Peter C. Kunze

In the early 1980s, Walt Disney Productions was struggling, largely bolstered by the success of its theme parks. Within fifteen years, however, it had become one of the most powerful entertainment conglomerates in the world. Staging a Comeback: Broadway, Hollywood, and the Disney Renaissance argues that far from an executive feat, this impressive turnaround was accomplished in no small part by the storytellers recruited during this period. Drawing from archival research, interviews, and textual analysis, Peter C. Kunze examines how the hiring of theatrically trained talent into managerial and production positions reorganized the lagging animation division and revitalized its output. By Aladdin, it was clear that animation—not live action—was the center of a veritable “renaissance” at Disney, and the animated musicals driving this revival laid the groundwork for the company’s growth into Broadway theatrical production. The Disney Renaissance not only reinvigorated the Walt Disney Company but both reflects and influenced changes in Broadway and Hollywood more broadly.

Stand-up comedians have a long history of walking a careful line between serious and playful engagement with social issues: Lenny Bruce questioned the symbolic valence of racial slurs, Dick Gregory took time away from the stage to speak alongside Martin Luther King Jr. , and—more recently—Tig Notaro challenged popular notions of damaged or abject bodies. Stand-up comedians deploy humor to open up difficult topics for broader examination, which only underscores the social and cultural importance of their work.

Taking a Stand: Contemporary US Stand-Up Comedians as Public Intellectuals draws together essays that contribute to the analysis of the stand-up comedian as public intellectual since the 1980s. The chapters explore stand-up comedians as contributors to and shapers of public discourse via their live performances, podcasts, social media presence, and political activism.

Each chapter highlights a stand-up comedian and their ongoing discussion of a cultural issue or expression of a political ideology/standpoint: Lisa Lampanelli’s use of problematic postracial humor, Aziz Ansari’s merging of sociology and technology, or Maria Bamford’s emphasis on mental health, to name just a few. Taking a Stand offers a starting point for understanding the work stand-up comedians do as well as its reach beyond the stage. Comedians influence discourse, perspectives, even public policy on myriad issues, and this book sets out to take those jokes seriously.

A collection of out-of-print and previously unpublished interviews with author and artist Maurice Sendak, ranging from 1966 until 2012. Highlights include an early New Yorker profile, a conversation with Dr. Seuss, Philp Nel's previously unpublished discussion with Sendak about his collaboration with Crockett Johnson and Ruth Krauss, and Terry Gross's last interview with Sendak.

In recent years, the longstanding practice of producing and circulating bootleg recordings of Broadway musicals has escalated as have condemnations of this activity as detrimental to the commercial theatre industry. Drawing on work from media industry studies, this article reframes theatre bootlegging not as a detrimental practice, but as one that may have generative contributions to the theatre industry for its promotional effects. Rather than celebrating such efforts as wholly resistant or co-opted, however, we must understand bootlegging as essentially fraught, staging the inherent tension between the Broadway musical as art and commerce and blurring the distinction between producers and consumers. Critical attention to theatrical bootlegging as a social and cultural practice foregrounds the range of stakeholders in theatre culture as well as the myriad ways that they function as market actors.

When Beauty and the Beast premiered in 1991, its self-assured protagonist was a deliberate departure from the earlier Disney princess narratives. With time, however, the film has been lumped in with the other princess films as regressive, in part because the fairy tale itself is fundamentally flawed. The decision to remake the film as a live-action spectacle opens Disney and the text to the familiar critiques, which the 2017 film alternately addresses and suppresses. This article focuses on three efforts Disney made to skirt the long-standing feminist critiques on Beauty and the Beast: the casting of Emma Watson, including an "exclusively gay" moment, and framing Beauty as an AIDS allegory. In the process, it becomes clear that the remake is a deferential companion piece designed for cross-generational appeal, both for children today and of 1991, to sustain the highly profitable Disney Princess franchise. By exploring how paratextual and textual strategies were employed to address potential critiques, I assess the extent to which Disney faltered in its efforts to offer a more socially conscious film.

It goes without saying that media studies examines media that has been produced, but what value might we find in those projects that were not produced? This article turns to failure as a productive site for inquiry, especially for archival work into production cultures. Taking Amblin’s unproduced adaptation of Cats from the Tom Stoppard Papers at the Harry Ransom Center as a case study, I argue that we turn to correspondence, contracts, and scripts of unproduced media for useful case studies into the complex relationship between creatives and industry. This model proves particularly useful for a production studies-informed inquiry in which individual creative agency and labor are foregrounded through textual and discursive analyses. Taken together, this article makes the case for the value of archival research into media industries studies, the productiveness of examining what prevents or obstructs projects from going into production or being completed, and the consequences of studying failure for our understanding of what media (and media studies) can be.

Despite the rich range of scholarship on the film musical, in-depth scholarly attention to the relationship between Hollywood and Broadway as symbolic centers of the U.S. culture industries has been surprisingly sparse. This article makes an intervention into this largely neglected history through an examination of David O. Selznick's failed efforts in the early 1940s to stage Gone With the Wind as a Broadway musical. Fresh off back-to-back Academy Awards for Best Picture, Selznick made the innovative move to try adapting Gone With the Wind during his four-year hiatus from film production. Using Show Boat as an inspiration and Oklahoma! as a catalyst to accelerate his efforts, Selznick's attempts ultimately failed during his lifetime, but represent an earlier inroad into cross-industrial franchising. Furthermore, few know that Selznick set up a summer stock theater in Santa Barbara in 1941 not only to hone his contracted talent, but also to prevent them from leaving southern California for the New York stage in the summer. Consequently, this article emphasizes the value of studying industrial failure for scholars of the culture industries as well as the need for greater study of the alternately generative and competitive relationship between Broadway and Hollywood—a relationship put into renewed relief recently as Broadway shows now espouse a high concept aesthetic to tell stories often with roots in film properties and fueled in part by Hollywood money.

