when nostalgia did not play a central role in its popularity. Other historical factors besides the fallout from the 1929 Stock Market Crash warrant closer scrutiny. Disney’s emergent success can be traced, for instance, to child-rearing studies in behaviorism. Nicholas Sammond’s book
Babes in Tomorrowland
explores how Disney constructed its early productions in relation to discourses on the generic (implicitly white, Protestant, and middle-class) concept of the “child.” While some early critics of the first motion pictures believed they could have harmful effects on women, children, and immigrants, the child eventually emerged as the one category most in need of protection from the cinema. As Sammond argues, however, the “child” was largely a social construction used to regulate media content and stifle discussion of other social factors, such as race and class. As a result, Disney positioned its products as correctives to perceived ills, offering films intended to have positive effects on children. This mode of film marketing, meanwhile, spread into advertising campaigns for other company products. Disney did not create the child as a marketing niche—yet, as the reception history of
Song of the South
later reveals, the studio did capitalize on and refine its possibilities through later years.
Sammond rejects any overt suggestion that Disney’s accomplishments emerged purely because of creative artistic genius—either his own, or that of the talented animators he employed.
Babes in Tomorrow land
is largely about the construction of the child in popular, as well as specialized and scientific, discourses. Disney, meanwhile, served as only one, albeit crucial, part of the “discursive matrix” 24 surrounding the concept of the child. While he emphasizes that there is no necessary direct or cause-effect correlation between studies of the child and Disney, he does outline preexisting conditions of possibility for Disney’s success in the late 1920s and 1930s. “Without the discourse of movie effects in circulation at that moment,” writes Sammond, “Disney would not have had recourse to this form of address” to naturalized middle-class virtues of deferred gratification, self-denial, thrift, and perseverance. 25 Sammond defines the company as one among many beneficiaries of earlier attempts by activist groups, popular magazines, and child-rearing manuals to exploit newfound concerns around children. Appeals to the child were, and often still are, deployed by adult defenders of Disney to highlight its perceived innocence.
Disney’s products thus were, and are still, targeted toward adults. While its animation may have been geared toward kids,
Song of the South
was reaching for an adult market with its live action melodrama. Originally conceived in the pre–World War II era,
Song of the South
was Disney’s cost-efficient exploitation of popular ’30s cinematic representations of the Old South, such as Bing Crosby’s musicals and
Gone with the Wind
. For nearly three decades,
Gone with the Wind
was by far the biggest Hollywood film. Every film that followed Selznick’s epic was conscious of its success. As the film scholar Molly Haskell recently wrote, “Reading the [original Margaret Mitchell] book and seeing the movie [adaptation] were to my generation interchangeable rites of passage as inevitable as baptism, the first communion, the first date, the first kiss.” 26
Gone with the Wind
was not only the highest-grossing film of all time until the release of
The Godfather
(1972); 27 it had also still grossed, as late as the mid-1950s, nearly
twice
as much as the next highest-grossing film of all time,
The Robe
(1953). 28
Song of the South
was, in a sense, Disney’s own adaptation of
Gone with the Wind
, which included casting Hattie McDaniel in a similar role of the maid. “It becomes immediately obvious,” Susan Miller and Greg Rode sarcastically wrote years later, “that Hattie McDaniel . . .
Babes in Tomorrowland
explores how Disney constructed its early productions in relation to discourses on the generic (implicitly white, Protestant, and middle-class) concept of the “child.” While some early critics of the first motion pictures believed they could have harmful effects on women, children, and immigrants, the child eventually emerged as the one category most in need of protection from the cinema. As Sammond argues, however, the “child” was largely a social construction used to regulate media content and stifle discussion of other social factors, such as race and class. As a result, Disney positioned its products as correctives to perceived ills, offering films intended to have positive effects on children. This mode of film marketing, meanwhile, spread into advertising campaigns for other company products. Disney did not create the child as a marketing niche—yet, as the reception history of
Song of the South
later reveals, the studio did capitalize on and refine its possibilities through later years.
Sammond rejects any overt suggestion that Disney’s accomplishments emerged purely because of creative artistic genius—either his own, or that of the talented animators he employed.
Babes in Tomorrow land
is largely about the construction of the child in popular, as well as specialized and scientific, discourses. Disney, meanwhile, served as only one, albeit crucial, part of the “discursive matrix” 24 surrounding the concept of the child. While he emphasizes that there is no necessary direct or cause-effect correlation between studies of the child and Disney, he does outline preexisting conditions of possibility for Disney’s success in the late 1920s and 1930s. “Without the discourse of movie effects in circulation at that moment,” writes Sammond, “Disney would not have had recourse to this form of address” to naturalized middle-class virtues of deferred gratification, self-denial, thrift, and perseverance. 25 Sammond defines the company as one among many beneficiaries of earlier attempts by activist groups, popular magazines, and child-rearing manuals to exploit newfound concerns around children. Appeals to the child were, and often still are, deployed by adult defenders of Disney to highlight its perceived innocence.
Disney’s products thus were, and are still, targeted toward adults. While its animation may have been geared toward kids,
Song of the South
was reaching for an adult market with its live action melodrama. Originally conceived in the pre–World War II era,
Song of the South
was Disney’s cost-efficient exploitation of popular ’30s cinematic representations of the Old South, such as Bing Crosby’s musicals and
Gone with the Wind
. For nearly three decades,
Gone with the Wind
was by far the biggest Hollywood film. Every film that followed Selznick’s epic was conscious of its success. As the film scholar Molly Haskell recently wrote, “Reading the [original Margaret Mitchell] book and seeing the movie [adaptation] were to my generation interchangeable rites of passage as inevitable as baptism, the first communion, the first date, the first kiss.” 26
Gone with the Wind
was not only the highest-grossing film of all time until the release of
The Godfather
(1972); 27 it had also still grossed, as late as the mid-1950s, nearly
twice
as much as the next highest-grossing film of all time,
The Robe
(1953). 28
Song of the South
was, in a sense, Disney’s own adaptation of
Gone with the Wind
, which included casting Hattie McDaniel in a similar role of the maid. “It becomes immediately obvious,” Susan Miller and Greg Rode sarcastically wrote years later, “that Hattie McDaniel . . .
Similar Books
