new thread
Not sure if anyone else has posted on this yet, (I'm only a little over 30 years late w/ the news) but I found an interesting bit of trivia on Disneyland.
Up 'til the late '60s, long-haired male visitors to the park were turned away at the gate, due to violation of an unwritten dress code.
I got the info off a site about urban legends, but it tells you which are true and which aren't. It's a pretty big site if you wanna check it out. Some fun reading, if nothing else.
www.snopes.com
The thing that surprised me the most was that, up 'til early 2000, employees of the park weren't even allowed to have mustaches.
Guess this all explains why Captain Hook was a bad guy.
Yes, I've heard this too. I guess Disney isn't all about love and acceptance and blah blah blah.
Discrimination against longhairs in the 60s was pretty bad. I saw on a VH1 special one time that David Bowie was part of an advocacy group to halt discrimination against long haired men. Mind you, these guys were hardly into the awkward stage! So it wasn't just Disney, it was pretty much everyone.
~Jenn
Hi!
In the 60's, if I remember right (I was only a child then!), some people (older women in particular) thought long hippie hair, even on GIRLS, was a disgrace!
Cheers, Barry
My mother said that when she was a child girls with long hair worn loose were teased. I think the main insult employed was telling them that they had 'nits' in their hair, i.e. lice! This was considerably before hippies, in fact circa the second world war.
Women back then were exorted to bob their hair in the belief that it would get in the way if they took a job to aid the war effort. Of course, before that most women hadn't worked outside the home.
Women before WW2 weren't expected to have jobs unless they were single, couldn't acceptably either cut their hair short or grow it long (unless they wore it up), were expected to wear skirts all the time, and generally were restricted in very many ways. Now women can pretty much have any hairstyle and wear anything, and it is men who have less freedom of appearance.
The same societal displeasure that kept some women within arbitrary guidelines of what should or should not be worn are the same forces acting on men, and everybody really, today. My sense is that things changed for women because they just decided not to care what people said and I think it could work the same way for men. Go ahead and dress as you like, have whatever hairstyles you please and see what happens. People hesitate to do a lot they really could be doing after all.
On a historic note, women also were cutting their hair during World War II for donation to the war effort. I still have not heard the reason for the collection but it is another factor for the cuts. Another point to make is that women have always worked outside the home, it was only a rarity for women of certain classes to do so. Women have long been seen in their family businesses, laboring in the homes of others, at factory jobs and many other kinds of work before and after marriage.
Elizabeth
Wasn't there an Austrian guy who took this way of thinking a little bit too far?
LOL well now I wouldn't go comparing Disney to Hitler ^_^ But in both cases, they were powerful enough to make people do what they wanted...who's gonna fight with Disney?
Actually, its been said that Disney was a Nazi sympathizer.
*snorts* You're kidding. That's insane. What a world we live in!
~Jenn
No joke. If I was kidding, I'd give some sort of an indication of sarcasm. Sometimes things that are seemingly wholesome are in fact quite contrary in nature. Are you familiar with the history behind many songs that children are taught to sing, like "Ring around the Rosey"?
Quite true. One thing that I also find repulsive is the celebration of "Columbus Day" in the US.
Are you sure about that? I know that to be true of Charles Lindbergh and Henry Ford, amongst others.
Actually it is true, do a little research on him and you will find this. Kinda a contrast to the cartoonish image that most people have developed about Disney now.
I googled it up and most of the info regarding this topic seems to be centered around whether he was a sympathizer or not. Thing is, based on what I found so far if he were he wasn't as outspoken about it as Henry Ford or Lindbergh (some hero, huh?). I'll continue my search because I find this a very interesting subject.
I've been to Disney in Florida and it is a great place. I was crushed when I had to cancel a long-planned trip there in August 2002. I would not hesitate to go back to Disney even with my long hair.
The long hair discrimination took place over 35 years ago. They were not trying to be evil but were misguidedly trying to maintain a "family" atmosphere. In the 1960s the common view was that long hairs were chronic drug users and troublemakers. We can laugh now but remember people weren't getting together on the Internet back then, there were only three television networks, and whatever the government said was reported to the public without question. Our society has come a long way since the 1960s and that includes Disney, a company that now goes out of its way to accomodate everyone who passes through the gates of it's theme parks.
Good point, of course. OTOH, this bit has a military ring to it:
"Faced with manpower shortages at their American theme parks, in early 2000 Disney modified their policy to allow male cast members to sport neatly-trimmed moustaches."
Of course, through all the years he ran Disneyland, Walt Disney had a mustache himself. This fact reinforces what we've come to realize and have said over and over: Demands that a man cut hair are almost never about appearance. They are almost always about power.