The interwar decades in Turkey saw the emergence of a reformist intelligentsia—bureaucrats, educators, sociologists, artists, publishers—who understood cultural production as a central arena for shaping the modern citizen.Footnote 1 In this pedagogical framework, children occupied a privileged position: both as the symbolic carriers of the future and as the primary subjects upon whom the cultural, linguistic, and moral ideals of the young republic would be inscribed. Children’s magazines became laboratories of modernity, where visual pleasure, national pedagogy, and global cultural flows intersected.Footnote 2
Within these spaces, Mickey Mouse became the earliest and most ubiquitous US figure to enter the Turkish cultural imagination. His appearance marked the beginning of a broader circulation of Hollywood characters and symbols. Within only a few years, Turkish children encountered Tarzan, Charlie Chaplin, Greta Garbo, King Kong, Felix the Cat, and other US cinematic icons through magazines such as Afacan and Çocuk Sesi, newspaper comic supplements, cinema screenings, Halkevleri (people’s houses), and provincial theaters.Footnote 3 Their rapid diffusion reflected the accelerating globalization of visual culture in the 1930s, at a moment when Turkey itself was undergoing a profound transformation driven by urbanization, media expansion, and the early stages of capitalist market formation.
The circulation of US mass culture in Turkey generated processes of cultural translation, selective adaptation, and ideological negotiation that shaped how these cartoon figures were understood and mobilized within local contexts. As scholars have long argued, cultural translation is never a neutral transfer of meaning but a practice structured by asymmetrical power relations and local regimes of interpretation.Footnote 4 Much of this literature, however, has focused either on textual mediation or on elite intellectual encounters, leaving less explored how global mass-cultural icons were reworked within vernacular media ecologies outside the Euro-American world.Footnote 5 The Turkish case is particularly revealing in this regard. Here, the translation of US cinematic imagery took place simultaneously across children’s periodicals, consumer campaigns, and traditional performance forms, in which imported figures were reframed through the moral, pedagogical, and nationalist concerns of the early republic. In early republican Turkey, children’s magazines paired Mickey with local companions such as Afacan (meaning “the mischievous one” or “the clever boy”); they recoded global consumer icons into vehicles for republican pedagogy, most notably through the Yerli Malı (domestic goods) campaigns, and embedded Hollywood figures within moral narratives that reflected the aspirations and anxieties of a rapidly modernizing society. These visual imports also spilled into traditional performance forms, above all Karagöz, the Ottoman shadow play, in which Mickey, renamed Mikimavız, appeared alongside Hacivat, Tarzan, Chaplin, and Greta Garbo in İsmail Hakkı Baltacıoğlu’s Karagöz Ankara’da (Karagöz in Ankara). In such encounters, the modern and the traditional did not remain discrete categories; they collided, overlapped, and reconfigured one another, producing hybrid cultural forms whose meanings were continually negotiated within the shifting ideological landscape of early republican Turkey.Footnote 6
These negotiations were inseparable from the early republic’s efforts to define the moral and intellectual boundaries of modern Turkish citizenship. Intellectuals like Baltacıoğlu, Haşim Nahit, and Enver Naci Gökşen viewed Mickey Mouse and other US visual forms as symptoms of a commodified global modernity that threatened to corrupt national culture and the pedagogical aims of the state. Their critiques adopted a nationalist, moralist tone: they defended Karagöz as an ethically grounded, human-centered art form, and condemned US icons as irrational, infantilizing, or culturally decadent. This stance mirrored contemporaneous concerns in Europe and the United States, where theorists of mass culture, including Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, Theodor Adorno, and later Jack Zipes, Henry Giroux, and Nicholas Sammond, analyzed Disney and Hollywood as instruments of capitalist distraction, ideological normalization, and racial hierarchy.
Yet not all Turkish critics aligned with this nationalist moralism. In 1936, Nazım Hikmet offered a different reading that rejected the civilizational binaries of nationalist discourse. Although he openly enjoyed Mickey Mouse comics and films, Hikmet identified the racialized, colonial logic embedded in Disney’s narratives and warned against uncritical localization of such imaginaries for Turkish children. His perspective, resonating with global Marxist anti-imperialist critiques of cinema, situated US icons not as moral threats to the Turkish nation but as ideological vehicles of empire. Mickey, in this view, became an entry point for critiquing capitalism, coloniality, and the racialized structures of global modernity.
This article brings these divergent interpretive communities into conversation. Drawing on children’s magazines, theater scripts, press coverage, memoirs, and early leftist cultural criticism, I argue that the encounter between Mickey Mouse and Karagöz in the 1930s and 1940s constituted a contested visual field through which Turkish modernity was negotiated. By tracing how US icons were appropriated, resisted, moralized, parodied, or politicized, the study demonstrates that early republican visual culture did not merely absorb global modernity but actively rewrote it. The result was a set of hybrid forms in which nationalist pedagogy, capitalist entertainment, traditional aesthetics, and anti-imperialist critique intersected, sometimes harmoniously, often contentiously. Ultimately, Mickey’s journey into Turkish cultural life becomes a lens for a larger question at the heart of the early republican project: What kind of civilization should be built, by whom, and through which visual languages? The debates surrounding Mickey Mouse therefore were never only about children’s entertainment, but about the moral, political, and cultural architecture of Turkish modernity itself.
