Goodbye, Disney

I grew up during Walt Disney’s golden age. I still remember some of the great Disney films of the 1950s and early 1960s. That may be partly because Disney movies were the only ones my older brother and I were allowed to see, but in any event they made a deep impression on me. Davy Crockett was fantastic; I owned a coonskin cap. Johnny Tremain, based on a very good book by Esther Forbes, told me much of what I knew about the Revolutionary War era as a kid, and I will never forget when he burned his hand. Old Yeller introduced a generation of boys to tragedy of a high order. And there were many more–Treasure Island, Peter Pan, The Shaggy Dog, Flubber. The list goes on and on.

When we got a television set, we watched the Walt Disney television show, too. As I recall it was on Sunday nights, and it was a special treat to eat dinner at a card table in the living room, most often grilled cheese sandwiches and chocolate milk shakes, while we watched.

When I was ten, my family took a driving vacation to California on the new interstate highway system. We went to Disneyland. I still have 8 mm footage of Disneyland in 1960, including the jungle ride that I believe was sanitized in later years.

Disney played a significant, and highly positive, role in the childhoods of an entire generation of Americans. But those days are gone. Disney has gone woke, and the quality of its products has fallen off a cliff. The last straw was the company’s going to bat for the grooming of small children in Florida. But that was just a sign of the times. Disney has gone over to the other side, and its influence has become malign rather than beneficent.

So it really wasn’t a surprise when leaked Disney footage confirmed that the company has a “gay agenda” and “adds queerness” to children’s programing.

SCOOP: I've obtained video from inside Disney's all-hands meeting about the Florida parental rights bill, in which executive producer Latoya Raveneau says her team has implemented a "not-at-all-secret gay agenda" and is regularly "adding queerness" to children's programming. pic.twitter.com/eJnZMpKIXT

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) March 29, 2022

The Disney organization that enriched American life for decades is dead. Disney has become a force for evil rather than a force for good. How to respond? With a boycott. It will be easy to boycott Disney movies; I haven’t seen one for quite a few years. But the company’s holdings are extensive: its subsidiaries, according to Wikipedia, include among others ESPN, ABC, Pixar, Hulu, FX, National Geographic and of course the theme parks. ESPN is probably the hardest to avoid of that group, but the less business we give to any of them the better.

We can also make ourselves heard. Disney and its many subsidiaries should be deluged with complaints from parents about how the company is now betraying children. Woke capitalism is one of the great mysteries of our time, but it won’t go away until corporations understand that the far left represents only a small minority of Americans, and the vast majority of us are normal.

We also should support alternative sources of children’s programing. The Daily Wire has announced that over the next three years it will invest at least $100 million in children’s live and animated entertainment:

“Americans are tired of giving their money to woke corporations who hate them,” said [co-CEO Jeremy] Boreing. “They’re tired of giving their money to woke media companies who want to indoctrinate their children with radical race and gender theory. But they want to do more than just cancel them. They want alternatives. The Daily Wire is giving them those alternatives.”

The Wire seems to have recruited some good talent:

Boreing has brought on Eric Branscum and Ethan Nicolle of “VeggieTales” and the Babylon Bee to head up kids content development.

It is sad that Disney is dead, but nothing lasts forever. It is time to move on to new and more wholesome entertainment choices for our children.