Walt Disney Owes Me an Apology
Disney is probably the most evil corporation on the planet, and I mean that in the technical, measurable sense. They gag their employees with non-disclosure agreements that would make a defense contractor blush. They’ve been run by the kind of power-hungry executives who make other power-hungry executives look principled. And their greatest long-term crime—the one they’ll never answer for in any court—is the systematic corruption of an entire generation’s expectations around love, romance, and courage. The reason disgruntled animators occasionally smuggled pornography into the frames isn’t hard to understand. You’d do it too.
The specific damage Disney inflicted on my romantic life is this: you cannot date someone who grew up on those films without eventually being required to sit through them. Not once. Repeatedly. By the third date you’ve signed an unwritten contract that includes at least two evenings a week on the sofa watching Sleeping Beauty or Cinderella, ideally singing along to the musical numbers. The karaoke subtitle feature is real and it gets deployed without shame.
The thing is—and this is where they get you—it works. I made a private vow years ago to find the movies stupid, the singing embarrassing, the animation beneath me. I held that vow with real conviction right up until Mufasa died in The Lion King and I was howling at the screen like I’d lost something personal. The Genie had me on the floor. Every resolution I’d made evaporated in real time, and there was nothing left to do but accept that Disney had reached into my chest sometime around age six and installed something permanent. Like Scientology, but with better merchandise.
We all grew up on this stuff. Saturday mornings with Darkwing Duck and TaleSpin, parked in front of the TV before the rest of the house woke up, absorbing lessons about bravery and self-worth from a cartoon bear who flew a seaplane. Not like Dragon Ball Z, which taught you that the correct response to any problem is to power up for forty-five minutes and then punch it until it stops existing. Goku was not a role model. He was a warning.
Fine. I’m grateful. I can still sing every word of "Circle of Life" from a standing start, unprompted, at any point during the day. I watched an entire episode of Pepper Ann while simultaneously cheating on my ex-girlfriend with a blonde who had nothing to do with the plot, and I still remember that the episode was about Pepper Ann’s acne. That’s a Disney-calibrated mind: perfectly tuned to retain the irrelevant and replay it forever.
My real gratitude, though, goes to Walt himself—specifically for Mickey Mouse, a character who has managed to concentrate my feelings about injustice, bad design, and unearned cheerfulness into one compact target. The laugh. The ears. The perpetual "oh boy." If I ever actually walk through the gates of Disneyland, the first rodent I see is getting launched back across the Atlantic toward whatever studio hallway it crawled out of. I’ve been waiting twenty years to feel that pure about something.