The Digital Dilemma of Disney

Eighteen years ago, I was an MBA student at SMU’s Cox School of Business and signed up for an Ethics class (a relatively new class for MBA students and was not required). Americans and Houstonians were in the backwash of the Enron scandal and the company filed for bankruptcy the month I received my MBA (December 2001). As a child growing up in the 1970’s, ethics was something that was taught in the home and reinforced in public school and Sunday School at most churches. It was also something that was incorporated into popular TV shows and movies like those produced by Disney. One of my favorite Disney Classics to this day is “Pinocchio”. I love the innocence of Pinocchio and the ethical teaching about the importance of not lying, even when caught doing something wrong like running away from home to Pleasure Island with bad boys like Lampwick. You may remember that Pinocchio grew donkey ears and a tail as a result and was filled with great remorse when he saw his father and the Blue Fairy (who turned him into a real boy at the end of the story). Our final term paper was to incorporate all the Ethical principles we had studied during the semester with professor Robert Raspberry, PhD. It was Spring Break and I decided to spend all week working on my term paper which I titled “The Digital Dilemma of Disney”. My research included watching all the Disney movies up to the latest release, “Dinosaur” and extracting the ethical teachings. I will list these teachings at the end of this blog so as to not BOG the BLOG but rather keep it flowing. The premise of my paper was to show how Walt Disney Studios had forsaken their early days of making movies with the intent to teach children important life lessons based on the Bible’s Ten Commandments (studied and revered by Jews and Christians). Some may question whether that was a very fun thing to do with your Spring Break, however, to a person who grew up watching “The Wonderful World of Disney”, seeing the movies, reading the Golden Books and listening to the stories on LP’s, it was a welcome trip back to Memory Lane. In December 2000, I was chosen to attend The Disney Institute as a student leadership delegate from the SMU Cox BLC led by Mrs. Paula Hill Strasser and funded by Mr. Edwin L. Cox, it was one of the highlights of my entire MBA experience! Today, I have an extensive collection of the movies (VHS and Blue Ray), rare Disney Golden Books from the 1950’s and the Peter Pan records with the story books. If you’re at least 50, or have parents who shared their record collections with their kids and grand kids (mine were shared with my niece and nephew), you remember the saying “You’ll know when its time to turn the page when you hear Tinkerbell wave her magic wand like this …” Many of you may not be aware that Walt Disney started out with Bible stories (books and records) like Noah’s Ark and David and Goliath. I know because I own them and was surprised when I found them. Sadly, these Bible stories have gone by the wayside with companies like Disney, although Dream Works produced “Prince of Egypt” about Moses and “Joseph King of Dreams”. For a while now, I have been contemplating doing a blog (of which this is the first) and said to myself that the first blog would be about my Ethics term paper “The Digital Dilemma of Disney”. You might ask, what does this have to do with a Pookey Tiger?