Disney Diversity: How Inclusiveness Has Almost Always Been Present in the Disney Universe
Disney Diversity: How Inclusiveness Has Almost Always Been Present in the Disney Universe
By Philip Kippel
The words "diversity", "inclusion" and "representation" appear to be tossed around quite a bit these days, whether it be regarding people of race or people with disabilities. There is nothing wrong with being inclusive.
However, the media has a tendency to make a big deal about it. One could say that they are trying to earn Brownie Points with audiences. Another could say that it's a case of political correctness being a burden on society.
Whatever the case is, recent efforts by the media are coming off as blatant pandering, etc., therefore they are earning the title of being "woke".
One big perpetrator of such “wokeness” would have to be the "Happiest Company on Earth": The Walt Disney Company.
If anyone thinks that Disney was never ever inclusive in the past, we are here to prove you wrong! Disney has been inclusive for many years, even during the life of Walter Elias Disney himself. They just never rubbed it in the faces of their audiences.
CHAPTER 1: A SOMEWHAT SHAKY START
Walt Disney was not just a dreamer and do-er. He was also a man who cared very deeply about the world and its problems and wanted to help change the world and make it a better place. He always had an extreme fascination with other nationalities, cultures and folklore and wanted to share a lot of that through his creations and even made friends with lots of people from different backgrounds.
However, like all human beings, Walt Disney was not perfect. In the early days, like all the other Hollywood studios in the 1930's, even Walt Disney could not avoid the same traps that his competitors fell into, such as producing some rather racially-insensitive content reflecting attitudes and prejudices of those times.
In his 1940 musical opus Fantasia, the 'Pastoral Symphony' segment features a character named Sunflower—a black stereotype centaurette with wild braids in her hair, big lips, large earrings and a donkey-like body who spends her screentime serving the other centaurs and centaurettes by combing their hair, polishing their hooves and other tasks.
Even though Sunflower has been removed from Fantasia since the 1960's, she does have her share of fans. There has even been a lot of fan art depicting her as a little more realistically-drawn and with her submissiveness completely gone.
We even have a number of Disney's classic cartoon shorts, even those starring Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Goofy, Pluto and friends.
One example of such is the 1933 Mickey Mouse short Mickey's Mellerdramer, where Mickey and his friends perform a stage play based on Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel "Uncle Tom's Cabin" (which took a stand against slavery and was the most popular and well-known stage play in America at the time), with Mickey playing the roles of Uncle Tom and Topsy, Minnie Mouse playing Little Eva, Horace Horsecollar playing Simon LeGree and Clarabelle Cow playing the lead role of Eliza the runaway slave…and Mickey and Clarabelle play their respective roles in full black-face makeup.
Also, like the other competing cartoon studios from The Golden Age of American Animation, Disney produced a handful of shorts featuring caricatures of popular Hollywood stars of the period, including African American stars (who were just as ripe for caricaturing as the white stars of the era) such as Cab Calloway, Fats Waller and Stepin Fetchit, as seen in shorts such as Broken Toys and Mother Goose Goes Hollywood.
However, since the 1960's, such cartoons have not been broadcast on television very often due to perceived stereotypical depictions of black people in some scenes. Sometimes they have been broadcast minus the scenes with the African Americans.
Even though the aforementioned black celebrity caricatures were given the always-offensive big lips that were all too often incorporated into black caricatures and stereotypes seen in films produced during that period, animation critic Charles Solomon noted in his book The History of Animation: Enchanted Drawings that the caricatures of Fats Waller and Cab Calloway in Mother Goose Goes Hollywood do not poke fun at their race and are treated just as good or bad like the other caricatured celebrities spoofed in that cartoon.
Things like Sunflower's role in Fantasia and the aforementioned shorts currently can’t be seen on the Disney+ streaming service for 'obvious' reasons.
HOWEVER, these pieces of animation should be released on Disney+ anyway, as they should still be seen by today's audiences as they were originally created, seeing them as simple products of their time. That way, while people would understand that such representations of people of color, foreigners and immigrants have always been wrong, they would be able to learn from them rather than pretend that such prejudices never existed.
Disney already released all of the studio's controversial cartoon shorts and World War II propaganda films on the Walt Disney Treasures DVD collections that were released throughout the 2000's and hosted by film critic and historian Leonard Maltin, who gave historical context introductions and disclaimers to many of the controversial shorts. If they can release such controversial content on DVD with disclaimers attached, they can do the same on streaming services like Disney+ too.
CHAPTER 2: THE BEGINNINGS OF TRUE DIVERSITY AND INCLUSION AT DISNEY
Of course, like with Disney's show business rivals, things got better and evolved over time and the offensive racial and ethnic caricatures were gradually phased out after the 1930's.
Neal Gabler, author of the biography Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination, argues that "Walt Disney was no racist. He never, either publicly or privately, made disparaging remarks about blacks or asserted white superiority."
Walt Disney himself was one to learn his lesson and he did make cartoon shorts that do portray other cultures in a more positive light and further reaffirm Walt’s extreme fascination with other nationalities, cultures and folklore such as The China Plate, Little Hiawatha, Ferdinand the Bull, For Whom the Bulls Toil and more.
In the animation studios, Walt's team of animators included talents from different backgrounds such as African-American animator Floyd Norman and Asian artists Tyrus Wong, Milton Quon, Iwao Takamoto, Bennie Nobori, Bob Kuwahara and Chris Ishii.
Floyd Norman, being the studio's first black animator who worked closely with Walt during the 1950's and 60's, said "Not once did I observe a hint of the racist behavior Walt Disney was often accused of after his death. His treatment of people--and by this I mean all people--can only be called exemplary."
In the 1941 animated feature Dumbo, the characters of the Crows were mostly voiced by black actors, including James Baskett, Nick Stewart and the Hall Johnson Choir, a group from a well-known Los Angeles black church who had previously sung on the soundtracks of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Pinocchio and would later sing on the soundtrack of Song of the South.
The crows were also modeled after black dancers Freddie & Eugene Jackson.
Despite all this, the crows have been criticized in later years as racist African-American stereotypes, especially in regards to the crows’ leader being called Jim “Dandy” Crow, resulting in Disney removing any appearances and references to the crows from book adaptations of the film starting in 2019 (when the live-action version of Dumbo, which also omitted the crows, was released).
According to Floyd Norman, who has defended the crows due to their basis in reality, the naming of Jim Crow was “Disney taking a cartoony jab at the oppressive South”. Many critics, pundits and personalities have rejected the criticisms thrown at the crows due to the fact that, with the exception of Cliff Edwards, black actors voiced most of them and their lead animator described them as being spoofs of many black entertainers at the time, with their clothes based on fashions of the 1930's and 40's - such as Jim Crow’s derby hat and spats.
Defenders have also praised the crows for being protagonists who are likable, supportive, empathetic and sympathetic to Dumbo’s tribulations as being themselves another alienated, ostracized and discriminated group and ultimately teaching the baby elephant how to fly.
Other notable defenders of the crows include Whoopi Goldberg (who expressed her desire to see the crows appear in more Disney merchandise when accepting her Disney Legends award in 2017), Leonard Maltin, Michael Wilmington, Alex Wainer, Eric Goldberg, John Canemaker, John Grant and the crows’ chief animator Ward Kimball.
The controversy regarding the crow characters was started by Richard Schickel, a white man who wrote a controversial book after Walt Disney’s death called The Disney Version. As a result, facts such as the crows being voiced primarily by black singers and being based on real black entertainers of the time are sadly often lost on modern audiences. Regardless, the Crows are still popular and beloved characters, including having a large number of black fans.
And let's not forget the package films made in the 1940's such as Saludos Amigos, which was produced for Central and South America as part of the United States’ Good Neighbor Policy, and its follow-up The Three Caballeros.
In 1941, the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs at the US State Department approached Walt about going on a goodwill tour of South America to counter a growing pro-Axis feeling in that region. Walt was initially uninterested, but when he considered that he could use the excursion to research a potential series of shorts with south-of-the-border themes, he finally agreed. The government sponsored the trip and made certain financial guarantees, but did not commission the making of any of the films that resulted.
Upon returning, Walt decided to integrate the subsequently-produced shorts with 16mm footage that he took for personal use. Hence, Saludos Amigos was born. It was not a propaganda film. What would be the point of promoting the merits of South American cultures to American wartime audiences or to the very countries it showcased? It was a purely commercial endeavor on the studio’s part. World War II had completely cut off Europe, but South America was still a potential market. Beginning with Saludos Amigos, Walt was able to break into that market and pump it for some much-needed revenue. And while the 1943 film Victory Through Air Power was clearly a propaganda film promoting the military theories of Major Alexander P. de Seversky, it was not in any way commissioned by the US government.
Saludos Amigos and The Three Caballeros both heavily showcase and embrace the cultures and traditions of South America, Central America and Mexico, with Jose Carioca (who is 100% Brazilian and the most popular Disney character in Brazil) and Panchito (who is 100% Mexican) taking Donald Duck (representing the American tourist) on whirlwind tours of those countries, both culturally and geographically.
In The Three Caballeros, Walt cast several popular Latin American stars of the period to appear in that film, such as Aurora Miranda (sister of Carmen Miranda), Dora Luz and Carmen Molina. Additionally, Brazilian actor Jose Oliviera voiced Jose Carioca and Mexican actor Joaquin Garay voiced Panchito.
The 1946 classic Song of the South, which was a personal pet project of Walt Disney, is quite an interesting movie because of the circumstances behind it. It was the Walt Disney Studio's first attempt at a live-action feature, with animated sequences spread out within that depict the Uncle Remus tales of Br'er Rabbit, Br'er Fox and Br'er Bear.
Walt grew up with the Uncle Remus stories, even putting on puppet shows based on them in the barn where he grew up in Marceline, Missouri, and wanted to make a movie that would serve as a tribute to those much-beloved folktales.
The Br'er Rabbit stories and characters were brought over from Africa to the United States and perpetuated by black slaves until those historic tales were eventually collected and compiled into books by American author Joel Chandler Harris and later discovered by Walt Disney and adapted to film.
It should be noted that Uncle Remus was a free man – however, it is widely mistaken that he was a slave.
That is one of the reasons why Disney has aimed to disown this movie, because it appears at first glance to have some racial undertones deemed "offensive" by today's standards. And one particular moment in the animated sequences involves Br'er Rabbit meeting a "tar baby" decoy.
However, should one actually watch the movie, they will see that there are no instances where the characters both animated and live-action represent the black-faced "minstrels" of old or inhibit any stereotypical behavior. And the movie takes place during the Reconstruction period, long after the conclusion of the Civil War and the abolition of slavery!
Plus the popular Disney anthem “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah”, the second Disney song to win the Academy Award for Best Original Song, was co-written by Allie Wrubel, who was Jewish.
Instead, with Song of the South, Walt Disney portrayed a world where everyone lived together in harmony.
People praised Fred Rogers for sharing a pool with black actor Francois Clemmons in a 1969 episode of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, but Song of the South had James Baskett and Bobby Driscoll holding hands on screen more than 20 years prior to that.
As Leonard Maltin once said, "What I take away from the movie is the following: That Uncle Remus is a warm, good-hearted character who captures the imagination of a lonely little boy who happens to be white. The boy is absolutely colorblind, and the audience relates to him. There is an incredible moment when Uncle Remus takes the boy’s hand in his, and there is an insert of the white and black hands clasped together. It’s the emotional climax of the movie."
The fact that a black man was portrayed as a hero and a father figure to a white boy in a movie made in the 1940's is astounding and the film does not get enough credit for all that. Johnny not only befriends Uncle Remus--he also befriends other people of different races and social classes, including a black boy named Toby and a poor white girl named Ginny.
It was equally important to depict a man like Uncle Remus as the narrator of the Br'er Rabbit stories because it gives ownership of the folklore to him and to black culture as a whole and it was people like him that kept the stories alive through generations of suffering and exploitation.
Just as The Three Caballeros showcased popular Latin American stars of the period, Song of the South showcased popular African American stars of the period such as James Baskett, Hattie McDaniel, Nick Stewart, Johnny Lee, Roy Glenn, the Hall Johnson Choir and others.
James Baskett, who portrayed Uncle Remus and voiced Br'er Fox, was the very first black male actor to win an Oscar, as well as being one of the first Hollywood portrayals of a black actor as a non-comic character in a leading role in a film meant for general audiences. Walt Disney became close friends with Baskett, described Baskett as one of the finest actors that he ever had the pleasure to work with and fought for Baskett to get that Oscar.
Baskett's acting was almost universally-praised and columnist Hedda Hopper was one of the many journalists who declared that he should receive an Academy Award for his work.
During the film's word premiere at the Fox Theater in Atlanta, Georgia on November 12th, 1946, Walt quietly left the theater for his room at the Georgian Terrace Hotel across the street after making introductory remarks and introducing the cast. He had previously stated that unexpected audience reactions upset him and that he was better off not seeing the film with an audience. Since Atlanta was racially segregated at the time, Baskett was unable to attend the premiere because he would not have been allowed to participate in any of the festivities. The second reason why Walt refused to stay at the theater for the film's actual screening was out of respect for Baskett and the other black actors of the film, all who were also banned from attending the premiere and its festivities, and out of protest for how they were mistreated.
When Baskett fell ill after filming was completed on Song of the South, Walt paid all of Baskett's hospital bills. After Baskett died from a broken heart in 1948, as a result of the NAACP turning on him in addition to criticizing the film, his widow Margaret Bonvill wrote a letter to Walt thanking him for their friendship and expressing gratitude for his support, telling Walt "You have been a friend indeed, and we have certainly been in need".
Nick Stewart, who voiced Br'er Bear, received a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Beverly Hills/Hollywood NAACP and the Living Legend award from the National Black Theatre Festival in 1995.
Stewart, along with his wife Edna, also used the money he made from his acting jobs on Song of the South and other movies to create his own Los Angeles-based theater, the Ebony Showcase Theater, which opened in 1950. It was the first theater to be owned by a black man, taught the arts to inner city youth and provided a venue for performers of all races, many of whom went on to become stars in their own right.
The Ebony Showcase Theater’s complex consisted of not only the Theater itself but also 8 apartments, an annex, a print shop, a thrift store, a restaurant and a house.
When Nick was called back to reprise the role of Br'er Bear for Disneyland’s Splash Mountain attraction in the late 1980's, Disney historian Jim Korkis asked him if he thought it was at all degrading to play Br'er Bear in Song of the South, regarding all the controversy of the portrayal of African Americans–Nick laughed and replied “Disney treated us like Kings” and concluded saying that the money he earned being Br'er Bear in Song of the South went towards a theatre for African American actors to play roles other than butlers and maids. Nick also said that he was to do the same thing with the money from the Splash Mountain ride.
If more people knew what Nick Stewart did with his platform, he and his roles would be celebrated a lot more. The work of Stewart and his colleagues does not deserve to be diminished.
African American actors and actresses found their voice with Song of the South and, like Gone with the Wind, paved the way for blacks in Hollywood–the numerous African American actors, actresses, writers, directors and producers of today can thank the cast of Song of the South for paving the way.
In a February 1947 interview printed in The Criterion, Hattie McDaniel (the very first black actress to win an Oscar, which she won for her performance in Gone with the Wind), who played Aunt Tempy, defended Song of the South by saying “If I had for one moment considered any part of the picture degrading or harmful to my people, I would not have appeared therein.”
