I can't remember the season anymore. On Kalemegdan, women were selling woolen hats at hand stalls, so I guess winter was coming, or at least it was late autumn with a basket that shaves the ears. At one of the stalls, while I was walking idly, I noticed a pile of old paper under the patriotic trinkets and trash souvenirs. I took a closer look at the yellowed pages: A politician's entertainer from 1939.
A window into the mother's childhood
I flipped through it, calculating in my head how old my mother was then. Seven. Judging by what I saw in the copy that smelled of ancient dampness and dust, the heroes of her childhood were the same as my heroes thirty years later: Mickey Mouse and Duckling. It seemed a little strange to me that the timeless Disney characters were as much friends to my parents' generation as they were to mine.
I bought that copy of Zabavnik with the vague intention of maybe showing my mother a window into her childhood. However, when I left for her in Bosnia, I never took it with me. This copy began gathering dust among the newspaper clippings in my private library.
Pre-war mice and ducks
Only much later did I find out that the journalists of the time political, Vladislav Ribnikar, Živojin Vukadinović and Dušan Timotijević, were the creators of the idea Politika's entertainer. Duda Timotijević, translating American comics, was the godfather of many Disney characters who were given popular names. By April 4, 1941, 220 issues were published. Two days later, the bombing of Belgrade and the collapse of Yugoslavia in April marked the end of Disney World in these areas. My mother had to part with her new friends from Disney comics.
It should be emphasized that in 1936, an unskilled but popular plagiarism of Disney's Mickey Mouse appeared in the magazine "Mickey Mouse", even before its famous brother. Mika Miš saw over 500 editions, but World War II also took him away.
Tito loves Paja Duck
The victory of the communists in the civil war, as well as the liberation of the country from the occupiers, did not immediately bring back the Disney heroes among the Yugoslavs. Comics were denounced as a bourgeois product. As in other spheres of culture, Tito's break with Stalin in 1948 meant the gradual rehabilitation of the culture of "class enemies", including characters called Mickey Mouse, Paja Patak, Šilja.
Vladislav Ribnikar started it again in 1952 A politician's entertainer. Allegedly, Tito told an agent of the Disney company that he had nothing against resuming the publication of Disney comics. Legend has it that Tito declared that he loved Paja Patka. However, for a whole decade before I was born, Disney characters represented an increasingly important part of the childhood of the post-war generations.
I belong to the generation that, instead of the newspaper, black and white format, since 1968, read a magazine in color. My Miki had red trousers, Paja Patak had a blue navy uniform, and Mini was in tufted dresses. It wasn't until my childhood was long behind me that I read that Minnie, Mickey's girlfriend, was actually a "flapper" - that's what the emancipated girls of the XNUMXs were called in America who wore short skirts and short hair, went out at night like men .
How Patkovgrad was settled
For me, the overall universe of Patkovgrad was complete and perfect. I couldn't imagine a time when Disney characters didn't exist. However, they had very accurate birth years - the first publication in a comic book or cartoon counts.
Thus, in 1928, Mickey Mouse was created as the first character from this famous series. He appeared in the cartoon together with Minnie, his future girlfriend. Over time, six of the most popular characters appear in addition to Mini - the athropomorphic dog Šilja (1929), the dog Pluto (1930), Paja Patak (1934), his girlfriend Pata (under another name in 1937, under her own since 1940). Raja, Vlaj and Gaja, Paja's cousins, were drawn for the first time in a comic book in 1937. Disney cartoonist Carl Barks created Baja the Duck, a multibillionaire and a miser, only in 1947.
We could list it for a long time - from Srećko Srećković, through the thief Bulldog to Proka Pronalazač or Maga Vračević. They were all born before me and before Disney's death in 1966.
Disney as a magic word
For a boy who first met comics and cartoons in the mid-sixties of the last century, Disney was not a man but a code that promised endless fun. Only later did I become interested in the character and work of a man who created a kingdom of anthropomorphic animal characters who had the most deeply human traits and behaviors: love and anger, loyalty and fickleness, hatred and forgiveness, envy and self-sacrifice, greed and generosity.
