Recently History Channel had a miniseries as part of their “Built America” franchise going over the history of Walt Disney’s early years, how he turned a small animation studio into one of the biggest animation studios of all time. While “Uncle Walt” would make live-action movies, he never forgot his animation roots, and despite almost spending too much money to stay in business, he took risks that mostly paid off. The films under his tenure and multiple years after up through the “Disney Renaissance” are some of the most beloved pictures and even TV shows in pop culture history.
Then you have the current Disney period, where costs run wild, the end results aren’t worth it, buying all the competition and pop culture avenues they see as profitable, then forgetting why they were profitable and blowing tons of money for little reward. That’s ignoring the culture war crap that’s more a symptom of a larger problem than anything else, but it’s a problem as well.
So where did Walt Disney succeed and Disney fail? I actually took notes while watching the miniseries, and the first five episodes were quite an eye opener into why current Disney is doing so bad that two different Film Theory hosts on YouTube were able to put their business up as how Disney and it’s absorbed subsidiaries could stop screwing up. Maybe they should watch this miniseries and see what they’re doing wrong? For example:
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BW’s Saturday Article Link> Graphic Novels ARE Books
The show Boy Meets World and its spinoff, Girl Meets World (following the daughter of the first show’s protagonist back when that could still lead to good storytelling–I actually like it more than her dad’s story), both have episodes in which a literature teacher has to fight to make a graphic novel part of their curriculum. I’m not a fan of the choices (for Cory it was God Loves, Man Kills, the X-Men story, if I remember correctly, and for his daughter Riley it was The Dark Knight Returns, both before Disney bought Marvel if memory serves) but they aren’t terrible ones to go with. It’s just not what I would have chosen. It does highlight the problems comics still have when it comes to being accepted as literature and art.
In an article by Ashley Skorld for Fansided’s “I Prefer Reading” site, she runs into someone at a bookstore suffering the same issue with her son, trying to get him to read something other than a comic. There’s nothing wrong with that, mind you. I love reading both, but she then claims that graphic novels aren’t “real books”, and the writer takes issue with that point of view.
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Posted by ShadowWing Tronix on July 27, 2024 in Comic Spotlight and tagged comics, commentary, graphic novels, Literature.
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