Monday Morning Music Ministry

4-4-22

In one of my former lives – not that I believe in reincarnation; I mean I have had several and varied careers – I was a writer of Walt Disney comics. Numerous treatments and scripts for Mickey, Donald, Uncle Scrooge, and the rest of the gang.

When I was hired, I was given a “story bible” – note the small-b – which instructed artists and writers how to handle the characters. My essential requirement was to “write like Carl Barks and Floyd Gottfredson.” These were the men most responsible for the Donald and Mickey, respectively, we knew from comic books and strips. These men were heroes; as a fan and scholar I already knew them personally; and of course it was a dream assignment. (Carl had even created the Uncle Scrooge character.)

I have copped a few awards and plaques through the years, and they are on my office wall, but they are arranged around my framed membership certificate from the Mickey Mouse Club, 1955. Dearer to me. “Ricky Marshall,” printed in red, around which those trivialities orbit.

I was, in childhood years and in grownup-childhood years, Mickey’s pal. Uncle Walt’s pal, really; of course I went to the theme parks and collected toys and went to the Disney movies. To kids in America for almost a century now, Mickey has been part of our DNA, in our blood.

Suddenly we are diagnosed with a blood infection, however.

The dissolution of the Magic Kingdom’s magic, the betrayal of Uncle Walt’s vision and ethos, have not been precipitous, but recently have accelerated with a vengeance. At the parks and in cartoons and movies, the words “Ladies” and “Gentlemen” and “Boys” and Girls” literally will be proscribed. A Princess is an endangered species because girls who might not dream of being princesses must not be offended nor have such awful visions planted in their hearts.

Mickey and Tinkerbell have been dethroned as Disney spokespeople; “Goofy” would be more appropriate; I hereby nominate him. Or Cruella.

Today, I would refuse to work for the transformed Disney, this counterfeit colossus. I knew a delightful lady, Virginia Davis, who as a little girl was a neighbor of the unknown Walter Disney in Kansas City. When the ambitious cartoonist dreamed up a concept of a live-action girl in an animated world, which became the silent cartoon series Alice in Cartoonland, Ginni played the role. And when the series became a success, Disney moved to Hollywood to produce more, and the Davis family followed. Decades later, when I invited her, out of retirement in Boise, Idaho, to comics conventions here and in Europe, she recalled uncountable stories of Walt… who, several years after Alice, created Mickey Mouse!

Ginni Davis remained friends with Walt’s widow Lillian. Even 25 years ago, I was told, Lillian was very unhappy with what the Disney “brand” had become; and she thought Walt would not have recognized, or liked, it either. And that was before the studio’s PC-pledges, this week, to sanitize its vocabulary and to make a corporate commitment (as per the Disney website) to design half of the studio’s characters to “come from underrepresented groups.”

Disney’s President of General Entertainment Content Karey Burke confirmed the policy. Despite her title, she claimed in a Zoom call to employees that she was shocked to realize that there were only a “handful” of “queer” lead characters in Disney productions. Odd, since she proudly said that she has two “queer” children herself. Technically, one “gay” and one “pansexual,” a category whose meaning eludes me (as do a couple of the letters in “LGBTQIA+”).

The spark that ignited this latest bit of lunacy was the Florida legislature’s law to prohibit the discussion of topics like transgenderism – including counseling and invitations to role-play – to students from kindergarten to second grade. The governor signed the bill; the growing “woke” elements of the nation’s “virtuous” elites erupted in protest; and Walt Disney World in Orlando – the sprawling megalopolis that enjoys tax and regulatory privileges from the state – went public with its dissent, and initiated political threats.

“Underrepresented,” for those of you who have not been following the map, navigating this new Fantasyland, does not mean creating characters with disabilities, or are Amish or Orthodox or Pentecostal, or albinos, or kids with developmental challenges, or birth defects, or cerebral palsy or Down Syndrome. No conjoined twins, sightless, nor (literal) dwarfs. No, the vast Disney “universe” will be populated 50 per cent by characters representing the minuscule portion of the population with rare sexual attributes like gender dysphagia. Pandering, that is, to a different audience in a particular demographic pool.

Disney’s declaration of war on traditional culture and America’s spiritual and social heritage is a pop-culture version of Russia’s brutal visit to Ukraine. American childhood is the innocent, unsuspecting landscape. This not only represents a serious matter; it is a serious matter.

Speaking of wars, they can be lost, or won. Any of us can go broke or lose a job, but we get a new job, we recover. Couples split up, and get back together… or don’t, but we find new loves eventually. Friends move away; we make new friends. Someone might betray us, and it hurts; but time heals the wound, or we forgive; usually we forget. In awful situations, we get sick, and recover, or cope. Wounded soldiers manage and, increasingly, are supported by those who love and appreciate them. Pets die; we get new pets. Life is a wheel.

But there is one thing that cannot be restored, or repaired, and certainly not redeemed when violated or lost. That is the innocence of a child.

“Kids grow up too fast,” we often hear, and that seems true, but I address more than that. As life has become too loud, too rude, too new, too strange, and, yes, too fast for adults… it surely has for children. Do technology and new media rob children of imagination… or maybe encourage imagination? I suspect it will take generations for that judgment.

But I am not inviting us to think about imagination. I am talking about innocence.