In the same aforementioned Criterion article, James Baskett commented “I believe that certain groups are doing my race more harm in seeking to create dissension than can ever possibly come out of the Song of the South.”
Ruth Warrick, who played Miss Sally and was the last surviving cast member from the film before her death in 2005, said about the film in a May 2003 interview “I wish Walt were alive. I’m sad it has not been released because it leaves out a whole chapter in the history of Walt Disney. The film is probably one of his crowning points…A labor of love, Song of the South was conceived by Disney as a celebration of Joel Chandler Harris’ Uncle Remus stories that inspired him and enchanted his children.” Warrick even dedicated her life to helping the underprivileged—she was one of the founders of Operation Bootstrap in Watts California; was an active member of the Martin Luther King Society; and taught black studies in Harlem, New York.
Clarence Page, an African American nationally syndicated columnist for the Chicago Tribune, called Song of the South one of his favorite films from his childhood and one he had hoped to share with his son. Page said in an interview, "There's a deep African tradition in Song of the South. Br'er Rabbit is an emblematic figure of African folklore, a direct descendant of the trickster who gets by on his wits. Where 'Political Correctness' gets ridiculous is when corporations trying to avoid a controversy just presume that if something is stereotypical, then African Americans are not going to like this. There is a diversity of images in the media now that reflect our diversity in real life. We can look at Song of the South with a new awareness and appreciation."
Floyd Norman, who first saw Song of the South as a child, stated on his blog MrFun's Journal that "Walt Disney...was clearly nervous how Song of the South would be accepted by this particular audience. When the film finally came to an end, the reception was positive overall. Though the motion picture failed to garner glowing reviews, most found the Disney film immensely entertaining. The African American audience absolutely loved the movie and even requested a second screening of the Disney classic."
Diane Disney Miller, one of Walt Disney’s daughters, recalled “It was a film he really wanted to do. My dad quoted so much from Uncle Remus’ logic and philosophy.”
The fact that Disney executives like Michael Eisner, Bob Iger, Josh D’Amaro, Bob Weis, Carmen Smith and Charita Carter have largely ignored all this and created and perpetuated the artificial controversies plaguing Song of the South today by keeping it under lock and key in the studio vault and spreading lies about it rather than releasing it, defending it and actually educating audiences about it severely undermines the film’s true importance and significance in cinematic history and pop culture as a whole.
This has caused too many people to buy into the lies and falsely accuse the movie of being “racist”.
However, the majority of audiences (including most of the black community) want to see it released on DVD, Blu-Ray and Disney+, including the same people that have defended the Dumbo crows (such as Whoopi Goldberg, who also expressed her desire to see the film get released after receiving her Disney Legends award in 2017) as well as Nick Stewart’s family (especially his daughter Valarie and granddaughter Maya).
The injury is increased when we add in the fact that the Ebony Showcase Theater and its entire complex was shuttered and demolished by the Los Angeles government in the late 1990's. Disney did nothing to help the Stewart family. Nick ended up dying from a broken heart in 2000 as a result of his hard work being stolen from him. And now, all of a sudden, Disney claims that they want to be inclusive!?
The Walt Disney Company largely ignored Nick Stewart’s plight and death, aside from Roy E. Disney saying "Nick was a show business legend who made his mark in virtually every area of the entertainment spectrum from vaudeville and radio to motion pictures and television. As the voice of Br'er Bear, he lent his vocal skills to creating one of Disney's most memorable characters and a screen personality that was larger than life. In addition to his achievements as an actor and his important contribution here at Disney, Nick was a very passionate and caring individual who created a landmark Los Angeles theater and provided young people with a unique opportunity to participate in the theater and learn other related crafts. He will be greatly missed."
The film was even acknowledged by the Disney-owned ABC Network in the 2021 ABC News program Soul of a Nation.
It is sad and sickening that some people are so offended by Song of the South because by trying to hide it away, they are literally destroying the remnants of African Americans' actual heritage.
In all, the Uncle Remus stories are oral traditions that have been perpetuated by the black community for centuries. There is value in that history, and it must be honored, not suppressed out of fear of offense.
The 1950's Mickey Mouse Club television show features appearances by diverse young performers such as black tap dancers Cherly Weinberg, Ronnie Wilson & Riley Wilson; black concert pianist Jon Robertson; Hall Johnson’s Singing Sprites Children’s Choir; ten-year-old Hawaiian dancers Yvonne & Linda Ribuca; and folks dancers like Philip Olvera, Louise de la Torre and Order of the Arrow--no attention to race paid in any of those appearances, just their talents.
Diversity can even be found in numerous episodes of the Disneyland/Walt Disney Presents/Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color anthology series, such as the "Davy Crockett", "Swamp Fox", "Daniel Boone", "Andy Burnett", "Elfego Baca" and "Texas John Slaughter" mini-series"; "From Aesop to Hans Christian Andersen"; "A Tribute to Joel Chandler Harris"; "The Great Cat Family"; "Two Happy Amigos"; "Disneyland After Dark"; "Disneyland Goes to the World's Fair"; "Von Drake in Spain"; "Mediterranean Cruise"; "Carnival Time"; "The Legend of El Blanco"; and others.
In the 1953 animated classic Peter Pan, Peter and Indian princess Tiger Lily share nose kisses during the song "What Makes the Red Man Red". Tiger Lily is even a popular character amongst Native Americans, especially because of her go-getter personality. Tiger Lily is no passive princess either, nor is she a victim of Captain Hook--she's a hero who is willing to sacrifice herself before betraying Peter to the enemy.
John Darling identifies the Neverland Indians as Algonquin and adds, "they're quite savage, you know." However, those Indians are actually positive characters overall as well.
Some might find the terms "red man" and "redskins" offensive, but there are still a number of Indigenous people in North America that refer to themselves as "the red man", particularly in relation to the more contemporary teachings of the medicine wheel and their place within global society.
The answer to the question "What Makes the Red Man Red" is actually quite sweet--the red man is red because he's blushing from being kissed by an Indian maiden.
Other questions in the song include "Why does he ask us how?", "How" being a Hollywood misinterpretation of the greeting "ah-how"--the answer is because he's inquisitive and that's why he knows so much. "When did he first say ugh?"--the answer is when he first saw his mother-in-law, which is just a typical mother-in-law joke. It's all funny in a dated sort of way, but the punchlines are mostly positive.
The term "squaw" is used in the song as well, but the only character referred to as a squaw in the film is actually Wendy Darling. And it's the old woman that's treating Wendy like a squaw, so it's absolutely relevant.
As much as it's Wendy, John, Michael and Peter Pan's story, it is also the Indians' story. The Indigenous people, the alleged Algonquins, are inhabitants of Neverland. They played, therefore, fellow Indigenous peoples played an active role in the story. They may have played war games with the Lost Boys, and sometimes the Indians won and sometimes the Lost Boys won, but those games always ended in a positive outcome. They were equal rivals, but they were also respected friends. And when it came to battling Captain Hook and his pirate crew, the Indians were also valued allies. The bond between the Indigenous people and Peter Pan and the Lost Boys was so great that Peter was even adopted into the Indian society for his role in saving Tiger Lily and became known as Little Chief Flying Eagle.
How are mere depictions of Indigenous people offensive?!
The 1954 film 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea features multiple black natives in a scene where they chase the main characters off of their island.
Walt produced a series of live-action documentaries from 1953 to 1960 called People & Places, all of which were filmed on location in countries that the Disney staff visited.
Even though the 1955 animated classic Lady and the Tramp is full of national stereotypes from Irish cops to Mexican chihuahuas, all kinds of people enjoy watching it anyway and consider it to be one of the first ventures into real diversity in the Disney Animated Canon. Si & Am, a pair of Siamese cats, are obvious parodies of Asian stereotypes, but there are Asians who enjoy Si & Am and "The Siamese Cat Song" anyway. Tony, the restaurant proprietor, is a stereotypical Italian man, but quite a few Italians like him anyway for his lovable personality and the fact that he sings "Bella Notte" (the film's most memorable song). Jock, a tartan-wearing Scottish terrier who speaks in a Scottish accent, doesn't seem to bother Scottish viewers, especially since he and Trusty, a bloodhound who talks in a Southern drawl, end up becoming the real heroes of the film.
And diversity at Disney wasn't just relegated to onstage/onscreen talent either—in 1955, Walt hired Mexican director Roberto Gavaldón to direct The Littlest Outlaw, a film featuring a bilingual English/Spanish cast including Pedro Armendariz, Joseph Calleia, Rodolfo Acosta, Andres Velazquez, Laila Maley, Pepe Ortiz, Gilberto Gonzalez, Jose Torvay, Jorge Trevino, Jose Angel Espinoza, Enriqueta Zazueta, Irving Lee, Carlos Ortigoza, Margarito Luna and Ricardo Gonzales. Because of this, the film was shot twice, once in English and once in Spanish, enabling it to be released directly into Spanish-speaking markets without the usual dubbing process.
In the 1962 film In Search of the Castaways, actress Hayley Mills kisses a tan-colored native on the cheek—given the time period in which it was released, you would think some people would take offense to such an action.
The climax of In Search of the Castaways features New Zealand warriors performing the “Maori Haka” dance. Led and trained by a traveling group of native singers from New Zealand called the Maori Hi-Five, real Maoris performed the “Maori Haka”, a dance used for centuries as a pre-battle dance. According to Disney publicity, “Eye-witnesses interviewed during the research that went into In Search of the Castaways described the awe-inspiring sight of Maoris, by the hundreds, performing the ancient ‘Haka’ ritual.”
The Jungle Book, the last animated feature made under Walt’s guidance, features two of the first major Asian characters in the Disney Animated Canon–Mowgli and Shanti.
One day that often stuck with Walt's son-in-law Ron Miller was when they held a private screening of To Kill a Mockingbird at Walt's house for his entire family. Walt loved that film and at its conclusion, he lamented, "That was one hell of a picture. That's the kind of film I wish I could make", feeling disappointed that the family-friendly image and reputation that had become synonymous with Walt and his company by the 1960's prevented them from releasing movies with its subject matter.
In the Disney theme parks, diversity and inclusion have been part of their bread and butter since the opening of Disneyland in 1955.
For starters, there is Walt Disney's Disneyland dedication speech:
"To all who come to this happy place; welcome. Disneyland is your land. Here age relives fond memories of the past…and here youth may savor the challenge and promise of the future. Disneyland is dedicated to the ideals, the dreams and the hard facts that have created America…with the hope that it will be a source of joy and inspiration to all the world."
The same thing also applies to Roy O. Disney's Walt Disney World dedication speech:
“Walt Disney World is a tribute to the philosophy and life of Walter Elias Disney … and to the talents, the dedication and the loyalty of the entire Disney organization that made Walt Disney’s dream come true. May Walt Disney World bring joy and inspiration and New Knowledge to all who come to this happy place … a Magic Kingdom where the young at heart of all ages can laugh and play and learn – together.”
Believe it or not, the actors/models who were studied as inspiration for Trader Sam and the headhunters in the Jungle Cruise attraction were, in fact, African-American—in fact, they were particularly modeled after African American actor/athlete Woody Strode, who was called down to Disneyland by Disney Legend Harper Goff and they made a mold of his body that was used not only on the Jungle Cruise natives but also on the Native Americans along the Rivers of America.
Actor/athlete Woody Strode modelling the animatronic natives for the Jungle Cruise attraction.
And for some time, Disneyland had an Aunt Jemima Pancake House restaurant, complete with an Aunt Jemima walk-around character that made regular appearances.
Aunt Jemima herself, like Song of the South, is a victim of the recent wave of Cancel Culture alongside fellow African American food icons Uncle Ben and Frank White of “Cream of Wheat” fame.
Additionally, the location in Disneyland where Critter Country now resides was once home to the Indian Village, where live Native American performers would reenact traditional tribal dances and overall celebrate the heritage of indigenous tribes.
A number of different Indigenous peoples were contracted to perform at the park for weeks at a time. These performers were not costumed by Disney, either. Instead, each performer wore their own traditional regalia and they danced in a pow wow arbor. Guests could choose to either just watch the dancers perform in the circle or they could join in. But most importantly, they were able to engage with living, breathing Indigenous peoples.
The Indian Village also had a gift shop where guests could purchase inauthentic Indian arts and crafts.
And of course the parks have been hiring cast members of different races, ethnicities and orientations for many years, including dancers, singers and performers in parades and stage shows, as well as the many musical acts and atmosphere performers that have performed at the parks over the years ranging from jazz musicians to mariachi bands to steel drum bands and more.
Even though the parks would not start hiring overweight people, people with disabilities, people with facial hair, etc. until many years later after Walt's death, it was most certainly a start.
One of the most significant examples of diversity and inclusion at the Disney parks is one that essentially everyone in the world knows by now: It's a Small World, which celebrates children of different races and ethnicities all over the world as they sing, dance and play together in harmony. Even the costumes worn by the animatronic children are designed to be as true and authentic to their respective countries and cultures as possible, despite their small sizes.
It was one of four Disney attractions that originally debuted at the 1964-1965 New York World's Fair (the other three being Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln, Carousel of Progress and Magic Skyway) and was created to help support UNICEF.
When It's a Small World moved to Disneyland in 1966, water from major oceans was flown to the park. During the grand opening festivities, Walt Disney and children from 16 Southern California ethnic groups poured all that water from the seven seas into the ride’s flume.
All this not only applies to the ride, but also to its iconic theme song, which is a prayer for world peace that can very easily be translated into other languages and was written and composed by Richard M. Sherman & Robert B. Sherman, who are, in fact, Jewish.
Walt Disney and children from different ethnic groups pour water from the Seven Seas into It's a Small World's flume at Disneyland.
If that were true, he never would have hired the Sherman Brothers, who ended up writing more than 200 songs for Disney's films, TV shows and attractions.
In fact, if Walt were racist at all, he would have never hired any of the aforementioned talents and other talents from diverse backgrounds such as Maurice Rapf, Luis Van Rooten, Marty Sklar, Joe Grant, Ed Solomon, Claire Du Brey, Al Taliaferro, Erdman Penner, Aurelius Battaglia, Don DaGradi, Clyde Geronimi, Eric Gurney, Sylvia Holland, Guy Williams, Louis Prima, Annette Funicello, Nancy Kwan, Akim Tamiroff, Nancy Hsueh, Oscar Holmoka, Sal Mineo, Sabu Dastagir, Judy Harriet, George Givot, Salvidore "Robert" Loggia, George J. Lewis, Anthony Caruso, Eddie Little Sky, John War Eagle, Abel Fernandez, Jose Perez, Alfonso Romero, Los Tres con Ella and Pepe Callahan, Paul Frees, Mel Blanc, June Foray and many, many others.
Walt even got to meet Osamu Tezuka, the creator of Astro Boy, at the New York World's Fair and discussed doing a collaboration movie with him, revealing that he saw Astro Boy and telling Tezuka "If you have time, visit me in Burbank".
Floyd Norman has also been quoted as saying "The funny part was that minorities weren't knocking at the gates to get in. The jobs were there if they wanted them and if they were qualified. It's like the old ruse that Walt didn't hire Jews, which was also ridiculous. There were plenty of Jews at Disney. Personally, I never felt any prejudice from Walt."
Even though diversity, inclusion and representation were not perfect or always done right during Walt's lifetime, the things that he did do right on those fronts were a beginning and helped lay the groundwork for Disney’s embracing of diversity, inclusion and representation to continue to grow and improve after Walt's death in 1966.
