![]() Its article was prompted by phone calls and letters from Christian groups. Stratton’s source for the story, the American Life League, meanwhile, hadn’t actually found the alleged subliminal scenes itself, either. Still, he decided to write a breezy tongue-in-cheek article about all three incidents for his paper. ![]() ``We didn’t make a final decision either way on what exactly people were seeing,″ he says. Stratton called the league, where a spokeswoman told him about the illicit messages in ``Aladdin″ and ``The Little Mermaid.″ He decided to see for himself and gathered a dozen or so reporters around a newsroom TV to view ``The Lion King″ scene. ``Watch closely as the cloud floats off the screen,″ the newsletter instructed, ``and you can see the letters `S-E-X.‴īemused, Mr. He was struck by an article warning parents about a scene from ``The Lion King″ in which Simba, the cuddly lion star, stirs up a cloud of dust. Stratton, who at the time covered health and medicine for the paper, was casually flipping through a copy of Communique, a biweekly newsletter published by the American Life League, an antiabortion group based in Stafford, Va. ![]() The reporter on that story, Jim Stratton, himself stumbled on the allegations inadvertently. It picked up the item from the Daily Press in Newport News, Va. The Associated Press, as it turns out, didn’t ferret out the story itself. And Tom Sito, the animator who drew the Little Mermaid’s purportedly aroused minister, says, ``If I wanted to put Satanic messages in a movie, you would see it. The company maintains that Simba’s dust is just that, dust. Aladdin’s line is ``Scat, good tiger, take off and go,″ Disney says. There’s nothing there,″ says Rick Rhoades, a Disney spokesman. ``If somebody is seeing something, that’s their perception. The article described the ``Aladdin″ and ``The Lion King″ scenes as well as one in ``The Little Mermaid″ in which it said an avuncular bishop becomes noticeably aroused while presiding over a wedding ceremony.ĭisney quickly fired back. Most people probably first heard about the allegations in early September, after the Associated Press ran a story saying a Christian group had identified the three subliminally smutty incidents. At least two waves of the rumor swept the country, from very different starting points. It was passed on by some people who didn’t believe it, by others who thought it was a joke, and by a Christian magazine that later _ and apparently to no effect _ retracted its story. an Iowa college student and a traveling troupe of evangelical actors. Runge a high-school biology class in Owensboro, Ky. Yet they have quickly become the stuff of suburban myth, like the ``Paul is dead″ rumor from the heyday of the Beatles or the persistent allegations that Procter & Gamble Co.’s moon-and-stars logo symbolizes devil worship.Īs the rumors spread, though, so did a common refrain: Where does this stuff come from? In the case of ``Aladdin,″ the allegation crisscrossed the country, traveling mostly through conservative Christian circles and helped by, among others, Mrs. And the three allegedly obscene sequences are hardly crystal clear even using the pause button on a VCR, viewers may debate whether they exist. Indeed, Disney catapulted into the headlines a few weeks ago on reports that there are subliminal sexual messages in three popular Disney videos: ``The Lion King″ and ``The Little Mermaid,″ as well as ``Aladdin.″ The charges were reported around the world TV news shows broadcast the offending snippets in slow motion, among them a scene from ``The Lion King″ in which dust supposedly spells out the word ``sex.″ĭisney denies inserting any subliminal messages. ``It’s like a toddler introduction to porn.″īy now, just about everyone has heard the rumors that so shocked Mrs. ``I felt as if I had entrusted my kids to pedophiles,″ says the Carthage, N.Y., homemaker, who promptly threw the videos into the garbage. Until, that is, an acquaintance tipped her off to a startling rumor: The Magic Kingdom was sending obscene subliminal messages through some of its animated family films, including ``Aladdin,″ in which the handsome young title character supposedly murmurs, sotto voce, ``All good teenagers take off your clothes.″ ``Disney was almost a member of the family,″ she says. that she owned stacks of its animated home videos, a ``Beauty and the Beast″ blanket and a Disney diaper bag. Anna Runge, a mother of eight, was so enamored with Walt Disney Co.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |