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This was worth posting in main thread IMO.
I have a friend who, for his honeymoon and at his wife’s request, went on a very expensive Disney cruise to a Disney island. When I heard this, I did feel an intuitive sense of disgust, but I had a difficult time justifying the feeling. What’s so bad about Disney that isn’t bad about going to Burning Man? What’s the difference between someone going to Disney, and someone buying an expensive car? And hell, what’s the actual substantive difference in consequence between going to Disney and going to the Sistine Chapel, or to the Eiffel Tower?
It irks me because for a normal adult American, there really is no difference in personal benefit. And actually, there’s probably a greater benefit to going to Disney than the Eiffel Tower — the tower is ugly and irrelevant to one’s life experiences, but the one who pilgrimages to Disney is reigniting and reexperiencing the fervent and innocent feelings of youth. Someone goes to the Eiffel Tower simply because of its cultural connotation (if not I have a cell phone tower to sell you), but Disney has even greater cultural connotation plus more. Not to mention less vagrants and peddlers. Is the difference that the socially advantageous trip to the Eiffel Tower is concealed as an interest in culture and not status? But wait, are we now on the same page of treasuring and hyping Western culture? And waiting even longer (as if a Disney ride) since when is Snow White and Fantasia and so forth not frankly wonderful pieces of Western culture? Better than a glorified cell phone tower, to be Frankish.
There’s a lot of tangents I want to go on here, but instead I’ll just briefly list two attractions: the key difference is indeed whether one adjoins his identity to a cultural tradition, which we all intuitively know is valuable; another key difference is whether there is a deeply substantive benefit to one’s soul (deepest level of personality), and cathedrals can do this better than Disney, but perhaps not by as much as we wish.
Disney is largely a girl brand but you were exposed to it heavily in your childhood. It's fairly common for adult women to still have a love for Disney. Men remember it as a childhood thing they were never that into.
Basically you're having a reaction to the perceived childishness of it. Kind of like how you'd react to someone asking to go to one of those adult kindergartens.
I'm not sure what the exact parallel would be. Star Wars fandom used to skew heavily male but didn't have event locations. Auto shows seem to have a similar gender split, but they aren't child focussed. Comic cons before girls in sexy costumes started going could work. WWE and Monster Trucks fit apart from the fact that they are seen as low class.
I think that depends on which movies they saw as a kid. All the princess movies? Yeah, they probably didn’t care too much about them. But The Sword in the Stone, Robin Hood, The Jungle Book, Pinocchio, The 101 Dalmatians, The Great Mouse Detective, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Fantasia—those were all great. I’ve noticed that, among my male friends with kids, the ones who are most positively-disposed toward Disney movies grew up with movies like those, while the ones who are completely indifferent to Disney movies only saw the princess ones.
I really liked Disney's The Jungle Book, The Little Mermaid and Sleeping Beauty as a child. I've seen The Jungle Book 30+ times.
But I haven't seen these films in the past 25 or 30 years or so. I really liked them as a young boy, but I'm not going to go to a nostalgia bend over them. I guess that is the difference between myself and these aging Disney women.
To the degree I'll revisit or relive the magic of these, it will be showing them to my child when they're old enough to withstand the screen time of a full length film.
That’s absolutely fair. I have seen a few of those films as an adult and without kids in the room, but I think all but one of those occasions was when my younger sister put one of them on when we were back visiting my parents.
I will say that I got more enjoyment out of rewatching those old Disney classics than I get watching most new movies. But the same holds true for most older movies and TV shows. I probably just have old-fashioned tastes.
I haven't seen many movies in the past few years, just a few on airplanes. They were pretty bad. The newest Star Wars was a mess. Live action Beauty and the Beast was inferior to my memories of the old animated version. Not sure why anyone had any inclination to make that movie.
At this point I'll probably enjoy watching old Disney movies with my child much more than the Disney junk I've seen recently.
I think the cliche that as movies have become more expensive, pre-existing franchises that already have fans and/or that can play on nostalgia have become more appealing to studio execs is probably true. And I'm guessing Beauty and the Beast was well into production before the The Jungle Book live-action remake made almost a billion dollars, but it probably helped to motivate Disney to fast-track all the ones that came after. And, to be fair, they kept making money, and lots and lots of money, until they didn't.
