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From Walt to Woodstock: How Disney Created the Counterculture

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Many biographies on famous people fit an agenda. In the case of Walt Disney, many biographies have axes to grind. Walter Elias Disney was a complex man. Douglas Brode illustrates how the conventional wisdom about Walt Disney isn't accurate. Walt's father was a socialist--in the days of the Red Scare, no less. "From Walt to Woodstock" provides ample evidence that Walt Disney was no reactionary--the commonly-held image of the Disney company is of a right-wing conservative corporation promoting an agenda out of the 19th Century.

When I ordered this book, I was expecting the thesis to be "Walt the Bohemian." After reading the book, I got the impression that Walt did not set out to create the counterculture, but instead laid the groundwork for it by trying to improve mainstream society. Not just by making great entertainment, Walt Disney field-tested urban planning, social engineering, and mass media techniques. I think Walt did improve mainstream American society. Walt Disney was a progressive man--progress was good! View his presentation of E.P.C.O.T. --made about six weeks before he died--and see for yourself. Go back to 1943 and the release of "Victory Through Air Power." Look at Walt Disney's prophetic "Man in Space."

I enjoyed Brode's book. His viewpoints on Disney movies were fresh and new for me, and now I want to see them again to see the things Brode saw in them. Usually I get something out of a book even when I don't like it. Many books on Walt Disney paint a dark picture of an evil, greedy man--if not for the name, I wouldn't know who they were talking about. Brode's Walt is someone I'd like to have for a friend.

I'm happy to add this book to my collection of Walt Disney biographies.

I enjoyed reading this immensely. Brode's argument is quite convincing, but I must point out that (1) Peter Max did not create the movie Yellow Submarine, he had nothing to do with it whatsoever, (2) Ken Kesey did not cross the county spiking water reservoirs with LSD, although I believe the possibility was DISCUSSED once, at least in the pages of Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, and (3) the Beatles did not create a song about Mary Poppins' Uncle Albert, but Paul McCartney did, after the break-up of the band.

The song is called, I believe, Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey, and I have a new appreciation for it now. I was born in 1958, and I can remember as a teenager hearing my father say something to the effect of "Whoever wrote that song had to be smoking something." How right he was!

The following review mostly concerns "From Walt to Woodstock", but it also concerns Brode's more recent book, "The Multicultural Mouse."

"How Disney Created the Counterculture." Well, now, Mr. Brode, let's not get all carried away. Ach, too late. He's off and running.

The title of this book is misleading. As I go through the book, I realize that Brode does not demonstrate that Disney created the counterculture, but he does make a case for the progressive nature present in Disney's themes throughout his enormous oeuvre. And if all Mr. Brode did was this, it is enough. It is high time to banish the "Dark Prince" to the nether region of the penultimate segment of "Fantasia."

The trouble is, Brode's book (and his follow-up, "The Multicultural Mouse", which I'm just reading) is purely awful, his good intentions and his exhaustive attempt at writing about each and every Disney cartoon and live action film notwithstanding. His "let's jump to glorious conclusion" title is indicative of his approach, and his taking on every single possible theme and interpreting every moment of film to represent the most radical aspects of the "counterculture", which he never adequately defines, end up as so ludicrous that he ends up hurting the very cause he has so bravely enjoined.

His tone is also a problem. It seems like a cocktail hour rant where people keep coming over and he becomes more and more demonstrative - and gone from reality. He tosses off his broad themes that SHOULD be explored, but they demand a more careful and culturally knowledgeable exposition than he can provide. A book like this requires so much more research and care, and he's not up to the task. His work is disappointing, flawed, and sloppy.

His proof that Disney "caused" the counterculture is simply that he has seen various connections to the hippie movements, flower power, antiwar, sexual freedom, women's rights, and drugs within the Disney works. He then repeatedly says that "impressionable young people" saw these and then went on from the fifties to grow up to be leftist radicals. That's as much of a connection as he can make to prove a "cause", and that's hardly proof of anything. We are not what we watch. When he speaks for himself (as he does in "Multicultural Mouse"), he becomes eloquent and the tone changes to a much stronger and more convincing one. But he does this, he claims, reluctantly (in a thoughtful passage about the Big Bad Wolf being a caricature of the Jewish peddler). What the book needs is more of that from himself and from other boomer voices. But there is no quote at all from a radical from the sixties left who says that Disney affected his political thinking and radicalized him.

In fact, one person in "Multicultural" does say this - that Disney changed his life - and it's Hugh Hefner. Who for some reason, Mr. Brode thinks was a countercultural voice. Which is another problem - Mr. Brode has a bizarre sense of the counterculture, particularly of feminism. His chapter on that in "Multicultural" had me on the floor laughing and wanting to tear my hair out. (Brode when on about women's long hair being a radical symbol, somehow forgetting that it was men's long hair that caused a gap in the generations back in the day.) Brode's take on the counterculture is so bizarre, and in corresponding themes in Disney films, that I wonder if he's really trying to sabotage his own theme.

He likes to show off, dragging in any quote from Romantic literature, beat poets, or sixties music to prove a point. Well, not prove a point, except in his mind. His description of deconstructive criticism at the beginning of "Counterculture" is instructive, but he uses it to wander all over the cultural universe and thus doesn't make any solid connections. It's a rant. His method is by association not logic.

