Pendergast T., Pendergast S. St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture. Volume 1: A-D

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DINERSENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE

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Woolworth’s remained literally a dime store for over ﬁfty years,

until 1932, when the top price was raised to 20¢. In 1935 the limited

price policy ended as the company expanded into higher-priced

merchandise such as furniture and appliances. Despite ﬁxed, low

prices, Woolworth paid better wages than most of his competitors. He

introduced minimum wages for all positions, paid vacations, and

Christmas bonuses. These things were far from standard early in the

twentieth century. Woolworth’s was also a major employer of wom-

en, although by the 1950s many were protesting their lack of

promotion in the company.

Woolworth’s lunch counters will be long remembered as the site

of civil-rights sit-ins in 1960. The ﬁrst one began at the Woolworth’s

in Greenville, North Carolina, on February 1, 1960. Soon protesters

throughout the South were occupying lunch counters and calling for a

nationwide boycott against Woolworth’s. The company’s earnings

dropped 8.9 percent in March. Many cities integrated their restaurants

after a few weeks, but Greenville endured sit-ins and demonstrations

until July 25.

Woolworth’s perfectly ﬁlled a key place in American culture in

the ﬁrst half of the twentieth century, but as the culture changed after

World War II, Woolworth’s importance waned. As other chains

emulated Woolworth’s low-cost approach, it became little more than

another department store. The 2,850 Woolworth’s stores of the early

1960s sold enormous quantities of merchandise, but held onto a very

thin proﬁt margin.

In the postwar era, Woolworth’s seemed stale and staid; its

workforce aged with its clientele as it failed to change with the times.

A succession of company-trained presidents found it impossible to

halt the gradual decline. The last 400 Woolworth’s in North America

were closed in 1997 and 1998. Woolworth’s survives in the United

States as Venator, a corporation consisting primarily of Footlocker

athletic shoe stores. In Great Britain and Australia Woolworth’s

remains a major variety and, in Australia, grocery chain.

Yet the legacy of the dime store thrives in the myriad discount

department stores throughout the world, in the many ‘‘dollar stores’’

now occupying the neighborhood malls that have taken the place

of downtown shopping districts, and in the merchandise purchas-

ing, display, and pricing policies that have become standards of

modern commerce.

—Paul Gaffney

URTHER READING:

Brough, James. The Woolworths. New York, McGraw-Hill, 1982.

Raucher, Alan R. ‘‘Dime Store Chains: The Making of Organization

Men, 1880-1940.’’ Business History Review. 1991, volume 65:1.

Winkler, John K. Five and Ten. New York, Robert McBride &

Co, 1940.

Wolff, Miles. Lunch at the 5 & 10. Revised and expanded edition.

Chicago, Ivan R. Dee, 1990.

Diners

Restaurants commonly referred to as ‘‘diners’’ have held a

special place in American popular culture since the 1930s. Once

sleek, futuristic icons of post-war optimism, they now capture our

attention as objects of nostalgia. As the precursor to fast-food

restaurants, diners were one of the unique building types spawned by

the burgeoning automobile society. Their very appearance—with

streamlined, movement-implying shapes and bright neon lights—

captured the spirit of the new mobile culture.

The diner evolved from horse-drawn night lunch wagons of the

late nineteenth century. These convenient wagons served walk-up

customers in downtown areas after restaurants had closed for the

evening. The next generation of wagons featured indoor seating; by

the turn of the century, many lunch wagons had become stationary.

The early diners’ forte was the quick, inexpensive meal—atmosphere

was not important. The clientele consisted of night workers and late

revelers. Sandwiches, hamburgers, pies, hot dogs, and breakfast fare

were standard items. By the 1890s, Thomas H. Buckley was mass-

producing lunch wagons and had placed them in at least 275 cities

across the country. Early diners were also converted from railroad or

trolley cars.

The diner that has become the object of popular affection dates

to the 1930s and 1940s. The machine-inﬂuenced, Art Deco or

Moderne design style that emphasized smooth curves, simplicity, and

shiny surfaces was inherent in much product design of the time, but in

the diner it was integrated into a total environment. Diners from the

Golden Age were long and low in shape, with streamlined effects and

clean surfaces, evoking a feeling of both futurism and movement.

Formica, stainless steel, and Naugahyde were the most popular

interior materials. Diners contained booths, but the highlight of the

interior was a long, shiny counter. Meals were simple and inexpen-

sive. The imagery of speed and progress ﬁt perfectly with the rapidly

developing mobile society, in which the automobile was reshaping

the landscape and creating opportunities for new building.

In the 1950s, as more families began to eat outside the home, and

the diner became more ‘‘respectable,’’ diners expanded in size and

menu. The 1960s marked a turning point for the diner, as the fast-food

restaurant industry proliferated. Fast-food represented standardiza-

tion, as opposed to the uniqueness of diners. You knew beforehand

what was on the McDonald’s menu, while every diner had a specialty

and a different atmosphere. In response, many diners tried to empha-

size their individuality by expanding their menus and adopting more

conservative imagery. Apart from their smaller size and the word

‘‘diner,’’ many of these diners became difﬁcult to distinguish from

standard restaurants. Booth and table service came to predominate

over the traditional counter. Colonial and Mediterranean architectural

styles often replaced the Art Deco model familiar from past decades.

Beginning in the 1970s, diners began to make a comeback as

nostalgic reminders of a more innocent time. They also became

legitimate subjects of study by architectural and popular culture

scholars. In 1978 the Cooper-Hewitt branch of the Smithsonian held

an exhibit on architectural packaging which looked at four popular

American building types: fast-food restaurants, diners, gasoline sta-

tions, and museum-village restorations. An article by Richard Oliver

and Nancy Ferguson, the curators of the exhibit, appeared in Architec-

tural Record for February 1978 and also as a reprint catalog. Also,

Barry Levinson’s 1982 movie Diner helped introduce the phenome-

non to a new audience. In the late 1990s, diners were still being

manufactured and patronized. Many older models have been restored.

Diners are the subject of books and museum exhibitions. The Henry

Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan, now includes a 1946 diner as

part of its collection of twentieth-century cultural artifacts, in an

exhibition entitled, ‘‘The Automobile in American Life.’’ Diners

have thus been recognized as unique cultural inventions which, like

DIONNE QUINTUPLETS ENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE

720

An example of the diner, 1952.

the gas station and fast-food restaurant, were byproducts of the

automobile revolution of the twentieth century.

