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Wherever you may be listening, whether it's Beijing or Kito or Cairo, we all probably have one big cultural reference in common.

Disney. The memories run deep, don't they? Minor listening to a cassette tape of the Lion King and asking my father, what does it mean to be prepared?

Or studiously counting the number of times I'd seen Pocahontas and it was 11, which is too many times to have seen Pocahontas.

I asked listeners on Instagram and the memories were strong for you too. One got to Euro Disney in Paris and was shocked that Pluto, the dog, spoke French.

Another would skip school once a year on a rainy day, her mother would drive her to Disneyland and they'd have the whole place to themselves, one of her favorite memories.

There were also a lot of traumatic memories, like one listener went running to Winnie the Pooh for his autograph, and she looked at his hands and saw that his costume didn't have fingers and she flipped out.

Another got lost and put in a room full of lost children and she was convinced like that's it, I'm going to be adopted by another family, I'm an orphan.

Some listeners families were anti-Disney because of their older racist and anti-semitic imagery and we'll talk more about that later.

But in all of our childhood memories, Disney is omnipresent.

This is FT Weekend, the podcast. I'm Lila Raptopolis. We're dedicating this episode to the massive, complicated economic and cultural force that is Disney.

It's shaped American culture from almost a hundred years and in turn the culture of probably every country around the world.

So today, we're exploring what happens when a company with that much influence just keeps growing.

Over the last 20 years, Disney has grown a lot. It bought franchises, famously the Star Wars Empire, Lucas Films, and the Superhero Universe Marvel.

It acquired media companies like the TV broadcasters ABC and ESPN and the streaming platform Hulu. It ate up production companies like Pixar and 20th Century Fox.

And then, two years ago, it rolled out its own new streaming platform, Disney Plus.

I think it's really hard to grasp what their power actually is and I think it operates on a different level.

So it operates on just having a ton of money and at the same time there's just this completely intangible power in terms of culture because we're consuming so much media that is produced by Disney at this point.

That's Dr. Sabrina Mittermeyer, who studies Disney at the University of Castle in Germany.

She wrote a book about the history of Disney theme parks and has another coming out this year on Disney fandom.

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