Disney
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"We have no obligation to make history. We have no obligation to make art. We have no obligation to make a statement. To make money is our only objective."
- – Michael Eisner, former CEO of Disney and Avatar of Capitalism
"Now, look at it! Gaze upon my empire of joy! "
- – Walt Disney, Epic Rap Battles of History
What Geedubs aspires to be.
The Walt Disney Company, also known as Disney or The Mouse, is an ancient juggernaut of a company made in ages past, and therefore is completely out of touch and sees everyone as walking piles of cash. They started out as an animated film company and went from there.
Chances are you’ve heard of them, and so has /tg/, mainly because some franchises we like have been bought up by the greedy motherfuckers over the years. Mainly Star Wars.
History
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 amount of shorts and eventually releasing the 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 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. It started in the 1950s when they largely missed out on Television. Disney's work was definitely good, but it was also time consuming, labor intensive and expensive and they could not churn out enough stuff for the minimal returns TV provided at the time. Instead it simply packaged up it's theatrical shorts for broadcast, leaving that space to be colonized by shameless corner cutters/innovative streamliners like Hanna-Barberra. By the 1960s (and especially after Walt's death in '66) it's animation studio gradually withered as animated shorts before films stopped being a thing, producing very little new content; output of feature pictures fell to one every three or four years. The company got by on theme parks, inoffensive live-action family dreck and inertia from an increasingly dated back-catalogue as Hollywood changed around them.
By the 1970s the rot really set in, most notably lot of the new talent in animation said "Screw You!" to the mouse and set out on their own, including Don Bluth who set up a rival company which could match Disney in animation quality and was willing to take creative risks with it. The company hit its darkest days with the aptly named The Black Hole and The Black Cauldron, both of which followed trends set by others (Star Wars and Ralph Bakshi's Lord of the Rings) and neither of which are likely to ever see a remake. But in the late 80's they got back on their feet making new cartoons for TV, and a series of theatrical hits known as the Disney Renaissance and ultimately the acquisition Pixar, giving it both a source of cutting edge technological breakthroughs and a set of excellent storytellers.
But that was just an established film company getting it's groove back in the late 80s and 90s. In the 21st century the Disney Company gradually morphed into the Fucking Borg. It technically started in the 1980s when they got their tentacles into Pixar, which they gradually subsumed, though this was just picking up something small and still forming that might (and ultimately did) grow into something groundbreaking. The serious assimilation happened after the turn of the millennium as the company ate up The Jim Henson Company in 2004, Marvel Comics in '09, Lucasfilm in '12 and 20th Century Fox in '19. If there's a bunch of valuable IPs up for sale that covers some base in the entertainment environment, the Mouse will snarf them up and milk them for all their worth.
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. While Disney has had other extremely competent creative minds (Bluth, Katzenberg, Feige, etc), the attitude of the executive management is that no one from the creative side will ever be allowed to take the helm. This dynamic famously played out in the 90's with Katzenberg, who presided over Disney's animation renaissance, but was thrown out, and ended up founding DreamWorks as revenge. Meanwhile Don Bluth left the company to create a successful career of animated films, including most famously the beautifully animated Land Before Time. Compounding the problem is that the company did have competent management under Michael Eisner, but he gambled too much of the company on Disney Paris and since then leadership has been adverse to taking risks unless it's buying something they know is good right now.
/tg/ Relevance
For better or worse Disney has been one of the biggest forces in pop culture period for nearly a century. Part of this is that it worms it's way into kid's childhoods and laying the foundation for sales down the line. A Seven Year Old who saw Snow White in '37 would grow up to have kids who'd they take to see Sleeping Beauty in 59 to try to share some of that nostalgic magic, who'd in turn take their kids to see The Little Mermaid in 89, who took their kids to see Moana in 2016. A lot of their most Iconic work is Fantasy and bits and pieces of imagery has wormed it's way out and into other works. If not lifted outright, than responded against. See Princesses, Disney did not invent the idea of a young woman who's the daughter of a monarch as being a plot element in stories but you'd be hard pressed to find a depiction of someone who holds that title in fiction nowadays which does follow the template or deliberately breaks the mold that the Mouse made.
Disney is big on IP management. It has its roster and with a few exceptions that it likes to keep buried for being bad or (ahem) Problematic (coughsongofthesouthcough) it tries to keep them in the Zeitgeist so they'd keep up a trickle of cash for years to come. In the 2010s there was a set of Live Action remakes or accompaniments to old Animated classics to cash in on nostalgia and remind the public that, yes, The Lion King still exists.
In particular, a 2010s acquisition spree led to Disney owning both Marvel Comics and Star Wars, both significant /tg/ adjacent-and-related properties, means we'll probably be talking about Disney owned properties for decades. Tolkien specifically wrote that he did not want the Walt Disney Company to adapt his work for film, probably because of major alterations done to the original work in various adaptions by them in his lifetime.
Fun Facts
- Disney is one of the leading purchasers of explosives after the US army. Yep, the house of mouse is second only to the Department of Defense in terms of explosives purchases, though these are mostly of the firework and filmmaking variety.
- Disney Theme Parks are designed with the intent of maximizing pleasure. For example, trash cans colors and service doors are painted in a shade of color that is unnoticeable or forgettable. Disney may hate the lore of their franchises but they take their theme parks dead serious.
- Until 2022, Disney World could manage its own entire county in Florida due to legislation that was enacted there almost half a century ago, meaning that is the closest we have yet gotten to a corporate government since the East India Company in India.
- Walt Disney actually played a role in NASA's lunar program; in the 1950s, Wernher von Braun was having difficulty convincing the US Government to fund a civilian space program with the goal of eventually landing on the moon. So, he collaborated with Walt to appeal directly to the American public, by using Disney's TV access to present his proposals for space exploration and generate interest in the field. NASA was formed three years later, with Braun and his team brought on as rocket engineers.
- Walt Disney once considered St. Louis as a possible site for Disney world, but he eventually settled on Florida, most likely due to the year round warm weather.
- Walt Disney moved from Chicago to California to establish himself as an animator. Chicago was an early hub of film production in the early 1900s, but the weather and economy of California resulted in most people moving there, and Disney was among them.
- Disney once considered Big Idea (the guys who created VeggieTales) to be a serious competitor. Big Idea were some of the first people to master computer animated film production. Veggietales got its start in 1993, whereas Toy Story didn't come out until 1995, and a lot of Pixar's prototype animations were no better quality-wise than what Big Idea was putting out; so despite being a much smaller company making direct-to-video content, they had gotten in early on this new phase of animation and thus had an experience and market share advantage. Phil Vischer was the CEO and founder of Big Idea, and considered Walt Disney one of his biggest influences. This competition was eliminated by Big Idea being bought out by another company due to inept management and the acquisition of Pixar.