—Dale Allen Gyure

URTHER READING:

Baeder, John. Diners. New York, Harry N. Abrams, 1978.

Gutman, Richard J. S. American Diner Then and Now. New York,

HarperCollins, 1993.

Gutman, Richard J. S., and Elliott Kaufman. American Diner. New

York, Harper and Row, 1979.

Oliver, Richard, and Nancy Ferguson. ‘‘Place, Product, Packaging.’’

Architectural Record. Vol. 163, February 1978, 116-20.

Yorke, Douglas, Jr. ‘‘Stopping at Stars: The Architecture of the

American Diner.’’ Architectural Association Quarterly. Vol. 8,

No. 2, 1976, 45-54.

Dionne Quintuplets (1934—)

Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie Dionne are the ﬁrst

monozygotic—all from one fertilized ovum—quintuplets known to

have survived to adulthood. They were nearly sextuplets, but the sixth

fetus miscarried in the third month of pregnancy. Born to Oliva and

Elzire Dionne, French-Canadian peasants, in their seven-room farm-

house near Callander, Ontario, the premature babies weighed a total

of 13 pounds, 6 ounces. They owe their survival to the quick and

intelligent care of the local general practitioner, Dr. Allan Roy Dafoe,

who collected virtually every incubator in the province and kept the

tiny girls alive through his excellent scientiﬁc care. Nevertheless, the

signiﬁcance of the Dionne Quintuplets rests not in their place in

medical history, but as examples of exploitation and publicity. Their

birth and survival created a worldwide sensation, and their father

collected a fortune by serving as their ‘‘manager,’’ selling the right to

photograph them, to have them appear in motion pictures, and to

secure their ‘‘endorsement’’ of various products. They were made

wards of the Canadian government in 1935, and for their ﬁrst ten

years were raised in a special nursery built for them out of public

funds. After a protracted lawsuit, their parents recovered custo-

dy in 1944.

The birth of multiple children in the United States never gar-

nered as much interest as that of the Dionne quintuplets. However, the

subsequent birth of the Thompson sextuplets and the McCaughey

septuplets in 1997 brought to light racial tensions in the United States.

Unlike the worldwide attention given to the Dionne family, the birth

of the ﬁrst African-American sextuplets on May 8, 1997 came with

little fanfare. Living in a two-bedroom apartment, the Thompson

family struggled to make ends meet with the money Linden Thomp-

son could make from his two jobs. Only after the much-publicized

birth of the white McCaughey septuplets, seven months later that

year, did corporations extend the same free products and aid to the

Thompson sextuplets as well. Although not the riches given to the

Dionne family, the lifetime of free diapers, college scholarships, and

use of a mini-van relieved some of the stresses on the newly

enlarged families.

—Gerald Carpenter

URTHER READING:

Barker, Lillian. The Dionne Legend: Quintuplets in Captivity. Garden

City, New York, Doubleday, 1951.

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Berton, Pierre. The Dionne Years: A Thirties Melodrama. Toronto,

McClelland and Stewart, 1977.

Blatz, W. E., et al. Collected Studies on the Dionne Quintuplets.

Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1937.

Braudy, Leo. The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History. New

York, Random House, 1986.

Nihmey, John, and Stuart Foxman. Time of Their Lives: The Dionne

Tragedy, a True-Life Fairy Tale. Ottawa, Canada, NIVA, 1986.

Roberts, Penni. ‘‘Thompson Sextuplets Offered Four-Year Scholar-

ships.’’ Philadelphia Tribune, December 26, 1997.

The Dirty Dozen

Directed by Robert Aldrich, The Dirty Dozen tells the story of

Major Reisman (Lee Marvin) and the twelve hardened convicts he

selects to join him on a suicide mission behind German lines in 1944.

The Dirty Dozen remains an interesting and popular ﬁlm, as it is

meticulously crafted, deftly edited, and features several future stars at

the beginning of their careers (including Donald Sutherland, Charles

Bronson, and Telly Savalas). Although released in 1967 at the height

of the anti-Vietnam war movement, The Dirty Dozen was neverthe-

less a success, becoming one of the biggest box-ofﬁce hits in MGM’s

history. War protesters readily accepted the ﬁlm’s depiction of

ofﬁcers as indiscriminate killers, while more militaristic moviegoers

approved of the ﬁlm’s brutal combat scenes.

—Robert C. Sickels

URTHER READING:

Basinger, Jeanine. The World War II Combat Film: Anatomy of a

Genre. New York, Columbia University Press, 1986.

Manuell, Roger. Films and the Second World War. New Jersey, A.S.

Barnes and Co., 1974.

Disability

The presence of disability in popular culture has taken many

forms; indeed, people with disabilities (PWDs) have appeared fre-

quently across the pop-culture spectrum: movies, television, print

media, dance, theater, music, and sports. Disability representations

have never been in short supply, though many produced by the

mainstream cultural industries remain questionable at best, hurtful

and divisive at worst.

Images of disability have perhaps found their most frequent

expression in movies, with the vast majority created from the perspec-

tive of able-bodied ﬁlmmakers and intended primarily for able-

bodied audiences. The earliest silent movies, each only a few minutes

long, tended to portray PWDs as comic ﬁgures given to pursuing

others or being pursued themselves, as in The Legless Runner (1907),

The Invalid’s Adventure (1907), and Don’t Pull My Leg (1908). As

the medium matured, moviemakers borrowed heavily from such

nineteenth-century literary fare as Moby Dick, A Christmas Carol,

Notre Dame de Paris (The Hunchback of Notre Dame), Treasure

Island, and The Two Orphans, to create more intricate narratives that

portrayed disabled people either as innocent victims or incarnations

of evil. The ﬁlms in this tradition included Orphans of the Storm

(1921), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923, but many versions

made since), The Sea Beast (1926), and numerous adaptations of A

Christmas Carol. The 1930s saw a continuing interest in such

stereotypical extremes—most notably in Moby Dick (1930), Charlie

Chaplin’s City Lights (1931), Todd Browning’s famous gallery of

grotesques, Freaks (1932), and a 1939 remake of Hunchback. Such

images began fading during the World War II era in favor of relatively

realistic and sensitive portraits of disabled veterans. Pride of the

Marines (1945) and Bright Victory (1951) both dealt with blinded ex-

servicemen; real-life veteran Harold Russell, whose service legacy

was to lose his hands (replaced by metal hooks), played himself in The

Best Years of Our Lives (1946), and Fred Zinnemann’s The Men

(1951), Marlon Brando’s ﬁrst ﬁlm, dealt with paraplegics. These

images, in turn, began giving way to famously larger-than-life civil-

ians who ‘‘triumphed’’ over their disabilities: opera singer Marjorie

Lawrence and Franklin D. Roosevelt, both polio victims, in Interrupt-

ed Melody (1955) and Sunrise at Campobello (1960) respectively,

Helen Keller, deaf, dumb, and blind, in The Miracle Worker (1962).

Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1964), however, mocked these

latter types with its title character, and signaled their temporary demise.

With alarming regularity, Hollywood has continued churning

out regressive disability movies such as Hook (1991), The Fugitive

(1993), Speed (1994), and Forrest Gump (1994), reﬂecting the age-

old practice of linking evil or innocence with disability, but an

increasing number of ﬁlms since the 1960s have offered positive

images. Hollywood has often reserved the most resonant and poign-

ant portrayals for disabled Vietnam veterans, as in Coming Home

(1978), Cutter’s Way (1981), and Born on the Fourth of July (1989).

Other memorable, if not entirely progressive, ﬁlms since the 1960s

include The Other Side of the Mountain (1975), The Elephant Man

(1980), Children of a Lesser God (1986), Rain Man (1988), and Scent

of a Woman (1992), which range over a variety of afﬂictions and

ﬁlm styles.

Despite its relatively short history, the television industry has

also demonstrated an interest in portraying the disabled experience,

with a number of series presenting disabled characters in continuing

roles. Gunsmoke’s mobility-impaired sidekick Chester Goode, played

by Dennis Weaver for nine seasons (1955-1964) during the program’s

20-year run, competes with Raymond Burr’s wheelchair-dependent

police detective on Ironside (1967-1975), as television’s most popu-

lar disabled character, while James Franciscus played a blind insur-

ance investigator on Longstreet (1971-1972). Taking a different

approach, nuclear-powered prostheses and implants turned disabled

ﬁgures Steve Austin (Lee Majors) and Jaime Sommers (Lindsay

Wagner) into the title characters of The Six Million Dollar Man

(1974-1978) and The Bionic Woman (1976-1978), respectively. Lat-

er, LeVar Burton played the blind chief engineer Lt. Geordi LaForge

in Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-1994) and a string of follow-

up movies.

Most of these ﬁlms and TV programs featured able-bodied

actors playing the disabled characters, a situation that some disability

activists have likened to the now discontinued practice of white actors

masquerading in blackface as African Americans or Shakespeare’s

Othello. Actors with actual disabilities have been employed only

sporadically in the ﬁlm and television industries, but their inﬂuence

continues to rise. Some old-line actors, such as Sarah Bernhardt,

Harold Lloyd, Herbert Marshall, and Lionel Barrymore, tended to

mask their disabilities before the cameras (Barrymore’s performance

DISABILITY ENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE

722

in the 1946 ﬁlm It’s a Wonderful Life is a notable exception), but for

more recent actors, their disabilities became part of the characters

they played. Harold Russell, whose hands were blown off in a

demolition exercise, won two Oscars for his work in The Best Years of

Our Lives, and Marlee Matlin, a hearing-impaired performer, won an

Oscar for her role in Children of a Lesser God (1986) and went on to

play bank-robber-turned-mayor Laurie Bey in the ﬁnal years of the

acclaimed TV series Picket Fences. Chris Burke, a developmentally

disabled actor, co-starred as Corky Thatcher on the popular drama

Life Goes On during its 1989-1993 run, and wheelchair-user Nancy

Becker Kennedy played a sharp-tongued secretary on The Louie Show

in 1996. Mitch Longley, a wheelchair-using heartthrob who once

modeled shirts for Ralph Lauren, appeared as Byron Pierce on the

soap opera Another World during the 1991/92 season and, beginning

in 1997, played the double role of Dr. Matt Harmon and Eric Mancusi

on the long-running soap opera, General Hospital, and its spin-off,

Port Charles.

Longley is only one of several PWDs who have also made

inroads into the modeling ﬁeld. One of the most famous, wheelchair-

user Ellen Stohl, posed nude for the July 1987 issue of Playboy,

making her that magazine’s ﬁrst disabled centerfold, while runway

models now have PWDs among their ranks, including Kitty Lunn and

Kim Barreda. A number of American corporations, such as McDonald’s

and K-Mart, have begun using disabled performers in their commer-

cials. A prime example is The Home Depot, which has featured

disabled employees Henry Gibson and Dan Brady in its ads.

Since the latter decades of the twentieth century, PWDs have

taken a more direct role in the creation of a pop-culture presence. Ron

Kovic, a disabled Vietnam veteran who wrote the searing autobiogra-

phy, Born on the Fourth of July, in 1976, also co-wrote the screen-

play, in which he was played by Tom Cruise, for the like-titled movie

in 1989. Three years later, Neil Jimenez wrote and co-directed The

Waterdance, a ﬁlm modeled largely on his own experiences as a

newly disabled person. Billy Golfus, who suffered brain damage

during a 1984 vehicular accident, eventually secured funding through

the Independent Television Service to produce When Billy Broke His

Head . . . and Other Tales of Wonder in 1995. This documentary ﬁlm

told not only his story but also the ‘‘tales’’ of other PWDs and their

struggles for civil rights. Disabled journalist and poet Mark O’Brien

collaborated with Jessica Yu on Breathing Lessons: The Life and

Work of Mark O’Brien (1996), an Oscar-winning ﬁlm for best short-

subject documentary and a recipient of a special National Educational

Media Network award. In 1992, Greg Smith founded On a Roll, a

nationally syndicated radio talk show dedicated to disability issues,

while John Hockenberry, a two-time Peabody Award-winning TV

network correspondent, shared his perspectives about life as a dis-

abled person in a 1995 memoir, Moving Violations, and in his one-

man show, Spokesman, produced off-Broadway in 1996. Christopher

Reeve, whose spinal cord was severed in a 1995 horseback-riding

accident, directed a one-hour AIDS drama in 1997 titled In the

Gloaming, and served as an executive producer for the 1998 TV

remake of Hitchcock’s Rear Window, in which he played the James

Stewart role of a wheelchair-bound man who witnesses a murder

across the courtyard of his apartment building.

Many other PWDs have contributed to the performing arts.

