Revised 8/31/2010 1 Name: Sarah Nilsen 8 Amount Requested: $12,000 9 Grant Period Start Date: ___8/30/2011__ 2 Rank: Assistant Professor At Rank Since (Month/Year): 8/2003 End Date: ____6/15/2012_ 3 Department: English 4 Area (Fine Arts, Humanities, Natural Sciences, or Social Sciences): Humanities 5 Other Anticipated Funding: 6 Scholarly Product: manuscript 7 Years at UVM: 7 10 Project Title The Mickey Mouse Club: A Cultural History 11 Project Abstract: Completion of a book length cultural history of the popular Walt Disney television series, The Mickey Mouse Club. Empirical historical analysis examines the development of children‟s television for postwar suburban audiences and the way in which issues of gender, sexuality, ethnicity and race are addressed through the show. The book draws on recent historical work in Disney studies and new Suburban histories to enhance our understanding of the emergence of television into suburban homes in the postwar period. 12 Check if your project involves any of the following: 1 ___ Human Subjects 2 ___Toxic, infectious or carcinogenic/mutagenic material 3 ___ Recombinant DNA 4 ___ Vertebrate animals 5____Radioactive materials 6 ___ Environmental impacts 7 ___ Use of UVM off-campus facilities 8 ___ Additional space , remodeling or construction (Requires chairperson's and Dean's initials) 13 Check if you would like to have your proposal considered for the Joan Smith Faculty Research Support Award in addition to those awards given general consideration ________ 1 Revised 8/31/2010 ____Sarah Nilsen______________ College of Arts and Sciences Faculty Research Support Awards Budget: FY 2011-2012, July 1, 2011 - June 30, 2012 Description Sub Total Total Faculty Projected Academic Year 2011-2012 Salary $62,915 (2010-11 salary + projected _% increase) Requested Support (not to exceed 1/9th) + 39.5% fringe $6990 + 2761 TOTAL Faculty Summer Salary (+ fringe): $9751 Research Assistant(s) remains 1/9th of either salary. salary for 2011-2012). In the case of a joint application, maximum *Salaries: Faculty salaries not to exceed 1/9th of projected academic Category Graduate Percent Appointment: Period of Time: Rate: Cost: Undergraduate Percent Appointment: Period of Time: Rate: Cost: TOTAL: Research Assistant Cost: Student Hourly Help Number of Students: Number of Hours each is Employed: Hourly Rate of Pay: TOTAL: Student Hourly Cost: TOTAL ALL WAGES: Capital: Unit cost $5,000 or more and useful life of more than one year. TOTAL: Capital Cost: Supplies and Expenses: No TRAVEL expenses here. No page charges, no reprint costs. TOTAL: Supplies and Expenses Cost: Travel: Funds are available after 7/1/2011. Only travel directly related to conduct of the research project. Roundtrip airfare- Burlington to Los Angeles (Burbank) $350 Hotel- Burbank (5 nights/ $130) $150 Rental car (5 days) $330 $650 Food (6 days at $55/day) TOTAL: Travel Cost: $1480 GRAND TOTAL ALL PROJECT COSTS (NOT TO EXCEED $12,000): $12,000 2 Revised 8/31/2010 Nilsen 1 Faculty Research Support Awards Proposal - Sarah Nilsen Every afternoon in the mid-1950s, millions of suburban American children came home from school and turned on their television sets to watch Walt Disney‟s The Mickey Mouse Club. Immensely popular with both children and adult audiences alike, The Mickey Mouse Club made its debut on Monday, October 3, 1955, ran for four seasons, and aired its final segment in September 1959, before going into syndication as a half-hour program from 1962 to 1965. The Mickey Mouse Club proved hugely popular during its first release. In 1956, The Mickey Mouse Club reached more total viewers than any other daytime program. It reached more children than any other program, day or night, except for Walt Disney‟s Disneyland series. It was seen four or five times a week by 42 percent of its weekly audience, and in its first year came in second in the Nielsen ratings to only the World Series. As Steven Watts argues in The Magic Kingdom: Walt Disney and the American Way of Life, a cultural history of Walt Disney and his studio, “This television show, beamed out to a national audience on a daily basis, was the studio‟s most noteworthy contribution to the raising of America‟s children during the Cold War” (Watts 335). Though there have been several books published on The Mickey Mouse Club for fans of the show, I am applying for a Faculty Research Support Award to help fund the research and writing of the first scholarly book of the cultural history of The Mickey Mouse Club. Much of the theoretical and historigraphic motivations for this project emerge out of recent histories of Walt Disney and the Disney studio that have begun to draw on extensive archival material to document the studio‟s impact on society. Previous Disney scholarship has tended to be unilaterally critical of