"Dopey's Legacy" was definitely not my favorite piece we've read in class. In fact, I don't think it would be an understatement to say I strongly disliked (maybe even hated) it. It wasn't anything about the way it was written, the style, or anything like that. In fact there were definitely some positives that the text brought to the table, such the organization structure (with clearly outlined subheadings detailing the introduction, main body, and conclusion). The thing that really made me angry was that "Dopey's Legacy" didn't deliver on the promise it made. It deviated from the self-proclaimed main point of the piece.
The group of authors who wrote the article stated that their end-game was to prove that Disney's portrayal of certain characters created a bad stigma for the mentally handicapped. However, this was not done. Rather than focusing on the effect of such a portray of mental illness in Disney movies, only the existence of mental illness in the movies was conveyed.
The majority of the paper simply summarized examples of the three Disney characters that were thought to exhibit mental handicap. They were Gus in Cinderalla, Dopey in Snow White, and Lefou in Beauty and the Beast. For the most part, I agreed with the examples they presented to highlight this point (although almost everything about Lefou was ridiculous.) Mentioning that only Dopey of all the dwarves had blue eyes, for example, was interesting. However, this was not the purpose of the paper.
Everything could have been perfectly written, it could have had perfect structure and everything, but if something is promised, it must be delivered for the paper to be successful. For this reason, the work was doomed from the start.
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