CHAPTER 3: DIVERSITY AND INCLUSION AT DISNEY CONTINUES TO GROW
One of the earliest examples of diversity and inclusion from the post-Walt era is the 1970's incarnation of The Mickey Mouse Club, which featured a much more racially and ethnically diverse group of Mouseketeers.
The 1971 film Bedknobs and Broomsticks features choreography that was done by a black man named Donald McKayle and the “Portobello Road” musical number includes multiple people of color including Black and Indian (from India) dancers, some of whom Dr. Emilius Browne (David Tomlinson) dances with.
Additionally, several post-Walt episodes of The Wonderful World of Disney featured made-for-TV movies such as The Million Dollar Dixie Deliverance, with actor Brock Peters, and The Wacky Zoo of Morgan City, which had an interracial menagerie of child actors and a black police officer.
Among the celebrity guest hosts in the TV series The Mouse Factory are Johnny Brown (who hosted four episodes: “Folk Tale Favorites”, “Aviation”, “Alligators” and “Wheels”) and Nipsey Russell (who hosted two episodes: “Sports” and “Elephants”).
The live traveling arena show Disney on Parade (the predecessor to Disney on Ice and Disney Live), which toured the world from the late 1960's to the mid-1970's, employed numerous black performers as well.
Pam Grier, described as cinema’s first female action star, has a major role as the Dust Witch in Something Wicked this Way Comes.
The 1989 made-for-TV movie Polly, a reimagining of the Pollyanna story with a black cast, featured the final performance of Butterfly McQueen.
One installment of the Mickey's Field Trips educational film series features Mickey Mouse taking a group of children on a tour of the United Nations and meeting some of its ambassadors along the way. Mickey was even honored at the United Nations during his 60th birthday in 1988.
At the Disney theme parks, we have later additions such as the various countries represented in World Showcase at Epcot, the Africa and Asia sections of Disney’s Animal Kingdom and resort hotels such as Disney’s Animal Kingdom Lodge, among others.
And to top it all off, many of the cast members that usually staff many of those locations travel from those respective regions to work at them as part of a cultural representative program.
Many of the classic attractions in Epcot's Future World, such as Horizons, World of Motion, Kitchen Kabaret, Spaceship Earth, etc. have embraced diversity, inclusion and representation too.
Even the much-beloved log flume ride Splash Mountain applies, due to it being based not only on Song of the South, but also on the Uncle Remus stories which are once again important and significant parts of African-American history, culture and folklore.
And not only did the parks go all out for holiday seasons (Christmas, Easter, etc.) a lot more in the past, but they also used to more openly acknowledge and celebrate other holidays too (such as having offerings for Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, etc. in addition to Christmas offerings during the holiday season).
Between the late 1980's and early 2000's, Walt Disney Animation Studios began to produce more and more animated features and shorts based on stories and legends that originated in regions other than Western Europe and feature more and more characters of different ethnicities, embracing diversity and inclusion in ways that were actually organic and not forced down peoples’ throats. Nobody gave a big deal or fuss about them all back then, as there was no need to then just as there’s no need to do so now.
The animated films released during that period show how diversity, inclusion and representation can be done seamlessly without rubbing it in the faces of the audience and how different races, ethnicities and genders can be propped up without tearing others down, which is part of why the animated classics of the Disney Renaissance and the first half of the Disney Post-Renaissance are still loved by the majority of audiences to this day alongside the Walt-era classics. For examples of such films:
--The Little Mermaid: Ursula, the main villain of that film, is fat and the fact that she thinks of herself as attractive (and laments that she has actually "wasted away" from her former weight) is played for laughs. However, this actually made her popular with many "fat and proud" fans to the point that there was an outcry when official Disney Villains merchandise gave her a slimmer physique.
--Aladdin: Despite being a mishmash of various Middle Eastern cultures and having some heavily stereotyped Orientalist depictions of Middle Eastern cultures, this film is rather popular in Middle Eastern countries and many people of Arabic descent have praised this film for having positive portrayals of Middle Eastern people as opposed to depicting them as terrorists or savages. Many Middle Eastern viewers have been more than happy to see themselves represented sympathetically through the characters of Aladdin and Jasmine and not as bloodthirsty warmongering monsters. In fact, the film's directors consulted layout supervisor Rasoul Azadani (who is of Iranian heritage) because they didn't want to offend anyone. And Azadani thought everything was fine.
–Pocahontas: While some American history buffs scoff at that movie for being historically inaccurate, not only did that film give us the first interracial official couple in the Disney Animated Canon, Pocahontas & John Smith, but it also represents indigenous people in a tasteful manner. There are no stereotypes to be found in the Powhatan tribe and all comic relief is left to the obligatory animal friends. It also shows how prejudice, hatred and even greed can be used to incite race wars as seen in the movie's climax as the tribe prepares to battle the army of English settlers commandeered by the villainous Governor Ratcliffe, whose plan was to ravage their land in search of gold or any other treasures that would aid him in his selfish political goals. Pocahontas's voice actress Irene Bedard (who is of Native American descent herself) has said that young girls of Native American descent have thanked her for portraying a Disney heroine who looked like them. Bedard also views the character of Pocahontas as an important figure in Native American representation and added "I think it is a beautiful story that talks about how we look at each other as human beings first, before anything else. We all share the same mitochondria."
–The Hunchback of Notre Dame: Esmeralda, Clopin, Quasimodo’s mother and their fellow gypsies are all of Romani descent. The villainous Judge Claude Frollo is racist towards the gypsies, accusing them of being thieves and practicing witchcraft and wanting to exterminate them all, similar to Ratcliffe’s prejudice towards the Native Americans. And like Ratcliffe, Frollo gets his comeuppance in the end as a result of his discriminatory and hypocritical actions.
–Hercules: In addition to its setting and majority of characters being Greek, the 5 Muses, who narrate the story singing gospel-sounding songs, are African-Americans.
–Atlantis: The Lost Empire: The crew that joins Milo Thatch to find the lost city of Atlantis includes Helga Sinclair, a German lieutenant; Audrey Ramirez, a Puerto Rican mechanic; Gaetan Molière, a French geologist; Vinny Santorini, an Italian demolitions expert; and another one of the earliest major African American characters in the Disney Animated Canon, a medic named Dr. Joshua Sweet, who was animated by longtime African-American animator Ron Husband. Also, that film’s main heroine Kida is the true first black Disney princess (not Tiana) and is also the actual first Disney princess to become a queen (not Elsa)--even Kida's voice actress Cree Summer has expressed disappointment over these factors being ignored.
–Lilo & Stitch: The first full-length animated feature to be set in Hawaii, the film heavily embraces Hawaiian culture, including hula-dancing, fire-dancing, surfing, luaus and the concept of “Ohana” (the film’s central theme). Most of its human characters, including Lilo and Nani Pelekai, David Kawena, etc. are native Hawaiians, along with people of other ethnicities such as African American Cobra Bubbles. Tia Carrere and Jason Scott Lee, who voiced Nani and David respectively, are both of Hawaiian descent and helped rewrite their characters’ dialogue using correct Hawaiian slang and colloquialisms.
–Brother Bear: All the human characters in this film are indigenous peoples, with several aspects of Inuit culture being portrayed. It connects several common themes, especially in the areas of Inuit common practices and mythology. Although the film incorporates numerous elements for children, including the humorous talking moose duo Rutt & Tuke, the Inuit cultural elements are illustrated remarkably well, drawing inspiration from Native American tribes sometime within the last two centuries. Despite some chronological inaccuracies, the film portrays the Inuit lifestyle in an accurate way–the most clearly congruent elements are those of musical ceremony practices, animal spirit totems, revenge practices and shamanistic influences. These factors show that the film represented common Inuit practices correctly.
Mulan and The Emperor’s New Groove revolve around characters who are Chinese and Peruvian respectively.
Disney produced an animated short based on John Henry in 2000, which is also not problematic in the slightest, yet Disney was still worried about offending people, leading to the short having a delayed, seemingly limited release. One would think that a short film about a black folk hero would have full support...
When The Wonderful World of Disney returned to network television in 1997, one of the first original productions created for this modern take on Disney’s classic TV showcase was a remake of the Rodgers & Hammerstein musical Cinderella, which had a racially diverse yet talented cast, including recording star Brandy Norwood as the titular character, Whitney Houston as the Fairy Godmother, Bernadette Peters as Cinderella’s stepmother, Whoopi Goldberg as Queen Constantina, Victor Garber as King Maximillian, Paolo Montalban as Prince Christopher and Jason Alexander as Lionel, to name a few.
The difference between this particular production and ones that they've done in recent years was that the producers focused on the talents of the actors and actresses, not checking off diversity points.
Continuing with television shows, we have the Disney Channel animated series The Proud Family, which is about an African-American family simply living their lives as any family would, with no focus on their skin color.
Even more so, that show was created by Bruce W. Smith, an African American animator who has worked on numerous Disney animated films such as Tarzan, the 2011 Winnie the Pooh, and the Mickey Mouse featurette The Prince and the Pauper.
The show’s voice cast even included a large number of African American actors and actresses including Kyla Pratt, Tommy Davidson, Paula Jai Parker, Jo Marie Payton, Orlando Brown, Karen Malina White, Cedric the Entertainer, Al Roker and others.
Most relevant to this essay’s subject, the show did an episode titled “Culture Shock”, which revolves around multiculturalism.
In that episode, the school that Penny Proud goes to is holding a special Multicultural Day event where students get assigned to live with families from other countries for a few days and Penny goes to live with a Muslim family. During her time with that Muslim family, she learns about their culture (such as fasting) and learns to appreciate them. One night, both her family and the Muslims return home from an enjoyable night out, only to find that the Muslims' home was vandalized, having been covered with graffiti saying some rather racist comments.
At the end of that episode, Penny gives a speech to a school assembly that America was founded on the basis that everyone was welcome to live in peace as they wished and harmful acts such as what was committed on her new friends must not be tolerated.
They even did an episode titled "Seven Days of Kwanzaa", where they celebrated Kwanzaa.
The show also tackled heavy issues such as racism, sexism, child sexualization, body image, poverty, rumors, LGBTQIA+ rights, etc. in a light-hearted but thought-provoking manner that was able to reach viewers without being overly-preachy. While the series did showcase the Proud family's ethnicity, it was all done organically and sincerely.
Other shows that come to mind include Even Stevens, whose titular Stevens family is Jewish and even had a holiday episode where they celebrate Hanukkah, Kim Possible, where Kim's partner/boyfriend Ron Stoppable and his family are also Jewish, Pepper Ann, where the titular character and her mother Lydia are also Jewish, and Phineas & Ferb, where Isabella Garcia-Shapiro and her family are Jewish as well.
If Walt actually was anti-Semitic, the company most likely would have continued such prejudices and immediately cancelled such programs should even a word of their heritage be spoken.
Further along, we have the High School Musical trilogy. Aside from being a massive phenomenon amongst children in the mid-late 2000's, they had a fairly diverse cast in terms of both their characters and the actors and actresses that portrayed them. For the main protagonists, we had Troy Bolton, a Caucasian boy, and Gabriella Montez, a Latina.
Troy and Gabriella fall in love with each other and their friends Chad Danforth and Taylor McKessie, both of whom are African-Americans may I add, find this wrong. The thing is, though, Troy and Gabriella being in a relationship is seen as a negative thing at first NOT because of their skin colors.
This is because the characters and the movies themselves see them for their personalities and interests. Troy is a basketball player while Gabriella's main focus is on academics and they bond over musical theater. Not once does anyone mention race. This is yet another prime example of how you do diversity and inclusion correctly.
Another example from around the same time would have to be the Disney Fairies franchise starring Tinker Bell of Peter Pan fame. In this series of direct-to-DVD movies and its accompanying line of merchandise, Tink was given her own squad of fairy friends, including Silvermist, an Asian fairy whose specialty is water; Iridessa, an African-American light fairy; Rosetta, a Caucasian garden fairy; and Fawn, a Latina fairy who works best with animals. Once again, the Disney Fairies franchise never pointed out their races and only focused on their talents.
The same can be said for another more recent property, Big Hero 6. The titular protagonists, led by Hiro Hamada, are all racially diverse. Hiro himself and his late brother Tadashi are Japanese. And Hiro's best friends/teammates are all of different ethnicities—GoGo Tomago is Korean, Wasabi is African American, Fred is Caucasian, and Honey Lemon is a Latina. If you watch that movie, its subsequent TV series, or look at all the promotional material, all focus is on their talents and high IQs, never on their races. In fact, San Fransokyo, the city that they call home, is a melting pot of multiculturalism that doesn't rub it in the audience's faces.
Diversity also does not have to be just racial either—it can also be between species.
Seeing as this is Disney, they have tons of media featuring talking animals.
One of the most recent examples is the 2016 animated feature Zootopia. Set in a big city inhabited by a massive array of different animal species, the movie itself is all about diversity. It also highlights how some parties are willing to cause dissent between races in order to achieve ill-gotten goals as a sudden rise in attacks on traditionally-prey animals by predator animals causes a threat to the city's peaceful life. The film also addresses how racism can occur on both sides.
In the beginning, Judy Hopps is ridiculed for wanting to be the first rabbit police officer in Zootopia and is even assaulted briefly by bully Gideon Gray, who interestingly enough appears later on as a reformed adult who has made something of himself.
Meanwhile, Nick Wilde relates a story of a cruel childhood experience to Judy in which after finally joining a junior scout troop as the only predator in the troop, he is held down as the other scouts fit a muzzle onto him as they taunt him by saying "Think we can't trust a fox without a muzzle?"--this particular memory further fuels the conflict when Judy concludes that the reason the predators are attacking is via a biological trigger that is forcing them to transgress back to their savage nature of the past.
As it turns out in the climax, the acts were all part of a bigger scheme perpetrated by Dawn Belwether, a sheep and originally the assistant to Mayor Leodore Lionheart, a lion and the original mayor whom she framed for the predators' initial disappearance. Interestingly enough, Leodore does confess that he did falsely imprison the predators, but mostly to study why they had been acting the way they were. So in all fairness, neither the lion nor the lamb were innocent.
Next up is the Disney Channel/Disney XD animated series Star vs. the Forces of Evil, created by Daron Nefcy. In the show's beginning, we are first told how the people of the dimension of Mewny are under constant attack by the monster race via old stories and propaganda.
However, as the series progresses, we learn that the monsters are actually peaceful and not the burden that they were initially made out to be. It should also be made known that in the show's final episodes, it shows a good example of how dangerous thinking with race in mind and giving power to the wrong people can be.
The character of Mina Loveberry, who is initially deemed as a war hero for her battles against monsters, ends up being the villain of the final episodes as she, maintaining a mindset trapped in anti-monster bigotry, wages a full-out war against the peaceful monsters which aims to end in genocide.
The Paul Rudish-produced Mickey Mouse Shorts have been very heavy on diversity and inclusion too, especially the episodes that take place in other countries—not only do they strongly embrace and capture the cultures of those nations; those particular episodes even have the characters speak in the languages of those countries!
Even characters with disabilities have managed to find their way into Disney productions from time to time, whether they be wheelchair-bound (such as Felix Renton from Kim Possible), blind (such as S. Ward Smith from Randy Cunningham: 9th Grade Ninja ), deaf (such as Gabriella in the Little Mermaid TV series) or amputees (like Della Duck in DuckTales 2017), among others. Again, their inclusions were organic rather than forced!
