Disney Is Winning The Culture War: The Samuel Lively Interview
Editor-in-chief Kyle Mann and creative director Ethan Nicolle welcome Samuel Lively, a Christian teacher and the author of Trojan Mouse: How Disney is Winning the Culture War. He has a MFA in Screenwriting and worked briefly in Hollywood. Kyle and Ethan discuss with Samuel Lively how Disney is infiltrating our homes and revolting against historical cultural norms as they analyze a slew of Disney films. Pre-order the new Babylon Bee Best-Of Coffee Table Book coming in 2020! Subscriber Portion (Begins at 00:52:58) Hidden Political Agenda in Disney films -Sleeping Beauty claims women are lazy -7 Dwarves: ableism, mocking disability -Fox and the Hound - Clearly a Fox News reference -Bambi - nuff said -Cinderella - anti-woman, lies to get women to wear glass slippers and cut their feet -Peter Pan encourages kids to snort pixie dust and take an acid trip to never never land -Alice in Wonderland - Do drugs. -Brother Bear - Bear propaganda -Little Mermaid - Men love women when they shut up -Jungle Book - Fathers can be replaced by bears - Finding Nemo - it is a sin to eat delicious salmon sashimi - Cars - Buy a Prius - Tangled - Women with long hair are problematic - Aladdin - Stealing apples is OK if you sing a Broadway song while running away from the city guards Topics Discussed Sam Lively's story. Who is he? Where is he from? How did you start thinking about the topic of your book? The culture war and how Disney is winning it Cultural Commies Children's movies being a vehicle for transmitting worldviews and narratives History of Disney (Golden, Silver, Dark Ages, Renaissance, Today) Expansion and acquisitions 1937-1942 The Golden Age - Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio, Fantasia, Dumbo, Bambi 1943-1949 The Wartime Era - Saludos Amigos, The Three Caballeros, Make Mine Music, Fun and Fancy Free, Melody Time, The Adventures of Icabod and Mr. Toad 1950-1959 The Silver Age - Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, Lady and the Tramp, Sleeping Beauty, One Hundred and One Dalmatians, The Sword in the Stone, The Jungle Book 1970-1988 The Bronze Age - The Aristocats, Robin Hood, The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, The Rescuers, The Fox and the Hound, The Black Cauldron, The Great Mouse Detective, Oliver and Company The Disney Renaissance 1989-1999 - The Little Mermaid, The Rescuers Down Under, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, The Lion King, Pocahontas, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Hercules, Mulan, Tarzan Post Renaissance Era 2000-2009 - Fantasia 2000, Dinosaur, The Emperor's New Groove, Atlantis: The Lost Empire, Lilo and Stitch, Treasure Planet, Brother Bear, Home on the Range, Chicken Little, Meet the Robinsons, Bolt The Revival Era 2010-Present - Princess and the Frog, Tangled, Winnie the Pooh, Wreck it Ralph, Frozen, Big Hero 6 Pixar -- counterfeit revival? Live action remakes The entire interview is available for Babylon Bee subscribers only… Become a paid subscriber at https://babylonbee.com/plans
I just have to say that I object strenuously to your use of the word hilarious.
Hard-hitting questions.
What do you think about feminism?
Do you like it?
Taking you to the cutting edge of truth.
Yeah, well, Last Jedi is one of the worst movies ever made, and it was very clear that Ryan Johnson doesn't like Star Wars.
Kyle pulls no punches.
I want to ask how you're able to sleep at night.
Ethan brings bone-shattering common sense from the top rope.
If I may, how double dare you?
This is the Babylon Bee Interview Show.
Yes, this is the Babylon Bee Interview Show, and I'm Kyle Mann.
I'm Ethan Nicole.
And today we have a special treat because we are sitting digitally with Sam Lively, who is the author of a book called Trojan Mouse: How Disney is Winning the Culture War.
Thank you for joining us today, Mr. Sam.
Hey, thanks for having me.
I'm a big fan of you guys.
Oh, that's why we're having you on.
We only have.
I'm glad we're finally having a special guest.
Well, normally we have a regular guest.
Yeah, just a regular old guy.
It's like, oh, we couldn't find anybody this week, so we're going to get Dave Rubin.
All-purpose guest.
Just like a generic brand.
It was a special edition.
Like re-release.
Foil-plated gold.
Out of the Disney vault comes Sam Lively.
So, yeah.
So Sam wrote a book about Disney.
And we all take a lot of Disney in.
You were just talking about how she's like a fire host of Disney in everybody's house.
Sorry, I would point at the wrong person.
Dan was just talking about how his daughter just started watching The Little Mermaid.
And just like absolutely fascinated, glued to the TV.
So we're going to find out if Little Mermaid is going to turn her into a feminazi or if she's going to turn her.
Actually, I will defend.
I will defend Little Mermaid.
Yeah, it is the start.
It's the start of the little girl cocaine that is the Disney Renaissance.
Well, the woke women hates Little Mermaid now, right?
Well, I'm sure now it's very much out of favor.
She chooses to lose her voice for a man.
Ooh, that's brutal.
Well, if you read the original story, the original Hans Christian Anderson story is very brutal.
She basically dies for him.
Right.
Anyway, I don't know if we want to get into it.
Sam, I don't want to steal your thunder.
Yeah, but I was waiting.
I was a piggyback in you there.
