Just finished watching the Disney 1970 blockbuster Dad Can I Borrow The Car?... and am blown away by it's wonderousness.

What happened to the mouse? A company that used to take risks, was a bit psychedelic, was creative, and fun. I remember a friend went to Disney World in Florida donkeys years ago (as all the rich kids at school did for their Summer holidays in the 1980's/early 1990's) and came back with an Epcot Centre VHS. That monorail looked like something that was built by craftsmen on Neptune. It was one of the best videos I'd ever seen in my life and it was about a fecking monorail! I wouldn't get to visit a Disney park in any form until 2012 when I went to Disney World Tokyo.

Anyway. IMHO Disney needs to stop with the 52,387 Star Wars films they seem intent on making as well as the armies of expensive lawyers they are building that would put a Warhammer 40,000 battle to shame, and start going back to stuff like Dad Can I Borrow The Car?... and the Herbie films. </rant>



EDIT: Actually I'll chuck in my Laserdisc of Mousercise to the mix too. More brilliance from the mouse house that they just don't do today.

EDIT 2: I think this was the VHS but I think it had a white part at the top and a yellow and red band across it? Perhaps around 1986/7? Anyway just look at that monorail! The only monorails I've seen that could rival it are in Brockway, Ogdenville and North Haverbrook!

the 70s happened and the 80s didn't help much either, then stock owners wanted more money and that's why we are in the situation we are in today
with the wonderful world of Disney.

On the other hand if you have stock in Disney you are doing well.

Stockholders. That’s pretty much it. Greed these days is even greedier than it used to be.

I mean, sure, Walt was an evil POS who loved money but at the same time never ever would have made, for example, Cinderella II...52 years after the original, after literally every single person who worked on the first one retired or died. It has an %11 on Rotten Tomatoes...but stockholders are happy, the movie made $120M out of $5M. That’s the kind of money they used to buy Muppets and Star Wars and all that.

They have no idea WTF to do with the Muppets, btw. It’s soulless money machine with nobody at the wheel. I wish they’d either end it or put a real hippie in charge of the whole thing but neither will happen. Instead we’ll have a Kermit and a Rowlf that say what billionaires think they would say.

I'd say Disney is about hit or miss today as it's always been.

A LOT of their live action movies from the 70s were utter crap (The Shaggy D.A., The North Avenue Irregulars, etc.) with a couple hits here and there (Pete's Dragon, Bednobs and Broomsticks, etc.) and their animated output from the 70s weren't all that great (while still fairly loved by many.) It's one of the reasons why Don Bluth walked out with a bunch of other animators to make their own studio since he thought they lost their way. Compare his The Secret of NIHM vs any of Disney's animated films of the 70s and you'll see a stark difference in the art and technical acumen of the film.

As for today, I just saw Raya and the Last Dragon and Coco recently and those were very good movies.

Meanwhile Captain Marvel and The Rise of Skywalker were less than great (even though my feminist friends loved CM and it grossed a lot of money, it was still not that great of a movie.)

I think it's just that since Disney has two gigantic franchises (Marvel, Star Wars) under their belt now with gigantic fanbases, the scrutiny is that much more magnified.

Their output is what's been magnified. They get a property now and they just churn that stuff out on a schedule. There wasn't a 20th century Peter Pan 2 and there was very little crossover between animation and live action for the simple reason of making the same movie again.

There was also no China to placate, speaking of Avatar and that kind of garbage.

It was hit or miss, but as a young child we wouldn't miss, and thus taped, every Disney Sunday Movie and every "Wonderful World of Disney" we could so as to not miss out.
Disney's biggest problem back then was they lacked any commitment to establishing a franchise, instead giving off the impression they regarded their "Disney" brand as the franchise, and that was clearly the fault of then CEO Michael Eisner.

Then the 90's rolled in and we had by that time Disney experimenting more heavily with the idea of weekday afternoon cartoons what with the likes of Ducktales, Chip'n Dale's Rescue Rangers, TailSpin. But even when they had popular and well loved cartoons, they still suffered badly with commitment issues to open those up to licensing for product lines beyond McDonald's Happy Meal toys and a couple of video games Capcom made.

This trend continued throughout the 1990's with video games and Happy Meal toys being the only major products available to kids, with the incredibly strange emphasis from Disney on licensing for branded clothing and linens. Sure kids love a t-shirt with their favorite character, but would you have rather had a Ducktales bath towel set (yes that was a real thing) or Ducktales action figures? Personally I would have loved to have had some Ducktales action figures, but they didn't exist because Disney was run by morons with no concept of how to handle tie-in products.

By the way, I had the Ducktales bath towel set when I was like 8 years old. Somehow drying off with Uncle Scrooge and his nephews never quite felt right.

