Life and Death and Disney

Reader Contribution by S.M.R. Saia
Published on October 6, 2010
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A few weeks ago I was listening to an interview with Michael Eisner, former CEO of Disney, on NPR. He was promoting his new book, Working Together, Why Great Partnerships Succeed. It was an interesting interview, and as usual, Diane Rehm took questions by phone and by e-mail that were then posed to Mr. Eisner on the air. What made this interview stick in my head was not anything in particular about the book, but a comment/question that was sent in by a listener. I don’t remember the exact words, but the comment was something along the lines of how the movie Bambi had caused the listener to run crying from the movie theatre, and whether or not Mr. Eisner felt that scenes such as the death of Bambi’s mother are appropriate for children’s movies. Mr. Eisner declined to really discuss the question, stating that Bambi was made some years before he took the helm of Disney, and the interview moved on.

This was one of the few times that I was inclined to actually call in to a talk show. If I had, this is what I would have said: I think that a child whose first personal experience of death is the loss of Bambi’s mother is a very lucky child indeed.

* * * * *

I’ll admit it; our T.V. is on around here A LOT, more often than not playing kid’s shows on DVD, or Disney movies, or for awhile there last fall – at my daughter’s repeated request – one of the six movies comprising the Star Wars saga. This used to bother me. I used to worry that we might be allowing our child’s brain to rot; that we were being bad or inattentive or just plain lazy parents. But lately, I’m starting to reconsider my position here. I’m starting to wonder if, just like the death of Bambi’s mother in Disney’s famous movie, the T.V. issue is all what you make of it.

For us, the television has always been a conversation-starter. Since she’s been old enough to really start asking questions, and since she began to watch things more sophisticated than Elmo, we have talked through almost everything that she has ever seen. “Who’s that?” “What’s that’s name?” “What happened?” “What happened to Bambi’s mother?” We always identify the “toot” – the “bad guy” in the movie, if there is one – and why they’re a toot, and whether or not they redeem themselves. We talk about the fact that there are “toots” in this world, and how a person can keep from becoming one.

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