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Narrating Decline and Erasing Race

Bryant Simon

in Boardwalk of Dreams: Atlantic City and the Fate of Urban America

By the 1970s, Atlantic City had become almost a parody of the American Dream. The city's neighborhoods were now made up of cracked sidewalks, houses desperate for new paint, and storefronts ... More

By the 1970s, Atlantic City had become almost a parody of the American Dream. The city's neighborhoods were now made up of cracked sidewalks, houses desperate for new paint, and storefronts barricaded with steel bars. Along the Boardwalk, Going Out of Business signs stretched across the fronts of once-elegant linen shops; movie marquees advertised films long gone. Atlantic City locals and faithful visitors have varying theories for the city's decline. Their narratives of decay give insight into the complexity of urban problems and are interesting for how they link seemingly mundane and unrelated shifts in commerce and technology to changes in people's leisure choices and vacation desires.Less

Illness in the Time of Disney

David B. Morris

in Illness and Culture in the Postmodern Age

Disneyland (1955) and Walt Disney World (1971) are significant postmodern inventions that Americans tend to see as a national tradition. No one would fault Disney for excluding chronic illness and ... More

Disneyland (1955) and Walt Disney World (1971) are significant postmodern inventions that Americans tend to see as a national tradition. No one would fault Disney for excluding chronic illness and dying from the Magic Kingdom: they have nothing to do with contemporary myths of childhood or with consumer fantasies. Chronic illness has almost no place in popular self-representations of the postmodern world. It is nearly absent from network television, which prefers to focus on acute illness that is curable, curable especially by handsome, heroic, young doctors using drugs, technology, and the resources of biomedicine. The denial of death is old news, and oversold, given the cameras rolling and clicking at every local disaster. The effort to reclaim chronic illness and dying from biomedical reductiveness and corporate Disneyfication is a major unfinished project of postmodern culture.Less

The Beaubourg Effect: Implosion and Deterrence

Steve Redhead

in The Jean Baudrillard Reader

This chapter is an extract from Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation, with an editorial overview

Broadway Black, Hollywood White: 1943–1957

Todd Decker

in Show Boat: Performing Race in an American Musical

This chapter considers Show Boat in the post-World War II era by way of the 1946 Broadway revival and two film versions made by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in Hollywood (extended excerpts in Till the Clouds ... More

This chapter considers Show Boat in the post-World War II era by way of the 1946 Broadway revival and two film versions made by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in Hollywood (extended excerpts in Till the Clouds Roll By and the 1951 Technicolor version). The Broadway production remade two black dance numbers by featuring black concert dancers Pearl Primus and LaVerne French. These changes benefitted the careers of a generation of black dancers, including Alvin Ailey. MGM underemphasized the show's black content, using “Ol' Man River” to feature Frank Sinatra and reshaping the role of Julie around screen goddess Ava Gardner. The 1951 film remains the most drastic revision of the show, truncating its historical reach and eliminating black performance as a central element of the story.Less

The Orange County Setting

Mark Baldassare

in When Government Fails: The Orange County Bankruptcy

Orange County is a place that is widely known but largely misunderstood. Many see it as vastly different from other U.S. communities. In fact, Orange County has a lot in common with many other ... More

Orange County is a place that is widely known but largely misunderstood. Many see it as vastly different from other U.S. communities. In fact, Orange County has a lot in common with many other regions, though admittedly this was more true in the years leading up to the bankruptcy. By focusing on the facts surrounding Orange County, we can better understand why the fiscal crisis happened in this place and the reasons it can happen in other locales throughout the nation. Orange County, California, has a variety of images in the national media. It is best known as the home of Disneyland, the self-proclaimed “Happiest Place on Earth.” Conservative politics has a large role in the public's image of Orange County. This chapter looks at Orange County's rapid economic growth and social diversity, economic recession in the 1990s, middle class, fiscal conservatism and voter distrust, the weak structure of local government, similarities with other county governments, local governments, and local focus and regional apathy.Less

1955, Disneyland: ‘The Happiest Place on Earth’ and the Fiction of Cold War Culture

Alan Nade

in The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century Literatures in English

This chapter examines the similarities between Disneyland and the fiction of Cold War culture. It shows that both the theme park and the television show divided ‘The Happiest Place on Earth’ into ... More

This chapter examines the similarities between Disneyland and the fiction of Cold War culture. It shows that both the theme park and the television show divided ‘The Happiest Place on Earth’ into four ‘lands’, which spatialised and temporalised national identity based on the principles of cinematic representation. The chapter explains how Disneyland became the figurative home of Tom Rath, the protagonist of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. It also takes a look at Disneyland in Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, James Baldwin's Notes of a Native Sun and Flannery O'Connor's The Coney Island of the Mind, to name a few.Less

The Happiest Plays On Earth: Theme Park Franchising in Disneyland Video Games

Heather Lea Birdsall

in The Franchise Era: Managing Media in the Digital Economy

Heather Lea Birdsall explores the Disney theme parks as a branded franchise space through a number of its video game appearances, including Kinect Disneyland Adventures (Microsoft Studios, 2011) and ... More

Heather Lea Birdsall explores the Disney theme parks as a branded franchise space through a number of its video game appearances, including Kinect Disneyland Adventures (Microsoft Studios, 2011) and its 2017 re-release Disneyland Adventures. Her essay makes clear that franchise management unites multiple physical and digital spaces in its strategic global expansion. She argues that tracing the history of Disney park-based games and apps, and considering other ways that the parks have been ‘gamified,’ reveals an ever-deepening trend of using digital game modalities to expand the Disney parks beyond their physical limitations as a means by which to establish and further them as a super-media franchise.Less

Creating a Style, 1946–1955

Brain Taves

in Hollywood Presents Jules Verne: The Father of Science Fiction on Screen

With his emphasis on a factual background in his stories, Verne offered the first analysis, in fictional form, of the challenges of the scientific age, but his stories also were set in his own time, ... More

With his emphasis on a factual background in his stories, Verne offered the first analysis, in fictional form, of the challenges of the scientific age, but his stories also were set in his own time, limiting them primarily to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, making them increasingly remote to modern audiences. By the late 1930s, however, adaptations of Verne novels began to be heard over the radio, becoming widespread by the end of the 1940s, reversing the decline in Verne readership and publication. The initial cinematic reflection was a movie serial in 1951, and the next year television broadcasts of Verne stories began. The spark that had been lit might easily have dimmed had not Walt Disney realized how Verne could be the source for a modern movie spectacular. His 1954 film 20,000 Leagues under the Sea is undoubtedly the most influential Verne movie ever made, achieving a level of critical, commercial, and artistic success that launched a seventeen-year cycle of live-action filmmaking of Verne’s work. Moreover, Disney also situated the work to echo for residual benefit, exploited through books, records, associated television shows, and theme park attractions.Less

4-D and the Ride Film

Ray Zone

in 3-D Revolution: The History of Modern Stereoscopic Cinema

The enduring importance ride films in cinema history and their relationship to 3D movies is examined.

Dramatizing Science

Marcel Chotkowski Lafollette

in Science on American Television: A History

This chapter examines the history of the incorporation on science into television drama in the United States. It explains that television fiction featured characters with scientific expertise and ... More

This chapter examines the history of the incorporation on science into television drama in the United States. It explains that television fiction featured characters with scientific expertise and that the dialogue characters were used to explain scientific concepts. The chapter describes some of the most popular shows of this type, including Museum of Science and Industry, Sunday at the Bronx Zoo, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. It also highlights the pioneering contribution of Walt Disney Studios' Disneyland, which combined live actors, film segments, and animation, inspiring other educationally oriented shows.Less