MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

The Disney theme park attraction It’s a Small World depicts world peace using audio-animatronic children singing an infectious song of unity. A number of scholars, including Stephen Fjellman, Laudan Nooshin, Katherine Baber, and James Spickard, have shown that It’s a Small World and its homogeneous simulacrum of a folk song symbolically colonize the world under a Western perspective and Western folk music aesthetics. The song, with its simple lyric and repetitive structure, presents a universalizing image of the child. The innocence signified by the recorded children’s voices erases strife, conflict, and disharmony, even as the costumes and instrumentation indulge in familiar national and ethnic stereotypes. However, consideration of actual children’s performances and interactions with the song suggests that the very folk-like repetition that promotes Disney’s transnational corporate agenda also makes playful subversion possible. Amateur videos made by visitors to Disney theme parks demonstrate that, through irreverent parody and musical poaching, children, as singing subjects, may reclaim their voices from the performing objects of the mechanized ride. In one such instance, musical counterpoint serves as both a metaphor and an actual strategy for resistance, as young visitors to Disney World sing a parody version of “It’s a Small World” from The Simpsons as a countermelody to the original song. Their countermelody, interweaving with the written score and forming consonances and dissonances with the official tune, aurally recreates the ways in which consumers of Disney products negotiate their own meanings with and against the grain of the company’s messages.