Last week marked the beginning of an 18-month celebration of
Disneyland’s 50th anniversary. It’s a peculiar place, blurring the line between fantasy and reality. For example, Disneyland receives more than 2 million phone calls every year, and the most frequently called cartoon character is
Mickey Mouse.
When Walt Disney died, in 1966, I somehow expected Mickey and Donald Duck and all the rest of the gang to attend the funeral, with Goofy delivering the eulogy and the Seven Dwarfs serving as pallbearers. Disney was their Creator, and he repressed all his characters’ baser instincts, but now that he had departed, they could finally shed their cumulative inhibitions and participate together in an unspeakable Roman binge, to signify the crumbling of an empire.
On behalf of my magazine, The Realist, I contacted Mad’s Wally Wood and, without mentioning any specific details, told him my general notion of a memorial orgy at Disneyland. He accepted the assignment and presented me with a magnificently degenerate montage, a detail of which you see here. Pluto is pissing on a portrait of Mickey Mouse, while the real, bedraggled Mickey is shooting up heroin. His nephews are jerking off as they watch Goofy fucking Minnie Mouse on a combination bed and cash register. The beams shining out from Sleeping Beauty’s Castle are actually dollar signs. Dumbo is simultaneously flying and shitting on an infuriated Donald Duck. Huey, Dewey and Louie are peeking at Daisy Duck’s asshole as she watches the Seven Dwarfs groping Snow White. The prince is snatching a peek of Cinderella’s snatch while trying a glass slipper on her foot. The Three Little Pigs are humping each other in a daisy chain. Jiminy Cricket leers as Tinker Bell does a striptease and Pinocchio’s nose gets longer.
The Disney corporation considered a lawsuit but realized that The Realist was published on a proverbial shoestring, and besides, why bother causing themselves further public embarrassment? But there were individual acts of censorship. In Baltimore, a news agency distributed that issue with the Disneyland Memorial Orgy removed; I was able to secure the missing pages, and offered them free to any reader who had bought a partial magazine. In Oakland, an anonymous group published a flier reprinting a few sections of the centerspread and distributed it in churches and around town.
Consequently, the feature became so popular that in 1967 I decided to publish it as a poster. Recently I found a carton of those original posters in my garage, and they’re now available via my Web site, paulkrassner.com.
Fortunately, the statute of limitations has run out.