Among the more notable are three singers who happen to be blind:

Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder, who have enjoyed long careers as

popular musicians; and Andrea Bocelli, who crossed over from opera

to become something of a pop sensation. The National Theater of the

Deaf, a mixed troupe of hearing and deaf actors founded in 1965, has

performed across the country and on national TV. Mary Verdi-

Fletcher, a wheelchair-user born with spina biﬁda, founded the

Cleveland Ballet Dancing Wheels, a group of dancers with differing

degrees of mobility that has given hundreds of performances on

several continents.

PWDs have had their greatest successes in the literary ﬁeld, with

memoirs and poetry volumes. Nancy Mairs’ Waist-High in the World

(1996) and Kenny Fries’ anthology Staring Back (1997) are promi-

nent among the countless examples. The inﬂuence of the disability

press has also grown appreciably, with New Mobility, The Ragged

Edge (formerly The Disability Rag), and Mouth playing crucial roles.

In the world of sports, the Paralympic Games typically attracts

thousands of amateur athletes and delegates from more than a

hundred countries and are by far the most famous of competitions for

PWDs. Among professional athletes, Monty Stratton pitched profes-

sional baseball for a few seasons in the 1940s despite having lost a leg

in a 1938 hunting accident. He went on to supervise The Stratton

Story (1949), a movie based on his life, which starred James Stewart.

Despite a congenitally deformed hand, Jim Abbott enjoyed several

seasons as a Major League pitcher and threw a no-hitter for the New

York Yankees in 1993. In the National Football League, New Orleans

Saints place kicker Tom Dempsey, born without a right hand and only

half a right foot, used that foot to kick a 63-yard ﬁeld goal against the

Detroit Lions in 1970, a NFL record that stood unmatched for 28

years. Casey Martin, a professional golfer with a rare and painful birth

defect in his right leg, made headlines in early 1998 by suing the PGA

Tour and winning the right to ride in a cart while participating in the

pro golf tour.

Of all pop-culture arenas, comic-strip art is decidedly the most

problematic as regards the treatment of disability. Berke Breathed’s

syndicated cartoon strip Bloom County and its wheelchair-using

Vietnam vet, Cutter John, are among the high points, but the ﬁeld has

generally been dominated by cartoonists such as Charles Addams and

Gahan Wilson, long known for their ‘‘sick-humor’’ takes on such

topics as blindness, deformity, and dismemberment. Their work

arguably paved the way for John Callahan’s repellent Hustler cartoon

images and Gary Larson’s skewed view of disabling conditions in his

near-legendary strip, The Far Side.

Despite the excesses of comic-strip art and certain other media,

however, the pop-culture representation of disability is constantly

advancing. As more and more PWDs get involved in the creation of

popular culture, the images can only improve.

—Martin F. Norden

URTHER READING:

Cumberbatch, Guy, and Ralph Negrine. Images of Disability on

Television. New York, Routledge, 1992.

Fries, Kenny, editor. Staring Back: The Disability Experience from

the Inside Out. New York, Plume, 1997.

Gartner, Alan, and Tom Joe, editors. Images of the Disabled, Disa-

bling Images. New York, Praeger, 1987.

Hockenberry, John. Moving Violations: War Zones, Wheelchairs,

and Declarations of Independence. New York, Hyperion, 1995.

Klobas, Lauri E. Disability Drama in Television and Film. Jefferson,

McFarland, 1988.

Mairs, Nancy. Waist-High in the World: A Life Among the Nondisabled.

Boston, Beacon Press, 1996.

DISASTER MOVIESENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE

723

Norden, Martin F. The Cinema of Isolation: A History of Physical

Disability in the Movies. New Brunswick, Rutgers University

Press, 1994.

Disaster Movies

In disaster movies, natural disasters, accidents, and terrorist

actions provide the setting for daring escapes and incredible heroism.

The ﬁlms rely heavily on special effects to recreate on screen the

violent consequences of earthquakes, plane crashes, and meteorite

storms; the category also includes monster-disaster movies in which

an enraged, oversized creature destroys buildings and other large

objects. It is an important part of disaster movies that in them heroic

acts are performed by unlikely heroes—by people with psychological

wounds, with limited experience of the things they are asked to do,

and in situations where the odds against success seem impossibly

high. Because these ﬁlms are about averting and surviving disaster, it

may be signiﬁcant that disaster movies began to be produced in large

numbers in the years after the horrors of World War II. If the twentieth

century has seen great advances in technology, disaster movies reﬂect

a fear that technology alone will not save us. Although their plots are

Passengers struggle for survival during a scene from the disaster ﬁlm The Poseidon Adventure.

often unrealistic and the acting and special effects unconvincing, they

offer the message that, through self-belief and the right moral choices,

people just like us have the ability to save themselves.

Disasters featured in disaster movies can be divided into three

main types: natural disasters, disasters caused by technology failing

or being accidentally damaged, and disasters caused by terrorism or

by the recklessness of an individual or agency. The most successful

disaster movies are usually the simplest, but popular disaster-based

ﬁlms can contain elements of one, two, or even all of these scenarios.

The actual type of disaster involved is only one of many reasons for a

particular ﬁlm’s popularity. Among other things, audiences want to

know how the characters will escape with their lives, they watch for

the special effects, and also for sentimental reasons; popular disaster

movies almost always include a love affair developing alongside the

disaster plot. When the type of disaster is signiﬁcant, it is often

because it reﬂects current or local concerns. In the 1990s, for

example, perhaps cashing in on pre-millennium fears, a rash of ﬁlms

such as Independence Day (1996) and Deep Impact (1998) appeared,

with plot lines based around threats to life on earth posed by attacks

from extraterrestrials or from asteroids. Similarly, in the 1980s ﬁlms

such as Testament (1983) and The Day After (1983) appeared in

response to the threat posed by the nuclear arms race. Because most

disaster movies are made in Hollywood and Japan, it is probably no

DISASTER MOVIES ENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE

724

coincidence that a large number of them feature earthquakes, tidal

waves, and volcanic eruptions.

The history of disaster movies is a relatively short one. Although

disasters have featured in movies from the beginning of the twentieth

century, ﬁlms in which the disaster is the reason for making and

watching the ﬁlm did not become common until the 1950s when alien

invasion and monster movies were popular. Before then, disasters of

various kinds had appeared in adventure ﬁlms and ﬁlms about war,

but true disaster movies were rare. One precursor to modern monster-

disaster movies such as Jurassic Park (1993) is Cooper and

Schoedsack’s King Kong (1933), but the ﬁlm is really an exotic

adventure thriller with only a small element of disaster movie action.

Such extravagant special effects as were needed to make the famous

scene on the Empire State Building are remarkable for their time, but

it was not until the 1950s that such effects could be achieved with

much regularity.