Aspects of sex and sexuality ought to be the domain of parents within the family setting. Similarly, matters of morality. Values. Standards. But teachers, teachers’ unions, liberal politicians and judges, the “entertainment” industry, and the talking animals and prancing fairies at Disney theme parks – they mostly agree that parents are the last people who should inculcate knowledge and wisdom to their children.

Maybe, next, they will propose that parents can be the responsible parties for reading, writing, and arithmetic, since those disciplines are no longer the priorities of schools.

Train children in the way they should grow, and when they are old they will not turn from it (Proverbs 22:6).

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Click: Slumber My Darling

5-23-16

Back when I was a writer for Disney Comics, I was given a bible – not the Holy Bible, although it had the properties of life and death in its pages. Like “script bibles” or “story bibles” in filmmaking and TV series, it is a summary of characters, personalities, traits, and background data, to keep writers and artists on-target. The essence was plainly stated: “Stick as close to Barks and Gottfredson as you can.”

Many of us grew up with Disney comics, and the definitive creators, although they were anonymous at the time, were Carl Barks (“the Duck Man”) and Floyd Gottfredson, who drew all the Mickey adventures. What a dream: write and draw like Carl and Floyd (each of whom I was blessed to know), and get paid for it.

I had monthly conferences with my editors, and for a while things went swimmingly. I even bought a house from all the stories I wrote. But there was one major bump in the road that I remember, decades later.

Scrooge McDuck and his nephews often set out on adventures. Humor and suspense, mysteries and slapstick, conflicts and surprise endings – what fun to dream up those stories. Once I was excited to invent a premise that contained a “switch” on a famous historical legend. Just as the Spanish explorer Ponce de Leon sought the mythical Fountain of Youth, I wrote an outline with Scrooge, Donald, and the nephews coming across the Fountain of Age.

The story possibilities were great. Of course Unca Scrooge inadvertently would drink from it; his instant decrepitude would be more than dismaying; it would materially threaten their quest in that story – I think it was a race against his rival; the attempts to counter the guzzling could be funny; and so forth. I was surprised, for all the ink spilled over the centuries about the Fountain of Youth, that nobody ever utilized its opposite as a possible storyline.

One of my editors, in a meeting, rejected it out of hand. “A Fountain of Old? That’s nonsense; it can’t be possible.” No; other editors tended toward my point of view; there could indeed be minerals or properties that could speed the aging process. Maybe a local tribe of elderly looking people could warn Donald and company at the last minute.

But that one editor persisted. “It simply doesn’t make sense that there could be a fountain, or a lake somewhere, whose waters make you age rapidly.”

I remember the session. After a moment of silence, I looked around the room and said, “Wait a minute. We are dealing with ducks here – ducks that walk and talk and dress themselves. One of them is richest duck in the world, and we carefully make sure he has his top hat, spats, and cane, every story. Huey, Dewey, and Louie, each of whom speaks a third of a sentence. Talking ducks!!!” And we were stymied about a plot where a hidden lake’s water aged you quickly.

The larger absurdity – or maybe it was ultimate logic – was that a room full of grown men, indeed an entire industry, made careers out of creating a “universe” of talking ducks and mice. The logic rested in the fact that the American public (and the world’s population, deep down) likes fantasy.

I was struck at the time (by the way, the story did make print), and I still am impressed, by the fact that many of the world’s great stories and legends have to do with water. Of course water is elemental source of life, irrigation, navigation, and all manner of sustenance: no mystery. Considering the dramatic possibilities – but not to be over-dramatic – the great poets and artists and writers and dramatists did not enthuse over air in the same manner as water.

Yes, they breathed; and manned flight might have been more of a technical challenge awaiting these professions. But, for instance to my case, humankind could have ventured into the waters of the world to fish… and been satisfied. But rivers became roads beckoning elsewhere; seas and oceans were irresistible, if frightening, gateways to the unknown. And we are back to Fantasy’s role in humankind’s DNA. From the arts to commerce.

The first chapters of Genesis make seemingly disproportionate references to water and “the waters.” It was through a Flood that God first judged the human race. Water, throughout the Bible, is a “type” of the Holy Spirit over and over. Jesus turned water into wine… His FIRST miracle. When Christ’s side was pierced on the cross, it is reported that both blood and water flowed. Start searching for references to water in the Bible and you will be deluged, by the number of them, their variety, their significance.

Are any of them references to a Fountain of Youth?

In a way, yes. The fourth chapter of John records that Jesus encountered a Samaritan woman who was drawing water at Jacob’s Well. He asked her for a drink and she was surprised, since she was a despised foreigner. Nevertheless she was sarcastic when He said that she would thirst again from the world’s water but He offered water after which no one would thirst again.

She still scoffed, and then He identified her as an adulteress, and other facts that made her call Him a prophet. But He said of Himself that, more, He was the Christ, and His meaning became clear. As clear as pure water.

Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”  The woman then said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I will not be thirsty or have to come here to draw water.”

Augustine has explained that the woman was a “type” of the world, the coming Church, for whom Jesus came: gentiles, pilgrims, and strangers who needed the Living Water. “So the woman left her water jug and went into town and said to the people, ‘Come, see a man who told me all that I ever did. Can this indeed be the Christ?’”

Truly Jesus provides – and is – the Eternal Water of life. It occurs to me that we all, in a way, are drinking from a Fountain of Old without really intending to do so; and we scurry about, all our lives, looking for a Fountain of Youth – or some other elixir of life, happiness, or prosperity.

And we thirst again, and again. And again. What odd ducks we are.

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Click: There Is a Fountain

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