The Walt Disney Company — Bunk History

The Gateway Arch in St. Louis.

Walt Disney Presents Manifest Destiny

On the St. Louis theme park that never made it past the drawing board.

by Devin Thomas O’Shea via HNN on April 30, 2024

Strikers outside Walt Disney Studios in 1941.

Disney Animators Strike During WWII Changed the Company — and Hollywood

The 1941 strike, following the spectacular success of “Snow White,” stunned Walt Disney and rattled his now-storied company.

by Francine Uenuma via Retropolis on September 4, 2023

Donald Duck with a U.S. military hat

How Disney Propaganda Shaped Life on the Home Front During WWII

A traveling exhibition traces how the animation studio mobilized to support the Allied war effort.

by Marilyn Chase via Smithsonian on July 11, 2022

Black and white photo of two Disney World "cast members" posed with Mickey Mouse

In the Magic Kingdom, History Was a Lesson Filled With Reassurance

Fifty years ago, Disney World's celebrated opening promised joy and inspiration to all; today the theme park is reckoning with its white middle-class past.

by Bethanee Bemis via Smithsonian on October 7, 2021

Animated scene from One Hundred and One Dalmatians

How 'One Hundred and One Dalmatians' Saved Disney

Sixty years ago, the company modernized animation when it used Xerox technology on the classic film.

by Gia Yetikyel via Smithsonian on June 2, 2021

Artist's rendering of the proposed Disney's America theme park in Prince William County, Virginia.

Disney and Battlefields: A Tale of Two Continents

The conflict between commercialization and historic preservation.

by Niels Eichhorn via Muster on April 20, 2021

Pocahontas characters overlaid onto a landscape.

Deconstructing Disney: Queer Coding and Masculinity in Pocahontas

Disney gets inventive when they need to circumvent white people’s historical responsibility for genocidal atrocities — and queerness is a useful scapegoat.

by Jeanna Kadlec via Longreads on April 1, 2021

Walt Disney's Empty Promise

For so many of the millions of tourists who come to Orlando, this—Disney, Universal Studios, I-Drive, all of it—stands in for America itself.

by Kent Russell via The Paris Review on July 10, 2020

Disney animators on strike, 1941.

Animators Brought a Guillotine to the Disney Labor Strike in 1941

It wasn’t simply a static symbol – the “blade” actually moved.

by Matt Novak via Paleofuture on November 26, 2019

Dream Come True

An excerpt from a new book reveals how Disneyland came to be.

by Richard Snow via Air Mail on November 23, 2019

A Spoonful of Sitcom Synergy: 25 Years of the "Disney Episode"

Why don't TV families go to Disney World as much as they used to?

by Myles McNutt via The A.V. Club on April 17, 2018

The Original Little Mermaid

On Kay Nielsen, Disney, and the sanitization of the modern fairy tale.

by Amber Sparks via The Paris Review on March 16, 2018

People in a large boat in an amusement park

How a Group of '70s Radicals Tried (and Failed) to Invade Disneyland

The Yippies' takeover did not quite go to plan.

by Kristin Hunt via Atlas Obscura on July 19, 2017

Disney strikers picketing the premiere of The Reluctant Dragon, Los Angeles, July 1941.

Storyboards and Solidarity

The current Hollywood strikes have a precedent in Disney’s golden age, when the company was a hothouse of innovation and punishing expectation.

by E. Tammy Kim via New York Review of Books on September 14, 2023

Lithograph of a a band playing and upper-class people dancing in a park.

The Scandalous Roots of the Amusement Park

The "Pleasure Gardens" of the 18th Century captivated the public with a heady mix of fantasy and vice.

by Cath Pound via BBC News on August 21, 2022

Drawing of the Alamo

How Racism, American Idealism, and Patriotism Created the Modern Myth of the Alamo and Davy Crockett

Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson, and Jason Stanford on the making of a misrepresented narrative.

by Chris Tomlinson, Jason Stanford, Bryan Burrough via Literary Hub on June 22, 2021

A women with her hands on the car horn

Her Crazy Driving is a Key Element of Cruella de Vil’s Evil. Here’s Why.

The history of the Crazy Woman Driver trope.

by Genevieve Carpio via Made By History on April 2, 2021

A collage including Betty Boop.

The Mixed-Up Masters of Early Animation

Pioneering cartoonists were experimental, satiric, erotic, and artistically ambitious.

by Adam Gopnik via The New Yorker on December 21, 2020

Two people watching Cliff Edwards perform on the ukelele.

Ukulele Ike, a.k.a. Cliff Edwards, Sings Again

Ukulele Ike, otherwise known as Cliff Edwards, was a major American pop star and an important early force in jazz. It’s time to give him another hearing.

by Donald Fagen via Jazztimes on December 7, 2020

If It's Tuesday, This Must Be Batuu

To work, a theme park needs to collapse the mythic pasts that it depicts with the pasts of our own lives.

by Deanna Day via Contingent on December 6, 2019

The Women Who Helped Build Hollywood

They played essential behind-the-scenes roles as the American movie industry was taking off. What happened?

by Margaret Talbot via The New Yorker on October 28, 2019

Soldiers burning books.

How We Roasted Donald Duck, Disney's Agent of Imperialism

Why a 47-year old anti-colonialist critique by Chilean dissidents may be newly relevant in the Trump era.

by Ariel Dorfman via The Guardian on October 5, 2018

Creating Disneyland Was Like Building a Brand New City

Even Magic Kingdoms need urban planners.

by Jessica Leigh Hester via Atlas Obscura on September 19, 2018

Will the Real Pocahontas Please Stand Up?

We might be better off if we knew a little more – or a little less – about her actual life.

by James Reinl via Al Jazeera on November 28, 2017

Still from Midnight Cowboy of a man with a gun in Times Square.

How the Movies Captured Times Square’s Grimy Golden Age

Times Square’s decline can be dated to the Depression, but it wasn’t until the 1970s that the bottom fell out.

by Nathaniel Rich via Current [The Criterion Collection] on July 25, 2024

Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert giving two thumbs up.

When the Movies Mattered

Siskel and Ebert and the heyday of popular movie criticism.

by Annie Berke via The Yale Review on June 12, 2024

Digital image of Lindsay Lohan, saying "Lindsay all grown up."

Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon

This tale of two girlhoods, Shirley Temple’s and Lindsay Lohan’s, sheds light on what “woman” means in the world of eroticized youth.

by Katherine Fusco via Dilettante Army on April 16, 2024

Keith Haring spray painting

Keith Haring, the Boy Who Cried Art

Was he a brilliant painter or a brilliant brand?

by Jackson Arn via The New Yorker on March 4, 2024

Gremlins climbing on a World War II warplane.

How Gremlins Went From Fairy Stories to Warplanes to Hollywood Legend

Meet these slippery, mischievous reflections of our anxieties about technology.

by Hadley Meares via Atlas Obscura on October 24, 2023

Collage of a shirtless performer and a cutaway image of an egg.

My Generation

Anthem for a forgotten cohort.

by Justin E. H. Smith via Harper’s on June 9, 2023

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