I'm scared, and you should be too.
Although this sounds like I was somewhat retarded as a toddler, little did I know that everything I watched ended up having a profound effect on the rest of my childhood. By about age nine or ten I'd seen the James Bond and Star Wars films countless times. And I mean all the James Bond films. Could even say I was a bit of an addict.
But it's the Disney films that have always held a special place in my heart. I was born around the time most film critics have called the 'Disney Renaissance'. This is a period between the late '80's and late '90's where some of Disney's most iconic movies were released. The likes of The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King and Aladdin all came out just as I was at the prime age to enjoy them.
But not to understand them.
Over the last few weeks I've found myself watching The Lion King and The Hunchback of Notre Dame for the first time in years. They're still just as enjoyable as they were when I was a kid but there's a side to the films I never knew existed.
Take Hunchback. It's arguably my favourite Disney Renaissance film and it's also probably one of the darkest films ever to have been released under the Disney brand. Dealing with kid-friendly themes like Hell, prejudice, social injustice and damnation, I can sum up the film in three words: Absolutely. Fucking. Terrifying.
Watching it back now I wonder how the hell I ever slept easy after having Count Frollo's evil face burned on the back of my retinas. I wonder how the hell I accepted Quasimodo as your bog-standard hero when he looks like battered liver. I wonder how the hell I didn't turn into a raging pyschopath after being brainwashed by all the evil undertones.
Frollo, who's face looks like the shrivelled skin around your elbow is a creepy old judge who spends most of the film lusting after the young gypsy Esmeralda.
Lusting.
In a Disney film.
Then there's the lengths Frollo goes to to hunt down Esmeralda. This eventually leads to burning down the houses of those suspected of 'housing enemies of the state'. Now as a bright-eyed and optimistic child I'd never have thought anything of it. Now that I've studied the Second World War and the tactics of the Nazis during their persecution of the Jews, I can't help but see a slight overlap.
In The Lion King during one of Disney's most underrated songs 'Be Prepared', the hyenas march in a way that's too similar to the marches of German soldiers in WW2 to be a mere coincidence. Then there's the way Scar stands upon an elevated rock and looks over his hyena army; as though he's about to order them all to attack France.
But Disney can get away with it, because all this Nazi propaganda is cleverly hidden under an assortment of cutesy characters and a host of upbeat musical numbers. As a result, you're bog standard toddler is too engrossed in the magic to notice.
So where the hell were my parents in all of this? I asked them about it the other day and their response was "Oh you're looking too hard at these things, you're trying to find something that isn't there."
And that ladies and gentlemen, confirms that my parents were more than happy to leave their eldest son in front of a set of terrifying movies that warped my fragile little mind. And that explains a lot.
Do all kids programmes have to have some kind of propaganda as though Josef Goebbels is the head of animation? Is Dora teaching us all Spanish because in 20 or so years we're all going to be enslaved by a man called Pablo? Are the Power Rangers trying to teach us to abandon our parents and go and fight crime? Is Spongebob Squarepants a marketing ploy by sponge manufacturers to make people go and buy more sponges?
These are all eminently possible, suggesting that the real war is not in the Middle East, but at the doorsteps of Nickelodeon, Disney and CBBC. So next time you find yourself watching entertainment designed for children, be on high mental alert because you could find yourself stabbing someone an hour later just because the fluffy little onscreen rabbit said so.
Yeah this got out of control pretty quickly.
