This cannot be disputed: the Walt Disney Company is one of the United States’ oldest and most successful entertainment conglomerates. It was founded in 1923, and as of this writing consists of a certifiably insane number of subsidiaries. Disney has long owned the ABC network and all of its affiliated networks, including ESPN. The company made international headlines in 2009 when it acquired Marvel Entertainment for over US$4 billion, and again in 2012 when it acquired Lucasfilm for over US$4 billion more. The “House of Mouse” is probably the most influential and powerful of the tiny handful of huge corporations that control most of the media in the United States and, by extension, the world.
It also can’t be disputed that, though a traditionally family-oriented business, Disney has allowed sexual images to make their way not only into completed cuts of their films, but also promotional and poster artwork. Many instances have been pointed out, from the overt (a couple of frames showing an image of a topless woman in The Rescuers) to the puzzling (a spire of the castle on the VHS cover of The Little Mermaid looks a hell of a lot like an erect penis) to the questionable (at one point in Aladdin, the Genie can be heard muttering offscreen something that sounds like “good teenagers, take off your clothes”). In each and every instance, changes were made to further releases, and chalked up to jokes by animators or simple misunderstandings. Why would Disney want to expose children (so to speak) to inappropriate sexual content, anyway?
Well, conspiracy theorists have their answers: Disney is all about sexualizing children. The Disney Company, they assert, wants to suck all of the money from the parents’ wallets while rendering their children compliant, subservient consumers, and early exposure to these sexualized images is the first step in that process. Also, they say, because it’s evil—mind-bogglingly, Satanically evil.
