Customer Reviews

How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic

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Ariel Dorfman offers the reader valuable insight into the way in which Latin America has been regarded and utilized by modern nations, governments, and corportions. "How to Read Donald Duck" is interspersed with unbelievable (although real) Disney cartoons possessing ridiculous political implications: vultures representing Hegel and Marx, dogs dressed up like Che and Castro... you name it, and Disney has apparently given it to Latin America.

Of course, in a vastly changed historical context, bourgeois ideology cannot produce anything approaching the seemingly reactionary facility of the Disney comic (just compare Disney with Buffy, Xena, or other postmodern heroes!). However, anyone trying to understand changes in the ideological outlook of Mass Culture must, of necessity, regard this book as one's unavoidablke starting-stone. That's that.

Dorfman and Mattelart's book is based on Donald Duck comics circulated throughout Latin America. Those books were translated and largely re-written by overzealous editors and are more different from than similar to Carl Barks' original comics. Insofar as one is interested in US / Latin American policy, politics and business, it is useful.

Disney's domestic business practives are by no means benign, but Barks is one of the more significant comics artists and enjoyed a much greater degree of creative freedom than most creators of the time. Barks cartooning is fluid and subtle, as is his storytelling.

For an insight into "the Duck Man's" work, check out Donald Ault's much more up-to-date book "Carl Barks: Conversations."

It just goes to show that even with the economy on a downturn the CEO of Disney walks away with 75 million dollars and gives the employees the dregs of the disney economy. This book is worth buying for it details the enormity of Diney's propaganda campaign to portray the third world as a place to be exploited. I've never saw such outright villainy as is portrayed in this classic by Dorfman. Disney portrays revolutionaries (in their comic strips) as essentially traitors and the reactionaries, and oligarchs as heroes with Donald Duck, Scrooge McDuck and company as aiding their crimes.

Ariel Dorfman is perhaps one of the most prolific authors of our time. How to Read Donald Duck is a must read for any historian, sociologist, or any person wanting to find social enlightenment.

It was quite appropriate for Disney to have used vultures representing Hegel and Marx, and dogs dressed up like Che and Castro. Marxism has manifestly failed, at enormous cost in needless suffering, political death, and the impoverishment of millions (please read "The Black Book of Communism"). Castro is much more popular among chic Westerners who don't have to live in his prison state than he is to his enslaved population. Really, the whole matter can be summed up by quoting some graffitti that was scrawled on one of Castro's innumerable propaganda posters. The official text of the poster read "Socialism or death!" The clever graffitti commentator wrote below it "What's the difference?"