the studio and has relied heavily on claims of the Disneyfication of society, yet the broad generalizations of much of this work have tended to lack empirical evidence and historical contextualization to support these positions. This book is therefore grounded in both recent Disney histories, such as the groundbreaking work of Steven Watts and Nicholas Sammond, and also media audience studies that have begun to rely on historical evidence to document the reception of individual media products on specific audience groups. I draw on this research to chart the development of the suburban American children's television audience during the fifties. This book addresses two significant holes within television history. First, historical analysis of The Mickey Mouse Club challenges and problematizes current dominant understandings of Walt Disney products, in such books as The Mouse that Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence by Henry Giroux and Team Rodent: How Disney Devours the World by Carl Hiaasen, as one-dimensional, reactionary, and stultifying. In addition, my work will redress the paucity of historical, culturally based analyses of early children‟s television and its impact on baby boomer audiences. Recent work by new suburban historians has lead to a major reappraisal of postwar U.S. suburbanization and yet the significance of the emergence of television during this period of tremendous social transformation has not been examined. The Mickey Mouse Club was a foundational show in the construction of the baby boomer children‟s television audience and the development of children‟s educational media. I have so far completed a significant amount of research for this project including the writing of two chapters. My research so far though has been dependent on secondary sources and fan magazines that I could access in Vermont. The manuscript opens with an overview of the history of the development of children‟s television in order to position The Mickey Mouse Club within a broader discussion about the significant social, cultural, and political discursive debates that surrounded the unprecedented technological arrival of the television set into the homes of millions of Americans in the fifties. The chapter further considers how these debates affected the production and reception of the Disney show. The book continues, then, with the two chapters that have been written. One provides an examination of 3 Revised 8/31/2010 Nilsen 2 The Mickey Mouse Club newsreels and points to Walt Disney's ability to create for postwar suburban children through television an intense, heterogeneous experience of a global community of children. These newsreels, produced by and for children around the world, provided access to the globe in a way that emphasized shared American ideals from the perspective of the child viewer. The other completed chapter considers the Disney studio‟s publicity and promotion of one of television‟s first children‟s star, Annette Funicello. Though many historians consider The Mickey Mouse Club to be homogenous in its representation of white, suburban youth, I show that the Disney studio intentionally emphasized ethnic differences as a model for assimilation during a time of significant racial tension. This chapter has been accepted for publication in Mediated Girlhoods: New Explorations of Girls’ Media Culture ed. Mary Celeste Kearney (Peter Lang, forthcoming). I am currently working on two new chapters, one of which is an analysis of the show‟s serials, “Spin and Marty” and “Hardy Boy,” and the manner in which the show represented changing notions of boyhood and masculinity within fifties popular culture. Issues of adult masculinity in the fifties have received intensive historical analysis and yet transformations in boyhood have received scant scholarly attention by cultural historians. This chapter then considers how the Disney show offered a new and distinct model of boyhood that was reflective of newer conceptions of childhood development that proliferated at the time. The other chapter I am currently working on considers the scientific and educational discourse presented on the show and its impact on the commercial imperatives of the medium. The producers of the show were caught in the double bind of attempting to deliver educational content while the network executives at ABC were demanding content that sponsors would support. Mattel, in fact, upon sponsoring Walt Disney‟s The Mickey Mouse Club program in 1955, became the first toy company to broadcast commercials to children. The contradictions between the financial demands of commercial television and the educational goals of children‟s television would eventually lead to end of the series and would continue to be a major issue in the evolution of children‟s television