In Disney's own early biography, there was nothing to suggest the progenitor of global magic. He was born in Chicago on December 5, 1901, exactly 120 years ago. He was a farmer's child. He had three older brothers and a younger sister. His father was from an Irish-Canadian family, and his mother's were immigrants from Germany. European roots sounded like a fairy tale: on the French coast opposite England there is a place called Izinja. From him comes the knight D'Izigny, a subject of Duke William of Normandy, who will go down in history as William I the Conqueror, the man who conquered England in the 11th century and ascended the English throne. He was accompanied on the campaign by the knight D'Izigny - that's how the surname crossed the English Channel and stayed there, turning into Disney. Emigrants from that family brought him to the North American continent, so that Walt, the fourth child of Elias Disney and Flora Cole, would provide him with world fame in the 20th century. Already at the age of seven, he was selling his drawings in the neighborhood. Sixteen-year-old high school student Walt Disney enlisted as a volunteer in the First World War, but as a minor he reached the position of Red Cross volunteer in the country of his noble ancestors, France.
And Hitler among the fans
After the war, there were years of founding companies and their bankruptcy, moving to Hollywood, where he founded the first drawing studio together with Abba Iwerks with a founding capital of 250 dollars. His first cartoon character, Oswald the Rabbit, was successful, but he was hijacked by the Universal Studio company. Disney's answer was - Mickey Mouse, the most successful mouse of all time.
In the story of Disney's success, we should certainly single out "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" from 1937, the first full-length cartoon in color, for the production of which Disney, despite the advice of managers, bankers and his wife, mortgaged the house. The film became one of the ten most successful films of the last century. In World War II, the Disney company works for the US government as a propaganda machine. But some Nazi submarines have Mickey Mouse on them. Hitler and Goebbels enjoy every new Disney movie at private screenings, while his works are officially banned in Nazi Germany.
The Dark Side of Walt Disney
There is also the shadow of the extreme right that will fall on Disney in the era of McCarthyism - the hunt for communist sympathizers in Hollywood in the first phase of the Cold War. He submitted reports to government officials about leftists among his associates and business partners. By the way, in his company women could not draw and create, they worked in the coloring department. When they reached the age of thirty, they would be fired. If an associate was found to have homosexual tendencies, he would be fired. Those were his ideals. In 1944, Disney founded the "Film Association for the Preservation of American Ideals", which gathered right-wing like-minded people - from Gary Cooper to John Wayne.
Towards the end of his life, Disney, a right-wing Republican, supported his friend Ronald Reagan, in his candidacy for governor of California. This is the same Hollywood actor who later became a symbol of Washington's neoconservative hardline as president.
Global childhood
The artistic intention and aesthetic clairvoyance of Disney were realized beyond the limits of his rather narrow ideological picture of the world. If it were not so, his characters would not follow the childhood of billions of children from Alaska to Shanghai, from Finland to the Philippines. Evidence of this can be found in the biography of this stubborn and imaginative man. About twenty Oscars, a series of honors around the world.
He opened a window into the world of Disney for my mother A politician's entertainer before the Second World War. For me, the whole of Patkovgrad was teeming with life Entertainer, comics and cartoons from the late XNUMXs. For my son, Paja Patak was in Germany at the beginning of the new millennium Donald Duck - Disney characters have slowly moved from animations and comics to 3D movies, games and lavish Hollywood productions with the signature of the company's founder as a trademark that guarantees good entertainment. Today there are already people who go to Paris just for Disneyland.
The Disney method and the Kalemegdan mouse
I may be an anachronistic child of the analog era, but I miss one kind of chastity in all of this - the smell of fresh printing ink on Politician's entertainer. The joy of a five-minute cartoon before the eight-thirty news. Trembling of the whole family over the fate of the 101st Dalmatian on the television program for the New Year holidays.
When I already mentioned Finland in this text - there Paja Patak (Aku Ankka) was banned for a while because he was drawn - without underpants.
Thus, through the aesthetic irony of history, some censors in the world have proven to be far more conservative than the artist Walt Disney himself. Perhaps the best characterization of this man was given by Robert B. Dilts, a well-known consultant in the field of applied psychology who once said that there are three Disneys - a visionary, a realist and a do-gooder. From that, they later created the Disney-method, assuming that every successful team must have one of these three.
And my copy Politika's entertainer from 1939? He dreams his black and white dreams in a small room in Belgrade's Nikolaj Gogol Street. Since my mother is gone, that's all I have left of her childhood. A folded newspaper format with Mickey Mouse peeking out. I don't touch it. I'm afraid a touch might turn it to dust.
Bonus video:
