My aim in this paper is to address two, quite different, questions that I believe are important for the future of media and communication studies. The first is to ask what is actually meant by the term `globalisation’. The second is ask whether there really is such an unbridgeable gulf between what political economists of the media do and what practitioners of cultural studies are up to. I discuss both of those questions with reference to the analysis of one of the product lines developed by Disney ¹.

The Disney empire is identified by many serious commentators as one of the paradigmatic global media corporations. If News Corporation gets first billing because of its owner’s public image, and if Time-Warner is just a little bit bigger, Disney is, nevertheless, definitely one of the `first tier’ global companies (Herman and McChesney, 1977: 81-84). I want in this paper to raise a slight query about that consensus. No one would contest the fact that it is very big, very diversified, and operates in many countries, but it is another, and more problematic, thing to say that Disney is a global media corporation ².

There are numerous, conflicting, theories of globalisation, but whichever one is adopted, it would seem to imply that a global company would be different in important ways from a purely national company. Disney as a global media corporation will do different things than would a purely US media corporation. Products designed for a global market will be different to products designed for a purely national market. Cultural products that are global in character will have transcended the narrow limits of the national, even as large and plural a nation as the USA.

There are many ways in which such general statements could be turned in to testable hypotheses. In this paper, I want to restrict myself to one. I want to look at what happens when Disney acquires a particular piece of intellectual property and transforms it into a part of the Magic Kingdom. Within that narrow scope, I want to be even narrower. I don’t want to talk much about media economics, and I don’t want to talk much about intellectual property law, and I don’t want to talk much about reception. I want to talk about signification. I want to talk about how the look and sound, the characterisation and the narrative, are transformed when a product is taken up by Disney. If globalisation has any real meaning, it should presumably be embedded in the nature of the media texts that are being diffused around the world.

My second reason for wanting to undertake this project is to explore an area of debate, or rather acrimonious dispute, between political economy and cultural studies, which is concerned with the issue of determination. Many political economists have a dirty little secret: they are Marxists of one kind or another. They are therefore quite keen on the idea that being determines consciousness, since that is one of things that most Marxists are quite keen on. Many students of cultural studies also have a dirty little secret: they used to be Marxists of one kind or another. They are therefore quite keen to deny that there is any value in the idea of determination, since that smacks too much of the old days ³. A division of labour has grown up. The political economists talk about monopoly, competition, regulation and integration both vertical and horizontal. Cultural studies, or at least its textualist wing, is busy talking about the play of signifiers, inter-textuality, deconstruction and how texts in general actually work. What I want to do here is to transgress that boundary and try to talk about texts, how they work, and how they change. No doubt I shall do this badly. My critical tools are a bit dated, I am probably not familiar with important recent developments, and I have altogether forgotten how to use some of the ones that I once thought I understood, but I shall try to be at least interesting, and hopefully entertaining. Of course, I am not doing this just for fun. I think that I can show that particular kinds of textual changes took place in the object I am studying, and I think that you would have to be pretty obstinate not to concede that they took place for crudely economic reasons. So I want to show that we political economists are right, not only when we present analyses of the economic workings of the media industries, but also by demonstrating that our opponents’ tools, when properly used, undermine their own claims about the autonomy of media texts, and actually provide yet more support for our position.

In undertaking this research, I was not interested in `politics’ in the relatively narrow sense of the manifest content of the artefact in question. That theme was brilliantly introduced by Mattelart and Dorfman many years ago (Mattelart and Dorfman, 1975/84). They have been followed by many authors, particularly writing about Latin America and about gender (Smoodin, 1994: 131-80; Bell et.al, 1995). Walt Disney himself was an unpleasant piece of work: anti-Semite, union buster, FBI informer (Eliot, 1994). Disney’s politics are pretty disgusting, even now that the old man is long gone. Racism remains a central theme, from at least as early as Dumbo right up to the present ⁴. More generally, however, I am not sure that political incorrectness is a necessary element in Disney. After all, the studio did produce an extremely successful film in which one of the major scenes involves an alliance of youth, proletarians and militant feminists temporarily disrupting capitalist patriarchy, personified in finance capital, and making their escape by brushing aside the forces of the bourgeois state⁵ . Of course, all artefacts have an important political dimension in that they normalise a particular representation of the world, and I will try to show how the changes I detail here constitute a political shift in this sense, but I don’t want to make any grander claims. The sorts of claims I want to make about determination are not linked to any particular kinds of political position ⁶.

Finally, I am not here making any claims about what `effects’ the artefacts I examine have on any audience. I do give some evidence about what real readers and viewers think about what they are exposed to, but, beyond noting those views, no inferences should be drawn about how people might change as a result of exposure to these particular fragments of the mediascape. The kinds of claims I want to make seem to me to exist more or less independently of any actual interpretations that might be made by real, live, flesh and blood, audiences.

The bear facts

In choosing an object of study, I wanted to take something that was central to Disney, and therefore capable of sustaining important conclusions, but I also wanted something that was not pure Disney Americana, since there would then be no process of change to examine, other than the internal evolution to the marketable product. That would be interesting, and would certainly yield valuable information about the micro-economics of media production, but it would not answer all of the questions at stake here ⁷. To do that, I wanted something that had originated outside of the USA and predated Disney, was purchased by Disney in a complete form, and whose Disney embodiment was marketed around the world. That way, there would be an original, pre-Disney, and a second, Disney, version, both in the public domain, and we could trace the changes from one to another.