Yeah, I try to stay away from a lot of the Hans Christian Anderson endings because they're pretty unsafe for family viewing or reading in some cases.
Very strange ending, yeah.
They're pretty brutal.
Yeah.
Yeah, I think some of those, they try to do the existentialist take where it's like, I'm going to go off and do my own thing.
And then everything gets destroyed and ruined.
And then her dad has to come save her.
So maybe it wouldn't be very good nowadays for the woke crowd.
So Sam, what led you to be the guy that wrote this book?
Like what inspired it?
Why were you the one to do it?
Well, I'm sort of a Hollywood outcast.
I worked very briefly at Universal.
I studied and taught screenwriting at Cal State Fullerton for a few years.
And so I had something of an insider's view to how stories are made.
But I was also a culture warrior for a lot of my teenage years and sort of a weekend culture warrior as an adult.
And so I've always been very concerned with how movies and entertainment culture have shifted people's opinions on key battleground issues.
And so, I mean, over the years, especially once I had kids, I started to think more and more about which particular companies were having the most impact on the culture.
And it was really hard to find one that even sniffed the overall power and reach of Disney, both for good in its early incarnation and then for evil in its current variety.
So, yeah, I figured I should, instead of doing the big panoramic view, to just give people a look at how one company evolved and became that sort of siege weapon for getting past otherwise pretty good defenses that Christian and conservative consumers have built up.
So do you think that because the implication of Trojan mouse is that there's bad guys hiding inside the mouse and they sneak the mouse in your house and then they all come out and kill your family?
Pretty much.
But is it that intentional or is it that because another thing is I'm I'm kind of a Hollywood outcast too.
I mean, I do some stuff in Hollywood, but I think, and I think a lot of people in Hollywood feel like outcasts.
But there's a one of the weirdest things to me about animation is that it's made for families.
It's made for kids.
But the people that make it, in order to be a person that spends all your time making it, a lot of them are more predisposed to being the kind of people that aren't very pro-family.
They're single artsy single people.
That's what animators are.
So they're already predisposed to be like communists.
So I've always wondered, like, is that part of it?
You know, and did the Trojan mouse get filled with commies just by the nature of the industry?
And, you know, or was it, you know, is it how much of it's on purpose and by design?
I got to say, I need to see an Ethan Nicole illustration of the Trojan mouse now with all these Soviet soldiers, conscripts come busting out of this thing.
Yeah, wielding hammers and sickles on their way out.
I mean, it's always, I mean, it's inherent to the artistic fields, at least in America, that there's always sort of a leftist flant.
I mean, that was going back to early Disney.
A lot of the early people who worked for Walt were not necessarily communists, but definitely leftist in their political sympathy.
Yeah, I use communists as a very generic term.
I'm just joking.
He calls everybody a communist.
Yeah, they're a bunch of commies.
But it really is.
And again, you're also right that most artists are not really thinking in terms of children's entertainment naturally.
They usually have much different muses for what the kind of stories they're trying to tell.
But it really did turn into something intentional right around the mid-80s when the big leadership change took place at Disney.
You started to get ideologically motivated, creative people who really saw almost the way that education progressives did back in the 30s.
They saw entertainment as a lever for social engineering and social justice.
And so you get this idea and you say, like, I've got this huge bullhorn, right?
And I have access to the masses of bigoted, unwashed Americans, right, who don't understand how special this worldview that I hold is.
And so I'm going to use that.
I'm going to use that and I'm going to broadcast to them and I'm going to win their hearts and minds in ways that they don't even realize that they're being preached to.
They don't realize they're being proselytized.
They're just going to come.
They're going to be swept off their feet.
And as a result, they're going to hand over their hearts and their minds and allow this very hostile storyteller to start shifting some of the bare assumptions that we have about who are heroes, who are villains, what the causes and consequences are for good behavior, bad behavior.
All that stuff starts to get opened up once you start entering into those, especially the children's stories, the fairy tales that have so much morality programming built into them.
Yeah, I feel too, though, and I don't know, maybe this isn't actually opposed to that idea, but when I see Disney movies and you look kind of over the sweep of American history over the last 50 years, and it seems like it both influences culture and it's also kind of reflective of trends that were already happening.
So I wonder how much of it is them trying to influence it and then being influenced.
And then, you know, it snowballs as they continue to push that same idea or agenda.
Right.
I mean, there's a lot of dynamics at play.
So you can't find like a single cause, like the root presupposition that everything else is built off of.
But I think it's undeniable when you look at, I mean, all of us who grew up in sort of Christian groups, and I've seen so many of my peers, I'm 34 now, and I've seen so many of the Christians who grew up alongside me shift dramatically their beliefs on major issues.
And a lot of it, when they justify it, when they reference what changed their opinion, it's almost always emotional appeals.
And most of those emotional appeals, you can eventually tie back to some sort of entertainment narrative.
And so I think, at least in the modern culture, maybe not in the 50s and 40s when Disney was more reflective of the broader culture.
But nowadays, or at least in the last 30 years, Disney has really been aggressive in pushing emotional narratives that then get become mainstream and then become part of what people reference to as to how to justify their stances on different issues.
Do you have any examples of kind of smoking gun events or things people have said that show that it is intentional?
Like we're trying to make this a we're trying to preach.
You should read the book, Ethan.
But I want people to say them on the show.
Yeah, yeah.
I'm just kidding.
I want them to read the book out loud.
