Apologies for the lack of a non-Disney podcast this week, if anyone actually cares that there wasn’t one. We had a busy week with our friend coming back from Army training and Brandon wasn’t in the mood for podcasts and stuff.
Also, apologies for him sniffling a bunch. I cut out as much of it as I could, but there’s still some in there.
What’s in this ep:
0:00 – Introduction
2:12 – Dumbo intro/history of Disney up through Dumbo
8:02 – Dumbo shows the future of animated movies
10:22 – Analyzing Dumbo
34:02 – Bambi introduction
35:22 – Analyzing Bambi
(At one point I say that I don’t remember the music of Fantasia because I don’t care about it. I forgot that we also had it turned down and talked over it. Still, I don’t think it’s an entirely incorrect statement.)
58:26 – Cinderella introduction
1:00:00 – Analyzing Cinderella
(I think Brandon and I are on two different pages re: gender roles in this part)
My Sword Is Unbelievably Dull 
1:11:23
I’m speaking a bit out of my element (since it’s been a half decade since some of these lit courses), and I’m not necessarily big on metaphors — but historicity aside, your take on Cinderella (antidepressants) is pretty fucking intriguing. And actually, fairy tales generally have their beginning in folk tales; and THOSE invite a hell of a lot of reading and re-reading. Little Red Riding Hood, for instance, has plenty in it about poop humor, rape, even incest. Hansel and Gretel, possibly, too. And of course, violence and mistreatment is a given; nobody really questions the messed-up stuff in those spheres.
With that, I think it’d be cool if you actively keep some of that in mind as you watched more of these films.
And, yeah, people love tossing gender stereotype issues around; I’m tired of speculating on the reasons why people do it. Point is, it happens, and I’m glad you’re actually trying to work through figuring out what these films are — or, I guess, what the parameters of the expectation you should have of them are. It feels like nobody cares about the “magic” of Disney anymore (do people still believe or talk about that anymore, or is that a dead notion, lol?)
If one person I know would feel something like “magic,” it might be Brandon, although he’s the type of person who doesn’t tend to cling to one concrete reasoning behind the way he sees things, which is the difficulty of having him talk in these things. He’ll say one minute that it’s the “magic” and another that a movie is more of a technical achievement, and you’ll notice that I often have to correct him when he does that. I think it’s mostly because unlike me, he’s not used to having to defend the shit he says and be careful with what he means.
As for seeing metaphors and such in my analysis, it can be fun, though I’m usually not one to go for those kinds of explorations. It’s like I said in my video about MLP S3 premiere: King Sombra being a metaphor for depression is a fun way of looking at it, and you could go on all day reading it that way, but it doesn’t help much in interpreting the main narrative of the episode. Some people really like viewing things metaphorically and doing it with long explanations, but I’ve never been a fan of those explanations and I’ve never written them. That’s why I didn’t dwell too much on the depression metaphor in Cinderella, nor the death metaphor in Snow White. I could have, but it’s not that interesting to me.
The wicked stepmother deal definitely strikes a vein with many women. I have seen far too many Latin soaps to ever forget that premise. It’s always the same deal, and yes, always the father is this really nice guy who somehow decides to get hitched to an obviously demonic woman. It’s quite an insane trope, really.
I guess the argument with the mouse and the gender stereotypes would go like this: you say that the male mouse cannot sew well and the women can so it’s natural for him to suggest that the women do the job. But this is fiction. Mice can’t speak, for one thing, and yet the decision was made to have this mouse speak and behave like a human being. If they already went this far, then they could have easily had this male mouse be able to sew, be able to at least contribute to the job and not stereotypically dump all of this work on the ladies. So the choices they made reinforce a stereotype, rather than help broaden possibilities for men and women etc.
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12:10 – 12:23
Holy fucking shit. Do you know how vile and racist you sound? God damn.
Yes.
I don’t really have a defense or anything for that line, I probably was just enjoying saying random racist shit.
Comments and observations on trends and statistics in different cultures can be made without being motivated by hatred.
I found your Disneycasts because I originally started listening to your youtube channel, discussing MLP, and really enjoyed how you organize your thoughts, and your overall approach. I REALLY appreciate how you obviously do your homework beforehand, and will touch on history and overall relevance, because that sort of stuff is just fascinating to me and really keeps my interest.
I have to say, I’m rather disappointed since I just found these casts, and it looks like there’s been no update past episode 3 (which I’ve yet to listen to, and will do so after this), because I’ve really enjoyed it so far, and thought it was really great how you were starting at the beginning and working your work chronologically through the Disney animation movies. I do hope that you and your friend will pick this podcast up again, because I’ve really been enjoying it.
It’s also been a very interesting listen because I grew up on Disney movies, and loved so many of them, watching them over and over again, so it’s really cool to hear the opinions of people who haven’t done so, and their very fresh opinions. On the other hand, I think having a guest on every once in a while that HAS a long history of watching Disney movies since their childhood would be a good stance to play against. Speaking personally, and having seen so many of the movies, I can say that I come up with some good points to bring up based on my experience, and I’m sure someone else with the same history would have similar points to address.
For example, I actually thought it was interesting how you brought up the Bambi sequel in this episode, but didn’t bring up the Cinderella sequels (which I’m assuming is just because you hadn’t heard of them, as you obviously haven’t watched as many Disney movies). There are 2 sequels, Cinderella II: Dreams Come True, which was a compilation of several short stories and exceedingly forgettable, and Cinderella III: A Twist in Time, which was PHENOMENAL and by far my favorite out of all the straight-to-videos. It actually has a really compelling overall story, and gives more life to the characters. I completely agree that it was pretty hard to actually choose a favorite character from the original movie, but a large focus of Cinderella III is creating a lot of depth and humanization of the different characters, and they really resonate with you a lot more and help make it into a really great movie.
Anyway, that’s enough of my rambling. I just wanted to say how much I’ve really enjoyed these podcasts, and I hope you and your friend start doing them again. Thanks for the awesome listens! : )
I’m glad you enjoyed them! It’s nice to know someone got something out of these, haha!
The reason we stopped is because Brandon got burned out on doing podcasts, and was less available for a little while because of school. He’s talked about his desire to continue marathoning the Disney movies, but without doing podcasts, so I’m not sure about the future. We had both watched Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan, but I never got around to the next film. I’m certainly interested in doing it, so I’ll see if Brandon may be yet interested.
Definitely~ I work from home, and podcasts and audio books are my favorite things to listen as they don’t distract by having any visuals, and can keep me entertained for the long hours I put in. : )
I hope that your friend Brandon picks up the desire to do more of these podcasts, as I said I’ve greatly enjoyed them~
Well, Brandon says he’s interested, but has to rewatch the movies first. So, yay! Maybe there’ll be an episode 4 pretty soon!
Excellent, I shall keep an eye out for updates! : ) Thanks again~
I’ve really been enjoying these too. Hopefully there’s an episode 4 sometime soon :)
Oh, and you need to see Cinderella III. It’s the best of the Disney direct-to-video sequels. I love Cinderella, but I think I like Cinderella III a little better. They give everyone, especially the Prince, more character and make them fight to solve their problems instead of having the Fairy Godmother do it for them. And they make Cinderella kind of a badass, especially in the climax. It’s fucking awesome. Go see it. Don’t watch Cinderella 2, though. That is one terrible movie, and you don’t need to see 2 to understand 3.
I will take you up on this.
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