Let's go by Forgotten. Hello everyone, and welcome to Forgotten Hollywood, your podcast and memories of yesterday year. My name is Doug Hesse and if you're tuning in Forgotten Hollywood for the first time, what I do in this podcast is take you on a journey back in time and share with you pieces of Hollywood that you may or may not know about. And today we have a very special guest with us today, Stephen Cranch Thomas, and he is here to talk about his book, Disney Animated Classics, A
Comprehensive Guide. Stephen, Welcome to Forgot on Hollywood.
Thank you so much for having me.
Well, it's always a pleasure to have guests on authors, and you know, thank you for spending a few minutes out of your busy time to be with us today to talk about your book. You know, Thomas, one of the things that we always like to do right out of the gate is allow you, the author to kind of talk about what the books about in your own words.
Of course, Yes, of Disney's Animated Classics is exactly what it says on the cover. It's run through each and every one of Disney's Animated Classics from snow White right up to Maana two, and each chapter uses the film in question to sort of launch off on exploration of Disney's films, of the production, sometimes of that film, but also on different themes. So you've got, for instance, the Dumbo chapter talks about the representation of alcohol and drinking
in cinema and in particularly Disney's cartoons. Princess and the Frog talks about the representation of race. The Pokemontas chapter talks about the very questionable representation of the Native American sort of population and the engagements they had with the English in that film.
What kind of inspired you write this book.
I've been a huge fan of Disney all my life. When I was a kid, we would get a lot of the videos on VHS, but we'd also record them off of the TV. And I went from, i suppose, being a child who loved Disney films to being a teenager who still really appreciated them, but was much more able to see the flaws and see the the interesting
different things that make them not always perfect. I think there's a lot of talk about Disney in the sense of how great it is, how wonderful isn't not so much where people are willing to appreciate it at the same time as looking at it from an outside perspective and saying what makes this interesting within the world of cinema, but also what makes this flawed and great at the
same time. When I was a student, I spent far too much of my student loan money on buying Disney DVDs until I had more or less all of them. I think I still have all of the Disney films on DVD up until Disney Plus became a thing, at which point I figured I'd save myself some money.
Absolutely. You know what's really fascinating to me is, you know, you talked about several different things, race, drinking, Native Americans, and I sometimes I don't think Disney gets the credit of kind of tackling some of those issues kind of in the forefront of things.
Yeah, I know, there's there's a lot of really interesting approaches across the films towards societal norms and what was expected at the time. I mean, one of the most common things we think about in terms of Disney's flaws is the racism representation and the like sort of different poor representations of race throughout their films. A lot of people talk back to Dumbo, and and there's a lot
of flaws in that. I mean, they've got the circus workers are these faceless, almost anonymous, dark figures who sing about being i mean very responsible their money and leaning into a lot of cliches at the time. But at the same time, the crows which are frequently called out the leader of the crows and Dumbo is literally called Jim Crow, but he's also one of the most likable
and kind characters in the entire film. I think very often Disney tries to push the boundaries a little bit without actually going so far as to cause trouble necessarily. Let's go by Garden Harleywood