Walt Disney: How He Inspired the Counterculture

Joshua Glenn, in the Boston Globe (June 27, 2004):

DID WALT DISNEY turn Johnny Tremain, the teenage hero of Esther Forbes's 1944 Newbery Award-winning novel of that title, from a proper Bostonian son of the Revolution into a proto-1960s radical?

Such is the suggestion of film historian Douglas Brode, author of the newly published "From Walt to Woodstock: How Disney Created the Counterculture" (University of Texas). Rather than providing pro-Establishment entertainment, claims Brode, who teaches cinema studies at Syracuse University, movies written and directed under Uncle Walt's oversight - including such animated classics as "Snow White" (1937) and "Alice in Wonderland" (1951), but particularly live-action movies like "Davy Crockett" (1955) and "Johnny Tremain" (1957) - encouraged young Americans "to question all authority and, when (if) finding it invalid, to strike out against those who would repress youthful freedoms, even if this necessitated employing violence as a last resort."

From the communalism of the Seven Dwarves and the "Swiss Family Robinson" (1960) to the psychedelia of "Fantasia" (1940) and "Alice" to Captain Nemo's eco-terrorism in "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" (1954), not to mention the spectacle of midcentury Mousketeers gyrating to rock'n'roll, Disney's hugely popular output prefigured the key themes of the 1960s counterculture, argues Brode in chapters on everything from "Disney and the Culture of Conformity" to "Disney and the Denial of Death."

Boston, which Brode points out is frequently evoked in Disney's films as shorthand for an oppressive, hierarchical social order, goes up in flames in "Johnny Tremain," a movie that approvingly traces the arc of a budding young capitalist's transformation into a violent revolutionary. "The initially wholesome, easy-going teenager is last seen killing agents of the establishment," Brode points out, "and doing so with great relish."