Uncle John’s Giant 10th Anniversary Bathroom Reader (78 page)

• “The Real Enemies of Karen Silkwood,” by Anthony Kimmery
(Rebel
magazine, Feb. 20, 1984)

• “Karen Silkwood: The Deepening Mystery,” by Jeffrey Stein
(The Progressive
magazine, Jan. 1981)

• “The Case of Karen Silkwood,” by B. J. Phillips (Ms. magazine)

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TALES OF THE CIA

As the Cold War ended, the CIA decided it needed to project “a greater openness and sense of public responsibility.” So it commissioned a task force. On December 20, 1991, the committee submitted a 15-page “Report on Greater Openness.” It is stamped SECRET, and agency officials refuse to disclose any of its contents.

This article by Lisa Bannon, which appeared in the
Wall Street Journal
on October 24, 1995, tells the story of how a significant rumor was born. It’s one of the best investigative pieces we’ve ever seen on the spread of an urban legend.

A
STARTLING DISCOVERY

Anna Runge, a mother of eight, was so enamored with Walt Disney Co. that she owned stacks of its animated home videos, a
Beauty and the Beast
blanket, and a Disney diaper bag. “Disney was almost a member of the family,” she says.

Until, that is, an acquaintance tipped her off to a startling rumor: The Magic Kingdom was sending obscene subliminal messages through some of its animated family films, including
Aladdin
, in which the handsome young title character supposedly murmurs, sotto voice, “All good teenagers take off your clothes.”

“I felt as if I had entrusted my kids to pedophiles,” says the Carthage, New York, homemaker, who promptly threw the videos into the garbage. “It’s like a toddler introduction to porn.”

A PERSISTENT RUMOR

By now, just about everyone had heard the rumors that so shocked Runge. Indeed, Disney catapulted into the headlines on reports that there are subliminal sexual messages in three popular Disney videos:
The Lion King
and
The Little Mermaid,
as well as
Aladdin.
The charges were reported around the world: TV news shows broadcast the offending snippets in slow motion, among them a scene from
The Lion King
in which dust supposedly spells out the word “sex.”

Disney denies inserting any subliminal messages. And the three allegedly obscene sequences are hardly crystal clear; even using the pause button on a VCR, viewers may debate whether they exist. Yet they have quickly become the stuff of suburban myth, like the “Paul is dead” rumor from the heyday of the Beatles, or the persistent allegations that Procter & Gamble Co.’s moon-and-stars logo symbolizes devil worship.

As the rumors spread, though, so did a common refrain: Where does this stuff come from?

In the case of
Aladdin
, the allegation crisscrossed the country, traveling mostly through conservative Christian circles and helped by, among others, Runge; a high-school biology class in Owensboro, Kentucky; an Iowa college student; and a traveling troupe of evangelical actors. It was passed on by some people who didn’t believe it, by others who thought it was a joke, and by a Christian magazine that later—and apparently to no effect—retracted its story. At least two waves of the rumor swept the country, from very different starting points.

AN AVUNCULAR BISHOP

Most people probably first heard about the allegations in early September 1995, after the Associated Press ran a story saying a Christian group had identified the three subliminally smutty incidents. The articles described the
Aladdin
and
The Lion King
scenes as well as one in
The Little Mermaid
in which it said an avuncular bishop becomes noticeably aroused while presiding over a wedding ceremony. Disney quickly fired back. “If somebody is seeing something, that’s their perception. There’s nothing there,” says Rick Rhoades, a Disney spokesman. Aladdin’s line is “Scat, good tiger, take off and go,” Disney says. The company maintains that Simba’s dust is just that, dust. And Tom Sito, the animator who drew the Little Mermaid’s purportedly aroused minister, says, “If I wanted to put Satanic messages in a movie, you would see it. This is silly.”

