Disney heiress Abigail Disney ripped her great-uncle Walt Disney for being “fascist” and stoking anti-Semitism and racism when he ran the corporate he co-founded together with her grandfather Roy O. Disney.
“He bordered on rabid fascism,” the 62-year-old heiress mentioned of Walt Disney on Marc Maron’s “WTF” podcast final week.
The rich movie producer and activist spoke with Maron about her new documentary that takes goal at her household’s firm, referred to as “The American Dream and Different Fairy Tales,” in addition to her household’s battle with habit.
Disney instructed Maron that whereas her great-uncle Walt was a “chaotic genius,” he and his brother performed up prejudices of the time.
“They weren’t shy about delving into the stereotypes if it served them,” she mentioned.
The Publish reached out to the Disney firm for remark.
The heiress famous that Disney positioned the wolf from “The Three Little Pigs and the Massive Dangerous Wolf” as a “Jewish peddler” and named one of many wisecracking black crows from “Dumbo” Jim Crow.
The Nationwide Affiliation for the Development of Coloured Individuals referred to as out Disney when he made “Track of the South,” a 1946 movie set within the Reconstruction-era American South that bolstered racist stereotypes.
“Once they made ‘Track of the South,’ individuals from the NAACP got here to the studio they usually mentioned, ‘Please don’t do it this fashion. Please discuss to us,'” she mentioned, noting that her household pushed forward anyway.
“In some enclosed means, Disney is an American fascist fantasy,” Maron mentioned.
“Nicely, yeah, that’s what it's — and it isn’t,” she replied. “They had been males of their time however that’s not an excuse … they knew.”
Lately, the corporate has labored to wash any traces of its controversial previous, eradicating racist themes from “Track of the South” and updating “Splash Mountain,” the journey impressed by the film.
It additionally took its Jungle Cruise out of operation to replace and eliminate adverse racial stereotypes of native individuals — and it even eliminated Walt Disney’s iconic opening day speech, which it has featured yearly since 1955 at Disneyland, a lot to the dismay of Disney die-hards who've branded the Mouse Home “woke.”
Apart from criticizing her household’s enterprise, Abigail Disney additionally revealed the similarities of her household to different American dynasties just like the Kennedys, explaining that whereas the Disney household didn’t have many tragedies, it did have habit.
“We now have our share of medicine. Medication occurred to all of us,” she mentioned. “If you happen to speak about medicine and habit and all that type of factor in any household the place there’s sources, you’ll see that really it’s tougher to get sober, a lot tougher to get sober when you might have cash.”
Disney backpedaled, saying she realized how onerous habit is if you’re “abjectly poor,” too, earlier than doubling down: “It’s so onerous if you’re trapped in a household and might’t actually get out of it since you depend on it for cash.”
The heiress admitted that she was talking from private expertise, however when Maron requested if she was sober, she paused.
“I’m difficult. I’ll simply say that,” she mentioned, earlier than including that she takes half in Al-Anon conferences.
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