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. 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 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.
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, and they'd flopped.
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, but being too lazy to build their own network, Disney bought ABC. 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 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 enviroment, they'll snarf it up when they cna.
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.
/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 a monarch's daughter 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. It preserves this by lobbying the US government to push back copyright expiration as far as it can go. The GW guys may use these laws to get their way but Disney has the money and reach to shape them to suit it's will.
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.
- The midget prince in Shrek is a jab at Michael Eisner.