Several urban legends surround Disney's animated feature films and television shows. Perhaps you've heard some of them on the playground when you were a kid. Back then, any juicy rumor was spread like wildfire, true or not. And the Disney stuff was as good as it got. Tales of images of sex and foul language secretly hidden in wholesome Disney films—poisoning the minds of our youth—still persist to this day.
It's time to wrap this mother up. Yes, what started as a series that was supposed to include five parts over a span of three weeks has instead taken nearly five months to complete. But no worries, the series is here, it's done and it will live forever in a small space on the world wide web so long as Mario keeps paying his bills.
We've been through most of the big rumors, and now it's time to take care of the remaining two in the series.
Snow White represents cocaine, and the seven dwarfs represent the seven stages of cocaine addiction:
You may have seen this one on MTV's urban myth show, and if you did, then you know it's false. As the story goes, Walt Disney and his animators used hallucinogenic drugs, and some of what they drew for feature films was based on their hallucinations (The Wonderland in Alice in Wonderland, or all the colors in Fantasia).
Walt didn't even come up with the Snow White story (it was an old European fairytale), but he did name the dwarfs and give them personalities. Do they represent certain stages of cocaine use, such as grumpy, sleepy and happy? Perhaps, but only by coincidence. And those "symptons" can be applied to nearly anything. Some of them don't even coincide with signs of cocaine use.
Tinker Bell in pornos:
Walt Disney wanted to use Tinker Bell in the promotion of his theme park, Disneyland, so the character was given a more wholesome image. The crew at Disney Animation didn't like the idea of Tinker Bell, who was originally a sassy little vixen, being de-sexified. So what did the animators do? They worked on a little project after hours with15-or-so-seconds of animation in which Tinker Bell was getting intimate with Jiminy Cricket. No sound, no music and no color. It was just in pencil-sketch form.
As a joke, Jim Hill reported on his site months ago, Disney's animators would oftentimes splice the racy footage of Tinker Bell in with rough footage of projects that rookie animators had completed. As the young animators sat down to watch their animation, they were suddenly shocked to see Tinker Bell getting freaky
And it wasn't just the folks at Disney who pulled these sort of pranks. There's a pornographic scene starring Popeye and Betty Boop floating around somewhere that was reportedly produced by Max Fleischer in 1938. Apparently, Jim Hill said, it was as a "thank you" to the artists who agreed to relocate to Miami when the Fleischer Studio moved from New York.
The ironic part of the Tinker Bell story is that Harlan Ellison was fired as a writer on his first day at Disney when studio heards saw and heard him joking about doing a "Disney porn flick." He acted out the parts and imitated the voices of several Disney characters. When Ellison returned to his office, he found a pink slip on his desk. Ouch.
