Reply #13: How to Read Donald Duck

[Squeech]

>BTW, what is Disney's facination with monarchy? The Little Mermaid, Alladin, The Lion King, The Emperor's New Groove.

There was a book with the above title, published in Chile during the year Salvador Allende was in office. The idea was that there's a consistent subtext in Disney comics, promoting capitalist economics and authoritarian government. Donald Duck was the usual exemplar: he typically goes off the rails trying to do something well-intentioned but anarchistic, and Unka Scrooge has to rescue him with tough market-oriented love. There's also a bunch of psychological analysis about how there are virtually no complete families in Disney: Mickey and Donald have girlfriends, not wives, and the kids are nephews and nieces, and nobody has an actual father, and the fuhrerprinzip-style politics this promotes. The book also demonstrated that Disney comics were sold in Chile and other South American countries for way less than the cost of production, implying that somebody was subsidizing the dissemination of this point of view.

The book was lavishly illustrated with examples, so much so that when it was translated into English and distributed in this country, Disney sued on copyright-violation grounds. They didn't win every remedy they asked for, but they did manage to severely restrict the press run of the book to make it awfully hard to find.