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Our fascination for associating wholesome, innocent icons of popular culture with hidden depravities and unsavory backgrounds seemingly knows no bounds. Thus we have tales that nature-loving pop singer John Denver was a Vietnam-era sniper, that genial children's TV host Fred Rogers served as a Navy SEAL, that the actor who portrayed geeky Paul Pfeiffer on TV's popular The Wonder Years grew up to become shock rocker Marilyn Manson, and that the host of Nickelodeon's preschooler favorite Blue's Clues died of a drug overdose. As the epitomical producer of popular children's fare, Disney comes in for more than its fair share of such rumors: scandalous tales about both Walt Disney himself (e.g., that he was booted out of the military, that he was a Nazi sympathizer, that he was an illegitimate child) and many of the films produced by the company he founded. A common motif among Disney legends is the claim that various Disney animated films were drug-inspired; that Disney and his band of animators were users of hallucinogens such as LSD, and their experiences with drugs formed the basis for such fare as the fantasy world of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the colorful visual interpretation of musical themes in Fantasia, and the surreal psychedelia of Alice in Wonderland. On a literal level, not much can be said to address these rumors other than to cite a litany of negative evidence. Walt Disney and his principal animators are well-known figures about whom much has been written, and no one who knew or worked with them claimed (or even suggested) that they partook of recreational drugs. And although drug abuse was enough of a social concern to prompt didactic scare films such as Reefer Madness and The Cocaine Fiends back in the 1930s, the drug of choice in Walt Disney's era was far more likely to have been alcohol than anything else. (Recall that the hallucinatory Pink Elephants on Parade sequence in 1941's Dumbo is triggered when the diminutive pachyderm inadvertently imbibes a tubful of champagne.) As for LSD, it wasn't even brought to the USA until 1949, too late to have been the driving force behind Disney's classic animated films (although alternative hallucinogens such as mescaline were certainly obtainable.) Of the notion that the imagination displayed in Disney's animated films was drug-induced, animator Art Babbitt, who drew the dancing mushrooms in The Nutcracker Suite portion of Fantasia, sarcastically quipped: Yes, it is true. I myself was addicted to Ex-lax and Feenamint. Drug rumors were undoubtedly fueled because Fantasia and Alice in Wonderland received mixed reviews upon their initial releases, and neither was much of a financial success until their re-releases (and availability as rental films) in the late 1960s and early 1970s drew crowds of college students who found the films' melding of color, light, music, and imagery made them ideal psychedelic head flicks. So much so, in fact, that Disney's marketing began to pitch these films to such audiences: Also of significance is that all the plot aspects of Alice in Wonderland which suggest drugs were present in Lewis Carroll's original work, and Disney merely adapted them for the screen. As for the original example, Walt Disney didn't invent Snow White, of course — the film was based on the European version of that fairy tale as collected by the Grimm brothers over a century earlier. Disney did flesh the story out to feature film length, though, and he was the one who created names and distinctive personalities for each of the seven dwarfs. But the suggestion that the dwarfs' names correspond (intentionally or otherwise) to the symptoms of various stages of cocaine addiction is bunk. Cocaine addiction might be considered to have identifiable stages, but no standard set of physical symptoms accompanies each stage. Many types of drug abuse (and physical or mental illnesses) can produce symptoms such as changes in sleep/wake patterns (sleepy), mood swings (happy, grumpy), alteration of personality (dopey, bashful), and allergies (sneezy) — eventually necessitating a trip to the doc.
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