In October 1923, Walt and Roy Disney officially founded the Disney Brothers Studio—now known as The Walt Disney Company. Disney has been celebrating its 100th anniversary throughout 2023 by commemorating the company’s greatest hits and marking the major milestones in the company’s remarkable 100-year history. However, not all of Disney’s productions have achieved iconic status or have even met with success. In order to understand the history of Disney, one needs to examine Disney’s lesser-known productions as well as its celebrated successes. With this idea in mind, Kathy Merlock Jackson, Carl H. Sederholm, and I edited a collection of essays titled Forgotten Disney, which came out this year in order to coincide with the celebration of Disney’s 100th anniversary. The contributors to Forgotten Disney come from around the world, but Charlotte writers are well represented.
Paula T. Connolly, a professor of English at UNC Charlotte, contributes an essay titled “Mickey & Co. Enlist: Disney’s World War II Animated Shorts.” In this essay, she analyzes the cartoons that Disney produced to support the war effort. Among the cartoons that she examines are 7 Wise Dwarfs (1941), The Thrifty Pig 1941), The New Spirit (1942), Out of the Frying Pan into the Firing Line (1942), and Der Fuehrer’s Face (1943). She discusses the role these cartoons played in encouraging viewers to purchase war bonds, conserve materials needed for the war effort, and support the soldiers fighting overseas. As she points out, these animated shorts were products of their time, but they still have something to say to contemporary viewers. She writes, “examining their techniques of persuasion can tell us much about how narratives—particularly political ones—are used to garner audience support.”
Dina Schiff Massachi, a lecturer in the American Studies Program at UNC Charlotte and an expert on L. Frank Baum and his Oz stories, contributes an essay titled “Disney’s Abandoned Rainbow Road to Oz.” She traces the history of Disney’s plan to produce a feature-length film titled the Rainbow Road to Oz. As she recounts, initial work on the film began in 1957, but the film was never completed. In addition to examining the various reasons why Disney ultimately shelved this film, she discusses the connections between Rainbow Road to Oz and two other Disney Oz projects that came out after Walt Disney’s death: Return to Oz (1985)and Oz the Great and Powerful (2013). As she points out in the conclusion of her essay, “While Disney revolutionized how Americans look at classic European fairy tales, … neither Walt Disney nor the company he built have ever truly been able to capture L. Frank Baum’s Oz with any real success.”
For readers who want to know more about Forgotten Disney, please click on the following link: https://mcfarlandbooks.com/product/forgotten-disney/
Paula’s and Dina’s contributions to Forgotten Disney underscore for me the important scholarship that is coming out of Storied Charlotte in the field of popular culture studies.