Written by Harsh Mehta
Edited by Ilakhiya
“Beating a dead horse” is a phrase that’s often used for a pointless, or futile activity. That’s how a lot of people that grew up with the peak era of Disney view the current wave of remakes and re-releases of beloved childhood classics like The Lion King, The Little Mermaid, Mulan, and more. However, that couldn’t be further from the truth for the corporate and marketing heads over at the Walt Disney Corporation. To paraphrase Bo Burnham’s ‘Repeat Stuff’, they’ll only stop beating the dead horse when it stops spitting out money.
The worst part of these modern remakes of classic animated movies are that most of them are entirely devoid of the spirit and charm of the original movies. Take the 2019 remake of The Lion King, the 1994 original and the following movies still very much hold up in the modern age, due to their timeless style of animation and iconic work all around, but the movie was recreated entirely in CGI, lacking a lot of the original emotional impact, as the hyper-realistic models of animals don’t quite have the same emotional facial expressions as the original animations. Disney production houses also now just having those models for the characters means that they can churn out the sequels for the movies increasingly faster as time goes on, generating even more profit. The second movie is slated to come out in 2023, and I’m sure it’ll be a massive release, as the 2019 Lion King is still the 7th highest-grossing movie of all time, higher than the original Lion King. This is also an incredibly calculated time for Disney to be releasing these movies, as the children that watched the Lion King back when it first came out and fell in love with it are now likely to be parents themselves, the timing is extremely convenient. These parents would see the remakes coming out, and take their kids to experience that crucial part of their childhood. The 1.66 billion grossed by The Lion King at the box office isn’t even the most of what profits can be made from that release, it also means that a whole new wave of Disney toys come out for Disney parents to buy their kids.
This entire business model of targeting now-parents that grew up with the classic Disney movies has been repeated a lot, they’ve made a live-action Aladdin, Mulan, Jungle Book, Cinderella, Lady and the Tramp, Dumbo, Pinocchio, etc. Just imagine the amount of money that has been minted without the creative leg-work of actually making a new children’s classic movie.
Nostalgia is an extremely useful tool against the human mind, every adult longs for that innocent, wondrous and child-like part of themselves that dies with exposure to the world. Corporations like Disney that puppet nostalgia and childhood memories are frankly disgusting to me. It isn’t even just Disney, though. Let’s travel to the other side of the world. Japan. Nintendo, the ruthless copyright violation hammer that’s wielded by Nintendo is infamous. They also hold the rights to huge swathes of our childhood. Mario, The Legend of Zelda, Pokemon and more. Pokemon is quite literally the most profitable IP of all time. These franchises culminate in massively passionate communities, I would know since I’ve been into Pokemon since I received my first video game and console on my fifth birthday, Pokemon Fire Red. Ever since, I’ve kept up with pokemon, albeit a bit more distantly. I can still name every Pokemon from generations 1 to 8. All of them, and I’m not alone in that passion, Pokemon alone has an insanely active community of fans online that create their own Pokemon games, their own original pokemon, and massively innovative projects, all for free.
However, even though they don’t profit from that work, Nintendo’s hammer arrives all the same. Pokemon Insurgence and Uranium were two of the internet’s most famous and polished Pokemon fan games, both with massive communities of their own. Pokemon worlds and games with a more gritty story, who wouldn’t love that? Well, Nintendo certainly didn’t, taking down both games from the internet and taking their creators to court over the games’ creations, even though both games were purely for the community, not even to make the slightest amount of money.
Disney also pulls moves like this, such as sending a cease-and-desist to a child’s funeral. Ollie Jones died of cancer, after a long and hard battle, and his wish for the end was to have a Disney-themed funeral. Well, the stain of a dead child wouldn’t reflect well on the shining ivory image of Disney, would it? They sent a cease-and-desist to the kid’s father, Lloyd Jones, ending his dying dream then and there. These mega corporations care nothing for the communities they grow and cultivate, no matter how passionately we support them. No matter how much money we make them, their boots will arrive swiftly on our necks when we express our passion in any way that won’t make them money. They will keep milking our childhoods, they will keep beating the dead horses. They’ll keep beating our dead childhoods.
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