US Comics, Cinema, and Animation as Local Response
Created by Walt Disney in 1928, Mickey Mouse began circulating globally through comic strips and cinema in the early 1930s, quickly becoming one of the most recognizable icons of visual modernity. On 10 September 1931, Akşam, one of Turkey’s leading newspapers, devoted the most prominent portion of its “Cinema” section to Mickey Mouse and his creator (Fig. 1). The full-page feature presented a large, colorful illustration of the character, accompanied by smaller depictions that showed Mickey in various dynamic poses. This extensive visual presentation signaled not merely fascination but an early attempt by Turkish media to participate in an emerging global visual vernacular. Remarkably, this coverage appeared less than four years after Mickey’s debut, revealing the unprecedented speed with which Disney’s creations traversed national and linguistic boundaries.
We believe there is hardly anyone left who does not know Mickey Mouse. For two years now, almost every cinema has been screening many of this little mouse’s films. People of all ages are watching these films with great delight. . . . However, there are very few who know how these films are actually made.Footnote 7
The news about how Mickey Mouse came into being and influenced the world, and the life story of Walt Disney. National Library newspaper collection, Ankara, Türkiye.
FIGURE 1. Long description
A full-page newspaper spread from the Turkish publication Aksam, dated September 10, 1931.
* Header: The word CINEMA is printed in large, stylized block letters at the top. Below it, a large headline reads Mickey Mouse nasil dogdu? followed by a sub-headline regarding the production of a 200-meter film requiring 5000 drawings.
* Body Text: The page is organized into five vertical columns of text in Turkish. A large, faint red stamp of a Mickey Mouse figure is overlaid across the center of the text columns.
* Illustrations and Photos:
- Top Left: A line drawing of Mickey Mouse playing a flute.
- Top Right: A line drawing of Mickey Mouse walking.
- Middle Left: A black and white portrait photograph of a young Walt Disney smiling.
- Middle Right: A black and white portrait photograph of a man with glasses, identified as Cemal Nadir Bey.
- Bottom Left: A small comic panel showing a character standing outside a house.
- Bottom Center-Left: A photograph showing a person working at a desk with animation equipment.
- Bottom Center-Right: A group photograph of several men standing together.
- Bottom Right: A comic illustration of a character in a small car.
The piece celebrated the technological novelty of animation while reimagining Walt Disney’s own biography as a didactic narrative of modern creativity, emphasizing perseverance, ingenuity, and self-made success. By foregrounding Disney’s personal struggle and artistic innovation, Akşam translated global cinematic modernity into a locally intelligible moral framework aligned with the early republic’s pedagogical ethos of industriousness and progress.
Yet the article also made an unexpected move: it mentioned that a Turkish animation project was underway, centered on Amcabey, a popular comic character created by Cemal Nadir (Güler), one of the pioneering cartoonists of the early republican era. Much like Mickey Mouse, Amcabey was envisioned as a humorous, accident-prone figure navigating the absurdities of everyday life. However, unlike Mickey’s anthropomorphic form, Amcabey was unmistakably human, embedded in the social and linguistic textures of Turkish urban culture. Although the Amcabey film was never completed or released, its very conception testifies to how global visual technologies inspired local experimentation in new narrative forms.
The Amcabey initiative can be understood as a creative act of appropriation and recontextualization. Turkish artists engaged Western models as cultural interlocutors and produced a distinctive local variant of animated storytelling that responded to national aspirations and global media trends. This brief yet revealing episode from early 1930s Turkey exemplifies the globalization of cinematic modernity and its asymmetric, dialogic circulation, through which ideas, images, and technologies were adapted and reconfigured within domestic frameworks of meaning. When Afacan magazine appeared in 1932, Turkish children encountered Mickey Mouse as part of a new cultural partnership. On its first cover, Mickey stood beside Afacan, a mischievous Turkish boy whose name literally means “clever” or “impish.” Illustrated by Cemal Görkey, Afacan appeared as Mickey’s refik, or companion, a figure through whom global imagery was recoded within a national idiom (Fig. 2).Footnote 8 Their pairing helped shape the visual landscape of early republican childhood and created a cultural space where global visual forms intersected with republican pedagogy.
The first issue of Afacan magazine featuring Mickey Mouse and Afacan, 12 October, 1932. Author’s collection.
FIGURE 2. Long description
A vintage newspaper front page with a complex layout.
* Masthead: At the top, the word A F A C A N is written in large red block letters. Interspersed within and around the letters are various cartoon characters including an ostrich, a monkey, a dog, a goat, a cat, and Mickey Mouse. A young boy in a red shirt and checkered cap stands in the center of the title.
* Header Information: Below the masthead, text indicates the issue number as 1, the price as 100 P A R A, and the date as 13 Tesrinievvel. It also lists the publisher as M. Faruk.
* Central Illustration: A large rectangular frame in the middle shows the character Afacan, a boy in a checkered cap and dark jacket, looking down at Mickey Mouse. Mickey is tipping a small hat toward him. In the background, a smiling moon hangs over a small house.
* Text Columns: Two columns of Turkish text flank the central illustration. The left column is titled Afacanla basbasa and the right column is titled Ilk soz.
* Bottom Comic Strip: A horizontal six-panel comic strip titled Resimli Hikaye: C A B I Efendinin maceralari runs across the bottom. It depicts a man in a suit and glasses interacting with a child and a ladder in an indoor setting.
Within the pages of Afacan, Mickey soon acquired unexpected ideological weight. In a didactic poem, he refuses imported ham in favor of Turkish cheese and sausage, warning that even a mousetrap would fail without domestic goods. This humorous verse encapsulated the ethos of the 1930s Yerli Malı campaigns, which sought to cultivate in children a moralized economic consciousness, teaching them to consume as patriotic citizens (Fig. 3). Through Mickey’s familiar image, the magazine turned a global capitalist icon into a vehicle of national economic pedagogy, linking the pleasures of reading and play with the duties of civic economy.
