The Disney Disclaimer

Weighing the limitations of our time against those of the past

When my wife and I visit our autistic son nightly in his group home, we often get to watch a classic Disney movie that is playing on the television in the living room. For many of these movies, the first thing we see is the disclaimer above. You’ll find this disclaimer at the start of Lady and the Tramp and The Jungle Book though not 101 Dalmatians.

Some years back I ran across the following prayer: “Help us, we pray, to break through the limitations of our own time, that we may minister in obedience to Jesus Christ.” The phrase “the limitations of our time” caught my attention. We all face the limitations of our time. It is indeed fortunate if we can break through those limitations, though few seem to do so with perfect success.

It’s easy to point out limitations of past times, congratulating ourselves on how far we’ve come since then. It’s less easy to acknowledge the limitations of our current moment, admitting to ourselves that we may not be as enlightened as we think we are. All times suffer limitations—limitations that follow from our bent humanity. Solzhenitsyn understood the problem:

If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

That’s what troubles me about the Disney Disclaimer: It calls out the limitations of the past, but with an obliviousness to the limitations of the present—that the line of sin cuts as much through present Disney as past Disney. To Disney’s credit, they are not editing out what they regard as offensive in the classic movies—that would defacement and desecration.

But can present Disney claim so much moral progress that it can legitimately berate past Disney? Is 2024 Disney really morally superior to 1955 Lady and the Tramp Disney or 1967 The Jungle Book Disney? In answer we might trot out two catalogues of sins, one from the past and and one from the present, and then decide which era had the worse sins.

But the issue isn’t moral progress or who has the worse sins. If we accept that we’re all subject to the limitations of our times, then it seems that as much as possible we should try to maintain a generous attitude toward the past, not excusing its faults, but also not exaggerating or inventing faults because of present sensibilities that were simply not an issue back when.

My dad and I grew up in Chicago—he in the 1920s and 30s, I in the 1960s and 70s. Chicago then was an ethnically diverse city with lots of immigrant neighborhoods. Each ethnic group received its share of ethnic slurs (names, jokes, and stereotypes).

Speaking for myself, I didn’t feel harmed or poorer for being on the receiving end of these slurs (which happened a lot given my obviously Polish name). And no angel myself, I didn’t feel any compunction about using the appropriate ethnic slurs with my non-Polish peers.

I wouldn’t say it was necessarily all in good fun. But it seemed to me much healthier than the up-tight attitude about ethnic and cultural sensitivity that now pervades our society and is evident in the Disney disclaimer.

I remember celebrating Thanksgiving on the far south side of Chicago back in the 1980s with some Irish friends at their home in a thoroughly Irish neighborhood. One Irish woman there in her thirties went on and on about how gorgeous Julio Iglesias was, only to end her panegyric by noting, “Of course he’s a _____” where the blank here was an ethnic slur.

In recalling the incident just now, I was led to wonder about the current cultural status of that slur. It had been a long time since I heard the slur. So I posed it as a query to ChatGPT4o just now:

ME: Is it wrong to use the word _____?

ChatGPT4o: Yes, it is wrong to use the word "_____." This term is an ethnic slur that has been historically used in a derogatory and offensive manner to insult and demean people of Hispanic or Latino descent. Using such language is harmful, disrespectful, and perpetuates negative stereotypes. It is important to use respectful and inclusive language when referring to others, and to avoid terms that can cause harm or offense.

This response perfectly parallels the Disney disclaimer. But does it suggest progress and an improvement over my Irish friend’s ethnic sensibilities? It probably would have been better if she didn’t add a gratuitous slur to her otherwise high praise of Julio Iglesias (though if she hadn’t added her slur, I probably wouldn’t have remembered her praise of him forty years later).

For me, the insipid moralizing of Disney and ChatGPT4o, with its scolding and self-righteousness, is becoming insufferable. Maybe I’m a dinosaur ready for extinction, but give me the former time with its robust insults over the present with its prissy facades that tout inclusiveness and diversity as virtues, but which leave resentments and hatreds stirring, and have given us a society as fractured and riven as at any time since the Civil War.