Storming Disney Castle
Liberating our heroes and legends from the slavery of "intellectual property"
Note: There will be another delay and another episode before I can return to the Gossage series. But I think this essay is a good one, a reminder of the power and potential we all have as creators and the creations who desperately need our help.
What color is Snow White's hair? Cinderella's gown? Does Pinocchio have a tiny companion? If attempting to answer these questions makes you picture these images, then you're likely part of one of the many generations raised by Disney. Your main exposure to fairy tales comes from cartoons.
Pecos Bill, Sleeping Beauty, Robin Hood... the list of Disney-fied characters goes on.
While Disney magic is certainly impressive, and none can doubt the incredibly mesmerizing effects of top-notch animation and “Imagineering” that is the Disney brand, in "bringing fairy tales to life" through animation, Disney also took them from the common domain of folklore and family stories to the realm of trademarks and copyrights where they’re currently trapped.
Animation can vividly realize what was once only possible through our imaginations. In doing so, it becomes "more real" than a book or vocalized words. This makes the output of a massive corporate entity like Disney the definitive version.
And it’s not like they consulted experts to make “the version” either.
Far from a consensus, many mythologists and folklorists felt that Walt Disney wasn’t just treating fairy tales as kids’ stuff, but that he was treating the kids who loved them like idiots. He was totally okay with dumbing things down and softening edges to make fearful parents happy.
Both CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien hated Walt Disney’s versions.
They didn’t believe children should be spared the gruesome realities reflected in the fairy tales collected by the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, and the millions of storytellers before them who helped craft them.
But despite their issues with the infantilization of our collective folklore and mythos, authors like Lewis and Tolkien were but humble writers working with words. No match for the technological behemoth that brings moving images, music, speech, and drama to the source material. And so the version that gets remembered, is Disney’s.
For example, few realize that The Little Mermaid is actually a story of vengeance over the prince’s infidelity and a cautionary tale against cavorting with eldritch species and cultures we do not understand—“Ariel” actually murders “Eric” for being unfaithful by the story’s end. In earlier versions of Cinderella, the ugly stepsisters go so far as to cut off their own toes to try and squeeze their feet into her glass slipper.
You may agree that the gruesome versions should be kept from children (although, for hundreds of years, they weren’t), but I think it’s more important for parents to have that choice.
Boys and girls with little education, no family counselors, or school therapists had no problem enjoying and learning from the OG stories. Then, sometime in the Victorian Era, the West started obsessing over preserving children’s “innocence” (read: ignorance), and adults started policing the vision of the world shown to them.
Today, most agree that deciding how much violence or reality a child can handle in our common cultural tales should be up to the parents. Except for Disney, who only wants to show you their version.
It would be one thing if other artists and creators were allowed to work with Disney's versions, but we can't. Their lawyers will literally ruin your life if you try.
Nor will power and influence save you—they once sued The Oscars for using Snow White in their opening number!
This is despite the fact that their characters are themselves ripped from the countless storytellers who evolved their source material over centuries and even millennia. All Disney did was adapt them to a new medium.
By setting up a legal moat around their versions, media companies imprisoned the characters in a fortress from which they could destroy anyone who sought to evolve or add to them, halting their development and fixing their form. Kinda makes you rethink the Disney logo, huh?
Characters who were once free to flit from mind to mind and storyteller to storyteller became enslaved to the moving picture makers with their superior display and mass production capabilities.
If you doubt this, it's all in the legal term: these aren’t inspired ideas or beloved creations, they’re "intellectual property."
Worse still, the characters are made to perform and behave in ways the audience fundamentally disagrees with. Whether because of some nefarious "woke" agenda or just because the writers are careerists trying to get noticed.
Again, it'd be fine if "their version" was just "a version" of many, which we were all free to add to, but the fact that you will be attacked for trying to do so means otherwise. Instead, we all have to put up with the fact that "THE version" is no longer "our version."
But there's (a new) hope:
After 100 years, the advent of cheap and easy animation and production technologies means we have a chance to break them out. Today you can 3-D print an army or animate a Mickey cartoon for the internet on your own. The caveat? It has to be free or parody.
Either the characters have to be in the public domain and not bear too close a resemblance to the "official version," or you have to make no money from it as "fair use."
The terms aren't ideal, but they offer hope to those who want to do more with the characters we grew up with than passively consume them.
A return to the ways we used to engage with beloved characters: telling our own stories about them to each other for little to no money.
I can feel the cringe from those who think I'm just calling on people to make fan fiction. I get that without strong editors and "brand guidelines" much of what gets made by amateurs is bad.
There are two easy remedies for the fan fiction problem:
1. Change intentions
What makes fan fiction bad is the creators intending to do little more for the characters or readers besides realizing perverse fantasies. Having Harry and Draco get it on before shopping for drapes likely isn't a serious attempt to tell a new and valid Harry Potter story. To dedicate yourself to honoring your favorite characters and creating something seriously worthy of the canon would circumvent many of the more questionable decisions made by fan creators.
2. Redevelop old skills
But even if fan creators did not, this would be okay. All great artists begin as terrible amateurs. As juvenile as your typical fan fiction seems, it’s the first stage of a creator's attempt to develop skills we once all had but allowed to atrophy under a consumption mindset and corporate legal scrutiny. They weren't "allowed" to make this as teens so what do you expect?
Given time to practice and serious intent to honor the characters we're working with, many of us will tell stories far better than the ads for toys and social engineering that pass for entertainment these days.
Freeing our favorite characters—and ourselves—in the process.
I never much cared for the Disney Corporation before, and even less now.
As an older second generation Floridian, I am sicken by the thousands of acres that have destroyed and continue to destroy for their theme parks and ancillary services that must support them.