How Disney Ruined Culture

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[Music] what's up wisecrack michael here and i'm back in a heavily sanitized wisecrack studio please people wear your freaking mask anyway today i've got disney on my brain and not just because my nostalgic mom keeps sending me this photo and who can blame me they basically own or license everything i love and everything i hate and that's not to mention the new season of the mandalorian because they own star wars also x-men that's right they own the x-people and just take a gander at the top grossing films last year and you'll be greeted by one name and one name only see from endgame to aladdin from frozen 2 to toy story 4 disney made 7 of the top 10 highest grossing films of 2019 and while this feat is impressive even for the big mouse it's not exactly something new in fact many of the top 50 highest grossing films of all time were either made by or later bought by disney now maybe for some of you this doesn't matter as long as you get that marvel cinematic goodness injected into your eyeballs a few times a year and i totally get it but what if i told you that disney's ever broadening artistic reach is actually bad for culture and not just because they made the worst star war how let's find out in this wisecrack edition on how disney ruined culture and i guess spoilers ahead for films you absolutely saw if you were ever a child but before we get into it i wanna give a shout out to this week's sponsor wondershare filmora we've all been picking up new hobbies since early march and if you're thinking about starting your own channel then you should check it out wondershare filmora is a simple to use video editing program which is comparable and more affordable than other big brands you might know filmora isn't just for simple edits either since it includes advanced features like chroma keying video stabilization and speed duration clipping here at wisecrack until recently we haven't been able to shoot in our regular studio with fancy cameras and lights but editing with wondershare filmora we could combat some of our issues the new update includes some awesome key features like color match keyframing motion tracking and audio ducking so you can create a professional looking video the best part is that the interface is user friendly so you don't have to worry about spending too much time googling tutorials click the link in the description to check it out for yourself if you comment on our pinned comment you could win a license to get the software for free so let us know what you would create in filmora now back to the show in the past few decades disney has gone from an industry giant to an absolute behemoth acquiring everything from the muppets to pixar to marvel to star wars to most recently 21st century fox of course disney's game of hungry hungry hippos but for intellectual property goes way back to the beginning according to the company's own telling founder walt disney moved to los angeles almost a hundred years ago with and i quote a lot of hopes but little else how wholesome four years later disney got his first taste of success with oswald the lucky rabbit the only catch when disney tried to make another round of these cartoons he found out that his distributor had gone behind his back and poached all of his animators worse upon reading the fine print of his contract disney realized he didn't even own the rights to oswald his distributor did and thus like a super villain's origin story our intrepid young walt vows to never get screwed again or as disney.com puts it he saw to it that he owned everything that he made after that disney set up shop in a studio that is five minutes away from wisecrack headquarters and is now a high-end grocery store here he created his most iconic character from then on disney became a veritable creative and financial powerhouse by 1937 it would break all box office records with the release of snow white and the seven dwarves early on though the success was predicated on a simple formula find an existing story make it as cute and wholesome as possible to maximize your potential audience and then dive into your scrooge mcduck sized money pool of course you might think this is fine after all pop culture is by definition entertainment aimed at the largest possible audience and disney definitely had one thing an aesthetic you know round faces saucer eyes big goofy grins and if the kids love it how could it be bad but as we've mentioned before disney's reign of cuteness was not a happy accident or mere coincidence walt was basically ruthless in his quest to make all things adorable and in the process disney has spent the last 100 years acquiring stories adapting them and ultimately twisting their original artistic intentions beyond recognition all of which is to say is all this cuteness actually super uncute but to see the disney method in action let's dissect an early example pinocchio for the uninitiated the story revolves around the titular puppet who just wants to be a real boy as the magical blue fairy tells him his wish will be granted if he proves to be brave truthful and unselfish and someday you will be a real boy a real boy but pinocchio's not about that life he runs away from home joins a puppet show and lies to the blue fairy about it which famously leads to this the fairy lets him off the hook but pinocchio doesn't stay out of trouble for long he soon whisked away on an all-expense trip to the dubiously named pleasure island there pinocchio and his resort buddies engage in all sorts of vices from drinking to smoking to gambling only to find out that they're turning into donkeys but with the help of his cricket companion pinocchio narrowly escapes only to learn that his daddy got lost at sea looking for him it says here he uh he went looking for you and uh he was swallowed by a whale pinocchio then sacrifices his little wooden life to save the old man from the literal belly of the whale but lo and behold now that pinocchio is good he's brought back to life by the blue fairy but this time as a real boy and everyone lives happily ever after if only life was that easy but what if i told you that the author of pinocchio carlo colotti never intended for his story to give children that warm fuzzy feeling and that once disney had bought their rights to the story the company whitewashed pinocchio to fit the big mouse's cutesy aesthetic if you have any doubt then i present to you the original ending of colodi's pinocchio without loss of time they tied his arms past a running noose round his throat and hung him to the