I did not want something that was folkloric, non-commercial, innocent, pre-capitalist, quaint. That would lead too easily in to a series of arguments about authenticity, commodity production, and what not. These are important arguments, but they raise issues other than the nature of Disney globalization. The transitions from European fairy tale, or French 19th century novel, to Hollywood animated feature involve a range of questions about translation in the widest sense ⁸. They also raise questions about the ways in which cultural commodities produced in early, or pre-capitalist, societies are adapted to the demands of fully-developed capitalist cultural production. I needed something that had been produced in a metropolis, as a cultural commodity, in an epoch of developed capitalism. I wanted an artefact that had already been around a bit, that was thoroughly worldly, that had been to market, and had already gotten (see, I can speak American) grubby from many grasping commercial hands. That way, I could be sure I was talking about what Disney did, not what the market, in general and in the abstract, did.

The artefact that best fitted this strict specification was Winnie-the-Pooh. A. A. Milne published the first of the Winnie the Pooh books, Winnie-the-Pooh, on 14 October 1926. The second, The House at Pooh Corner, followed on 11 October 1928 ⁹. The books quickly became very popular. Editions were frequent: the British edition of Winnie-the-Pooh had been through 56 printings Before Disney (1965); The House at Pooh Corner had 41 BD. There were 130 printings of the US editions of The House at Pooh Corner before June 1943 (Thwaite, 1992: 109). The original books circulated world wide, including the USA, and they had, by 1992, been translated into 32 languages, including Esperanto (Winnie-la-Pu) and Latin (Winnie Ille Pu). There continues to be a trade in artefacts that are directly derived from this original version. The books quickly became a central part of the childhood of the English middle class ¹⁰.

This popularity with the English middle class has led to a number of mistaken ideas about the books. There is a temptation to think of the stories as having been naively constructed by a doting parent, told first to his very own children, overheard by a visiting adult with literary connections, who suggested they might have wider appeal, humbly and naively offered to the alien world of publishing, and eventually published to the astonishment of their tyro author. In fact, A. A. Milne did have a son called Christopher Robin, but his familiar name was `Billy Moon’. Milne claimed to have taken very little from life, and Christopher Robin’s many comments on his relationship with his father contain nothing to contradict that view. Far from being a naïve amateur, Milne had been a professional writer since leaving Cambridge 25 years before. He had made a career on Punch (a mildly satirical magazine with iconic status for the 19th and early 20th century philistine middle classes), of which he became deputy editor. He had published numerous books of stories, literary journalism and plays, mostly for adult audiences. Even while serving as a signals officer in the First World War he had continued to produce commercial writing. By the early 1920s he was an extremely successful dramatist and was starting a new career as a writer of detective novels 11. The Pooh stories were more or less an accident and grew out of poems (collected as When We Were Very Young, and containing a swan called `Pooh’ and a bear who both worried about being stout and looked very much like the later Pooh) published earlier ¹². These books were the product of a thoroughly professional literary sensibility, and it can easily be shown that many of the stylistic features which so charm the reader were commonplace rhetorical strategies employed in his adult writing ¹³.

The stories were illustrated by E.H. Shepard, a successful commercial artist who, like Milne, worked for Punch. What might seem naïve was the product of a trained and professional artistic sensibility ¹⁴. Shepard worked over the drawings very thoroughly, taking models from life (his bear was based not on Christopher Robin’s toy but that of his own son, which was called `Growler’) and from imagination to create the necessary illusion of spontaneous, even childlike, representation ¹⁵. There was nothing in either the words or the pictures that could be traced to anything other than the labours of two conscious and skilled experts, who calculated them to appeal to a particular kind of market that they both already knew intimately from years of highly successful production.

Both Milne and Shepard were quick to recognise that they had a valuable property that they could exploit through spin-offs, merchandising, and so on. The first story was broadcast on `all stations’ at 7.45 p.m. on Christmas Day 1925, and there were regular (radio) broadcasts of both stories and poems during the twenties and thirties (Thwaite, 1992: 187). From 1929, there was a stream of Christmas calendars, notepaper, Christmas cards, nursery prints, birthday books, project books, and so on <sup>16</sup>. Neither of the creators appear to have regarded their original work as sacred. They developed, changed, and altered the material as the market demanded. Many of the stories originally appeared in magazines, and Milne changed some of them before they entered book form (Thwaite, 1990: 295ff). For later editions, Shepard made new drawings, adding for example a brick arch to the famous wooden bridge for a 1958 edition <sup>17</sup>. The 1973 Methuen edition, which collects both books under the title Winnie the Pooh, has illustrations coloured by E. H. Shepard himself, made when he was in his nineties, which I think alter the character of the text considerably. Neither were they particularly concerned about allowing other people to alter their texts. In the 1950s, they allowed A. Schenk to publish a pop-up book with his modifications to the pictures (Milne, 1953). Purists will at once note that this alteration to the illustrations (technically: `decorations’) also involved an alteration to the overall narrative structure: neither Tigger nor Kanga and Roo appear in the original story of Eyeore’s Tail. The stories were not only widely translated, they were widely popular around the world. The Latin translation was made by a Hungarian doctor of medicine living in São Paolo, who wanted to teach Latin to some children and lacked a suitable book. The stories were, then, a successful commercial product that underwent transformations in the interests of the market place, and experienced a mild form of globalisation from early on in their life.

Disney acquired the rights from Milne’s widow in the 1960s, and produced what was originally intended as a single, full-length animated feature. The studio account runs that, because the story, unlike the normal Disney material, was not directly familiar to a US audience, the decision was taken, naturally as the direct result of the wisdom of the great man himself, to release the material as a series of three shorter episodes, running as support to main features. Like much of what is told about Disney, this is not quite true. The books had early on been at least as successful in the USA as in Britain: Winnie-the-Pooh was published in New York one week after London, and sold 150,000 copies between 21 October and 31 December 1926 (Thwaite, 1990: 318). This popularity continued. As we have seen, the number of US printings actually outstripped the number of UK printings, and sales were much larger. In 1947, the original toys went on a tour of the USA, which ended up lasting 10 years. They are still there (Thwaite, 1992: 143). Milne’s stories were certainly well-known to generations of US children, even though they might not have had the mass audience that Disney wanted to win. From the beginning, the familiar Disney process of synergistic exploitation got under way. When the first film was released, there were 169 associated products licensed to 49 different manufacturers (Thwaite, 1992: 162). Disney started producing books based on the film. Later, there was a series of short videos using new narrative material originating with Disney which were first released on television, and in the 1990s the full-length original version was released on video. In 1997, a wholly new full-length feature, set after the ending of the original books, was released, direct to video. During the same period, there was the expected deluge of associated merchandise: books, toys, shampoos, clothes, and so on, proliferate. `Pooh Bear’, as he is now usually known, got the normal, Disney treatment in every respect apart from full-scale theatrical release.