Bebe's Kids (1992) was the first animated feature film by, about, and (arguably) for African Americans, bringing together two trends in early 1990s Hollywood: the resurgence of feature animation and the emergence of hip hop cinema. Despite its ambitious intentions, the film was a commercial and critical failure, and its attempts to bridge black cinema and animated media have largely gone neglected by scholars in both fields. This essay offers a history and analysis of Bebe's Kids to demonstrate not only the nature of this intriguing media failure, but to also discuss an important moment in hip hop history where nascent white-owned media companies seized upon hip hop-and blackness in general-in an attempt to legitimate themselves as producers of quality content. Indeed, Bebe's Kids represents a marked departure from the nihilism and violent realism of the " ghetto film cycle " toward a light-hearted hip hop cinema that not only showed a different vision of urban black life, but also proved to white audiences that hip hop was edgy, exciting—and safe. Like the Hudlins' House Party (1990), the animated Bebe's Kid offers a generative counterpoint to the standard perceptions of the tone and worldview of early hip hop cinema.

While children’s literature remains an important genre in contemporary literature and publishing, we often marginalize its study to elective courses or classes outside the English department. Teaching children’s literature, however, foregrounds many issues central to our field as teachers and scholars of American literature. In this essay, I offer 13 reasons for including children’s literature in American literature surveys. It is my contention that doing so not only expands our idea of the survey course, but can empower our students both inside and outside of the classroom.

Drawing upon feminist and queer theories, this article offers a reading of Casablanca that aims to not only show the suppression of Ilsa’s agency, but the queer dynamics of the homosocial interactions in the film. It rebukes claims by film critics like Roger Ebert that Casablanca is “about a man and a woman who are in love, and who sacrifice love for a higher purpose.” Instead, the film’s final subject appears to be male friendship, which can be extended to earlier readings of the film’s propagandistic intentions. To accomplish this task, the essay shifts focus from Rick and Ilsa to three triangulations of desire that are fundamental to my understanding of the film: Rick, Ilsa, and Sam (Dooley Wilson); Rick, Ilsa, and Victor (Paul Henreid); and, most importantly, Rick, Ilsa, and Renault (Claude Rains). Using Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s work on homosocial male desire, I argue that Casablanca more accurately depicts the emotional complexity of male friendships and the reductive role of women in these fraternal bonds not only to fulfill the film’s admittedly propagandistic goals, but as an inadvertent testament to gender dynamics in a power structure organized around male power and interactions.

This essay considers the implications of social media technologies, specifically Vine, for comedy studies, childhood studies, and digital culture. Whereas the child as producer and consumer is often overlooked in the humanities, the author contends digital technologies radically liberate children to become producers of original content which can be easily and widely circulated around the world. Through case studies of three young producer-participants ("produsers") on Vine – Lillian Powers, Nash Grier, and Marissa Mayne – I consider the complexity of children’s humor, the need to consider real children in childhood studies, and the possible consequences on our understandings of authorship, distribution, and consumption.

The academic study of children’s and young adult literature actively addresses fiction written by and about members of the African American and queer communities, but rarely is the intersection discussed at any length. This critical oversight fails to appreciate the creative work of Jacqueline Woodson, a self-identified black lesbian author whose fiction consistently engages themes of love and friendship alongside race, gender, and sexuality. The article examines Woodson’s 1997 novel The House You Pass Along the Way as a key text in both African American and queer young adult literatures for its original articulation of a queer black adolescent subjectivity. Drawing from queer theory, African American literary theory, and children’s literary studies, I focus on themes of ghostliness, interraciality, tomboyism, and language to argue for increased critical attention on this award-winning, yet critically underappreciated writer as well as further engagement with the growing field of black queer studies.

Natalie Babbitt's novel for children, Tuck Everlasting, -- the story of a young girl who, while wandering through her family’s wood, comes across a mysterious family, the Tucks, who unknowingly became immortal when they drank from a spring therein -- appeared in the early stages of the contemporary environmental movement. Winnie, with the assistance of this family, resists attempts by the ominous Man in the Yellow Suit to pump and market the spring water, and in the process, Winnie learns the value of living and friendship. Babbitt’s novel has surprisingly received limited ecocritical attention, but, as I will show, the book features various problematic “inter-being” relationships worthy of further discussion. To flesh out these contradictions, I employ the critical paradigm of ecofeminism, which coincidentally emerged around the time of the novel’s publication, and in the process, I intend to demonstrate what ecofeminism might bring to the academic and pedagogical study of children’s literature. While calling the novel “ecofeminist” in its ideological posturing would be anachronistic, I believe ecofeminism and Tuck Everlasting mutually inform each other in fruitful ways, especially in regards to our understanding of interconnectedness and the continuing marginalization of the child in academic study.

The ‘ocker film’ was one of the defining subgenres of the revitalized Australian cinema of the 1970s. Characterized by bawdy humor and roguish escapades, these picaresque films satirically perpetuated an image of folksy Australian masculinity that countered and antagonized a queered image of British masculinity. To this end, these popular comedies rebuked the lingering British cultural influence in Australia while underscoring its distinctive humor and cultural identity, albeit one that was sexist, anti-intellectual, and homophobic. In the 1990s, a series of Australian film comedies took up (and took on) the ocker tradition to revise this problematic image of Australian masculinity. In this essay, I argue that The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (Elliott, 1994) re-appropriates and revises the ocker tradition, especially its pervasive heteronormativity. Though it falters in its treatment of women and ethnic minorities, Priscilla promotes a message of diversity that queers what I call the ‘andronationalism’ – that is, masculinized nationalism – touted in the ocker film tradition to envision a more modern and more inclusive image of Australia.

