Blog: Articles filed under Disney

I have to hand it to Disney. Few corporations can be great at being both good and evil. My hat goes off to you, Disney, for achieving that fine equilibrium. You bring us quality programming for kids—and manage to ruin their lives in the process.

I speak, of course, about the sick and twisted travesty that is Disney television shows. Case in point: Kim Possible. I ranted once before about how Disney ruined Kim Possible by giving it another season. What will Disney do next? Recess: The College Years?! “Will T.J. and Spinelli work things out? While Gus struggles with his sexuality and Mikey with his drug addiction, Gretchen debates: Caltech, or MIT?! This time, on Recess: The College Years…” It’s just…wrong! And don’t even get me started on what passes for children’s programming these days. Disney’s poor attempts to subscribe to the subcultural “slang” dialect of the pre-adolescent is just another example.

I’m just getting old…

Disney and I have a sort of love-hate relationship going on when it comes to its television.

I‘m from the mid-nineties generation of children. I grew up on the after-school and Saturday-morning Disney cartoons like Disney’s Recess and The Weekenders. To this day, I proudly admit that I watch those whenever I can. I‘ve got less opportunity to watch The Weekenders, but Recess comes on every day after school, so I watch it if I’m not working. Old school Disney rock on!

Lately I‘ve been less and less impressed with the average after-school shows they’ve been producing. Maybe I‘m just losing touch with today’s “cool” brand of pre-adolescents. Maybe I‘ve become too cerebral. But some shows I just can’t stand, like Jake Long: American Dragon. Then there are some shows like The Suite Life of Zack & Cody or That’s So Raven which I can’t help watching while simultaneously loathing and despising myself for watching them. The acting and writing’s just so terrible; the gags are just so … juvenile. I understand that this is children’s programming; maybe I‘m being too judgemental. But then when I compare these shows to what I watched as a kid (and still watch), there does seem to be a decline in the quality of the productions.

So what gives, Disney?!

P.S. I enjoy Kim Possible, because it presents positive themes for kids in an extremely entertaining matter. But Kim and Ron dating? The show should have ended after So the Drama. I’m sceptical about this fourth season, although on average it hasn’t been terrible so far. Just okay…

I‘ve been rather single-minded about finishing my novel lately, and as such I’ve noticed that my posts here are becoming more narratives about my life (which is, frankly, very boring) instead of interesting glimpses into my mind (which is slightly less boring). So consider the following.

I don’t really like Disney all that much. I find Disney a souless corporation with humble beginnings. That said, we owe Disney a huge debt of gratitude that few movie studios could claim. Because Disney has done over the years something spectactular, something that I’ve just realised is really amazing.

I look at society today and see an overemphasis on transitory values, mostly because we are a materalist society. This focus on materialism is at the cost of spirituality. Even religion is a materialist world nowadays. We put more stock in the numbers on our bank statement than we do the worth of someone’s actions or words. Kind of cold, really.

But it isn’t always like this. When children are growing up, they are taught that lying is wrong, not to steal, and to share with others. Somewhere along the blurry line between prepubesence and adulthood, these wholesome values get lost, replaced by the cutthroat attitude necessary to survive today’s capitalist age.

The most obvious culprit is, of course, the media, and they do share a lot of the blame. They bombard adolescents, like me, with images of what society considers “perfection”. I’m talking mainly about the attacks on adolescent self-esteem promoted by companies that sell makeup or clothing or (Zarquon forbid!) that evil stuff known as “body spray”. The media gives adolescents their second set of life values: beauty is to be pursued at all costs; ugliness is to be shunned. Outward appearance is more valuable than inward personality. Oh, and money is good.

Take a step back and look at the stuff that goes on in a child’s life compared to that of an adolescents. And for the better part of a century, that “stuff” includes Disney. Disney movies, in particular, lead the vanguard in the tireless crusade to communicate humanity’s core beliefs to our children. I’ll use Beauty and the Beast because it is the most obvious example: the beast, even though he is ugly, is the hero. Shrek and its ill-advised sequel, Shrek 2, are more contemporary examples based on the same theme. Even Mean Girls, a movie aimed at adolescents, has those values in them.

So where do they go? Why do we suddenly discard them when we realise that we need to get ahead in the world or be left behind? I don’t know. All I know is that I didn’t realise it until now, but we owe Disney a lot for doing its part. And I think I’ll stop getting annoyed at the blatantly obvious plots in Disney shows, considering that they were designed for an audience younger than me, content in the understanding that maybe, just maybe, some of those young people will resist the media-saturated images of their adolescent years.

I went to see The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe last night with my father and brother. It was pretty awesome. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

The camera angles were a bit too tight for my liking. It was like they were trying to stuff too much into every scene, or move too close in on a character’s face. It just felt unusual. It will be interesting to see how it translates to television.

I really, really enjoyed the music. For me, music makes a film. When I go to see a movie, I listen mostly to the music. If I ever get a novel published and someone (Zarquon forbid!) goes insane and wants to make a movie from it, it will have to have most awesome music. Frank Herbert’s Children of Dune still has, in my opinion, the greatest music of any miniseries/movie. But I do digress.

I’m posting this, by the way, because my dad told me this morning that he was surprised that I had not posted a Narnia review on my blog. So here it is, Dad.

Unlike Serenity, which was a good movie, I am very open to the idea of Narnia sequels. Hopefully they will be as entertaining as this one. Now, of course, this would have the disadvantage of me having to read the books all over again (I have not read them since at least grade 6, if not earlier in my life… .). It‘d be worth it, though. They’re good books and the movies, for a Walt Disney production, did not let me down. (The fact that I don’t remember half the book would help with that.)

Muwahahahaha.

Yes, the one movie I have anticipated all my life—er, well at least since I‘ve found it. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy premieres in the U.S. and Canada on April 29, 2005!

Many people, including myself, are ambivalent (some outright outraged) about the movie. I think that Disney is in a precarious position: if they followed Adams’ script, then the movie should be okay. Although I warn people, remember that Adams has the tendency to rewrite the series for each medium. So it might differ from the books, just go with the flow.