The result is very widely appreciated, if the dozen or so dedicated web sites produced by fans, or the existence of lively discussions of merchandise purchase that form the stock in trade of `alt.fan.pooh’, are any indication. Disney’s Pooh has established the same sort of enduring hold over a new generation of children and adults as did Milne’s original. Indeed, the success of Disney has not eclipsed the appeal of the classics: Grolier has just (July 1998) announced that it will implement a Milne project that he never brought off, and publish the all stories as individual small books with Shepard’s coloured illustrations.

When is a bear not bare?

The answer is: When he is a Disney bear. The original bear was, mostly, a nudist. In this, he differed from his friend Piglet, who always wore the same sort of swim-suit outfit. Pooh did, in two stories (the very wintery `In which Pooh and Piglet go hunting and nearly catch a Woozle’ and `In which a house is built at Pooh Corner for Eyeore’), wear a little jacket with a couple of buttons which, in the edition with coloured pictures, was red. Disney’s Pooh always wears the same red tee-shirt. Disney’s Pooh is different from Milne and Shepard’s ¹⁸. We can trace those differences under six headings:

1. Appearance. Disney’s Pooh looks different from Shepard’s. The most obvious difference between the original and the Disney version is, of course, that the latter is entirely in colour. As we have seen, this is not so much of a transformation in itself, since Shepard had provided a coloured version of his original illustrations. What is different between this latter and Disney’s version, however, is the kind of colour. Shepard’s was messy, uneven, badly fitting, and it was, mostly, `cool’ colour. Disney’s colour, or as I should say, color, on the other hand, is sharp, bright, uniform and `hot’. There are other obvious visual changes. Line is one of them. The boundaries of the drawings are often unclear in Shepard, whereas in Disney they are always sharp. Sometimes in Shepard, the drawings themselves are almost reduced to the level of children’s work, whereas Disney’s are always adults’ drawings for children. The change in the appearance of characters is striking. Apart from acquiring clothes, Pooh also gets a nose job and eyebrows. Tigger and Kanga are transformed as is, most strongly, Rabbit. Christopher Robin changes, too, although this is perhaps largely a process of updating the look of children to take account of the passage of time ¹⁹. I think it is not unreasonable to say that the change that has taken place here is that the looks of the characters have come to approximate more closely to those present in other Disney artefacts: they have been `cartoonized’, and cartoonized into a US idiom. This, in the US cinema generally and in Disney in particular, is marked by severe anthropomorphism and, for that reason, they are drawn with expressive faces: that is why Pooh now has such strongly marked eye-brows and always wears clothes, and why Rabbit, who was the most `realistic’ of the original drawings, is so completely altered. The originals were toy animals, albeit stylised toy animals, they were not human, and their faces were distinctly un-expressive.

2. Sound. The books, of course, are silent, but as we have seen, they were broadcast from the first. I have not heard any recordings of these early versions, but I am willing to bet that if I do eventually find one, it will sound terribly BBC. More recently, there have been recordings that use famous British actors and do sound terribly English, although not all BBC English. In considering this question, you need to remember the politics of voice. The English are trained from earliest childhood to pay great attention to what other people sound like: voice is one of the key markers of social class in this society. As George Bernard Shaw remarked: `One Englishman has only to open his mouth for another to despise him’. So we notice when the sounds change, and change they do. In the first film, the grandiloquent Narrator (`I am the Narrrrattorrr’) sounds very much like an English classical actor who migrated to Hollywood and made a living playing English milords in a string of costume movies. Christopher Robin is voiced in English, at least in the version released here, allegedly as a result of the xenophobic campaign waged by British newspapers. The other characters, Pooh and Tigger in particular, are voiced in American ²⁰. The short, wholly-Disney productions are voiced entirely in American, including Christopher Robin. Interestingly, and much to my discomfort when I first saw the movie, in the second feature Christopher Robin is voiced in English again, at least in the version released in Britain, although admittedly not very strongly.

3. Place. The location of the original stories is not very strongly marked. It is, no doubt, England, and Shepard went for long walks in Ashdown Forest to get the right sorts of settings for his drawings, and made many detailed studies of the flora before finalising them. It could, however, be almost anywhere in Northern Europe, or even the East Coast of the USA. There are no strong markers of national place in the drawings, and some important things in the narrative (snow, floods, sunshine) are rarities in the UK. On the other hand, Christopher Robin’s `real’ house, which would have been a fairly strong marker of place, is almost never shown apart from the interior staircase at the beginning and end of Winnie-the-Pooh. What is shown, and marked on the map, is a tree house just like the animals’. In much of the Disney version, the same point could be made, but in the short videos there is quite a lot of the `real world’. The house in which Christopher Robin `really’ lives is shown, and it is straight from US suburbia. The town through which the toys travel is Smalltown, USA. The non-animate toys with which Christopher Robin plays are another clue: in one shot, for example, he has what is clearly an American football ²¹. In other words, to the extent that the Disney version is visually placed, it is placed in America.