This essay considers the role children’s literature plays in what Lennard J. Davis has called “the hegemony of normalcy” by closely studying a sample of biographies of Helen Keller intended for children. Through the lens of disability studies, I examine how Keller’s life has been re-appropriated to portray her as a victim of her disability rather than of a society that privileges the “able-bodied.” Such analysis also revisits the debates over biographies for children, an area of children’s literary study often neglected because of accusations of bowdlerization and oversimplification of the subject’s life as well as a perceived lack of artistry.

This article critically examines the integral function of Nadia in Utomlennye solntsem/Burnt by the Sun (Mikhalkov, 1994) as a necessary component of the ideological and commercial aims of the film. Critiques of the film often focus on the love triangle, but Nadia is a vital character who serves to shift the audience favour away from Mitia towards Kotov. Through a discussion of Aristotle's and Rousseau's conceptions of the child, I argue that Nadia embodies a western image of childhood contradictory to the representation of childhood in Soviet propaganda of the time. This directorial decision reveals not only Mikhalkov's political agenda, but the international ambitions for the film as a commercial product.

Despite the reports on the rise of "obesity," the portrayal of fat male protagonists in contemporary American fiction remains relatively rare. When it occurs, the character is quite often rendered as tragicomic. I offer close readings of two protagonists from critically acclaimed novels to flesh out trends in the depiction of the fat male body, which I call "extraordinary," in contemporary American fiction. In charting these characterizations, I hope to reveal the tensions between an attempt at empathy and a tendency to render fat male characters as pathetic.

Twitter has proven itself to be one of the fastest growing and most popular social media services online today. The familiarity many of our students have with Twitter makes it an ideal tool to integrate into our classroom, but those of us unfamiliar with how it works may be unsure of how to do so. This article provides five strategies for incorporating Twitter into your literature classroom: adaptation, role-playing, prequels & sequels, reader response blogging, and
Twitter stream co-lecture.

On December 20, 2015, the Palace Theatre announced the casting of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, a new play by Jack Thorne, based on a story by Potter creator J.K. Rowling, John Tiffany, and Thorne himself. Set nineteen years in the future, the play introduces theatre into the Harry Potter universe, 1 though the Wizarding World of Harry Potter areas of Universal Studios theme parks have long featured live performances. While news from London's theatre district, the West End, rarely instigates an international cause célèbre, this announcement delighted and surprised Harry Potter fans around the world in its casting of Numa Dumezweni as the strong-willed female lead, Hermione Granger. An accomplished British actress born in Swaziland to South African parents, Dumezweni would become the second actress to portray Hermione following Emma Watson's star-making turn in the eight Harry Potter films produced by Warner Bros between 2001 and 2011. Unlike Watson, however, Dumezweni was black. The ensuing controversy provides a productive inroad into examining race in the world of Harry Potter, not only for the questions it raises about the authorship and ownership of popular texts, but also for the specific constraints and attendant cultures that come with media and its afterlife. Adapting a print text for the stage means entering a new medium and, in the process, a new culture of common practices and expectations, both of the artists and of the audience. This chapter explores these nuances to complicate our understanding of not only the decision to cast Dumezweni, but to further understand how race operates across the Harry Potter universe and media culture more broadly. Though I am a White critic, I ground my discussion of this controversy in the commentaries, critiques, and theories developed by scholars of color so that I might challenge received accounts of this evocative moment in Harry Potter fandom. I will examine this case study through three different lenses: the cultural differences between film and theatre as media and industries; the enduring debate over " colorblind casting " (hereafter, nontraditional casting) in the theatre, 2 in particular, but gradually more across media culture; and the increasingly visible tension between authorship and ownership of popular texts that takes places online in what Henry Jenkins has called " convergence culture " —that is, to borrow from the subtitle of his landmark book, " where old and new media collide. " In so doing, I drawn upon and expand our understanding of race and media through a critical examination of the Harry Potter universe, the culture industries, and convergence culture. 1 I use " the Harry Potter universe " to encompass the world of Harry Potter, which includes the seven books, but also the supplemental books, films, online materials in Pottermore, theme park attractions, and other extensions that further develop the world in the spirit of transmedia storytelling, all under the supervision of J. K. Rowling. 2 Though " colorblind casting " is often used across the culture industries to discuss the practice of casting white roles or roles where race is not specified with actors of colors, I will use " nontraditional casting " because not only does it encompass casting practices beyond questions of race, but it conscientiously avoids the casual ableism of the term. I will only use the term hereafter when quoting others.

Mark Hartley's documentary Not Quite Hollywood proposed an alternative account of Australian film history, privileging exploitation and genre filmmaking of the 1970s and 1980s. The most high-profile interviewee is Quentin Tarantino, who alternately celebrates the excess and carnage of these films and credits their impact on his own oeuvre. Rather than focusing on the cultural politics of Hartley's revision, this chapter examines how Tarantino develops his auteurial identity and credibility through his appearance. A survey of the U.S. critical reception of the so-called " Ozploitation " is offered to foreground an exploration of how Tarantino uses the films to fashion a countercanon that both challenges traditional cultural authorities (historians, film reviewers, scholars) and asserts his own critical and artistic authority.

