2004 Column Archives
Finding Fish Tank Profits
By John Sammon
Jun 20, 2004, 12:09

Disney’s film “Finding Nemo” is doing to tropical fish what Jaws did for the world’s shark population----decimating them.

Thanks robber barons at Disney. Thanks a lot.

Because of your movie, every kid and their stage mom in the neighborhood wants a little Nemo of their own in a fish tank. As a result, tropical fish are disappearing from coral reefs in the South Pacific as fast as poachers can catch them.

You sure don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.

The guys at Disney have a sickness that has a big long clinical medical name, like with fifty letters, for people who for reasons of their own----attribute human characteristics to animals.

It’s sick, sick sick!

But it’s profit.

I have a long history of anger toward the Disney Empire, a ruthless corporation with little loyalty to its own country. The company used to be owned by Walter Disney, a one-time newspaper artist drawing furniture advertisements, before moving to Hollywood and Mickey. He envisioned a park where unlike other kids' amusement parks, an adult or parent, as he put it, an average slob like you or me, could enjoy a ride with his kid.

I hate being designated an average slob.

As habitat for bears disappeared (not necessarily Disney’s fault), Walt installed at the park a plastic bear with a moving head. For most of their former range, you can no longer see a bear in the wild, like I did as a boy, to the great impoverishment of humankind.

But you and your children can still see a fake at Disneyland.

I resent this.

Walt was a reactionary, right wing, communist-hating anti-Semite, who every time his employees asked for a raise, called them “communists.” He was a cheapskate and a puritan moralist. It’s ironic that a Jewish person with a more liberal bent would later own the studio.

In particular, I don’t like the studio’s use of historical figures to advance political ideology, for example, turning Pocahontas into a feminist and environmentalist, when there’s no historical evidence she was any such thing.

But turn-around is fair play. When the studio was right wing, Davy Crockett was portrayed as a six-foot-four paragon of virtue rather than the more realistic five-foot-six back woods braggart and buffoon who deserted his wife and told his constituents to “Go to hell!” (I’m going to Texas).

I’d like to pose this question to the corporate big shots at Disney. Are you donating money to the World Wildlife Fund for the tropical fish you’re destroying with Finding Nemo?

I doubt it.

Send me a hostile memo from your ivory tower skyscraper on the fifty-eighth floor, or the fax in your limousine.

Disney is a corporation that has a suit of armor protecting it, lovable characters, Mickey, Minney, Pluto and the rest. Criticizing Disney is like criticizing Ronald Reagan this week, or motherhood and apple pie.