Probably the most glaring was Linda Wolverton, who's the screenwriter who did Beauty and the Beast, went in with the very open intention of separating Disney princesses and heroines from their past, right?
And so it was her desire to break them from the sort of the scholar-y maid, you know, the princess by birth who's forced into virtual slavery and has to work for these horrible people and then is, but takes it with grace and meekness and humility and is ultimately saved by a gallant sort of Christ-like prince who then whisks her off into the clouds.
So she very intentionally decided, you know, I want to create a new princess heroine archetype that young girls will be able to look to as their role model.
And with Belle, in particular, she created one of the first, and that led to a series of other heroines who became much more pronounced, independent, not dependent on fathers, not dependent, eventually not dependent on a Prince Charming type, who were willing to fight back, who never took any sort of demotion with grace or meekness or humility,
but resisted it angrily and claimed the birthright of independence and authority.
And I think you can see that very clearly reflected in the culture in terms of what especially young girls have adopted as hero figures and role models.
And especially in the tone of sort of lipstick feminism in the generation since I think you could tie that very, very closely back to Linda Wolverton's work with Disney.
Belle is a brave woman who don't need no man.
She needs a giant hairy monster.
She just needs him.
But she tames him and emasculates him and feminism.
My favorite Disney princess is the hunchback.
That's, to me, the bravest story.
The princess?
Yeah.
He's not one of the princesses with the hunchback?
Because every movie, the name of the movie is the princesses.
It's like, you know, Hercules.
Is that like a new trans interpretation of the hunchback in Notre Dame?
Yeah, he's like Hercules, Aladdin.
I could go on.
That's true, I guess, Aladdin.
But if you do, if you just look at that span, the 90s Disney movies, look at all of the women in each of those stories.
And they're very intentionally pushing away from a meek, submissive princess to uniformly strong.
Like Esmeralda in the Hunchback of Notre Dame is not only strong, like she beats the captain of the guard in sword fighting.
She actually criticizes God for not rescuing her people.
And then she also, I think she dances on the stripper pole at one point, too.
So just a sort of like multi-front rejection of modesty, of humility, of dependence on grace, all the things that used to typify a Disney princess.
So why do strong women frighten you?
They're terrifying, man.
Why do you want to control women?
But men shifted too, right?
Well, look at what has to happen, though, for the strong princess character to become so overpoweringly strong, right?
It requires, it's like the balances of justice, right?
Blind justice.
And the patriarch, the patriarch, it has to be smashed in order for the strong princess architect to rise forth.
So you see the look at what happens to all the guys, the dudes.
They're big children, right?
They turn to act like big, goofy children.
Right.
I mean, Triton, the little mermaid, he's the first one.
He's the big, strong, buff guy who looks like sort of like a combination between like a muscle mag and Moses from the Ten Commandments.
God with thin fork.
But then it's like they hit him with the shrink ray from Honey, I Shrank the Kids, right?
And it's like he goes from, so you can go from that patriarch to Maurice in Beating the Beast.
And Maurice has like three scenes.
The first one, he knocks himself out with his own invention.
In the second one, he gets thrown in jail.
Yeah, the inventor dad.
In the third scene, he gets thrown in the insane asylum, right?
So it's like, so like a rapid tumble from that high pedestal.
And then in Aladdin, the Sultan is like a fat, idiotic boob, who ends up getting locked in a parrot cage.
Oh, sorry about that.
With getting trackers stuffed in his mouth by the parrot.
Hey, did you see the new, did you see the live-action remake?
Yeah, notice what they had to do in the middle of the day.
Well, I didn't see it, but I heard that, I don't know, Jasmine becomes the Sultan or wants to become the Sultan.
I heard something crazy about it.
She does.
She does become the Sultan.
And that's where you get into tougher areas because it's funny because Aladdin at the time was a very feminist and very sort of hedonist sort of liberation from the patriarchal, traditionalist Disney past.
But because it was very disrespectful towards the Arab culture, it became sort of a pariah among progressives.
And so in the new version, they couldn't actually be as mean to the patriarchy because this was an Arab patriarchy.
So you have to have a different set of rules.
You can't smash an Arab patriarchy in the same way that you would a Western one.
So they end up having to make noble.
Yeah, exactly.
So they have to make him noble, but then he then recognizes his daughter's birthright, right?
And he turns over in a dignified way, the sultancy, or however you pronounce sultanhood to his daughter at the end.
So they have to play those games.
You'll see it also with Mulan, where because they had started to just get a little bit more culturally aware at that point, where they couldn't actually make the dad look as bad as a Maurice character.
So they had to make him dignified and injured, right?
And then empower Milan to be the strong man of the family.
Stunning and brave.
So yeah, you know what's funny is they always say like, you guys are trying to control women when you bring up criticism like this.
And I'm like, I can't think of anything I would less like to do than control women.
It just makes them boring to make them always have to be like the like, you know, I rip a piece of my shirt off and I'm tough and like I'm a go-getter.
And like they all become the same character.
Right.
It becomes boring.
It might even be interesting.
It's boring because they're so precious too.
Like if you've ever tried writing an animation, women and the minorities are the scariest to write because you're trying to be so careful.
So you can make the white characters do whatever you want.
You can just have fun and then immediately your own agenda is destroying your whole goal.
But this is why I think the Renaissance ones were so effective because they really are.
I mean, they really are little girl cocaine.
I mean, they know how to do traditional femininity in ways that appeal to young girls and young women and women.