This essay argues that the establishment of the Best Animated Feature Oscar created a de facto children's literary prize that can be read as a tacit acknowledgment and celebration of children's film culture. Though children's films consistently rank among the highest-grossing and most acclaimed films of the year, critical attention and popular respect for them are often qualified or absent completely. Furthermore, following James English's argument of censorship as/and prizing, I note how the film industry parallels and diverges from the book industry both in how it censors materials and prizes distinguished contributions to their respective fields/industries. Ultimately the essay aims to encourage greater critical attention to these entertaining and innovative, though often ideologically vexing films as well as the productive exercise of critically examining the prizing/censorship initiatives.

This essay explores Judi Dench's portrayal of M over seven films, examining the progressiveness of the decision to cast a woman in the traditionally male role of M. Though Dench's M is initially masculine in her approach to running MI6, the relationship between M and Bond begins to take mother-son undertones throughout the remaining Brosnan films and the early Craig films. In Skyfall, Dench's most prominent role in the series, M's alleged sins make her a target, a pariah, and finally a victim. Over seven films, the James Bond films -- never a space for radical or even progressive gender dynamics -- recuperates an imposing female figure and works her into a safer, more recognizable female role. Framing this portrayal in terms of feminist and postfeminist discourses, this essay underscores the place of older female characters in contemporary film.

In this essay, I focus on the early films of Tim Burton from 1982 to 1992 to discuss how an American way of life based on a exceptionalist ideology was not only criticized, but also shown to be contradictory. To further this analysis, I demonstrate how Tim Burton embraces the subversive German Expressionist style yet alters it to function within a capitalist studio system during a largely conservative cultural and political moment.

French film critic Aurélien Ferenczi refers to Frankenweenie as a pastiche of Whale’s Frankenstein,  and the term “pastiche” seems to be one that critics are prone to employ in describing Burton’s work. Yet if we understand it in the sense that Frederic Jameson does—as “blank parody” —then such an assessment carelessly reduces the political import of Tim Burton’s work, especially his early short films and features. More accurately, Burton appropriates the German Expressionist style and fuses it with the Hollywood aesthetic that demands clean and tidy stories with happy endings, such as E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (Spielberg, 1982), The Karate Kid (Avildsen, 1984), Back to the Future (Zemeckis, 1985), Hoosiers (Anspaugh, 1986). Dismissing Tim Burton on the basis of his commercial success reveals an outdated allegiance to the Romantic notion of authorship, one which the pragmatics of the studio system easily debunk. A more nuanced (and practical approach) would appreciate Tim Burton’s ability to adopt subversive styles and incorporate them into mainstream products without impairing their potential for success. Despite German Expressionism’s often counter-hegemonic intentions, its inaccessibility often alienated the group it aimed to awaken and inspire.  Burton’s appropriation demonstrates one incarnation that attempts to marry avant garde aesthetics with the studio’s necessity for popular consumption. While it may not spark a revolution, it does work to undermine the stale conventions that continue to anesthetize the mainstream audience by reifying the values and practices of the dominant ideology.

This essay considers two revisionist children’s films, Shrek (Adamson, Jenson, 2001) and Monsters, Inc. (Docter, 2001), that incorporate elements of horror to play with the conventions of the horror film and the fairy tale, respectively. Released fairly early in the history of computer-animated cinema (Toy Story, the first feature-length computer-animated film, was released only six years earlier), Shrek and Monsters, Inc. represent not only technological innovation, but genre innovation as well. In a clear break from the animated tradition of Disney-produced animated features, the “monsters” do not promote fear, comic derision, and their eventual destruction at the hands of the hero, but sympathy and audience identification. These films encourage the presumed child viewer to align herself with the monster, rather than or even against the human characters. This fictional revisionism, very much in the spirit of postmodern poetics, allows the filmmakers to simultaneously create a new story while playing with and parodying the very genres from which these monsters originate. Rather than celebrating a world good and evil are clearly distinct, Shrek and Monsters, Inc. implicitly encourage an examination of normalcy and social mores. Drawing from work by psychoanalytic and queer frameworks, I explore how children’s cinema extends and revises interpretations of cinematic monstrosity by critics like Isabel Cristina Pinedo and Harry Benshoff. Furthermore, I show how monstrosity in these films embodies fears and anxieties that must be confronted and understood, not aggressively attacked and annihilated. In this manner, Shrek and Monsters, Inc. function as lessons on tolerance and empathy rather than escapist exploitations of personal fears.

A secondary concern of this essay is how these films, unlike their predecessors, exemplify a shift primarily child-directed cinema toward cinema that engages in what Barbara Wall has called “double address.” Though ostensibly intended for children’s consumption, these films consciously include appeals directed at adult viewers, subtexts that often escape children’s frames of reference or cognitive capabilities. Such techniques include the hiring of talent known primarily for their work outside of children’s entertainment (Billy Crystal, John Goodman, Steven Buscemi, Cameron Diaz, Mike Myers, and John Lithgow); allusions to other works of popular culture, especially Hollywood films targeted toward adult audiences (Pulp Fiction and The Godfather in Shrek; Fargo, The Right Stuff, and Psycho in Monsters, Inc.); and sexual innuendo (in Shrek, Magic Mirror introduces Snow White with the quip, “Although she lives with seven other men, she's not easy.”). This layered narrative speaks not only to the genre play at work in these films, but the appeal for the widest possible audience necessitated by the increased financial investment for production (Shrek reportedly cost $60 million, Monsters, Inc. nearly double that). As a result, corporate and commercial necessities are redefining children’s films in terms of their audience, form, and content.

