“If ogres and witches give the kiddies nightmares, as is said, shouldn’t Walt Disney send ‘em into hysterics? Well, here’s what eminent educators have to say about that,” wrote David Frederick McCord, a freelance writer, in the April 1934 issue of Photoplay Magazine.
Photoplay Magazine (1911-1980) was the forerunner of today’s celebrity-oriented magazines with shocking titles to capture the attention and money of an audience that had gone “movie crazy.” More often than not, the most shocking thing was the title itself with the article being a piece of entertaining publicity puffery.
In fact, when Photoplay ceased publication in 1980 (after two mergers with other film-oriented magazines), its staff moved over to Us magazine. In the 1930s, the magazine was in its heyday and fairly influential in the motion picture industry.
The title of McCord’s article was “Is Walt Disney a Menace to Our Children?” It certainly attracted attention and I used it as the title of this column for the same purpose.
Over three years, before there was concerned debate about whether the Wicked Witch in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) was too scary for children to see (and stories of young children wetting the upholstered seats of the New York movie theater out of fear when the film was shown), adults were discussing the horrors and frights that popped up in Disney short cartoons.
As McCord wrote:
“I ran into Walt Disney’s Lullaby Land [a Silly Symphony released August 1933] and those ogres took my eye and ear. How they shimmied over the landscape! And their blood-chilling yells! Lon Chaney might have yelled like that, if he had lived far enough into the talkie era. But those banshee bellows must have made Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi feel pretty cheap.
“While all the ‘oo-ooo-oohing’ was going on, a youngster in the audience started to cry. And kept on crying. A lot of shushing was needed to handle the situation and the incident started my brain working, my mental boiling point being practically zero. What I started wondering was this:
“How many other children have been frightened by this picture? How many have been kept awake or given nightmares by the Big Bad Wolf, the wicked witch in Hansel and Gretel [another Silly Symphony from 1932 actually titled Babes in the Woods] or the rats in The Pied Piper [a 1933 Silly Symphony]?”
For those who haven’t seen ‘Lullaby Land’ in a while, it is a fairly innocuous story of a baby boy and his stuffed calico toy dog who dream they are in the Land of Nowhere with fields of quilted landscape (that later inspired a section of the Story Book Land canal boat attraction at Disneyland made up of 20 different real plants).
Typically, inanimate things like castor oil bottles and high chairs spring to life. Powder puffs and binkies grow on trees.
The boy unwisely enters a Forbidden Garden where plants and trees are made out of sharp objects like scissors, knives, razors, and shears and is warned by timepieces hanging on a tree that “baby mustn’t touch.”
Of course, the baby plays with matches and gets burned, and is chased by three Bogey Men (who McCord described as ogres) that were created from the smoke of the matches. The boy hides behind a rattle tree. Then the Sandman appears and sings the boy safely back to sleep.
A close-up of the Bogey Men ogres who frightened a young boy in 1933. (c) Disney
This short was made the same year Silly Symphonies like Three Little Pigs and Night Before Christmas were released, so I can understand if its story or images didn’t stick in your mind.
Certainly, McCord brought up a legitimate concern and one that is still discussed today although in the article, he jokingly refers to Disney’s cartoons as “Sinister Symphonies” and “Mickey the Menace.”
Walt Disney felt that his cartoons were not for children, but for a family audience. Famously, Disney said, “Life is composed of lights and shadows, and we would be untruthful, insincere, and saccharine if we tried to pretend there were no shadows. Most things are good, and they are the strongest things; but there are evil things too, and you are not doing a child a favor by trying to shield him from reality. The important thing is to teach a child that good can always triumph over evil.”
Wisely, in order to explore whether his concerns had any validity, McCord went and interviewed a variety of authorities.
First, he talked with Helen Josephine Ferris, who served as editor-in-chief of the Junior Literary Guild from 1929 until her retirement in 1959.
Her high literary standards and the desire to share good literature were well known, and those standards were reflected in the high quality of her Guild selections, as well as her own published works.
“The child who cried in terror at the sight of the smoke ogres in Lullaby Land may have been an unusually sensitive one or one much too young for that kind of story. The Big Bad Wolf in Three Little Pigs is really more amusing than terrifying. Much too ladylike, if you ask me,” Ferris told McCord.
McCord then interviewed Charles Gray Shaw, who was then a professor of philosophy at New York University and went on to other academic acclaim.
“No great or successful man ever whistles,” said Charles Gray Shaw, a descendent of Miles Standish’s John Alden, in 1931 sparking a huge controversy at the time. “Whistling is an unmistakable sign of the moron. It's only the inferior and maladjusted individual who ever seeks emotional relief in such a bird-like act as that of whistling.”
In response to McCord, the conservative Shaw replied, “When people criticize fairy tales as being bad for children, they think that they are living in the same world as the child. They aren’t. As for the child who cried at the orges, children are crying all the time. The emotional reaction amounts to very little. When grown-ups take more than a passing interest in fairy tales on the screen, it is a sign of infantilism.”
Then, McCord talked with Mrs. Henry S. Pascal, the chairman of the board for the United Parents’ Association of the Greater New York Schools.
McCord found that the organization had just finished sponsoring a special Disney film program. Pascal was delighted that Disney cartoons appealed equally to both parents and their children and could be used as a way to strengthen that bond.