In the 1950s, advances were made in ﬁlm technology that

allowed ﬁlmmakers to make better use of special effects techniques

pioneered in the 1930s. Many of the resulting ﬁlms were a combina-

tion of science ﬁction and horror, but disaster was often at their heart,

as titles such as When Worlds Collide (1951) and War of the Worlds

(1954) suggest. It has been suggested that the new threat of nuclear

destruction meant that ﬁlmmakers and audiences became concerned

with global, rather than local, conﬂicts and many of the monster-

based disaster movies of the 1950s involve mutant creatures terroriz-

ing and destroying cities. New ﬁlm techniques such as ‘‘3-D,’’ made

possible by improvements in color ﬁlm, made monster movies still

more thrilling as giant creatures appeared to step off the screen and

into the audience. Perhaps because of the Japan’s own experience of

nuclear destruction the Japanese ﬁlm industry has been proliﬁc in the

ﬁeld of atomic monsters, its most famous being Inoshiro Honda’s

Godzilla, King of Monsters (1954).

In the 1960s, science ﬁction disaster movies and nuclear acci-

dent ﬁlms remained popular in Japan, where Honda’s Godzilla and

other monster series continued until late in the decade. Although extra

footage of well-known American actors was added to Honda’s ﬁlms

for American distribution, disaster movies in the United States

generally did less well in this period. American disaster movies in the

1950s had mostly upheld Hollywood’s conservative values and, in the

1960s, the genre perhaps seemed less suitable for exploring the new

moral climate than, for example, the westerns of Sam Peckinpah or

the thoughtful science ﬁction of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space

Odyssey. It was not until 1970, with the release of Airport, that

disaster movies became popular again.

The Golden Age for American disaster movies was the 1970s.

As Hollywood re-embraced the idea of making popular, big budget

features, the disaster movie became an important format for demon-

strating spectacular special effects and for drawing in audiences to

watch destruction on a large scale. Exactly what appeals to audiences

in watching planes crash, ships sink, trains collide, and tall buildings

burn will probably never be known for sure, but ﬁlms like The

Poseidon Adventure (1972), The Towering Inferno (1974), and the

Airport series gave Hollywood some of its most lucrative successes.

Unlike the futuristic ﬁlms of the 1950s, disaster movies in the 1970s

often dealt with familiar events and situations, ones that already

caused anxiety for many people. For example, the number of miles

Americans travelled by air doubled between 1965 and 1970, and air

travel is one of the most common themes for disaster movies of the

1970s. Similarly, at a time when many new highrise blocks were

being built and planned, Paul Newman and Steve McQueen braved

ﬂames and smoke to rescue people from a party on the top ﬂoor of

‘‘the tallest building in the world’’ in John Guillermin’s The

Towering Inferno.

While the special effects in ﬁlms like The Towering Inferno are

impressive for their time, as with many disaster movies the biggest

challenge its makers faced was to prevent the record-breaking sky-

scraper—the ‘‘Tower of Glass’’—from looking like a model. In the

1990s the situation has been helped by improvements in digital

technology and, in particular since the late 1980s, the ability to mix

live action with what are known as Computer Generated Images

(CGI). CGI has become widely used in the production of many kinds

of ﬁlms, but it is used most spectacularly in disaster movies which, in

the 1990s, have become much more realistic in terms of sound and

vision. The turning point in the relationship between conventional

ﬁlmmaking and CGI was James Cameron’s deep-sea disaster movie

The Abyss (1989). The plot of Cameron’s ﬁlm peripherally involves a

research team working on the edge of a deep ocean trench, whose

seabed living quarters seem certain to be dragged down into the abyss.

The discovery of friendly aliens living at the bottom of the trench

allows the opportunity for some impressive effects, such as a sus-

pended column of seawater known as a ‘‘pseudopod,’’ exploring the

corridors of the deep-sea craft. Cameron used CGI and improved

digital sound technology to excellent effect in his 1997 disaster ﬁlm

Titanic, creating convincing footage of the great ship’s ﬁnal hours.

Director Steven Spielberg used similar techniques to bring dinosaurs

back to life in Jurassic Park (1993) and the more overtly disaster-

based The Lost World (1997).

Disaster movies have a tendency to take themselves too serious-

ly and if improvements in special effects mean that comical visual

effects are rarer in the 1990s, disaster movie plots have improved very

little. Emotions are still crudely acted and contrived situations—such

as the appearance of a dinosaur in San Diego in Spielberg’s The Lost

World—still challenge audiences to believe. Because of these weak-

nesses and responding to the popularity of disaster movies in the

1970s, parodies of disaster movies have also proved popular. In

particular, the Airport series of ﬁlms, the last of which appeared in

1979, was parodied in 1980 by Airplane!, a ﬁlm advertised with the

tag-line ‘‘What’s slower than a speeding bullet, and able to hit tall

buildings in a single bound?’’ The ﬁlm spoofs the typical disaster

movie plot when a pilot who is afraid of ﬂying becomes the only

person capable of ﬂying the plane, while the score by Elmer Bernstein

parodies the melodramatic music that accompanies all popular

disaster movies.

While disaster movies have tended to be made as ﬁctional

entertainment, other categories of disaster movie have taken a more

serious approach. There are ﬁlms based on the Exxon Valdez oil spill

and the Mount St. Helens volcanic eruptions, while others, such as the

many Titanic disaster ﬁlms, add a ﬁctional or semi-ﬁctional dramatic

element to the real-life story. Still others, such as the British-made

semi-documentary Threads (1985), mix documentary reporting with

dramatization to make a serious point, in this case about the threat of

nuclear war and its long-term effects. Whatever the reason for their

appeal, in the 1990s disaster movies continue to be produced in large

numbers and with great commercial success. Hard-core disaster

movie fans will argue that they watch for the scenes of destruction and

to revel in the special effects, but the importance of even a basic

human story unfolding alongside the disaster suggests that their

popularity has as much to do with sentiment as with spectacle.

—Chris Routledge

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725

FURTHER READING:

Annan, David. Catastrophe: The End of the Cinema? New York,

Bounty Books, 1975.

Broderick, Mick. Nuclear Movies: A Critical Analysis and Filmography

of International Feature Length Films Dealing with Experimenta-

tion, Aliens, Terrorism, Holocaust and Other Disaster Scenarios,

1914-1989. Jefferson, North Carolina, McFarland and Co., 1991.

Cook, David A. A History of Narrative Film. New York, W.W.

