Of all the Disney legends, my favorite is the one that tells the story of the mythical animation studios having entire rooms filled with highly erotic material of their main characters. A story that, despite the surreal idea, was confirmed in a sense by one of their animators.
Fueled by the internet, the story goes that back in the 1930s, as a way to mock the puritanism of Walt Disney and his movies, these adult-oriented drawings became a way to fight against the company’s creator while workers fought for their rights.
The origin of the Disney secret room legend
It is said that, around 1930, when Disney achieved much of its success with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs as the first major animated feature film, the studio’s animators were seriously unhappy with the company. Despite the financial success, they felt deeply undervalued. A feeling that Walt Disney refused to alleviate through salary improvements and a great inequality among the animators.
Organized in a union, the animators went on strike in 1941 causing several weeks of shutdown within the studios, and pushing Walt Disney to seek other business alternatives that led the genius to push for the creation of the Disney theme park. Among their complaints, in addition to salary, there was a clause in the contracts that seemed to particularly bother the artists. According to the documents, any work they created after being hired would automatically become the property of the studio.
It is said that, with the intention of mocking that rule, some animators began creating erotic content of the most famous Disney characters to annoy the magnate. The protest stemmed from the idea that, although those drawings created by them then became part of the studio, they could never really use them.
The fact that it is a black legend instead of a verified fact is mainly based on the fact that none of those drawings have come to light so far, and Disney has always denied that it actually happened. The story always came from someone who had told someone else that they had gotten into trouble with Walt when the drawings were discovered.
However, a few years ago, it went viral that, at a FurryCon, the creator of Jake Long: American Dragon, Jeff Goode, had revived the discourse of a room filled with such content within Disney. When asked about what he thought of some of his characters being transformed by the fan community to draw them in situations not suitable for all audiences, Goode replied that he was used to it.
Apparently, when he started working at Disney, an executive took him into a room and started showing him highly erotic drawings of some of the company’s characters, like Kim Possible, warning him that if he accepted to work there, that is inevitably what would happen to his characters. Legend or not, it seems evident that Disney is fully aware of what happens between fandom and internet artists.
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