Steamboat Willie
1 2021-04-16T18:08:55+00:00 Christen Kadkhodai 4f1a22ca86629a98482907fea98a466b6f15a3a3 102 1 plain 2021-04-16T18:08:55+00:00 Christen Kadkhodai 4f1a22ca86629a98482907fea98a466b6f15a3a3This page is referenced by:
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Chapter 2
8
First Movies
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With the birth of Mickey Mouse Plane Crazy, Steamboat Willie, and later Silly Symphonies, comes the birth of Walt Disney from anonymous animator to industry heavyweight. Notably, Steamboat Willie and Silly Symphonies draw deeply from rural themes. Steven Watts, Disney biographer notes the connection: “Many of the Disney Studio's famous animated shorts from the late 1920s…revolved around rural motifs and small-town adventures.”[1] Although Disney often cited his childhood in Marceline, Missouri, as an inspiration for his stories, he spent a very brief time there as a boy. “When I was five my family moved out of Chicago and went to Marceline, Missouri, where my father bought a farm,” Disney relays in a 1938 interview with The Family Circle. “We lived there six years, and I guess it must have made a deep impression on me.”[2]
Disneyland’s Maine Street USA was entirely modeled after the Marceline of Disney’s childhood. Scholars such as Brian Burnes, Robert W Butler, and Dan Viets have noted Disney’s “affection” for “small-town, turn-of-the-century life to the boyhood experiences that were echoed and in expanded in his animated cartoons” in their work Walt Disney's Missouri: The Roots of a Creative Genius.[1] They write: “Disney’s concept of what it means to be an American was directly inspired by those five seminal years of his childhood.”[2] Marceline, and therefore Maine Street USA, become important primary resources in the investigation of Disney and his idea of patriotism as it related to jingoism. In general, Disney’s communication of pro-American patriotic themes through its films, parks, and merchandizing, further cemented jingoist ideals. Numerous primary source materials quoting Walt Disney support Giroux’s assertion of the corporation’s desire to make American identity synonymous with Disney’s corporate identity: “Disneyland will be a place dedicated to the ideals, the dreams, and the hard facts that have created America,” Disney said on the creation of his first amusement park.[3]