Clearly Wes Anderson is an eclectic director, admittedly drawing from a variety of cinematic (Renoir, Malle, Melville, Truffaut, Scorsese, Ray) and literary (Salinger, Hemingway, Fitzgerald) sources. An odd, yet invaluable source, for Anderson’s style and content has been children’s literature, especially the contemporary children's fiction of his childhood in the 1970s. For example, The Royal Tenenbaums alludes, both visually and narratively, to E. L. Konigsberg's From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, Jean Craighead George's My Side of the Mountain, and Helen Cresswell’s Ordinary Jack. No critic has mentioned or analyzed this relationship, despite its pervasive influence on the director’s work, especially his ongoing fascination with children, childhood, and child-like figures. By deliberately re-appropriating and revising these texts, Anderson forges his own authorial style characterized by whimsy and nostalgia while simultaneously deconstructing the faulty binary of child and adult.

One remarkable aspect of the afterlife of The Big Lebowski (Coen, 1998) and its subsequent ascent to cult cinema status is the relative speed with which it achieved that level of subcultural recognition. Unlike Reefer Madness, which was reclaimed and re-appropriated, or The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which was especially embraced by a specific community, The Big Lebowski received mixed critical and commercial attention, but quickly rose to become a cult classic without clear demographic appeal. In her article on The Big Lebowski and replay culture, Barbara Klinger identifies white men’s strong identification with the film, though she admits this group, like any social demographic, has considerable diversity within it. Indeed the fans are as varied as any film viewing population might be, and their enthusiasm for the film gives rise to a variety of fan practices. In this chapter, I survey the ways and manners in which Lebowski fans have embraced, manipulated, and occupied digital spaces in order to share their love for this idiosyncratic masterpiece. By surveying fan fiction, YouTube videos, and websites, I show how the rise of the internet, somewhat paralleled to The Big Lebowski’s own rise, has allowed for extensions on existing fan practices and the rapid development of new fields of interactions between viewers.

In this essay, I do not want to rally behind Modern Family as a champion of LGBT issues, but I do not wish to dismiss it as being too compromising, either.  Rather I argue that Modern Family’s true target is not the “proper” family unit, but a comedic examination of gender roles.  Throughout the series, Jay, Phil, and Mitchell consistently find themselves trying to assert their masculinity while being reminded of their inadequacies.  Cameron, on the other hand, comfortably shifts between the macho man (he’s revealed to be a former college football player) and the sensitive nurturer (“Ferberizing” his daughter, Lily, causes his considerable distress).  Michael Kimmel has argued that homophobia is a fear of being “unmask[ed]” as not manly enough (36); likewise, resistance to characters who are “too gay” ultimately reflects a male spectator’s anxiety about their inability to satisfy socially constructed gender roles.  So even though the show downplays the nuances of the LGBT family, its comic examination of masculinity’s unstable construction may be a subtler progressive move in that it targets the root of much homophobia—gender.  This shrewd tactic could eventually lead to a greater acceptance of gay and lesbian characters (and their relationships) in mainstream media, while not alienating an audience that opposes the gay family unit as appropriate subject matter.

This course examines the various structures of media institutions from political economy and critical media industry studies. It explores how political and social forces shape different media industries in historical and contemporary landscapes, such as television and the Internet. The course addresses critical issues shaping the media industries, including ownership, power, regulation, neoliberalism, content, labor, and globalization. Students will be introduced to foundational theoretical concepts and frameworks in the study of media industries. The course further provides an in-depth understanding of how political, economic, and social factors have shaped the production, distribution, and consumption of media.

This course examines how public policy has shaped, regulated, and failed to regulate television and the internet. If the airwaves belong to the public, how could and should they be used? Focusing on the establishment and administration of the Federal Communications Commission, we will explore the development of television and internet in a U.S. context. Special attention will be paid to key stakeholders, including industry figures, public administrators, lawmakers, and content creators. Key concepts and policies explored in this course include the Fairness Doctrine, the public interest, the digital divide, and net neutrality as well as case studies on indecency, children's television, public broadcasting, and Netflix and other streaming services. We will examine how the FCC has not only shaped U.S. media culture, but the media industries themselves.

The course is a critical introduction to narrative conventions and plot structures across a range of media forms, from film through immersive spaces. Students will complete a range of critical and creative projects. We will treat scholars and practitioners equally as media theorists, reading materials by both to unpack how mediamakers tell stories. Ultimately, we seek to understand the creative nature of critical thinking and the critical nature of creative praxis.

The United States has spawned few truly distinctive art forms-but one of them is the integrated musical. Although it has its European antecedents, including the Singspiel and music hall entertainment, the musical brings together acting, dancing, and singing in an accessible and popular articulation of what German composer Richard Wagner famously theorized as Gesamtkunstwerk-the "total artwork." But this integration of performance, music, and drama also calls to mind the sociopolitical meaning of integration, especially when one considers the undeniable indebtedness of the musical form to Black and Jewish artists. Playing upon both meanings of integration-the bringing together of storytelling elements and the unification of racial and ethnic populations-we will examine race, ethnicity, and the Hollywood musical from Show Boat (1936) through Encanto (2021). The genre's focus on relationships (romantic, familial, communal) as well as its utopian impulses make it a vibrant forum for ideological tensions and conflicting social discourses. What emerges is not only a cultural history of the musical as an art form, but a social history of the United States as well, in which the musical both stages and (temporarily) resolves the social injustices of the society from which it sprang. As an upper-level seminar, we also will develop in-depth film analysis skills, exploring a range of approaches, methods, and critical frameworks.

