Walt Disney Productions Publicity Ephemera – Blog Post 2

Because the Walt Disney Productions Publicity Ephemera, 1938-198x span a more than forty-year period, I assumed that the finding aid would allow me to draw conclusions about the evolution of Disney’s publicity materials during that time. I expected some changes, such as the kinds of films produced or the kinds of materials used to advertise them, to become clearly visible as I perused the finding aid.

However, as seems to be the case with other finding aids, I found that the publicity ephemera were organized alphabetically rather than chronologically (the physical collection itself seems to be scattered neither chronologically nor alphabetically throughout the 12 boxes). The alphabetical organization would be helpful if I were searching for a particular title among the list, and did not know which year it was released. For instance, while it might be easy for me to locate the Mary Poppins photographic highlights from 1964, I would struggle to find the more obscure Melody Time preview program from 1948.

Yet if I were trying to construct a narrative out of these materials, the alphabetical ordering would seem to obstruct my aim. Though Melody Time appears directly below Mary Poppins because of their alphabetical similarity, the two programs were released nearly twenty years apart and seem to have little thematic similarity. In order to discover which films were advertised before and after Mary Poppins, I would need to manually put the publicity ephemera in chronological order. Only then would I have a structure resembling the kind of annals that Hayden White discusses in “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality.”

Even in annals form, though, White does not believe that a collection of data forms a complete narrative (9). From there, I would need to add additional commentary to each entry to form something closer to a chronicle. For instance, even after I link Mary Poppins to Emil and the Detectives or one of the other films produced in 1964, I must still consider why they might have been marketed in such close succession. I could ask whether their subject matter is related, whether there is similarity in the materials used to advertise them, or whether these advertisement materials have similar styles. Yet according to White, the short chronicle I have just described only “aspires to narrativity” (9) because it does not provide any kind of moralizing conclusion—it simply drops off with my observation of how Mary Poppins’ publicity materials may have influenced the development of the Emil and the Detectives publicity materials.

It would be difficult even to draw enough conclusions to create a chronicle, because the finding aid excludes contextual explanations for each item. Prior knowledge informs me that not all of the Disney releases detailed in the finding aid were popular successes, and thus were not all equally impactful on audiences. Yet each publicity material appears in the finding aid as if on equal ground, having accomplished its advertisement goals to equal success. In this way, the finding aid includes materials that may not always be viewed as “important” in the arc of Disney’s history. While this may present some difficulty in determining how all these films relate to each other and how their publicity materials affect those following them, it also leads me to a sort of moralizing conclusion. Because all these publicity materials must have affected some people, and their impact may have been great on those individuals, perhaps it is not the archivist’s intention to decide which ephemera had the most lasting impact. Perhaps in organizing the materials alphabetically, but also in including the lesser-known materials at all, the archivist invites the viewer to construct new narratives concerning how a work like Mary Poppins could possibly be related to a work like Emil and the Detectives.