branch of a tree called the big oak a tempestuous northerly wind began to blow and roar angrily and it beat the puppet from side to side making him swing violently like the clatter of a bell ringing for a wedding and the swinging gave him atrocious spasms it's really bad his breath failed him and he could say no more shut his eyes opened his mouth stretched his legs and gave a long shutter and hung stiff and insensible you heard right kolodi had pinocchio gruesomely hanged this inspired so much angry fan mail that his editor demanded he bring the puppet back to life and continue the series which he begrudgingly did in collodi's defense though pinocchio being hanged was pretty much par for the course it's hard to see in disney's version but pinocchio was intended to be a tongue-in-cheek albeit bleak morality tale the simple moral be good or suffer throughout the story we see a mean-spirited and rude pinocchio a stand-in for all misbehaving children robbed starved stand and also his legs get sawed off but we're not supposed to feel especially sorry for him his actions cause all of his suffering oh and if that wasn't enough collodi also heaped on the psychological abuse making pinocchio at one point think he had killed geppetto and the blue fairy which i didn't even know was possible and while you and i growing up in a media diet full of high saturated disney cuteness might find the story repulsive it's pretty run of the mill if you're familiar with old german folklore more recently we've seen similarly gothic tones in children's books like lemony snicket's a series of unfortunate events now let's be fair maybe you don't want your kid's bedtime story ending in gruesome death but there's still something unsettling about the way a media giant like disney can take a beloved fairy tale purge it of its original intentions and thus rewrite the narrative in our collective memories instead of saying faithful to kalodi's artistic intention disney did what it would continue to do for decades buy a story bleach it in a caustic vat of cuteness and pump it out in exchange for cold hard cash gone were the dark satiric overtones and in their place were syrupy lions like this thank you m'lady he deserved to be a real boy as for pinocchio himself he went from being a total frat pro to the naive piece of pine we know and loved today in the process his character design underwent similar changes with walt disney scrapping the angular designs found in collodi's story for a character model that can best be described as what would happen if mickey mouse had a baby with a tree obviously collodi's estate was kind of pissed with his grandson suing disney's italian distributor for infringing on the moral copyright of the story now i know what you're thinking it's an adaptation artists are allowed to adapt and sure they are plenty of great art exist because someone took an existing story and made it their own sometimes undercutting the original like pride and prejudice but add zombies more seriously something like there will be blood took the first few pages of upton sinclair's equally awesome book oil and basically threw away everything else but nobody would accuse paul thomas anderson of whitewashing oil and i don't think pratt and prejudice in zombies has somehow cheapened the jane austen novel maybe part of the difference lies in formula and scale pta hasn't created a billion dollar industry by stripping stories of their content and replacing them with a deranged daniel day lewis disney on the other hand regularly takes stories like pinocchio or sleeping beauty or hell the hunchback of notre dame and throws them into the commercial meat grinder worse they've been doing this pretty consistently for the past hundred years seriously if you were to put all the disney films on a spinning wheel whatever you'd land on would likely be an adaptation in which the original story has been blanched artistically ground down and pumped out as a cute little disney sausage actually why don't we just spin that wheel and find out ah yes the 1989 classic the little mermaid timeless story in which a young mermaid makes a faustian bargain with a sea witch to gain legs so she can win the hand of a hunky prince based on the hans christian andersen tale of the same name disney's retelling strips the story of a lot of its darker and more religious overtones in the big mouse's version we're treated to a love story that ends with a happily ever after the prince ultimately realizes that he really digs this mermaid the mermaid frees herself from the sea witch's curse the prince harpoons said sea witch and all is basically right with the world the message true love saves all but the source material isn't nearly as happy or uplifting that's because anderson flatly rejected this message first of all his story portrays love primarily as suffering for example anderson's mermaid doesn't just give away her voice in exchange for legs but also endures the pain of being stabbed every time she takes a step nevertheless she delights in dancing for the prince and making him happy what's more in anderson's telling the prince never returns the mermaid's affection instead he marries a local princess so yeah rough deal but there's a reason for this anderson wanted the mermaid to be saved not by love but by sacrifice at the start of the story the mermaid despairs not just because she's half fish but also because she doesn't have a soul and won't be able to chill with her prince in heaven in fact the whole bargain with the witch revolves around ariel gaining a soul if she manages to kiss her true love but as anderson explained to a friend he never wanted the mermaid to gain a soul simply because she fell in love with a straight up hunk he thought such an ending would be explicitly wrong in short anderson would have despised disney's ending in which a kiss and a strategic boat crash saves the day see in anderson's tale the mermaid saves the day with a christ-like sacrifice where she gives up her life and love to save the prince and lo and behold she's rewarded for her good deeds and turned into a gentle spirit if she helps mankind for the next 300 years she'll be rewarded with a soul hooray well according to anderson this is the more natural more divine path though it probably wouldn't have jacked up disney's 1989 stock prices and at this point we could keep rambling off examples the real pocahontas is not a story about the freedom to love who you choose it's about colonists kidnapping a native american woman and murdering her husband the original sleeping beauty is literally about a woman being