Mickey Mouse kissing a hand as a gesture of respect during Ramadan Bayram, asking for locally produced nuts as holiday pocket money and thereby promoting domestic consumption among children. Afacan Gülünçlü Çocuk Gazetesi 26, Kanunsani (January) 1933. Author’s collection.
This development is noteworthy. Mickey Mouse, perhaps the clearest emblem of US mass culture and corporate capitalism, was mobilized to advance Turkey’s project of economic independence. What emerged was a process of strategic repurposing in which global symbols were appropriated to promote local ideals of productivity, thrift, and national self-reliance. In this process, Afacan became a medium through which global visual modernity served the cultural engineering of the republic.Footnote 9 Seen in this light, the co-presence of Mickey and Afacan in Turkish print culture reveals a paradox central to early republican modernization: the effort to resist Western economic dominance through the very images Western capitalism had produced. The child reader stood at the intersection of this tension, learning to be both a modern consumer and a national subject through the smiling face of Mickey Mouse.
Given this extensive cultural circulation, it is useful to consider how access to global visual icons Mickey Mouse, Charlie Chaplin, and even Tarzan was shaped by class and geography in early republican Turkey. Long before the spread of television, Mickey Mouse and other global characters circulated internationally, often shared collectively in schools or local reading rooms through rental or pooled purchase systems.Footnote 10 Children following Afacan or Çocuk Sesi in the 1930s could collect Mickey Mouse comic supplements distributed during national and religious holidays, such as 23 April (National Sovereignty and Children’s Day), New Year, or Ramadan, or purchase special issues independently. Some readers even turned these sequential drawings into makeshift cinematic devices, manually rotating the frames to imitate film projection. Such playful practices reveal the permeability between print and moving-image culture during the early republican period, as well as the creativity of children as consumers and producers of media.
Mickey was not alone in this visual world. Charlie Chaplin and Tarzan were likewise featured and even “localized” in Turkish children’s periodicals of the same decade. Much like Mickey, Chaplin was portrayed as a lovable yet şapşal (foolish) character, whose clumsiness lent itself easily to caricature.Footnote 11 His figure appeared in illustrated albums distributed as holiday gifts through newspapers and magazines, often under the rhetoric of “education through laughter.”Footnote 12 Tarzan, meanwhile, was framed less as a colonial hero and more as an exotic curiosity, adapted for younger audiences discovering the outside world through visual fantasy.
By the mid-1930s, these figures had become familiar presences in Turkish popular print culture. A 1936 column in Cumhuriyet referred to Miki Fare Robenson (likely adapted from Mickey Mouse Meets Robinson Crusoe), translated by Ahmet Ekrem, and Miki Fare Albümü prepared by Burhan Bilbaşar.Footnote 13 The columnist praised the quality of foreign children’s publications while criticizing local publishers for their “dull covers and page designs.” At that time, there were four children’s magazines in Istanbul and one in Ankara, most targeting the literate middle class. For example, Raşit Çavaş later recalled that Mickey Mouse comics printed on glossy paper by Pulhan Publishing were considered luxury goods for children outside the major cities, a sign that access to such modern visual materials was mediated by class and geography.Footnote 14
Advertisements and press announcements confirm how these global icons permeated the domestic media environment. A 1934 Afacan advertisement invited children to watch a Mickey Mouse film at Saray Cinema, implying that the readers already recognized him from magazines.Footnote 15 Two years later, Sakarya Cinema announced that part of its revenue would be donated to victims of the Adana earthquake, listing Mickey Mouse among its featured screenings. Similar events were held in Halkevleri (people’s houses), open-air theaters, and private cinemas, attesting to the widespread presence of these icons, even beyond metropolitan Istanbul. Personal recollections reinforce this pattern. Firsthand recollections further illuminate this pattern of circulation. One such account comes from Uğur Ersoy, who remembered watching Mickey Mouse cartoons with both children and adults at his father’s cinema in the southern port city of Mersin during the early years of World War II.Footnote 16 His memory, echoed in similar testimonies, reveals how deeply these global visual icons had entered everyday life, even in provincial towns, by appealing to the shared aspirations of an emerging urban middle class.
In sum, the visibility of figures such as Mickey Mouse, Chaplin, and Tarzan in local Turkish magazines indicates that access to modern visual culture was not confined to metropolitan centers. Whether in Istanbul or in the provincial towns of Anatolia, middle-class and upper-middle–class children encountered these global icons at an unusually early stage, through both print and cinema. Because Afacan was distributed to schools across nearly every region of Turkey, it is also reasonable to assume that children who could not afford to buy the magazines themselves nonetheless accessed them indirectly, borrowing copies from classmates or sharing them in reading circles. Such practices suggest the formation of a participatory culture of circulation that extended beyond direct ownership, allowing printed modernity to travel widely among young readers. Yet, despite scattered traces in memoirs and press reports, the precise circulation numbers of these magazines remain elusive, leaving the true extent of their reach open to informed speculation rather than empirical certainty.
