I think it was a rule during the early days of movies and television that the good guys had to always win in the end. I remember seeing some classics like Orwell's "Animal Farm" and Thornton Wilder's "Our Town" where the ending was changed for the movie version. I can see it if the story was originally written for a movie, but to take something famous and change it like that seems to be an insult to the intelligence of the viewers. I wasn't crazy about cartoons as a kid for that very reason, well that and the rampant anthropomorphism.
Disney started out in that culture but, looking back on it, I think he was partly responsible for the eventual segueing away from it. I remember crying in disbelief when Davy Crocket went down swinging at the Alamo. I kept waiting for the part where he pulls off a miracle save at the last minute, but it never came. By the time I saw "The Great Locomotive Chase", I had become sufficiently desensitized that it didn't bother me too much when the good guys failed in their mission. It was history after all, and to change history just to make a happy ending would be kind of a travesty.
Love him or hate him, there's no denying that Walt Disney was an icon of American pop culture. I liked some of his stuff, and dismissed most of the rest as childish nonsense, all except for "Bambi". Now that one wasn't just factually inaccurate, it was downright subversive. To this day, another popular term for anthropomorphism is "Bambi-ism".
Well, only one more sub-zero night and then the temps are supposed to return to normal for this time of year. Our gas furnace is still chugging long, and it seems to be complaining less often than it did a week ago. Maybe it was just spoiled by 18 years of being subsidized by the wood furnace and now is learning to stand up and take it like a man. How's that for anthropomorphism?
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