The Disney Fetish

One poster, psychedelically colored, shows the Seven Dwarfs, Snow White, Goofy, Minnie Mouse, Cinderella and a naked Tinker Bell, and other Walt Disney characters indulging in what looks like one of the Marquis de Sade's more complicated performances. Meantime, Mickey Mouse is shooting heroin into his arm. In another poster, Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse and Goofy are getting stoned on a water pipe.

Besides the profit motive and what has become a rather relentless desire to give offense, there seems in such new novelty and head shop items an impulse to debunk childhood fantasies, or at any rate the fantasies of Disney's artists, by degrading the whole crew and thereby achieving a kind of liberation. It is Disney in the style of Jean Genet--a symptom, paradoxically, of the fetish for childhood that has seized many who are in the process of leaving it.

Disney's lawyers were unamused. They filed suit in Chicago federal court against 18 defendants, including local shopkeepers and two distributors, charging copyright infringements, trade disparagement and other offenses. Mickey and the rest, said the suit, "have acquired an image of innocent delightfulness and are known and loved by people all over the world." One shopkeeper observed blandly if accurately: "There are a lot dirtier things around."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.