Pro tip: if you ever get hired by Disney, don’t make jokes about their characters fucking. The late, controversial sci-fi writer Harlan Ellison learned this lesson the hard way when he was unceremoniously fired on his first day on the job at Walt Disney Studios, after joking during lunch — unknowingly, within earshot of the studio heads — that they should create a Disney porn flick.

Ellison’s reputation for airing dirty laundry is actually pretty helpful here, as he writes at length about the funny scandal in the 1978 essay “The 3 Most Important Things in Life” and recounts the unfortunate tale as a “classic example of what not to do.“

It was the late 1960s, and Ellison had established himself as a prolific writer of novels and short stories. Still, it struck him as odd that an animation behemoth like Disney would want to work with an “upwardly struggling young writer trying to bludgeon his way into movies,” as he described himself at the time.

Amazed that the whole thing wasn’t a hoax, Ellison navigated his way through the maze of Disney Studios and found his own parking spot, as well as an office with its very own bathroom and a private secretary. After a morning of boredom and no clear instruction, Ellison took his lunch break alongside the other writers, dusted off his best Mickey Mouse impression and quipped, “Hey, listen, what a kick! Why don’t we do a porn Disney flick?”

Unaware of the studio execs sitting at the next table, Ellison doubled down in a bid to solicit chuckles from his colleagues, cracking jokes about Tinker Bell flying up the heads of guys’ dicks and furiously flapping her wings. Ellison even did some fantasy casting of his Disney porno; naturally, Mickey and Minnie Mouse — the studio’s beloved heroes, who have inspired more than a handful of disturbing porn parodies over the years — were the stars of the show.

“Okay, you guys,” he said in his signature impression. “Let’s get that hand-held Arriflex [camera] right down there between Minnie’s legs! I wanna see close-ups of quivering labia!” Donald Duck, Pluto and the Seven Dwarves were all soon involved in Ellison’s lunch-table masterpiece, as the presumably mortified execs eavesdropped in horror.

Ellison’s obvious creativity and flair for the fantastical took him far (he’s viewed as one of the greatest Star Trek script-writers of all-time, although he’s gone on record saying that he hated his work), but this brief, X-rated monologue swiftly closed the door on his time at Disney.

At least he got a pretty solid anecdote out of it, and an invaluable life lesson. Or as he joked, “Big business is humorless — and at Disney, nobody fucks with the Mouse.”

Image curiosity of Pip R. Lagenta, no changes made. Licensed by Creative Commons.