Good Or Shit: The Disney Playlist

A few weeks ago, in our post-work-whinge-pub, which is conveniently located across the road from the office, a smartly dressed relatively important employee of the company I work for asked me which Disney character I would be. I thought about it for a minute, it is a hard one, before picking the one I had identified with most as a child. “Belle” I said, thinking of the girl who was always reading and wanting adventure. And everyone looked at me as if I was mental. “What? It's the books,” I explained. A friend shook her head at me. “You're not nice enough to be Belle.”

This conversation came about because the guy asking had made a casual confession – his day had been stressful. So bad that, he told us, he'd put his headphones on and proceeded to work while listening to his Disney playlist.

I shit you not, his Disney playlist. It still blows my mind to think of it. Any respect I had for the guy tripled. Dude has a Disney playlist. When he needs a bit of a pick-me-up he might listen to a little I Just Can't Wait To Be King. When he's feeling boisterous – a little Gaston.

I'm not unfamiliar with this concept. A couple of years back when my best mate was a data analyst with flexible working hours and I was part-time pharmacy assistant/freelance writer, he and I spent a lot of time getting drunk on school nights. The evening usually began (in the afternoon) with a slab (or a couple of long necks, depending on the cash flow) of Coopers and light conversation that developed into deep discussion – the more pissed we got – usually revolving around our paternal disappointments. On one particular night, as the beer was running out, my mate suggested we finish off some – I'm going to call them thingies – he had leftover from a festival. Yes it was a Wednesday and we had responsibilities the next day but hey, we were young and trying to follow our dreams. Or something.

I'm not sure how it happened. It was like one thing led to another and before we knew it, it was 3am and we were “YouTubing it out” to Disney tunes. And I mean two people in their late twenties singing at the top of their lungs, acting out the lyrics, putting on a real energetic performance. It was so – cathartic.

We named it Disney Revival Night. And, up until I left Australia, Disney Revival Nights had developed into a kind of tradition. Most of our friends got involved.

Several years later at a London pub, my work colleague's admission of a Disney Playlist also resulted in a mass-sharing of Disney favourites. Few can deny it; Disney has been a childhood institution. Most of the people I know have grown up watching these movies and singing these songs, they hold fond memories of them and still now, as cynical adults, can derive a sense of pleasure from Disney's over-the-top sentimentality. This might be a stretch but, I think The Circle of Life might have a globally unifying power.

But, there are always critics. Walt and his enchanted world have been accused of proffering subtle and occasionally not-so-subtle-messages. Take the racist lyrics in the song Arabian Nights – “where they cut off your ears if they don't like your face, it's barbaric, but hey, it's home” – or what the feminists have to say about Ariel rebelling against her father by swapping her fins for a pair of legs in order to run off and get married a week later. Actually, there is a whole heap of stuff out there about the negative effect the Disney princesses have on our daughters.  

But, when I was a five-year-old flapping about on a blue doona cover singing “up where they walk, up where they run, up where they stay all day in the sunnnnnnn” I wasn't tapping into some sense of feeling trapped by surroundings that only a prince could save me from. I was just having fun imagining I was a mermaid. Princes were yucky. 

For me – other than the light-hearted, entertaining, magical, musical elements – Disney films had some very basic messages – dare to follow your dreams, self-sacrifice, rise and meet life's challenges. They asked you to line up Gaston and the Beast and recognise who the real monster was. They told you to let go of the past. They showed you endurance in the face of adversity. They're filled with universal positive messages. Even this dog cried when Mufasa died:

Perhaps it is all these concepts that, even at my age, make me want to drop whatever it is I'm doing, get out my air-mic and start singing, with absolute joy, as soon as I hear A Whole New World. In fact, this is why I had to stop listening to my Disney playlist at work – it was just too distracting.

Growing up with Disney was fun. It's still fun. And all its princesses did not cause me to have any unrealistic ideas about the world, or my role in it. And if at any point it had looked like I was going to start spending my days staring wistfully out of windows waiting for my prince to come, or walking around kissing frogs, let me tell you, my mother would have put that fanciful shit to rights quick smart.   

Then again – when I was an eight-year-old I ran around my grandmother's backyard in Wodonga singing Belle's song from Beauty and the Beast. Not “Tale as old as time,” I was singing – “I want much more than this provincial life”. I was bookish, and odd, and curious about the world outside of Albury-Wodonga, so I got where Belle was coming from. Now I'm on an adventure “in the great wide somewhere” and my boyfriend is pretty hairy – hey, maybe I wished upon a star.