Among modern treatises on historical revisionism in popular culture, the greatest of the 20th century was "The Series Has Landed" Futurama, episode two of season one. the second episode of Futurama, "The Series Has Landed," takes place just after Fry has been unfrozen after a thousand years of Cryogenic sleep and has not yet had time to acclimate to the shifted perspectives and priorities of the 31st century. Now a delivery boy for an interplanetary delivery service, his first delivery is a trip to the moon. FRY: So where are we going, anyway? LEELA: nowhere special, the moon. FRY: the moon-- the moon? the moon-moon!? LINDSAY: an exotic adventure for Fry, but a mundane trip to, well, Disney World for the rest of them. AMY: Guh. It's the happiest place orbiting Earth. LINDSAY: The only thing worth visiting on the moon, in fact, is a chintzy theme park: a very thinly veiled allegory for Disney, and this very thinly veiled allegory to the Disney theme parks also does what Disney World does best: NARRATOR: No one knows where when or how man first landed on the moon, but our fun-gineers think it might have happened something like this. LINDSAY: Revised history and change it to suit the park's own needs. Which the park-goers accept unquestioningly but Fry knows to be inaccurate. One of the park's signature rides as the Pirates of the Caribbean parody called Whalers on the Moon. RIDE MUSIC: But there are no whales, so we tell tall tales and sing a whaling tune! LINDSAY: So pointing out that the line in The Honeymooners was Ralph actually threatening physical violence, or that there were no whalers on the moon, is met with annoyance. FRY: Screw this phony stuff! LEELA: But the phony stuff is what's fun! It's boring out there! LINDSAY: people just want to take the park's attractions at face value without thinking about the Implications of this revised history, and then go home. ROBOT RALPH KRAMDEN: One of these days Alice! Bang, zoom, straight to the moon! FRY: That's not an astronaut, it's a TV comedian. He was just using space travel as a metaphor for beating his wife. LINDSAY: for the purposes of this essay, however, It's a pretty spot-on encapsulation of how people tend to get kind of defensive whenever confronted with the idea that the past isn't as simple or as pleasant as they might like to remember. But it's also a pretty spot-on parody of Walt Disney World and its tendency to sprinkle pixie dust on, you know, everything. The Disney approach to life, love, and history is a touch... dated. Magic wishes, happily ever after, this has been at the core of the Disney brand for almost 90 years to the point where, after decades of being one of the dominating creative forces in pop culture, this ethos has inspired countless knockoffs. Which is to say nothing of the countless parodies. [FIONA SINGING INCREDIBLY HIGH PITCHED NOTE] CHARACTER: Do you not know that sucking my d**k is a serious offense? Punishable by f**k you! LINDSAY: Think of how many movies, television shows, and media you've seen where a character will look out into the middle distance, about to pour open their hearts through song, and then someone grinds that moment to a halt. CHARACTER: Stop that, stop that, you're not going into a song while I'm here! LINDSAY: Even Disney's in on it now. GISELLE: [SINGING] How does she know? ROBERT: Don't sing, it's okay. You know, let's just walk. LINDSAY: Part of the post-Eisner rebranding we've seen is savvy to the fact that Disney's hopes, dreams, and happily ever after message needs to be repackaged carefully to appeal to modern audiences, even contextualized as necessary just to get by day-to-day on this miserable dirt ball we call earth. Enchanted is explicitly about the balance between the naivete of the old Disney model and the demands of the real world. Frozen, Disney's most lucrative animated movie to date, has its whole "Girl, you can't marry a guy you just met" bait-and-switch hammered in over. ELSA: You can't marry a man you just met. ANNA: you can if it's true love! LINDSAY: And over. KRISTOFF: You got engaged to someone you just met that day? LINDSAY: Moana not only deconstructs the chosen one narrative, but even features a character that is basically every middle school edgelord trying to act like he still doesn't cry at Bambi. MOANA: The Ocean chose you for a reason. MAUI: If you start singing, I'm gonna throw up. LINDSAY: Sincerity is for girls. Even Tangled makes it clear that Rapunzel and Eugene wait a few years before they settle down. EUGENE: Did Rapunzel and I ever get married? And after years and years of asking, asking, asking, I finally said yes. LINDSAY: No more of this three-day engagement nonsense. And the weird