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0 pointsgodzillabrennus3mo ago0 comments

Disney is the same company as it was 20 years ago. In fact, it's the same company as it was 100 years ago. They only care about profit. They do just enough brand management to preserve the profit motive.

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jeffwask3mo ago

To be fair to Walt Disney, he cared about a lot beyond profit and believed in advancing technology and society in a way modern corporate leaders absolutely do not. He was no saint but he's a far cry from modern CEO's.

godzillabrennusOP3mo ago

To be fair, Walt Disney partnered with his brother Roy Disney, and they co-founded and ran the Walt Disney Company (and the iterations before it). These iterations of the Disney Company were never just Walt Disney.

jeffwask3mo ago

Yes, but if you watch any documentaries about early Disney and listen to those people talk everything was about Walt's vision even after death they would ask "What would Walt want or do?" He was a figure whose influence and vision is on another level in American History (both good and bad) and early Disney was Walt no matter who was in charge on paper or even if Walt was still alive. That only started to change under Eisner. Roy was the one who kept Walt grounded so ambition shrunk but they stayed the course Walt set.

macintux3mo ago

Walt grew up in an era when there was still a sense that wealth and power brought with it strong moral obligations to serve the community and nation. We lost that somewhere along the way.

LocalH3mo ago

We lost that when it was found that losing that was even more profitable.

eli_gottlieb3mo ago

I think that, given the times, we might rate him a little bit above "no saint". Perhaps slightly below or at par with the norms of his time, which we could now look back on as the peak of some rather nasty tendencies in society.

https://www.vulture.com/2013/12/walt-disney-anti-semitism-ra...

jeffwask3mo ago

He also normalized and romanticized the American Expansion and displacement of Native Americans. He's a very complicated and flawed figured who irrevocably changed the course of this nation. Even Walt recognized that Walt Disney the man and Walt Disney the icon were two different people, and he was flawed in ways as a man the icon who appeared weekly in everyone's living room was not.

DoughnutHole3mo ago

Companies can have additional motives to profit, and they’re more likely to when control is concentrated just because individual people have multiple desires.

This was certainly the case with early Disney because Walt Disney was a megalomaniac utopian. I don’t think the original Epcot plans ever had a reasonable chance of being profitable, but Walt pushed them because he believed he was the saviour of urbanism in America.

postalcoder3mo ago

Yes, perhaps if we deflated Disney’s moral rot by a diversified basket of other morally-rotted goods, I suppose we’d be able to conclude that Disney is perhaps the same company.

Outside that effort, I see a company once famous for its prudishness now unafraid of shame.

BowBun3mo ago

I firmly disagree and think this shallow take dishonors a pretty great man. While not perfect, Disney gave us the bedrock of American children's culture which has been a soft tool for the US for generations. Not to mention technology and other advancements. I'm not a Disney nut, but the man was one-of-a-kind and an impressive industrialist who instilled a great culture of innovation and a deep love of children and play. All things I value.

CodingJeebus3mo ago

> While not perfect

Yep, Disney was also a leading producer of racist tropes and content during Jim Crow. Historical clips of Mickey Mouse characters putting on minstrel shows with blackface alongside other racist stereotypes like crows can easily be found online[0]. Not to mention Song of the South[1], a film Disney produced based on Uncle Remus stories following slaves who happily live on a Georgia plantation. Disney has, of course, done their best to scrub these entries from history, but they played a major role in depicting racist tropes to kids for decades.

0: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/b5j4T9E8PuE

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Song_of_the_South

mikkupikku3mo ago

We all acknowledge that Walt Disney was a flawed person, I don't think anybody here disagrees. To me, what sets him apart from other corporate leaders isn't Walt's moral character, but rather his ambition to influence the direction of humanities development, both culturally and technologically. He was about a lot more than just making number go up.

eli_gottlieb3mo ago

One could argue that the company reoriented itself so purely towards children's art and kitsch because they needed to get themselves into a market segment where they could completely sanitize their output of these kinds of embarrassments.

staticautomatic3mo ago

Don't forget the Native Americans in Peter Pan!

caminante3mo ago

Amen. Blaming Disney for bad content is like blaming politicians.

Who asked for the content? Who elected the politicians?

**[Jiminy] crickets**

wat100003mo ago

We can acknowledge that people are terrible, while also wanting people not to cater to the lowest common denominator.

caminante3mo ago

You appear to be lost.

Who said and where's the "false dichotomy" you allude to in the discussion above?

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AznHisoka3mo ago

Garbage in, garbage out, as someone wise once said

armenarmen3mo ago

Fwiw I think the all US presidents since Clinton were elected on a non interventionist/pacifist campaign. Blaming the voters when every one of them (less so with Biden) violated those promises is a bit unfair, if you still believe in democracy.

dragonwriter3mo ago

Almost every one of them was elected again, often by wider margins (the only exception losing to another one of them) after deatroying any illusion innthat direction you might argue was produced by their campaign positions, so I don't think you can absolved the American electorate here, even if one agrees that their campaign before taking office met your description.

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eli_gottlieb3mo ago

I don't recall George W. Bush ever actually promising to stay out of wars and interventions. It's been standard for the two parties to criticize each-other on grounds of doing interventionism badly or going too far towards one extreme regarding foreign policy, but nobody has run as a real pacifist or isolationist because they would lose in a landslide. It especially doesn't help that pacifism and isolationism are associated with activist fringes in both parties who often lean into crank theories or make friends publicly with adversarial states.

wat100003mo ago

Blaming the voters seems completely sensible when they reelected W in 2004. The man's Vice President was Dick freakin' Cheney. You can't seriously tell me the people voted for pacifism and got screwed over.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

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jeffwask3mo ago

godzillabrennusOP3mo ago

jeffwask3mo ago

macintux3mo ago

Walt grew up in an era when there was still a sense that wealth and power brought with it strong moral obligations to serve the community and nation. We lost that somewhere along the way.

LocalH3mo ago

We lost that when it was found that losing that was even more profitable.

eli_gottlieb3mo ago

https://www.vulture.com/2013/12/walt-disney-anti-semitism-ra...

jeffwask3mo ago

DoughnutHole3mo ago

Companies can have additional motives to profit, and they’re more likely to when control is concentrated just because individual people have multiple desires.

postalcoder3mo ago

Yes, perhaps if we deflated Disney’s moral rot by a diversified basket of other morally-rotted goods, I suppose we’d be able to conclude that Disney is perhaps the same company.

Outside that effort, I see a company once famous for its prudishness now unafraid of shame.

BowBun3mo ago

CodingJeebus3mo ago

> While not perfect

0: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/b5j4T9E8PuE

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Song_of_the_South

mikkupikku3mo ago

eli_gottlieb3mo ago

staticautomatic3mo ago

Don't forget the Native Americans in Peter Pan!

caminante3mo ago

Amen. Blaming Disney for bad content is like blaming politicians.