MDMD[5] p. 155 (Clocks and Time) & Disney

[Doug Millison]

Anthropomorphize those talking clock faces a bit and you're not far from
the dancing tea pots and dishes and other household paraphernalia of
"Beauty and the Beast" or earlier Disney cartoons, images of popular
culture that I imagine are as familiar to Thomas Pynchon as they are to the
any other parent (or anybody in late 20th century America as far as that
goes).

Linking to Pynchon's involvement with Japanese pop culture...

Disney's "The Lion King" appears to have appropriated an earlier, vastly
popular Japanese story about Kimba the white lion, created by Osamu Tezuka,
a pioneering Japanese cartoonist (creator of "Astro Boy" among other
classic cartoon and comic book characters -- there's an amazing shop in
Tokyo's Harajuku district devoted to Astro Boy and other Tezuka merchandise
and memorabilia, or at least there was as recently as '94; that's the part
of Tokyo given over to trendy youngsters, near the street in Yoyogi Park
where all the heavy metal bands, their fan clus, the Elvis tribe, etc. come
out to play on weekends, Tokyo's tribute to Western pop culture to the
max). There's an illustration of Kimba at
http://zikzak.net/~gelfling/anime/kimba.html, and more info on the entire
incident, and links to Tezuka stuff, at
http://moonrock.murdoch.edu.au/~pinelli/wwwsites/wwwKimba.html.

Waiting for my clock to speak,
Doug

At 11:22 AM 8/5/97, Matthew P Wiener wrote:
>(Personally, Simba reminds me of some cartoon from the 60s, but that may
>well be Kimba.  It's been a while.)


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