Refugees From Disney’s World

“Welcome, welcome, our newest brothers and sisters from the Lone Star State, to the Church of the Baited Mousetrap. You join our congregation of believers who have stood up and said ‘no’ to the false deities of Disney.

“Now, for those in our flock who hadn’t heard, the Texas Board of Education heroically dumped its $45-million worth of Disney stock to protest all those violent, sexual movies. No, not ‘Hercules’--’Pulp Fiction.’

“In this house, we never say, ‘right church, wrong pew.’ Here, there are no wrong pews . . . only many and different ones.

“That pew there is the environmentalists’. They hate Disney for chewing up wild habitat in Florida, for anthropomorphizing Siberian tigers into cuddly kittens, and for all those dead Dalmatians that looked so cute on film but when the kids took ‘em home and they didn’t act like the ones in the movie, they got sent to doggie heaven by the vet.

“The ‘Pocahontas’ protesters are over there, with the Arab Americans protesting ‘Aladdin’ and the African Americans who would protest their stereotypes in Disney films if they ever get cast in any. Squeeze right on in next to the Christian fundamentalists who can’t believe that Disney World actually holds an annual ‘Gay Day.’

“Now those pews over there--those are the lawsuit pews. Big Bird, he’s in sanctuary here. Disney kept trying to buy him out. And that’s Peter Pan. His copyright expired about 90 years ago, but Disney acts like they own him, so he’s hiding out here too.

“And to our new members, we repeat our belief: ‘Who says the lion cannot lie down with the lamb, as the Lion King already lieth down with stockholders?’

*

The House of That Darn Disney is so big because Disney is so big. Having something for everyone also means having something to tick off everyone. And Disney has theme parks and a TV network and cable channels and movie companies, newspapers, radio and TV stations, hotels, pro sports teams and a record company, and all the tie-ins and spinoffs. It built a town in Florida so pristine it makes the village in “The Truman Show” look like Calcutta. It holds the marketing rights to the RCMP--the Mounties. Its products sell from Tuzla to Tierra del Fuego.

Sometimes it seems like a fourth branch of government. In Anaheim, more than a half-billion dollars in municipal bonds were sold to pay for public improvements, many of them to support Disney’s second theme park there. In Florida, where Disney World thrives, its improvement district is a kind of city-state which--thanks to the Florida Legislature--is empowered to create its own municipal courts system and build its own nuclear power plant.

In whatever costume the world sees Disney, beneath Snow White’s peasant blouse beats the heart of a savvy CEO. Nothing is too big to aspire to buy; nothing is too small to escape notice.

Disney sued three Florida day-care centers for painting Disney figures on their walls without authorization, which usually means payment. The furor only ended when Universal stepped in and painted Flintstones figures, free, over the Disney ones. An elementary school in the Valley was named after Walt Disney, but when it put schoolkids in mouse ears on its letterhead, Disney forced it to stop.

I heard of a woman who went to a Westside bakery to order a Winnie the Pooh cake for her child’s birthday. The baker declined, saying Disney was known to sue people over “this kind of thing.”

When a colleague writing about infant deaths described a gravestone in a Culver City cemetery bearing a dead child’s name and a carving of Minnie Mouse, I kept waiting to read that Disney had sued the grieving mother, too.

Disney is pop culture, and pop culture is us; it has made in America stamped all over it. We may be appalled by “Pulp Fiction” or driven mad by “It’s a Small World,” but who among us is brave enough to tell the kids they can’t have that action-figure theme meal?

*

Maybe I sit alone in my pew, but I doubt it.

In my pew, we grieve at how the individual imaginations of millions of children are crowded out by the monolithic Disney version. Consider its fairy tales, as sanitized as a strip of paper across a motel room toilet seat: In an original “Cinderella,” the wicked sisters are punished by being rolled down cobbled streets sealed inside barrels lined with nails. Scary? Absolutely. The child psychiatrist Bruno Bettelheim proposed that scary fairy tales help children get over their fears vicariously, a way of preparing for real-world horrors. The only fear Disney’s versions will help them get over is a fear of marketing.

Patt Morrison’s column appears Wednesdays. Her e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com