Drifting from Disney's main franchises, we direct your attention towards The Muppets—a ragtag band of misfits made up of animals, humanoids, monsters, aliens, robots, machines, objects, food, plants, minerals, clothing, buildings, vehicles, abstract creatures, mythological creatures, extinct creatures and other kinds of beings. Acquired from The Jim Henson Company in 2004, the Muppets franchise has always celebrated diversity and inclusion since it was first established in the mid-1950's.
To Kermit the Frog, it doesn’t matter if you’re a bear whose repertoire of jokes are old hat, a clown-esque person who throws fish, a Swedish Chef, a temperamental diva pig, or even a creature of indeterminate taxonomy who is romantically attracted to chickens. As long as you share Kermit’s dreams of singing, dancing, and making people happy, you are always welcome in the Muppet troupe.
And it’s not just the Muppet characters themselves who are diverse. Jim Henson hired people from many diverse backgrounds to work for him and with him. His number one partner Frank Oz, who originated the roles of Miss Piggy, Fozzie Bear, Animal, Sam the Eagle, etc., is Jewish. Late puppeteer Richard Hunt was homosexual. And Kevin Clash, who many a child would recognize as the original performer of Sesame Street’s Elmo, is Afrifcan-American.
This also extended to the many celebrities that Jim Henson and his crew got to meet and work with over the years. For example:
-Henson's unsold 1964 TV pilot The Land of Tinkerdee starred a Latino actor named Darryl Ferreira.
-The fact that Sesame Street has always had a diverse human cast since its inception in 1969, including Caucasians like Bob, African Americans like Gordon and Susan, Latinos like Luis and Maria, Jews like Mr. Hooper, Asians like Alan, Native Americans like Buffy, Indians like Leela and people with disabilities like Linda.
-The roster of guest stars on The Muppet Show was diverse throughout the entirety of its five-season run (1976-1981), including white stars (Paul Williams, Peter Ustinov, Sandy Duncan, Ethel Merman, Edgar Bergen, Steve Martin, Dom DeLuise, Julie Andrews, John Cleese, Roy Clark, Alice Cooper, Sylvester Stallone, John Denver, Liza Minelli, Christopher Reeve, Gene Kelly, Brooke Shields, Carol Burnett, etc.), black stars (Lena Horne, Ben Vereen, Lou Rawls, Cleo Laine, Pearly Bailey, Harry Belafonte, Leslie Uggams, Dizzy Gillespie, Lola Falana, Diana Ross, Shirley Bassey and Gladys Knight), Latino stars (Rita Moreno, Raquel Welch and Senor Wences), Jewish stars (Joel Grey, Harvey Korman, Avery Schrieber, Zero Mostel, Milton Berle, Madeline Khan, George Burns, Peter Sellers, Gilda Radner, Helen Reddy, Lesley Ann Warren, Danny Kaye, Victor Borge, Dyan Cannon, Linda Lavin, Arlo Guthrie, Beverly Sills, Alan Arkin, Tony Randall, Marty Feldman, Melissa Manchester, Paul Simon, Hal Linden and Buddy Rich) and even LGBTQ stars (Jim Nabors, Vincent Price, Rudolph Nureyev, Elton John, Liberace and Debbie Harry).
All of them are examples of Jim's inherent inclusion who lent their talents to create many iconic characters and memorable moments on The Muppet Show, Sesame Street, Fraggle Rock, and many other TV shows, feature films and other assorted media starring these timeless puppets. And part of why Jim Henson and his collaborators created those shows and films, which have been seen and adored in more than 100 different countries, was to help make the world a better place.
Then we have Disney's most popular and lucrative intellectual properties that they've acquired in recent years: Marvel Comics and Star Wars.
For instance: The Star Wars universe has always been populated by a diverse cast of characters that are both multi-racial and multi-species ever since George Lucas first introduced it to the world in 1977.
For one big example, in the original Star Wars trilogy, there is the character of Lando Calrissian, who is African-American. However, people will always remember Lando as the one who made a shifty deal with Darth Vader to have Han Solo frozen in carbonite at the end of The Empire Strikes Back rather than the 'token black character'--this is a complete contrast to the recent Disney-produced Star Wars sequel trilogy, where the character of Finn is seen as nothing more than a 'token black character’.
And that is just scratching the surface of the barrel.
CHAPTER 4: WHEN THINGS WENT WRONG
As the 2010's progressed, things began to go astray.
On May 25th 2020, right during the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, an African-American man named George Floyd was approached by police officer Derek Chauvin, who put him in a stranglehold to the point that he suffocated and died.
Ever since then, serious re-evaluations have been made to several aspects of society, including media. Disney was no exception. One month after the tragedy, they announced that at their Florida and California theme parks, they were to be re-theming Splash Mountain.
This meant that the ride's longtime inhabitants, the cast of Song of the South, would be eliminated and replaced by characters from The Princess and the Frog, a more recent movie—a decision obviously fueled by George Floyd's death. And since then, Disney has been calling attention to any character, cast member, etc. of color and putting them on ridiculously high pedestals. The problem is, though, it is all highly unnecessary.
As a stark contrast to Song of the South, The Princess and the Frog is a retelling of The Frog Prince, a story that originated in Europe rather than America.
Unlike Song of the South, The Princess and the Frog has absolutely nothing to do with African American heritage!
That movie's protagonist, Tiana, is an African-American woman living in the 1920's. Her dream is to open up her own restaurant to honor her late father's talent for cooking. Of course, considering the time period, Tiana’s dream is taken as a joke by many around her because of her race and even her gender, with both black people and white people alike laughing in her face.
Compared to Song of the South, Disney seems to treat this movie slightly better despite it not being a box office success compared to Song of the South and other movies such as Beauty and the Beast, Tangled and Frozen. It could likely be because of the company's Disney Princess franchise, where many of Disney's most famous royal leading ladies have been reduced to the likes of the common Barbie doll and Tiana is merely a "token" in the brand.
Another idea could be that it was considered "less racist" by some when stacked side by side with Song of the South. This last argument, though, is a flimsy one! This is because even when The Princess and the Frog was released in 2009, some people called out its use of stereotypes and other racially-peculiar aspects, one being the fact that the characters of Mama Odie and Dr. Facilier are both people of color who use voodoo and hoodoo magic in their spells.
Other factors that make The Princess and the Frog controversial include things like segregation being overlooked and unaddressed in the film (some viewers have felt that the film should've had more realistic and/or less optimistic depictions of the Jim Crow-era American south) and the fact that Tiana is a frog for most of the film.
Others have been wary over The Princess and the Frog as a whole for trying too hard to be racially diverse. Because of these comparisons, alongside many other reasons, the announcement of Splash Mountain's re-theming has been greatly frowned upon by the vast majority of audiences and some fans have been split over it since.
The Princess and the Frog, which attempted to bring hand-drawn animation back to Walt Disney Animation Studios and revived many of the classic elements of the Disney Renaissance, not only failed to make a substantial profit (it got clobbered by two CGI-heavy live-action films released around the same time--Avatar and Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel), but it has also had a mixed reception and further damaged the prospects of 2D animation.
Most of the people who want Splash Mountain to be closed down are people who have never actually seen Song of the South and are merely making false assumptions about the ride and the movie that it is based on, further proving that the only way that Disney can stop the lies and artificial controversies plaguing Song of the South is to release it.
When the retheme was announced, which was only done to appease the "Black Lives Matter" mob, lots of people died inside and have hated Disney as a whole since then. By announcing the retheme, they were effectively telling the guests "Yeah, this insanely popular ride that you love is racist, which makes you racist for loving it all these years. Here, we will correct you by giving you something that #BlackLivesMatter can approve of."
It should also be noted that Walt Disney himself has been compared to Br'er Rabbit. Like Br'er Rabbit, Walt Disney was resourceful. When Walt was a young man, a badly-written contract allowed a powerful enemy to steal his first successful cartoon star, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, away from him. So on the train ride back to Los Angeles, Walt shortened Oswald's ears and lengthened his tail, thus Mickey Mouse was born.
On the last page of his Walt Disney biography, Michael Barrier wrote that the young Walt was a "human Br'er Rabbit, constantly wriggling out of the snares set for him." So if they were to evict Br'er Rabbit from Splash Mountain, Walt Disney the company would be evicting the spirit of Walt Disney the man!
Either way, the blind worshiping of Tiana and equally-blind shunning of Br'er Rabbit and Uncle Remus is a prime example of them pandering to the Cancel Culture mob in addition to being examples of whitewashing and history-erasure.
Disney didn't really give Tiana (a character who has never really been all that popular and profitable to begin with) that much love and exposure prior to 2020 anyway and they still sideline her most of the time anyway, further proving that the only reason for wanting to put Tiana into Splash Mountain is because she's black and for no other reason whatsoever, once again showing that they only treat Tiana as a token rather than an actual character with an actual personality and that her skin color was the only reason why they made her an official member of the Disney Princess franchise in the first place.
The majority of audiences (including most of the black community) want Splash Mountain to stay as it is, including Miss Georgia Smith of the Uncle Remus Museum in Eatonton, Georgia and Nick Stewart's family.
Further examples of Disney's misguided attempts at diversity and inclusion bring us back to the theme parks:
In addition to the proposed re-theming of Splash Mountain, they recently made changes to Jungle Cruise, eliminating the scenes featuring animatronic headhunters and the character of Trader Sam.
While both may be considered somewhat "barbaric" and harsh by some, they are much more true to African culture than anything else and should be treated and respected as such.
By removing Trader Sam and the headhunters, they have also erased the work of Woody Strode!
The new human characters now seen climbing the tree to escape the rhinoceros actually are racist by comparison due to the fact that they adhere to stereotypes of their cultures and actually go against Disney's aim at being inclusive by going with subtle stereotypes, unlike Trader Sam and the headhunters.
Further adding to the hypocrisy is the fact that despite Trader Sam and the headhunters being removed from the ride, they are still featured in the Jungle Cruise movie that came out in 2021, the same year that the ride took them out!
What is even more upsetting to the public is the fact that the Jungle Cruise rides have replaced the black natives with primates, replacing the Indigenous peoples of the Amazon with a gag scene featuring chimpanzees in a sunken boat! Removing African black natives, fictional or otherwise, and replacing them with monkeys is in fact racist, since black natives still exist in this world!
Also, throughout history, some people have called black people "apes", "gorillas", "monkeys", etc. as racist/derogatory terms, with some even going so far as to spread lies about black people having tails like monkeys!
Not only does all this further perpetuate the use of referring to black people in such a discriminatory manner, but it also further reaffirms that Disney and others are not really pushing for "diversity" or "inclusion" right now, but are actually pushing for an increase in division and exclusion instead! They could've retooled Trader Sam and the natives a bit maybe, but no, they just had to throw the baby out with the bathwater once again and show how The Walt Disney Company of today actually has become racist and discriminatory.
Another equally-ill-advised change to the Jungle Cruise is the removal of the pygmy boat heads/masks and hut and replacing them with what looks like a shack that an outsider might run.
By doing these kinds of changes, it is further erasing history and people of color and can easily give people the impression that no humans have ever actually lived in jungles when people who live in jungles like natives, pygmies, headhunters, etc. still exist and continue to live in jungles today! To quote the Joni Mitchell song “Big Yellow Taxi”, “They paved paradise and put up a parking lot”.
One more recent inclusion-confused move involves the 1988 movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit and the Disneyland attraction Roger Rabbit's Car Toon Spin receiving a revamp placing Roger Rabbit's wife Jessica in a lead role as she gains a private eye persona, re-writing the original story in which Jessica gets kidnapped and it’s up to Roger to save her.
The following points must be understood as to why these changes are bad ideas and water down and destroy Jessica:
In the movie, Jessica was already established as a fleshed-out and complex character with depth and competence to her actions. She is an intentional subversion of the Femme Fatale trope common in Noir films and almost everything she does comes from a place of genuine love and compassion.
When she finds out that Eddie Valiant had taken photos of her with Marvin Acme, she slaps him and says "I hope you're proud of yourself...AND those pictures you took!", showing that she is not some animated prostitute with no dignity.
Later on, as Eddie traverses Toontown, she saves him from meeting his end at the hands of Judge Doom when he attempts to shoot him, brandishing a gun of her own.
Despite being a scantily-clad and sexually-charged temptress/seductress who teases and gets flirtatious and affectionate with other men on a regular basis, Jessica shows that she remains a loyal and devoted wife to Roger Rabbit, whom she married because "he makes her laugh". She is one of the most intelligent and proactive characters in the film and even helps prove Roger's innocence, stashes him in the trunk of her car to keep him safe and bakes him a carrot cake once they get home at the end of the movie.
Jessica already manages to save herself anyway. In her final appearance in the ride, she was always seen brandishing a giant mallet that she clobbers her weasel captors with as she tells them “This is gonna hurt you a lot more than it’s gonna hurt me”.
Just because a woman gets kidnapped or captured does not automatically make them a damsel in distress. Even though Jessica gets captured near the end of the movie as well as in the ride, she was never truly a “damsel” and even then she still held her ground ("booby" trap, anyone?).
While the idea of having an attraction starring Jessica Rabbit is alright, as she has proven to be a very popular character amongst cult audiences, the move feels like yet another misguided attempt at Disney's "inclusion" agenda, this one being that female characters need to be strong and never focus on their looks, blindly stumbling into the objectification vs. sex positivity debate by saying that the only way that characters like Jessica can be empowered is to have masculine jobs and wear masculine clothing, basically slut-shaming Jessica and other beautiful female characters and body-shaming femininity in the process.
In November 2016, while Robert Zemeckis, who directed Who Framed Roger Rabbit, was promoting his film Allied, he was asked about the possibility of another Roger Rabbit feature. His response was that he thought the chances of Disney green-lighting another Roger film were "slim". He further explained, "The current corporate Disney culture has no interest in Roger, and they certainly don't like Jessica at all."
Then in December 2018, while promoting his then-latest film Welcome to Marwen, Zemeckis reiterated in an interview with Yahoo! Movies that even though the Roger Rabbit sequel script that had been submitted to Disney was "wonderful", he still felt that the company was unlikely to ever produce it, as he felt that it didn't make any sense as there is no "Princess" in it.
Looking back on Zemeckis's words, it appears that he was right all along and that the decision to make those unnecessary changes to Roger Rabbit's Car Toon Spin and thus water down Jessica seems to stem from the hatred that Disney executives of the time had towards the character.
Further adding to the irony is the fact that the plot of Who Framed Roger Rabbit already contains allegories for racism, prejudice, discrimination and segregation, with some of the humans often being discriminatory towards the Toons, the fact that the Toons are largely confined to living in the somewhat-ghetto-like Toontown and the fact that Toons were allowed to work and perform at the Ink & Paint Club, the nightclub where Jessica performs, but could not go there as customers (similar to how many nightclubs back in the day allowed African Americans to work and perform at them, but not to go to them as customers).
By doing those changes to Roger Rabbit's Car Toon Spin, they completely miss the point of Jessica's character, have seemingly lost all understanding of the concept of her character and ignore her most famous quote, "I'm not bad. I'm just drawn that way."
