Mickey Mouse Monopoly Review:

Walt Disney and his company created what can only be considered as a media empire, with huge amounts of influence on some of the most crucial aspects of modern society, the development of our children and how they perceive the world and its ever growing complexities. The documentary “Mickey Mouse Monopoly” takes a close look at the  Disney phenomenon and what are supposed to be  images of innocence magic and fun, yet seem to bare many great underlying messages on today’s society and how Disney potentially wants children to perceive it. 

The documentary, based on the thoughts of great minds like Dr. Henry Giroux of the Pennsylvania State University deals with how Disney movies tell stories on race, gender and class under the disguise of innocence, that seems to disguise some of the often alarming messages one can take from the movies when seen in a more analytical point of view. 

Walt Disney has long been a corporation that to me, stands solely for the clever entertainment of kids, giving them an entertaining piece of animation, filled with basic life lessons for children on one hand, but also intelligent often humorous undertones for the entertainment of the adults accompanying the children. Yet after watching “Mickey Mouse Monopoly,” I was left with a whole new image of Disney, one in which a sole emphasis on peaceful child entertainment takes a backseat to incredible levels of corporate influence and marketing. Indeed over the last century, the Disney company has established an empire far beyond the regular scopes of media influence. With the purchase of the ABC network and expanding into many other fields of marketing and production. The Disney company has gained unprecedented amounts of leverage and power, that really leaves them in a certain sense “too big to fail.” 

This phenomenon can be seen in Disney’s complex copywriting system and the way they protect the Disney name. This results in many authors having great trouble publishing anything dealing with Disney and its movies. Thus often times, authors are left unable to use the word “Disney” in a title and many times won’t be able to publish certain pictures or other visual material. This often presents writers with great difficulties in properly documenting and analyzing the many aspects of Disney tales and movies and has led to numerous dilemmas in the past. The great power of Disney also shows with how they make a profit through there many projects. While a lot titles like Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast and the Lion King turned out to be a huge success for Disney, other movies like Hercules could not solely rely on being a box office hit. This is where Disney shows how entangled it is with other forms of media and production, as they often end up drawing a huge profit from marketing strategies, like including Hercules figures in happy meals, releasing a film based video game, or designing a line of costumes for kids. In this way the Disney Company manages to spin and twist any project to allow it to become profitable to the extent they had envisioned. 

In conclusion we see that just with the few aspects touched on in this blog, Disney moves from being a genuinely peaceful source of family entertainment to a more corporate like phenomenon, where things are often far more capitalistic than one wants to believe.