Roles of Mothers in Disney Media

In this weeks reading, Are Disney Movies Good For Your Kids?, Giroux brings to light the values that are portrayed in Disney movies that the public, specifically parents of young kids, may not know. In Wednesday’s class, we discussed how the heroes and heroines of most Disney movies come from unstable family backgrounds; most are either orphaned or have no mothers. There is much debate about the reasoning behind this phenomenon. In doing some research on this topic, I found that some allege that it comes from the guilt that Walt Disney had about the death of his own mother, Flora Call Disney. Some feminists believe that the absence of mothers in Disney movies it is to create dramatic interest in the main characters; if mothers were present to guide them, the plot would not be as interesting. Others believe that it is to show that a happy family does not have to consist of a traditional, cohesive family with a mother, father and a child. Such examples are Pinocchio having no mother, Belle in Beauty and the Beast having no mother, and Quasimodo’s mother being killed in The Hunchback of Notre Dame. To many of my peer’s dismay, I am not a big fan of Disney movies and in all honesty, cannot recall ever sitting through a whole one. I am therefore not familiar with the plot of any of Disney’s movies. As a kid, however, I was an avid watcher of Mary Kate and Ashley’s films and television series.

A recurring theme in the Olsen twins’ acts was the absence of a mother figure. One such show was Two of a Kind, which appeared on ABC Family in 1998 and 1999. ABC family is a cable television network currently owned by ABC Family Worldwide Inc., a division of The Walt Disney Company. In Two of a Kind, the main premise of the show is that Mary Kate and Ashley are being raised by a single father. Many of the episodes revolve around the feats that their dad faces raising a set of twins alone. Likewise, in their 1998 movie, Billboard Dad, the twins’ father is widowed and they decide to paint an advertisement on a giant billboard on Sunset Boulevard to find their dad a girlfriend. In the first, their mother is never mentioned and in the latter, their mother died.

While I was always aware of this theme of a mother’s absence in the Olsen’s movies and television shows, I was not cognizant of this overall theme of the lack of mothers’ roles in the media. Why is the media hating against mommas?