The other day a group of us were talking about kids stuff and we got to talking about Disney and its addiction to stupid direct to dvd sequels. I pointed out how almost every animated movie Disney has ever made has a sequel. Snow White, Dumbo and a few others have escaped, but most haven’t.
As a parent this is aggravating because marketing has basically figured out how to suck kids in. The trend got really bad over the last few years with crappy 60 minute long DVDs that were horrible. This addiction to sequels is actually one of the biggest creative differences Pixar had with Disney. Toy Story was owned by Disney, and Pixar was against making sequels for sequels sake. Disney decided to make it themselves. Its not surprising Pixar was going to leave Disney.
In 2007 it looks like someone saw the light. More likely the ousting of Eisner and the desire to keep Pixar got them thinking. Disney ebded up buying Pixar. This in itself could be really bad, but it isn’t. When it happened John Lasseter ende up getting placed highly in the Disney food chain. He made an important change. He decided Disney would move away from all the sequels. He even went as far as saying he thought one upcoming sequel, Tinkerbell, was “unwatchable” in one of its early forms.
Does this all signify me actually liking Disney as a company? We’ll see, but it cannot hurt. Now we just need to get Lasseter to work on keeping that stupid Disney Vault open so they don’t release only once every 10 years.
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