US Stars in the Shadow of Karagöz
Karagöz shadow theater, a cornerstone of Ottoman popular culture, is a traditional form of puppetry that combines humor, satire, and folklore. Karagöz and Hacivat, a shadow play whose origins are often traced back to antiquity, but which took on a more standardized narrative form in Asia and the Middle East, centers on the verbal sparring between Karagöz, representing unrefined wit, and Hacivat, embodying educated sophistication. Performed with translucent leather puppets illuminated against a white screen, these plays were a staple of Ramadan evenings and public festivities, functioning both as popular entertainment and as a vehicle for social commentary.Footnote 17 By the early 20th century, however, the tradition faced the threat of obsolescence in the wake of rapid modernization and changing cultural tastes.Footnote 18
İsmail Hakkı Baltacıoğlu was also one of the key figures who devoted significant effort to reviving Karagöz, striving to reinvigorate the tradition by integrating elements from contemporary global popular culture. His play Karagöz Ankara’da (Karagöz in Ankara) notably introduced the US cartoon figure Mickey Mouse, localized as “Mikimavız,” into the traditional repertoire, accompanied by the “Fare Türküsü,” a humorous adaptation of Turkish folk song conventions (Fig. 4). This experiment reflected both a desire to preserve an endangered art form and an attempt to adapt it to the sensibilities of a new generation.Footnote 19 Upon appearing on stage, Mickey greets Karagöz with reverence, calling him “father,” and attributes the origins of cinema to Turkish shadow theater. The message is clear: although Mickey Mouse may enjoy global fame, the cinematic art form is rooted in Turkish tradition.Footnote 20 Karagöz, flattered, listens patiently, until Mickey suddenly shifts tone, threatening to spread the plague by rubbing against him while making rodent-like squeaks. Given the historical association of rats with plague outbreaks, especially during the early 20th century, this moment subtly reaffirms Mickey’s zoological origin. Soon after, the tension dissolves as Mickey assures Karagöz that he is not a real mouse but a cinema star.Footnote 21 Unlike the anthropomorphized, sanitized Mickey of US cinema, the Turkish adaptation preserves his mouse identity, perhaps as a narrative device to maintain continuity with local tropes.
Mickey Mouse drawing designed by Mahmud Cuda for the play Karagöz in Ankara. Aytek Soner Alpan Collection.
It is important to remember that Baltacıoğlu was more a conservative educator than an entertainer, committed to preserving Karagöz and reimagining it with modern figures that could extend its cultural relevance. However, the project was not without its contradictions. Mahmud Cuda, the artist tasked with designing the puppets for Karagöz in Ankara, rendered Mickey with five human-like fingers, mirroring the human characters. This stood in contrast to the canonical design of Mickey Mouse, who famously wears white gloves with only four fingers. This stylistic choice was originally made by Walt Disney for both technical convenience and visual clarity in early black-and-white animation.Footnote 22 Cuda’s departure from this convention demonstrates the aesthetic logic of shadow puppetry operating independently of cinematic norms.
Karagöz as a Counterfigure to Tarzan and Greta Garbo in Turkish Moral Discourse on Hollywood Stardom
In Karagöz Ankara’da, Mickey Mouse is one of several US cinematic figures to appear on the Turkish shadow stage. Tarzan, Greta Garbo, and, most prominently, Charlie Chaplin, whose silent films enjoyed considerable popularity in Turkish cinemas during the 1930s, also feature in the play (Fig. 5). The narrative centers on Hacivat’s efforts to bring Karagöz back to the stage after a period of absence, reflecting contemporary debates about the place of Karagöz in the cultural life of the republic. Hoping to rekindle his spirit and modernize his image, Hacivat invites each of these Hollywood stars in succession, urging Karagöz to don Western attire and return to performance. Yet none succeed. Ironically, it is not a global icon but a Turkish intellectual, Münir Hayri Egeli, who had financed the staging of the play in Ankara for the benefit of orphans, who finally persuades Karagöz to make his return.Footnote 23 This episode is emblematic of the broader cultural project in early republican Turkey to revitalize traditional forms, such as shadow theater, by integrating them with modern, and often foreign, elements. In the context of Afacan magazine, Karagöz and Hacivat appeared alongside Mickey Mouse in an illustration published during the month of Ramadan, a clear gesture toward cultural renewal (Fig. 6). These efforts reflected a broader attempt to position indigenous art forms within evolving aesthetic preferences and emerging patterns of mass consumption.
Charlie Chaplin, designed by Mahmud Cuda for the play Karagöz in Ankara. Aytek Soner Alpan Collection.
A cartoon featuring Karagöz, Hacivat, African child (?), Mickey Mouse, and other local Turkish figures, heralding the arrival of Ramadan 29 December, 1932. Author’s collection.
FIGURE 6. Long description
The magazine cover is organized into three vertical sections.
At the top, the masthead features the word AFACAN in large red block letters. Various cartoon characters, including monkeys, dogs, and Mickey Mouse, are integrated into and around the letters. A central boy character in a red vest and cap jumps joyfully. Text above the masthead indicates the date 29 Kanunuevvel 1932.
In the middle section, a large rectangular illustration depicts a nighttime scene under a crescent moon with a mosque silhouette in the background. A procession of characters moves from left to right. Karagöz and Hacivat are seen leaning over a wall on the left. Below them, a group including an African child, several local boys, and Mickey Mouse walk together. A boy in the center beats a large Ramadan drum. To the right, two boys are shown running. A small cat is visible in the foreground. Captions below the illustration mention Afacan and his friends welcoming Ramadan.
The bottom section contains the title Afacan, Karagöz ve Hacivat followed by the word PERDEDE. Below this, the page is divided into four columns of Turkish dialogue text, formatted like a play script with character names followed by their lines. A sidebar on the right side of the page includes the price 100 Para and additional dialogue between Karagöz and Hacivat.
