Around the middle of 1990, Entertainment Weekly released a story on offensive artwork in America. Shortly after, rumors began to spread about a lovable sea creature and her solid gold sea-palace. While Disney’s The Little Mermaid told the tale of a young innocent romance, it still created controversy with its movie poster. The cover depicts the movie’s characters in a rather harmless composition, but some viewers believed that the castle in the background was excessively phallic. One tower in particular seemed caused most of outrage in parents and Disney lovers. Some believe that a disgruntled Disney artist, who was enraged about losing his job, put the phallus there on purpose. However, according to Snopes.com the artist didn’t even work for Disney and claimed that the resemblance to a penis was merely accidental. Perhaps the artist’s subconscious got the best of him. Nevertheless, the poster and cassette cover were changed and nothing resembling male genitalia is on there today. It doesn’t make a difference whether this “Penis Conspiracy” is true or not because people will see what they want to see and believe what they want to believe. Anybody can find a “hidden meaning” in something even if it wasn’t there in the first place. This explains why Jesus’s face keeps popping up in burnt toast and in water damaged walls. I don’t think we’ll ever really know what was going through the artist’s mind when he created The Little Mermaid cover art, but whether you see a palace or a phallus, you’ll never look at Ariel the same way again.
There's a lot of dirty work going on behind closed doors at disney. Have you ever seen this? It was created by Disney employees during their work on the Little Mermaid. It's pretty graphic and relatively anti-social. If that's not your thing I wouldn't recommend watching it.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTrHwH2gEY8