Disney's The Princess and the Frog was the first to feature a black heroine, but the film still raised some eyebrows. The studio is no stranger to controversy—here are 10 scandals from its past.
When Disney first released its film adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s classic tale in 1951, moviegoers were not entirely pleased. British critics attacked the studio for “Americanizing” the story of Alice’s fall down the rabbit hole, while American viewers criticized Disney for distorting Carroll’s prose. “Mr. Disney has plunged into those works … snatched favorite characters from them, whipped them up as colorful cartoons, thrown them together willy-nilly … scattered a batch of songs throughout and brought it all forth in Technicolor,” read a review from the New York Times. (In the studio’s defense, Carroll was a pretty twisted writer whose work the Encyclopaedia Britannica calls “nonsense literature of the highest order.”) The film enjoyed a revival of sorts in the 1960s and ’70s, thanks to Jefferson Airplane’s 1967 acid-rock epic “White Rabbit” — and, no doubt, Alice‘s own inherently hallucinogenic imagery. Suddenly the Mad Hatter, the Cheshire Cat and the hookah-smoking, vowel-blowing caterpillar were icons for hippies across the country.
Hollywood doesn’t get much more G-rated than 1989′s tale of perky Princess Ariel and her animated adventures under the sea. But the movie’s home-video cover deserved an adults-only rating, at least in the eyes of many scandalized parents. One of the tall, thin castle spires depicted in the cover’s artwork (also used in posters and other promotional materials) bore an uncanny resemblance to the kind of protuberance that men generally cover up with bathing suits. Disney was flooded with complaints once word of the similarity spread and strenuously denied rumors that the suggestive edifice was a work of sabotage by a disgruntled artist. “This is the Walt Disney Company,” a beleaguered spokesman was quoted in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch as saying. “Why would we do something like this?” Intentional or not, Disney had no interest in being perceived as smut peddlers — a phallus-free version of Ariel’s castle graced the cover of the movie’s LaserDisc version.
Richard Dawson, the wisecracking British entertainer who was among the schemers in the 1960s sitcom “Hogan’s Heroes” and a decade later began kissing thousands of female contestants as host of the game show “Family Feud” has died. He was 79.
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