pinocchio grows increasingly convincing in his simulation of real boy. The films
denouement transfigures the wooden body into a veritable flesh body. Pinocchio
earns the privilege of becoming a real boy he is now indistinguishable from his
desire and has been appropriately socially rendered (he is awarded a status, a
position or placement). This tale of social transformation serves as to instruct not
only the surface values of the prewar American era, but also the underlying nature
of public ritual.
In The Rites and Symbols of Initiation, the religious scholar Mircea Eliade
made eight concluding remarks after conducting his survey of the worlds rituals of
initiation into each respective society. Eliade concluded that all these ceremonies
held in common the principle that one truly becomes a man in proportion as one
ceases to be a natural man and resembles a supernatural being. What Eliade
means is that we learn to embody a socially privileged idea of conduct, and that this
behavior is a representation of an ideal man, not a description of an real man.
The supernatural transformation of Pinocchio into a real boy instructs the children
audience of their need to embody supernatural values and earn a role, a position,
within the social framework. Children learn that society does not want or need
children, does not need natural humans society needs real boys, supernatural
humans; the machine needs replacement parts. Children must omit portions of
themselves to become social beings.

Science fiction operates today as the supernatural. The Skywalker of the Star
Wars and the Avenging God of Thunder teach children the values of social good
through the dramatic opposition presented as entertainment the world needs
superheroes bit. Supernatural values, unrealistic expectations, nothing I can do
about it this socialization creates cartoon citizens to perpetuate the cartoon world.
The triumph of cartoon good over cartoon evil orients children towards particular
value judgments which will guide them once inside the consumption matrix a
human being is a means to an end in this network of consumption. The God of
Thunder exists to make money nothing I can do about it: because the world
needs superheroes.
If Mickey Mouse didnt exist it would be necessary to invent him.

The near total artificiality of the XXIst century Avengers franchise is the
product of a complex evolution of the technologies in the entertainment industry
and a recapitulation of Pinocchios material transformation. George Lucas space
opera of 77 was an unprecedented special effects bonanza. Disney has wished
upon all its stars to materialize an increasingly real boy world out of wood. The
wood is the ABC Family, and the real boy world is the EPCOT. The technologies of
the entertainment industry are currently capable of inserting human actors and
artificial characters seamlessly together within fabricated environments it is
simply the suspension of disbelief they wish to achieve, but here the nuanced result
is what I call Roger Rabbit phenomenon.
In 1988, the team of artists working under the direction of Robert Zemeckis
produced the award winning special effects feature Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, a
Walt Disney Company Production (largely derivative of the work of competitor
Warner Bros. Looney Tunes animator Tex Avery). The film portrays a city where law
and order must be maintained by humans and cartoons alike, living together in the
whimsical Toon Town. Roger Rabbit, like Mickey Mouse, is an animal/man/machine
(Pinocchio being a plant/man/machine) Roger Rabbits wife, Jessica, is a cartoon
human a woman/machine. Jessica Rabbit is a two dimensional representation of a
woman, and Bob Hoskins, as an actor on film, portrays a two dimensional
representation of a detective. The films integration of the cartoon and the real is
entertaining but the integration occurs at the devaluation of the real. As
Pinocchios imitation of the flesh body eventually usurps the definition of the real,
the Roger Rabbit phenomenon usurps the definition of environments and the
definition of agency within those environments.
What George Lucas achieved in 1977 was a suspension of disbelief which
allowed audience members to experience a world of excitement in a galaxy far, far
away. In the new millennium, the Avengers franchise offers an experience of our
world today, yet from a wildly fantastic perspective two-dimensional nonetheless.
The Walt Disney Company has brought together the innovations of industrial smoke
and mirrors to produce an extremely convincing representation of reality depicting
the most fantastic cartoon achievements of the XXth century. The Avengers film
culminates in a space-opera battle sequence which demolishes the New York

skyline. The cartoon world is no longer distinguishable from our world not far, far
way at all. Our increasing participation in the cartoon world divorces participation
from previous social realities that flesh bodies created and maintained. The makebelieve has been made believable. Our disbelief has been suspended and is kept
suspended in a cycle of consumption, where products and entertainment blur,
laughter bleeds into money, and Disney controls what is permissible to be made
believable.

The American image of itself and the worlds image of itself is the product
and property of corporations of which Disney is merely representative welcome to
America on Ice. The privatization of our heritage is anathema to publication, a
necessary component of the public and therefore a democratic society.
When I was twelve my grandmother had me hold a chunk of the Berlin Wall in
my hands I wasnt too much older when the twin towers fell. Amongst all the
conflicting reports we have heard about that day over the years, I grew to know one
thing for certain towers fall. Walls are torn down. Borders are static only on maps.
A meaningful world can only exist in our hearts and minds.
The pyramids were a dream once, the Holy See was just a dream once; the
Third Reich and the Islamic State are just dreams. America is just a dream. They are
dreams that ask for nothing less than total participation. They are dreams that
consume peoples lives. They are dreams that people are willing to die for. They are
dreams that people are willing to kill for. We have to be careful to dream with our
hearts and our minds, because one persons dream can become another persons
nightmare.
Its a small world, after all.