4. Language. Both of these versions were constructed primarily in the same language, so there is no real problem of translation. There are minor differences, that annoy the adherents of each dialect quite a lot about the speech habits of users of the other one, but really they are the same thing. There is, however, another change. The original version was very cavalier about the spelling it attributed to the characters. The most famous version is the notice in `In which Rabbit has a busy day and we learn what Christopher Robin does in the mornings’, in which Christopher Robin announces he is `bisy’, but will be `backson. Much of Owl’s character depends on the fact that he makes claims to literacy that he cannot sustain. Disney tidies most of this up, as we can see by comparing the Shepard’s and Disney’s maps of the terrain in which the action takes place. This concern with making sure that children get the right habits straight from the word go is carried to its logical conclusion in the 18-volume `Grow and Learn Library’ edition of texts based on the characters. The Disney version is permeated with an educational correctness that is not only absent from, but foreign to, the original ²².

5. Narrative. As infuriated purists have noted, Disney plays havoc with the original story lines. Some of the original elements of the books are never used by Disney, for example the search for Small and the Expotition to the North Pole. Others are mixed together - Tiggers not being able to climb trees together with the footprints in the snow from the Woozle hunt, for example. In other places, extraneous matter is introduced, for example Tigger and Roo ice-skating, into an existing narrative. Even when using the original material, the Disney version operates with a different narrative logic. This is most evident, however, not with the incidents but with the order of introduction of characters. In the original, Kanga and Roo did not arrive until near the end of the first book. Their arrival provoked Rabbit’s notorious racist outburst, and the plot to kidnap Roo in order to force them out of the forest. Tigger did not appear until the second story of the second book. All three are present from the start of the Disney version, and Tigger is an essential narrative spring from early on. The effect is to change the focus of the stories. In the original version, the central relationship is between Pooh and Piglet and, them being what they are, it is slow, contemplative, poetic. In the Disney version, Tigger is at least as important a protagonist (`Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too’), and Piglet is actually absent from some of the earlier narratives. Because Tigger is such a bouncy animal, the effect is to make things quicker, eventful and active.

6. Character. Very near the start of the original Disney film (The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh) we meet Gopher. As he says in introducing himself: `I’m not in the book’. He comes to play an important role in all of the Disney productions, although is nowhere essential to the progress of the plot. This intrusion provoked outrage in the columns of the Daily Mail, when the first Disney production was released in Britain. The journalist expressed (synthesised?) horror at the fact that Gopher was in the film and Piglet was not <sup>23</sup>. This ignored the fact that Piglet is not introduced into the original until the third story, except in a Shepard drawing of Pooh being hauled out of Rabbit’s doorway. There are two real points about Gopher. The first is that he is not part of the British child’s bestiary, although he may well be in the USA. I am not trying to argue that Gopher is `foreign’: the gopher is no more and no less native to British shores than are bears, tigers, kangaroos and elephants, all of which figure prominently in the original stories. It is more a question of what is normally accepted as being part of the range of cuddly stuffed toys that young children get given as presents, play with and form attachments to. Bears, tigers, kangaroos and elephants have long been part of that British juvenile bestiary, the gopher has not. What has happened is that this particular convention of normality has shifted from Britain to the USA. The second point is that Gopher is an active character. Like Tigger, his presence diminishes the placid relationship between Pooh and Piglet that is at the centre of the two original books. In its place there is incident and activity. There are other changes to character. Small is deleted, and Rabbit’s friends and relations are changed from a menagerie of small creatures to just rabbits. Kanga is sexualised, and Tigger is made to fancy her. It is not too much to say that in the original, the animals are lightly gendered, if at all. Kanga is female, and is drawn with an apron and brush, but her concerns are maternal rather than sexual. Despite that fact that he is textually a `he’, in one of the British dramatisations, Piglet is played, without noticeable distanciation, by a female actor ²⁴. In the Disney version, all the characters are pretty firmly gendered ²⁵.

Overall, it is clear that the transition from Milne and Shepard to Disney involved a complex series of changes to the text, both as a narrative and as a visual artefact. These changes may seem arcane, but they are very obvious to aficionados. They commonly discuss the differences between `Classic Pooh’ and `Disney Pooh’. They conduct online opinion polls about which version they prefer, and enter sharp debates as to their various merits. These differences clearly matter.

A great and glorious A

A catalogue of transformations is one thing. It is quite another to make a claim about what they amount to. Talking about meaning in media studies has a well-known difficulty: just so soon as you finish, someone will jump up and say `But audiences are active and they construct meanings’. What was a jolly good and interesting idea twenty years ago has, perhaps, become a little disabling. As the one of the chief initiators of that tradition of research put it, agreeing, no doubt unconsciously, with Eyeore’s certainty that three sticks arranged in a particular way meant `A’: `the analysis of the text or message remains...a fundamental necessity, for the polysemy of the message is not without its own structure’ (Morley, 1992: 21). This is obviously right. It is quite possible to say that the textual organisation of a particular artefact exhibits such and such a structure, without at the same time claiming that it is this structure, and the meanings that it privileges (`prefers’, to use a term probably by now discredited), are the ones that any audience actually constructs in the course of its situated consumption. The former is a question of our knowledge of the text, the second a question of our knowledge of the audience.

So, I don’t feel particularly ashamed to offer an interpretation of the changes that we have observed for the reason that it ignores the sense(s) that real audiences make of these texts. In this particular case, however, there is another, and much more worrying, problem to consider: it is very easy to make a complete fool of oneself. There are at least two parodies of well-meaning Marxists interpretations of Winnie-the-Pooh, and these do make us look ridiculously earnest. `Martin Tempralis’, in the most famous of the parodies, wrote that:

I intend to let this be An Awful Warning to Me, and only to make only very much smaller, and I hope less contentious, claims about what all the changes mean ²⁶

I do not think it is unreasonable to say that the original is constructed on the basis of what we could call an English middle class structure of feeling. Perhaps we can be more precise. Certainly, in its visual look at least, it is very much the product of a particular time. I would say that the time is that of the peculiar denial of modernity that is so characteristic of the suburban middle class in England ²⁷. (We live in half-timbered houses in leafy roads called horrid things like `Sylvan Avenue’, not urban apartments on streets called rational things like `Nth Street’.) What is more, the structure of feeling it that of a confident class that does not worry about spelling: Christopher Robin will learn to read and write perfectly well in due course. If we want to date it, then surely it is that long, hot, peaceful and utterly mythical Edwardian summer that so obsesses British films and television. The world the books represent may be decent, civilised, warm, ironic, domestic, and half a dozen other good things, but the cultural unconscious that produced this version was profoundly English.

