The Magical-Market World of Disney

Monthly Review, April, 2001 by Janet Wasko

Looking at the Disney merchandise available in one American city, Tracy compared different types of Disney products and where they were produced. He found that a majority (80 percent) of the toys, jewelry and ceramics (which require manual labor) were manufactured in dependent countries, while media products (which benefit from automated production) were overwhelmingly (92 percent) produced in industrialized nations.

Conclusion

Disney is an icon of American culture. It has insinuated itself into the everyday life of hundreds of millions of people, primarily through its role in the commodification of children's culture, but also through the commodification of media and culture, more generally. Although it still has a beneficent public image that goes back to the original Disney animation studio, there is no doubt about what the company is all about. As Michael Eisner put it bluntly in a 1981 staff memo: "We have no obligation to make art. We have no obligation to make a statement. To make money is our only objective" (cited in Kim Masters, The Keys to the Kingdom). Or as one can read on the Disney investor's Web page: "Disney's overriding objective is to create shareholder values by continuing to be the world's premier entertainment company from a creative, strategic and financial standpoint." [4] What Disney is about is creating entertainment commodities that penetrate into homes everywhere through the manipulation of innocence and dreams--the manufacture of fantasy for profit.

In terms of accumulation, there are no limits to the expansionary goals of Disney, which sees itself as a global corporation with a universal, increasingly high-tech content in a new economic age. The magical-market world that Disney has created is one in which a global megacorporation is able to exploit the new digital technology while continuing to plunder history, mythology, and folktales for its visual icons--and transforming these into new, fun-filtered licensed products aimed mostly at children, who are taught to buy into both the visual images and the final licensed products. At the same time, Disney, with its unlimited commercial thrust, has absorbed one of the big U.S. television networks, ABC, giving it considerable control over not simply the manufacture of fantasy, but also the presentation of television news, supposedly a window into the world of reality. What Disney thus represents is a giant financial box, expanding seemingly without limits into a wide range of cultural products. In the Disney utopia we will all live locked up in this financial box in a sea of commodified culture--a fate reminiscent of Weber's iron cage.

"People feel overworked and underpaid, especially in contrast to their CEOs, who now make 500 times the average employee's wages."

Business Week, September 11, 2000, p. 182

Janet Wasko teaches the political economy of communication at the University of Oregon. This article is based on two chapters from Understanding Disney: The Manufacture of Fantasy, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001).