Disney adds African-American Princess Tiana to Royal Family 86 Years After the Company was Founded

I blogged about Disney’s new black Princess Tiana a while back and I have to say, it’s a financial move for the company and nothing else. The doll will make its debut today at the American International Toy Fair in New York City.

For Disney, it’s not just about being culturally and politically correct. Chi-ching is more like it. The Disney Princess franchise, which raked in $4 billion in global retail sales last year, is aging and what else to do but introduce something the company deliberately side-stepped for so long — a black doll. The cocoa-colored doll, which sports a tiara and a flowing blue gown, and is roughly the size of a Barbie, is expected to sell for about the same $10 to $15 as Barbie.

Well, Disney’s latest project isn’t like Ty Dolls Sasha and Malia plush dolls, because Princess Tiana was on the drawing board long before Barack Obama was elected the nation’s first black president. According to USA Today, marketing experts say the doll signals a growing awareness by industries from toymakers to cosmetic companies that diversity is critical in a nation where people of color will be the majority in little more than 30 years. Tiana will hit to the big screen later this year in the animated musical The Princess and the Frog. She is the first princess introduced by Disney since Mulan in 1998.

Wait. We have more politically correct black dolls coming. Mattel, which has the license to create the Princess Tiana dolls, is planning to release its own line of black dolls in September. Part of the Barbie family, the So In Style dolls are being touted as having a more authentic appearance, from their hair to their varying skin tones.

As with her fellow princesses, according to USA Today, Tiana merchandise will range from Halloween costumes to backpacks. The newspaper states that there are plans for Tiana-theme MP3 players and digital cameras to be in stores by the end of the year, and a line of Princess Tiana and The Princess and the Frog books will go on sale this fall.

Okay. I am not saying that the idea isn’t a good one, but what took Disney so long? The company was founded on October 16, 1923 by brothers Walt and Roy Disney as an animation studio. It has become one of the biggest Hollywood studios, owner and licensor of 11 theme parks and several television networks including ABC and ESPN. So, with that in mind, Disney should have been on the cutting edge of change in America in creating a black doll. Big deal. They waited 86 years to release a black doll. Seems their motivation is more financial than to foster diversity in their toy chest.

By the way, the Prince Naveen is white. They couldn’t bear to put a brother in that role.

Filed under: Black Doll, Issues of race and diversity, Mattel, Princess Tiana, The Princess and the Frog Movie, Walt Disney

Walt Disney’s ‘Subservient’ Black Princess Rankles Film Critics

It seems as though we can never get away from the stereotypes that have dogged blacks in America for eons. Well, Walt Disney has joined the fray with its latest animation film. I actually never heard of this latest project, but on first glance, I was heartened that the company was casting its first black princess, a heroine who could be a positive role model for little girls and a very ambitious marketing plan. But alas, that was shortlived. The film studio now finds itself fending off a chorus of accusations of racial stereotyping in the forthcoming, “The Princess and the Frog: An American Fairy Tale.”

The film is a musical set in 1920s New Orleans, and was supposed to feature Maddy, a black chambermaid working for a spoilt, white Southern debutante. Maddy was to be helped by a voodoo priestess fairy godmother to win the heart of a white prince, after he rescued her from the clutches of a voodoo magician. Sounds stereotypical to me, don’t you think so? Isn’t this a throwback to slavery?

According to the Independent, Disney’s original storyboard is believed to have been torn up after criticism that the lead character was a clichéd subservient role with echoes of slavery, and whose name sounded too much like “Mammy,” which is an unwelcome reminder of America’s Deep South before the civil rights movement swept away segregation.

The heroine has been recast as Tiana, a 19-year-old in a country that has never had a monarchy. She is now slated to live “happily ever after” with a handsome fellow who is not black – with leaks suggesting that he will be of Middle Eastern heritage and called Naveen. The race of the villain in the cartoon is reported to have also been revised. The film studio began making changes a year ago, first to its title, The Frog Princess, which some had interpreted as a slur. Amendments to the plot followed.

To put it bluntly, we have dreams and stories like everyone else and it we would like to be portrayed positively, though, I must add that there are elements in our community whose actions are contrary to the majority of blacks in the United States. Why do we always have to be portrayed as subservient to someone else?

Disney now says that the rewritten tale “takes place in the charming elegance and grandeur of New Orleans’ fabled French Quarter during the Jazz Age… Princess Tiana will be a heroine in the great tradition of Disney’s rich animated fairy tale legacy, and all other characters and aspects of the story will be treated with the greatest respect and sensitivity.”

Disney’s efforts to be multicultural have not always gone according to plan. In 1993, there were protests from Muslims who said the animated film Aladdin depicted the Middle East as barbaric. One lyric included with the line: “I come from a land, from a faraway place, where the caravan camels roam, where they cut off your ear if they don’t like your face; it’s barbaric, but hey, it’s home.”

Filed under: Black Princess, Princess Maddy, Princess Tiana, Walt Disney