thing is, this meta examination of the Disney brand works: people like it. People will pay for Disney getting meta about Disney. BELLE: I'll be in my room. [STITCH WOLF-WHISTLING] BELE: Get your own movie! LINDSAY: So enter 2013's Saving Mr. Banks. The most meta of the recent Disney trends of metatextual analyses within the Disney Company, as it is actually about the Disney ethos, and how it Disney-fies everything it touches. Poor A.A. Milne The studio, one of its most famous films, and Walt Disney himself as portrayed by America's favorite uncle: giver of good hugs and David S. Pumpkins, Tom Hanks. On the surface Saving Mr. Banks tells the true-ish story of P. L. Travers and the culmination of her twenty-year resistance to selling Walt Disney the rights to adapt her beloved children's books: Mary Poppins. Adapting these books had been Walt's passion project for decades. WALT: But then she gave me one of your books, and oh my gosh, my imagination caught on fire, absolutely on fire. And those embers have burned ever since as you know. TRAVERS: I do, yes. WALT: 20 years. TRAVERS: So you keep saying. LINSDSAY: But Travers resists because she sees Disney movies as sentimental flim-flam. TRAVERS: Mary Poppins does not sing. LINDSAY: The making of Mary Poppins narrative is interwoven throughout with flashbacks to Travers' childhood her, relationship with her father: a loving, charming man who adored his daughter and also happened to be a chronic alcoholic, and who died when she was 7. The film is titled Saving Mr. Banks because much of the negotiations between Travers and the Disney Studios features a great deal of hand-wringing over the Mary Poppins character of Mr. Banks. TRAVERS: I told the illustrator I did not like the facial hair, but she chose to ignore me. Now this time around, this is my film, and I shall have my way. ASSISTANT: Mrs. Travers, this is a specific request from Walt. TRAVERS: Why? LINDSAY: the film even go so far as to imply that the reason Travers is so resistant to giving Disney the rights is because she lacks closure over the death of her own father, which is why it is so important for the emotional climax of Mary Poppins to be about Mr. Banks. Yeah. But this topic is fraught in a way that most biopics aren't. And people are less forgiving of creative liberties taken here in the interest of creating a compelling narrative. But Saving Mr. Banks' portrayal of Walt Disney as a shrewd businessman, but basically a nice guy? It's ruffled some feathers. DISNEY: Now, there are all kinds of showmen and all kinds of show business But it's a fact that only one or two men are at the top in any given group. LINDSAY: This movie has been described as a piece of pro-Disney propaganda: historical revisionism in and of itself. Which, you know. Well. It is. WALT: The mouse is family [MUSIC: I WANNA KNOW WHAT LOVE IS] And before you fill the comments section with diatribes on how old uncle Walt was a racist or an anti-semite, Let's just say that is a discussion for another day. A long one. Check your sources. So this movie was fraught not just because one of the main characters is Walt Disney. TRAVERS: Do you always get everything you want, Walter? WALT: Pretty much. LINDSAY: Who was either the patron saint of all that is good and pure about humanity, or the very face of evil, depending on who you ask, but also because of the underlying theme of artistic integrity versus selling out, and hey maybe selling out is best for everyone Pam! That's right. You get in bed with the mouse, Pam. With the mouse! But all that notwithstanding, I honestly feel like this movie is underrated. The quality of the film gets buried by these comments that Walt was a very bad man, and the movie of course treats it as a given that he isn't. For one, Saving Mr. Banks is the extremely rare father daughter movie that isn't tied in to the daughter finding herself through marriage, But is instead a broader journey about self identity that you see more often in father-son movies. Emma Thompson does an amazing job being absolutely charming and relatable despite being an abject, unequivocal jerk. TRAVERS: Will the child be a nuisance? It's an 11 hour flight. LINDSAY: The Disney brand is so overwhelming and easy to dislike, and Disney himself is so shrewd and borderline phony that even if you're in the life as a Disney stan, you can still totally see where she's coming from. Tom Hanks is, well. It's Tom Hanks. TRAVERS: I won't have her turned into one of your silly cartoons. LINDSAY: But as for the need to see Walt portrayed warts and all, I can see the desire for that, but that was not this movie. MARY POPPINS is an interesting movie to make a making of movie about in