Norton and Company, 1996.

Keyser, Les. Hollywood in the Seventies. San Diego, A.S. Barnes, 1981.

Disc Jockeys

Since the early days of radio broadcasting, the disc jockey or DJ

has been an essential part of radio, not just playing records but serving

as an intermediary between the listening audience and the stars of

popular music. Disc jockeys enjoyed the most inﬂuence on their

listeners in the 1950s and 1960s, when they introduced new music to

Americans and made rock and roll the dominant force in youth culture.

Famed disc jockey Wolfman Jack.

In the ﬁrst two decades of radio in the United States, the person

who introduced records and made station announcements was usually

a technician who worked the broadcast equipment. It was a policy of

the large radio networks to avoid recorded sound as much as possible

and rely on live programming. Thus there was little call for disc

jockeys in the 1920s and 1930s. The radio networks were forced to

drop their opposition to canned music as their studio musicians were

called up to join the armed forces in the 1940s. Thus began the rise of

the radio announcer who played recordings on the air, the so-called

disc jockey.

The most popular was Martin Block, whose ‘‘Make Believe

Ballroom’’ invited listeners to a pretend concert and entertained them

with humor and records. His program was networked in the 1940s and

reached a national audience. The monopoly of the three national radio

networks—NBC, CBS and ABC—was broken in the 1950s and this

allowed many small independent stations to go on the air. Lacking the

programming resources of the great networks, the independent sta-

tions relied on recorded music. The man spinning the records also

made commercial announcements and read the news. At this time an

estimated 75 percent of all programming on American radio came

from records, providing many job opportunities for young men with

ambitions in the music industry. Many important entertainers, record

producers, and entrepreneurs of the 1950s got their start on local radio

DISCO ENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE

726

stations playing records, including Bill Haley, Norman Petty, and

Sam Phillips.

African Americans in southern cities and urban ghettos in the

Northeast were an important new market for independent radio and

many urban stations began to realign their programs to suit a predomi-

nately African American audience. Ownership of black radio re-

mained in the hands of whites, but gradually black disc jockeys were

allowed to broadcast. It was this group that began to play rhythm and

blues records and create a new kind of radio personality who was to

inaugurate the era of rock and roll.

Most radio announcers maintained a digniﬁed demeanor and

spoke in clear, correct English, but some African American disc

jockeys broke all the rules of on-air behavior and invented outrageous

alter egos for themselves. Their antics were rapidly copied by their

white counterparts, who also stole the most commercial songs from

their playlists and introduced them to the great white teenaged audience.

It is signiﬁcant that the term ‘‘rock and roll’’ was coined by a

white disc jockey from Cleveland, who played rhythm and blues

records and created an entertaining on-air personality for himself.

Alert to telephone requests and the sales of records in local stores,

Alan Freed responded quickly to the growing appeal of R&B and

turned his show into a showcase for the music. In 1951 he started to

call it rock and roll. Such was the success of his ‘‘Moondog’s Rock

and Roll Party’’ that he moved to New York in 1954 and a much

larger audience. The program climbed to the top of the ratings chart as

rock music became more and more popular. Freed was America’s

most inﬂuential disc jockey, a conduit through which the ‘‘race’’

music of the 1940s became the rock and roll music of the 1950s.

The disc jockey of the late 1950s and early 1960s was an

extremely important ﬁgure in the business of popular music. Radio

play constituted the main form of promoting a record and many

stations allowed the disc jockey to choose what records were to be

broadcast. He decided which up-and-coming bands would get the

radio play essential to selling records and moving up to bigger

audiences and better paying shows. Disc jockeys found that repeated

play of a record could make it a hit and the mythology of rock and roll

is full of stories of unknown performers becoming stars overnight

because of a radio personality who ‘‘broke’’ the record to his listening

audience. Disc jockeys did a lot more than play records—they

managed bands, promoted tours and public appearances, acted as

master of ceremonies in rock shows, and became friends and advisors

to the stars. Their name would share equal billing on the billboard of a

typical rock and roll performance of the 1950s and early 1960s, as

announcer and promoter. They became active intermediaries between

rock and roll musicians and their audiences. Several of them, such as

Alan Freed and ‘‘Murray the K’’ Kaufman, became stars of popular

culture in their own right. Murray the K of station WINS of New York

played an important part in introducing American youth to the Beatles

during their ﬁrst tour of the United States in 1964. Kaufman certainly

promoted the Beatles but his position on the Beatles’ bandwagon also

helped his own career and his station.

The great power enjoyed by disc jockeys in the marketing of

recordings encouraged corruption. The practice of ‘‘payola’’ (a

contraction of ‘‘pay’’ and ‘‘Victrola’’) in which the disc jockey was

bribed with money or a share of the publishing rights of the song was

widely used to get airplay. The smaller record companies commonly

paid disc jockeys and juke box operators to use their recordings. This

practice came under scrutiny of the U.S. House of Representatives at

the end of the 1950s and the ensuing Payola scandal ended the careers

of several inﬂuential disc jockeys, including that of Alan Freed. The

payola scandal was only one of the factors reducing the power of disc

jockeys in the 1960s. The move to the Top 40 format—in which the

playlist was based on the Billboard charts—narrowed down the

choice of records to be played, and the gradual consolidation of the

radio industry—with one business organization controlling several

stations—often took the decision about what records were to be

played out of the hands of the on-air staff.

The great technological watershed of the late 1960s and 1970s

was the migration from AM to FM broadcast bands, which brought a

signiﬁcant increase in sound quality and encouraged stations to use

high ﬁdelity long playing records rather than the 45 rpm singles that

had been the staple of commercial radio for two decades. The typical

disc jockey of the FM album-oriented station was much quieter and

unobtrusive compared with the radio personalities of the 1950s and

1960s. The person playing the records was expected to have more

knowledge of the music and indulge in less histrionics. Women were

now ﬁnding it easier to get jobs in radio stations as the archetype of

the disc jockey was recast.