This 4-credit course is an introduction to film analysis designed to help students develop a visual literacy with regard to film and a critical understanding of how films produce meanings. Focus is placed on formal analysis of film including elements such as narrative, mise en scène, editing, camera movement, sound and on key critical and theoretical approaches such as neoformalism and psychoanalysis. Classical Hollywood cinema and avant-garde and independent filmmaking traditions are studied in order to focus on the politics of form required film journal helps students develop analytical and critical skills. This is a required course for the film studies minor.

Science fiction (or sci-fi) is one of the most popular genres in global entertainment-and one of the hardest to define. Prolific writer Isaac Azimov defined his genre of choice as "that branch of literature which deals with the reaction of human beings to changes in science and technology." We will take this definition as a starting point for our own study of science fiction film, which will historically organized and from a feminist perspective. In the spirit of feminist critique, we will examine the traditional concerns of feminist media scholars, including representation, authorship, and ideology, as well as the specialized interests of feminist science fiction, such as alternative embodiments, technological change, dystopic societies, the boundaries of the human and nonhuman. Students will consider not only how science fiction has proved to be a fertile ground for feminist critique, but how the same genre also provides generative space for exploring the possibilities and limitations of various futures.

This course provides an introduction to U.S. and global feminisms and its applications to media and cultural analysis. From the representation of gender onscreen to the value of unpacking gender's role in contemporary politics, we will use feminist frameworks to examine identity, aesthetics, and ideology through film culture. This course is introductory and does not presume familiarity with feminist politics, critical theory, or film studies.

This 3-credit course is an introduction to the study of television as a unique audio­visual culture with its own history, aesthetics, and meaning production. Students will learn about the television industry, its audiences, and its programming. Examples from television programming from the 1950s to the present will supplement readings.

For many of us, we have always known and loved the world of Walt Disney. We grew up with these characters, these stories, and these songs. But how often do we ever think deeply about Disney, even discuss and analyze it at length? Studying Disney offers us a rare opportunity to consider childhood, the media industry, and American culture simultaneously. In this course, students will examine representations of race, gender, sexuality, class, and ability on screen and behind the scenes at Disney. We will also explore the wide expanse of Disney’s properties, from movies to TV to theme parks and theater. Students will also gain experience with conducting research, studying primary documents and contributing to public history. In the end, students will have a richer understanding of Disney not only as a company, but as a cultural institution.

The introduction of digital technologies often has been lauded as nothing short of a major transformation. In a recent Directors Roundtable for Hollywood Reporter, Martin Scorsese observed, “More than an evolution, we’re in a revolution of communication and cinema, really, or movies or film—or whatever you want to call it.” People can purchase films on DVD or from streaming services, connect through social media platforms, and experience visual worlds that were solely completed via computers. But this celebratory rhetoric also has been criticized by scholars and critics who note, as André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion suggest, that “the shift to digital media is more of a turn than a revolution.” This course takes up this debate by examining film and new media via four major areas of concern for media scholars: production, distribution, exhibition, and consumption. We will not only examine film in the digital age, but also the usefulness and limitations of using film terminology to understand innovative new media forms.

For many of us, we have always known and loved the worlds of the Walt Disney Company. We grew up with these characters, these stories, and these songs. But how often do we ever think deeply about Disney, even discuss and analyze it at length? Studying Disney offers us a rare opportunity to consider childhood, the media industry, and American culture simultaneously. In this course, students will examine representations of race, gender, sexuality, class, and ability on screen and behind the scenes at Disney. We also will explore the wide expanse of Disney’s properties, from movies to TV to theme parks and theater. Students will also gain experience with conducting research, studying primary documents and contributing to public history. In the end, students will have a richer understanding of Disney not only as a company, but as a cultural institution.

This course provides an introduction to US and global feminisms and its applications to media analysis. From the representation of gender onscreen to the value of unpacking gender's role in contemporary politics, we will use feminist frameworks to examine identity, aesthetics, and ideology through film culture. While we generally focus on contemporary films produced from the United States, students will have the opportunity to study early women's cinema as well as women's cinema from beyond a US context in their research papers and projects. This course is introductory and does not presume familiarity with feminist politics, critical theory, or film studies.

This course is a historical survey of international animation from the earliest days of cinema up to recent digital animation, with special foci on Disney, anime, experimental, and political animation techniques and forms. Not only will students be introduced to film animation as a rich and complex art form, but they will also study its primary practitioners over the past 100 years. The course does not presume familiarity with animation or film studies, and as such, will introduce students to key principles and concepts of both during the course of the semester.

Jean-Luc Godard once claimed that cinema was “the most beautiful fraud in the world.” This course takes his claim to heart, examining cinema as an art form, storytelling medium, and enduring cultural
force. We will cover the basics of narrative and film technique before studying important theoretical concepts and critical approaches. To enrich our study, we will closely analyze representative works of
Hollywood and world cinema. Students will develop a strong foundation for future study in the major.

E. B. White once observed, “Humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the purely scientific mind.” This course proceeds from the idea that White was wrong: analysis of humor—and, by extension, comedy—can not only enrich our understanding, but our appreciation, of its complexities. Our approach will be U.S.-centered and historicist, arguing that film comedy emerges from a specific time and space for a specific audience. By closely examining comedies in their sociohistorical context, we will examine what Hollywood film comedy reveals to us about American culture and its people.

Critics often treat Wes Anderson’s films as the highly original creations of a distinctive auteur. While Anderson’s films have an aesthetic that appears to be wholly his own, his work also reveals the clear influence of filmmakers from around the world as well as Anderson’s close network of collaborators. In this course, we will examine film authorship through a close study of Anderson’s oeuvre. From auteur theory through recent studies of below-the-line labor, we will discuss creativity and influence
in film production. Students will understand the history and limitations of such studies for analyzing and evaluating cinema as an artform.