non-consensually impregnated in her sleep and giving birth to twins also in her sleep now we're not going to say disney should be making more films about assault because that'd be horrible however the general disney meat grinder which polishes off any rough and unsavory edges comes with consequences in the case of pocahontas it's a very shitty history lesson that some people might never question but that's just the first of many ways that disney's storytelling might actually be a major disservice for developing young minds that's because most of the stories disney adapts are fairy tales and while these stories may often be dark and complex and vaguely disturbing they also offer children a symbolic template for understanding the world for example in a children's cancer clinic researchers found that patients were able to use fairy tales to express and cope with their anxieties one child for example identified with the big bad wolf in little red riding hood venting his frustration and anger by drawing an oversized wolf with massive teeth another child drew a comically tiny wolf as an expression of confidence and bravery in the face of his struggles here we see how the darkness of fairy tales can actually offer a light to children confronting adversity but disney often strips these fairy tales of their bite instead inserting a bland wholesome narrative as we saw with pinocchio and the little mermaid and ironically in the process disney's developed new narratives that are in their own rights potentially quite destructive as psychologist susan darker smith points out young girls who identify with characters like cinderella or belle from beauty and the beast are more likely to end up in abusive relationships as adults while interviewing victims of domestic abuse darker smith found that many identified with the heroines of these stories in which love conquers all believing that if their love is strong enough they can change their partner's behavior of course the reality is tragically different ironically by peddling a convenient narrative in which all the world's problems can be solved by true love disney fails to give children any tools for navigating real life problems and that was kind of the whole point of fairy tales to convey the darker and crueler aspects of life so as to better prepare children for the realities of adulthood of course this all begs the question should disney care according to the legendary and incendiary free market economist milton friedman definitely not he argued that companies don't have the same responsibilities that people do a person might have a responsibility to be a nice neighbor or recycle while a company's only responsibility is to make more money and friedman's definition of corporate responsibility has pretty much become gospel in other words disney will only do what is required to make the most amount of money regardless of the social consequences it's the capitalist raison dead of companies the world over and it explains why disney operates a cuteness factory indeed when disney went dark in the 1970s and 80s it put out a series of grimmer edgier films like the black cauldron that were huge box office failures and nearly brought about the collapse of the great empire of mouse the so-called disney renaissance of the 90s was a major course correction back into the sentimental cuteness that has sustained the company ever since and it's no wonder cuteness after all has a very particular way of hijacking our brains and more importantly it's cells studies have shown that cuteness increases our concentration a useful trick to make sure humans pay close attention to their adorable young or you know pay more attention to a dysfunctional snowman even more telling when volunteers were hooked up to an mri machine and bombarded with cute images their nucleus accumbens also known as the pleasure center of the brain lit up and started pumping out dopamine in other words when viewers saw mickey mouse's adorable body bob up and down on screen 100 years ago they were unwittingly receiving the first micro doses of disney branded brain candy interestingly enough the phenomenon of cuteness being used for potentially nefarious purposes has a name cultural theorist joshua paul dale calls it evil cute and while dale specifically cites gambling machines that use cute cartoon kittens as an example it's not hard to argue that disney's precious animated friends might also qualify in the end cuteness is just a means for disney to pad its bottom line regardless if it's telling stories that are ultimately good for children and while you might not be too devastated to hear that disney sabotaged your favorite 16th century tale about a naughty sentient puppet the disney vacation of storytelling becomes more viscerally upsetting when the big mouse starts screwing around with more iconic cultural works you catch my drift ever since disney acquired the universe's most beloved franchise fans have increasingly despaired at the creative choices that resulted the last trilogy began with sentimental fan service befitting of disney it seemed to briefly flirt with darkness and complexity in the last jedi suggesting star wars wouldn't fall completely into the pits of cuteness and then this that's right disney quickly course corrected and opted for a sweet conclusion based on a magical kiss romantic sacrifice and of course everyone you care about is jedi royalty now ray skywalker all of which is to say there's no property or franchise which disney won't find a way to wrap its cute little tentacles around so what happens now honestly probably nothing good as disney continues to grow which it's almost certainly going to do it's reasonable to worry that we'll see an expansion of their blanket philosophy of cuteness and as we've seen in the past that cuteness probably comes at the expense of story nuance and morality it definitely makes us nervous for the future of a franchise like x-men it's hard to imagine disney signing off on something as subversive as logan and as disney continues to gobble up more and more of the media we love we're worried that there won't be space for grittier darker stories for grown up fairy tales if you will but what do you guys think is our loathing for the disney empire totally reasonable and warranted or do we sound like overly quarantined haters let us know in the comments as always huge thanks to our patrons for your support hit that subscribe button like it's a fairy tale you're ready to ruin for buckets of money and as always thanks for watching later [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Wisecrack