McCord went to the elementary education department at Columbia University and talked with faculty members Jean Betzner, Alice Dagliesh and Annie Moore, who all felt that the Disney cartoons and Mickey Mouse, in particular, were tremendous contributions to children.
Professor Harry A. Overstreet was a writer and philosopher who, at the time of this article, was the chair of Department of Philosophy and Psychology at City College of New York.
McCord sought out Overstreet, because he had previously denounced fairy tales: “And now parents insist on inflicting this primitivism, this pathetic infantilism of the race on their children, forcing them to think uncasually, magically, miraculously, forcing them to habituate themselves to the technique of dreamy wish-fulfillment.”
When he phoned the professor, Overstreet told McCord, “Well, I may have revised my opinions since then” in regards to fairy tales and the Disney cartoon versions where things were done so fantastically that even a child knows not to take the things so seriously.
Dr. Abraham Arden Brill was an internationally famous psychiatrist. He was the first official psychoanalyst to practice in the United States, as well as the first translator of the works of Freud into English.
In response to McCord’s queries, Brill wrote the following:
“I find that they [Disney’s Silly Symphonies] are enjoyed by grown-ups much more than by children. To children, they are a visual representation of their fantasies. Children look upon animals as other beings—I might say human beings—and to see these animals perform wonderful feats is a distinct gratification to the child. The situation is quite different in the case of the former: Adults have long ago given up fantasy and they are forever bound to the grim reality of routine life.
“The average person knows that he has to keep his feet on the ground and that no fairy will put gold into his pockets. Nevertheless, the hilarity and wholesome outbursts of merriment at such performances on the part of grown-ups show that they, too, get an excellent outlet from Mickey Mouse. For the time being, the grown-up is, as it were, ‘narcotized’ by these performance, because they take him back to childhood.
“He then forgets all about his drab, routine problems and merges back into a period of life when everything could still be attained through fantasy. Temporarily, at least, he forgets all about inexorable reality and relives his childhood. As soon as the performance is over, he naturally realizes that it was nothing but fantasy.
“I feel that the Three Little Pigs furnish more entertainment than fright. To adults, they stand for another Silly Symphony, etc. In children, the Three Little Pigs may at first produce some emotional reaction of fear. I have not noticed it, although I have particularly watched children’s reactions.
“On the contrary, they seemed to be amused. I can, however, imagine that some children might be a little bit frightened, but the effect can only be temporary. The average child in the movie is more than 5 or 6 years of age, and at that age no impression can be of a permanent nature.”
A scene from the Silly Symphony Lullaby Land where the young boy and his stuffed dog arrive. (c) Disney
In fact, recent research has concluded that children generally have no memories before the age of 5 or 6, so all those young children dragged through Disney parks in their early years do not recall even brief images of the experience as they grow older.
McCord concludes his article by jokingly surrendering that Disney “frights” do not seem to do damage to children and that next time he wants to write about something more restful and fun.
I don’t claim to be an expert, but I have been an uncle to two nieces and two nephews growing up over the years, as well as a public school teacher for many years, and while I enjoy Disney cartoons, I have seen that the fearful elements (as well as the joyful elements) do make an impact on young people.
Of course, I am the kid who, when the Disney live-action movie Darby O’Gill and the Little People was shown at the Pickwick Drive-In in Burbank, hid behind the car seat where my mother was sitting until the sound of the howling Banshee was gone.
In my own case, even with all my professional experience in television and film and knowing how things are done (and the “tricks of the trade” from using Hershey chocolate syrup for blood in black and white films), I avoid movies that feature torture and gore because even though I know that “it is all just a movie”, the images and fears haunt me afterward.
It all comes down to the power of the imagination.
My initial reaction to the Twilight Zone television episode “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” when William Shatner quickly pulls back the curtain on the airplane window and sees a gremlin pressed up against the glass staring back at him was so powerful, that it comes to mind every time I fly.
Watching the episode today, the cheapness of the costume, my experiences seeing Shatner become a parody of himself, and my knowledge of what is coming and when does not dim that first impression in the slightest. My imagination created that scene in my mind more powerfully than its 1963 minimal budget. It was the idea, not the actual presentation.
As an uncle, I did monitor which Disney cartoons I shared with my nieces and nephews at what age, and if a disturbing moment came up, I used it as a “teachable moment” to talk about it and help them understand.
I’ve seen children scared of the costumed characters at the Walt Disney World Resort or afraid to go on an attraction because it is dark inside. Children are going to be scared, and I don’t think you can blame Walt Disney and his cartoons for being a major cause.
To tell a good story, there often needs to be a strong villian and a set of perils to overcome. That temporary anxiety results in a more fulfilling resolution when the forces of light overpower the darkness that seemed unconquerable.
As Walt said, I think it is good for children to realize that there is darkness in the world, but that it can be overcome.
Is Walt Disney and his films a menace to our children? No, I don’t think so. I think a good argument can be made that those films inspired and comforted more than they frightened. However, I won’t defend films made after Walt’s death by the Disney Company. To me, that’s an entirely different studio.
Eighty years ago, adults apparently had some of the same concerns about Walt Disney films that some parents do today, and probably will still have 80 years from now.