AN INADVERTENT FIND

The Associated Press, as it turns out, didn’t ferret out the story itself. It picked up the item from the
Daily Press
in Newport News, Virginia. The reporter on that story, Jim Stratton, himself stumbled on the allegations inadvertently. On a slow day at the end of August, Stratton, who at the time covered health and medicine for the paper, was casually flipping through a copy of
Communique,
a biweekly newsletter published by the American Life League, an anti-abortion group based in Stafford, Virginia. He was struck by an article warning parents about a scene from
The Lion King
in which Simba, the cuddly lion star, stirs up a cloud of dust. “Watch closely as the cloud floats off the screen,” the newsletter instructed, “and you can see the letters S-E-X.”

Bemused, Stratton called the league, where a spokeswoman told him about the illicit messages in
Aladdin
and
The Little Mermaid.
He decided to see for himself and gathered a dozen or so reporters around a newsroom TV to view
The Lion King
scene. They weren’t convinced. “We didn’t make a final decision either way on what exactly people were seeing,” he says. Still, he decided to write a breezy tongue-in-cheek article about all three incidents for his paper. “We handled it lightly,” he says.

Stratton’s source for the story, the American Life League, meanwhile, hadn’t actually found the alleged subliminal scenes itself, either. Its article was prompted by phone calls and letters from Christian groups. One of the callers had first read about the
Aladdin
allegation in the March issue of
Movie Guide
magazine, a Christian entertainment review based in Atlanta.

ALADDIN EXPOSED

In a story titled “Aladdin Exposed,”
Movie Guide
alleged that, in a scene on the balcony with love interest Princess Jasmine and her pet tiger, Aladdin murmurs the “take off your clothes” line. The article likened the line to allegedly demonic messages in 1970s rock songs that can only be heard when the albums are played backward. “Thousands were seduced into following the suggestions of these same messages,” the magazine wrote. It urged “moral Americans” to write to Disney’s chairman, Michael Eisner, asking him to remove the “manipulative subliminal messages.”

Overlooked by the
Movie Guide
reader who repeated the allegations to the American Life League, though, was one important fact:
Movie Guide
later ran a retraction. After its piece ran, Movie
Guide
received a letter from Disney saying that the line was actually “Scat, good tiger, take off and go.”
Movie Guide’s
publisher, Ted Baehr, decided to clear up the matter once and for all, and took the video to a digital recording studio to decipher the questionable passage syllable by syllable. Although the line is hard to understand,
Movie Guide
concluded, it “falls short of the charge of subliminal-viewer manipulation,” as the newsletter put in its July issue. Adds Baehr, “We messed up by not listening before.”

THE PLOT THICKENS

Movie Guide
, in any case, hadn’t ferreted out the alleged subliminal message on its own, either. Baehr says the publication received a “flood of letters and calls complaining about
Aladdin
” in December, January, and February.

One of the letter writers was Gloria Ekins, Christian education director of First Christian Church in Newton, Iowa. “I heard it from my daughter” last winter, Ekins says. Her daughter Jenny, 17, heard it from her friend Jane Ford, a classmate at Newton Senior High School. Jane, in turn, first learned of the
Aladdin
message from her older brother, Matthew Ford, a college senior at the University of Northern Iowa in Cedar Falls, Iowa.

Ford would prove to be one of the central figures in the
Aladdin
saga: He heard the line on his own. The college student, who works part time at a local video store and a movie theater, is an electronic media major who hopes to go into the movie business. A self-confessed movie buff, he happened to be watching
Aladdin
one day last January when he stumbled across the alleged line. He had no moral or religious purpose in spreading the word about it. He simply thought it was funny….

“We were all sitting around the dorm back in January watching
Aladdin
and I couldn’t figure out something he was saying,” Ford recalls. “I said, ‘Rewind that,’ and then we heard it.” He adds, “My friends think it’s funny because it’s a Disney movie.” Months later, when the
Aladdin
line showed up on the national news, Ford never imagined he helped start it all. “When I saw the news,” he says, “I just thought I wasn’t the only one who noticed it.”

