Disney

What do you think of when you think of Disney?

It could be argued that Disney is the most-well known company in the world. Disney is the world’s largest media conglomerate by market value and Hollywood’s
biggest single movie producer.

A media conglomerate, is a company that owns large numbers of companies in various mass media.

Disney Subsidiaries

• Can you think of any Disney subsidiaries?
• List as many as you can.
• A subsidiary is a company...
• ...controlled by a conglomerate.

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The Power of Disney

• Disney has become central in shaping children's daily lives
• All toward a lifetime of constant, unthinking consumption.
• "one kind of value, market value; one kind of success, profit"

There has been a major transition from a culture of innocence and social protection, to a culture of commodification.

Disney not only represents "one of the best-known symbols of capitalist consumerism" but also claims to offer consumers a stable, known quantity in its brand-name products.

One measure of the corporate assault on kids can be seen in the reach, acceleration and effectiveness of Disney's marketing and advertising efforts to turn kids into consumers and childhood into a salable commodity.

What is unique about Disney, is its titanium-clad brand image - synonymous with a notion of childhood innocence and wholesome entertainment - that manages to deflect, if not completely trounce, criticism at every turn.

The Values of Disney

• What do you think are the core values of Disney?
• How are these values represented in their products?

Disney is an icon of American culture and middle-class family values.

REPRESENTATION

With the pervasiveness of Disney in our culture, the films the company produces have
come under scrutiny time and time again.

DISNEY AND WOMEN

• Appearance valued over intellect
• Women are helpless and need protection
• Women are domestic and want to marry
• Overweight women are unpleasant and unmarried

How are these values represented within this clip from 'Beauty and the Beast'

DISNEYLAND

"I hate Disneyland. It primes our kids for Las Vegas."
- Tom Waits

Now a worldwide distributor of a particular kind of cultural politics, Disney is a teaching machine that not only exerts influence over young people in the United States, but also wages an aggressive campaign to peddle its political and cultural influence overseas.

In May 1992, entertainment magazine The Hollywood Reporter reported that about 25% of Euro Disney's workforce — approximately 3,000 men and women — had resigned their jobs due to unacceptable working conditions.

How is Disney distributing it's cultural politics (consumerism) through its theme parks? Watch the Big Yet Small trailer.

CELEBRATION

The values Disney produces as it attempts to commandeer children's desires and hopes may offer us one of the most important clues about the changing nature of our society and the destructive force behind the unchecked economic power wielded by massive corporations.