A dark "new" part of Disney's past (as unearthed by me, my brother, and a famous artist!)

[batson]

 

So, quite a few years ago, I borrowed a book written by Lasse Åberg, quite a famous artist and performer here in Sweden. Åberg is also notable as an enormous Disney fan and houses, to my knowledge, one of the biggest collections of official Mickey Mouse memorabilia in the world. In the book I borrowed, many of those pieces of obscure merchandise are shown and talked about. The mos, err, interesting piece to me was a small official collectors card that one could get along with a piece of candy known as Alfa Cola back in the 1930's. The cards were part of a series where Mickey traveled around the world and experienced different places. The interesting card in question is one where Mickey is pictured alongside Adolf Hitler and Hermann Göring at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. Hitler and Göring are doing the nazi salute and Mickey happily stands with them, looking out over the crowd. A card with text on it that came with the picture reads, in Swedish, that Mickey and his supposed crew are "Seen in company with Hitler and Göring present at a troop parade in Olympia stadium."

 

I told my brother about the card many years ago, and we both thought it would be interesting to publish it on the internet and maybe see how people would react to it, considering that this seems to be a piece of Disney history that is completely and utterly forgotten. Hell, maybe even Disney themselves would take notice, since they are probably as surprised as anyone that such a relic exists. But, you know, life gets in the way of these sorts of fun side-quests so we never did anything with it. But earlier today my brother calls me up and tells me that he has published the picture on his Twitter. So yeah, it's done. It will be fun to see if it will make it's way around the internet.

 

Here is the tweet if you wanna see it for yourselves:

 

So yeah, an offical piece of Disney merchandise where Mickey is hanging out with Hitler, from probably around 1936 or shortly thereafter, before WWII and the holocaust, but when the Nazi regime was nevertheless completely open with its anti-semitic policies and well underway with it's quest of ridding Germany of jewish elements. So... not so good. Not so good indeed.

 

My brother also decided to make this dramatic representation of how Mickey might very well react to such a dark, hidden part of his life suddenly being unearthed 85 years later:

 

Edited December 10, 2022 by batson

[DaBigJ]

I don't know what's worse, the fact this exists or the fact that I'm not surprised it's official 

[CrownSlayers Shadow]

Huh...I guess Family Guy was onto something with mocking Walt Disney as an anti-semite, then?