Walt Disney
The Three Caballeros

"The ruin of youth began with…”

“With the long-haired!”

“The long-haired.”

“The miniskirt!”

“The miniskirt.”

“The gramophone.”

“Not the gramophone.”

“A little bit the gramophone too.”

It seems there was the brazen face of an iron Republican like Nelson Rockefeller behind the creation of one of the most successful animated films by Walt Disney. We're in the forties. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs have made mincemeat of the wicked witch, Pinocchio has lost his head over Greta Garbo, Bambi is now a tasty venison steak, and the events of the little flying elephant Dumbo - for this, see also "1941 Allarme a Hollywood" by Steven Spielberg - have made more than a few officers of the United States Army cry. Adolf Hitler holds half of Europe in his hands, and since the Japanese have bombed a few boats down at Pearl Harbor in the Hawaiian Islands, the very ones where sixty years later Graham Nash claims to fight the horrors and deformities of capitalism, the Americans have decided to go to war against the Japanese, Nazi Germany, and Italy of the "Mascella."

Walter Elias Disney has a bluesman’s name and was born in Chicago (Illinois), a city made famous by the sound of musicians like Bo Diddley and Willie Dixon, Muddy Waters and Sonny Boy Williamson I and II, but he is white, doesn’t know a damn thing about Robert Johnson, and in his films, Uncle Tom is the usual colored servant with a heart of gold who tells stories of Br'er Rabbit and Br'er Bear to the master’s rich grandchildren. All stuff that would make Malcolm X sick, but at the same time, all characteristics that, in Rockefeller's eyes, make Walt a good American. In those years, in fact, Nelson Rockefeller, who is the grandson of the famous John Davison, works at the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs and decides that, in order to brainwash the South American friends, there is nothing better to do than to contact Disney, whose productions have already gained great popularity and international fame, offer him a tourist tour in Latin America locations, and a few tens of thousands of dollars to document himself on culture, customs, and traditions of local populations, and create productions for celebratory and propaganda purposes.

The results of this not even too unusual collaboration between the multinational of the most beloved mouse by children all over the world (no offense, Jerry...) and the American state are two feature films. The first of the two is titled "Saludos Amigos", a decent episodic animated film (four episodes) still occasionally broadcast, albeit individually, on television today. There’s Donald Duck on Lake Titicaca, Goofy playing the gaucho, the little plane Pedro flying over the Andes, and the green anthropomorphic parrot José Carioca, a Brazilian version of Donald Duck, passionate about football and crazy for bean stew, dancing samba. The second hit American theaters two years later and is titled "The Three Caballeros." Like and more than its predecessor, this film is also a successful and entertaining homage to Latin America and a great masterpiece of animation and technique. The refinement of the "mixed technique,” which indeed involves the "interaction" between real people and animated cartoons, allows for more spectacular scenes compared to previous Disney productions (“Fantasia,” “The Reluctant Dragon,” “Saludos Amigos”). The feature film is again divided into episodes, all strictly set in South America and all masterfully held together by intermission sequences, perhaps and paradoxically more spectacular than the episodes themselves.

The three caballeros are the usual Donald Duck and his two old friends from South America: José Carioca, of whom we’ve already spoken, and Panchito Pistoles, a crazy Mexican rooster rarely and seldom reappeared in Disney's stories and plots. It's Donald's birthday, and the occasion becomes a chance to experience kaleidoscopic and almost hallucinatory adventures and misadventures in Latin America, fly over Mexico on a magic carpet, travel on a bizarre train in the wonderful state of Bahia in Brazil, and meet unforgettable and absurd characters like the little penguin Pablo who starts a journey from the South Pole in the steps of Robinson Crusoe to reach the tropical islands, the peculiar and irritating Aracuan bird, the winged donkey Burrito. Donald, for the first and only time ever, chases after all the (wonderful and beautiful) women he meets on the beaches of Acapulco, or in a sunny desert between cacti that pair with Dumbo's pink elephants, so unsettling are they. At the end, there's also a bullfight and fireworks, and although we are now adults and aware that all beautiful things sooner or later end, “singing and dancing samba and caramba,” a tear escapes us anyway.

The issue of the gramophone is still unresolved and to be clarified. On one hand, it is certainly difficult, complicated, and pretentious, perhaps delusional, to argue and prove that films like "Saludos Amigos" and "The Three Caballeros" could have compromised and manipulated the brains and culture of the Latin American population. On the other hand, it is undeniable that these Americans never do anything for nothing. The most widespread versions tell that these films were shot in the forties to somehow convey a positive image of the American and capitalist way of life in Latin American countries at the expense of Nazi Germany's ideologies, which seemed to have a certain grip on the South American population in those years. Now, beyond the objectively and historically indefensible Nazi theories, it is undeniable that in the last century, American propaganda has always succeeded in its aims and goals in all its more or less evident manifestations. It was this that, by promoting a seemingly ideal system of life, in the last century sanctioned the affirmation of the American capitalist way of life and led to the apparent definitive decline of ideologies, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the fall of the Berlin Wall. Where military strategies, satellites, and space flights failed, Mickey Mouse arrived and swept clean. Also in South America, where Americans have historically done as they pleased, without certainly caring for the safeguarding and respect of local culture and traditions.
Even in Italy.

Hollywood is a giant joke and a gathering place for freak shows, and the America of Jack Kerouac and Charles Bukowski exists only on printed paper and in the diseased minds of some indestructible and incurable hippie. Every time I listen to a record by Bob Dylan, by Patti Smith, the Buffalo Springfield, Simon and Garfunkel, I feel ashamed like a thief, understand why people like Kurt Cobain decided to end it all, and I feel like vomiting when TV stories talk about depression and all those bullshit on drugs and the dissolute and damned life of rockstars. Damned rock’n’roll. The long hair, the miniskirt, the gramophone…

They sold us a big con.