I demand a better future

[freckles_and_doubt]

Hah! Back in the day when I used to indoctrinate incautious first-years into the consumerist evils of Disney cartoons, the ickle firsties would never believe that Disney's primary ideological purpose was to make them go out and acquire screeds of consumerist junk. I submit in evidence this, proof positive that the young are being conditioned. "She's the pretty princess with the things." Tchah. Also pshaw. Also, beauty myth.

I am keeping my upper lip stiff and my chin up in the face of a maddening day featuring the random disappearance of my email access, owing to the ITS geeks having cottoned on two weeks late to my new job, and changed my login directory tree without changing the equivalent email one. I have about a zillion things to do, most of which entail digesting the timetable needs of academics for two separate schedules. All of this data-gathering is done by email. Also, my salary slip hasn't arrived, suggesting the usual HR hangups. Am soothing the savage beast with David Bowie. (Later period David Bowie is actually very soothing, even the cover of "Cactus". Also, is it just me, or is he doing insane self-referential injoke references in "Slip Away" by sticking the smoky background riff from "World Falls Down" over the lyric "in space it's always 1982"?).

Despite chins and lips and soothing, grrrr.

Comments

Once Upon a Time

[bronchitikat.livejournal.com]

Uncle Walt only wanted to make great (cartoon) films.

Then the Great American (Consumerist) Dream took over & the films became but an excuse for mass Marketing. Hence these days you get the stuff in the shops long before the film opens. Well, you do in the UK anyhow.

Which is a critique of the Great American Way more than the film people. IMO

Re: Once Upon a Time

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

Actually, she says, drawing a deep breath and marshalling her arguments, my research suggests that Walt always wanted to make money before anything else. He was a businessman first, a craftsman and technological innovator second, and an artist way, way third; even the early films tend to firmly entrench a middle-class capitalist (and incidentally sexist and racist) status quo. The mass marketing has become a lot more prolific and up-front with the later films, but I think it was always there.

In my lectures I always had to earnestly ensure students that I don't actually believe Disney is the Antichrist, but I'm not sure they believed me. Does it show? :>.

Re: Once Upon a Time

[bronchitikat.livejournal.com]

Does it show? No, but then, I'm not an impressionable, raised-on-Disney, kid.

[strawberryfrog.livejournal.com]

Are you inclined to comment on this?