general. Not only was it a technological breakthrough with the combination of live-action and animation, but it was also Disney's last great film passion project before he died. Now say what you want about old uncle Walt but the man was a capitalist. So it's interesting that this was the project he was willing to go through such great lengths to get the rights to, as it is the only Disney era movie that is at least... socialism curious. JANE: Please may we feed the birds? MR. BANKS: Whatever for? MICHAEL: I have tuppence from my money box! JANE: Just this once, please? MR. BANKS: Waste your money on a lot of ragamuffin birds? Certainly not! LINDSAY [immitating Michael]: But I want to redistribute the wealth, father! MARY POPPINS is one of those antagonist-less kids movies, but if there is a villain in Mary Poppins, then it is the Bank. And I'm not normally a fan of "dad you work too hard" lessons in movies, but I think it works in Mary Poppins because of the way it satirizes the fragility of the bank system and the way it ties in with Mr. Banks' skewed priorities. BANKER: And just how much money do you have young man? MICHAEL: Tuppence, but I wanted to feed the birds. LINDSAY: A kid who wants to feed the birds causes a bank run. MICHAEL: Give it back! LINDSAY [immitating Michael]: The people shall seize the means of production! Feed the birds! LINDSAY [normal]: The biggest source of conflict in the Mary Poppins universe, the Disney version anyway, is how the obsession with money and prestige comes at the cost of being good parents. And the irony of all of this: the parents' storyline, the socialism curiousness, the bank being evil, aside from mentions of Mr. Banks being unhappy, this whole storyline wasn't in the original book, but added by Disney. Part of this was to give the story a more film-like shape, what with giving the characters more of an arc, and part was to make it more relatable to families of the 1960s who may not quite understand why a family with a stay-at-home mother would even need a nanny, if she didn't have some, you know, hobby or activity to do all day, which is actually addressed in Mr. Banks. TRAVERS: Why in the world have you made Mrs. Banks a silly suffragette? ANIMATOR: I wonder if Emmeline P would agree with that adjective. LINDSAY: and the majority of the stuff that is changed from the source material: that of giving the family itself an arc to rediscover itself and each other, is really the biggest change from Travers' books and ends up itself compromising most of the plot of Saving Mr. Banks. ANIMATOR: It does seem strange that Mrs. Banks allows her kids to spend all of their time with the Nanny when she doesn't have a job to speak of. LINDSAY: the structural changes that Travers most resisted ended up being kind of necessary to make it watchable as a feature film. So that Mary Poppins exists at all is noteworthy, and the story of how it came to pass is compelling. Even if, shall we say, creative liberties were taken. Yes, the film does ultimately come down favoring Walt's perspective. One would struggle to say that it celebrates Travers' work more than it does Disney's TRAVERS: The rain brings life. DRIVER: So does the sun. LINDSAY: But on the whole, with the exception of this scene where Disney and Travers have the daddy issues discussion, WALT: It's not the children she comes to save. It's their father. It's your father. LINDSAY: The film does hew true-ish. If you move some timeline elements and characters around. Disney did travel to London to meet with Travers, several times in fact. But it wasn't at the eleventh hour and probably didn't involve any stories about flawed tragic fathers WALT: You best be quick there, Walt. You better get those newspapers up on that porch and under that storm door, Pop is gonna lose his temper again and show you the buckle end of his belt. LINDSAY: Disney's story about forced child labor is true, but he never went on record to frame that as anything other than good hard honest american work. Ralph the car driver and his disabled
daughter didn't exist, but he was a composite character of Disney Studios workers who did befriend Travers during her stay. RALPH THE DRIVER: Well hot dog. LINDSAY: There is no evidence that Travers danced and sang to lets go fly a kite, But she did sing along to feed the birds on those tapes, and yes, she did insist on those tapes. TRAVERS: No no, that we cannot have. That would be quite un-English. Disney did snub Travers an invitation to the film's to premiere, WALT: Not an easy decision for me, but do you know what she's like. We got press, interviews, cameras,