I mean, all women, while at the same time pushing anti-patriarchal sort of, I don't know, I can't keep track of my waves of feminism, but one of the later waves of feminism into the forefront.
So it's much more effective, I think, in moving hearts and minds than some of the newer stuff.
Some of the newer stuff gets so aggressive that it ceases to be attractive to anyone.
Whereas the stuff that is much more artfully done, like the Mulans, like the Beating of the Beast, I think are far more effective and win far more admirers among Christians and conservatives than some of the more aggressively woke stuff.
Well, let's back up a little bit because your book talks about this ongoing war, and you don't use the terms like conservatives and progressives.
You call them loyalists and revolutionaries, I think.
And you kind of paint this, the broader culture war, and then also specifically the war going on within Disney throughout the years as this loyalist who kind of control the cultural center and then the revolutionaries who are on the outside and see themselves as marginalized and outcast and oppressed.
And they're trying to see themselves as these brave freedom fighters that are trying to topple that center or take that center.
So you want to talk about that a little bit?
And then I'd like to kind of dive in because we're talking about Renaissance, and I think a lot of people maybe don't know what that is in terms of Disney.
And then we'll kind of go through a broad timeline of Disney films after that.
But yeah, why don't you break down that loyalist and revolutionary idea?
Well, yeah, you did a great job of it already.
Oh, thank you.
The general reason I use those terms is just because, I mean, left and right, conservative, liberal, those are, they've become so toxic.
I mean, there's baggage.
They're used as insults.
And I thought that even though loyalist kind of implies sort of bad things for fans of the American Revolutionary War, I thought it implied something much more true about how the actual culture war is shaping up in that the center is really a circle.
It's not a side, right?
And it's shrinking down as everything from the periphery is pushing down, trying to take all the norms, right?
The power to make something normal and acceptable and good.
And so that idea, right, of people who are loyal being pushed down, pushed down, pushed down by all this sort of coalition of the fringes, right?
This revolutionary fringe, who are united by their hatred and grievances towards the loyalist center.
So I thought those terms sort of implied what was most valuable to both parties.
The loyalists really value the culture that they inherited, right?
And that includes a Christian worldview.
It includes a hierarchical setup of social relationships, you know, especially in terms of family, right?
And the big one of those is patriarchy, but also stuff like civilization over primitivism, right?
We also like parents over children, right?
We like mankind over nature, right?
So all those things.
Guns over guns.
We like guns over no guns.
But all those hierarchies are what loyalists like.
It's what they inherited.
It's what they believe works.
It's what they want to preserve.
And then revolutionaries are people who have been left out, who have been grieved by those hierarchies, who see themselves at the bottom of those.
And so they want to flip all of them.
And they want to become the center, but they never actually acknowledge when they become the center because then they would lose their revolutionary identity.
So that's why you get the absurdity now, where you have people pretending to be these aggrieved parties when they are running Hollywood, running Silicon Valley, running academia, right, and Wall Street, right?
And it's like, so where exactly is this supremacist, oppressive power structure now that you guys run everything and are now kind of looking for this sort of Emmanuel Goldstein kind of figure that's still causing everything to break down.
So, sorry, 1984 reference.
That doesn't fit the Disney The patriarchy is alive.
We are preserving the patriarchy right here.
We're the last holdouts here on the Babylon B podcast.
It's scary how we get clean the Babylon B.
The Babylon B. By the way, I have an idea.
This is a little off track, but I was looking at your guys' logo, and I was thinking if you just added other set of wings on both sides of the bottom, you would have brass knuckles, right?
All the wings would look like fingers.
They do kind of.
And the B would be the brass knuckles.
And that would be a very militant.
I'm not sure you guys are going to that imagery, but anyway.
So anyway, that's the revolutionary versus loyalist idea.
And that plays into Disney because Disney really creates a nice sort of bookends for the modern culture war.
They started out as the ultimate loyalist institution just as the culture war was really getting underway.
And they have turned into one of the most effective revolutionary siege weapons for getting past loyalist offenses and getting especially young people and children to question their loyalist heritage and start to embrace some of these revolutionary ideas.
Well, I think we should get into some of the hidden political agendas in Disney films.
Oh, yeah, let's do this first.
So here, we have a list, and we want you to confirm or deny or comment on these.
So Sleeping Beauty promotes the lie that women are lazy.
Promotes the lie that women are lazy.
That they just sleep lazy.
Is this a hidden agenda?
A hidden liberal agenda, a hidden colour.
something inherent to beautiful it's probably what's the episode of feminist I don't know if she's good day The opposite of feminists would be, I'm guessing, a patriarchalist.
What is the word, though?
There's a word for it.
What?
Misogynist?
I guess men's rights or misogynist.
Men's rights activists.
This is an MRA.
It's an MRA film.
Women are lazy.
I don't know.
There's no comment.
How about that?
How about this one?
Seven Dwarves.
It's ableism.
It's mocking disability.
So this is probably the right because they're evil.
Okay.
And they mock.
Well, you notice that all the old movies were made by the old white guys.
So these are all.
Yeah.
It's just like Trump mocks people with disabilities all the time.
We saw a video where clearly he did that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So.
All right.
So Fox and the Hound is clearly propaganda referencing Fox News.
Right.
That's obvious.
Yeah, I don't think that even needs to be commented on.
Another obvious one is Bambi.
Enough said on that one.
Enough said.
