"Entering the Tooniverse:" Anti-Capitalist Children's Play in Disney's Toontown Online

Abstract

Toontown Online was a massive multiplayer online roleplaying game released in 2003 by The Walt Disney Company in collaboration with Schell Games. Featuring a world of colorful, fun-loving player characters fighting against an evil invasion of grayscale, corporate-loving robots, the world of Toontown poses a culture of children’s play against a culture of adult U.S. corporatization. This thesis explores how a history of U.S. children’s media and play culture is represented through an anti-capitalist lens in Toontown Online and its fan-made remakes, using cultural studies and historical, literary, and media analysis. By positioning children’s play culture against U.S. adult work culture, Toontown’s narrative emphasizes how children’s play can be used as an act of resistance against capitalism. Themes of anti-authoritarianism, anti-colonialism, anti-corporatism, and environmentalism are used to depict a parody of U.S capitalist history through Toontown’s antagonists. Media fan studies is used to explore how Toontown Online’s fan community has expanded the game’s anti-capitalist theming after the original game’s closure.