Written By Andrea Widburg
As is the case for most Americans living today, I grew up on Disney. I loved the classic princess movies, The Wonderful World of Disney, and the live-action movies of the 1960s and 1970s. When a local television channel syndicated The Mouseketeers in the late 1960s, I watched that too.
Some (indeed, a lot) of the Disney product was banal, but it never deviated from a certain purity: Be good, be kind, be patriotic (if that was relevant), work hard . . . that kind of stuff. The next generation of Disney movies also promoted that message, whether with classic princess movies (Beauty and the Beast) or a non-romantic “adventure with a friend” film such as Moana.
Moana’s earth goddess ending, though, hinted at what was to come with Frozen II, which was a visually beautiful, but tedious effort to introduce kids to anti-colonialism, man-deriding feminism, and Gaia worship. Watching that and thinking of the classic Disney movies, one has to wonder “Where on earth does this stuff come from?”
The answer is surprisingly easy: It comes from the current crop of Disney writers and producers, all of whom were marinated in hard-left college liberal arts programs.
This post offers two exhibits to prop up this assertion. The first is a cri de cœur from Itxu Díaz about the horrible changes wrought on Disney’s DuckTales. Díaz is Spanish, so the syntax is a little scrambled, but you’ll quickly get the gist about the push to take an entertaining character who always has an eye for the girls and turn him into a vehicle for pushing homosexuality on small children:
Donald, that charming children’s character, has been kidnapped by a company following a rigorous ideological program of liberal indoctrination, whose latest conquest has been to introduce in the new episodes of Duck,Tales, two gay ducks who have adopted a little duck, whose sexual habits have not been revealed thus far.
But there’s nothing idle about this portrayal. That’s not my opinion: It’s what Frank Angones, one of the people responsible for the series, says. In a dense article, with prose about as nimble a turtle wading in a pot of glue, Angones apologizes for the existence of a multitude of “heteronormative romances” — whatever that means — in the Duck Tales story, and blames Scrooge, Donald, and Fenton for liking the gal ducks and not the guy ducks. This co-executive producer says, with certain contempt for his product’s own history, that “legacy characters” with values from Disney’s past have for some time weighed down the series’ sexual inclination.
It seems he wants more representation for drakes attracted to drakes and hens to hens, albeit running the risk of upsetting environmentalist movements, since this could lead to anatidae becoming endangered species. In any case, I would love to see Donald’s face when Angones accuses him of being a retrograde and fascist for wanting to be with Daisy. Fortunately for him, he’s absolutely incomprehensible when he speaks, so it’s difficult to accuse him of being a homophobe. He’s a lucky ducky.
The second example is a Prager U video in which Ben Shapiro explains intersectionality, a terrible idea that was born on college campuses and that indoctrinated college graduates are carrying into corporate America. To illustrate the point, the video plays footage of a Disney writer discussing how important intersectionality is to her work and her messaging. I’ve transcribed the gist of it, but you have to watch this incoherent cultural Marxist speak to appreciate who’s teaching your children:
As I started to rise in television, I started to just get more blunt and just start saying, like, “I would like a black writer” because if I said “diverse,” you know, you’d, you’d get, you’d get, “Well, white is diverse,” which is something somebody said to me and I was, like, “Wow.” Um. Ah. I was, like, “It’s not. Cool.” But, um, but, but to really, you know, I, I reached out to my, you know, um, ah, the women that I respect, who are, who are not white, ah, writers and directors. And I said, “What should I say, what, what, what, how, what language should I use? You know, and, and I think it’s worth it if you were in, um, a position of hiring power or, or a green-lighting power to, like, reach out to people that are not like you and say, “What can I do to be an ally and, and how can I how can I support, um, writers of color and, um, lgd LGBTQ and disabled writers? Like, what can I do?”
To mangle an expression, leftists fully understand that the message comes through the medium. When your children sit glued to the TV screen, whether because you let them watch as a reward for something or to give yourself a few minutes of downtime, Disney’s hard-left “creative” people are tunneling their messages about intersectionalism, sexual identity, sexual orientation, climate change, feminism, and all the other leftist shibboleths, directly into your children’s brains. And because Disney is always going to be more fun and exciting than you are, you can bet that Disney’s messages will resonate more than yours will.