Guns.
I guess there's enough said.
Why did I say guns?
You said enough said, and then you just said guns.
We thought it would be better if they did a Bambi?
Just Bambi?
Just Bambi.
Okay.
Bambi.
We feel like there would be a good reboot where the hunter has a giant AR-15 with AR-16 with a long clip.
And you just unloads and Bambi had gun arms and his name was Blamby.
Blamby?
Oh, goodness.
Oh, that's like the revenge.
Yeah.
The revenge.
Bambi's revenge.
Or Bambo.
Bambo.
Bamboo.
That's Bambo.
That's better.
You want a job?
He's going to get my job?
Yeah.
His puns are better than yours.
Blamby.
His pun power.
Bambo.
It's incredible.
First blood.
I actually think I used that pun with Toy Story 4 already.
Oh, you did?
think i called her uh rambo peep yeah so i'm kind of yeah i'm kind of reusing that was I know we're getting off track, but I'm a little like, I don't always see these worldview things in movies, and I'm like, oh, that was a good movie.
And people are like, actually, it's all about feminist propaganda.
And I'm like, what?
But that Toy Story Floyd like totally broke down all the points of all the other Toy Story movies.
And then Bo Peep just became this crazy feminist lady out in the middle of nowhere.
And it was wild.
You're next.
Do I have to read this?
I don't know.
You said it.
Cinderella is anti-woman.
What?
Lies.
I dictated this to you.
I don't know what you wrote down.
Lies to get women to wear glass slippers and cut up their feet.
I don't think that's what I said.
If you step on glass slippers.
It's like footbinding.
Clearly, you got a bright version of your feet, and you're going to be like Bruce Willis and diehard walking around tracking blood everywhere.
Footbinding is okay because it's a foreign culture.
But glass binding is European and evil.
Right.
You don't have to comment on any of these, by the way.
You can just sit there and wait until we get to the serious part.
I'm just trying to find more puns to recycle here.
Peter Pan encourages kids to snort Pixie Dust and take an acid trip to Never Neverland.
True or false?
No, that I never thought.
I never thought of Pixie Dust as Alice in Wonderland, obviously.
Do drugs.
Same thing.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Drugs are good.
And then Brother Bear.
Yeah, Alice in Wonderland.
Okay, go ahead.
You say Alice in Wonderland.
I don't want to say that.
Well, Alice in Wonderland actually became sort of a it made like the College Circuit as a as an LSD movie.
It actually got second life because of its appeal as a drug trip movie.
I just think Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz, they're both so bizarre when you really think about it.
I don't know that something like that could be would be mainstream now.
I don't know.
Though the 90s had some very strange stuff.
Brother Bear.
Yeah.
Brother Bear is just pure bear propaganda.
Yeah, pro-bear.
A human abandoning his humanity just to become a bear.
And a glorification of one of the most horrible animals ever to exist.
The bear.
The bear.
Wow, I wasn't expecting to see bear hate.
Oh, they're evil.
Gonna add another revolutionary grievance to the list.
Well, you wrote this book.
I wrote the book Bears Want to Kill You.
So that's where I'm coming from.
There probably is some truth to the Brother Bear thing, I'll bet.
What?
Just about how it's because he was talking about civilization versus barbarism.
And there probably is some truth.
Yeah.
I just remember, I don't remember.
Brother Bear is very much, very much revolutionary.
The whole idea is both pagan.
It's like pagan over Christian.
And then it's also nature over man.
And both are very explicit in Brother Bear.
Yeah, I was shocked.
Although, Brother Bear sort of in that obscure in the early 2000s era where nobody even remembers watching those Disney movies.
Yeah.
I saw almost none of those.
The only reason I watched it is because I was going to be making my comic Bear Mageddon and I needed good reference for bear drawings and they Disney anime just draw amazing.
So I freeze framed a bunch of stuff from the movie.
But I remember I actually watched the whole thing.
I was like shocked.
Spoiler alert, if you haven't seen it, the guy becomes a bear and he's cool with that.
He's like, oh, let's be a bear forever at the end.
That's cool.
He's like, you know what?
It's cool with that.
I could just leave my family and just life and general.
Oh, it's way better being a bear and just walking around and pooping in the woods and eating squirrels and salmon.
That's not a better life.
You got to just news flash.
If you're at home, stay a human.
It's a horrible, it's a horrible way to go.
Well, he got he got to walk in another species moccasins.
Yeah, that'd be fun for a day or two.
Yeah.
You're supposed to come back though.
Like, what if at the end of Princess and the Frog, she stayed a frog forever?
That'd just be weird.
Wait, did she?
Well, don't you remember Shrek?
Don't you remember Shrek?
Oh, yeah, Shrek is the ultimate millennial sort of blueprint for how to tell those stories.
It's no longer cool.
We're post-human now.
We're post-human.
Yeah.
And so you always want to embrace the non-human identity.
That's actually a thing.
I mean, it's a little off the field.
But if you look at Avatar, right?
If you look at the warm bodies, you guys were actually referenced that on one of your shows with Brian Gadawa, I think.
Yeah, like falling in love with the zombie, right?
I mean, all these things where it's like the post-human romance actually becomes superior.
Twilight, of course, is that all these post-human, non-human, superhuman romances have become in vogue because mankind, right, the divine birthright is worthless now.
And so now we have to seek a more evolved or more enlightened identity.
Little Mermaid.
