So I'm not entirely sure this is the right place to ask, and I might be skirting the rules a bit as it might break the "20 yrs rule". Still, I don't really know where else to ask and I've been wondering about this for a while for the past... 20 years or so, and figured I'd give it a shot here. The subject matter isn't particularly serious but I am asking very much in earnest.
Anyways...
So there is a common myth that in Disney movies, specifically animated movies like Aladdin/Little Mermaid/Beauty and the Beast/ etc the artists intentionally incorporated "adult themes" into some of the scenes. Phallic shapes, stuff like this.
As a child and to this day I will see this assertion, evidenced by a particular scene or another in the movies. I mean, I always just figured people will "see what they want to" so to speak and that it these people were probably just reading a too much into otherwise benign imagery. Still, it doesn't seem that far fetched that an artist might try to subtly incorporate some "deviant" imagery, so...?
If anyone actually knows anything about this I'd love to get to the bottom of it.
Sorry if this isn't the correct sub for such a question.
The only true story that I know of is the topless lady who appears in the background in two frames of The Rescuers - it seems to have been first noticed on a home video release in 1999 (twenty years after the theatrical release) and it's the only story Disney have officially confirmed. They announced a recall of the videos, and stated that the image had been inserted in post-production, twenty years earlier. By who, it's never been revealed.
There are a number of other rumours, but they're all either fake or unconfirmed. The priest in The Little Mermaid having a hard-on, a home video release of the same film having a cover with a phallus-shaped spire drawn by a disgruntled artist (half-true - there is a spire on the cover that looks like a penis, but it was unintentional, rather than a malicious action), the word 'SEX' appearing in the air in The Lion King. Those examples, to be fair to them, come from genuine confusion (the priest does have a lump in his pants, but there's no indication it's a dirty joke; the word in the air in The Lion King is supposed to be 'SFX' for 'special effects) more than anything.
The best is a story that's been circulated by various Disney employees over the years, about a group of animators showing Walt a film with a hidden frame of a naked woman, to test how good his eye is. Sometimes it's a Mickey Mouse cartoon, other times the film's subject is unspecified. In one telling of the story, he notices the woman, asks who inserted the frame, and then fires the guilty parties. In others he laughs it off, humbly joking that he spotted the frame not due to a superpowered eye for individual frames, but purely because of the lady's lack of clothes. In one telling, the film's markedly less subtle - rather than a hidden frame, it's an out-and-out porn parody featuring various Disney characters. The one common link between the stories is that they're all second-hand - they're all stories that animators say they heard from other animators, and lack any specifics of time, place, or who was involved or fired. It's never been asserted by anyone claiming to have been there, so it's likely to have just been an urban legend.
This is all pretty comprehensively covered over on Snopes' Disney page (www.snopes.com/disney/disney.asp), where the awesome and dedicated couple who run the site even managed to speak to the artist who designed the Little Mermaid VHS cover.