I am a baby boomer, born in 1946. In 1957, I was 11 years old in the 6th grade in Richmond, California. In 1956 the biggest event I can remember was the visit to Disneyland, with my parents and I visited that same year.
Unknown to my child's perception there was another event looming--the advent of commercial nuclear power. The Shippingport atomic power station would open in Pennsylvania the next year. What I didn't realize was that as a child I was being prepared to accept this untested and later proven unsafe industry that was quietly being prepared by vast economic and political forces beyond my knowing.
A major element in that brainwashing of young children was the 1957 Disney film, "Our Friend the Atom."
It is difficult to convey to people today who did not experience it the incredible influence that Walt Disney and his productions had on the children of that time. Disney films like "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs," "Cinderella," "Pinocchio" and others had captured our imagination even earlier. Then the television show "Disneyland" premiered in 1954. It captured the imagination and viewership of children throughout the country and was, we now realize, used as a promotion for the opening of the Disneyland park the following year. Disneyland was promoted on the TV show, in comic books--everywhere a young person could look. The features on the show were a mass cultural phenomenon with children on school buses singing "The Ballad of Davey Crocket" to the desperation of the bus driver.
It was within this cultural mileau that Disney presented his show, "Our Friend the Atom." Of course, we all watched it rapturously. Later we discovered that this was not just a TV episode but a multi-pronged marketing campaign to promote the nuclear industry whose first commercial nuclear power plant opened in Shippingport in 1958.
No, it was much more than a TV episode. It also involved a book of the same title along with a display that would be set up in the Tomorrowland section of the new Disneyland park. Not only that, somehow the film managed to be shown in school classrooms all over the country and discussed by teachers with materials supplied by Disney. I actually wrote a 7th grade book report on "Our Friend the Atom." In addition, and here my memory is a bit foggy, but I do remember some people who were not teachers coming in to my 7th grade and talking about the wonders of nuclear power and one of them called opponents (yes, there were some at that time too) "dirty people."
The bottom line is that we were sold a pile of bilge by a company that had won the trust and admiration of a nation of children yet served the interests of corrupt government and industrial groups that are to this day lying about the true nature of this technology as we currently witness from the disaster in Japan.
We have been had.