| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Babes in Tomorrowland: Walt Disney and the Making of the American Child, 1930–1960. By Nicholas Sammond. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. x, 472 pp. Cloth, $89.95, ISBN 0-8223-3451-8. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 0-8223-3463-1.)

Walt Disney's "colonization of childhood" has been a subject of social and scholarly anxiety ever since the man and his movies first met popular acclaim with the 1928 cartoon Steamboat Willie. By the late 1940s, many writers were expressing fascinated concern with the way Mickey Mouse had become one of the most recognized images on earth and hence an especially powerful figure in the life of the typical middle-class American child. By the late 1950s, following the opening of Disneyland in 1954, the premiere of the television show The Mickey Mouse Club in 1955 (watched by some twenty-one million Americans every day), and the steady proliferation of mass-marketed and carefully licensed consumer products ranging from Davy Crockett coonskin caps to Mouseketeer playclothes, Disney's exceptional role in the engineering of the ideal American child was noted with increasing alarm. In Babes in Tomorrowland, Nicholas Sammond explores the collusion between Disney, consumerism, and the social construction of the "normative" American child as a means of engaging the nagging issue of media effects in modern life.

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