In 1959, the largest “atomic” submarine fleet in the world was owned by Walt Disney. While I’m not proposing that a bad day in the Magic Kingdom might have resulted in nuclear Armageddon, the Disney fleet is an historical fact that stems from the cooperation among Disney’s business empire, major American arms manufacturers and the U.S. government.
Disney was the ideal venue for the government’s propaganda effort.
Disney had long established relationships with the federal government dating back to the early 1940s. In a sense, Walt Disney went to war before America did, producing war shorts on contract for the National Film Board of Canada and military production films for Lockheed Aircraft. Days after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, Walt Disney was in Washington meeting with top government officials. The result of these meetings was The New Spirit (1942), an animated film made to encourage citizens to pay “taxes to smash the Axis.” This began a close relationship between Disney and the U.S. government in the production of films for propaganda, training, and educational purposes. These films not only served the needs of the government in wartime, they added over two and a half million dollars to the Disney studio’s coffers in the first year of the war alone.
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