In Karagöz Ankara’da, the dialogues between Karagöz and Tarzan are structured around a clear symbolic opposition between civilization and primitivism. Tarzan, as he is widely known, is a fictional character who lives a wildlife in the rainforest, embodying the archetype of the “noble savage.” Karagöz, on the other hand, asserts his civility and cultural superiority throughout their exchange. As soon as Tarzan appears on stage, Karagöz rebukes him for his near nakedness, suggesting that civilized individuals are expected to cover themselves appropriately. In a particularly striking line, he asks, “Are you in a sea bath?”—a reference to the cage-like structures used in Turkey during the early 20th century to separate genders at the beach. Tarzan responds, “The laws of nature demand it,” to which Karagöz sharply replies, “The principles of morality require otherwise.” Karagöz questions Tarzan’s credibility, exclaiming that no one would take a primitive man seriously. Tarzan, in turn, boasts of his fame and wealth in America. Karagöz retorts that in a country full of madmen like America, of course, Tarzan would be celebrated, whereas he lives in poverty. Tarzan then proposes that Karagöz join him in the jungle, suggesting that he also could gain fame and fortune by abandoning modern norms and embracing a more primitive way of life.Footnote 24 Karagöz rejects this, affirming that it is impossible for a “modern man” to undress and regress into a primitive state (Fig. 7).
Tarzan, designed by Mahmud Cuda for the play Karagöz in Ankara. Aytek Soner Alpan Collection.
In the following scenes, Tarzan mimics the calls of various animals and invites Karagöz to join him in the jungle, promising that he will learn the language of the wild and ultimately live as an equal among its creatures. He emphasizes the jungle’s abundant natural resources, food, water, and shelter, offered freely by the environment, which sharply contrasts with the inflation and economic struggles of city life.Footnote 25 This portrayal reflects Marx’s theory of alienation, which critiques capitalist modernity for disconnecting individuals from their inherent human nature and vital needs. Marx’s concept of Entfremdung (alienation) describes how, under capitalist modes of production, workers become estranged from the essential aspects of their human nature. As Wood explains, Marx identifies four key dimensions of this alienation: workers are alienated from the product of their labor, from the labor process itself, from their “species-being” or human essence, and from other people.Footnote 26 In capitalist production, labor is no longer an expression of human creativity but becomes an imposed activity governed by external forces. Rather than being a source of self-realization, work becomes a means of survival, reducing the worker to a mere commodity. This condition not only strips individuals of agency but also dissolves the social and communal bonds that constitute human fulfillment. Therefore, alienation under capitalism is not merely economic but existential, leading to a profound loss of meaning, autonomy, and connectedness in the modern industrial world.Footnote 27 Tarzan’s vision of life in harmony with nature symbolizes a yearning to overcome this estrangement by restoring a more authentic connection to oneself and one’s community.
Despite Tarzan’s persistent attempts to persuade Karagöz, the latter remains unconvinced. This failed conversion is significant because it reveals the classificatory logic underlying Baltacıoğlu’s project. Tarzan functions as a foil through which the boundaries of civilized identity are articulated. The dialogue reaches a climax when Tarzan solemnly invokes abstract concepts such as “honor” and “virtue,” prompting a discussion of the social meanings attached to these values. The exchange reveals a discursive framework that links civilization, morality, social discipline, and modernity. Within this framework, concepts such as honor and virtue operate as markers of civilized belonging, naturalizing a particular vision of the modern self and shaping the categories through which social identities are understood and evaluated.Footnote 28
When Karagöz asks how Tarzan recovers from illness in the jungle, Tarzan proudly declares he never falls sick. Karagöz calls him a liar and argues that modern medicine, unlike the ineffective traditional remedies, has developed cures for diseases like typhus.Footnote 29 Given that Turkey, even during that period, was grappling with epidemics and limited access to health care, this defense of scientific medicine takes on a didactic tone aimed at the audience, particularly children. More significantly, the dialogue reflects broader public discourses on health and hygiene in early republican Turkey. In a striking moment, Karagöz challenges Tarzan’s reliance on primitive remedies and praises modern medicine for having found cures to diseases such as typhus. This moment is not merely comic relief; it resonates with the public health campaigns of the era, which aimed to educate children and families about hygiene, vaccination, and the benefits of modern medicine. Rasimoğlu argues that the early republic actively constructed the “healthy child” as a symbol of national progress and employed visual and textual propaganda to instill biomedical norms in the population.Footnote 30 In this light, Karagöz’s promotion of modern medicine over Tarzan’s traditional methods mirrors the state’s pedagogical rhetoric and its investment in rational, scientific health discourse.
The final scene culminates with Karagöz declaring, “You may be physically stronger than me, but intellectually I am superior!” This type of opposition is emblematic of traditional Karagöz performances, in which characters engage in sharp verbal sparring and witty exchanges, an interaction style that resonates deeply with the audience’s expectations. This discourse reflects the influence of positivist and Darwinian thought on the dichotomy between the “modern” and the “primitive” human. The contrast presented by Karagöz and Tarzan encapsulates a broader intellectual tradition in which modernity is often equated with civilization, progress, and rationality. In comparison, primitiveness is linked to nature, instinct, and simplicity. This binary opposition is deeply rooted in 19th-century and early 20th-century positivist epistemologies and Darwinian evolutionary theories, which framed human development as a linear progression from a primitive to a civilized state.Footnote 31 Darwinism provided a scientific veneer to such distinctions, which often were used to justify social hierarchies and claims of cultural superiority.