For many of us, we have always known and loved the world of Walt Disney. We grew up with these characters, these stories, and these songs. But how often do we ever think deeply about Disney, even discuss and analyze it at length? Studying Disney offers us a rare opportunity to consider childhood, the media industry, and American culture simultaneously. In this course, students will examine representations of race, gender, sexuality, class, and ability on screen and behind the scenes at Disney. We will also explore the wide expanse of Disney’s properties, from movies to TV to theme parks and theater. Students will also gain experience with conducting research, studying primary documents and contributing to public history. In the end, students will have a richer understanding of Disney not only as a company, but as a cultural institution.

Animation stands as one of the oldest and least respected forms in film. An in-depth study of animation, however, reveals how challenging it can be to tell stories in this way. In this course, we will review the history of animation from an aesthetic perspective,
considering various techniques, the development of the form, and significant practitioners. Topics will include classical Disney, stop-motion animation, Saturday morning cartoons, anime, Pixar, limited animation, Nicktoons, video games, and experimental animation. By the end of the course, students will understand the rich variety and ongoing significance of animation across media.

Jean-Luc Godard once claimed that cinema was " the most beautiful fraud in the world. " This course takes his claim to heart, examining cinema as an art form, storytelling medium, and enduring cultural force. We will cover the basics of narrative and film technique before studying important theoretical concepts and critical approaches. To enrich our study, we will closely analyze representative works of Hollywood and world cinema. Students will develop a strong foundation for future study in the major.

David Bordwell has argued that the classical Hollywood style remains the dominant mode for cinematic storytelling. Yet a range of national traditions have arisen alongside and in opposition to this hegemony. This course surveys world cinema history through a focus on aesthetics and storytelling. Through a close study of fourteen films, we will seek to understand influential directions, movements, and industries in the development of popular, art, and experimental filmmaking outside of the U.S. In so doing, students will hone their knowledge of the vocabulary, tools, and methods necessary to analyze cinema.

The Road to Sesame Street features government documents tracing the development of the Public Broadcast Act of 1967, the landmark legislation that established the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, PBS, and NPR. Using materials from the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library in Austin, this project provides a behind-the-scenes view of the power players, interest groups, and decisions that laid the groundwork for American public media. Not only did the Act lead to influential programs like Sesame Street, it also promoted a utopian ideal for television and radio in American society.

This course serves as a critical introduction to storytelling for all Radio-Television-Film students. Our goal this semester will be to survey story structure and narrative strategies across a range of media, genres, and formats to develop your knowledge of US storytelling and production practices. Students will be expected to read and view all materials to gain a firm foundation in the course concepts, which will be reinforced through critical and creative assignments. At the end of the semester, students will have developed a command of narrative and aesthetic conventions to serve them throughout their time in the RTF program and into their careers as media practitioners.

This is the very first pass at this course. Comments welcome via DM or to pkunze@tulane.edu.

Social media appears to be ubiquitous. In the last two decades, liking, tweeting, friending, and streaming have become everyday behaviors for billions of people around the world as social media has become a crucial component of our social, professional, even emotional lives. Mediated sociality is hardly new, but doing so via digital media applications and platforms powered by data, algorithms, and artificial intelligence is. How do we study and understand such important and influential technologies? How is media studies able to address these concerns, and how might social media platforms raise new questions and issues for media scholars? This course serves as a critical introduction to social media platforms with attention to key concepts, concerns, and conversations in the scholarly study of such cultural forms. As an upper-level seminar, we also will develop in-depth media analysis skills, exploring a range of approaches, methods, and critical frameworks.

From an independent production company to a highly profitable global conglomerate, the history of the Walt Disney Company echoes the history of the U.S. media industries. Disney offers generative insights into children's culture as well as into the corporate behaviors behind media production. In this course, we will consider the role of industry in textual analysis as well as the value of texts for understanding industry. We also will hone our knowledge of the cultural studies framework through close attention to race, gender, sexuality, class, and ability on screen and behind the scenes at Disney. Through in-depth formalist and ideological analyses of representative Disney narratives, students will better understand Disney and American media in general.

A special issue of Studies in Musical Theatre offering a range of new critical perspectives on Lin-Manuel Miranda's Hamilton, including:

“Is It Like a Beat Without a Melody?”: Rap and Revolution in Hamilton | Jeffrey
Severs

Rise Up: Nuyorican Resistance and Transcultural Aesthetics in Hamilton | Gabriel
Mayora

Hamilton’s Women | Stacy Wolf

Blackout on Broadway: Affiliation and Audience in In the Heights and Hamilton |
Elena Machado Sáez

Staging a Revolution: The Cultural Tipping Points of John Gay and Lin-Manual
Miranda | Tiffany Yecke Brooks

Miranda’s Les Miz | Jeffrey Magee

Hamilton Meets Hip-Hop Pedagogy | Alison Dobrick

“Hey Yo, I’m Just Like My Country”: Teaching Miranda’s Hamilton as an
American Chronicle | Timothy J. Viator

Lin-Manuel Miranda and the Metamyth of a Nation’s Founding | Helen M. Whall

“What If This Bullet Is My Legacy?”: The Guns of Hamilton | Meredith Conti

Hamilton and Class | Matthew Clinton Sekellick

A Conversation Rewound: Queer and Racialized Temporalities in Hamilton |
Shereen Inayatulla and Andie Silva

The Tears of a Clown questions the pervasive narrative that men have begun only recently to realize the limitations society places on them as men. Feminist scholars of masculinity contend men now are starting to see masculinity as an unattainable ideal that restricts, oppresses, and frustrates them. This questionable claim functions as a rhetorical move to create simultaneously a space for male voices in feminist discourse and to validate masculinity studies as a field of inquiry, which seemingly needs no legitimization when one considers the popularity of gender studies in the academy and the value such work can bring to our understanding of politics, history, culture, and society. My study uses an analysis of comic texts to glean information about the fluctuating ideological script of postwar American masculinities. My contention is that the comic—comedy, humor, and laughter—functions as a viable way for men to redirect and sublimate the fear, anxiety, and anger they experience as men. Since many associate this strategy for dealing with emotion as “kidding around,” few people, even within the academy, take humor and laughter seriously. Therefore, it does not betray masculinity’s requirement that men remain stoic and instead serves a vital social function. By close reading comic texts, I reveal the diverse ways male protagonists employ this strategy, and in the process, I reveal the importance of the comic in understanding the relationship between the male subject and society.

