The Walt Disney Studios, and its divisions and subsidiaries, have always upheld a very loose relationship between well-established historical fact, and their productions.

One case in point would be The Prince of Egypt, a delightful tale of Moses growing up. It clearly shows Moses playing around the slaves building the pyramids, and that he was personally responsible for the pug nose of the Sphinx.

• The last of the Pyramids was completed about 5 generations before Moses (if you date Moses according the Torah, collected about 400 years after his time).
• The Sphinx had a nose until it was used for target practice during World War I, “The War to End All War”, 34 centuries later, or about 0.9 centuries ago.

Minor details, but they bug me.

Then there is the recent flap over the Disney 9/11 documentary that aired on ABC last month. ABC insisted that they modify it to remove provably false (potentially libelous) scenes that indicated that the Clinton administration ineptly aided Bin Laden.

Mallard Fillmore, a syndicated conservative cartoon duck (worth watching in order to keep an eye on the pulse of that side of issues), spent last week railing about the way “powerful Democrats” forced ABC to change the documentary to “make Clinton look better”.

Clinton, in the midst of the Lewinsky distraction, had Bin Laden’s training camps bombed, to the ire and condemnation of Republicans in Congress. Intelligence reports for the first 9 months of 2001 regularly mentioned Bin Laden as a growing probable threat, but were apparently dismissed by the new administration.

I understand the need to sometimes fudge history to tell a more exciting story, but I think Disney productions would not suffer too much if they at least got recent facts straight before putting a story before the public.It just irks me how a big media group like Disney actively contributes to cultural illiteracy. Call it a pet peeve.