Baltacıoğlu’s didactic approach in Karagöz Ankara’da employs this paradigm explicitly, simplifying complex social and scientific ideas into narratives accessible to children. The dialogue between Tarzan, the emblem of natural, instinctual existence, and Karagöz, the representative of civilized intellect, dramatizes this tension, reflecting contemporary debates about modernization and identity in early republican Turkey. This literary device serves not only as entertainment but also as an ideological conduit reinforcing positivist, modernist notions of progress and civilization.Footnote 32
After Tarzan exits the stage, the next guest is none other than Greta Garbo, one of Hollywood’s most internationally recognized female stars of the 1930s. As Garbo enters, Karagöz immediately begins criticizing her in a tone shaped by traditional gender norms. He asks how she became so famous, to which Garbo replies that it was because of her “man-like voice.” Karagöz reacts uneasily to this answer, insisting that a woman’s voice ought to sound “like a woman’s,” thereby reinforcing culturally embedded expectations of gendered vocality.Footnote 33 This exchange highlights a pivotal moment in the performance, during which vocal tone becomes a site of gender anxiety. Although Garbo did not have a voice “like a man,” her vocal qualities were certainly atypical for female stars of her time. When she made her transition from silent films to sound with Anna Christie (1930), her first spoken line, “Gimme a whisky, ginger ale on the side, and don’t be a stingy, baby,” was met with both awe and fascination. Her voice was low, husky, and resonant, often described as smoky, sultry, or enigmatic.Footnote 34 This unusual vocal timbre contributed significantly to her mystique, aligning with an androgynous star persona that blurred conventional gender distinctions.
Garbo’s deep voice challenged the Hollywood norms that typically associated femininity with softness, clarity, and a higher pitch. Rather than detracting from her appeal, it became integral to her image as an emotionally distant yet profoundly magnetic figure. In Karagöz Ankara’da, Karagöz’s discomfort with Garbo’s vocality serves as a performative reinforcement of normative gender binaries. However, through parody and exaggeration, the scene also opens space for a critique of these rigid norms, gesturing toward a broader conversation about gender, performance, and voice in modernity. In the ensuing dialogue, Garbo’s distinctive, almost theatrical “drunken walk,” familiar from her Hollywood roles, is immediately deemed immoral by Karagöz. He declares her to be a woman outside the bounds of normative behavior.
Garbo proudly responds that her way of walking made her famous in America and that she has become rich as a result. Karagöz, echoing his earlier remarks to Tarzan, whom he labeled “primitive” for his shirtless body yet envied for his wealth, retorts, “You may be as rich as you like, but you neither walk nor speak like a proper woman.” When Garbo proposes to teach Turkish women how to walk gracefully like her, Karagöz reacts with outrage. For him, the Turkish woman is a noble figure: she fought on the frontlines during the War of Independence (1919–22), then toiled in factories, raised children, and sustained the nation through domestic labor. If she were to speak or move like Garbo, Karagöz claims, she would dishonor the country’s dignity. Garbo, in turn, argues that without adopting her style, Turkish women will never produce a movie star of global fame.
This tense exchange reveals a layered discourse through which questions of celebrity recognition, gender performance, nationalism, and moral authority are negotiated. Garbo’s stylized bodily comportment, what Judith Butler might define as a form of gender performance, clashes with Karagöz’s construction of a “national morality,” in which women’s bodies symbolize collective virtue and resistance.Footnote 35 The body becomes a political battleground: Garbo’s sensual walk and low voice are markers of global stardom and modern femininity in a Western mold, as Karagöz defends an idealized image of the Turkish woman as devoid of any feminine association, modest, and industrious, a figure central to the nation-building project of early republican Turkey.Footnote 36 Rather than a mere culture clash, the scene stages a confrontation between two models of womanhood: one cosmopolitan and performative, the other nationalist and sacrificial. Garbo’s insistence on stylistic femininity as a route to visibility challenges the Turkish model of virtue through labor and service. In this regard, the dialogue not only negotiates aesthetics and morality but also exposes the gendered fault lines of modernity itself.
As can be seen, through these dialogues the playwright Baltacıoğlu underscores the idea that US cinema icons are not to be admired or imitated. Instead, he elevates the image of the “modest Turkish woman” as the ideal figure, one who embodies national virtue, dignity, and moral integrity. Although he often is categorized as a modernist intellectual committed to educational reform and national progress, his work also reveals a distinct form of Occidentalism, that is, a critical stance toward Western cultural hegemony and values. In this framework, Karagöz emerges as a paradoxical figure: despite his outdated lifestyle and ragged appearance, he is portrayed as honorable, dignified, and civilized, at least by the moral standards promoted by the early republican ethos. He is neither a mouse like Mickey, who functions as a commodified and infantilized figure of modern consumerism, nor a half-naked Tarzan who roams primitively through the jungle, nor an immoral woman like Greta Garbo, whose allure and fame are linked to seductive modern femininity. Each of these US figures represents a form of modernity that is deemed incompatible with the Turkish national character as envisioned by Baltacıoğlu.
Miki Denen Maskara (Mickey the So-Called Buffoon): Moral and Pedagogical Critiques of US Cinema and Comic Culture
Enver Naci Gökşen, a prominent advocate of language reform during the early republican period, expressed sharp criticism following his attendance at a primary school performance. His response was published as a vehement article. Gökşen praised the children’s performance of the tango “in tails befitting their race” as appropriate; however, his tone changed markedly when the children reappeared dressed as Mickey Mouse, crawling on the floor with tails, ears drooping over their shoulders, clad in black bodysuits designed to fully resemble mice, and with slightly hunched backs to complete the effect. The article even included an illustration depicting the children in this guise.Footnote 37 Although Gökşen questioned the purpose of the performance, he ultimately condemned it as mere imitation and urged that children be directed toward more serious pursuits.