Although disc jockeys were still instrumental in ﬁnding new

music and introducing new performers, their power in popular music

was in constant decline in the 1970s and 1980s. Commercial radio

relied less on the individual in front of the microphone and more on

the programming director and market analyst to chose the records to

be played. The ﬂamboyant radio personality survived only on the

morning show; the rest of the days broadcast was handled by

anonymous interchangeable voices. Disc jockeys did ﬁnd opportuni-

ties to set themselves up as independent businessmen who played

parties and clubs. The creation of rap and hip-hop came out of the

activities of disc jockeys in the New York area, who kept the records

playing while ‘‘toasters’’ or master of ceremonies spoke over and in

between the music. The introduction of music television in the 1980s

raised expectations that the presenter would wield some inﬂuence but

the ‘‘vee jay’’ proved as disposable and ephemeral as his or her

counterpart on the radio. The continuing pattern of consolidation in

the American radio industry in the 1990s ensured that the disc jockey

would be the person playing the records not the unique performer

inﬂuencing musical trends and making the stars of popular culture.

—Andre Millard

URTHER READING:

Chapple, Steve, and Rebe Garofalo. Rock’n’Roll Is Here to Pay.

Chicago, Nelson Hall, 1977.

Gillett, Charlie. The Sound of the City: The Rise of Rock and Roll.

New York, Pantheon, 1984.

Passman, Arnold. The Deejays. New York, MacMillan, 1971.

Sterling, Christopher, and John M. Kittross. Stayed Tuned: A Con-

cise History of American Broadcasting. Belmont, California,

Wadsworth, 1990.

Williams, Gilbert. The Legendary Pioneers of Black Radio. Westport,

Connecticut, Praeger, 1998.

Disco

Derived from the French discotheque, disco refers not only to a

musical style but to a unique brand of dance-club decor, a sexy-

synthetic manner of dress, a style of dance, and an attitude toward

DISCOENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE

727

sexual promiscuity and night life, all of which came together during

the 1970s as ‘‘disco,’’ one of the most glitzy and celebrated fads in

American popular cultural history. Between 1975 and 1979, the

established sensibilities of rock and pop, which emphasized sincerity,

emotion, and rebellion, gave way to the enchantment of dance ﬂoor

rhythms, which colonized popular imagination as an alluring dream-

scape of pleasure and sexual utopia. In disco, the boundary between

commercial fabrication and real experience became blurred. Disco

ushered in a new post-1960s concept of hedonistic weekends, holi-

days, and exciting after-hours activity that was open to anyone with a

reasonable income, a basic sense of rhythm and a good body.

However, for all its fashionable accouterments, what lay at the

essential heart of the disco craze was the music. Characterized by an

insistently repetitive base and a hypnotic beat, overlaid with teasing,

sexy vocals, it captivated and mesmerized its adherents.

Though psychedelic dance bars had experimented with combi-

nations of dance, music, and lighting since the 1960s (‘‘oil wheels’’

and ‘‘sound-to-light’’ systems), it was during the 1970s that the

technological, musical, and fashion elements that deﬁne the culture of

the dance club were reﬁned and popularized. In the early 1970s discos

began expanding their equipment to include a wider array of musical

and visual props. The ‘‘mirror ball,’’ which could fragment a white

spotlight into a million rotating dots, became the symbol of the new

disco, along with synchronized lights that were matched to the bass

track of a record. Later, with the appearance of the smoke machine

and dry ice, came the ‘‘pin spot’’ light, which could stab through a

cloud of smoke to cast an illuminated shaft across a darkened room.

Throughout the 1970s, commercial dance clubs sprang up across the

country, ranging from fashionable and exclusive big city venues like

New York’s Studio 54, to more modest hotel discos and revamped

bars and clubs. The larger venues included advanced lighting and

music systems controlled by a disc jockey, or DJ, who lorded over the

collective euphoria from an elevated booth, cajoling the crowd to

‘‘get down and boogie.’’ Disco fashions highlighted the tight ﬁt, high

heels, platforms, and the funky ‘‘gentleman’s’’ three-piece suits, and

displayed an unabashed preference for polyester.

Pop music had always been danceable and ﬂamboyant, but what

set disco apart was that it was not only music for dancing, but also

music about dancing. The disco beat was the anthem of the dancers,

the disco ﬂoor a wonderland of sexual promise where anything might

happen, providing the perfect environment to indulge the pursuit of

one’s fantasy. Unlike the ‘‘be-ins,’’ the pot parties, and other esca-

pades favored by hippies, disco promised an experience of the exotic

that could be easily slotted into a well ordered working week and

coordinated with a regular pattern of one night stands. Film titles such

as Thank God It’s Friday and Saturday Night Fever reﬂected the

compartmentalized nature of this package-tour utopia. Though dis-

co’s dreamland of sexual fulﬁllment is often remembered as the

longing of the heterosexual male libido, the real origins of disco’s

sexual imagery lie in the gay club scene of New York and San

Francisco, where its camp atmosphere of sexual reverie was ﬁrst

born. This fact was largely obscured from disco’s audiences at the

time. With hindsight, it is astonishing that middle-class, heterosexual

listeners were oblivious to the homo-erotic suggestions that permeate

the songs of such widely accepted groups as The Village People—

songs such as ‘‘Macho Man,’’ ‘‘In the Navy,’’ and ‘‘YMCA.’’ As it

matured, disco sanitized and commercialized itself and, at its peak, it

was targeted at an age group too young to be admitted to a real dance

club, let alone have any clue as to what separated gay from straight

dance culture.

Disco’s real ground zero, however, was not the concert hall or

even the dance ﬂoor, but the AM radio dial. Mainstream radio started

playing disco music in the mid-1970s, and by December 1978, 200

disco-only formats aired across the country. Six months later, the

number had increased by a further 50. In 1974 and 1975 respectively,

George McCrae’s ‘‘Rock Your Baby’’ and Van McCoy’s ‘‘The

Hustle’’ introduced the sounds of disco to AM radio, though it was a

few years before artists such as Kool & The Gang, Gloria Gaynor,

Donna Summer, the Bee Gees, KC and The Sunshine Band, Sister

Sledge, Diana Ross, and the Village People rode the wave of disco

enthusiasm. By the time disco dominated the airwaves in 1979, even

Rod Stewart and the Rolling Stones were among those who had

hopped onto the bandwagon.

No group stands out as more emblematic of the period than the

Bee Gees, who began the 1970s as a British-Australian pop phenome-

non with moderate sales, and made a sensational break through on the

soundtrack of Saturday Night Fever. The ﬁlm, which made a star of

John Travolta, focused on a working-class youth who escapes the

mundane reality of life by becoming a demi-god of the local disco

scene. The soundtrack was originally released as a double LP in 1977,

becoming the industry’s biggest selling soundtrack album and pro-

ducing ten singles hits from its 17 tracks, of which ‘‘How Deep Is

Your Love,’’ ‘‘Stayin’ Alive,’’ and ‘‘Night Fever’’ dominated the

pop charts in 1977 and 1978. The famous image of Travolta, wearing

a white polyester suit, his pelvis thrust forward and his ﬁnger raised

skyward against a background of disco lights, came to deﬁne the

decade, an emblem of disco’s garish eroticism. The Bee Gees, whose

thumping, squealing ballads of sexual enterprise saturated the ﬁlm,

typiﬁed disco music for the remainder of the decade. Ironically, both

Travolta and the Bee Gees later fell victim to the ﬁckleness of fads

and fashion, and became easy objects of ridicule for some years to come.

