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opinions, it is extremely profitable. Appropriation helps to standardize desire by giving people the market standards they demand, but as a currency, it actually floats within markets.

Appropriation thus participates in those inevitable historical movements in which, as Lawrence Levine points out, what is elite and what is popular are always being redefined (1991:230). Walt Disney showed that he himself understood the dynamics of appropriation when, speaking of Fantasia, he said, ‘‘Gee, this’ll make Beethoven!” (cited in Schickel 1968:244). Although probably joking, Disney was intuitively aware that cultural capital moves bi-directionally: that his sources lent him cultural authority, but that he also changed the nature of their marketing and popularity. Perhaps Walt Disney also understood that he renegotiated the meaning of individual works and the signifying of authorial names.

IV

Thinking about how a major Disney animated film uses Shakespeare leads to an interrogation of the phenomenon of appropriation itself. When appropriation informs a film’s overall structure and set of characterizations, as in The Little Mermaid and Lion King, it serves the kinds of rhetorical goals that we have seen. But in corporately made animations, where appropriation tends toward allegory, resemblances to Shakespeare can seem generic or coincidental. Why, for instance, quote Hamlet’s Yorick speech in The Quest for Camelot or give Iago’s name (from Othello) to a bird in Aladdin? In such brief quotations, modernist transcendence is less a goal than a transient effect. When, as in The Quest for Camelot, flourish seems the main end, we perceive mainly trivialization, personal indulgence by the creators, and creative fatigue.

Sometimes we forget that corporate entities are composed of individual people, making personal judgments based on, but not mechanically generated by, market assessments that derive from education and even taste. Despite its dispersion into a variety of corporate products, Disney’s conglomerate is run by individuals, including a very “hands-on” Chief Executive Officer with direct influence on what animated blockbusters get made, and how they appear.6 As Herbert Gans has shown (1974:23–27), we cannot assume that “low-culture” creators write less to please themselves than “high-culture” ones do. Since the ascension of Michael Eisner, Disney has carefully blurred the cultural boundaries between high and low with

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