A SECOND WAVE

In fact, almost a year earlier, in the spring of 1994, another teenager did notice the supposedly salacious line—and he started a separate wave of the rumor that also ended up tearing through Christian circles. Jon Wood, now a 16-year-old sophomore at Green Mountain Senior High School in Lakewood, Colorado, says he was watching his younger sister’s new copy of the video when he “heard a whisper.” He adds, “It was weird, I just felt like something was wrong. I heard something in the background and rewound it, and I just heard it.”

Jon, who says he was “shocked” by the line, immediately called his 16-year-old brother, Jake, into the room to show him, too. A few weeks later, the boys showed it to their aunt, Chris Leach, of nearby Fort Collins, Colorado, who had just bought the video for her own five children.

Leach, whose husband is a pastor, passed the word on to a friend from religious circles, Glen Lee, who at the time was the youth pastor at Calvary Temple Assembly of God, a Pentecostal church in Owensboro, Kentucky. Lee in turn told a neighbor, Becky Tomes.

Tomes, the mother of two toddlers, listened to the tape in June 1994 with her husband, but “we didn’t really hear it,” she says. That didn’t stop her, though, from spreading the rumor to another friend, Sheryl Arnold, who listened for herself and decided that, no doubt about it, it was indeed an obscene subliminal message. “We have surround-sound TV,” she explains. “And when I listened to it, it was very clear.”

Arnold told a friend of hers from church, Eva Sturgeon, a Pentecostal singer at Calvary Temple. After church one day, Sturgeon passed the word to her brother’s girlfriend, Casey Ranson, now a junior at Apollo High School, a public school in Owensboro. Intrigued, Casey brought the
Aladdin
cassette into school and played it for her English and biology classes. “Nobody believed me when I told them, so I brought it to school and when I played it, they heard it,” Casey says.

SOME SKEPTICISM

Casey herself told, among others, a classmate named Whitney Underhill, who says with some skepticism, “The more I listen to it, it doesn’t sound like ‘take off your clothes.’ It drops off and is hard to understand.” But Whitney nevertheless repeated the tale to a friend of hers, Johnny Henderson, who at the time was a senior at Owensboro High School. He told a schoolmate, Courtney Lindow, who in turn told another classmate, Lauren Hayden.

Lauren proved to be a providential choice. Her father, P. J. Hayden, is principal of a Catholic elementary school in Owensboro, St. Angela Merici Elementary. Lauren told him the tale, and Mr. Hayden promptly spread the word among his school’s parents, showing
the
Aladdin
scene at parent-teacher meetings. “I know a lot of our parents are concerned about subliminal messages/’ Mr. Hayden says. “I tell them, monitor [Disney movies] like you would anything else. The Disney name is not as…clean as we thought it was.”

Among the parents he alerted was Lisa Bivens, who has three daughters. On a February afternoon, she took her children to a local church to see a performance by Radix, a traveling evangelical troupe of performers based in Lincoln, Nebraska, that uses song and dance to bring home biblical stories and tell morality tales. After the show, Bivens mentioned the
Aladdin
episode to the troupe’s leader, 30-year-old Doug Barry. In May, Barry and Radix traveled to tiny Carthage, New York, 45 minutes from the Canadian border, for another performance. Among the audience members was Runge, the mother of eight. They spoke together later at a brunch, and as talk turned to the dangers of sex and violence in the media, he repeated the
Aladdin
tale, throwing in another allegation he had heard from a teenager who wrote to him, about the supposed “S-E-X” in
The Lion King.

IT SMELLS “PERVERT”

Runge was furious—and determined to do something about it. Over the summer, she began calling Christian organizations and conservative groups, from Pat Robertson to Phyllis Schafly. She hit pay dirt when she reached the American Life League, which politely thanked her for passing on the
Aladdin
allegation—it had already heard that one from Movie
Guide’s
readers—but which promptly published the article about
The Lion King
that led to the Associated Press story that started the avalanche of unwanted publicity for Disney.