Disney
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"Over at our place, we're sure of just one thing: everybody in the world was once a child. So in planning a new picture, we don't think of grown-ups, and we don't think of children, but just of that fine, clean, unspoiled spot down deep in every one of us that maybe the world has made us forget and that maybe our pictures can help recall."
- – Walter E. Disney
"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 The Walt Disney Company
What Geedubs aspires to be.
The Walt Disney Company, also known as Disney, The Mouse House, or increasingly The Rat, is an ancient juggernaut of a company made in ages past, and therefore is completely out of touch, seeing everyone as walking piles of cash at best and unwitting chattel at worst. 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[edit | edit source]
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 and animator, but he was a better businessman who especially understood the importance of talent, image and self promotion. (The fact that he almost ruined by his distributor Universal buying his best colleagues out from under him probably had something to do with this.) 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 in 1937, the first feature length animated film. Despite costing triple its original budget and earning the nickname "Disney's Folly," it was an instant hit. This was followed by the classic Pinocchio and the cult-classic Fantasia in 1940. During World War II he got a lot of money from the US Government making propaganda films, but only enough to pay the bills and the company was millions of dollars in debt by the end of the war. Ever the businessman, Disney managed to turn things around by diversifying into live action, pushing out a hot streak of animated films like Cinderella and Alice in Wonderland in the 1950s, and possibly his masterstroke: theme parks where children could see the characters and places they saw in the movies come to life. He marketed directly to kids with TV shows like The Mickey Mouse Club, simultaneously recycling his old theatrical shorts, building a new format of children's show that lasted decades, and incidentally providing generations of Hollywood bigwigs with fresh child actors to molest. By the 1960s Walt had it made: he had a vast studio with an entrenched niche, a brand known around the world, enough cash for a certain cartoon duck to swim in and generally became an icon of American Success. He was also a hard-driving union-busting asshole who smoked himself to death and (unintentionally) helped typecast animation in the western hemisphere as worthless pap intended strictly for kids for the rest of the century.
Decline and renaissance[edit | edit source]
After Walt got a taste of building theme parks, he fell for utopianism. Believing the lessons learned from building Disneyland could be applied to building a better city, he and a small group of like-minded yes-men became increasingly distracted with buying up large swaths of Florida to found an Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, like Rapture but above the water (most of the time) and with less Ayn Rand. As a result, the company wasn't paying attention to trends. While they did a brisk business in shorts and other programming for ABC, they missed the bus when it came to made for television animation. This left the field open for studios like Hanna-Barbera, Filmation and a resurgent Warner Bros. What they lacked in quality (and how) they made up for in quantity, shutting Disney out of the children's television market for decades as producers discovered that cartoons were WAAAAAY more profitable if you used them as commercials for as much merch as you could shove out the door. (While Disney pioneered merchandising as early as the 1930s, it was generally done as a supplement to the art, which was expected to stand on its own. The newer studios just used art to sell merchandise.) They continued to repackage 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 theatrical 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 increasingly filling in the void.
Walt's death brought an INSTANT end to the envisioned EPCOT project, with the land and buildings that were already paid for getting rolled into Disney World. 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 points of Disney's dark age came for live action with the aptly named "The Black Hole" and for animation with "The Black Cauldron"; "Black Hole" was an absolute turkey, and while time has been kinder to "Black Cauldron" it was a massive bomb on release that didn't know what it wanted to be. Disney was out of ideas, reduced to copying Star Wars and adapting random fantasy novels.
This would not stand. Tired of watching the company simultaneously sink and burn, a coalition of shareholders led by the surviving Disney family brought on Michael Eisner from rival Paramount to straighten things out. The first decade of his tenure was a string of successes. Eisner brought in Roy E. Disney (Roy Disney's son) to turn around the animation department, finally giving it the resources it needed to compete with Don Bluth's studio. Roy spearheaded a collaboration with Stephen Spielberg that gave us Who Framed Roger Rabbit, which won three Oscars and still stands as the best combination of live action filmmaking and animation ever. He also put further resources into improving the studio's technology base, which had barely changed since the 60s; this was the beginning of their highly lucrative collaboration with Pixar, and the CAPS digital production system which enabled shots that were impossible with physical cels. The cold war ended and a booming 90's economy juiced park sales. Finally realizing he couldn't afford to treat TV as just a side business, he launched Disney's first cable TV channel and redefined 90s kids' childhoods with the legendary Disney Afternoon series. But like General Lee in the Civil War, Eisner would have his Gettysburg, a mistake that would break him forever... and it was Euro Disney.
Euro Disney almost destroyed the company. Had it been attempted later in the 90s, with more debt, it WOULD have bankrupted Disney. The park was a gamble; centrally located among some of the richest economies on the planet with construction costs eventually reaching 22 billion francs, it was too big to fail... and it failed, because they hadn't counted on typical French contrarianism and a continent-wide recession making its loan payments unsustainable. 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 "family entertainment centers" like Chuck E Cheese) died. Frank Wells (who had been hired from WB as a counterweight to Eisner's ego) died in a helicopter crash and Eisner, previously a bold thinking risk-taker, became a defensive and embattled CEO firing anyone who looked like a threat to his position; this brought an end to their animation dominance as Jeffery Katzenberg was kicked out only to go found Dreamworks. (This wasn't all bad though, since Katzenberg had tried to turn Toy Story into an Adam Sandler comedy.) Their only really groundbreaking move during this time was to buy ABC.