LINDSAY: And she did make a big stink about it and showed up just to spite him. She did go to Disneyland, and she hated it, but Walt wasn't there and no carousels were ridden. Walt wasn't even present during the two-week meeting: he peaced out after day one because he got so frustrated with Travers, and then let the Sherman Brothers deal with her. ANIMATOR: Does it matter? TRAVERS: You can wait outside. LINDSAY: But for adaptational criticisms, more people had a beef with the idea that P . L. Travers was ultimately happy with the film version of Mary Poppins. Travers did cry at the premiere, but not because she was touched or had gotten some sense of closure, so much as from grief that her beloved creation was no longer hers and never would be again. But there is some truth to the idea that she eventually was okay with it: Again, If you stretch the timeline a bit. In a 1977 interview, Travers remarks "I've seen it once or twice and I've learned to live with it. It's glamorous, and it's a good film on its own level, but I don't think it is very like my books." Travers did not make peace with the film at the premiere, but she did after a few decades, admitting that there were parts of the movie she liked and even incorporating ideas conceived by the Disney story department into the final Mary Poppins novel in 1988. It is true, however, that she never made peace with the dancing penguins. WALT: Mrs. Travers, what has you so upset now? TRAVERS: Penguins. Penguins have very much upset me Mr. Disney. LINDSAY: others have called the film a character assassination on Travers herself, and the film kind of glosses over or wipes its hands of some of P. L. Travers' less flattering personal histories. WALT: You got kids? TRAVERS: No, well, not precisely. LINDSAY: We can touch on the ethics of portraying Travers as a frigid fuddy-duddy who just needs to loosen up and sell out TRAVERS: What is all this... jollification? TRAVERS: If you so much as step one foot in here with that trolley, I shall scream. One cannot live on cake alone! TRAVERS: I hope we crash. LINDSAY: but in terms of this story, to put it diplomatically, Travers was not a good team player. If the film softens Walt Disney, it softens Travers, too But perhaps the most common complaint with the film wasn't about Travers, but the way it softens Walt's edges. And that it definitely does. CHARACTER 1: You see how it goes up on the word down? CHARACTER 2: on the word down it goes up. CHARACTER 3: It's ironic. WALT: Forget ironic, it's iconic.I won't be able to stop singing that for weeks! [WALT HUMMING] Walt was notoriously stingy with compliments and basically never gave them, but here he is all "call me Walt!" WALT: Oh, Walt, call me Walt. Mr. Disney was an old man, isn't that right? LINDSAY: And the loving and supportive patriarch to his staff. As per Disney Studios decree, you never see Walt smoking but he does refer to it, you see him putting out cigarettes, and he literally introduced with a sickly cough off-screen [WALT COUGHING AND WHEEZING] Don't smoke, kids. But here's the thing: Uh, Walt's flaws weren't what this movie is about. I mean, did we really need a scene where he takes a break from the filming of Mary Poppins to discuss the evils of communism? This movie is not about Walt Disney it is about the heartbreak of giving up one's own creative vision and trusting a shameless capitalist with it. It is about the argument of whether or not doing such a thing is for the greater good, and what that greater good even is. Is it bringing happiness into the lives of all, or is it to educate children? TRAVERS: Mary Poppins is the very enemy of whimsy and sentiment. She's truthful: she doesn't sugarcoat the darkness in the world that these children will eventually, inevitably, come to know. She prepares them for it! She deals in honesty! LINDSAY: But most of all, it is about a woman's relationship to her long dead father, and about how our histories and families influence who we become and how we frame our history and worldview. It's about the conflict between two creative visions: do we view history through rose-tinted glasses, or do we always need to be honest about the cruelties of the world? WALT: You've never been to Disneyland? That's the happiest place on earth. . TRAVERS: Mr. Disney, I-- I- I cannot begin to tell you how uninterested-- no, positively sickened I am at the thought of visiting your-- your dollar printing machine. LINDSAY: But given Disney's approach to the framing of culture and history, you can see where Travers wouldn't be thrilled. [INCOMPREHENSIBLE RIDE NOISE] Disney movies and theme park attractions traditionally are less set in a culture or place in history, so much as a version of a culture or place in history. A very Disney version. CHARACTER: You wanna buy a sundial? Like Snow White is German inspired because the original fairy tale is German, and I guess there is some Snow White stuff in Germany in Epcot, but there's nothing really distinctively German about Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Or Beauty and the Beast, which is set in France, CHARACTERS: Bonjour! Bonjour! Bonjour! Bonjour! Bonjour! LUMIERE: After all, Miss, this is France! But not like anything resembling real France. Like you see Beauty and the Beast and you're not like "oh, Beast and/or his descendants are going to meet a grisly fate in a few years." [GUILLOTINE SOUND, CHEERING] In quote- South America -end quote, we have the happy exploits of the 3 caballeros in the Saludos Amigos films... The list goes on and on. The Disney approach strips these tales and places down to broad cultural signifiers that a Western audience would happily consume. It gets rid of anything that could be considered too salacious for the Disney brand, and changes the setting so that you no longer think "this is a French fairy tale," but instead "this is a Disney fairy tale." part of Walt Disney's evil genius was the efficacy with which he branded everything he produced as unmistakeably Disney. That was the business model in 1961, so you can see where Travers would assume that this is what would happen to her beloved Mary Poppins. TRAVERS: I won't have her turned into one of your silly cartoons. LINDSAY: And she would be right. Cultural appropriation and historical revisionism are kind of integral to the Disney brand, whether it's for narrative purposes or a meta comment on how the Disney Corporation is viewing or changing itself. We could go down the rabbit hole of real world examples of historical revisionism-- the thing is, I promised myself I'd keep this video under an hour, so let's look at Disney World attractions. ACTOR: Let freedom ring! LINDSAY: There isn't anything in Disney world that isn't portrayed through that very distinct Disney filter. Main Street USA was designed to be a tribute to the home town of Walt's childhood, but no one is going to deny that it's a highly whitewashed, highly idealized version of the American small town. But if you want some real honest-to-god Disney style historical revisionism, head on down to the Hall of Presidents! I'd have gone inside, but unfortunately the ride is shut down because the president is... ...bad. Sometimes Disney decides to update their attractions to changing sensitivities. Pirates of the Caribbean has this segment which is presently called the bride auction, and will be replaced when the ride closes for maintenance in 2018. It features... "wenches" being sold as chattel. All are tied up and some are crying. RIDE NARRATOR: Strike yer colors, ye brazen wench! No need to expose yer superstructure! LINDSAY: Fun for the whole family! But when the Disney Company tries to respect that yeah, maybe they should change some stuff, this is met with resistance. And that is perhaps the problem with rooting so much of your brand in nostalgia: whenever you point out that maybe some parts of the thing you're consuming might be unethical, people take it as an assault on their childhood. No, what do you mean there were no whalers on the moon? People who consume the Disney-fied version of history and culture, on some level, they know it's false. But there's something almost traumatic in pointing out that there might be something amoral about this sort of historical revisionism, something that doesn't jive with our modern sensibilities, or even with the fun nature of what is otherwise a whimsical ride with no slavery. So it's not always just the framing that's the problem, It's the audience. Once you frame a history, a culture, or even a story in a certain way, it can be really hard to un-frame it. And the truth is, Mary Poppins has become a Disney movie in the popular consciousness, much more than it is seen as a beloved series of children's books. Lord of the Rings are still books first. The Chronicles of Narnia are still books first. But Mary Poppins is a Disney movie. The main conflict of the film ultimately comes down between both people using a fictional property as a means of reconciling their difficult memories of their fathers. ASSISTANT: She wants to know why Mr. Banks has been given a mustache. WALT: Oh, I asked for that. for that. ASSISTANT: Yes, they told her that, but she wants to know why. WALT: Because I asked for it. LINDSAY: both Travers' and Walt's narratives within the movie are shown as wrapped in an obsession with preserving and mythologizing the memories of their fathers. It ends up being the crucial similarity that they share with each other. WALT: