L3ANM515 - The Walt Disney Company, the World’s First Transmedia Empire - TClément

Objectives

The aim of this class is twofold, namely to: 

• To expand knowledge on the American media and cultural industries, through a joint analysis of both their products and the logics of production, distribution, and consumption behind them;
  
• To reinforce the command of critical and methodological tools for the analysis and commentary of mass media products.
  

Content

This class sets out to examine the processes that have allowed the Walt Disney Company to become the world’s largest media conglomerate and perhaps the most iconic representative of “convergence culture.” (Jenkins). To this end, students will be required to consider the business and industrial imperatives that inform the production and distribution of the company’s media content through the analysis of its many products (i.e. animated films, film franchises, television, parks, and merchandise). 

Arranged into a six-part sequence (as detailed below), those case studies will highlight the logics of creation, circulation, and reception behind those products, as well as the company’s strategy of cross-promotion, which has allowed it to expand the same, largely self-referential universe across multiple media platforms. Among other themes, the class will deal with:

• The studio’s technical, esthetic, and narrative innovations as competitive advantages in a crowded market and in the Hollywood studio system;
  
• The central role of intellectual property in the company’s business model, through the systematic use of the studio’s back catalogue, merchandise, or franchises;
  
• The effects of narrative- and business-synergy across multiple media platforms from the company’s early beginnings on;
  
• The reception of mass culture, with specific emphasis on reception theory, popular cultural practices (e.g. fandom), as well as the audiences’ changing expectations regarding onscreen diversity and gender norms.
  

 Class outline

The class’s overall outline is chronological. It aims is to evidence the evolutions and lines of continuity in the history of a company that most systematically profits from its mythology and legacy.

• Introduction: Walt Disney and the myth of “American entrepreneurial genius”;
  
• Early animation: from short to feature-length films;
  
• Early diversification: licensing and merchandising;
  
• Disney’s television and theme park businesses;
  
• From Disney Renaissance to industrial hegemony: Disney’s rise to premier entertainment empire;
  
• Political Disney? Disney, “political correctness,” and diversity.