A planetary culture creator turns 100

Monday, October 16, marked the centenary of a rather unique entity of this planet. Over the last 100 years, it has been the generator of iconic creative content that is familiar to people from Santiniketan to San Jose. It has certainly faced trouble in the form of popular pushback in the recent past – from being accused of moving away from its ‘family-oriented’ fare, and pandering to a woke, LGBT-cheering minority, to suspected of plagiarising stories from non-American cultures to present it ‘back’ in its own (in)imitable style.

Be that as it may, in sheer soft power terms and cultural value, this company outpunches nations, its home base America included, and their culture peddlers. Today’s tech-creative, generative AI-lurching Co-Bros, openly or secretly hold this entity in awe. Indeed, a 1949 short story by Arthur C Clarke, ‘Expedition to Earth’, underlines its pan-planetary heft. A crew of Venusians land on Earth 5,000 years after humankind is destroyed. But the visitors find only a can of film from which they manage to extract precious visual information to figure out how Earth’s alpha species looked. This info includes a ‘biped’ staring back at them ‘with arrogant bad temper’. The Earthly artefact ends with the last few words flashing across the screen that the Venusians never manage to decipher: ‘A Walt Disney Production‘.