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 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 union-busting sexist jerk who smoked himself to death and also (unintentionally) pidgeon-holed animation as being something "For Kids".

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 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. Instead it simply packaged up it's theatrical shorts for broadcast, leaving that space to be colonized by shameless corner cutters/innovative streamliners the process like Hanna-Barberra. By the 1960s it's animation studio gradually withered as animated shorts before films stopped being a thing, 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 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. 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 them in animation quality and was willing to take creative risks. In the late 70s and 80s they tried to recapture the Zeitgeist with at best marginal success and came close to shutting down their animation studio before they got back on their feet making new cartoons for TV, the theatrical hits of the Disney Renaissance and ultimately the acquisition Pixar, giving it both a source of cutting edge technological breakthroughs and 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 enviroment, 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 only to be thrown out before he could take the Iron Throne (only for him to go and found Dreamworks to get revenge). 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

The Goons from Sleeping Beauty, a lot of people saw these guys before they ever heard the word Orc

For better or worse Disney has been one of the biggest forces in pop culture period for nearly a century.