What the Disney version does is first of all to change the time. I am no expert on US cultural history, but I would guess that boys in shorts went out in the 1950s, or at the very latest the 1960s, and I would venture that this is the time of videos. In an important sense, this is a time with the same function as that of the English original. It is an imaginary time of social content, and it is before now: before Vietnam, drugs and violence and the collapse of the family. It is the imagined time of the childhood of the adult mediator rather than the time of the child audience ²⁸. In large part this structure of feeling is middle class and small-town, but it is also a more neurotic phenomenon, worried that its children must learn to read and write properly from the very start. It is an American structure of feeling, and its points of reference in terms of the six factors we traced above are all US. Look and voice, place and language, character and narrative, all point to that conclusion. It may be open, friendly, lively, active, fun, and half a dozen other good things, but the cultural unconscious that produced this version was profoundly American. Just to give one final, and I hope clinching, example of what I mean by an American cultural unconscious: among the books spun off from the videos is Winnie the Pooh’s Thanksgiving. As I have to tell visiting US students every year, this is not a European holiday, and we expect them to attend lectures normally on the third Thursday of November.

What I think I have shown is that, purely at the level of textual organisation, there are systematic changes in the nature of the artefacts consequent upon the acquisition of the property by Disney, and that these can only be interpreted as a normalisation of the property along US lines. The first imagined audience of Milne’s books was in England; the first imagined audience of Disney’s films is in the USA.

An A it is - until somebody treads on it

Given the nature and the extent of the changes, I think it is reasonable to say that we are faced with a major disjuncture at the point where Disney acquired the property. Unless we believe that these far-reaching and systematic changes came about by chance, we have to account for them. It is not really possible to argue that there was an internal textual logic driving the kinds of changes we have seen. There is indeed a textual logic pointing towards colour reproduction, at least enabled by technical changes in printing and film making, but this explains only why Shepard coloured his line drawings, and why Disney worked from the start in colour. It does not explain why Disney’s use of colour is so strikingly different from Shepard’s. Purely internal, textualist, accounts of these changes simply will not wash.

We must then ask what kinds of extra-textual pressures produced these observable transformations.. To put it slightly differently, we can’t avoid the issue of determination, in one form or another. There are, in fact, several possible ways of thinking about the problem. One obvious one is the through technical demands of the different media. Moving images demand different kinds of drawing than do pictures on a page, and stories told with moving pictures impose different narrative demands than do words on the page. Particularly in the case of film, there are strong generic conventions, as well as a general sense of pace and rhythm, that impose themselves on any narrative. This is an important insight, and it might explain why some stories were dropped and others jumbled together. But to say that techniques and conventions imposed changes does not explain why the changes took the form they did. The visual logic is that of standard Hollywood, not that of some alternative, for example manga. To take one obvious example, the sexualization of Kanga is entirely consonant with precisely the conventions of Hollywood. Nor do the existence of cinematographic conventions explain why the changes are reproduced so exactly in the books published by Disney.

Another possible approach is to consider the shift from what was essentially craft production, working with a low capital outlay, to the large scale, industrial production of culture in highly capitalised firms that was, and is, so characteristic of Hollywood. Again, this is an important observation. We have seen that Winnie-the-Pooh was a commercial product from the start, but different kinds of production impose different demands upon the material. The division of labour inside a major studio is always substantial, and studios producing animation are no different. They need standardisation in the labour of many people, who produce vast numbers of images, and will therefore tend to adopt visual styles that lend themselves readily to such regularity ²⁹. Clearly, that was not a burden Shepard laboured under. His images change in detail over time, and even within the confines of one story. But that same observation tells us that there is more at stake when Eisner and his mates embark on a project than when Milne and Shepard got together. We would therefore expect Disney to use every available method to make sure that the project in which they were investing their cash was likely to win popular approval, and to continue to make money consistently over time. That might well explain why the spelling is mostly different. Milne and Shepard were addressing a confident middle class audience. Disney is addressing a mass audience that worries about the education of its children.

None of these factors on their own fully explain why what I have called a change in the creative unconscious took place. Indeed, taken together they point towards the demands of an industry - in other words to an economic factor that determines the change. Surely, this must be the real cause of the changes? Milne and Shepard were working for a small, and primarily British market, although admittedly with an èlite US audience very much in mind as well ³⁰. Disney is working for a mass, and primarily US, market. That is why Pooh is transformed to fit US expectations.

Winnie the Pooh went to the USA in 1947 for the same reason as millions of other immigrants. He went to get rich. How do you get rich in America? You won’t get far if you stick to the things you learned in the old country. You have to adapt if you want to get on. You learn the language of America. You adopt the customs of America. You honour the flag of America. The PR people of Dutton, Milne and Shepard’s US publisher, told the author of the most recent biography of Milne that: `We like to say that Pooh became an American citizenÕ’(Thwaite, 1992: 143). Of course he did.

We can put the same point more formally. There was a textual transforma-tion co-incident with the transfer of the intellectual property rights in Winnie-the-Pooh. The nature, direction and detail of this transformation can only be explained with reference to the changed economic circumstances of the new productions.

But nobody minds. Nobody cares.

What do audiences make of all this? The short answer is: I don’t know. The argument I am here advancing is logically independent of whatever responses audiences may make to the actual products. To say only that, however, would be very bad manners. I have no background in, or aptitude for, systematic audience research, either qualitative or quantitative. What I have done is a bit of talking and a bit of lurking. I would not really want to dignify these activities with big words like `interviews’ or `ethnography’.

