S3E15: Disney's 1988 year in review & The American Friends of Lafayette's preview of the year 2024
Two bicentennials recognized in two different ways
Welcome to the last episode of the Everything is a Primary Source Podcast…for the calendar year. Don’t worry, I’ll never stop this podcast! In fact, I plan on delivering another 15 episodes in just this season alone. That being said, I’ll be taking a break from editing and uploading new episodes for most of January. Daily history through pop culture posts will still be on Instagram and essays and newsletters will go up on Substack as usual.
Speaking of online media outlets, in the remaining days and hours of each year, those sites like to put out their year in review lists; top ten moments in music, this year in television, best movies of the year…so on and so forth. This podcast eats those lists up because they act as outstanding summative primary sources. Someone had to curate all the events of the previous year based on their own gauge of importance, and doing so in retrospect. Pop Culture events in April may seem unable to be matched in May, but by October they may be all but forgotten. December is the judge for the previous 11th months. If your show or film or song can stay relevant through Christmas, then you will help define the year that was.
The topic of the first segment today comes from 1988 and was along these lines. I was joined by Nicki Sirianni, who as an employee of GBH in Boston is no stranger to children’s media, to talk about the artifact she selected— a book titled Disney’s Year Book 1988.
It’s interesting that considering all of its resources by the end of the 1980s, the Walt Disney company was still producing books with this kind of material. It’s also interesting and somewhat confusing that this year book—which is normally something that comes at the end of the year—seems to be wrapping up 1987 rather than looking ahead to 1988. The cover art with the main Disney characters filling in for well-known 1787 Constitutional Convention delegates and the reference inside the book about 1937’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs indicates that the book is about ‘87 in review and not ‘88.
All of this is very much a reflection of the Disney company being out of sorts a bit in the 1980s. True, they had two big parks that remained the Promised Land for Kids, but the media dominance they had enjoyed earlier in the century and would return to starting with 1989’s Little Mermaid was not part of their world in 87-88.
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