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Subliminal Messaging and The Disney Corporation |
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Maryanne Tucker |
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Janet Gilmer vs. Walt Disney Corp. |
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The cultivation of ALL evidence against Disney did not go unheeded. On December 15, 1995, a Fayetteville, Arkansas woman by the name of Janet Gilmer filed a class-action lawsuit against the Walt Disney Corporation and their subsidiary Buena Vista Home Video. This was after she noticed that “hidden sexual content offensive to children” in three of Disney’s popular movies, “The Little Mermaid”, “The Lion King”, and “The Fox and The Hound” (Goldstein, 1997). The bulk of Gilmer’s claims were thrown out by the residing Judge Waters which involved “invasion of privacy, common law fraud, breach of warranties and negligence” (Goldstein, 1997). But Gilmer gained power in numbers when she summated more than 20,000 letters that had been written to the company from other people also concerned with these hidden messages (Goldstein, 1997). Waters could not throw out the case against the subliminal messages, which are in an infringement on the First Amendment. According to the law anything explicitly visible in a film is protected and cannot be subjected to use in court. Implicit, subliminal images, however, are not protected. That was enough for Gilmer and her lawyers to argue that the company had deemed and promoted the films as appropriate for a children’s audience, despite, according to Water “its knowledge at the time that the videos contained subliminal messages” (Goldstein, 1997).The case, however, did not make it to trial. After the judge dismissed most of the allegations, the company thought better to settle out of court and reached an undisclosed amount of compensation in August 1997 (Goldstein, 1997). |
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Fayetteville, Arkansas |
1995 |
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Evidence AGAINST Disney |