He is not only silly, he's often downright wrong. I know many Disney films - as well as many TV series from the fifties - and when reading Brode's descriptions, I find errors of fact and of emphasis. Because of that, I feel I can't trust his descriptions of the films I don't know, and this is incredibly frustrating.

For example, in the first pages alone, he makes several goofs. He refers to a song of Annette Funicelli's as a rock song. "Lonely Guitar" was not a rock song, it was a ballad Annette sung on an episode of "Zorro", that was written by Jimmy Dodd. In his description of "Parent Trap", he says that Sharon dresses up as Beethoven. In fact, Sharon wore a dress and pearls and started to play Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. In discussing a subplot in "The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh", involving an officer, he not only gets facts wrong, he distorts the whole story. And when discussing "Pollyanna", he goes way way out, both in "Counterculture" and "Multicultural." He writes about the minister telling his congregation to leave the church and go out into nature (Brode thinks this is proof of pantheism) and then says that soon they are all dancing under the trees. In "Multicultural", he spends a good deal of type on a very small subplot involving the maid Nancy and her boyfriend, waxing eloquently about sexual freedom and Romeo and Juliet. I have no idea what he's talking about. His description of what happened in "Pollyanna" bears no resemblance to the actual film. And he misses the very things that could enhance his theme.

Such errors go on and on in both books. But what is truly frustrating is that Mr. Brode misses, by a mile or a trillion miles, in his microscopic counterculture by association a go go, the really important and so obvious how could he miss progressive themes in Disney films. If he'd only bothered to watch the movies he describes.

So I encourage everyone to try. Watch Disney films - cartoons, animated fairy tales, nature tales, live action, TV shows, the Mouseketeers - and see what you find. Mr. Disney was a man of his times, and he changed - as did the themes of the culture. Also, that he could entertain children (although he said his works were not for children) , there are themes he would approach differently. Doing this is a work that requires years and a great deal of knowledge about many fields.

Mr. Brode's works, this one and the recent "Multicultural", have many many silly pages. But there are a few times he makes some very good points and observations. I am glad he wanted to write his books. But, alas. I cannot recommend them to anyone. His defense of Disney may be unique at the moment, but it's far from helpful.

How Disney set the stage for the cultural earthquake that was the late sixties...agree or disagree, I really didn't see how that thesis could fail to make for a wonderfully entertaining read. That feeling lasted all the way through the introduction, which is well-written and sets the stage for a fascinating book.

But then came Chapter One. The very first paragraph makes it clear that Brode has a poor grasp of his subject. He refers to Bill Haley and the Comets as "a Texas-based band" (they were actually from Pennsylvania) who shook the music world with "Rock Around the Clock" in 1954 (it was released in 1954, but didn't become a big hit until late 1955, and it was not rock's first hit record or even Haley's first hit record), and explains that Alan Freed dubbed the new music "rock and roll". (Freed popularized that term, but did not invent it - and he was using it before "Rock Around the Clock" appeared on the scene.) Minor errors? In most cases they would be, but this book is most likely to appeal to people who know their rock history, and to us, those are not minor errors. What they are is a sign that Brode really doesn't know very much about an extremely important part of the cultural shift he is trying to address here. Just a few pages later, his cluelessness about rock history becomes almost comical as he discusses - apparently seriously - how Disney made its very own contribution to the new music via Annette Funicello. Yes, really. And it only gets worse from there.

Well, you might be thinking, at least he knows his stuff regarding Disney movies. Maybe he does, maybe he doesn't (I have my doubts). But it's just about impossible to take seriously his claims as to Disney's impact on the cultural landscape of the time when much of what he has to say about that landscape simply isn't accurate. Besides that, even Brode acknowledges the big impact of non-Disney movies like "Rebel Without a Cause" on the changes he addresses. He does draw a lot of interesting parallels between real-life signs of change and those found in Disney movies (i.e. only the bad guys smoke), but correlation is not causation.

Still, his argument for that correlation is an interesting one. It would carry a lot more weight if only he had stronger knowledge of the culture he was writing about.

Brode tries to argue in his book that Disney and the company are very liberal and socialist. He writes that Disney actually favored socialism over captialism, and that Disney created movies to entertain the masses. He also statees that the Disney company was the catalyst for the student protests of the sixties. The book reads as if he was instructed by a PR person from Disney; he leaves out every criticism ever published. According to him, there are not racial or gender issues promoted in the animated films. His arguments, however, seem lame and sometimes far-fetched. This cannot be seen as a trustworthy, academic secondary source about Disney and the company!

As always, Douglas Brode delivers in spades. Professor Brode completely overturns the idea of Disney as a middlebrow filmmaker by detailing how Disney movies played a key role in transforming the children of the Eisenhower era into the radical, pot-smoking Aquarians (also known as losers) of the '60s. Fortunately, Professor Brode either lacks or effectively hides any bias (such as mine) against those members of the '60s movement that to this day ruin our nation. Another testiment to Brode's professionalism and character. A must read for Disney movie buffs...