programming. I am applying for research funds to provide support for the researching and analysis of primary resources that are necessary for the completion of this project. I intend to use these funds during my sabbatical leave in order to complete the research for and writing of the last chapters. These chapters include an investigation of Walt Disney‟s relationship with federal agencies through an examination of the studio‟s participation with the FBI in the production of several episodes of the The Mickey Mouse Club. Though many earlier histories have characterized Walt Disney as a politically conservative and activist Cold warrior, Disney‟s relationship with the federal government was not stable or predictable and the shooting of these episodes at the FBI provides insight into the difficulty of producing a commercial television show that upholds and articulates the ideological intentions of the state. The final chapter is in many ways the most challenging and addresses the reception and impact of the show on audiences internationally. The Mickey Mouse Club was immensely popular abroad, running for years in Mexico, Japan, and in particular, Australia. Many members of the cast of the show assembled for highly successful tours of Australia in 1959 and 1960. Television did not reach Australia until 1956 so the series screened well into the sixties. Cultural historians have begun to question the theoretical and historical assumptions in arguments about the negative, unilateral impact of American media and, especially Disney productions, abroad. This chapter directly challenges these claims of cultural imperialism and Americanization and provides one of the few empirical historical studies of the impact of Disney products globally. By documenting the manner in which the show was received overseas and how audiences were interpreting and actively participating with the show and its stars, the chapter provides a case study of how Disney products functioned in the global marketplace. The only way in which these chapters can be written is through access to the records available at the Disney Studio archive in Burbank. The book closes with an analysis of the continued significance of the show through cultural analysis of later iterations including The New Mickey Mouse Club in the 1970s and the All-New Mickey Mouse Club which appeared on the Disney Channel in the 1990s. 4 Revised 8/31/2010 Nilsen 3 The next stage necessary for the completion of this book is a research trip to the Walt Disney archive in Burbank, CA in order to access its extensive archive of the show, including production records, clippings files, and fan correspondences. The archival research and writing of the next chapters for this project will be conducted during my sabbatical year and I hope to have the majority of the book completed by the end of my sabbatical leave so that it can be submitted to publishers for publication. This book project is the culmination of my scholarly and teaching interests in Disney studies, children‟s television, and cultural studies. After regularly teaching classes on Walt Disney and American Culture for several years at the University of Vermont, it has become apparent that there is a significant lack of rigorous, historical research on the Disney studio and its products that can be used in the undergraduate classroom. This book is written with my students in mind, and is intended to introduce to them the processes of historical interpretation and cultural studies methodology that occurs in the analysis of a media product. 5 Revised 8/31/2010 Nilsen 4 Works Cited Giroux, Henry. The Mouse That Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence. NY: Rowan & Littlefield, 1999. Hiaasen, Carl. Team Rodent: How Disney Devours the World. NY: Random House, 1998. Sammond, Nicholas. Babes in Tomorrowland: Walt Disney and the Making of the American Child, 1930-1960. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. Watts, Steven. The Magic Kingdom: Walt Disney and the American Way of Life. NY: Houghton Mifflin, 1997. 6 Revised 8/31/2010 SARAH NILSEN 315 Old Mill University of Vermont Burlington, VT 05405 Sarah.Nilsen@uvm.edu EDUCATION UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA Ph.D., December 2000. School of Cinema-Television, Critical Studies. M.A., 1995. School of Cinema-Television, Critical Studies. AMERICAN FILM INSTITUTE M.F.A., 1992. Screenwriting. DARTMOUTH COLLEGE B.A., 1989. English Literature and Creative Writing. PUBLICATIONS Books Projecting America: Film and Cultural Diplomacy at the Brussels World’s Fair of 1958 (McFarland, forthcoming, Spring 2011). Articles “All-American Girl?: Annette Funicello and Suburban Ethnicity in the Mickey Mouse Club,” Mediated Girlhoods: New Explorations of Girls’ Media Culture ed. Mary Celeste Kearney (Peter Lang, forthcoming). “America‟s Salesman: Walt Disney‟s USA in Circarama” Beyond the Mouse: Disney’s Documentaries and Docudramas, ed. A. Bowdoin Van Riper (McFarland, forthcoming). “Be Sure You‟re Right, Then Go Ahead”: The Davy Crockett Gun Craze” Red Feather: An International Journal of Children’s Visual Culture 1:1 (Spring 2010). “White Soul: The „Magical Negro‟ in the Films of Stephen King,” The Films of Stephen King: From Carrie to Secret Window, ed. Tony Magistrale (New York: Palgrave, 2008): 129-140. “Don‟t Stop „til We Get Enough: Michael Jackson and the Enjoyment of the Other,” International Journal of Zizek Studies (forthcoming). 