Cartoon Wasteland: Remediating and Recommodifying Archival Media in Disney’s Epic Mickey

Oswald’s Homecoming

In spite of its eponymous title, when Disney’s Wii video game Epic Mickey was released in 2010, the game garnered much more attention for one of its secondary characters: Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. This is perhaps unsurprising, as the game marked the rabbit’s first appearance in any Disney-animated text since 1927. As early as February 2006, when news first broke that the Walt Disney Company had acquired the rights to Oswald from NBCUniversal, much was made in the popular press of both Oswald’s “homecoming” and of the ways that the rabbit might be incorporated within and across Disney’s vast network of media holdings. Though in many ways a “forgotten” Disney character with whom contemporary audiences may not be familiar, Oswald has long figured in Disney lore, particularly in the many great-man histories of Walt Disney that link the “loss” of Oswald (though never a Disney-owned property) not only to the birth of Mickey Mouse but also to Disney’s emphatic insistence on maintaining absolute creative control over his intellectual property. The historical accuracy of these well-worn narratives notwithstanding, the issue of proprietary rights is nonetheless pertinent to the Oswald deal. Disney’s fierce policing of its media catalogue is no myth, nor is its systematic mining of its library of trademarked and copyrighted material for new commercial content.

In the eighty years since Oswald’s creation, Disney has grown from a small, independent animation studio to one of the largest media conglomerates in the world and one that, as Eric Smoodin puts it, has its “corporate finger in more cultural pies than perhaps any other twentieth century producer of mass entertainment.”[3] Thus, the question of how and why Disney would choose to reintroduce Oswald in a video game offers a particularly productive line of investigation for examining the corporate and aesthetic logics of Disney’s synergistic remediation practices and for mapping the ways in which such commercial and creative pressures shape the production and design of specific texts. This article thus traces the history of Epic Mickey’s development and the corporate dealings that shaped its highly intertextual formal and aesthetic design. This article’s aim is to examine not only the macrostructural dimensions of Disney’s corporate synergy practices and recommodification strategies but also the role that creative agents working within the larger corporate structure played in determining the game’s design and deployment of “old” Disney media as well as newly secured properties, in a new-media format. Finally, parsing the game’s wider cultural significance, I also consider the central function that memory and archiving, as discursive practices, perform in constructing modes of player engagement with the text.

The Walt Disney Company’s multimedia empire understandably figures prominently in media industries studies of convergence, synergy, and cultural production in the age of the multinational conglomerate. While macrostructural, industry-based analyses are indispensable for understanding the industrial dimensions of Disney’s cultural production, it is equally crucial to consider how the company’s corporate strategies are brought to bear on the form and aesthetics of particular media texts—not only the most commonly analyzed media objects, such as movies and other filmed entertainment, but new-media endeavors as well. As Thomas Schatz argues in his contribution to Media Industries’ inaugural issue, recent studies of media industries tend to “focus on ownership and control, on technology and policy, on marketing and consumption, with only incidental concern for the creative and cultural dynamics involved.”[4] There is comparatively little work, however, “about individual agency in the creation of media content, about the formal style and expressive qualities of individual works, and about the analysis and assessment of media texts.”[5] Schatz thus emphasizes the need for media industries studies attuned to the fact that “the media industries are cultural industries involving the systematic production and consumption of expressive, meaningful works that manifest our shared sense of ourselves, our lives, our values.”[6] Schatz’s comments are worth noting here, as Epic Mickey’s innovative combination of old and new media necessitates an attentiveness both to the corporate circumstances surrounding the game’s development and to its unique formal/aesthetic qualities. Thus, in keeping with Schatz’s call for a more integrated media studies approach, this essay combines a political economic analysis of the macroindustrial configurations informing Epic Mickey’s development with a close analysis of the text’s “expressive qualities” and cultural significance, and considers the role that individual creative agents played in its production.

My analysis is thus structured around four key axes of inquiry, drawing on media industries studies work on synergy, corporate archiving, and individual agency and theories of digitextuality, and prosthetic memory. First, Janet Wasko’s political economic analyses of Disney undergird my arguments concerning how Epic Mickey figures into the broader corporate logic of Disney’s synergistic recommodification and reissuing practices. While these macrostructural factors are key to unpacking the game’s commercial objectives, as my second line of analysis reveals, individual creative agents also played an important role both in determining the game’s design and its synergistic deployment of Disney properties. Looking at issues of creative agency, I draw primarily on an interview I conducted in June 2014 with Warren Spector, founder of the game’s developer, Junction Point Studios. Spector’s oral history of the game’s production provides valuable insight into the commercial and aesthetic objectives that both he and Disney aimed to achieve with Epic Mickey. Third, engaging with Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s conceptualization of remediation—“the representation of one medium in another”—as well as Anna Everett’s work on digitextuality and click theory, I offer a close textual analysis of the game’s formal and aesthetic repurposing of archival and analog material in a digital medium.[7] Lastly, turning to Epic Mickey’s cultural and ideological valences and identificatory structures, I borrow from Alison Landsberg’s theory of “prosthetic memory” to parse the ways in which Epic Mickey negotiates processes of archiving and remembering.

Putting these discrete theoretical threads and interpretive approaches into dialogue with one another allows for a more comprehensive examination of the nexus of corporate and creative imperatives undergirding Epic Mickey’s design and gameplay as well as the identificatory mechanisms through which it engages players in cultural memory work. This paper thus proposes a methodological scaffolding for critical game-industries research attentive to the relationships between macroindustrial corporate structures, mid-level creative practices, and textual meaning-making. Before delving into this analysis, I first offer a brief overview of the game’s mechanics and core narrative elements.