banned Disney stories

Gerstein, David DK - ECN DGE at ECN.egmont.com
Tue Sep 9 15:21:14 CEST 2003


	Daniel, Mike:

>> [Treasure of Marco] very interesting!  Is there a list somewhere of 
>> similarly banned stories?
>
>I once had a list of changes in The Carl Barks Library
	[snip]
>I don't 
>know if there a list of banned Disney stories available. I believe that 
>somewhere in the mid-1990s, some attempts were done by fans. But the 
>results got "banned" themselves, by other fans. The thought was that it 
>might give Disney a handy list of items that may better be forgotten 
>forever.

	It sure might. The existence of such lists can often create
controversy where there was NONE before, with very damaging results.
	A good example of this kind of thing comes from a Warner Bros
Animation internet fan forum that I like to visit. About three years ago, a
group of fans in that forum began enthusiastically listing Looney Tunes
cartoons that (to paraphrase) "luckily aren't censored or banned yet- but
WOULD be, if Warner realized what controversial material they contain, like
THIS and THIS and THIS! Yep, lucky for us they're still shown on TV intact!"
	Some more experienced list members pointed out that writing lists
like this equated to providing censors with ammunition. "Oh, I don't think
so," was the general reply. Fans enjoyed the excitement of personally having
discovered something that might be scandalous to somebody.
	Within a few months somebody at Warner discovered the forum and
began reading the lists. Sure enough: instantly, almost all of the relevant
cartoons began to be censored and banned on American TV. I heard the story
from the inside. It ain't pretty, folks.

	At various times there have been lists of banned comic stories
inside Disney. Many of us can think of certain duck or mouse tales that one
Disney regime or another has complained about over the years. But regimes
come and regimes go, and different regimes often use different lists (or
start from scratch at determining what they object to).
	So it's difficult to know which stories are banned at a given time-
but one thing for sure, there's no way to hurt ourselves worse than by
publicly conjecturing and guessing about individual stories.

	Excuse my worried tone, guys but I feel more strongly about this
than about almost any subject we've discussed lately.

	Best, David


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