To me, the whole thing has the look of a kind of cargo cult. They saw the massive success of those old movies and thought they could replicate it in live-action for even more success, and it worked for a while, since they did get a lot of the superficial similarities right. But as they kept making more and more, the audience has been wising up to the fact that they really lack the substance that made the originals great.
What I don't get is how Disney execs could be so incompetent as to not understand this. Their flagship films like The Lion King (CGI remake) make basic, fundamental, amateur errors in things like writing, acting, cinematography, even music (the entire sequence where Nala discovers adult Simba - a pivotal, very important moment in the film's narrative - is egregious in all of these, including setting the song Can You Feel The Love Tonight during the day). From what I've heard, their more recent ones like The Little Mermaid are even worse in many ways in that regard. It's like they tried to build all the decorations of a house to look like an older house without bothering with the foundations and support structure. Studio execs, just out of naked selfish interest, should understand that it's important to get this right! And studio execs at the exact same company 30 years ago seemed to understand this! Where did all that expertise and knowledge go?
And with Star Wars, Kathleen Kennedy, the president of Lucasfilm, gets a lot of the blame, but she herself was a producer in the old Indiana Jones films, i.e. the good ones. Where did all that filmmaking expertise that she herself had go? How could she sign off on "Somehow, Palpatine returned?"
As someone fairly out of the loop for modern films, that last Star Wars film was shocking. I was amazed at how bad it was. It was ultra fast paced rushing from one thing to the next. Just a jumbled mess rather than a film.
How the old Indiana Jones films and their creators could degrade into this is beyond me. I'm hoping this was some sort of high water mark for ultra fast paced filmmaking and everyone will take a deep breath from now on.
Either that, or with generative AI, we're at the cusp of an era that makes the current pace and everything that came before it look sluggish.
I do think the rapid pace at which they pump these out is definitely a factor. Again, I don't understand the mentality of the execs who signed off on this kind of crazy release schedule, where we're getting like 2 or 3 live-action remakes a year, including ones dumped onto streaming and such, and a similar number of Marvel shows. Strike while the iron is hot, get while the getting's good, and all that, but did the idea that audiences have a refractory period between big releases and so finding the right rhythm of releases instead of just flooding them with content just not occur to them? And obviously the quality suffers, with CGI being a well known issue but also the important stuff like writing.
It's like the execs thought their audiences were vending machines, where you just insert latest content and get money back out, and the more content you insert, the more money comes out, with no limits. It doesn't take a genius businessman to know that this isn't how that works, and Disney isn't just a business, it's the top of the top of the top in its industry, the metaphorical New York Yankees of Hollywood. These execs should know enough about business not to treat their audiences like that, if only out of naked selfish interest.
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what. the. fuck.
I've been ignoring the Disney Death Spiral, but how do you screw that up that badly? There are furries who would kill (figuratively, right?) to be involved in the storyboarding for that particular scene. I can get why they'd skip out on the bedroom eyes, but I hope whoever was in charge of that scene isn't getting fursuit heads in their bed.
Given the visual style of the CGI remake, my guess is that decision maker is less a furry and more an enthusiast of actual interspecies erotica. By which I mean that I'm guessing Jon Favreau likes to fuck cats.
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One is low status, the other is not. End of story. It's probably downstream of that.
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You may just share DFW's view of cruises?
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From what I've heard about Disney cruises, they aren't that different from regular cruises. Yes, you can make the staff die a little inside by making them listen to your "complaint" about seeing a mouse in the restaurant for the thousandth tine. But other than that they are just regular cruises with extremely good customer service they charge a premium for. Don't compare them to Paris, compare them to a package holiday. Sometimes you just want to spend a week or two not worrying about anything.
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I think for me a lot of it is that Disney is completely commodified commercial art. It’s rarely about just telling great stories or making unique and beautiful things. And their park and cruises are that but turned up to 11. It’s a simulation of real things dumbed down until even the dumbest and most easily offended are nodding along. A lot of franchise films and shows are like that, having long since lost whatever was real and true about them in favor of selling fan-bait and pumping out the next money grab.
Burning man may be the reserve of rich idiots, but it’s not fake, not dumbed down and you don’t exit through the gift shop. The Eiffel Tower is a real place in real France full of real French people. Yes there are tourists, but there are also locals who aren’t there for ambiance but instead because they actually live there. Much of the same can be said of theater especially local stuff, or cultural events and other historical places. There’s a difference between a place created as a simulation of reality and an actual reality. The French part of Epcot is not and cannot be like real France.
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