I have my own Mr. Banks. And even if this scene didn't really happen, which it didn't, there is a deep truth to the idea of the scene. WALT: Rare is a day when I don't think about that eight-year-old boy delivering newspapers in the snow, and old Elias Disney with that strap in his fist. I'm tired of... remembering it that way. LINDSAY: The fictional Walt of the scene knows and understands that his father was flawed, and even cruel. He hasn't forgotten what's happened. But it's better for him to focus on the positive memories rather than the negative ones, and this informs his worldview and his business. WALT: we all have our sad tales, but don't you want to finish the story? Let it all go and have a life that isn't dictated by the past? LINDSAY: So while the scene might be totally bogus in terms of things that actually happened in the real world, it does tap into why people love Disney's rose-colored filter. Part of Disney's genius was commodifying the way people mythologized culture, especially American culture. He found a way to brand and sell it because, here's the thing: historical contextualizing and, yes, revisionism, is always kind of inevitable, especially in times of national stress. Sometimes this kind of identity branded mythologizing can be about reclaiming former glory and scapegoating the other, but Disney's brand of mythologizing was all about feeling good about what you already had, and ignoring the bad parts. whether that's the totality of the story, or not. This film ultimately explores the very human desire to protect the memories of the people we love: people and fictional characters. TRAVERS: Why did you have to make him so cruel? He was not a monster. LINDSAY: Even if they aren't always happy memories. Take this line right here: WALT: Maybe not in life, but in imagination. Because that's what we storytellers do. We restore order with imagination. We instill hope. Again, and again, and again. LINDSAY: This line seems almost a response to one of the longest-running criticisms of Disney storytelling: that it's soppy, that it whitewashes history and culture. But I like how the movie pits it against what people actually do in real life. It's not like Walt Disney invented this by any stretch of the imagination. He just figured out really, really effectively how to sell it. As Walt himself put it in one outburst: And here's the problem with whalers on the moon: if history, culture, and stories have been revised to fit s sanitized or outright false narrative, the onus is on the consumer to, well, PLEAKLEY: Educate yourself! LINDSAY: And the truth is, most people won't. It is kind of poetic that the linchpin of this movie, its emotional thesis, is the least historically accurate thing in the movie, and also a big reason why people feel kind of iffy about this movie, because it reads as propagandistic corporate apologia for giving up one's intellectual property for the greater good of commodification and mass consumption, which, you know, it is. And I feel like there is this sort of expectation where even if you so much as admit that, you are therefore required to wholeheartedly condemn it, and, well, I can't. Because I think you can have that discussion over who owns ideas once they are out in the public consciousness, while still admitting that Mary Poppins, the movie, even if it doesn't adhere to the books as much as Travers wanted, MARY: That will be quite enough of that, thank you. LINDSAY: It's a net positive for the world, and I'm glad it exists. It's a great movie. It holds up, and even if corporate approved Tom-Hanks-Movie-Walt says that Mary Poppins is going to make people happy while dollar signs literally spin out of his eyes, just look at this three-year-old child on her make-a-wish trip to Disney World meeting Mary Poppins. PARENT: She watched her over and over again when she was in the hospital last year. Kept her going. LINDSAY: sorry there's something in my eye. Life doesn't have a neat theme you can package into a two-hour movie, but as humans we crave narrative satisfaction with the stories that we tell, so this movie can be both a borderline unethical treatise on how, after being relentlessly ground down by a major studio, selling your intellectual property to a large corporation can in some ways work toward the greater good despite robbing you of autonomy over your own creation, and it can be a thoughtful piece on the way we attach so much of our personal identity to the fictions and histories we fabricate, and how difficult it can be to let that go. [POPPY BACKGROUND MUSIC] It can be both! [MARIACHI MUSIC]
Lindsey makes really intelligent videos.
I love her videos. Plus I kinda have a crush on her :/