Graduation Year
2025
Document Type
Open Access Senior Thesis
Degree Name
Bachelor of Arts
Department
American Studies
Reader 1
Nicolette Rohr
Reader 2
David Seitz
Reader 3
Thomas Koenigs
Terms of Use & License Information
Rights Information
© 2025 Sylvie R Kromer
Abstract
In 1995, the film Operation Dumbo Drop was released by Walt Disney Pictures. This film, based on a true story of elephants being airlifted across Vietnam in 1968 by the American military, holds a unique position as a rare family-friendly comedy about the Vietnam War. As a reflection of 1990s-era cultural memory of the Vietnam War, the film rehistoricizes and sanitizes the war, following a similar trend in other pieces of media from the same era. Operation Dumbo Drop must be seen in this context and as a product of the moment in which it was made. In taking a critical view of the film, we can see how its re-envisioning of the Vietnam War puts American exceptionalism back on screen after a period of grappling with its role in the war and its effect on Americans on film. Ultimately, Operation Dumbo Drop portrays a happy ending to a war that the United States didn’t win, and it was the political moment between the end of the Cold War and the attacks of September 11th, 2001 and the Iraq War that provided an atmosphere in which this film could be made.
Recommended Citation
Kromer, Sylvie, "Operation Dumbo Drop: Cultural Memory, and Representations of the Vietnam War in the 1990s" (2025). Scripps Senior Theses. 2570.
https://scholarship.claremont.edu/scripps_theses/2570
Included in
American Film Studies Commons, American Politics Commons, American Popular Culture Commons, Political History Commons, United States History Commons
