Abstract
Disney characters and products feature in most people's lives at some point, especially during the childhood years but a recent visit to Disneyland Paris was striking also because the real Disney devotees there were not children but adults. For the adults standing impatiently in the first rows to meet and greet the Disney characters (and not really allowing the little ones to get a good view of them), the Disney princesses were indeed the manufacturers of fantasy to use Janet Wasko's expression. The second edition of Understanding Disney: The Manufacture of Fantasy adopts the same integrated approach of studying the production, distribution and consumption of Disney texts as the first edition. Wasko reminds us that Disney is also a very successful business or more precisely businesses. She looks at the ‘Disney Multiverse from a systems perspective and contribute to further understanding its significance’ (p. 6). Although Wasko herself does not really explain in the Introduction what is new in the second edition, the blurb mentions new examples provided throughout. The chapters have the same titles as in the first edition. There are seven substantial chapters on the history of Disney, Disney as an empire and a focus on the corporate aspects, ‘analysing the world according to Disney’, ‘dissecting Disney's worlds’, and Disney and the world. This short book note does not do justice to this thorough and comprehensive account of the role of Disney from a political economy perspective.