Description

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Disney Plus Beatles shatters the mirror holding the Beatles' carefully crafted image and reconstructs the looking glass to reveal its reflecting echoes today. This book explains how Disney-via the Beatles-shapes the production and reception of 21st century American pop music. It probes Disney's and the Beatles' functions as cultural institutions, an approach that considers gendered, sexual, racial, and other implications of these joined phenomena in the age of streaming platforms like Disney+.

After uncovering Disney tropes in visual aesthetics and storytelling related to the Fab Four, the book considers U.S. artists with controlling visions for their multiplatform media, specifically Beyonc , Taylor Swift, Lana Del Rey, and Lil Nas X. As "princely" auteurs, the pop musicians in this book are perceived as self-made innovators while appearing to create safe spaces for audiences. These Disney dynamics-impressive prince/adorable princess-cultivate appeal, especially among fans who feel deeply personal relationships with these musical phenomena. Disney Plus Beatles offers an incisive look at the cultivation and collaboration of celebrity persona and corporate production.

About the Author

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Katie Kapurch is Associate Professor of English at Texas State University, USA. She is the author of Victorian Melodrama in the Twenty-First Century (2016) and co-editor of New Critical Perspectives on the Beatles (2016) and The Beatles and Humour (Bloomsbury, 2023). Her scholarship routinely uses a comparative lens to explore the significance and appeal of gender and very popular subject matter, from the music of the Beatles and their girl fans to Disney fairy-tale films to YA fiction.