This has led to concerns that they might take this too far and that it could affect the marketing and merchandising of Jessica elsewhere and that the company may try to push her private eye persona as her definitive look or try to imply that her original design is something to be ashamed of when it is not. Putting Jessica in the detective outfit and not her iconic red dress makes her look unrecognizable.
These changes also make Roger Rabbit himself look bad. Just because male characters like him tend to be clumsy and often stumble when trying to accomplish anything does not automatically make them useless or incapable! Even klutzy males like Roger are fully capable of saving lives and being true heroes when called for. As Roger tells Judge Doom when confronting him towards the end of the movie, "We Toons may act idiotic, but we're not stupid!"
While the concept of Jessica Rabbit becoming a private eye in any form of media has potential and is not a bad idea in principle, the execution of it in Roger Rabbit's Car Toon Spin is just like all of Disney's other recent attempts at "inclusion": flawed and pandering.
This has been done before, as the iconic "Redhead" character in the Pirates of the Caribbean scene depicting a woman auction was recreated as a female pirate who runs the auction, modified so that the pirates are selling off stolen goods instead.
Some people fail to realize that in the original Pirates auction scene, the women being auctioned off look like they are actually excited and/or desperate to be married off to the Pirates, especially the redhead and the plump female, given how the plump female was constantly smiling and looking adoringly at her pirate captors (a stark contrast to the sad look the plump female has over being forced to give up her eggs and chickens in the current auction scene) while the redhead was acting all flirty, seductive and lifting her skirt to show her legs.
And the women still tied up in line, in addition to also looking adoringly at their pirate captors, look sadder due more to being desperate to get married off to the Pirates rather than being sad about being potentially sold into slavery, hinting at those women being just as bad as the pirates deep down. Plus pirates were terrible people in real life anyway and auctioning off women was something that real life pirates actually did! And such scenes and the audio-animatronic figures in them were worked on by the first female Imagineers--Alice Davis, Harriet Burns and Leota Toombs.
Disney Legends Alice Davis and Leota Toombs work on the redhead and other Pirates of the Caribbean animatronics.
Denae Mato, a political hobbyist and former organizer for 2020 presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg, shared in a tweet on March 7th, 2022 that her grandmother was the model for the original redhead figure, with Mato also being disgusted over the original redhead figure's removal.
The mindsets being perpetuated these days give off the notion that all males are inherently foolish, incompetent, perverted and sexist. Even the aforementioned attraction changes imply all that. Such anti-male attitudes are sexist too!
Women can be just as bad, flawed, perverted and lustful as men too. And despite the false narratives that some people in the entertainment industry have been trying to push the past couple of years, people speaking out against such ill-advised changes are not all “ists” or “phobes”--most men love strong female characters and most women love strong male characters and vice versa! The truth is that males and females can both be competent, caring and look attractive as they do it.
It's important to teach young women that they don't have to be ashamed of their bodies and don't owe it to anyone to maintain a certain appearance. When women are not allowed to be sexy, smart and feminine all at the same time, you are sending a mixed message to girls and saying that you have to sacrifice one for the other.
The whole idea of a "strong female lead" has long been embraced, BUT it needs to be thought through thoroughly and with an understanding of the difference between being a Feminist and being a Feminazi. Plus beautiful female characters like Jessica Rabbit, Redd, etc. were already strong, intelligent, independent, confident, passionate, free-thinking and empowered women to begin with, making such changes even more unnecessary and part of why forcing them into less-revealing clothing actually destroys their characters, misses the whole point of who they are, comes off as anti-feminist and makes them almost unrecognizable.
Disney seems to have developed a hatred towards sexy people in recent years, forgetting that sex appeal has always had a place at Disney, whether it be an inherent part of certain characters like Jessica, Redd, etc.; some of the costumes worn by dancers, performers, etc. in past Disney parades and stage shows; some previous versions of meet-and-greet characters; etc. Plus Jessica, Redd, etc. still appear on merchandise and in other places in their classic designs, which is yet another reason why it makes more sense to change their appearances in the parks and attractions back to their original and more iconic incarnations, as well as bringing the sexier dancer, performer and character costumes of the past back into Disney's parades, shows, meet-and-greets, etc.
After all, shunning and eliminating sexiness is also not being inclusive and hating sexy people is just as wrong and discriminatory as hating people because of their skin colors, body sizes, genders, orientations, disabilities, etc.!
Changing such female characters, forcing them to cover themselves up in seemingly more conservative outfits, etc. goes against who they are as characters and their independent, free-spirited, "screw you, I do what I want" attitudes!
Yet another theme park location that recently received a "woke" makeover is the Main Street Confectionery at Magic Kingdom, including a new backstory about a competition among home bakers called the Sweetest Spoon Showcase with each character being of a different ethnicity or sexual orientation, including:
-Saul Fitz: A town tailor who is gay.
-Willie Anderson: A young black man whose hobbies are...hobbies.
-Dr. Alsoomse Tabor: A Native American professor.
-Toshi Hayakawa: An Asian firefighter
-Sonia Sanchez: A Puerto Rican
-Agata Kaminski: A music teacher
Such things are all fine and dandy of course, except that it all feels forced.
Saul Fitz being a town tailor and a gay man to boot only further perpetuates negative stereotypes.
It doesn't outright say what's so special about Agata Kaminski--it is said that she makes Polish donuts, but that doesn't necessarily mean that she herself is Polish. Plus Polish people are not necessarily a minority and the fact that she's female isn't that special either given the others.
Some people say Song of the South shows black people as happy slaves even though the time period is wrong, yet we can have openly gay people and people of color living without segregation in the early 1900's!? Anyone with real common sense would know the realities of what would happen if you were to live in a town with people of color and LGBTQ+ people back in those days--things would be different in a very bad way.
We all know that Disney is meant to be an escape to worlds of fantasy with some touches of reality thrown in for good measure, but this kind of fantasy where the early 1900's was more welcoming to gay people and people of color is way too unrealistic.
This too comes across as totally backwards and yet another pathetic attempt to rewrite history. Such moves go against the Disney way, further showing how they have lost their logic and have forgotten that being realistic is where they have gotten most of their inspiration from in the past.
(Strangly enough, despite all this, the Confectionery displays Savage Bros. machinery featuring a Native American caricature.)
It has even been suggested that The Great Movie Ride at Disney's Hollywood Studios was removed mostly because some of the movies represented or shown in that attraction have been accused of being racist or politically-incorrect. And once Disney lost the licenses to use the movies owned by their competitors, they took advantage of the situation and replaced it with Mickey and Minnie's Runaway Railway, which was originally planned to be built somewhere else in DHS until Charita Carter threatened to fire any and all Imagineers who tried to stop The Great Movie Ride's removal!
Such attempts to make things “politically-correct”, such as with the Splash Mountain retheme and the changes made to Jungle Cruise, Pirates of the Caribbean, Roger Rabbit’s Car Toon Spin, Tom Sawyer Island and the Main Street Confectionery and the removal of beloved attractions like The Great Movie Ride, are nothing more than short-term kneejerk reactions to movements such as BlackLivesMatter, MeToo and TimesUp, as well as the murder of George Floyd and the protests that followed, which have been detrimental to pop culture and society as a whole more than anything—the majority of guests have hated all those changes with a fiery burning passion and had no problems with the previous versions of those attractions. Such changes MUST be reversed, since changing theme park rides will not make the ongoing problems in society go away!
The Disney parks have even gone so far as to eliminate the phrase “Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls” from in-park PA announcements and spiels just to be more “gender-inclusive”, which also comes off as nothing more than more of the same pandering and virtue-signaling that nobody wants. Not only has it been a long-standing tradition to say “Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls” at the Disney parks, but there was never anything wrong with saying it either! It's a tradition that nobody got offended by!
Even the announcements for the recently-discontinued Walt Disney World fireworks show Happily Ever After originally said “Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, dreamers of all ages”, which WAS inclusive already--once again, removing the “ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls” part was totally unnecessary and further proof that Disney and other companies really need to stop changing everything that was originally made, discussed or founded on just because a very tiny microscopic minority of people cry and moan--such things were already in place way before the new generation, so there is no way to possibly cater to everyone who whines.
The use of gender-inclusive language is nothing new at Disney parks anyway--for example, cast members saying phrases that fit the themes of the locations they’re working in (“Howdy, folks” throughout Frontierland and Critter Country; “Ahoy, mateys” at Pirates of the Caribbean; “Step lively, bodies” at The Haunted Mansion; etc.) and even occasional fun variations of parade introductions such as “Ladies and Gentlemen, Bats and Ghouls” at the start of Mickey’s Boo-To-You Halloween Parade.
"Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls..." isn't just a Disney tradition. It's a tradition much older than Disney itself. It's professional showmanship. For example: Imagine being under the Big Top and the ringmaster is the one to say, "ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls; may I direct your attention to the center ring..." It's also uttered by the barkers drawing in crowds to marvel at the latest spectacles at the sideshows. It's one of those cultural phrases. There's a type of magic to it. Most people do not like being called "friend" by total strangers and the guests just want to be given the services they pay for in a polite and professional manner and that's it! To a lot of people, having strangers call them "friend" is almost provocative--it tends to take peoples' minds to places like, "Hey friend. We don't want any trouble here..." It's like telling a person to "calm down", only it ends up causing the opposite effect. Disney calling people "friends" or "dreamers of all ages" at the parks is not a gesture of friendship toward the guests--it's an elimination of personhood, just like how "Comrade" is used by communists to make everyone equally worthless. They're not "friends", they're "guests/customers.
Most Disney fans know that Walt Disney was an entertainer first and foremost. Such a simple, yet iconic phrase like "ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls" is very much a part of that legacy.
At least 99.5% of people identify themselves as either a male or a female anyway and the majority of non-binary people would most likely find the omissions of “ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls” gratuitous.
A very tiny microscopic minority of people are choosing to ruin everything for the majority of the guests by trying to find issues where there have not been any! Nobody wants to be lectured at a theme park or while on a vacation!
The company has been calling any attraction set in a different time period "racist" or "problematic", as if we are supposed to pretend that Native Americans never wore tribal feathers and war paint or how African cruises should not mention headhunters or shrinkers as if they never existed. By attempting to wash out entire rich histories of native peoples, the executives and those who do not actually do their research are the only ones who come off as racists and sexists here.
In a poll conducted by Neil Newhouse of Public Opinion Strategies in early 2021, which was released exclusively via The Daily Wire, the results indicated that 64% of Americans oppose Disney's decisions to alter their theme park rides while only 36% approve. The Daily Wire's Amanda Prestigiacomo added that Americans of color notably also oppose those decisions as well as 60% of Disney fans.
These attractions are neither racist nor problematic! We should not ignore the cultures of other people because companies like Disney want to virtue-signal! Those attractions still exist in their previous pre-Cancel Culture forms at Tokyo Disneyland, so the American versions of them can be changed back to their pre-Cancel Culture forms too.
Another reason why these “diversity and inclusion” efforts in the Disney theme parks fall flat on their faces is because the company has been pricing out lower class people for many years and many lower class people are people of color who will never be able to afford to go to any Disney park.
Therefore, many of the people that Disney executives think will supposedly connect with these changes will never be able to experience them. In Layman’s Terms, all of these attempts are destined to backfire very, very badly and are already backfiring.
What one needs to know about the Disney theme parks is that they are meant to be an escape from the real world and for one to enjoy worlds of yesterday, tomorrow, fantasy and storytelling, not to be used as platforms for social justice agendas!
Josh D’Amaro, Charita Carter, Carmen Smith, Bob Weis, Kevin Lively, etc. spouting out nonsense like “we will be updating the parks and their attractions to reflect and value the diversity of the world around us” also completely contrasts and goes against what Disneyland and the other parks are truly supposed to be as stated by the plaque that hangs above the entrance to Disneyland saying “Here you leave today and enter the world of yesterday, tomorrow and fantasy”.
Because of all these foolish mistakes over the past few years, the Disney parks have actually become less inclusive.
Disney has even been driving away fans of their acquired properties too with such identity politics.
For example: Kevin Feige, president of Marvel Studios, thinks that the new black Captain America is the best version of that character—it's yet another example of trying too hard to be woke. Instead, they should be creating new hero characters who are of different skin colors and genders from the start to appeal to said audiences rather than change pre-existing ones! We all have our favorite iterations of beloved icons who have changed throughout the years, but to say that one particular one is your favorite JUST to appease a certain crowd is nothing more than pure pandering.
Over at Lucasfilm, Kathleen Kennedy, J.J. Abrams, Rian Johnson, Pablo Hidalgo, Sam Maggs and others have driven away longtime Star Wars fans by committing such crimes as attacking fans on Twitter and destroying beloved legacy characters like Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, Han Solo, Yoda, Lando Calrissian and others just to prop up the new characters like Rey (and only because she’s a woman), as well as Kennedy firing Gina Carano just for her political opinions and no other reason whatsoever despite Kennedy’s “The Force is Female” agenda and Disney’s claims to love strong, independent women.
In the same aforementioned poll conducted by Neil Newhouse of Public Opinion Strategies in early 2021, it was revealed that the majority of audiences hate that Lucasfilm gave Gina Carano the boot and want the company to rehire her and bring back her character Cara Dune, who has become a fan favorite.
The anti-Luke Skywalker sentiments shared by Kennedy and her colleagues at Lucasfilm was discovered during an episode of the web series Rebels Recon based on the way one employee decorated their desk--in one installment of that web series, hostess Andi Gutierrez walks past a desk, where an image of Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader from Return of the Jedi can be seen...with Luke's face having a big red "X" drawn across it. Many have come to see this as confirmation of an official anti-Luke bias, which motivated the decision to kill off the character in The Last Jedi.
There is also the Star Wars: The High Republic books–a series built entirely on identity politics with characters that were created ONLY to fill agendas, such as an obese Jedi named Ram Jamoram and a pair of non-binary twins called Terec & Ceret, as well as highly un-creative ideas like a rock named Geode and a vessel called “The Vessel”.
Again, audiences are fine with such diverse characters, but when they are created to do nothing more than check boxes, it automatically turns them off. Making matters worse is that that book series was spearheaded by Kennedy and her story group, which included Justina Ireland and Krystina Arielle—two African-American women who have long track records of being absolutely hateful and racist towards white men. Justina Ireland once even went so far as to say “If you don't like my book and politics, don't buy my book.”
Actor John Boyega, who played Finn in the Star Wars sequel trilogy, expressed displeasure over being relegated to B-plots and comic relief in The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker, especially after he was already set up to be a major character and possibly even a Jedi and Rey's love interest in The Force Awakens. Boyega has also felt that he, Oscar Isaac (who played Poe Dameron) and Kelly Marie Tran (who played Rose Tico) were given bad roles if not straight-up sidelined in the last two movies, suggesting that Disney intended those three characters to be token minorities. As a result of the bad treatment, Boyega has sworn never to work with Disney and Lucasfilm again.
The higher-ups even went so far as to request that they change the name of Boba Fett’s starship “Slave I” despite there being many slaves in the Star Wars universe already anyway such as Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader…and Vader was voiced by African American actor James Earl Jones!
Star Wars was already inclusive, diverse and pure, but has since been subverted by real life evil forces who only want to push agendas.
As George Lucas once said, "People who alter or destroy works of art and our cultural heritage for profit or as an exercise of power are barbarians."
