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

1. Colleen Montgomery is a PhD candidate in media studies at The University of Texas at Austin. Her dissertation project, supported by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Doctoral Fellowship, examines the industrial dimensions of vocal performance in Disney and Pixar animated features of the late 1980s through the first decade of the 2000s. Her work has been published in Cinephile, Animation Studies, and the Cinema Journal Teaching Dossier. She currently serves as the co-coordinating editorial chair of The Velvet Light Trap Journal.

2. The author would like to thank the Media Industries editors and anonymous readers for their invaluable feedback and support as well as Thomas Schatz, Mary Kearney, and Paul Monticone, who provided helpful editorial suggestions on early drafts of this article.

3. Smoodin, Eric, “Introduction: How to Read Walt Disney,” in Disney Discourse: Producing the Magic Kingdom, ed. Eric Smoodin (London: Routledge, 1994), 2.

4. Thomas Schatz, “Film Studies, Cultural Studies, and Media Industries Studies,” Media Industries 1, no. 1 (2014): 40.

5. Ibid., 39.

6. Ibid., 40.

7. J. David Bolter and Richard A. Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 45.

8. Other notable “forgotten” characters include the Gremlins, title characters of a 1943 Roald Dahl book and uncompleted feature film collaboration between Dahl and Disney; Horace Horsecollar and Clarabelle Cow, who first appeared in late 1920s Disney animated shorts; and Mickey Mouse’s eponymous nemesis in the 1933 short The Mad Doctor.

9. Warren Spector, in discussion with the author, June 19, 2014. All other Spector quotes cited in the article are also drawn from this interview.

10. Mike Budd, “Introduction: Private Disney, Public Disney,” in Rethinking Disney: Private Control, Public Dimensions, ed. Mike Budd and Max H. Kirsch (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2005), 1.

11. Janet Wasko, Understanding Disney: The Manufacture of Fantasy (Cambridge: Polity, 2001), 44.

12. Ibid., 45.

13. Ibid., 83.

14. Paul Grainge, Brand Hollywood: Selling Entertainment in a Global Media Age (New York: Routledge, 2007), 115.

15. Ibid.

16. Wasko, Understanding Disney, 84.

17. The interns were a group of students participating in Disney Interactive’s Student Internship program: a paid summer internship for graduate and undergraduate students.

18. Subsequently, in 1928, Universal head Carl Laemmle ousted Mintz and installed Walter Lantz as the series’ new producer. Lantz would go on to produce more than 140 Oswald shorts for Universal between 1928 and 1943. Michael Barrier, The Animated Man: A Life of Walt Disney (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 51–58.

19. The deal also involved the transfer of a number programming and promotional rights, including telecast rights to the live Friday coverage of four Ryder Cup golf championships through 2014, expanded video highlights for the Olympics through 2012, video promotion for ESPN’s Monday Night Football during NBC’s Sunday Night Football through 2011, and expanded highlight rights for other NBC Sports properties through 2011.

20. Walt Disney Company, “ Walt Disney’s 1927 Animated Star—Oswald the Lucky Rabbit—Returns to Disney: Mickey Mouse’s Predecessor Rejoins Disney’s Family of Animated Characters through Agreement with NBC/Universal,” last modified February 9, 2006.

21. The cut scenes are notable not only for their 2-D cinematic aesthetic but also for their animation style, which was directly inspired by Disney concept artist Mary Blair’s work.

22. In side-scrolling platform games, the player’s avatar moves laterally across the screen, jumping between platforms or over obstacles to advance in the game. Rather than view the action from the character’s point of view, the player’s perspective is perpendicular to the axis of action.

23. Spector notes that his production team was given full access to the Pinocchio score, in particular. Jim Dooley composed original music for the game.

24. Bolter and Grusin, Remediation, 46.

25. Anna Everett, “Digitextuality and Click Theory: Theses on Convergence Media in the Digital Age,” in New Media: Theories and Practices of Digitextuality, ed. Anna Everett and John T. Caldwell (New York: Routledge, 2003), 7.

26. Ibid., 21.

27. Anna Everett, “Click This: From Analog Dreams to Digital Realities,” Cinema Journal 43, no. 3 (2004): 93, doi:10.1353/cj.2004.0015.

28. Ibid.

29. Everett, “Digitextuality and Click Theory,” 14.

30. Ibid., 16.

31. Zach Whalen and Laurie N. Taylor, eds., Playing the Past: History and Nostalgia in Video Games (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2008), 1.

32. Ibid., 9.

33. Ibid., 5.

34. “Walt Disney’s 1927 Animated Star—Oswald the Lucky Rabbit—Returns to Disney.”

35. Alison Landsberg, “Prosthetic Memory: Total Recall and Blade Runner,” in Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk: Cultures of Technological Embodiment, ed. Mike Featherstone and Roger Burrows (London: Sage, 1995), 175.

36. Ibid., 176.

37. Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 143.

38. Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation (New York: Routledge, 2012), 23.

39. It is worth noting here that Spector himself was formerly employed as an archivist at The University of Texas’s Harry Ransom Center, where he was involved in creating the first catalogue for the David O. Selznick Collection.

40. Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory, 143.

Bibliography

• Barrier, Michael. The Animated Man: A Life of Walt Disney. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008.
• Bolter, J. David, and Richard A Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000.
• Everett, Anna. “Click This: From Analog Dreams to Digital Realities.” Cinema Journal 43, no. 3 (2004): 93–98. doi:10.1353/cj.2004.0015.
• ———. “Digitextuality and Click Theory: Theses on Convergence Media in the Digital Age.” In New Media: Theories and Practices of Digitextuality, edited by Anna Everett and John T. Caldwell, 3–28. New York: Routledge, 2003.
• Grainge, Paul. Brand Hollywood: Selling Entertainment in a Global Media Age. New York: Routledge, 2007.
• Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. New York: Routledge, 2012.
• Landsberg, Alison. Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.
• ———. “Prosthetic Memory: Total Recall and Blade Runner.” In Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk: Cultures of Technological Embodiment, edited by Mike Featherstone and Roger Burrows, 175–90. London: Sage, 1995.
• Mike Budd. “Introduction: Private Disney, Public Disney.” In Rethinking Disney: Private Control, Public Dimensions, edited by Mike Budd and Max H. Kirsch. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2005.
• Schatz, Thomas. “Film Studies, Cultural Studies, and Media Industries Studies.”Media Industries 1, no. 1 (2014).
• Smoodin, Eric. “Introduction: How to Read Walt Disney.” In Disney Discourse: Producing the Magic Kingdom, edited by Eric Smoodin, 2–22. New York: Routledge, 1994.
• Walt Disney Company. “Walt Disney's 1927 Animated Star—Oswald The Lucky Rabbit—Returns to Disney: Mickey Mouse's Predecessor Rejoins Disney's Family of Animated Characters through Agreement with NBC/Universal.” Last modified February 9, 2006.
• Wasko, Janet. Understanding Disney: The Manufacture of Fantasy. Cambridge: Polity, 2001.
• Whalen, Zach, and Laurie N. Taylor, eds. Playing the Past: History and Nostalgia in Video Games. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2008.

Copyright © 2015 (Colleen Montgomery). Media Industries is an open-access, peer-reviewed, online academic journal. As such, we aim to participate in the open exchange of information. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial No Derivatives (by-nc-nd) License. Under this license, this work is available for sharing and noncommercial distribution provided the appropriate attribution is given.