IS WALT DISNEY TRULY THAT INNOCENT?
WHY ARE THERE NO PARENTS IN HIS COMIC BOOKS?
HOW COME THE NATIVES AND THE SAVAGES ALWAYS GIVE UP THEIR RICHES TO THE DUCK INVADERS?
WHY DOES DONALD LIKE SCULPTURES AND PHOTO ALBUMS?
WHAT ARE HUEY, DEWEY AND LOUIE DOING IN VIETNAM?
These and other questions were first brought up in the revolutionary Chile in the distant 1971.
Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart, How to Read Donald Duck
28.05.2007 | The book How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic was first published in 1971 in Chile under the title Para Leer al Pato Donald, and was during the fascist period prohibited and burnt together with other literature. The book – a product of political struggle – is a profound and ingenious critique of the holy cow of childhood culture, the myth of Disney.
With a new foreword of the authors, an updated introduction by David Kunzl, a commented bibliography of the leftist writing on cultural imperialism and comics, and with a supplement on censorship conducted by the American government and the legal-political rights for the critique of Disney by John Shelton Lawrence.
The Slovenian translation by Aleksandra Rekar brings an exhaustive portrait of the functioning of the Disney Corporation in the study by Sandra Bašiæ Hrvatin: Mattelart's and Dorfman's analysis of the Disney comics shows that under the apparently innocent and “handgloved gentle” children’s world, offered to mass consumption by the corporation, a hard fist of corporate imperialist ideology is hidden. The “hidden thing” that Mattelart and Dorfman sought in the comics the managers of the Walt Disney Corporation openly employ to address their owners. The then president of the managing board Michael Eisner wrote the following in the letter to shareholders in the annual yearly report: “Most likely it is not an exaggeration to see the role of the American entertainment industry as an influential historical factor. The Berlin Wall did not fall because of the power of the Western arms, but because of the power of Western ideas. And which was the channel that transmitted these ideas? We can freely admit that the channel was to a great extent the American entertainment.”
With a new foreword of the authors, an updated introduction by David Kunzl, a commented bibliography of the leftist writing on cultural imperialism and comics, and with a supplement on censorship conducted by the American government and the legal-political rights for the critique of Disney by John Shelton Lawrence.
The Slovenian translation by Aleksandra Rekar brings an exhaustive portrait of the functioning of the Disney Corporation in the study by Sandra Bašiæ Hrvatin: Mattelart's and Dorfman's analysis of the Disney comics shows that under the apparently innocent and “handgloved gentle” children’s world, offered to mass consumption by the corporation, a hard fist of corporate imperialist ideology is hidden. The “hidden thing” that Mattelart and Dorfman sought in the comics the managers of the Walt Disney Corporation openly employ to address their owners. The then president of the managing board Michael Eisner wrote the following in the letter to shareholders in the annual yearly report: “Most likely it is not an exaggeration to see the role of the American entertainment industry as an influential historical factor. The Berlin Wall did not fall because of the power of the Western arms, but because of the power of Western ideas. And which was the channel that transmitted these ideas? We can freely admit that the channel was to a great extent the American entertainment.”
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