Men love women when they shut up.
We already told that joke.
It's true.
Darn it.
Wait, are you typing in?
Yeah, that's actually Ursula's joke.
That's actually Ursula's joke in the big musical number in Little Mermaid.
We stole a joke from Ursula.
I forget what it's poor and a lot of people.
Oh, yeah, she does make a joke about that.
So we're only about 30 years too late.
Yeah, you got beaten to the punch by the octopus drag queen.
Modeled after a drag queen.
Have you heard this?
From you.
Did I tell you this?
Oh, yeah.
I got excited and called Ethan in the middle of the night and said, you got to hear what Dragon spoke.
Check out this drag queen's website.
It's all based on Ursula.
Okay.
No, he didn't say that.
Jungle Book.
Divine.
It says fathers can be replaced by bears, which is more bear propaganda.
Because Blue the Bear is like a father figure.
It's kind of disgusting.
Sorry.
Wow, the bear, the bear themes are really strong.
I mean, did you make it to Brave too?
I mean, there's more bear programming.
Oh, yeah, the whole bear thing in Brave.
But doesn't she reject the issue of rejecting the moment into a bear or something?
Yeah, but they save her and turn her back into a human or something.
She returns.
She does return in that one.
But not before Bonding.
Right.
That's the one Pixar movie I just do not remember anything about.
Yeah, it's so forgettable.
I think I own it.
I don't know anything about it.
All right.
Finding Nemo.
It is a sin to eat delicious sushi.
It's horrible.
I felt like the propaganda in there when they're going, like, fish are friends, not food.
And they look at your kids through the screen.
They're like, get it?
Fish are friends.
I think that's this isn't a Disney movie, but happy feat.
I believe it made it really made fishermen out to be like literally evil people.
Like they're tackling real life evil.
Like they should be killed by police.
I know.
They need to make a, I guess the counter propaganda to this is to make a movie about how delicious some animals are.
Maybe they need to be like the villains, you know, like so we're actually doing the world a service by slaughtering all these cows.
Eating Nemo.
Oh, yeah.
You know what?
There could be one about the Chicago fire, you know?
Like it would be a conspiracy of like the cows.
You know, old Bethy was like the sort of like Manchurian candidate kind of figure trying to like bring about the end of the human race.
And well, you're the one with the screenwriting.
Yeah.
Use your credential background to go for it.
I'll go for it.
Yeah.
Cars is clearly just a big commercial by a Prius.
Environmentalism.
Cars 2 actually is.
Cars 2 is actually.
I heard about that.
I didn't watch it.
I never saw Cars 2, but I heard it.
Yeah, no one watched Cars 2.
No one watched Cars 2, but it did try.
It tried to gain relevance by turning environmentalist at the end.
Terrible.
Tangled, women with long hair are problematic.
What's that mean?
Well, she's got long hair.
And she's subjugated.
She cuts it at the end.
She cuts it at the end to become free.
She cuts it short, yeah.
And to save the man.
Yeah.
Yeah.
She does.
She does cut it to save the man.
It's sort of like a dual statement.
It's like a Captain Marvel kind of haircut combined with sacrificing for the patriarchy.
So it's a tough, it's hard to decide which one that falls into.
What's problematic and what's brave?
I don't know.
Yeah.
It is weird.
There's a whole woke issue with long hair.
What is it?
What is it?
Yeah.
Or even they don't say that, but they would cheer a moment at a woman cuts her hair short.
Yeah.
I don't know.
I don't get it.
Long hair is great.
Maybe that's a problem.
Because a guy likes long hair.
That makes it bad.
Finally.
Finally.
This brutal list.
The brutal list that we cobbled together quickly before the show.
Aladdin.
I have not read this.
Stealing apples is okay if you sing a Broadway song while running away from the city guards.
That's true.
That's true.
It justifies the stealing of the apples.
And the bread.
Although that sounds liberal.
Well, someone quoted Proverbs at me on that one.
And I forget which proverb it is, but there is a proverb that relates to stealing when you're hungry.
Yeah, good way.
So I'm afraid.
I'm afraid because I condemned Aladdin on that one too.
And then I felt a little guilty for not knowing my proverbs fully.
Well, he's hungry.
He steals only what he can't afford.
Exactly.
And that's everything.
Got to eat to live.
Got to steal to eat.
Otherwise, we'd get along.
Should we sing?
I steal it.
Oh, boy.
Or death.
Yeah, there we go.
Well, so let's go ahead and kind of look at the broad overview of the timeline of Disney movies.
All right.
So Golden Age Disney.
This was kind of the beginning.
After all their cartoon shorts and stuff, they started doing feature films.
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio, Fantasia, Dumbo, Bambi.
Sam, masterpieces.
Your analysis.
Yep.
That is all golden age stuff.
Yes.
And again, if you understand what Walt Disney was doing, too, Walt Disney was a complete pioneer.
Nobody had done sound and animation successfully until he did it.
Then he was the first to do a big feature when nobody believed it could be done with Snow White, which became one of the biggest hits of all time.
And then he continued to push through with a hiccup during World War II because basically he got drafted into propaganda work while most of the European markets were closed.
So he had to basically shut down work.
But then he came back from that in the 50s with a vengeance, spreading through animation, live action, and television.
So you can sort of see the Golden Age's two phases, like the first one with Bambi and Snow White and Pinocchio and Dumbo.