7 Revised 8/31/2010 PRESENTATIONS Reimagining Girlhood: Communities, Identities, Self-Portrayals conference, SUNY_ Cortland, Fall 2010, paper presentation, “All-American Girl?: Annette Funicello and Suburban Ethnicity.” Popular Culutre/American Cultural Studies Conference, St. Louis, Spring 2010, paper presentation, “Selling Good Design: IBM and the Films of Charles and Ray Eames.” African Literature Association Conference, UVM, Spring 2009, paper presentation, “Don‟t Stop „til We Get Enough: Michael Jackson and the Enjoyment of the Other.” APCS Conference for Psychoanalysis and Social Change, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, Fall 2008, paper presentation, “Don‟t Stop „til We Get Enough: Michael Jackson and the Enjoyment of the Other.” Popular Culture/American Cultural Studies Conference, San Francisco, Spring 2008, paper presentation, “All American Girl: Annette Funicello and the Question of Ethnicity” and roundtable member on Race and the Films of Stephen King. Console-ing Passions: Feminism, Television and Video, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, Spring 2006, paper on Annette Funicello. Visible Evidence Conference, Concordia University, Montreal, Summer 2005, paper presentation, “Anything Can Happen Day: The Mickey Mouse Club Newsreels.” MIT4: Media in Transition Conference, MIT, Cambridge, Spring 2005, paper presentation, "Everyone Neat and Pretty: Mickey Mouse Mediocrity." Console-ing Passions: Feminism, Television and Video, Tulane University, New Orleans, Spring 2004, paper presentation, "Six Gun Galahads: Masculinity and the Television Western." Society for Cinema Studies Conference, Spring 2003, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Spring 2003, paper presentation, "Be Sure You're Right”: The Davy Crockett Gun Craze." Society for Cinema Studies Conference, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Spring 2003, workshop on the films of Claire Denis. Film and History Conference, Kansas City, Fall 2002, paper presentation, "'Be sure you're right, then go ahead': Race and the Davy Crockett Television Craze." 8 Revised 8/31/2010 Wisconsin Political Science Association Conference, Oshkosh, Fall 2002, The Media and the Bush Presidency panel. APCS Conference for Psychoanalysis and Social Change, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, Fall 2001, “Do the Right Thing?: Transference in the Classroom.” University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh Dean‟s Symposium, Oshkosh, Spring 2001, "Popular Culture and the Cold War." Society for Cinema Studies Conference, Washington, DC, Spring 2001, “Violence is Desire: Claire Denis‟ Beau Travail." Console-ing Passions Conference: Feminism, Television and Video, University of Notre Dame, South Bend, Spring 2000, “Shirley Clarke‟s Visual Jazz." Film and Literature Conference, University of Florida, Fall 1999, “Bug-Eye in South Pacific: The Atomic Sublime at the Brussels World‟s Fair." Cold War Conference, Indiana University, Bloomington, 1999, “America‟s Salesman: Disney at the Brussels World‟s Fair." Western Association of Women Historians Conference, Huntington Gardens, Pasadena, 1998, "Gendered Spheres: The World's Fairs of the 1930s." Society for Cinema Studies Conference, San Diego, 1998, Media Literacy workshop. Society for Cinema Studies Conference, Ottawa, 1997, “It Happened at the Fair: Film and the Paris Expositions," French Cinema in the 1930s and Its Intertexts panel. UCLA Southland Conference, Westwood, 1997, “Disneyland Goes to the World‟s Fair," Imagined Communities panel. Society for Cinema Studies Conference, 1996, “The Total Art of Stalin," Avant Garde panel. HONORS AND AWARDS University of Vermont, Faculty Development Grant, Fall 2005, research on the plans by the U.S. State Department for the American Pavilion at the Brussels World‟s Fair of 1958. Fulbright Scholarship, 1998/9, The Canada-U.S. Fulbright Program, research on American pavilions at Canadian international expositions. Vander Putten International Fund, Fall 2002, funding to meet with British media organizations and 9 Revised 8/31/2010 institutions in order to develop a summer media studies program. 10