The Age-old Catholic Mastery of Disneyfication
How the Church sanitized Roman polytheism and neutralized esoteric Christianity
Isn’t it discombobulating to notice that the Catholic Church practiced the insidious art of disneyfication long before Walt Disney co-created Mickey Mouse?
Not only is the Catholic Church the oldest Western institution, but that church mastered this kind of propaganda centuries before corporate advertising.
What, then, is disneyfication? One encyclopedia article defines it well as “the commercial transformation of things (e.g. entertainment) or environments into something simplified, controlled, and ‘safe’ — reminiscent of the Walt Disney brand.” More broadly, this includes “the processes of stripping a real place or thing of its original character, and representing it in a sanitized format: references to anything negative or inconvenient are removed, and the facts are dumbed down with the intent of rendering the subject more pleasant and easily grasped.”
The Walt Disney Company has done this for decades with its animated movies which sanitize fairy tales, fables, and folklores, including tales from Aesop, the Brothers Grimm, and Hans Christian Anderson. Having acquired Marvel Comics and the Star Wars franchise, Disney has done the same with its movies that…