And then the second big phase where they just started making everything in every direction, which was when Cinderella came out for the animation stuff.
It's when they did those big, cheesy, screwball comedies like the shaggy dog in live action.
And they were also doing television on a huge scale at the same time.
They had the Disneyland show, which was a massive hit where basically a third of the country was watching an infomercial for the building of Disneyland, which was really in itself just a infomercial for all the products that he had already released.
So Disney's golden age, again, you could look at it as like a reflection of the culture, but it was so pervasive that it's like, it was also a reflection of itself.
So, I mean, you really have to give some credit to Disney for creating that idea of what American values were for people in that time.
And it's very easy for us to look back in retrospect and think, oh, the 50s when all the women were forced into vacuum duty for their husbands, right?
But really, it's like a it's, I think a lot of it is Disney's reflection of what he wanted and it's in a resistance to sort of the cynicism that had come over during the World Wars and as a result of the Depression.
And Disney was pushing back hard and saying, no, this is the middle America that I grew up in and loved.
This is the family dynamic that we should all cling to.
These are the American heroes like Davey Crockett, right, that we should all emulate.
And these are the futures, right?
The astronauts and the scientists and the soldier heroes that are going to guide us forward.
And so not a lot of explicit Christianity in that, but it was all resting on a very strongly Christian worldview and then a very traditionalist view of social relationships and a very proud and patriotic view of America that really liked the American heartland in particular.
Not as crazy about urban or sort of the metropolitan kind of stories that the TV writers were starting to tell from the coasts.
But yeah, it was very much about middle American virtue and proclaiming that as the ultimate American value.
And it was very, very successful.
As a result, people came to see America as a reflection of the heartland, not as a reflection of the coasts, which is the complete opposite of what it is now.
Yeah, I always kind of picked up the Disney's, I mean, and I could be completely wrong about this.
I don't know if he was passionately political.
I know the Epcot Center originally he was trying to build a society.
Like he wanted to actually build a working society.
That didn't really work out for him.
Yeah.
If you look at Disney, Disney was actually, his dad was a socialist.
So he was not really that ideological politically other than what he developed in his own experience.
So he was an entrepreneur.
He was a sort of almost accidental tycoon.
And so, but he had some sort of, he called it Jesus Christ communism.
He tried to, he was an artist.
He was trying to like pow around with his fellow artists who are often sort of leftist.
But then once the sort of the red scare happened and he found out that they were unionizing and there was like a big political rift in the studio, he turned very hard to the right and became very anti-communist, very, very dogmatically pro-American and pro-middle-American.
I think that was something that he always had because that was his life, right?
He grew up in the middle of the country.
And it hadn't become like a big snobby thing of the coast versus the middle of the country quite yet.
But he really anticipated that.
And so the more there became hostility to that vision, the more he doubled down on it.
So I would say it wasn't necessarily political, but it was very culturally conservative.
And so he really, really was loyal to that idea of the small town, almost rural American center, knowing the answers to life's hardest questions and having the role models that we needed to press forward.
And then with Epcot, Epcot was sort of the, I guess, a heresy that he was embracing at the end.
I mean, he was so in love with city planning because he had built Disneyland and he was just such an entrepreneur in mindset.
He was all trying to tackle a huge new challenge.
So he thought like, hey, we've got all these social problems on the eve of the 60s.
Why can't we try to just build using American ingenuity, right?
American engineering know-how, again, a very middle-American value to solve all the urban problems.
So he's basically trying to flip the script instead of the urban bureaucrats trying to solve everything for the poor, backwards middle Americans.
It was now the middle American trying to solve urban problems with good old-fashioned common sense and know-how.
And that, in his view, common sense and know-how was building a 27,000-acre city of the future with like weird voluntary citizens who like, I forget how he was going to have it happen.
It was probably going to be something like the Koch brothers libertarian islands, which I don't think ever materialized either.
Sad.
But yeah, it was not probably not headed in a good direction.
It was a very sort of techno-utopia kind of thing.
And unfortunately, that consumed a lot of his latter-day energy instead of sort of honing in on the culture war that was breaking out right before he died.
If he had figured out how to live for like 900 years, I wonder what he'd be creating if he just kept going.
What he's making now?
He'd probably be creating another planet.
He'd be like, all right, Disney Planet is underway.
Disney's space.
He's blogging it and he's doing salty videos.
Disney Space Force would be a thing.
Yeah, Disney Space Force.
He'd have conquered all the galaxies.
Or the moon.
He'd buy the moon, take it over.
Nuke the moon, and then buy the moon.
Yeah.
He'd make, no, he'd get two more moons and make a bigger Mickey Mouse.
Wow, that was beautiful.
Yeah, so.
The day after Tomorrowland.
The day after tomorrow.
Exactly.
Yeah, so we basically had this golden age, and I think some people call it like the silver age when you get into the 50s, but you had this age where, you know, it was almost like they could do no wrong.
There were a couple of duds in there, if I remember right.
I think Sword in the Stone was a little goofy.
Yeah, it was a little goofy.
I actually like Sword in the Stone.
The book's a little goofy too.
It is leather.
Yeah.
Yeah, there was some.
That book is bizarre.
Yeah, that book's very weird.
They had some animation issues in some of those.
But for the most part, yeah, you're right.
I mean, nobody was doing what they were doing.
I can look back on all of those movies and you see a lot of value in them.
And like you said, a lot of loyalist values in those.