Rats in the walls[edit | edit source]
After Euro Disney, company leadership was placed in the hands of Bob Iger, who shifted to a model of growth through acquisitions that turned Disney into the Borg we know today. First they bought The Jim Henson Company, though they had planned to do that in the 80s before talks were derailed by Henson's death. Then they bought ABC and ESPN. Pixar. Marvel. Lucasfilm. 20th Century Fox. Even National Geographic. If there's a profitable-looking 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, everything they touch has a bad habit of turning to shit; Star Wars especially has gone from embattled-but-strong to a zombie franchise. They even started cannibalizing their own franchises again, first with crappy direct-to-video sequels to the Renaissance movies and again in the 2010s with a slate of unnecessary (but bankable) CGI/live-action remakes.
They probably would have been fine despite that if not for one thing: Nurgle left a charming gift basket to kick off the 2020s and forced all the parks to close. This started the dominos falling:
- The parks are the backbone of Disney's massive profits, so closing everything put a significant dent in their financial picture. That means less money to invest in park improvements and new content, which means lower sales later as they have less product to sell.
- Even before COVID Disney had been constantly looking for ways to charge more for less, squeezing ever-more money out of an ever-smaller number of "Disney adults" to drive growth. Not only is this the antithesis of Walt's vision of drawing in large swathes of Middle America to milk dry, after COVID a tough job market combined with the shift in spending habits from being boarded up in your own home for a year and the lukewarm appeal of Disney as a brand in that time led to even fewer families making the trip, and a much harder time hiring staff to keep the place running.
- For that matter, Disney has no idea what to do with the parks in general. Many key Imagineers have moved to Universal and the people who stayed are more preoccupied with rebranding or replacing classic rides like Splash Mountain with whatever IP the higher-ups want to push than improving or renovating what's there, let alone creating something genuinely new that could inspire future blockbusters the way Pirates of the Caribbean did. Budget cuts strike seemingly at random and rumors persist of Iger and friends stealing from the till.
- Bob Iger's ego combined with lockdown measures forced the company to go all-in on their own streaming service before they were ready, and combined with all the other studios doing the same thing the industry collectively fell into the same trap that allowed Netflix to kill cable TV in the 2000s: too much content fighting over a finite and shrinking pool of customer dollars to the point where piracy has started making a serious comeback after Netflix almost wiped it out.
- Identity politics came to town, and as we all know identity politics is the bane of creativity. Disney was already suffering from brain drain across all segments because the genius execs thought the "magic" of working for Disney was more important to creatives than good pay, good working conditions and creative freedom; this is why Gravity Falls ended after two seasons and many third-party animators refuse to take contracts with the company. The pipeline of lefty "artists" fresh from California art schools plus previous generations either retiring, being forced out or moving to other studios exaggerated the problem until there was a clear sense that "the message" was more important to most of their writers and directors than making something people actually wanted to watch. The rest simply seem to have an utter disdain for their target audience.
- Iger's drive to snap up as much IP for Disney+ as possible has introduced massive overhead costs and forced the theatrical side to make harebrained scheduling choices around the releases they've already acquired, often leaving their own movies to rot in suboptimal release windows or outright cannibalizing one film in favor of another with higher marketing spend. This is not a good position to be in when your output is already creatively weak, post-COVID box office is weak as hell and your traditional ways of making up for that (home video, video-on-demand, merchandise) are all turning into sunk costs for already-mentioned reasons.
So what the fuck happened?[edit | edit source]
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. As soon as he and his brother Roy died there was nobody left to steer the ship but soulless money men, who either fail to understand the long-term value provided by quality work or don't care because they want to use the company to steer public opinion and/or fully plan to flee the ship before it sinks.
/tg/ Relevance[edit | edit source]
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 its way into kids' childhoods, laying the foundation for sales down the line. A seven-year-old who saw Snow White in '37 would grow up to have kids they'd 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 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. Unfortunately for him, another monolithic corporation would try to destroy his legacy instead, but that's another story.
Of special note to /tg/ is the Donald Duck comics, specifically Donald's ancient, fantastically rich uncle Scrooge McDuck. Originally written as a pastiche of the Christmas Carol character, Scrooge evolved over the years into the perfect example of a retired player character; he's seen it all and done it all, and he earned every last one of his absurd treasures over a lifetime of adventuring. You can read up on his epic-level campaign in Don Rosa's The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck, though you'll have to pirate it since certain parts of it (namely the part where he starts acting like a real robber baron... or a player character) are one of those things Disney likes to keep buried. The Durulz from Runequest were created in homage to Donald, especially his "whirling tornado of rage" schtick that most King of Dragon Pass players have been on the wrong side of at least once.
Fun Facts[edit | edit source]
- Between on-set pyrotechnics and fireworks shows, Disney is one of the leading purchasers of explosives after the US army.
- Disney Theme Parks are designed with the intent of maximizing pleasure. For example, trash cans and service doors are painted in a shade of color intended to be 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. This is because when Walt was alive, he originally intended to build what he called the “Experimental Prototype for the Community of Tomorrow,” a full-on planned city with advanced-for-the-time transportation networks with an attached industrial park field-testing the latest consumer products. Now it’s just parks, hotels, and other overpriced amenities.
- Walt Disney actually played a role in NASA's founding; 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.
- (Almost) nobody has ever died at a Disney theme park. Mysteriously, people who suffer severe accidents, allergic reactions etc. at Disney parks always manage to avoid being declared dead until the moment their cooling corpses cross the property boundary.