Views: 869,859

Rating: 4.7976851 out of 5

Keywords: disney movies, star wars, disney live action, mulan, the mandalorian, disney, mickey mouse, pinocchio, pinocchio song, little mermaid, the little mermaid, rey star wars, palpatine, x men, fairy tales, disney songs, walt disney, disney history, film, wisecrack, movies, video essays, show me the meaning, comedy, what went wrong, wisecrack edition, deep or dumb, philosophy, wisecrack michael burns, sleeping beauty, pocahontas, the mandalorian season 2, disney live action ranked, remake

Id: _jed8B4L4-4

Length: 19min 15sec (1155 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 09 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/irun_mon]

I really can't stand Wisecrack anymore. They turn 3 minute ideas into 20 minute monologues. But they don't do it like every other channel by slowing it down and nitpicking on details, they just shove the idea up its own ass 30 times in the effort to relate it to whatever Jung once said about something completely unrelated.

And the conclusion is always some doomsday prediction of the end of our culture. Unless its Rick and Morty, then its genius because Schoppenhauer said something once.

[u/BuddhistSagan]

They also ruined my hometown of Orlando.

[u/oddspellingofPhreid]

Yo, I just want to pop in and say (the video sponsor) Filmora is a garbage product by a garbage company. Don't make the same mistake I did.

[u/Aspel]

It's really weird how the tone in this thread seems to be that Disney didn't ruin anything and Wisecrack is just annoying, even though their increasing market control over film and television and comics is demonstrably bad.

[u/Ascarea]

Lol Disney ruined culture, so I guess museums, galleries, concert halls, libraries and theaters all around the world are in flames!

[u/Terpomo11]

I figured by the title that this would be about their use and abuse of copyright law.

[u/AgrippaDaYounger]

This seems like a pretty vapid hot take; theres a reason Disney fine tuned their stories from the source to not be depressing and its because it wouldn't sell. People want media they share with their children to feel safe, not so much sanitized of culture but softened to prevent it from being traumatic to younger kids, this is the Disney formula. And it's not like they have erased history, like I personally am a big X-Men fan, and I'd love to see them present the X-Men as more mature content because in the comics it was often at times, but if they soften it like Fox did then I'll just have to accept it, it's not as if they are going back and censoring the comics, infact they've made the comics way easier to access and read with Marvel Unlimited.

[u/1wildstrawberry]

There is so much that could be said about Disney harming culture with their monopolistic tendencies and manipulation of copyright law, but changing the plots and ending of 200+ year old public domain stories whose morals seem to be universally "submit to and obey authority or suffer/cause the suffering your loved ones" or "be a pious Christian or suffer" is not the problem. I'd call it good, actually. Grotesque, authoritarian, and lacking empathy aren't substitutes for profound. Anyone can change all the old morality tales that they want, usually for the better, just break up the goddamn monopoly.