Disney Easter Eggs

I think I might be bending the rules a bit with this post (also deadlines, but it’s end of the semester, so…). I had a really hard time thinking of a topic to write about. I tried to think about what it’s like when “the supposedly seamless world of ‘content’ [is] disrupted or otherwise affected by that which contains it.” In a way, it reminded me of metafiction. Fiction is often immersive enough that we don’t need to think about where the story came from, but a meta-fictional text is always drawing our attention to its own construction. In a similar way, such a device draws our attention to the “maddening tentacles” that are just below the surface of the story.

Thinking of the question in this way, I was reminded of when a friend and I became totally fascinated by those Disney easter eggs. Some of them are cute gestures to previous Disney films (Belle from Beauty & the Beast and Pumba from The Lion King are both featured in the Hunchback of Notre Dame), but the ones that get the most attention are the phallic imagery or the word “sex” appearing in different places. This was probably when I was about 13, by which point I had stopped watching Disney movies, but still only thought of them as entertaining stories. It seems silly to say, but growing up on Disney meant that the content of a story—for example, Cinderella—became so wholly merged with the container—the specific Disney animation of that story, or the vehicle by which the story is relayed to the viewer—that even now it’s actually impossible for me to separate them. Seeing that penis on the cover of The Little Mermaid drew back the curtain a little bit on Disney movies and revealed the constructed quality of the animation, and thereby drove a little wedge between the content of the story and the container of the animation and showed them to be two distinct things.

The annotations on this one are super helpful--especially "glistening."

This garbled, sloppy, possible spelling out of "sex" in the Lion King is so much less offensive that everything else in Disney. The leader of the crows in Dumbo is actually called Jim. His name is "Jim Crow." I think it would be possible to argue that Disney's weird racism also kind of serves the same purpose as these intentional glitches...

The Rescuers (and Down Under) is/are one of the most underrated Disney films. Eva Gabor voiced Bianca, which is probably the best decision Disney ever made (second only to the release of Maleficent on May 30th, which is going to make all of my dreams come true--Maleficent is hands down the best Disney villain of all time).

Okay, I am guessing that this one is a fake to make fun of all the idiots like myself who spend their time looking at stupid Disney easter eggs on the internet. Even so, it is simultaneously the best and worst thing I have ever seen.