So I think it was, what, 70s and going into the 80s when things started to fall apart a little bit.
And I mean, why don't you just narrate for us what went down at Disney during that time that resulted in us getting such wonderful films as The Black Cauldron?
And almost every movie in that period is an animal.
What happened there?
Yeah, and there was a big animal thing.
Go ahead.
The Disney Dark Ages is what they're known as.
And they began because of problems with succession planning.
Disney died of lung cancer and exhaustion, really, in the late 60s.
And he was such a creative dynamo.
And for better or for worse, he had never really allowed anyone else to rise up next to him of equal stature.
And so without him, there was really nobody left at the studio who could fill his shoes creatively.
I mean, he had some good business people, but nobody who could really create narrative, craft narrative the way he could.
And so you ended up with a lot of just what would Walt do kind of stuff where they just tried to shamelessly copy his old stuff.
Like aristocrats, I know a lot of people like that, but it's just so fluffy, cute without any substance and just kind of almost nauseating to me.
And then as his son-in-law, Ron Miller, took over, they tried to push it into an edgier direction.
I mean, it was the instinct, right, of Walt was this bold risk-taker.
Let's be risk-takers too.
And so they didn't really have a strong ideological conviction.
So they didn't want to scare off sort of the loyalist Disney base that wanted family values.
They didn't want to do anything.
If I could characterize this era, it definitely seems random.
It's like they're just trying all this stuff.
I don't know.
What about animals in Robinhood?
They're all animals.
It's like, it looks so weird.
Why do they abandon humans?
Why are they obsessed with animals?
I think you could talk about this a little bit.
What's the deal with all the animals?
Yeah, it's cuteness uberalis is what I call it.
Where it's just they, without really any confidence in being able to tell these very powerful moral fairy tales, right?
You end up just trying to skim the surface appeal of Alt Disney, which is, oh, doesn't they have a lot of cute animals in those?
And so they just did all cute animals, and they didn't have anything underneath.
I mean, Robin Hood is just endless montages of slapstick comedy with no real soul, no real moral tale, which is a shame because, I mean, Robin Hood, the story is like loaded with depth and drama that you could mine to tell some really meaningful stories.
But they just were paralyzed.
All they could do was sort of rehash the most surface appeal of Alt Disney.
And then as Ron Miller and his team took over and started to take some risks, they took risk in just bizarre directions with no real vision.
And so you ended up with movies like The Black Cauldron, with movies like Dragon Slayer and Black Hole, and even Tron, which is like hilarious to watch because it's just everywhere ideologically.
It's like a weird Christ allegory, but then he makes out with one of the programs right before sacrificing himself on their behalf.
I mean, it's just, it just does not know what it's trying to say.
I don't know.
I don't appreciate you, badmouth and Dragon Slayer.
I mean, you had a Dragon Slayer is the worst.
You have a 70s kid with an afro, you know, that's in this whole medieval setting.
You are welcome to enjoy it aesthetically, but my goodness, it is the most aggressively anti-Christian game.
That was a partnership with Paramount.
Interesting, Paramount would become the secular sort of blueprint for what Disney would become because they took the two top guys from Paramount, Katzenberg and Eisner, to end the Dark Ages.
So the Dark Ages basically almost bankrupted Disney.
And so the shareholders got antsy.
And so Roy Disney, Walt's old nephew, came in and helped bring in a dynamic trio to restore Disney to greatness, which was three guys from elsewhere in Hollywood, Frank Wells, Michael Eisner, and Jeffrey Katzenberg.
And they all took power in 84 and began the process of turning Disney into a completely typical Hollywood studio in the sense that it was going to be run by people who were revolutionary in values and completely untethered from the Disney tradition of love and loyalty to those middle American sort of,
downstream from Christianity values.
All right.
So that basically brings us up to the Renaissance, which is what we want to talk about because I think this is a super interesting period.
And this most of us now, I think, grew up on these films.
These are the films of the 90s.
So why don't we break into our subscriber portion?
Oh.
And if you don't pay us money, you don't get to hear the best part.
And so where can people check out The Trojan Mouse?
It's on Amazon.
I know I've got the Kindle version.
Yeah, it's on Amazon.
Paperback and Kindle.
Amazon Paperback.
You can also find it on Facebook and SamLively.com too.
Sam Lively.
Okay, and where can people follow you?
Follow you on Twitter?
Yeah, Twitter.
Samuel P. Lively is my handle at Twitter.
And yeah, samlively.com will probably be the best place to find me.
Awesome.
I'm reading, I read the whole book and it was awesome.
So I definitely recommend you guys check it out.
It's a super, you know, I like a lot of the Disney films and it's a super interesting, just easy to read, but still in depth with a lot of the world views and stuff.
I'm not a big thinker of this kind of stuff.
So to see someone actually do some analysis on each film was super interesting.
So I really appreciated it.
And I think you guys will too.
Cool.
Coming up next for Babylon B subscribers in the Disney wheelhouse.
It's like, are we really going to overthrow this bastion of American culture?
Well, we talked about Beauty and the Beast a bit.
We talked about Aladdin a bit.
What about Lion King?
Because I have two young girls.
And so sometimes when we watch something, it gets so bad.
It's like, what's the point?
I mean, why is time trying to be constructive?
Thing about Christian Entertainment is a lot of times they set up to make really blank propaganda, Christian propaganda.
I feel like they get how to make it, they hide it better.
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