Two major stories in this week's issue deal with radically different kinds of American dream machines. One concerns the immensely successful girlie magazines, now under pressure because of the Supreme Court's new ruling on pornography; the other reports on an empire no pornography ruling could ever touch, that of Walt Disney Productions.

Disney produced the first picture that Movie Critic Richard Schickel ever saw, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Schickel was then seven years old. Years later, he became the regular critic for LIFE and also the author of the only major study to date of Disney's life and work, The Disney Version (1968). "His organization," Schickel says, "touches everybody during the most impressionable years. It's not what they do that's harmful, but what they don't do."

Schickel expands this thesis in the Show Business section.

Like Schickel, TIME'S Hollywood Correspondent Roland Flamini entered a movie theater for the first time in his life as a six-year-old in England to see Snow White. One of his biggest surprises in reporting the Disney story was the style of the Disney executives he met:

"They were efficient, businesslike and more clean-cut and soberly dressed than most of their counterparts at other studios."

To prepare for her article on "Disney After Walt," Show Business Writer Judy Fayard sat through three full-length Disney cartoons, all of which she had seen before. The spell lingered, too, for she wore a Mouseketeer hat as she wrote the story.

If sober efficiency typifies the proprietors of Mickey Mouse, it also marks the inventor of the Bunny, Chicago Correspondent Richard Woodbury reports. "I was surprised to find Hefner such a serious, business-minded person," he says. "We met in a second-floor conference room of the famous Playboy Mansion and talked for nearly two hours, and there were no girls or hedonists around."

Contributing Editor Paul Gray wrote the Press story on Hefner and his competitors. Before he joined TIME, he was a professor of English literature at Princeton, where, he says, "I used to feel like reading magazines more than students' papers." He got his wish with this story -- stacks of sex magazines as assigned reading. "I've done less interesting research," admits Gray, who wrote his doctoral dissertation on James Joyce, "but at this point I still think that one of Joyce's words is worth a thousand of Hefner's pictures."

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