ss of the tribal encyclopedia (McLuhan's emphasis). They had memorized the poets. The poets provided specific operational wisdom for all contingencies of life - ... With the advent of individual detribalized man, a new education was needed. Plato devised such a new program for literate men. It was based on the Ideas. With the phonetic alphabet, classified wisdom took over from the operational wisdom of Homer and Hesiod and the tribal encyclopedia (vi-vii).
Where the written word and the Ideas sought out the individual, detribalizing a society where only a select few would ever read, television now alters the environment. In place of the written word, the Image is the agent of the operational wisdom. The tribal encyclopedia, individualized by the written word, now reemerges as the "universalizor." Except for an audience of a select few, the written word is rarely employed on television; it is an oral and visual medium. In cartoons, frequently, even the oral element is eliminated: the cultural environment is purely visual. Moreover, by the anthropomorphosis of animal cartoons into human-acting characters, the bounds of ethnicity and race are erased in a single stroke.
This revolutionary broadening of the audience base has not been lost upon the creators of animated cartoons. Those artisans and entrepreneurs, in the spirit of commercial enterprise that drives the costly process involved, have been quicker to expand their appeal to those "retribalized" children's markets than social observers have been to comment upon the phenomenon. Walt Disney's landmark creation, Mickey Mouse, originally whistled and squeaked his way to international fame. It is no accident that Mickey's cohort, Donald Duck, is the most popular incoherent character in the world. Children from Ghana to Krakow share with suburban Valley Girls and urban Milwaukeegans the "experience" of piloting a cranky steamboat down a squiggly river populated by boun...