For another example of how not to handle such things, let's look at the upcoming live-action version of Snow White. Not only has Rachel Ziegler, the actress cast as the titular character, attacked fans and critics on social media, which is a big no-no in the entertainment industry, but following criticism from actor Peter Dinklage over the "stereotypical" portrayal of "dwarfs", Disney then announced that the film would replace the titular dwarfs with "magical creatures" and that casting for those roles would begin shortly. Apparently, Dinklage does not seem to understand the difference between humans affected by actual dwarfism and dwarfs as mythological and fantastical creatures from ancient European folklore and fantasy, even going so far as to say that the Seven Dwarfs live in a "cave" instead of a cottage.
Like the other mistakes of the past few years, that move has also been strongly criticized by most people and fans, calling out Dinklage for hypocritically virtue-signaling and ignoring the original source material as well as criticizing Dinklage's words and the resulting response from Disney for being harmful to the little people community, including the potential actors for the roles of the dwarfs, potentially making it even harder for Dinklage's fellow real life little people to find work.
Oddly enough, Peter Dinklage appeared in the movie Elf for one scene where the whole joke is that Will Ferrell's character thinks he's an actual elf. And now Dinklage is concerned that Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is offensive and problematic!?
Another reason why Disney, like too many other companies, has gone “woke” in recent years is that they have been making the mistake of giving in to the argument that adding more diversity and inclusion will help the company’s bottom line in the long term.
Unfortunately, what they really mean by “diversity” and “inclusion” lately is merely a diversity of faces, not a diversity of ideas. This results in the hiring of too many unqualified employees. People are supposed to be hired for jobs based solely on their qualifications, character and merit, not their skin color, appearance, clothing, sexual orientation, etc. Such mistakes have only caused Disney and other companies to lose even more money as a result of hiring people only because of their looks and not because of how good they are at particular jobs.
What The Walt Disney Company has been doing lately in terms of inclusion efforts is, as previously mentioned, pandering and racist unto itself. They seem to be ignoring their previous works (especially those from the Walt era) and either focusing on only their most recent productions from the past 5 or so years, placing their POC employees on high pedestals when they don't necessarily need or want the attention, or outright faking all of that just to keep a good public image. Same applies to everyone else in the media/entertainment industry. So much so that it is hard to tell the difference between authentic inclusion and mere pandering. It can be summed up in this quote from the 1992 film Newsies:
-"Jack, when I walk, does it look like I'm faking it?"
-"Nah, who says you're faking it?"
-"I dunno. It's just that with so many fake crips on the street today, a real crip ain't got a chance. I gotta find me a new selling spot where they ain't used to seeing me."
That dialogue there is between the movie's main protagonist Jack Kelly, played by Christian Bale, and his sidekick Crutchy, played by Marty Belafsky. The issue was that since newsboys sell newspapers to passersby, some paperboys tend to fake injuries just to make more money, therefore ruining any chances of those with real injuries making an honest living. Replace “injuries'' with “diversity”, “inclusion” or "representation" and we have our current problem. Right now, Disney and many others in the entertainment industry are no better than those faking injuries just to pander to the crowds and get attention. If anything, it gives the implication that those in charge may be secretively bigoted themselves and are wearing inclusive masks to hide their true feelings.
In regards to how we should treat the more unsavory aspects of the past, it can be easily summed up with another quote from another much-beloved Disney film, The Lion King:
-"Yes, yes, the past can hurt. But as I see it, you can either run from it, or learn from it!"
Rafiki says that to Simba to encourage him to get over the death of his father Mufasa, return to Pride Rock and oust his uncle Scar, thus putting an end to Scar’s destructive tyranny. The same can be applied to any past prejudices that we have had in earlier times as a nation, realizing that we have come so far and how not to go down any similar paths in years to come. Disney, however, seems content with taking the first option, especially eradicating whatever Walt Disney himself did that would be thought of as "un-PC" to a VERY minor percentage of its audience and obliviously saying that it never happened.
Those who virtue-signal the hardest always have something to hide.
The notion of Disney insincerely doing all this just to pander has a LOT of weight behind it if you consider the company's relationship with the Chinese Communist Party. As many know, China's government treats its people like disposable insects, subjecting them to mandatory labor, labeling homosexuality as a disease, being racist towards minorities such as African Americans and Uighur Muslims, and other atrocities towards mankind. Seeing as Disney frequently does business with China, all of their “diversity” and "inclusion" projects and acts are nothing more than hypocritical!
Alex Hirsch, the creator of the Disney Channel animated series Gravity Falls, called out such hypocrisies in the following Tweet in 2021:
-"Disney privately: Cut the gay scene! We might lose precious pennies from China and Russia!
-Disney publicly: honk honk we put rainbow bumper stickers on Lightning McQueen! CONSUME OUR PRODUCTS TEENS
-(shows a screencap of a pride-oriented post by Disney's official social media outlets)
-To any creative at Disney TV, Feature, Publishing, or Streaming: please mercilessly spam your execs with "There's room for everyone under the rainbow" next time they tell you to "please revise" your LGBTQ+ character for "not being Disney appropriate"."
Considering how they bow down to governments that would love nothing more than to mutilate the genitalia of trans-genders, gays, lesbians, and such others, their claims to celebrate Pride and care about those who the time is about are nothing but hollow. And if they refuse to honestly respect and care for people of color, they may as well not care for ANYONE.
One recent affirmation of Disney's hypocrisy and false commitment to diversity, inclusion and representation would be the cutting of a scene in Marvel's The Eternals, the latest movie that they have vouched as being all about diversity, inclusion and representation. The cut they made consists of a progressive kiss between two characters. And the reason behind its omission is largely for the movie's release in Middle-Eastern countries. Regions like China, Russia and the Middle East have no tolerance or acceptance of such things, so if Disney was really committed to diversity, inclusion and representation, they would not have made such a move. More so, if Disney WERE to adhere to its stance on diversity, inclusion and representation, they wouldn't even be doing business with countries like China, Russia and the Middle East to begin with. That way, they wouldn't have to censor any of their movies for foreign releases.
Further adding to the greedy, spineless, hypocritical and contradictory attitudes of Disney executives, another example of how countries like China have been racist towards people of color lies in some of their movie posters--Finn/John Boyega is featured prominently on the American poster for Star Wars: The Force Awakens, but on the Chinese poster for that film, he is shrunken down. On the American poster for Black Panther, the face of Black Panther/Chadwick Boseman is visible, but on that film's Chinese poster, the titular character's face is covered by his mask. A company cannot claim to support diversity, inclusion and representation in the United States of America and do the opposite when it comes to other countries! This only further reaffirms how insincere Disney's recent "inclusivity" efforts really are as well as how too many executives don't actually believe in such causes or care about promoting diversity, inclusion and representation and that it's all play-acting being performed by ruthless people who would probably go so far as to sell their own parents for a quick buck!
There's also the fact that some scenes in the live-action version of Mulan were filmed at a Uighur Muslim concentration camp in Xinjiang with the excuse that they "wanted to be authentic" even though most of that film was shot in New Zealand rather than China and they could've easily shot those scenes in New Zealand as well! Disney even thanked that concentration camp and the CCP in the credits.
The live-action Mulan also omitted the character of Shang, Mulan's love interest, only because of the #MeToo movement!
It's not a bad thing at all to be inclusive, BUT...what Disney has been doing is nothing but pandering to the woke crowd. There's a difference, and it's called “subtlety”. Disney's attempts have been anything but. Not to mention the obvious elephants in the room being the proposed retheming of Splash Mountain and the removal of Trader Sam and the headhunters from Jungle Cruise. Those are not examples of inclusion, that's just whitewashing and further proof of Disney thinking that EVERYTHING is problematic and wanting to change everything about the company's past creations and pretend that it's "progressive"!
Plus the majority of Disney's customers, in addition to the adult fans (especially those in their 40's, 50's and 60's) are nuclear families...and all of them combined outnumber the whiny and smug "activist" employees and executives remaining from the Bob Iger regime who enjoy playing the victim card to get what they want!
Kids and parents alike do not wish to see such things as overly-blatant same-sex interactions and overly-explicit subject matter such as girls having periods in movies aimed particularly at kids and families. And parents do not wish to have to explain uncomfortable things like how two women can procreate to young children either.
To make matters even worse, in addition to bullying too many people into silence, wokesters have even been pushing such filth to brainwash and groom children because it's the only way they can semi-effectively reproduce! Luckily, more and more parents are waking up and fighting back against all the woke propaganda being pushed in entertainment, schools, etc. and some companies are also starting to realize that wokeness and cancel culture don't sell.
The fact that the latest Pixar film Lightyear has been a major box office bomb and gotten banned in 14 countries due to its ideology-pushing propaganda further reaffirms how out-of-touch with Disney's true core values and customer bases those entitled crybaby employees and executives are and how they've been making it extremely difficult for Disney, Bob Chapek and Susan Arnold to get away from politics completely and get back to actually focusing on the majority customers, fans and making money!
Regardless of all this, it should once again be made clear that people normally wouldn't care if gay or lesbian kisses and stuff ended up in movies, TV shows, etc., but the problem here is that such things are currently being done in all the wrong ways. Instead, it's currently being done to make political statements in movies, TV shows and other media where such statements should not exist in addition to using it to indoctrinate and groom children when such things are not things that little children under the age of 13 should be taught.
If the off-putting actions of the activists still working at Pixar; Disney Parks, Experiences & Products and the rest of The Walt Disney Company continue to go unchallenged and unpunished, it will be nothing more than a major setback for the advancement of LGBTQ+ rights, people of color rights, womens' rights, etc. Nothing turns audiences off more than superficial "me, me, me" identity politics and with Susan Arnold being a lesbian, it must be painful for her to see issues that she probably does care about being used by such mean-spirited activists to mess with the company and its bottom line.
You can’t just change one’s legacy without people noticing and wanting to stop it! Moving forward is one thing, and Walt WAS about moving forward, but it’s about HOW you move forward that counts. And the way they’re going at it is all wrong--just look at Disney’s "Stories Matter" and “Reimagine Tomorrow” campaigns, which have gone out of their way to talk down to people and further make Walt Disney himself look bad for instance.
The fact that the above statement from Disney and the Reimagine Tomorrow initiative as a whole are going out of their way to gloat about how The Walt Disney Company is the most inclusive company ever while deliberately spreading lies and ignoring, attacking and eradicating the company’s past inclusivity efforts and successes is also incredibly telling, as well as being slaps in the face to not only the company’s founders but also to all the other talented people who poured their hearts and souls into making all their past creations a reality.
Only name-dropping the titles of films released during the last five or so years is not enough proof to show that one is diverse and inclusive--such a statement does not hold any water due to its failure to acknowledge inclusive films from the Walt era (Song of the South, The Three Caballeros, Saludos Amigos, Dumbo, Peter Pan, Lady and the Tramp, The Jungle Book, In Search of the Castaways, The Littlest Outlaw, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Lt. Robin Crusoe U.S.N., Tonka, A Tiger Walks, etc.) and even inclusive films from the post-Walt era (Bedknobs and Broomsticks, Pocahontas, Mulan, Hercules, Aladdin, Atlantis: The Lost Empire, Lilo & Stitch, Brother Bear, The Emperor’s New Groove, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Big Hero 6, Cool Runnings, Remember the Titans, Polly, Treasure of Mautecumbe, She Stood Alone, A Mother’s Courage: The Mary Thomas Story, Queen of Katwe, the 1997 Cinderella, the High School Musical trilogy, the Disney Fairies franchise, etc.), most of which even incorporated diversity and inclusion in a much more tasteful, organic and successful manner.
By way of contrast, a lot of more recent films (Moana, Raya and the Last Dragon, Coco, Soul, Encanto, Turning Red, Lightyear, The Princess and the Frog, Black Panther, Black Widow, Shang-Chi, The Eternals, most of the live-action remakes of Disney's animated classics, the Star Wars sequel trilogy, etc.) have forced all that stuff down our throats and, regardless of whether or not they're actually woke, are being used to push agendas and focus solely on diversity, inclusion and representation for the sake of it at the expense of good storytelling, character development, entertainment value, etc., which makes it even harder to like those films, their respective characters and anything else connected to them.
They even go so far as to involve people who have rotten attitudes towards audiences and fans, chips on their shoulders and utter disdain for their customers as well as skeletons in their closets and extremely checkered pasts. This is further proof that current Disney executives, managers and directors have been much more focused on coming up with slogans and stuff rather than acknowledging and defending their company’s history!
The "Stories Matter" disclaimers that have been added to certain films and shows on Disney+ only come off as condescending and patronizing.
Because they feature suspected racial and ethnic caricatures that were commonplace in Hollywood during the times in which they were made, Disney has been overly-cautious with them and Disney+ even went so far as to make a lot of them off-limits to those under the age of seven in an attempt to "protect" children.
It's one thing to put disclaimers on films and shows that actually need them (such as certain cartoon shorts, the World War II propaganda films, etc.) or even to include warnings of stuff like tobacco depictions or anything that may affect photosensitive viewers, but the fact that they have gone so far as to slap such disclaimers onto films and shows that do not deserve them (such as Dumbo, Peter Pan, The Aristocats, The Jungle Book, Aladdin, Saludos Amigos, The Three Caballeros, Lady and the Tramp, Swiss Family Robinson, The Muppet Show, etc.--many of which already have organic diversity, inclusion and representation in them anyway) is an insult to the audience and a huge slap in the face to everyone who worked on them!
Those disclaimers can also cause people to ignore deeper nuances in those films and shows, including minor character moments such as the aforementioned nose-kisses in Peter Pan.
They even went so far as to slap a "Stories Matter" disclaimer on the recently-released Chip 'n' Dale Rescue Rangers Complete Series Blu-Ray!
The fact that they keep letting all those other films and shows off with a warning while still refusing to release Song of the South altogether is equally unfair and blasphemous!
And the exclusion of particular TV show episodes on Disney+ for "editorial reasons" (such as "outdated cultural depictions", references to certain historical events, allusions to the occult, the inclusion of celebrities with checkered pasts, etc.) and not even bothering trying to attach disclaimers to them too is just as horrible, insulting and hypocritical. Just because episodes have controversial things in them does not mean that they should be withheld from release!
One prime example is The Simpsons episode "Stark Raving Dad", which guest-starred Michael Jackson (who did not actually appear in the episode)--that episode was pulled from rotation in March of 2019 by creator Matt Groening and show-runners Al Jean and James L. Brooks in a rash response to the HBO documentary Leaving Neverland--a film that has turned out to be a biased, one-sided hit piece made by two liars looking for a quick buck.
Other Simpsons episodes featuring guest stars that have either become controversial or have been mired in allegations and displayed actual bad behavior such as Placido Domingo, Steve Tyler, Dustin Hoffman, Pete Townshend, Alec Baldwin, Ted Nugent, Lena Dunham, Hugh Hefner, Charlie Rose, Mel Gibson, David Copperfield, James Woods, Donald Trump, Richard Branson, Mario Batali, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, 50 Cent and the Red Hot Chili Peppers are still available for viewing on Disney+. Even the two couch gags that were done by Ren & Stimpy creator John Kricfalusi can still be seen! All this makes Groening, Brooks and Jean look like hypocrites and backstabbers.
And Groening himself has had allegations against him too and should know better than to cancel someone merely because of hearsay, especially after death!
