Zips and doodahs

Show me an "authoritarian" and I will show you a parent. Until the birth of our first child we feel that censorship, moral guidance and authority are in place simply to restrict our freedoms and curtail our enjoyment. What does it matter to us if homosexuals actually hold hands in public? Or if 17-year-olds smoke cannabis resin? But oh how very different things look when little Basil or Belinda is born. Suddenly we are in the position of steering another through life's shoals, and what before seemed "groovy" must now be seen in a very different light.

Personally I can measure the growth of my own moral maturity by my changing reaction to the film output of the Disney Corporation. Once I would have scoffed at those who, like the American Family Association, have accused Disney of "attacking family values". But I have changed my mind. Left- wingers have always been adept at inviting us to "decode the metatext" - to examine the deeper social and moral messages being conveyed by pieces of art or music. So, night after night, as my innocent ones have rested their curly heads against my chest, I have been as busy decoding as Bletchley Park on a busy night in 1943. And I do not like what I see.

For instance, can you name me one intact family to be found in any of Disney's major animations? Dumbo was dropped by a stork on his unmarried elephant mother. No Jumbo anywhere. In The Aristocats we have the Zsa Zsa Gabor-voiced mother cat and three small kittens. Not only is there no dad, but there is no reference to one. Instead we witness the consummation of a relationship between the female cat and the first male to come along (O'Malley, the alley cat). Beauty's mother is dead, as is Pocahontas's. The Little Mermaid's and Jasmine's (Aladdin) are simply and inexplicably absent. Cinderella, Mowgli and Wart (The Jungle Book and The Sword in the Stone) are orphans, not to mention Donald's "nephews" Hewey, Dewey and Lewey. Is this not an extraordinary record for a so-called "family" entertainment corporation?

Even worse are the number of irregular relationships that these children strike up with adults. Wart lives alone in a stone cottage with an old wizard. Pinocchio is created out of wood by a single man and - upon turning into a boy - snuggles up to him in a large bed, with a suspiciously satiated smile on his face. In the appalling Song of the South an ancient negro man inveigles children into his hut and tells them long stories. Whatever happened to "don't talk to strangers"?

Snow White features seven little men who live together, sleep together and bathe together. One, who seems constantly to be inebriated or worse, is called Dopey. Another (created, let it be remembered, at the height of the first great cocaine epidemic in Hollywood) is known as Sneezy.

Petty theft is excused on grounds of poverty (Aladdin again); in Beauty and the Beast the natural hostility of a community to the bestial outside threat is depicted as proto-fascism, and Pollyanna's heroine (orphaned, naturally) subverts an entire community, including a robust preacher, turning them into a Sixties-style commune.

And how well the Disney liberals understand the power of language! Consider the use of double entendres in those catchy ditties available to all children on video, CD and tape. Older kids will surely not be unaware of the possibilities inherent in "Some Day My Prince Will Come", younger ones of the seductive, unclothed freedoms of "Bare Necessities". But these pale in comparison with the notorious "Zippedy doodah". We know what a zip is - and I think we can guess at the doodah.

My message to Disney, then, is this. Clean up your act and do it now. Otherwise, this father - stern, but loving - will not be buying any more of your merchandise. Except, possibly, 101 Dalmations.