Sammond on new Disney Museum

The Chronicle Review examines the new Walt Disney Family Museum, which opened in October in San Francisco. The museum's focus on a single person makes it unusual, reporter Randy Malamud writes. He interviews Nicholas Sammond, author of Babes in Tomorrowland: Walt Disney and the Making of the American Child, 1930–1960, who says the museum does not challenge Disney's self-creation narrative, in which the founder is "an American genius, a born tinkerer and inventor, like Henry Ford or Thomas Edison," with a dash of "the qualities of Horatio Alger (entrepreneurial determination) and Abraham Lincoln (humble origins and hard work)." The museum will also have an archive, but scholars Malamud interviews seem skeptical that they will have complete access to its treasures. Disney is protective of its corporate image, and much scholarship, including Sammond's book, sometimes presents a bit too much complication for them. Still, Malamud concludes, "the museum energizes the fascinatingly charged scholarly debate that the Disney phenomenon has provoked, shaking the worn, staid, sometimes cynical images we have of Disney and his empire, bringing to them renewed color and motion."