Walt Disney, who made a mouse enter taining, last week made a mousetrap educational. To illustrate an atomic chain reaction for Our Friend the Atom on ABC's Disneyland, Disney moviemakers crowded 200 mousetraps together, each with a pair of pingpong balls poised on its taut spring. When Physicist Heinz Haber, the show's narrator, tossed a single pingpong ball into the arena of massed traps—so that each sprung trap would fire two balls to spring two more traps—the screen erupted into a chaos of snaps, pings and pongs. The mousetraps were the brightest touch in a lucid, hour-long primer, mostly in cartoons, tracing the story of atomic energy from Democritus to Rickover. The title ominously suggested that the show might smack more of Pluto than plutonium, but apart from small blemishes, e.g., giving a Russian accent to the villainous genie in the illustrative fable of the genie-in-the-vessel, the lesson was straightforward, cleverly taught and free of the cuteness with which some TV educators have patronized the mass audience.
Viewers can look forward to lots more of Disney: last week he signed a $9,000,000 contract to do three filmed series for ABC next season, including another round of Disneyland. For nine weeks millions of viewers suffered through their TV screens with young (30), curl-cropped Charles Lincoln Van Doren as he stood inside one of the soundproof pressure cookers of NBC's game of chance, Twenty-One, and answered a staggering variety of questions ranging from Lincoln to Latin America, from chemistry to comic strips. Last week
Cliff hanger Van Doren gave his fellow sufferers something special to cheer about —he broke TV's record ($100,000) for big giveaway bonanzas, built his winnings up to $104,500. As a result of it all, Bachelor Van Doren, son of Poet Mark Van Doren,* has become a sort of All-America Ph.D. When he enters his English classroom at Columbia University, his students rise to cheer him. He is being swamped with TV offers and marriage proposals. (A tax expert said he could save $16,000 by getting married this year, and a girl wrote: "I would like to meet you. I am 20, and my bust is 37.") Charlie Van Doren was painfully torn between going on again this week at the risk of losing some of his big stake to a new opponent, or getting out now that he has enough to finance a "snazzy sports car" and several free summers in which to finish a thesis on Poet William Cowper and write a novel. "Something about it gets you," he said.