The Magic Kingdom: Walt Disney and the American Way of Life

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Title:

The Magic Kingdom: Walt Disney and the American Way of Life

Author:

Steven Watts

Date published:

1997

Publisher:

Boston: Houghton Mifflin

ISBN: 0395835879

Description


Part biography and part cultural analysis, the book sheds new light on the cultural icon of “Uncle Walt”.   The author offers a cultural study in hybrid biographical form that straddles the pros and cons of the Disney impact. As has been observed many times, Disney’s mythic small-town America and its idealized middle-class values, symbolized by Disneyland’s pseudo-1890s Main Street, USA, was an exercise in sentimental populist optimism. His Midwestern boyhood became in memory the ethical model he would articulate in film, then in TV and theme parks. In the process, the author shows, Walt exploited consumerism with a multiplicity of tie-ins, persuading buyers to pay homage through their pockets to the idealized Disney image of themselves. One critic saw Disney in his most influential years as “America’s foremost dispenser of placebos”.  Alternately tyrannical and avuncular, high-minded and folksy, Disney himself, in author’s lens, embodies the contradictions of his legacy.  The author digs deeply into Disney’s private life, investigating his roles as husband, father, and brother and providing fresh insight into his peculiar psyche, his genuine folksiness and warmth, his domineering treatment of colleagues and friends, his deepest prejudices and passions. Full of colorful sketches of daily life at the Disney Studio and tales about the creation of Disneyland and Disney World, the book offers a definitive view of one of the most influential Americans of the twentieth century.




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