Many thanks to Sarah Caré for her lovely visual notes of my talk for the lovely researchers of GROW. Sarah is a postdoc on the Wondre research project and gave us practical tools for visual notetaking.📝
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Current Project: Reading Mickey
Current Project: Reading Mickey
Disney’s Mickey Mouse character is a global icon, transcending generations, cultures, and media. ‘Reading Mickey’ studies the domestication and reception of the Italian and French Mickey magazine from 1932 until 1968. Unlike the animated movies and albums, these magazines have not yet been fully examined, and even less so from a comparative perspective. These magazines present an opportunity to compare practices of adaptation, appropriation, and reception in children’s press.
In particular, I will explore how French and Italian publishers adapted the global figure to their local reader and how those local readers responded to that product in correspondence sections, by competing in challenges, and through forming Mickey clubs. From the 1940s, Americanised popular children’s press was subject to political pressure, censorship, and competition from new media. Mickey was being hated and loved, and resurfaced post-WW2 to thrive through the 1950s.
‘Reading Mickey’ will explore the hypothesis that these magazines created a melting pot of local and global, making a magazine that was relatable for the Italian and French child. The project will glean new insights into the local appropriations of Mickey magazines and the under-researched response they solicited among child readers, while providing a broader understanding of transmedia and commercial strategies targeting children as consumers.
This project is possible thanks to the generous support of the F.R.S.-FNRS and the FWO.
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