Although this article may appear isolated, it fits within a broader pattern of Gökşen’s critiques of US cultural imports such as Mickey Mouse and other comic books. In another piece for Yeni Adam, he denounced the majority of children’s magazines, accusing them of operating under a mercantile mindset and offering no educational value. He described their content as “Mikifare monstrosities’ illogical and unintelligent buffoonery,” alongside other trivial stories, including “Uncle Tom’s Adventures on the Moon,” “Who Robbed the Safe?” and “Sesame, open” (a reference to Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves), as well as “Indian bandits and other nonsense.” Gökşen worried that such US cultural products contributed nothing beneficial to the development of Turkish children (Fig. 8). Echoing themes found in Baltacıoğlu’s play Karagöz Ankara’da, his writings reveal a stance resistant to cultural capitalism and an explicit call for the production of more nationally grounded literature by Turkish authors.
Illustration of the Fare Çocuk (mouse child) described in Gökşen’s article, artist unknown. Yeni Adam 481, 16 March 1944. SALT online archive.
Whether by deliberate intent or coincidence, Yeni Adam magazine issue 284, also featuring the “Mikimavız” scenes from Baltacıoğlu’s Karagöz Ankara’da, included a critique of Mickey Mouse by Haşim Nahit. He characterized Mickey Mouse as a new form of fable but contended that humanity’s tendency to understand itself through animal representations was rooted in intellectual laziness and cultural backwardness. He lamented that writers who favored “Mickey plays,” in which animals speak rather than humans, failed to engage their minds with scientific inquiry as he did. Nahit further argued that Karagöz, with its exclusively human characters and themes, stands as a national symbol reflecting the advanced intellectual achievements of the Turkish people dating back thousands of years. Consequently, he called for the immediate removal of Mickey Mouse–like figures from children’s media in Turkey.Footnote 38 This critique aligns with broader contemporary anxieties about foreign cultural influence and the preservation of national identity in early republican Turkey.Footnote 39 Beyond the critiques of Mickey Mouse, another animal figure that faced even harsher criticism in the 1930s was King Kong, whose cinematic debut sparked global fascination. In 1934, Baltacıoğlu, writing in Yeni Adam (which he both edited and published) denounced the film in an article titled “Bugünkü Sinema Cemiyet Düşmanıdır (Contemporary Cinema Is the Enemy of Society)”. Baltacıoğlu likened King Kong to the jinn and fairy tales of underdeveloped societies, asserting that belief in such “supernatural” beings had no place in a secular, rational society.Footnote 40
For Baltacıoğlu, these fantastical narratives failed to provide any intellectual value to either children or adults. Instead, they merely served the profit motives of large capital-driven media corporations. Echoing contemporaries like Enver Naci Gökşen, he argued that Turkish society must secularize and prioritize the formation of the modern individual. To do so, it must suppress primitive instincts, such as fear, lust, fantasy, and the craving for miracles, and ensure that cinema and visual culture refrain from stimulating these baser emotions. Cinema, in his view, only held value if it contributed to Turkey’s modernization project and the moral and intellectual cultivation of its citizens. As previously discussed, Baltacıoğlu and other Turkish intellectuals saw the traditional Karagöz shadow play as an ideal didactic tool, one that promoted education and ethical development, in stark contrast to the seductive illusions of global cinematic capitalism.
In modernizing societies, fables and supernatural narratives have often been criticized for hindering rational progress and promoting escapist or regressive worldviews. Jack Zipes argues that fairy tales and fantastical stories historically served ideological functions, often reinforcing hierarchical norms or discouraging critical thinking.Footnote 41 He emphasizes that in capitalist modernity, such narratives became mass-produced tools of conformity, shaping passive consumers rather than critically engaged citizens. Similarly, Walter Benjamin warned that the commodification of storytelling in modern culture, particularly through figures like Mickey Mouse, eroded the communal and experiential value of traditional narratives. Expanding on this, Miriam Hansen reads the Mickey Mouse phenomenon within the broader context of the Frankfurt School’s concerns with mass culture and distraction.Footnote 42 For thinkers like Kracauer, Benjamin, and Adorno, Mickey represented a mechanized form of entertainment that simultaneously reflected and reinforced the alienation inherent in capitalism.
Critiques of mass culture, popular entertainment, and the social effects of modern media were not confined to European and North American intellectual circles. Similar concerns emerged in early republican Turkey, where cultural reformers such as İsmail Hakkı Baltacıoğlu and Haşim Nahit criticized figures like Mickey Mouse and King Kong. Their objections centered on questions of national identity, moral education, and the pedagogical goals of the new republic. In this context, supernatural and anthropomorphic characters appeared incompatible with projects of secular and rationalist education, as well as broader efforts to cultivate an ideal citizenry. Reformers instead promoted cultural forms such as Karagöz, which they regarded as morally instructive and pedagogically useful. Situating these debates alongside broader international discussions of mass culture highlights how shared concerns about media, morality, and subject formation acquired distinct meanings within different political and cultural contexts.
