Dungeons, Dragons, and Donald Duck

Growing up, I remember how assiduously my parents used to pay attention to newspaper flyers for grocery stores. If a store was offering a good price for some item or other that we needed – or might conceivably need at some point in the future – they'd take note of the sale and head off to buy it, often in bulk. At one point, the item in question was frozen orange juice concentrate, a staple of my childhood breakfasts but something I don't think I've tasted in years. 

In this particular case, my father brought home an absurdly large amount of frozen orange juice – a couple of dozen cans at least. I suspect the only reason he didn't buy more was because our little freezer would have had room for nothing else. At the time, I wasn't struck by how much orange juice he bought so much as the brand. It was one I'd never seen before and that confused me a great deal, namely Donald Duck Orange Juice. 

My young mind boggled. What did Donald Duck have to do with orange juice? There was no obvious connection between the Disney character and orange juice. Had there been some famous old cartoon where Donald imbibed lots of orange juice or something of the sort? What was the connection? I thought about this a lot as a kid, because those little cans were in my freezer for months. Unfortunately, I was never able to make any sense of it until comparatively recently.

It turns out that, during the 1940s. Donald Duck was Disney's most licensed character, thanks in part to his appearance in lots of World War II propaganda films (Der Fuehrer's Face probably being the most famous). Consequently, his image appeared on many different food products, not simply orange juice, though few of these products continued past the 1960s. Later, when Walt Disney was planning to build Disney World, the Florida Citrus Canners Cooperative, which produced Donald Duck Orange Juice under a handshake agreement, aided him in his efforts, eventually sponsoring the Sunshine Pavilion at the new theme park. In return, Disney helped design Orange Bird, a mascot for the Canners Cooperative (now called Citrus World).

Ultimately, though, the real reason Donald Duck Orange Juice exists is that Donald Duck was a popular character at the time of the original deal and slapping his sailor-suited face onto the cans helped its sales. In turn, Disney benefited by ensuring that Donald Duck remained a recognizable part of the consumerist popular culture that was expanding in the aftermath of the Second World War. It didn't matter that Donald Duck had no connection whatsoever to orange juice; what mattered was that, by putting his image on the orange juice, people who felt some kind of affection for the character might consider buying it. The business genius of Walt Disney and his successors was in understanding the profit to be made not in creating entertainment but in the licensing of ancillary products based on that entertainment (even if only tenuously).

I was reminded of all this recently when Amazon sent me an email announcing the release of a D&D-themed cookbook, of all things. Naturally, as a hater of fun before it was cool, I immediately scoffed at this, putting it in the same category as D&D-branded sunglasses and beach towels. On further reflection, though, I think it's more insidious than that. Whereas those sunglasses and beach towels were likely marketed toward kids who actually played Dungeons & Dragons (or would one day), things like the cookbook strike me as instead simply capitalizing on the contemporary pop cultural faddishness of the D&D "brand" à la Donald Duck Orange Juice. Cinnamon swirl bread doesn't suddenly become D&D-ish because you call it "elven bread" or whatever. This strikes me as silly and more than a little cynical.

I've been complaining about the turning of not just Dungeons & Dragons but other aspects of popular culture into "lifestyle brands" for a long time, so this isn't a new gripe. I don't begrudge anyone their enjoyment of this kind of stuff – de gustibus and all that – but I pointedly try to absent myself from it as much as I am able. I do this for the same reason that I don't own nerdy T-shirts or treat plastic figurines like modern day lares and penates: these are my hobbies, not my identity. I play roleplaying games, read science fiction books, and occasionally enjoy fantastical movies and TV shows, but I also do other things, most of them not in any way connected to those hobbies and I like it that way. The older I get, the more I observe about the way the world works, the saner this approach seems to be.