Holding Their Banner High

By RICHARD CORLISS

Michael Eisner says he was raised in Manhattan, but he must have meant on Mars. What earthling could claim that he never saw a Disney movie until his mid-20s?

From 1937, when Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs premiered, until, say, the mid-'60s, Walt's entertainment edifice was a unique institution -- a cathedral of popular culture whose saints were mice and ducks, virgin princesses and lurking sprites, little boys made of wood and little girls lost in wonderland. Virtually every child attended this secular church, took fear and comfort from its doctrines, and finally outgrew it. The achievement of the Walt Disney Co. under Eisner has been to recapture the audience's childhood and extend it into adolescence and beyond. Today customers keep coming back to the movies and theme parks long after they have outgrown short pants.

For most American children of the past half-century, a Disney cartoon feature was the sacred destination of their first trip to the movies. Disney taught kids what a film could be -- how it could blend sight and sound into enthralling art, how it could salve your soul and scare you to tears. Alone in the dark, awed by images bigger and bolder than any dream, children shuddered through a skein of traumas that Walt had devised for them: the outrage of kidnaping (Pinocchio), the ridicule of deformity (Dumbo), the death of a mother (Bambi). Long before the '80s scourge of slasher movies, Disney's were the true horror films, offering primal nightmares and blessed release. And the young were their eager victims. When Snow White premiered at Radio City Music Hall, the management reportedly had to reupholster the seats because they were so often wet by frightened tots.

Walt Disney was of course more than America's story-spinning uncle; he was the canniest businessman in Hollywood. His credo might have been the Jesuits': Give me a child before he's seven, and he will be mine for life. Once this shaman-showman had seized kids' minds, he could raid their piggy banks. And on that mountain of pennies he could build an empire. His cartoons and feature films sired comic books, toys, hit songs (Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?, When You Wish upon a Star, Zip-A-Dee Doo-Dah) and the ubiquitous Mickey Mouse watch. While other moguls ground out 40 or 50 pictures a year, then consigned them to rot in the vaults, Disney made a few superior films that could be recycled for a new audience of children every seven years. A half-century ago, he had anticipated the principle of ancillary markets -- the spin-off of theatrical releases into sound-track LPs, sequels, pay-cable airings and TV series -- that drives the movie industry today.

Then TV arrived, and Walt really revved up his marketing genius. He named his first prime-time series Disneyland -- a recurrent plug for the Anaheim theme park -- and filled it with old cartoons and his avuncular presence. When a Disneyland serial about Indian Fighter Davy Crockett stoked a brief frenzy for coonskin caps, the studio quickly sutured the three episodes together and released them as a theatrical feature. Minimal expenditures, more revenue. Then Disney launched an afternoon program, The Mickey Mouse Club, which introduced the Mouseketeers, a troupe of child stars who cavorted like stagestruck Cub Scouts and intoned the show's anthem-hymn ("Who's the leader of the club/ That's made for you and me?/ M-I-C! K-E-Y!/ M-O-U-S-E!"). Disney had invented yet another addictive rite of passage, especially for all those preteen boys who avidly monitored the progress of young womanhood stirring under the Mouseketeer sweater marked ANNETTE.

In 1939 Film Historian Lewis Jacobs saluted Walt Disney as the "virtuoso of the film medium." Twenty years later, this Hollywood Paderewski was playing mostly Muzak. His studio's artistic growth had been stunted, by both the | demand for new product in two mediums and the creeping conservatism that afflicts almost any burgeoning corporation. Yet Disney was always a visionary entrepreneur; he still had magic to do. In the 1950s Disney made three business decisions that would sustain his company until the Eisner years. Decades later, they would profoundly affect the movie business.

-- In the early '50s, as television usurped film's place as the most pervasive popular art, most movie studios sold TV rights to their pre-1948 films. Disney knew better; he knew his pictures had a shelf life. So he hoarded his booty, doling out the old animated features to movie theaters while airing the cartoon shorts on his own shows. When the pay-cable era finally arrived, the Disney Channel had a vintage supply of no-cost programming -- all thanks to Walt's farsightedness.

-- In 1959 Disney released The Shaggy Dog, the studio's first live-action comedy feature. The film -- about a teenager transformed into a talking sheepdog -- wasn't much, but it grossed $9 million on a $1 million budget (while the more costly animated feature Sleeping Beauty was earning only $5 million on a $6 million budget). The same elements of domestic fantasy, special effects and easy laughs were cloned over and over for Disney hits from The Love Bug to Splash. Hollywood's future auteurs were watching too. When they grew up they adapted the Shaggy Dog comedy-fantasy into one of the '80s' most reliable genres. What is Michael J. Fox's time-traveling De Lorean in Back to the Future, after all, but a retooling of Fred MacMurray's airborne Model T in The Absent Minded Professor?

