During World War II, Disney’s lovable characters made their own contribution to the war effort. In short propaganda films, Donald Duck, Goofy and the gang encouraged fellow Americans to support the draft and pay their taxes. And, through Disney characters, Americans learned about the evils of the Nazi regime. Here, we’ve gathered five of these animated propaganda films: Donald Gets Drafted (1942); Der Fuehrer’s Face (1943), The Spirit of 43′ (1943), The Old Army Game (1943), and Commando Duck (1944).
Fast forward 25 years and America found itself fighting a very different war, the Vietnam War. So far as I know, Disney never threw its cultural weight behind this divisive conflict. It wouldn’t have made good business sense. However, Disney’s most iconic character, Mickey Mouse, did appear in an animated underground film created by two critics of the war, Lee Savage and the celebrated graphic designer Milton Glaser.
Produced in 1968 for The Angry Arts Festival, the one minute animation shows Mickey getting lured into fighting in Nam, and then, rather immediately, getting shot in the head. The anti-war commentary gets made brutally and economically. Sometimes less is more. In a recent interview with Buzzfeed, Glaser recalls: “[O]bviously Mickey Mouse is a symbol of innocence, and of America, and of success, and of idealism — and to have him killed, as a solider is such a contradiction of your expectations. And when you’re dealing with communication, when you contradict expectations, you get a result.”
Mickey Mouse In Vietnam aired once at the aforementioned festival, then faded into oblivion, only to resurface later at the Sarajevo Film Festival and now on YouTube.
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Related Content:
Donald Duck’s Bad Nazi Dream and Four Other Disney Propaganda Cartoons from World War II
How Bertrand Russell Turned The Beatles Against the Vietnam War
Bed Peace Revisits John Lennon & Yoko Ono’s Famous Anti-Vietnam Protests
I hope that we learn about these animals that are the largest one the face of the Earth, which is important, because this something that people are unaware of being the case.
I have paperwork and pictures of a dwarf named Pokey the Disney company created for my dad’s regiment during the Vietnam war