Happily Ever After ...

After reading Linda Christensen’s piece on cartoons and the role media plays in children’s lives, I found myself reflecting back to when I was a kid.  I grew up in the 1960s and 1970s when, in my little world, things appeared very simple.  When I was young, my brother, sister, and I did not have a television let alone a computer. It was during my middle school years that the show “The Magical World of Disney” aired on Sunday nights.  This Disney show aired mostly movies, or made for television shows, and not as many cartoons back in the 1970s.

Also, Disney World was quite foreign to me as a kid.  What I remember about Disney World was my friends talking about a large amusement park in Florida, which sounded much cooler than Rocky Point in Rhode Island.  I went to Disney World for the first time at 22 years old on my honeymoon.

Flash forward many years and now I am a young mother raising a little girl, Mandy, on my own.  When I got married in 1986 did I fall for the “Cinderella” story where I was going to marry Prince Charming and live “happily-ever-after”? Hell yeah!  Although I wouldn’t say I was counting on the life my mom had, remember the 1970s were also the “bra-burning” years, I did have a warped sense of what a “normal” life would be.

The first Disney movie I brought Mandy to was “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” when she was two years old.  I was so excited to expose her to the “Wonderful World of Disney”.  Sadly, I felt quite cynical when the movie was over because I just thought it was so weird that this woman lived with seven men.  I didn’t really think about it too much until I brought Mandy to see the movie.  Long story short, my daughter did not grow up in the idealistic Disney fantasy world that many young people are exposed to.  From an early age she was told how ridiculous this cultural phenomenon was.  I felt bad sometimes because although her friends all thought that their blond, blue-eyed Prince Charming would arrive on a white horse some day, Mandy was told that Prince Charming simply did not exist.  Over the years we have had so many conversations about relationships and Disney, along with Reality Television, that it actually became fun to watch movies and television shows while we picked out all the crazy stereotypes.