First of all, as I mentioned above, real adult audiences do notice the difference. They can tell whether something is Classic or Disney and they use the terms when discussing Pooh, particularly when orienting each other on different kinds of merchandise (about which they often display an encyclopaedic knowledge). Children don’t seem to be interested in making the distinction, although it may well be evident to them.

Secondly, there is a real division of opinion over the importance of the distinction. There are those who do not have a marked preference for either: they like both with equal intensity. An informant, who proudly told me that as an undergraduate at Oxford she had fallen in the Cherwell while being held upside down by the legs in order to gain a competitive advantage at Pooh sticks, leaves notes about being `BACKSON’ on her office door for students and also sports a Disney key-ring with a picture of Eyeore on it. Then there are those who do have a marked preference for Classic Pooh, best expressed by a participant in a flame war who headed her contribution `Is Disney's bear the Anti-Pooh?’ I have not found anyone yet who expressed a marked preference for Disney, although some of the exchanges suggest that some fans may not be entirely clear that there is any other version, and Thomas Streeter tells me his small child likes that one better ³¹.

Thirdly, as might be apparent from the above, adult fans appear disproportionately to be women. Interest does not appear only to be a function of parenthood. Being a fan involves collecting lots of merchandise, and some other, quite surprising, things. Among the fan activities that people claim to undertake is `dressing up as Piglet as often as I can’. More conventionally, I have shared a platform with a distinguished US academic who proudly told the audience that she was wearing Winnie-the-Pooh socks. Fans certainly write a lot of poetry, go on holiday to visit Milne’s home, and tell each other that the natives say `Car Park’ when they mean `Parking Lot’.

Most importantly from our current point of view, the split in fandom does not seem to be a simple geographical one. I would guess that the majority of Classic Pooh extremists are in fact English. Certainly, I have heard some extremely virulent views expressed on the subject by people born in England, some of whom are so anti-nationalist that they have spent most of their lives believing that the working class has no fatherland. I would also guess that the majority of bi-fans are from the USA, although there are certainly exceptions like the sociologist cited above. I can’t prove this, of course, but I like to think that there is in general a nice contrast between the narrow and chauvinist English culture and the open and welcoming American one.

In which we say good-bye

I have, I think, demonstrated fairly conclusively two things that are of wider importance than simply enriching our understanding of Winnie-the-Pooh, vital though that no doubt is to some people. In the first place, the transition from Milne and Shepard to Disney can only be explained by the crudest form of economic determinism. The changes were made because that was the way to make money out of the property. Those who deny the value of economic factors in explaining the textual features of cultural artefacts are simply wrong. Of course explanations couched in materialist terms can be offered, and I have just produced a very convincing one. On the other hand, I think that this is probably an exceptionally crude example of economic determinism. It is important because it demonstrates that the project of a Marxist cultural studies is a viable one, but it is not likely to be confirmed in quite such a striking way in other concrete analyses. More generally, one would expect to find a much more mediated situation, in which the economic factor had rather less importance in the direct explanation of textual transformation ³².

The struggle for materialism in cultural analysis is important, but it is only one of my concerns here. The other theoretical question at stake concerns globalisation, and in important ways that is as much a struggle within materialism as between the materialists and their enemies. Amongst us materialists, it is agreed that Disney is a company, not a discursive practice. But what sort of company is it? If Disney is a global company, then surely it should be selling global products? What I have here shown is that Disney transforms the products it acquires, not into global products but in to American products. It is American products that it sells around the world.

In this light, I think that there is something of a continuity between the two lives of Winnie-the-Pooh. I have tried to stress very hard that the original was a commercial product and that it spread around the world quite rapidly. Of course, this was small-scale stuff compared to what Disney has done. It was stumbling, amateur, more or less accidental, and so on. But it happened. I am very reluctant to say that this is evidence of `globalisation’ as far back as 1926. Perhaps there is a better term? Winnie-the-Pooh was created in the heart of a vast colonial empire, then at its greatest territorial extent. Surely `imperialism’ fits what happened in the spread of Classic Pooh extremely well? The animals of the Empire were rounded up, thoroughly stuffed, and converted into the playthings of the young sahibs.

Disney has done the same sort of job on a much larger scale. He stuffed the gopher because the empire he sold to is centred on the USA. Is this some new phenomenon called `globalisation’ that is so different from imperialism? Disney is very big. Disney operates around the world. Disney has been professional, systematic, deliberate. But what Disney makes and what Disney sells is America. The only way in which talk of globalisation seems to me to make any sense is as an extension and intensification of the same imperialist dynamic that was around in 1926.

In this case, I don’t think we are discussing an isolated example about which we need to enter various methodological caveats, except to note that, just as in 1926 there were several imperial centres, so there still are today. On the contrary, I think that we can generalise from this to some laws production of global commodities. I would identify five as being particularly important. The first four are based on observations about what happened to Pooh. The fifth is a prediction, which certainly was not true for Milne and Shepard, but which I think probably applies to their successors in modern Britain, and elsewhere:

1. Global cultural products are first and foremost local products of the culture industries in the imperial centres. Global cultural industries produce primarily for those markets.

2. Local products from outside of the imperial centres are taken up by the cultural industries of the imperial centres to the extent that they fit the cultural logic of those industries. Something that is not so adaptable will remain provincial even if it commands a mass audience in its own place of origin.

3. Once taken up, they are thoroughly transformed to meet the cultural norms of the centres. Anything that does not fit those norms will be replaced by something that does.

4. Only if they are capable of commanding a substantial audience in the centre will products be globalised.

5. Local artists who wish to be more than obscure provincials tailor their productions to meet what they believe the culture industries of the imperial centre are seeking.

