Editing Disney (section)

== History ==
[[Image:Walt_Disney.jpg|300px|thumb|right|Walt Disney, planning out his [[/v/|underwater hypercapitalist utopia]] ]]
Once upon a time, there was a man from the magical land of Chicago named Walter who liked to draw, and so he got into the new film industry in the roaring 20s making short animated films. He was a decent artist who soon got a firm grip on animation, but he was a better businessman who especially understood the importance of iconography, image and self promotion. He gathered talented people, cultivated their skills and methods and pushed the envelope with ''Steamboat Willie'', the first animated short with sound. By the 1930s Disney had become a household name with a large number of popular shorts and eventually releasing ''Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs'' first feature length animated film in 1937, which he followed up with ''Pinocchio'' in '40 and more afterwards. During [[The World Wars|World War II]] he got a lot of money from the US Government making Propaganda and afterwards, Disney was swimming in money like a Cartoon Duck. He had a vast studio with an entrenched niche, a brand known around the world, the cash to pursue big prestige projects like massive theme parks and became an icon of American Success. He was also a hard-driving union-busting sexist jerk who smoked himself to death and also (unintentionally) helped pidgeon-hole animation as being something "For Kids".

Even so, things were not going so well for the Disney Corporation in the third quarter of the 20th century. After Walt got a taste of building theme parks, he fell for utopianism.  Believing that he could make a better city, he and a small group of like-minded yes-men became increasingly distracted with their pet project of buying up large swaths of Florida to make a glorious worker's paradise (except not like [[Communism|that one]]) known as EPCOT. 

As a result, the company wasn't paying attention to trends.  They missed the bus on television, leaving fertile ground for lower cost, faster turnaround studios like Hanna-Barbera and a resurgent Warner Bros.  What they lacked in quality they made up for in quantity (especially Hanna-Barbarra, who worked out how to use layered frames to animate a character's arm or head instead of having to redraw the character from scratch for each frame), shutting Disney out of the children's television market for decades as producers discovered that cartoons were WAAAAAY more profitable if you treated them as 20 minute toy advertisements. They repackaged some of their old shorts for broadcast but there were only so many of those to go around and the trickle of new ones dried up as animated shorts died off in the early 60s.  The pace of new Disney feature films dropped to one every few years, with lower cost live action family films filling in the void.  
[[File:Eilonwy.gif|left]]
Walt's death brought an INSTANT end to the envisioned EPCOT project, and what followed was essentially a lost decade of cost cutting and rummaging through Walt's notes for half baked ideas to keep the company going through the 70's.  Tired of this creatively bankrupt environment, Don Bluth and several other key animators prominently quit to form their own studio and went on to dominate children's movies in the early 80's.  The absolute low point of Disney's dark age came with the aptly named "The Black Hole" and "The Black Cauldron", neither of which will ever see a remake (god forbid anyway).  Their idea pipe was empty; they'd been reduced to own-brand ripoffs of Star Wars and Tolkien, both of which plowed in harder than [[Star Wars|Porkins]].

This would not stand.  Tired of watching the company simultaneously sink and burn, the board brought on Michael Eisner from rival Paramount to straighten things out.  The first decade of his tenure was a string of successes.  Disney's animation department entered its renaissance, and began a partnership with Pixar. The cold war ended and a booming 90's economy juiced park sales.  Understanding that they couldn't ignore TV, Disney bought ABC and began building it's own cable TV Channel.  But like General Lee in the Civil War, Eisner would have his Gettysburg, a mistake that would break him forever... and it was Disney Paris. 

Disney Paris almost destroyed Disney.  Had it been attempted later in the 90's, with more debt, it WOULD have bankrupted the company.  The park was a gamble; it was too big to fail... and it failed. It would be years before it turned a profit.  It caused every park under construction to grind to a halt.  Projects too far along to be cancelled outright had to be severely cut back, while potentially more lucrative long term projects like Disney Regional Entertainment (which planned to go after Dave & Busters and Chuck'e'Cheese) died.  Eisner, previously a bold thinking risktaker, became a defensive, embattled CEO firing anyone who looked like a threat to his position; this brought an end to their animation renaissance as Jeffery Katzenberg was kicked out only to go found Dreamworks ''(FYI, the midget prince and his perfect city in Shrek is a brazen jab at Eisner)''.  

After Disney Paris, the company shifted to a model of growth through acquisitions that turned them into the Borg we know today. They bought Pixar. Then they bought the Jim Henson Company.  Marvel.  Lucasfilm.  FOX.  If there is a profitable set of Intellectual Properties that fits a niche in the current media environment, they'll be there to snarf it up. And as is the case with many media empires, many of these franchises have turned into shells of their former selves; some even to the extent of becoming near-dead franchises.

The issue with Disney is essentially the [[Lorraine Williams]] problem scaled up to [[Epic]] levels of money.  While Walt was alive, his focus on quality and creativity reigned.  But the Disney of today is in some ways reflective of the greater malaise of the western media in general; the sense that the best stories have already been told, that there's nothing new or compelling to do. Disney has even gone on to cannibalize its own properties, first by making low-budget sequels of the Classic and Renaissance era films for the direct-to-video market, and then doing it again decades later with live-action remakes. As of 2022, Disney appears to be returning to the post-Walt era of releasing an increasing number of forgettable films than culturally relevant successes, leaning heavily on brand familiarity with Marvel and Star Wars over its own in-house properties.