The Disney One

Yup, due to popular demand, we are going to look at Disney this time.

These guys are perhaps the most famous subliminal messengers of all time. You will find YouTube and the rest of the web literally strewn with content of either sexual or deviant nature hidden cleverly inside movies from the Walt Disney Empire. Everything from erections in the priest from the Little Mermaid, to penises (penii?) in the Walt Disney logo, to the word sex written with stars in the Lion King, nudity in Who framed Roger Rabbit and many, many other instances of inapropiate images in the movie. Think of the children, for Christ's sake!
However, a very logical conclusion to this odd streak of adding this to movies is animators. Usually, animators in studios have shitty jobs. They have to do most of the hard work (drawing and actually animating the movie), and yet nobody gives them any credit and they aren't very well paid. So a sensible explanation is that the unrecognized arstists and animators like to hide words and stuff that only keen, usually adult eyes will notice just to relieve the daily grind and have some fun. It would not make sense for Disney to actually want to pervert children, since the only thing they want is money, and perverts are not a good money source. Another thing is that these subtle references probably don't work on little children, and the only people who actually notice are those that watch the movie fram by fram trying to find something.
Free time, huh.

On a closing note, here are a couple of videos that show messages. Some are pretty impressive, others require the consumption of hallucigens to understand, but we can all agree, there are a lot of these videos.
http://www.subliminal-video.com/lion-king-subliminal-messages/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73fCLx-mFLg

Seriously, damn. These dudes need to get laid more.

Third time's a charm

It literally is. This one is supposed to be special, yo. It's gonna have fancy fireworks and those crazy spinning things and shit. Word, dude.

Anyway, I was researching like a responsible student on my subject and came across a pretty good article from the guys at wiseGEEK. It was short, clear and to the point, talking about the different amount of subliminal messages. Besides talking about backmasking (covered in my second post) they also mentioned a couple more, of which one stood out, related to subliminal advertising. More specifically, the idea of hiding things in plain sight. The article states that in the movie Spider-Man, for example, great many scenes have advertisements in the background, which are not usually noticed, since the audience is looking at Spidey. It’s actually common practice to do this, as the law does not state that this kind of advertising is illegal. However, the effect this might have over viewers is doubtful at best. Most people don’t even notice it showed up, and while that might be a good thing if you’re going for the subconscious mind, it generally means it was ignored. The strategy that might be more effective (again, no promises for actual effectiveness, as it is really hard to test this at a lab) is to see the product associated with something positive, like a bystander having a refreshing soft drink and looking very pleased about himself, or a person wearing a specific brand of clothes surrounded by beautiful women. However, with this technique the advertising experts walk a fine line between the unnoticeable (and thus, ineffective), and the too noticeable, which in most cases looks too obvious and ends up backfiring for the company. However, when the main characters purposefully interact with or consume some product or another, and the brand is mentioned or clearly visible, it is called product placement, and usually involves the company paying the writers of a movie or comic book to include their companies’ product and make a positive association with it. There are some pretty ridiculous cases of extreme product placement out there, like Twinkies being used by superheroes to defeat villains or some other implausible scenario.

That was my weekly rant on subliminal messaging. I recently acquired a book (a real, paper, honest-to-God book) with a chapter on subliminals that will lend some credibility to my research.

Peace out, homies.

Ellis-Christensen, Tricia. "What Are Subliminal Messages?" WiseGEEK: Clear Answers for Common Questions. 26 June 2011. Web. 02 Sept. 2011. <http://www.wisegeek.com/what-are-subliminal-messages.htm>.