By the end of 1979, disco’s celebration of the fanciful and the

fake was beginning to wear thin. After a stream of ‘‘one-hit won-

ders,’’ disco seemed to be more the product of producers and

promoters than of the artists themselves. One of the problems was that

disco music seemed to lack talented performing musicians: electroni-

cally manipulated sounds replaced the bass, drums and guitar that had

typiﬁed rock, and in live performances disco stars came to rely

increasingly on recorded tracks and off-stage musical support. The

Village People, largely a stage act, kept back-up singers entirely out

of view of the audience. More than this, disco proved notoriously

adaptable to a variety of commercial marketing devices. A record

called Hooked on Classics, whose cover featured a Mozart-like

character mimicking Travolta’s famous pose from Saturday Night

Fever, mixed well-known classical music hits to a disco beat. Novelty

songs like ‘‘disco duck’’ climbed the AM charts, and even the theme

from the ﬁlm 2001: A Space Odyssey, was re-recorded as a disco hit.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about disco was its strange

demise and long disgrace. Its commercialism, its ersatz sexuality and

its reliance on radio to reach an average music consumer—rather than

record sales to reach a ‘‘fan’’ market of countercultural listeners—

seemed to violate everything rock stood for, and provoked a powerful

backlash from fans of ‘‘real’’ rock. Hostility came to a head in 1979

when a ‘‘Disco Demolition Derby’’ was organized by radio DJ Steve

Dahl at a baseball game at Detroit’s Tiger Stadium. Anti-disco fans

burned more than 100,000 albums, hoisted ‘‘disco sucks’’ banners,

and rioted, forcing the cancellation of the game. The precise nature of

this backlash remains unclear: Dahl’s event, which has since been

compared to fascist book burnings, may have been homophobic,

sexist or racist, or it may have expressed a widespread disappointment

DISNEY ENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE

728

with the increasing commercialism of a supposedly rebellious musi-

cal form. It was most likely a combination of these factors, but,

whatever the case, not since John Lennon’s fateful remark about the

Beatles being more famous than Christ had there been such a

widespread consumer revolt against the music industry. The reaction

against disco’s commercialism, cheap sentiment, and faux sexuality

fueled the emergence of other more ‘‘authentic’’ expressions of youth

culture, punk and heavy metal. By 1981 the disco boom was bust.

—Sam Binkley

URTHER READING:

Haden-Guest, Anthony. The Last Party: Studio 54, Disco, and the

Culture of the Night. New York, William Morrow, 1997.

Disney (Walt Disney Company)

When it was founded in 1923, Walt Disney Productions consist-

ed of a small cracker-box studio in Hollywood housing a small group

Mickey and Minnie Mouse in Disneyland.

of creative artists headed by a young visionary who had recently

arrived from the Midwest to produce cartoons for the movies. Beyond

that, there was little more than a paper menagerie of barnyard animals

and a mouse nicknamed ‘‘Mickey’’ who emerged at night to seek

crumbs left behind by the artists. Five years later, that mouse had

made the jump to the silver screen starring in Plane Crazy (1928) with

the assistance of artist Ub Iwerks who supplied the artwork and Walt

Disney, himself who came up with the trademark squeaky voice. The

company was on its way.

At the end of the twentieth century, The Walt Disney Co. was

considered by many to be the most inﬂuential company in the world

surpassing even its founder’s vision as it has established footholds not

only in motion pictures but in such diverse industries as television,

electronic media, book publishing, hotels, transportation, tourism,

amusement parks, real estate, sports, and communications. In an

industry where ‘‘vertical integration’’ had become increasingly im-

portant, Disney and its chief rival Time Warner have their corporate

ﬁngers in more pies than any other entertainment entities. Yet, the

mouse continued to lead the way.

Perhaps, the most recognizable logo in the history of the world,

Mickey Mouse has left his footprints on every country and culture in

the world but the road to success has not been entirely without its

share of ups and downs. Walt Disney was born in Chicago in 1901, the

son of a ne’er-do-well father who drifted from one job to another. He

learned to work hard early in life and had very little escape from the

drudgery of his life except for the drawings he would create when no

one was looking. This early experience instilled two traits in Disney

that would follow him for all of his life. One was that he learned the

value of hard work and became a compulsive ‘‘workaholic.’’ The

other was a ﬁrm belief that the public thirsted for escapism and

‘‘happy endings.’’

In 1919, Disney went to work for the Kansas City Film Ad

Company where he put his drawing talents to use working on short

animated commercials for local merchants. He also met another

young artist named Ub Iwerks. Together the two learned the funda-

mentals of animation and decided to strike out on their own producing

a series of ads and comic shorts called Newman’s Laugh-O-Grams for

the local Newman’s Theater. In 1922, Disney took the Newman’s

concept further by creating pure entertainment oriented theatrical

cartoons satirizing popular fairy tales. Unfortunately, he had the habit

of spending more money on the production and technical aspects of

each ﬁlm than they brought in. The result was that, artistically, the

ﬁlms were quite polished for their time with full background detail

and a full spectrum of wash tones that served to establish the basic

Disney style. Financially, however, the company was forced to go out

of business because it’s production costs were simply too high.

In 1923, Disney moved to Hollywood with his brother Roy and

formed the Disney Brothers studio to produce short subjects which

combined both live action and animation. The impetus for the move

was based on an experimental short subject based on Alice in

Wonderland which was a reversal of rival animator Max Fleischer’s

Out of the Inkwell series which featured a cartoon clown having

adventures against a live background. Disney’s version featured a live

Alice character juxtaposed with cartoon backgrounds and animated

characters. The series, which was dubbed Alice in Cartoonland was

picked up by a Los Angeles distributor named M.J. Winkler. Yet, with

the formation of the company, both Disney brothers realized that

animation was not a one or two man job. Additionally, Walt realized

that he was not the animator that his friend Ub Iwerks was so he hired

a small staff including Iwerks and an up and coming animator named