Walt Disney Is Frozen Because We Want To Believe
A detailed look at the Walt-Disney-is-Frozen Rumor and why it will never die.
Frozen in Time
FULL DISCLOSURE: I'm a 39 year old man who recently watched the animated mega-hit FROZEN with my 3 year-old daughter.
CONTEXT: We were staying in a hotel in Maine, it was raining out, and it was between FROZEN and MADAGASCAR 3: EUROPE'S MOST WANTED. Honestly, the cover art alone of the latter gave me a headache, so I chose the former, a 3D computer-animated musical fantasy–comedy film-that-has-1.3 billion dollars in revenue-as-of-2015.
DISCLAIMER: Although I did fall asleep somewhere during Elsa's existential crisis (the second one)--I do feel I'm more than qualified to give you a breakdown of this film and more importantly analyze the Rumor About Walt Disney That Will Never Die.
What follows below is a delectable mix of sugary pop references and tasty morsels of factoids peppered with my unique flavor of creative non-fiction. It's been my experience that facts don't do what I want them to do so I therefore do what I have to do: I re-invent them. Hey, even Walt's motto was/is, "Where Dreams Come True." We all know the only place this happens is in our minds...
THE "DEATH" OF A DREAMER: Walter Elias "Walt" Disney "died" on December 15, 1966. Officially, lung cancer did him in. Walt was a chain smoker his entire life so I'll buy that. One report has him picking up the habit at the seasoned age of ten, when he started to draw his neighbor's horse and copied comics out of the newspaper. He dropped out of High School at 16 and by then was tugging on those Lucky Strikes like there was no tomorrow. I'm going to skip over his career as animator-turned-mogul and go straight to the last days. There's lot's of stuff out there about how he died. Let's face it, when you have a machine like Disney you want the machinery to run clean. But..the rumor he was frozen has origins in Walt's fascination with technology, specifically life-extension applications, and his Salinger-esque obsession with preserving innocence. The cyronically-faithful say Walt was "suspended" just prior to being officially dead (not to be confused with legally dead, clinically dead or brain-dead) by the pioneers of that interesting-in-concept-but-surely-impossible-to-execute "science" called cryonics, then in its infancy but still able to perform Walt's last wishes. A faux corpse was cremated and then delivered to Forest Lawn. After they froze him up, like Olaf from FROZEN (minus the smile, I would guess), they quickly placed his futuristic-EPCOT style sarcophagus under his favorite ride, Pirates of the Caribbean.
THREE REASONS THIS ALL MAKES SENSE TO ME:
1. Anyone who has ever been to Disney World and experienced it as a kid, when EPCOT was cutting-edge, and the whole place was magical if not also outrageously expensive, bureaucratic and impersonal. There's even an attraction called Living With the Land that has all sort of tomorrow-land crops with nutrients to give a citizen of the future extended life. Weird. Now where can I find some online? Come on, it's 2015!
2. The problem is so many animators at Disney are essentially boys who never grew up. These are talented but perpetually immature 13 year old guys who want nothing more than to slip a very hidden, very perverted sexual reference into The Lion King. Just enough to make them get a laugh, piss of the Christian Right and to send some subliminal messages to millions of children. Okay, maybe that last one's not true...
3. A lot of naysayers will tell you the first known cryonics experiment didn't happen until January 1967, one month after the man who turned a rat into an icon allegedly "died." So what? That was the first known experiment. I'm sure there were all sorts of unknowns happening. Like, why would Walt host a Nazi one month after Kristallnacht? How could he think Mortimer was a good name for his Mighty Mouse? Why did he yell Kurt Russell's name while in the hospital?
Bottom line: we will never know "the truth" until someone breeches the Fort Knox security around and under Pirates of the Caribbean or Walt Disney Co. let's us in and stops this charade.
THE VERDICT ON THE MOVIE: I hereby give FROZEN a score of two and a half stars out of five.
Reasons:
One star for the audacity of including a not-so-subtle salute to Sappho .
One star for proving once again any character named Hans in any movie by any studio is a villain or has at least a semi-sinister side.
One half star for the obvious reference to Walt (Elsa is a derivative of his middle name)
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