"All’s Not Well in Mind of Margaret Lazarus"

While reading “All’s Not Well in Land of ‘The Lion King’”, I could not help but wonder what was wrong with Margaret. Margaret Lazarus, the author of the writing that can be found on page 418 in “The Prentice Hall Guide for College Writers”, bases her argument off the belief that “The Lion King” and other Disney films are focused around stereotypes. I personally believe her methods of determining this are very much flawed and over critical.

First of all, Margaret Lazarus uses the characters from the Disney movie “Beauty and the Beast” to prove a point on how women are shown as subordinate. She says the story is “about a beauty who tames an angry male beast.” It sounds to me like the male character is getting the bad rap in this example. She also used “The Little Mermaid” to support her weak argument on how women are viewed as inferior in Disney films. She whines about how the mermaid gives up her glorious voice and splits her body to be with a prince. Couldn’t that same story line be about a woman’s power of choice to be with her true love. And if I recall, the evil octopus who took the mermaid’s voice away was a woman too. Margaret failed to mention that. If you go into a movie looking for stereotypes, chances are you can skew characters and plots to align with your argument.

Margaret also states that “The Lion King” promotes the stereotype of blacks being ghetto and trashy like the hyenas were portrayed, when she says “the hyenas are dark-mostly black.” If you look at a picture, hyenas can be pretty dark and nearly all are covered by black spots. With black being a common color of evil, nothing to do with a skin color, it is not a surprise that the bad guys in this film were dark. She also went on saying that Whoopi Goldberg, a black entertainer, was the voice of one of the hyenas who talked with a ghetto inner-city dialect. However, she fails to mention the voices of the other two hyenas (Cheech Marin and Jim Cummings) were Mexican and white. While the voice of Whoopi was viewed as entertaining by most, it is sad that some people have to take it into a racist content. This shows again how Margaret has a one-set mind to prove her point.

While reading the conclusion, I could not help but laugh at Margaret’s motive of writing this piece against Disney. She did it for the kids! What kind of sheltered and skewed childhood are Margaret’s kids having that causes them to be “scared and frightened by the ‘Lion King’”. Seriously, I must have been misinformed because I thought it was a Disney cartoon. Being a kid who has grown up watching Disney films, particularly “Lion King” being a favorite, I believe Margaret is looking way too hard to find these “stereotypes.” I think the Disney creators are just making unique characters and storylines to keep people of all ages entertained. They are not portraying a preference of a racist and sexist society by showing bigoted images and attitudes, like Margaret Lazarus argues.