Globalisation is either meaningless babble or it is an extension of the basic idea of imperialism. Winnie-the-Pooh is in Hollywood for exactly the same reason as the Elgin Marbles are in Bloomsbury ³³. All that has changed is the dominant imperial power.

P.S. - Pooh wants us to say...

It is inevitable that I shall be asked which I prefer: Classic or Disney? Well, of course, I am an Englishman, and so when I read the stories and see the videos, I think that the subtlety, complexity and irony of Milne is much superior to the bland optimism of Disney. But I am also a socialist internationalist and when I read what Milne and Shepard wrote about themselves, the unreflective waves of vulgar provincial trivia cast the books in a different light. Wullschläger argued that Milne was the last, degenerate, representative of a line of Victorian writers of children’ stories, and that his work was sanitised and bathed in nostalgia not only for a past phase of life but for a past historical epoch. As she says, the books do reek of `security and middle class complacency and practical Englishness’ (Wullschläger, 1995: 199). As she says, in Milne the fantasy of the wildness of childhood is ultimately tamed. From that point of view, the energy and openness and optimism, the very simplicity, of Disney has much to commend it <sup>34</sup>. The truth is that Disney did not need to change Pooh to `introduce’ it to a US audience, as we have seen, the books were already a major success in that market. What he did was to introduce Pooh to a different class - the working class, as much in Britain as in the USA. Of course, he introduced the material in a particular, de-radicalised, conformist, sort of way, as popular culture rather than working class culture, but the address is different, and much wider, than that of the original books. Here, surely, we have a familiar dilemma. On the one hand, the complexities of èlite culture (in shorthand, Europe) versus the simplicities of popular culture (in shorthand, America). Both have their strengths and appeal, but I don’t think those are the only choices open to us. Back in the depths of the Cold War, there was a slogan that I always thought best summed up my own political views: `Neither Washington nor Moscow, but International Socialism’. The stakes are different now, but I suppose my final words on the war between Classic Pooh and Disney Pooh would have to be: `Neither Ashdown nor Anaheim, but international children’s culture’.

Notes

1     In origin what I am looking at was one of the last things that Walt Disney himself worked on, but it has             survived the various changes of régime right up to the present.

2     I should perhaps say how I got into this business. My interest in Disney as a subject, and my interest in globalisation as a concept, date from a lecture given by Janet Wasko at the Centre for Communication and Information Studies of the University of Westminster in 1996. Harrow on a winter evening produced the predictably tiny audience, but Professor Wasko was her normal brilliant self. She produced a mass of persuasive evidence for the claim that Disney was a truly global company, but somehow it did not quite square with the things that I had been looking at. A protracted adolescence meant that I came to parenthood very recently, in 1992, and I have been reading a lot of Winnie-the-Pooh books, listening to a lot of Winnie-the-Pooh tapes, and viewing a lot of Winnie-the-Pooh videos, over the last few years. Globalisation, as I then understood it, did not quite seem to fit with what I was spending a lot of time with. Turning parental obligation into a research opportunity was the next obvious step.

3     My own position in all of this is public, if obscure, knowledge. I was told when I was a graduate student, and by an extremely distinguished representative of cultural studies, that I was a low flying materialist. Time has proved him right. I used to be a Marxist and I still am a Marxist. So I think being determines consciousness. Most of the time, I just beaver away on vulgar little questions like press economics, thinking about being and leaving consciousness to cleverer people.

4     Cartwright and Goldfarb write of one of Disney’s health education films that: `The Latin American is....the absent embodiment of disease in the film’s general xenophobic discourse on protection from invasion from disease’ (1994: 179). I have to say that ethnic stereotyping is not necessarily all to the bad. You may have noticed that Disney’s worst villains are usually English - the fratricide Scar, for example - as are some of the most clownish figures. On the other hand, of course, there is the sexual politics, homophobia in the case of Scar. One recent commentator wrote: ‘But the real story of The Lion King is the marginalization of females such as Nala and Serabi, the vilification of gays personified by Scar, the ghettoization of Blacks and Hispanics, represented by the dreaded hyenas, and the glorification of hierarchy and paternalism symbolized by Mufasa and Simba’ (Robertson, 1998: 45). From the other end of the political spectrum, there are web sites devoted to demonstrating that The Lion King is full of hidden pictures of copulation and other unsuitable things.

5     A literal description of the second part of the `Stepping Time’ sequence in Mary Poppins. Cuomo argues that the effect of the film is to re-enforce the patriarchal order: `As a spinster occupying the moral high ground, as a magical being exempt from the laws of science, as a witch kept aloft above the sexual order of the Banks household by her black umbrella, she establishes the patriarch by unsettling him just enough to make him take notice of the shifting social scene and re- adjust accordingly’ (1995: 217). In my view, while she is right to say that it is Mary Poppins who calls a halt to the carnivalesque social upheaval, and that this is symptomatic of a more general positioning of that character, this reading mis-recognises the function of musical numbers in film, where I find myself much closer to Richard Dyer’s classic interpretation than to Cuomo’s literalism. OK, so they don’t actually establish the dictatorship of the proletariat, but not all films can have happy endings.

6     Since I am saying such harsh things about Disney, I suppose I should state somewhere that I don’t think the company has special demonic powers. Like every major cultural producer, from the other Hollywood studies through to the BBC, some of the things that Disney does are very good by almost any standards (Mulan, for example) and some are complete rubbish (Winnie-the-Pooh’s Most Grand Adventure, for example).

7     And would run the risk of duplicating the work of Janet Wasko (1996: 357-63).

8     See, for example, Zipes on the transitions from European folk-tales, through fairy stories, to Disney films (1995).

9     There were two other books of verse in the cycle of four children’s texts. They have not been taken up Disney, so far as I know.

10 I must confess that they were not part of my childhood. The first book I recall was the Latin version in the library at my Grammar School. On the other hand, when I made a mistake about the narrative structure in an earlier presentation of this paper, the English middle-class members of the audience rose as one to correct me.

