Team Rodent - Carl Hiaasen [4]
The secret weapon is trust. Disney is the most trusted brand name in the history of marketing. It hooks us when we’re little and never lets go, this unshakable faith that Disney is the best at knowing what’s best. Who better to trust with Quentin Tarantino or a lesbian sitcom?
Remember also that the the company’s granite base of consumers is a prosperous and relatively open-minded Middle America; a Middle America that still finds patience (and even loyalty) for Bill Clinton, a president reported to claim biblical license for soliciting extramarital blow jobs. Team Rodent knows the tolerance level of its audience because it raised its audience. The fundamentalists’ “boycott” of Disney is doomed to flop because Middle America isn’t participating and doesn’t, if you’ll pardon the expression, give a rat’s ass. Middle America completely trusts Mickey with sex, violence, and occasional unwholesomeness, as long as it’s mildly entertaining.
Even so, one must wonder what the Disney brain trust was thinking in the summer of 1997 when, one week after the Southern Baptists denounced the company, its Hollywood Records division released an album called The Great Milenko. A brief but representative sample of lyrics:
I’d order you a drink then stir it with my dick.
And then to get your attention in a crowded place
I’d simply walk up and stick my nuts in your face.
Decidedly more Peep Land than Pat Boone. Other cuts on the album celebrated dismemberment, mutilation, forcible sodomy, necrophilia, and, in one instance, nonconsenting sex with a llama.
The group alleged to have written and performed these songs is named the Insane Clown Posse. The stars are presented as two white “Detroit street rappers” calling themselves Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope. On the album they are pictured as tongue-wagging jesters with painted faces. On the Internet they are pitched as “a celestial circus of lunacy, madness, and excess that travels through time and space to distort pleasant youthful memories into a horrific living night … these clowns carry axes instead of balloons.”
Tupac Wayne Gacy!
The outcry over The Great Milenko was immediate and predictable. Six hours after the CD landed in music stores, Disney yanked it off the shelves. The company said that although the lyrics had been screened (and some songs cut) by its legal department, nobody had shared the material with the company’s image-obsessed chairman, Michael D. Eisner.
At first it sounded plausible—Milenko bore all the signs of a bureaucractic fuckup, and wasn’t Disney overdue? As Team Rodent’s realm grows larger and more far-flung, airtight control becomes increasingly difficult to maintain. With so many creative and ambitious people on the payroll, it’s inevitable that some will slip Eisner’s reins.
But is that what really happened?
The Milenko CD was released and recalled on June 24, 1997. Other than a brief spate of news stories—“How’d Disney Ringmasters Let It Happen?” asked the Los Angeles Times—the incident faded quickly from the headlines. Disney appears not to have suffered at all, financially or imagewise. In fact, a case could be made that the company benefited from the publicity by responding so decisively. Never before had a hundred thousand units of anything been removed so swiftly from the reach of innocent consumers. It was as if Disney, under siege from the religious right, meant to reassure Middle America that it knew exactly where the lines of decency were drawn.
Which raises the intriguing possibility that The Great Milenko wasn’t a blunder at all, but actually a sly public-relations trick. Suppose Disney was looking for a bone to throw to the fulminating Baptists. What better sacrifice than a tediously offensive rap album that nobody was going to buy anyway?
In retrospect, the likelihood of something so raunchy slipping past Eisner seems remote; the guy is legendary for micromanaging. Somebody high in the organization had to know Milenko was in the pipeline, because Disney was prepared for the ensuing uproar.