To quote Isaac Butler from Slate.com, "Art is more than the people who made it, and it’s independent of them in many ways. But it also makes them money. Each airing or stream of “Stark Raving Dad” might put a few coins in the Scrooge McDuck’s treasure bath that is the Jackson estate. So getting rid of one of the show’s approximately six gajillion episodes of television might look like the correct moral stand to take. But preventing people from seeing a work of art is almost never the correct moral stand. Brooks, Jean, and Groening ought to know this, seeing as that’s the point of “Itchy & Scratchy & Marge,” the show’s early, brilliant episode about the limits of stopping people from seeing art that makes them uncomfortable. In that episode, Marge Simpson successfully gets Itchy & Scratchy, the dumb, hyperviolent show beloved by her children, taken off the air, only to change her mind when she’s recruited into an effort to censor Michelangelo’s David. It’s one of the first episodes that hints at the maturity and complexity that would become the show’s hallmark—maturity and complexity that’s missing from this panicked and ill-considered decision to choose for The Simpsons’ audience which episodes of the show we’re allowed to watch. Where do we draw the line? The important thing is that we are able to draw it ourselves."
Keeping audiences from seeing such works also sends the signal that sexual assault survivors are being taken seriously without actually committing to any meaningful reform going forward and consigning "Stark Raving Dad" to the dustbin of history is a mistake, an offense against art and the medium of television, and part of a growing trend of corporations using their consolidated power and the decline of physical media to do damage control by destroying works.
The truth is that Michael Jackson was already proven innocent in a court of law and is no longer alive to defend himself. This is yet another example of why we should not cancel important pieces of art and film and television history due to mere allegations from fame-seeking individuals whose stories don't add up. We should not allow accusations to destroy a creator's legacy after death, especially with only hearsay.
Groening, Jean and Brooks would be wise to apologize for their mistake and restore "Stark Raving Dad" to the Simpsons catalog as the majority of audiences want.
Like theme parks, movies and TV shows are supposed to be for joy, escapism, entertainment, education and enlightenment, not to be used as platforms to indoctrinate people or push potentially-harmful agendas!
"Reimagine Tomorrow" and "Stories Matter" are nothing more than shams and facades that really go hand in hand with Kylo Ren from the Star Wars sequel trilogy when he says "Let the past die. Kill it if you have to." The editing, censoring and erasing of old stories amounts to nothing more than cultural vandalism. As long as such things exist in the company, it will remain impossible to trust them. And when you try to kill the past, it always comes back to bite you in the rear.
The Reimagine Tomorrow Zoom meeting from March 2022 that got leaked by Christopher F. Rufo really cements how boastful, bragging and out-of-touch the activist Disney executives involved with it truly are. Most of those outside "cultural advisors" that have been holding Disney hostage for the past few years were brought into the company by former CEO Bob Iger as the 2010's progressed (partially because Iger was hoping to run for president of the United States) and Peter Rice (an executive and board member from the Walter Kaitz Foundation who was brought in as part of Disney's acquisition of 20th Century Fox in 2019).
During this virtual staff meeting among Disney employees and executives, they admitted to having a not-so-secret agenda to push questionable gay and queer content in programs targeted to children.
President of Disney General Entertainment Content Karey Burke spoke on how important it was for her to have “many, many, many LGBTQIA characters in our stories” as the mother of transgender and pansexual children, wanting a minimym of 50% of characters to be LGBTQIA and racial minorities. Burke said, “I’m here as a mother of two queer children, actually. One transgender child and one pansexual child. And also as a leader. And that was the thing that really got me, because I have heard so much from so many of my colleagues over the course of the last couple weeks in open forums and through emails and phone conversations. I feel a responsibility to speak, not just for myself but for them. That is up to all of us. We had an open forum last week at 20th where, again, the home of really incredible groundbreaking LGBTQIA stories over the years, where one of our execs stood up and said, ‘You know, we only had a handful of queer leads in our content.’ And I went, ‘What? That can’t be true!’ And I realized, ‘Oh. It actually is true.' We have many, many, many LGBTQIA characters in our stories and yet, we don’t have enough leads and narratives in which gay characters just get to be characters and not have to be about gay stories. That’s been very eye-opening for me. I can tell you it’s something that I feel that perhaps had this moment not happened, I as a leader and me as my colleagues would not have focused on. Going forward, I certainly will be more so. I know that we will be and I hope this is a moment where — shoot, the 50 percent of the tears, sorry, are coming — we just don’t allow each other to go backwards.”
A Disney production coordinator identified as Allen March, who says he worked on Moon Girl, also revealed Disney has actually created a tracker in order to determine whether or not the company is creating enough LGBTQ+ characters. March said, “I’ve had the privilege of working with the Moon Girl team for the last two years. They’ve been really open to exploring queer stories. I’m on the production side, part of the work that I feel like I can put in is making sure that — we take place in modern-day New York so making sure that that’s an accurate reflection of New York. So I put together a tracker of our background characters to make sure that we have the full breadth of expression. We got into a very similar conversation, Karey, of like, ‘Oh. All our gender nonconforming characters are in the background.’ So it’s not just a numbers game of how many LGBTQ+ characters you have. The more centered a story is on a character the more nuanced you get to get into their story. Especially with trans characters, you can’t see if someone is trans. There’s not one way to look trans. So kind of the only way to have these canonical trans characters, canonical asexual characters, canonical bisexual characters is to give them stories where they can be their whole selves.”
Vivian Ware, Diversity & Inclusion Manager at Walt Disney Parks & Resorts, states, “Last summer we removed all of the gendered greetings in relationship to our live spiels. So we no longer say, ‘Ladies and gentleman, boys and girls.’ We provided training for all of our cast members in relationship to that. So now they know it’s, ‘Hello, everyone’ or ‘Hello, friends.' We’re in the process of changing over those recorded messages, and so many of you are probably familiar when we brought the fireworks back to the Magic Kingdom, we no longer say, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls,’ We say, ‘Dreamers of all ages.' So I love the fact that it’s opened up the creativity, the opportunity for our cast members to look at that. We have our cast members working with merchandise, working with food and beverage, working with all of our guest-facing areas, where perhaps we want to create that magical moment with our cast members, with our guests. And we don’t want to just assume because someone might be, in our interpretation, may be presenting as female, that they may not want to be called ‘princess.’ So, let’s think differently about how do we really engage with our guests in a meaningful and inclusive way that makes it magical and memorable for everyone.”
Nadine Smith of Equality Florida shares a wild conspiracy theory that Republicans want to kidnap gay people's children, stating, “We’re also reacting from the reality that when they can erase you and they can criminalize your existence, when they can demonize who you are, the next step is to criminalize you and take your kids. And we’re already seeing that in Texas. So the slippery slope between these ugly messages emanating from legislative leaders in our state and then amplified by our governor, whose spokesperson immediately began calling everyone who opposed this bill ‘groomers’ aka pedophiles.”
Latoya Ravenau, an executive producer for Disney Television Animation who is currently a director on The Proud Family: Louder and Prouder, revealed how she has turned the studio into her own personal pocket to insert as much LGBT content as possible. She says “I love Disney’s content. I grew up watching all of the classics. They have been a huge informative part of my life. But at the same time, like, I worked at small studios most of my career and I’d heard, you know, you hear whispers. I’d heard things like, ‘They won’t let you show this in a Disney show,’ and I’m like, ‘Okay.’ So I was a little like sus when I started, but then my experience was baffingly the opposite of what I had head. In my little pocket of Proud Family Disney TVA, the showrunners were super welcoming . Meredith Roberts and our leadership over there has been so welcoming to my not-at-all-secret gay agenda. Maybe it was that way in the past, but I guess something must have happened in the last, they are turning it around, they’re going hard, and then like all that momentum that I felt, that sense of ‘I don’t have to be afraid to have these two characters kiss in the background.’ I was just, wherever I could, just basically adding queerness. If you see anything queer in the show — no one would stop me, and no one was trying to stop me.”
Raveneau also serves as a writer and Executive Producer on the series Rise Up, Sing Out, a show that proudly boasts its LGBT representation with a character named Amelia who has two lesbian mothers. Rise Up, Sing Out is described as a show that aims to deliver inspiring and optimistic messages such as celebrating black hair and exploring names that can be mispronounced or stigmatized. That show has been criticized for pushing elements of Critical Race Theory (also known as CRT), such as teaching children about race-based microaggressions. In one of their most popular episodes, a dark-skinned character named Gabriel is dropped off at school by his mother, whereupon he’s told by a white student, “Hey, Gabriel, I didn’t know that was your mom. Your skin is so much darker than hers.” “Hold it, did that comment make you feel uncomfortable?”, the show’s lead character, a young black girl named Taniya, suddenly interjects. “That’s a micro-aggression!” “A micro-aggression is when someone says or does something that makes you feel bad / Sometimes just because of your race,” Taniya sings, her added caveat muddying the definition of what constitutes such an act, ascribing a specific racist intent to what was once defined as an unintentional action. “But you know what? He’s wrong! You should be proud of your skin. / It’s what makes you you.”
CRT is another polarizing issue that many parents have fought against teaching to their young children in states like Virginia where opposition to CRT was a deciding factor in the 2021 Gubernatorial race won by Republican Glenn Youngkin.
Earlier this month, a group of animators at Pixar accused their parent company of preventing them from allowing LGBT scenes in movies that were aimed at children, a talking point that led to a huge LGBT backlash against the company for failing to immediately support progressive opposition to Florida’s Parental Rights in Education bill, which bans the teaching of sexual orientation and gender identity to students in kindergarten through third grade. That bill has been labeled an anti-grooming bill by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ press secretary Christina Pushaw while opponents have mislabeled it the “Don’t Say Gay” bill. There has been fierce debate on social media about how much of the LGBT agenda should be pushed on children between the ages of 4-8.
Another set of videos from the Reimagine Tomorrow conference call expose just how rotten Disney’s core truly is as an employee reveals that the company is actually using its benefits programs for “gender affirmation procedures” in order to assist employees and their children to “transition.”
In the first video, an unnamed Disney employee says, “The other big area is gender identity and expression. So doing all of this work to ensure that our employees and cast can express their gender here authentically and proudly at the Company. So coming up with guides on how to change your photo, information about pronouns, working with our benefits team to give information about gender affirmation procedures both for our employees who are transitioning and trans, but also our employees who have kids who are transitioning.” This type of treatment typically includes puberty blockers, breast removal, and genital surgeries for ‘kids who are transitioning.'
Another video clip shows Latoya Raveneau, who previously bragged about pushing her “not-at-all-secret gay agenda” through Disney, admitting that she specifically wants to indoctrinate children with “the pockets of the LGBTQ community that you don’t see.” She says, “I identify as a biromantic asexual. I’ve had a lot of learning and growing about myself this year, kind of facilitated by how comfortable I felt on The Proud Family and with my immediate team at Disney TVA. And so it’s just sort of like this creative dissonance between my personal experience, where I feel so safe and so supportive. I mean, I wasn’t in the closet, but I’m real out now. Outside of my team, outside of TVA it feels like the things that we believe that we’re trying to put into the shows are not what we are seeing in the real world. It leaves you in a weird space. I’m thinking or I’m still thinking I want to use my content to go deeper – talk about how non-monolithic the LGBTQ+ community as an asexual. As an asexual – I feel like a lot of people don’t what that is. I have to have a dissertation ready at any given time. I want to add the pockets of the LGBTQ community that you don’t see. I want to get gay advanced. And then I realized, ‘Oh s***, we need to go back to Gay 101."
Karey Burke, who previously served as the head of original programming at Freeform, admitted the company has specifically been targeting millennials and Gen Z with LGBTQIA+ content through their Freeform channel. She says, “When I was at Freeform it was very much in the brand ethos of Freeform to be the tip of the spear when it comes to inclusion. And we, like you Latoya, we jumped up and down, we celebrated that. Nobody stopped us, and it felt great. In part, I think nobody stopped us because we were targeting Gen Z and millennials. We were targeting a younger, I think, more open-minded — and now we know, as my son texted me this morning, ‘Gen Z is 30 to 40 percent queerer than the other generations, Mom. So Disney better get with it.'”
In 2018, Burke participated in the first Freeform Summit that hosted a variety of individuals including Grown-Ish Executive Producer Kenya Barris who stated, “I actually do think that millennials and women are destroying everything because it needs to be destroyed or disrupted.” Yara Shahidi, the star of Grown-Ish would also state, “I guess if there is anything that this panel represents — I was reading The Fire Next Time and the one thing that he says is, ‘Do you want to be integrated into a burning house?’ And what this room represents is a group of people that are dedicated to setting out the fire and building a new infrastructure.”
Latondra Newton, Disney's chief diversity officer, has been trading access and favors to people who buy her jewelry, selling influence through her moonlighting and overpriced jewelry line, which is clearly illegal.
Carmen Smith, executive of creative dev-prod/content and inclusive strategies at Disney Parks, Experiences & Products and Walt Disney Imagineering, is responsible for most, if not all, of the recent unwanted politically-driven changes at the parks. In addition to being the driving force behind such atrocities as removing the natives from Jungle Cruise and getting the Splash Mountain retheme announced, some of her other crimes include messing with the second-story windows on Main Street USA (which are meant to be tributes to Disney studio staff members of the past) and removing museum-quality paintings showing actual American history in Epcot's American Adventure pavilion and replacing them with crummy images based on the Pixar movie Soul.
The rot inside Disney has clearly been festering within the company for years, to the point where Disney CEO Bob Chapek was forced to bend the knee, grovel, apologize and pledge to "be a better ally for the LGBTQ+ community", the internal activists taking Chapek as an ideological hostage.
It is becoming increasingly clear why woke activists are angered at the idea of having less access to children and thus being unable to groom them.
As a result of the leaks and the ensuing backlash, any and all further Reimagine Tomorrow meetings, including one about "race", were put "on indefinite hold" and Peter Rice, the kingpin behind these initiatives, was fired from Disney on June 6th, 2022.The studio even vowed to stop making movies with Caucasian heterosexual male lead characters, being oblivious to the fact that such an action is also an act of racism and forgetting that racism can go both ways. All of this further reaffirms that most of Disney's attempts at diversity and inclusion in the past were actually successful by comparison, as well as being done naturally, tastefully, subtly and organically and without rubbing it in the faces of their audiences while most of the ones since the mid-2010's have been utter failures. Only name-dropping movies released in the past 5 or so years is also not enough to build such a reputation on!
All of the evidence combined only proves that Disney higher-ups haven't really cared about inclusivity. Announcing the Splash Mountain retheme, giving politically-correct makeovers to classic attractions, Pride merchandise, etc. were only about saving face while trying to squeeze money out of people at the same time.
Following the leaking of Reimagine Tomorrow's Zoom meeting and political agendas, people have been turning away from Disney in droves; holding protests outside The Walt Disney Studio, Disneyland and Walt Disney World; cancelling Disney+ subscriptions; declining to renew theme park annual passes; cancelling Disney vacations; refusing to watch Disney's movies and TV shows; not wanting to spend money on Disney products; etc.
And many parents no longer want to take their kids to any Disney destinations, buy Disney merchandise for their kids, let their kids watch Disney programming, etc. due to the activists and their agendas destroying the public's trust in Disney as a once-highly-respected creator of neutral family-friendly entertainment that both kids and adults could enjoy.
A nationwide survey conducted by Convention of States Action in partnership with The Trafalgar Group in April of 2022 found that nearly 70% of people are now less likely to do business with Disney because of all these revelations.