11 He already had a house in Chelsea and a farm in the Ashdown Forest, serviced by a small army of servants.

12 It is a revealing fact about the purchasers of the early editions of the four books that the poetry much outsold the prose, suggesting that it was an adult dynamic that drove the success.

13 For example, the famous opening passage, which I quote here from the first Latin edition: `Ecce Eduardus Ursus scalis nunc tump-tump- tump occipite gradus pulsante post Chritophorum Robinum descendens’ (Milnei, MCMLVIII: 3).

14 Shepard had studied at the Royal Academy, and exhibited one portrait there before turning to more commercial work (Shepard, 1986).

15 See the sketches and final printed drawings collected in Sibley (1982).

16 Although Milne did exercise some discretion, turning down Pears Soap and other companies he thought unsuitable (Thwaite, 1990: 307-09). In at least one case, the motive was not nakedly commercial. Milne and Shepard, who had both fought in the First World War, early on granted rights to ceramic reproductions to a pottery employing disabled ex-soldiers (Thwaite, 1992: 118).

17 Illustrated in Sibley (1982: 80).

18 I am not the first person to note this. In fact, I find myself in the embarrassing company of the Daily Mail (a right-wing British newspaper), which ran a campaign against the first Disney version because of the changes it made to the original (Thwaite, 1992: 64-65). Even Finch, the hagiographer of Disney’s films, noted `the unnecessary Americanizing of some of A.A. Milne’s characters but felt that, despite this `the Disney animation dealt very capably with the difficult task of translating the original Christopher Robin stories to the screen’ (Finch, 1995: 253-58). For a book lavishly, not to say slavishly, dedicated to chronicling the development of Disney’s visual style, it is extraordinary (or perhaps not) that there is no mention of the changes to Shepard’s pictures.

19 Hal King told the outraged Daily Mail that `Christopher Robin came out too sissified. So we gave him a haircut and some decent clothes’ (Thwaite, 1992: 166).

20 Director Wolfgang Reitherman told the (by now incandescent) Daily Mail that `The Mid-West accent is the generally accepted neutral accent at which we aim as it is acceptable to the whole American market’ (Thwaite, 1992: 165).

21 American balls are smaller than ours.

22 To be fair, I should say that the very odd and incoherent Winnie-the- Pooh’s Most Grand Adventure does revert to Wol’s orthography. It also refers to `autumn’ as well as `fall’ in the opening section. On the other hand, the terrain is most definitely un-English.

23 According to the Daily Mail, `Pressed, Reitherman admitted that the rodent had been introduced because Disney was worried about the "Britishness" of the original’ (Thwaite, 1992: 166).

24 Thus perhaps defusing the implications of Pooh and Piglet going off to live together after Eyeore moves Owl into Piglet’s house.

25    This observation leads me to doubt that Bell and her co-authors are correct when they write: `Disney’s trademarked innocence operates on a systematic sanitization of violence, sexuality, and political struggle concomitant with an erasure or repression of difference’ (Bell et.al., 1995: 7). That is certainly what their theory says should happen, but the evidence does rather point in a different direction.

26     Actually, Milne was a bourgeois pacifist, at least when it did not matter. He published a well-known anti-war book in 1933, but still managed to volunteer to fight in the First World War, and to support the Second World War. Shepard was a less radical figure, being described by his biographer as: `what is now called "an establishment man" ‘ (Knox, 1979: 8). He produced at least one outrageously racist drawing (Ibid.: 155).

27     As Wullschläger notes, Milne wrote these key texts after Ulysses and The Waste Land (1995: 197). He also published the first of them in the year of the General Strike.

28 It may also be structurally analagous. If the real world of Pooh is that mythical land of content in late Victorian and Edwardian England, when the rule of Britannia was unchallenged, then the real world of Disney’s version is perhaps the America of Eisenhower, when the American imperium was likewise untroubled.

29 Bryman argues that finding ways to control the different processes involved in the production of culture was always a central aspect of the Disney organisation, which reaches its highest point in the organisation of the theme parks (Bryman, 1995).

30 The first paperbacks of the classics were 1965 in the UK and 1970 in the USA (Thwaite, 1992: 140).

31 He was keen to tell me that he, of course, preferred the classic version.

32 Certainly, in the only other example I have done any serious work on, the transition from novelist to playwright in the case of George Bernard Shaw, the situation was indeed much more complex.

33 Actually, he is in New York, in the Children’s Room of the New York Public Library to be exact. This only goes to illustrate another of Janet Wasko’s great insights: if they make the films in Hollywood, they make the money in New York.

34 Despite what Zipes claims to be the general cast of Disney fairytale adaptations towards `non-reflexive viewing’, Disney’s original Pooh is quite post-modernly self-reflexive (Zipes, 1995: 40).

References

Bell, E., Haas, L., Sells, L. [Eds.] (1995) From Mouse to Mermaid: The Politics of Film, Gender and Culture. Bloomington, IA: Indiana University Press.

Bell, E., Haas, L., Sells, L. (1995) `Introduction’ in Bell, E., From Mouse to Mermaid: The Politics of Film, Gender and Culture Haas, L., Sells, L. [Eds.]. Bloomington, IA: Indiana University Press. 1-17.

Bryman, A. (1995) Disney and His Worlds. London: Routledge.

Cartwright, L. and Goldfarb, B. (1994) `Cultural Contagion: On Disney’s Health Education Films for Latin America’ in Smoodin, E. [Ed.] Disney Discourse. London: Routledge. 169-80.

Cuomo, C. (1995) `Spinsters in Sensible Shoes’ in Bell, E., Haas, L., Sells, L. [Eds.] From Mouse to Mermaid: The Politics of Film, Gender and Culture. Bloomington, IA: Indiana University Press. 212-23.

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