Abstract:Bebe's Kids (dir. Bruce Smith, 1992) was the first animated feature film specifically by, about, and (arguably) for African Americans, bringing together two trends in early 1990s Hollywood: the resurgence of feature animation and the emergence of hiphop cinema. Despite its ambitious intentions, the film was a commercial and critical failure, and its attempts to bridge black cinema and animated media have largely gone neglected by scholars in these fields. This article offers a history and analysis of Bebe's Kids not only to chronicle the history of this intriguing media failure, but to discuss an important moment in hip-hop history where nascent white-owned media companies seized upon hip-hop—and blackness in general—in an attempt to legitimate themselves as producers of quality content. Indeed, Bebe's Kids represents a marked departure from the nihilism and violent realism of "the urban ghetto film cycle" toward a light-hearted hip-hop cinema that not only showed a different vision of urban black life, but also proved to white audiences that hip-hop was edgy, exciting—and safe. Like the Hudlins' House Party (dir. Reginald Hudlin, 1990), the animated Bebe's Kids offers a generative counterpoint to the standard perceptions of the tone and worldview of early hip-hop cinema.

Shadow of a Debt: Hitchcock's Literary Sources R. Barton Palmer and David Boyd, eds. Hitchcock at the Source: The Auteur as Adaptor. Albany: State University of New York Press, 20 1 1 . vii + 328 pp. Illustrations. Hitchcock's Films and their Sources. Contributors. Index. $90.00 hardcover. $29.95 paper.As the title of their 2006 anthology implies, editors R. Barton Palmer and David Boyd's Afier Hitchcock: Influence, Imitation, and Intertextuality collects critical essays examining Alfred Hitchcock's influence on his contemporaries as well as recent Hollywood and world cinema. Essays covering Michelangelo Antonioni, Claude Chabrol, Pedro Almodovar, Kenneth Branagh, and Jonathan Demme testify to the early impact and enduring legacy of Hitchcock. Their highly readable anthology, Hitchcock at the Source: The Auteur as Adaptor, however, reverses the direction by examining not Hitchcock's cinematic influence, but his literary influences. Twenty essays by prominent scholars in Hitchcock, film, and adaptation studies come together to present a career-spanning antliology that will surely prove indispensable to scholars and fans of Hitchcock.The editors and several contributors make a point of noting Hitchcock's claim, "What I do is to read a story only once, and if I like the basic idea, I just forget all about the book and start to create cinema" (8). The book proceeds as a deliberate revision of this playful misrepresentation on Hitchcock's part. As Thomas Leitch notes in the first chapter, "In a fundamental sense, of course, Hitchcock is always becoming Hitchcock" (17), and the early chapters chart Hitchcock's debt to literature. The book progresses from the early influence of popular West End drama to Hitchcock's turn to fiction, especially novels. Mary Hammond demonstrates the impact of Victorian melodrama on Hitchcock, Charles Barr underscores the influence of the director's early partnership with screenwriter Charles Bennett, and Mark Glancy argues for the impact John Buchan, author of The 39 Steps, had on Hitchcock's politicization of the thriller. Furthermore, Alan Woolfolk and Barbara Creed illustrate the presence of Freudian psychology in Spellbound and Vertigo, respectively. Combining readings of the source texts with a keen understanding of Hitchcock's work habits and technical choices, die writers consistently show that regardless of his claims to die contrary, Hitchcock was rarely far from his source text.What makes Hitchcock distinctive among literary adaptors is diat unlike his contemporary John Huston, who directed adaptions of Herman Melville, Carson McCullers, and James Joyce, Hitchcock preferred popular dramas and fiction rather than so-called "literary" fiction. In her chapter on Rear Window, Pamela Robertson Wojcik notes this affinity when she quotes John McCarten's New Yorker review of the film: "The author of this claptrap is Cornell Woolrich, a popular drugstore author, and Hollywood's affinity for him is easily understandable. What isn't understandable, however, is Alfred Hitchcock's association with this" (qtd. in 213). Indeed, reviewing the helpful appendix of Hitchcock's film sources at the end of the collection, one notices that while Hitchcock's early career featured adaptations of work by Noel Coward, Joseph Conrad, and Sean O'Casey, his later work was based on authors who have since fallen into obscurity (save John Steinbeck and, perhaps, Daphne du Maurier and Leon Uris). Leitch may have found the best explanation for this peculiar tendency. Quoting from Francois Truffaut's legendary interviews with Hitchcock, Leitch reminds us that the director balked at the idea of adapting Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment because "he had no desire to join 'Hollywood directors [who] distort literary masterpieces'" (15). This explanation reveals how the often formulaic fiction to be found in magazines and drugstore racks did not bear the distinctive writing style and respectability often found in the classics, and therefore these works were more hospitable to Hitchcock's superimposed aesthetic. …