A survey commissioned by NBC News and performed by Hart Research Associates/Public Opinion Strategies revealed that the share of Americans with a favorable impression of Disney has collapsed from 77% in 2021 to just 33% in 2022 as a result of the company's slip into racial and sexual ideologies tarnishing the company's name--truly catastrophic reputational damage and a warning to other companies about the cost of going woke.
As of May 3rd, 2022, Disney has lost over $63 billion in market capitalization as a result of all these many years of bad decisions, constant pandering, empty virtue-signaling and trying to pander to a very tiny minority while ignoring the often-silent majority. These grave errors have been costly and detrimental to Disney. And it’s bad enough that the company has already been billions of dollars in debt for well over a decade.
Not only are the vast majority of guests, customers, shareholders, etc. angry about these perversions, but so are the majority of Disney employees and cast members, who no longer feel respected or welcome in the company as a result of all this.
No company on Earth should ever force their staff to believe the same political and social values they have. Ever! It's bullying and tyranny, plain and simple.
Wokeness and Cancel Culture kill logic, intelligence, cognitive thinking, reasoning skills and peoples' ability to think for themselves and do research before they talk and destroy fun, humor, comedy and genuine love and affection. It has also made more and more people become cold and distant, cynical, mean-spirited, overly spineless and afraid, lose any and all sense of innocence and keeping in touch with their inner child, develop aversions to even the most innocent of interactions and acts of affection like hugging and kissing, etc. All this needs to stop, as wokeness and cancel culture are not only harming peoples' brains, but they are also hardening their hearts and making them increasingly stupid and ignorant! Nobody wants to live in a world without empathy, kindness, logic, laughter and love!
The majority of people from all political parties, religious backgrounds, POC communities and the LGBTQ+ community are against all the Wokeness, Cancel Culture, attempts to groom children and indoctrinate them into alternative lifestyles, etc.
Over 22 years ago, many people warned that the current generation that has become overly-bratty, spoiled, entitled and coddled was going to eventually turn into a giant pain in the neck when such people got older--and unfortunately, it did. Many of us are now fighting to stop and reverse such ailments.
Disney has been doing all this not because a politician or law-maker has forced them to do so, but because their views of society have changed due to what the rest of the media has seen or done. It appears that they operate under the false belief that if even one person is offended, then everybody is offended…and if everybody is offended, then Disney will lose its audiences and their money and profits. Little do they know that their ill-advised actions have actually been causing the very things that they want to avoid: losing their audiences and losing money and profits.
Basically, diversity, inclusion and representation at Disney started out as almost non-existent but gradually came into being and got better and better over time as the prejudices of the early days dissipated. Unfortunately, over the past few years, all of that progress has been getting reversed as a result of Cancel Culture and the current attempts that a very tiny minority of people have been making to whitewash our history and erase our past are no different from the attitudes and prejudices of many years ago.
Walt Disney the man was a lot more progressive than people give him credit for, yet in recent times, some of the company's executives and employees have come to view Mr. Disney as the bane of their existence and the bane of the company's existence, wanting to hide his work away from the public and pretend that the company was always perfect and squeaky-clean, not realizing that no matter how hard you try to hide something, people will eventually find out about it, share it with others and keep it alive anyway.
Somebody will always find fault or be offended no matter what you do! So Disney and all other companies need to realize that there is no possible way to please everybody all the time and that if you try to please everybody, you only end up pleasing nobody!
The same can be applied to all that has been happening within the media, ranging from Aunt Jemima being re-branded into Pearl Milling Company and the Dixie Chicks dropping the "Dixie" in their name to Ms. Bellum being written out of the 2016 Powerpuff Girls reboot and Hello Nurse being eradicated from the 2020 Animaniacs reboot, among others. Believe it or not, such woke actions and the destruction, erasure and ruination of such pop culture icons and institutions as a whole are in fact true racism and true sexism.
In summation, we need to find a way to counter these thought trains, movements, and the like and utilize the more unsavory aspects of history to teach everyone to be more inclusive, diverse, accepting, tolerant, etc. without erasing or sugarcoating the past or anything else! If not, we may all face a racially-oppressive history in a different form than what our ancestors went through years and years ago. After all, a famous saying comes to mind here: Whoever fails to learn from history is doomed to repeat it!
CHAPTER 5: SUGGESTIONS FOR FIXING THINGS
The first of the many suggestions that we have to help The Walt Disney Company get back to its roots, regain the dignity and respect that it used to have, bring back the magic and make Disney a truly inclusive and welcoming environment again is to remember that Walt Disney and his creations always put out messages that have given the average person hope. The company did manage to maintain those ideals and philosophies even after Walt's death, only to eventually lose touch and forget them all. A return to Disney fully embracing those original ideals and philosophies in their movies, TV shows, theme parks, etc. is in order. No political-correctness, no wokeness, no cynicism, no close-mindedness, no leaving anyone out and no giving in to cancel culture. Just good storytelling, endearing characters, high-quality well-developed products and genuine love and compassion.
What Disney and rest of the entertainment industry should do to be inclusive and not come off as pandering or woke, we offer this suggestion--just look past race and include people naturally and organically. An old show business saying comes to mind here--"Show, don't tell." And avoid mentioning race altogether, like Walt did. As previously mentioned, Disney HAS done this many, MANY times throughout its existence without making any sort of fuss about it and without giving in to tiny minorities of people who will never be happy or satisfied no matter what they do.
They also need to stop attacking fans and quit perpetrating the stereotype that all concerned fans are nothing more than basement-dwellers with nothing better to do than complain—not all fans of media are like that! Giving middle fingers to fans is very bad for business.
Get rid of such unnecessary job positions as "Chief Diversity Officer", "Head of Inclusion Strategies", etc. Such DIE (diversity, inclusion and equity) garbage only changes companies that are supposed to be friendly and welcoming like Disney into racism-infested Hell Holes.
In regards to the theme parks, we offer suggestions such as these in order to promote REAL inclusion (which also means adding and allowing ALL of the characters to happily coexist, not replacing or leaving anyone or anything out) and not drive away anymore guests:
–Create a separate attraction themed to The Princess and the Frog from scratch and build it somewhere else, allowing Splash Mountain to stick to its Song of the South theme and thus allowing Splash Mountain to continue being the monument to true African American history and folklore that it already is. If the characters from Song of the South and The Princess and the Frog can coexist elsewhere (such as on record albums, the 2011 video game Kinect Disneyland Adventures, etc.), they can happily coexist in the real life Disney parks too.
–Give Mickey’s Toontown a huge expansion and create a new separate attraction from scratch starring Jessica Rabbit as a detective (and depict her and Roger as actual equals this time), allowing Roger Rabbit’s Car Toon Spin to go back to the way it was. (The year-long Toontown revamp now taking place is a perfect opportunity to quickly abandon the Detective Jessica storyline in Car Toon Spin, remove all of the Detective Jessica figures and references and put the original Jessica figures back in exactly as they were before 2021.)
–Put Trader Sam, the natives, the pygmy mask heads on the boats and everything else that was removed from Jungle Cruise back into that ride while keeping some of the new additions and getting rid of other things like the genuinely-offensive new characters climbing the tree and bringing back the original men climbing the tree.
–Change the auction scene in Pirates of the Caribbean back to the way it was, thus going back to having the women being auctioned off. Move the current Redd figure to the burning town scene, along with new animatronics of the same wenches from the auction now dressed in pirate outfits and frolicking alongside the male pirates. This would further reaffirm the fact that Redd, the plump female and the other wenches all actually wanted to become pirates and marry them, thus having the restored original auction scene explaining how they became pirates and thus showing their transitions from lonely and bored village maidens to adventurous dames. Plus a portrait of Redd as a pirate already appears in one of the caves earlier in the ride anyway, showing that her time eventually came.
–Re-incorporate Lilo & Stitch into Disney’s Polynesian Village Resort. Again, the characters from Lilo & Stitch and Moana can happily coexist without sacrificing one or the other. Lilo & Stitch is NOT insulting to Hawaiians!
–Bring ALL of the characters, dancers and performers out for meet-and-greets regularly again, not just the “popular” ones. And that includes making all of the male face characters just as common as the female ones. The company continues to include tons of their characters in other media such as merchandise, video games, posts on their social media sites, etc., so make them all available to meet the guests at the parks on a regular basis again too and not just during special events and parties! And let the characters, dancers and performers be sexy, cute, playful, extremely affectionate, etc. both with the guests (both the kids and the adults) and with each other again too!
–Get back to making sure that the cast members, characters, performers, etc. engage ALL of the guests in interactions, ask and pick adult guests to participate in shows and parades, dance with them, etc., not just the little children. After all, Disney is for EVERYONE, including making adults feel like kids again without making anyone feel weird or awkward! Excluding and rejecting adults is not inclusive!
–Significantly lower all the prices (tickets, food, merchandise, hotel rooms, etc.) so more people (including lower-class people of color) can be able to afford to go to Disney’s parks and resorts, make things that used to be complimentary complimentary again, bring back things like extras and free parking at the hotels, etc. The parks have become so overpriced and overcrowded to the point where the enjoyment is sapped from the experience. The company would make a lot more money if they lowered the prices. They've been charging more and offering less for way too long and at a certain point, pricing gets to such a state of ridiculousness based on a lack of value that they have no choice but to reassess--they're already at the point now whether they want to admit it or not and if they don't reassess, the company's stocks will continue to blow up in their faces.
–Stop abusing, overworking and mistreating cast members, start paying them all actual living wages, stop putting too many rules and policies on them, make the parks fun to work at again so people will actually want to come work at them and stay employed by them for the long term and not want to resign too soon, etc. (Plus doing all these would be great ways to avoid staffing problems in the future.) Even Disney heiress Abigail Disney has long been unhappy about the mistreatment of Disney cast members in recent times.
--Put "ladies and getlemen, boys and girls" back into all of the theme park announcements. If you REALLY want to be inclusive, have the announcements say ALL of the genders! And let cast members call guests “prince”, “princess”, “king”, “queen”, etc. again as well!
--Incorporate the Crows into the Dumbo the Flying Elephant attractions, maybe as animatronic figures to entertain the guests waiting in line.
--Stop being afraid of celebrating America and showing off patriotic pride at the parks, especially at Disneyland and Walt Disney World, and do more patriotic stuff at the parks like they used. After all, Disney parks have always been ground zero as symbols of all things that made America great. And as Walt Disney said in his Disneyland dedication speech in 1955, "Disneyland is dedicated to the ideals, the dreams and the hard facts that have created America, with the hope that it will be a source of joy and inspiration to all the world."
–Bring back a lot of the old beloved attractions, parades and shows that have been removed from the parks over the years. Most of them have strong connections to Walt and his spirit and DNA in one way or another even if he wasn’t necessarily involved with them and did not deserve to be shuttered or replaced and the company could’ve easily built a lot of the attractions that replaced them from scratch somewhere else in underutilized spaces, current backstage space, etc. Plus whenever Disney makes new merchandise promoting past attractions, they usually sell like hotcakes, so it would be very beneficial of the company to take advantage of all that, as well as the fact that the parks have always thrived on nostalgia and nostalgia, including extinct attractions, becoming increasingly popular again and using their revivals as further examples of true inclusion. There's also the fact that many of those extinct attractions such as Horizons, World of Motion, Kitchen Kabaret, etc. embraced diversity, inclusion and representation too, which is another reason why bringing them back would be a smart move.
Do away with the Stories Matter and Reimagine Tomorrow initiatives, so nobody will ever be subjected to their lies ever again.
Despite the foolish things that new Disney CEO Bob Chapek said prior to 2022 causing people to doubt and mistrust him (such as the misinformation about Song of the South and Splash Mountain in the above video), we hope that he only said such things because he was still under Bob Iger's thumb at the time and that he meant what he said in the memo he delivered throughout the company in January of 2022, telling everyone that they will be focusing on three pillars, with the third pillar being "relentless focus on our audience":
We are a big company with many constituents and stakeholders, all of whom have a place in our decision-making. But at the end of the day, our most important guide—our North Star—is the consumer. Right now, their behavior tells us and our industry that the way they want to experience entertainment is changing—and changing fast thanks to technology and the pandemic. We must evolve with our audience, not work against them. And so we will put them at the center of every decision we make.
If Chapek truly means what he said by basically telling everyone in the company to stop antagonizing the fans, start giving them what they actually want and move away from the "putting politics before profits" mandates that Bob Iger and his fellow "activists" pushed, we hope that Chapek and Disney's new Chairman of the Board Susan Arnold will also read this entire article from start to finish and take all of our suggestions to heart and implement them to help get Disney back on the road to recovery and resume embracing true, genuine, organic diversity and inclusion like they used to.
Copyright Philip Kippel (c) 2021-2023
Please sign and share the following petitions:
Who Censored Jessica Rabbit? 2022
Bring the Brers from Disney's Song of the South back to the Disney Parks!
Save Pirates of the Caribbean Redhead Scene
Keep the old elements of the Jungle Cruise at Disneyland And Walt Disney World
To Save Splash Mountain and keep it as it is in Magic Kingdom and Disneyland
Save Lisa Simpson's Birthday: Restore Michael Jackson's Episode Into The Simpsons Catalog
Further reading, additional links and resources:
Watch "Song of the South" on Archive.org
The Walt Disney Family Museum-In Defense of Walt Disney
Amino: Why the Crows from Dumbo Are Not Offensive
2719 Hyperion: Caballeros in the Age of Misinformation
The Walt Disney Family Museum-Walt and the Goodwill Tour
Television Academy Foundation Interview with Nick Stewart
Disney Removes Injun Joe References From Magic Kingdom’s Tom Sawyer Island
Poll: Nearly 70% Now Less Likely to Do Business With Disney
Nolte: Pro-Grooming Disney’s Favorability Rating Plummets 53 Points In One Year
DANG: Disney's favorability rating has cratered from 77% to 33% since last year
D23: 7 Adventurous Facts About Walt Disney's "In Search of the Castaways"
The Walt Disney Family Musem-Small World, Big Message: The Music of “it’s a small world”-
Oh My Disney: 11 Things You Didn't Know About Lilo & Stitch
Oglethorpe Journal of Undergraduate Research: Inuit Myth in the film "Brother Bear"
Orlando Sentinel: I Love Disney World, but Wokeness is Ruining the Experience | Commentary
Public Opinion Strategies Memorandum--Recent Polling Data Re: Disney and Gina Carano
Comicbook.com: Some Disney Fans Upset Over Jessica Rabbit Getting A New Look
The Walt Disney Family Museum-Important Women in Disney History: Harriet Burns
The Walt Disney Family Museum-The Davises: It's a Small Love Story
Comicbook.com: Star Wars Fans Claim to Confirm Anti-Luke Conspiracy Theory at Disney
Vanity Fair--John Boyega Gets Real About Star Wars and Racism: “It Changes You”
TheThings: Here's Why Michael Jackson's Episode of The Simpsons Was Pulled Off Air
Slashdilm: Disney+ Desperately Needs A Host For Its Older Content – Here's Why
Blu-Ray.com--Chip 'n' Dale Rescue Rangers: The Complete Series Blu-ray
Flickr Photostream: Vieilles Annonces
The Original Mickey Mouse Club Show
Redlands Symphony’s Jon Robertson reflects on career
Debut of a Dean--Jon Robertson
Breitbart: Disney Lost $63 Billion in Market Capitalization Since Going Full Woke in Florida
Florida's Parental Rights in Education Bill
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