“1984” opens with an extreme long shot of a line of male workers marching through a long tunnel in tandem, monitored by a line of TV-screens on the wall. In this article, I point out some of these intertexts-from the aesthetics of fascism to Plato to The Truman Show-and discuss what I call the video’s ‘aesthetics of immediacy.' The 1984 ad Referencing Orwell's 1984, its ostensible message is rather on the nose. Yet, if we take a closer look at the aesthetics of this ad with a duration of only 45 seconds, we see that many other intertextual links can be made some of which not necessarily intended. The TV ad “1984,” directed by Blade Runner’s Ridley Scott, introduced the Apple Macintosh PC to the world for the first time. A Brief Illustrated History of the Fruit Crate Label.The Carolina Parakeet and the American Orchard.Understanding the Past: Reading, Re-enacting, Performing.The Origins of the American Vegetarian Movement.You can view the entire Johnny Appleseed animated short here: Johnny Appleseed could be an eccentric in postwar America, but the boundaries of that difference were increasingly constrained in a culture that valued conformity even as it professed to celebrate the power of the free individual. Johnny Appleseed was a generic Christian in the story, not an apostle of unconventional Swedenborgianism. This little man, he throwed his shadow clear across the land, across a hundred thousand miles square and in that shadow everywhere you’ll find he left his blessings three love and faith and the apple tree.ĭespite the story’s celebration of individualism, Disney’s Johnny Appleseed stopped short of praising difference in favor of conformity. The Disney story ends with an image of an aged Johnny Appleseed atop a ridge, his shadow stretching across a transformed landscape of fields and orchards: Notably, the Indian makes only a minor appearance in Disney’s Johnny Appleseed. Instead, Johnny Appleseed works to win over the trust of the forests animals, convincing them, by his kindness, of the benign nature of his mission to transform the wilderness. The creatures of the wild forest Johnny Appleseed will transform into an ordered orchard embrace him as a friend. While John longs to join them, he believes he cannot- that he is too weak and too small, The wagon train has its own song celebrating American individualism: Soon his attention is drawn to a long train of Conestoga wagons pushing west, each containing a pioneer family. Johnny celebrates American freedom, singing, “Here I am ’neath the blue blue sky, doing as I please,” thanking God for that freedom. Faith in God and the ability of the individual to make a difference in history are the central themes. The Johnny Appleseed story told by Disney is a near perfect sermon on postwar American values. The cartoon opens with a young Johnny singing a Disney-created song that has come to be known as “The Johnny Appleseed Grace,” and many believe it was actually written by Chapman. The narrator stated that three other great nation builders had their distinctive tools in their mission- Paul Bunyan had his axe, John Henry his hammer, and Davy Crockett his rifle- but Johnny Appleseed’s tools were his bag of apple seeds and his Holy Bible. When Disney released an animated version of the Johnny Appleseed story in 1948, John’s faith in God was front and center. Disney made Appleseed part of its team of early American superheroes, alongside Paul Bunyan, John Henry and others.
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