Disney

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"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

Walt Disney, planning out his 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 amount of shorts and eventually releasing the Snow White first feature length animated film in 1937. In 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, a brand known around the world, the cash to persue big prestige projects like massive theme parks and became an icon of American Success. He was also a union-busting sexist jerk who smoked himself to death.

Even so, things were not going so well for the Disney Corporation in the mid 20th century. It started in the 1950s when they largely missed out on Television. Disney's work was good, but it was also time and labor intensive for not a lot of returns letting upstarts rise in their place. Instead it simply packaged up it's theatrical shorts for broadcast. By the 1960s it's animation studio gradually withered, producing very little new content. Animated Shorts in front of feature pictures stopped being a thing and output of feature pictures fell to one every three 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. A 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 quality. In the late 70s and 80s they tried to recapture the Zeitgeist and came close to shutting down their animation studio before they got back on their feet making new cartoons for TV, the Disney Renaissance and ultimately the acquisition Pixar, giving it both a source of technological breakthroughs and excellent storytellers.

But that was just an established film company getting back on it's feet 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 ABC, which they gradually subsumed, though this was just picking up something small and still forming that might (and ultimately did) grow into something groundbreaking. They weren't very good at the whole 3d animation thing, but they bought Pixar to be good at that for them. They also weren't very good at coming up with ideas anymore either, but to fix that they bought the Jim Henson Company in 2004, Marvel Comics in '09, Lucasfilm in '12 and 20th Century Fox in '19.