Despite all this, unlike figures like Baltacıoğlu or Enver Naci, the Turkish socialist intellectual writer Nazım Hikmet did not frame his moral criticism of Mickey from a nationalist perspective. In a 1936 article written under the pseudonym Orhan Selim, he remarked that even as an adult, he followed Mickey Mouse and other Disney characters featured in film and comic magazines with genuine interest. However, he soon turned to discussing the banning of certain films in Turkey at the time. His critique centered on the portrayal of African peoples, many of whom were still under colonial rule, as primitive or even monstrous in such films and cartoons. He warned Turkish publishers against presenting this content to children in a “localized” form and urged them to avoid reproducing such stereotypes.Footnote 43
As contemporary scholarship has emphasized, Mickey’s Mellerdrammer (1933) is a key example of how early Disney productions reproduced and normalized racial stereotypes within mainstream US media. In this short film, Mickey performs in blackface and participates in a parody of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a practice that scholars such as Henry Giroux and Nicholas Sammond have analyzed as emblematic of the ways in which Disney’s early animations reinforced racist imagery under the guise of family entertainment.Footnote 44 Sammond, in particular, situates this cartoon within the tradition of US minstrelsy, arguing that such representations contributed to the construction of whiteness by portraying Blackness through comedic, primitive, and subhuman representations.Footnote 45 That a Turkish writer like Nazım Hikmet was sensitive to these dynamics in 1936, even as Disney was rapidly globalizing, underscores the transnational visibility of racialized media and the ethical concerns it raised across different cultural contexts.
Conclusion
The journey of Mickey Mouse, and alongside him, other transnational icons such as Charlie Chaplin, King Kong, and Tarzan, into the cultural life of early republican Turkey provides a compelling lens through which to examine the processes of modernization, identity formation, and cultural negotiation in the interwar period. Far from representing a one-way channel of Western cultural domination, the Turkish reception of these figures demonstrates a complex interplay between global entertainment and local pedagogical agendas. As this study has shown, US popular imagery was not confined to elite cinemas or metropolitan households; it reached deep into provincial towns through magazines, film screenings, and children’s cultural programs, suggesting a surprising depth of early cultural globalization. Yet these presences were never politically or ideologically neutral. Instead, they provoked vivid debates among Turkish intellectuals, educators, and artists who struggled to reconcile the enchantment of modern visual entertainment with the moral and civic imperatives of nation-building.
These debates unfolded during a transformative decade, when the young republic was reshaping its institutions and cultural foundations. The state’s emphasis on secularism, scientific rationalism, and disciplined citizenship created fertile ground for discussions about childhood, education, and morality. Within this context, global figures such as Mickey Mouse, Chaplin’s Tramp, or the jungle hero Tarzan became more than mere objects of amusement; they functioned as symbolic actors in the cultural drama of Turkish modernity. Some welcomed them as educational tools capable of fostering literacy, humor, and cosmopolitan awareness among children; others denounced them as embodiments of commodified, morally ambiguous global capitalism that threatened to erode national and ethical values.
The localization of these icons in Turkish children’s media, particularly in magazines like Afacan and Çocuk Sesi, highlights how global visual cultures were reinterpreted within domestic frameworks. Editors and illustrators reimagined Mickey, Chaplin, and even Tarzan in Turkish idioms, pairing them with local characters such as Afacan or traditional figures like Karagöz. In doing so, they produced hybrid narratives that linked imported symbols of modernity with national pedagogical aims. Mickey could become an advocate of Yerli Malı, Chaplin a lovable fool whose humor taught moral restraint, and Tarzan a curiosity whose adventures were tamed for moral instruction. Through such adaptations, global capitalism’s icons were repurposed into instruments of civic education and patriotic consumption, revealing how early Turkish modernity sought to domesticate the foreign within its own ideological boundaries.
Yet this process also drew sharp criticism. Reformers like İsmail Hakkı Baltacıoğlu and Haşim Nahit regarded such figures as cultural distractions, undermining the moral and intellectual mission of the republic. Baltacıoğlu’s Karagöz Ankara’da, which introduced a Turkish variant of Mickey (“Mikimavız”) into the traditional shadow play, attempted to reconcile popular media fascination with national educational goals. The play’s resolution, in which Karagöz reasserts moral authority over the foreign interloper, illustrated an enduring preference for human-centered, local narratives over mechanized, commercialized ones. Similar reservations were voiced in Yeni Adam, where Mickey and Chaplin were criticized as symptoms of cultural infantilization and foreign dependency. Socialist writer Nazım Hikmet added a more explicitly anti-imperialist perspective, questioning the racial and colonial undertones embedded in imported film and animation. His critiques anticipated later analyses by scholars including Jack Zipes, Henry Giroux, and Nicholas Sammond, who exposed how early Hollywood and Disney productions encoded hierarchies of race, class, and civilization under the veneer of universal entertainment.
Ultimately, the Turkish case demonstrates that modernity was not imported wholesale from the West but actively rewritten through local acts of selection, critique, and transformation. Rather than passive consumption, the reception of Mickey Mouse, Chaplin, and Tarzan reveals a process of negotiation, a localized modernity that balanced fascination with resistance. These global icons became hybrid figures: simultaneously foreign and familiar, capitalist yet pedagogical, cosmopolitan yet nationalized. Through their transformation in Turkish print, performance, and critique, they served as both mirrors of global modernity and canvases upon which a distinctly Turkish vision of progress, morality, and cultural self-definition was drawn.
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank Ömer Durmaz for his comments and suggestions for additional sources. Special thanks are also due to Mustafa Türkan, İdil Çetin, Leyla Kayhan, Atacan Atakan, and Alper Kerem Koşar for their valuable feedback. The author is particularly grateful to the anonymous reviewers, whose careful reading and detailed comments significantly improved the manuscript.
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