Consuming Disney: Image Cultivation, Indoctrination and Immersive Transmedia Storytelling in Disney Cookbooks

Fictional cookbooks promise immersive, transmedial gateways to fictive worlds through culinary means. Cookbooks in general are also powerful educational devices that both reflect and shape cultures. Disney, too, has sought very early to physically integrate its ‘magic kingdom’ into the world and minds of its consumers, as is most evident in its various parks and resorts but also in its cookbooks. The cookbooks not only reproduce Disney’s iconography, but also its ideology, which is both physically realised and incorporated in the recipes. The cookbooks give insight into Disney’s overt self-referentiality and self-image as artistic innovator and as global, inclusive producer of wholesome, inter-generational media texts. They exemplify the ‘Disneyfication’ of daily familial commensality and of rites of passage in people’s personal lives. Additionally, recipes shed light on the dynamic relationship between franchises, fans and texts. Here one can observe how the ‘Disney curriculum’ (Sandlin/Garlen Sandlin, Jennifer A./Julie C. Garlen (2016): Introduction. Feeling Disney, Buying Disney, Being Disney. In: Disney, Culture, and Curriculum, eds. id. New York [et al.], 1–26) can also be appropriated and re-shaped.