In some respects, there may be no cultural figure in the West who is as potentially controversial as Walt Disney, even though love and hatred for what he represents are frequently felt by the same people. At the same time, there is certainly no other filmmaker whose aesthetical and ideological preoccupations have permeated so much of modern life that, paradoxically, his omnipresence verges on invisibility. Even beyond the grave, continuing manifestations of his vision have become so integral to American society that they are commonly regarded as natural and relatively unquestioned parts of the landscape, like a salt shaker or a babysitter or a place to go on vacation.
It has been reported that in 1966, the year that Disney died, two hundred and forty million people saw at least one of his movies while eight hundred million read a book or magazine bearing his imprint. One would not be unduly surprised to learn that last year the figures were even higher. In an uncharacteristically provocative and rather corrosive account of the opening of Disney World in Newsweek (October 18, 1971), Joseph Morgenstern charged that Walt Disney Productions was “nothing more or less than a royalist plot, a computer program to take over the United States and turn it into a continental Magic Kingdom.
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