It's the stockholder/boardroom member/whatever financial advisor BS mentality that's causing movies and popular entertainment in general wind up like cable network television where all the channels began to drop their special content for more mainstream junk until they all pretty much just became the same thing.

This post is nuts to me. You’re essentially condemning 20th century Disney for not wh**ing themselves out like they do now. They should have made more sequels and toys is your argument. There should be as many Bambi and Peter Pan movies by now as there are Godzilla or Bond movies. How wonderful that would be for their bottom line but nothing else. (I do wish they had continued on with The Once and Future King but if they had it would have likely have been so off target as to make it worthless.)

They sure have “commitment to a franchise” now. That’s all they have. It’s what totally sucks about them.

Btw, Disney doesn’t make their own bath towels. Those are things that a bath towel company makes in a dozen different kids franchises a year. There would have been Light Bright sets and Presto Magix and Thermos branded lunch boxes and Panini stickers and Tyco slot cars and all that. All the crap salesman would compete for the license. The fact that Ducktails wasn’t just another toy anime is mostly what set it apart from other shows of the time. The product was the program. There’s nothing wrong with that. To have action figures ready at launch it pretty much has to be a toy based show like He Man or Centurions or Inhumanoids or some other naff crappola that isn’t half as good as Ducktails.

In Japan good toy anime existed, in the US you get GI Joe..if you’re lucky.

Could not have said it better myself. Recently a friend asked why I don't watch much new anime and I told him it just doesn't appeal to me. This is a lot to do with why, so much is just made to be a safe cash cow.

Thankfully I've got so much great old stuff to watch.

I don't completely disagree with you, but the franchises they stick with now are existing franchises created by others from outside of Disney that they spent enormous amounts of money to mishandle.

But as far as actually Disney created original properties go, there's not really much to talk about. During the Walt Disney era they did a few movies series that were movie franchises that did rather well; Love Bug, the unnamed "Medfield College" centered pentology of films, and the two films based on the life of Davy Crockett. And looking back, Walt Disney wasn't afraid to license out product rights. But then we see in a post Walt world Disney introducing some very amazing high-budget concept movies, such as "Earthstar Voyager" and "Condor Man", Disney Sunday Night Movies that felt like they were TV series pilots and left you really wanting more. But more never came.

Then in the 1990's is when we did begin seeing the infamous "Disney Sequelitis" setting in, with direct to home video crapola like "Bambi II: Petunia's Big Stink", "Aladdin 2: Jafar's Not Quite Dead Yet", "Beauty and the Beast: Return of the Beast", and a stinking festering load of other hot poop like a second, and far less enjoyable, reboot of the classic Disney original movie "Parent Trap". Now that's not to say everything they did sucked, just all the sequels in the 90's surely did. But things people would actually like to have gotten sequels to, those never materialize.

Did we want more Star Wars? Yes, but from George Lucas, not from Disney.
Did we want more X-Men, Spider-Man, and so on Marvel comic book character movies? Yes, but again from literally any company but Disney.

The Disney Sequelitis of complete suckage disease that began in the 1990's hasn't stopped plaguing Disney. The only exception to this sequel blight has been the two movie franchises from Jerry Bruckheimer; those being National Treasure and Pirates of the Caribbean. Those have been the only movies from Disney that gave a tiny ray of light in the vast darkness that perhaps Disney's curse was lifted, and then they spent four-billion dollars to prove the world wrong and churned out five very lousy Star Wars movies. Movies so bad we'd all like to pretend we never saw any of them while secretly plotting to erase someone whose last name is Kennedy from the face of the Earth. And then there's the Marvel nightmare. Everyone I know who is a fan of any given Marvel Comics property will tell you that it's been great seeing professionally made and acted out action scenes with some of their favorite Marvel characters, and how just much they love to use chapter skip to avoid the rest of the comic franchise cannon breaking drivel those movies sadly represent.

I just don't like the gratuitous fanservice in modern stuff. Most of the time it just comes across as completely unnecessary at best and creates a huge tonal whiplash at worst.

I did not know a single person who wanted George Lucas to make more Star Wars movies by 2015. I don't like the sequel trilogy either, but Star Wars fans at large stopped being George Lucas fans well before he sold the company to Disney.

Anyway, I also don't see the point in judging companies by how many good "franchises" they have. I care about movies, not franchises. A great movie that doesn't have a glut of sequels and spinoffs is no less for it.

T&A is, ironically, super safe.

EARTH-STAR VOYAGER is a personal childhood favorite.

my mom taped it for be back in 1988, on her LINEAR-STEREO 1986 HITACHI VT-1570A VHS VCR.
still have that cassette, -a 1988 FUJI T-120- and it still plays fine, 30 years and umpteen child/teenhood plays later.

though i realize it is a long-forgotten, failed one-off experiment, it sure would be nice all the same
if DISNEY would throw us weirdo-kids who grew up with it a bone,
and toss out at least a decent DVD re-release...