-- The most dramatic innovation was the theme park, a spiffy, sanitized version of the old amusement park. Disneyland, and later Walt Disney World, were dazzling essays in salesmanship. The rides (such as Peter Pan's Flight and Snow White's Scary Adventures) promoted the films. The Disney characters strolling through the parks served as free commercials for the Mickey Mouse back scratchers, Goofy bikinis, "Totally Minnie" fashions and Donald Duck notepaper (with the warning READ MY LIPS) on sale in the parks' stores. And in creating roller-coaster rides with a story line, Disney helped shape the course of movie narratives. George Lucas designed the Star Tours ride for Disneyland, and is planning an Indiana Jones attraction, but he is only returning a big favor. Lucas' movies are essentially Disney theme-park rides transferred to film. They fit perfectly into the Disney world -- a world of high-tech thrills and genteel Americana. A monarchy of make-believe. A Neverland for the whole family.

This Disney land was always a world so rich and rigid that it was ripe for satire. In 1954 Harvey Kurtzman's Mad comic book burlesqued the Disney cartoon world, with its talking animals wearing three-fingered gloves, its ducks in sailor suits but no pants, and a mouse named Minnie "with lipstick and eyelashes and a dress with high-heeled shoes; a mouse, ten times bigger than the biggest rat." This was mild stuff compared with a 1967 parody that Mad Alumnus Wallace Wood drew for Realist magazine. In the cheerfully scabrous "Disneyland Memorial Orgy," Walt's creatures behaved exactly as barnyard and woodland denizens might. Beneath dollar-sign searchlights radiating from the Magic Kingdom's castle, Goofy had his way with Minnie, Dumbo the flying elephant dumped on Donald Duck, the Seven Dwarfs besmirched Snow White en masse and Tinker Bell performed a striptease for Peter Pan and Jiminy Cricket. Mickey slouched off to one side, shooting heroin.

Walt's corporate scions were suitably outraged by this, but the worst was still to come. It is one thing to be defamed; it is another to be ignored, as the studio pretty much was after Walt Disney's death in 1966. Most galling of all, other people were working the old Disney wonder, and making it work at the box office. The Star Wars trilogy was putting a high-tech spin on the old Disney legerdemain. So, brilliantly, were Steven Spielberg's films: Close Encounters of the Third Kind used When You Wish upon a Star as a theme, and E.T. was "Bambi from Outer Space."

In spirit, all these blockbusters -- among the top grossers in movie history -- were closer to the cartoon classics than the late-'70s Disney product was. Without its founder, the studio floundered, producing modest cartoons, lame sequels and sci-fi thrillers without art or heart. However conscientiously Ron Miller ran the shop, he was no match for Lucas and Spielberg. As if by osmosis, these young outsiders had learned the master's lessons of film artistry and audience manipulation. Miller was Disney's son-in-law, but Lucas and Spielberg were Walt's true heirs.

Enter Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg, with a plan. The new Disney picture bosses ignored Star Wars-type space operas and exploited another familiar format: the adult comedy. Down and Out in Beverly Hills, Ruthless People and Outrageous Fortune were not the species of fantasy-comedies -- the sons of Son | of Flubber -- that Disney had more or less invented and every other studio was copying. The new Disney films had complicated plots crammed with philandering men and bawdy women. They found their antecedents in classic French farce (even as Three Men and a Baby is a remake of a French movie in the boulevard-comedy style). These were the rules: go big, move fast; a lotta laughs, a little sex. In tone the comedies were live-action cartoons. And they created, in the stock company of Richard Dreyfuss, Bette Midler and Danny DeVito, human equivalents of Mickey, Minnie and Donald.

They did more, in a commercial sense, than Walt ever achieved. The success of these comedies made Disney a major studio, not just a boutique. But if the product line was more varied than in the old days, Disney still had the most distinctive profile in the business. The films could be spiced with nostalgia (Tin Men) or social comment (Good Morning, Vietnam) or cop bravado (Stakeout and Shoot to Kill), but they all shared a surface sophistication and an invigorating mean streak. These were movies for adults, the missing piece of the studio's audience. Disney movies of the past, like the theme parks, had embraced a limited market: children and their doting parents. Now the company is reaching for urban teenagers and young adults -- the whole postnuclear family -- and it is grabbing them.

Traditionalists may mourn the loss of old values, the introduction of four- letter words, even the voracious ambition of this new movie conglomerate. But Eisner and Co. are simply, savvily, reflecting their times as Walt Disney deflected his. Perhaps today's children, bombarded by TV images of lust, violence, deceit and despair -- and that's just on the news -- no longer have childhoods. They surely don't have them the way Walt dreamed them and put them on film. The company's new bosses would have died of boredom if they had merely exploited Walt Disney's name and ways. Sure, they could have kept cashing in on the old goodwill for decades, but they couldn't mint innocence.

So they did what was needed to survive and flourish. They turned the cathedral into a mall. There's a multiplex cinema there, and all the films are Disney's. No way a young Michael Eisner could escape them now.