This expanded and revised edition explores and updates the cultural politics of the Walt Disney Company and how its ever-expanding list of products, services, and media function as teaching machines that shape children's culture into a largely commercial endeavor. The Disney conglomerate remains an important case study for understanding both the widening influence of free-market fundamentalism in the new millennium and the ways in which messages of powerful corporations have been appropriated and increasingly resisted in global contexts. New in this edition is a discussion of Disney's shift in its marketing strategies towards targeting tweens and teens, as Disney promises to provide (via participation in consumer culture) the tools through which young people construct and support their identities, values, and knowledge of the world. The updated chapters from the highly acclaimed first edition are complimented with two new chapters, "Globalizing the Disney Empire" and "Disney, Militarization, and the National Security State After 9/11," which extend the analysis of Disney's effects on young people to a consideration of the political and economic dimensions of Disney as a U.S.-based megacorporation, linking the importance of critical reception on an individual scale to a broader conception of democratic global community.
Industry Reviews
The Mouse That Roared: Disney And The End of Innocence by Henry A. Giroux and Grace Pollock sets a new standard for the study of Disney and popular culture. It offers new lens to understand the merger between corporate power and corporate culture while unveiling the insidious educational force of pre-packaged culture. This brilliant book should be read by every parent, educator, and youth. -- Donaldo Macedo, University of Massachusetts, Boston
Disney productions carry important cultural authority but until now we have lacked sure-footed guides to unpack the consequences when Disney products get embedded in everyday play, learning, and growing up. Now Henry Giroux and Grace Pollock in their revised and expanded edition of Giroux's pioneering study give us the tools with which to talk back to Disney's world. These tools are especially welcome because other ways of talking back to consumer culture have been relentlessly closed down by neoliberals. This book offers a crucial intervention in cultural politics for any place where Disney products sell. -- Nick Couldry, London School of Economics and Political Science
This book has expanded since 1999 (CH, Feb'00, 37-3408), just as the Walt Disney Corporation has. And, caveat emptor, mirroring the Disney empire's covert maneuvers to turn children into consumers, so, ironically, the publisher and the authors (both McMaster Univ.) would have libraries and scholars acquire this edition, which the publisher announces as 'thoroughly revised and updated throughout.' Alternating in tone between popular and pedantic, the book retains its provocative and compelling original stance: Disney wrote on children's tabulae rasae and shaped the cultural imaginations of several generations of American youth. But the authors include two new chapters, one on militarization and one on Disney's current global influence, which extends even to Shanghai. Giroux and Pollock's argument that Disney edits public memory, channels children toward desiring consumption, reconstructs historical narratives (even turning America into a theme park), and controls pedagogy continues to be worthy of debate, and the authors supply fresh and cogent illustrations (e.g., the Jonas Brothers, Pixar, post-9/11 culture) to bolster their claims. This screed against the monopolistic idolatry of Disney still commands attention. Recommended. * CHOICE *
Henry A. Giroux and Grace Pollock's revised and expanded edition of The Mouse That Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence presents tools, key concepts and analyses, and the context to provide a critical pedagogy of all things Disney. The author's dissection of the Disney Empire shows that it is not only selling entertainment and related products but a way of life and value system that the authors critically unpack. This is a valuable resource for all parents, teachers, and those interested in cultural studies of contemporary culture. -- Douglas Kellner, UCLA; author of Media Culture and Media Spectacle and the Crisis of Democracy
