Fast Food Nation - Eric Schlosser [21]
In the mid-1950s Wernher von Braun cohosted and helped produce a series of Disney television shows on space exploration. “Man in Space” and the other Tomorrowland episodes on the topic were enormously popular and fueled public support for an American space program. At the time, von Braun was the U.S. Army’s leading rocket scientist. He had served in the same capacity for the German army during World War II. He had been an early and enthusiastic member of the Nazi party, as well as a major in the SS. At least 20,000 slave laborers, many of them Allied prisoners of war, died at Dora-Nordhausen, the factory where von Braun’s rockets were built. Less than ten years after the liberation of Dora-Nordhausen, von Braun was giving orders to Disney animators and designing a ride at Disneyland called Rocket to the Moon. Heinz Haber, another key Tomorrowland adviser — and eventually the chief scientific consultant to Walt Disney Productions — spent much of World War II conducting research on high-speed, high-altitude flight for the Luftwaffe Institute for Aviation Medicine. In order to assess the risks faced by German air force pilots, the institute performed experiments on hundreds of inmates at the Dachau concentration camp near Munich. The inmates who survived these experiments were usually killed and then dissected. Haber left Germany after the war and shared his knowledge of aviation medicine with the U.S. Army Air Force. He later cohosted Disney’s “Man in Space” with von Braun. When the Eisenhower administration asked Walt Disney to produce a show championing the civilian use of nuclear power, Heinz Haber was given the assignment. He hosted the Disney broadcast called “Our Friend the Atom” and wrote a popular children’s book with the same title, both of which made nuclear fission seem fun, instead of terrifying. “Our Friend the Atom” was sponsored by General Dynamics, a manufacturer of nuclear reactors. The company also financed the atomic submarine ride at Disneyland’s Tomorrowland.
The future heralded at Disneyland was one in which every aspect of American life had a corporate sponsor. Walt Disney was the most beloved children’s entertainer in the country. He had unrivaled access to impressionable young minds — and other corporations, with other agendas to sell, were eager to come along for the ride. Monsanto built Disneyland’s House of the Future, which was made of plastic. General Electric backed the Carousel of Progress, which featured an Audio-Animatronic housewife, standing in her futuristic kitchen, singing about “a great big beautiful tomorrow.” Richfield Oil offered utopian fantasies about cars and a ride aptly named Autopia. “Here you leave Today,” said the plaque at the entrance to Disneyland, “and enter the world of Yesterday, Tomorrow, and Fantasy.”
At first, Disneyland offered visitors an extraordinary feeling of escape; people had never seen anything like it. The great irony, of course, is that Disney’s suburban, corporate world of Tomorrow would soon become the Anaheim of Today. Within a decade of its opening, Disneyland was no longer set amid a rural idyll of orange groves, it was stuck in the middle of cheap motels, traffic jams on the Santa Ana freeway, fast food joints, and industrial parks. Walt Disney frequently slept at his small apartment above the firehouse in Disneyland’s Main Street, USA. By the early 1960s, the hard realities of Today were more and more difficult to ignore, and Disney began dreaming of bigger things, of Disney World, a place even farther removed from the forces he’d helped to unleash, a fantasy that could be even more thoroughly controlled.
Among other cultural innovations, Walt Disney pioneered the marketing strategy now known as “synergy.” During the 1930s, he signed licensing agreements with dozens of firms, granting them the right to use Mickey Mouse on their products and in their ads. In 1938 Snow White proved a turning point in film marketing: Disney had signed seventy licensing deals