१७ एप्रिल, २०२२

"As Disney prepared to introduce its streaming service in 2019, it began an extensive review of its film library. As part of the initiative, called Stories Matter..."

"... Disney added disclaimers to content that the company determined included 'negative depictions or mistreatment of people or cultures.'... The Stories Matter team privately flagged... characters as potentially problematic, with the findings distributed to senior Disney leaders, according to two current Disney executives, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss confidential information. Ursula, the villainous sea witch from 'The Little Mermaid' (1989), was one. Her dark color palette (lavender skin, black legs) could be viewed through a racial lens, the Stories Matter team cautioned; she is also a 'queer coded' character, with mannerisms inspired in part by those of a real-life drag queen. Tinker Bell was marked for caution because she is 'body conscious' and jealous of Peter Pan’s attention, according to the executives, while Captain Hook could expose Disney to accusations of discrimination or prejudice against individuals with disabilities because he is a villain. At least some people inside Disney are concerned that such sensitivities go too far. One of the executives worried that looking at artistic creations through a 'politically correct filter' could chill creativity."

From "Disney, Built on Fairy Tales and Fantasy, Confronts the Real World/The entertainment behemoth spent decades avoiding even the whiff of controversy. But it has increasingly been drawn into the partisan political fray" (NYT).

I think they should be proud of making such a strong female villain. It there's any problem here it's there's too much sexuality for children (the Little Mermaid desperately wants legs, i.e., a crotch):

३७ टिप्पण्या:

Narayanan म्हणाले...

It there's any problem here it's there's too much sexuality for children (the Little Mermaid desperately wants legs, i.e., a crotch):
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@ Professora : yesterday you brought up something in Tucker Carlson's mind etc. ha ha

wanting legs for terrestrial ambulation would be my thing in my mind! I have not seen movie however!

wendybar म्हणाले...

Dumb.

Dear corrupt left, go F yourselves म्हणाले...

don't listen to old Christmas tunes about cuddling by the fire... You racist rapists!
but DO listen to Madonna or some gang bangers sucking the life out of a coke bottle, jiggling their junk, grindr trash talking, and displaying their blow up the White House old booty. You prudes.

You will obey the commands of leftist hillarywoodland. the sore losers insist you worship them, and cast your eyes away from the sea witch! or Barney fife.

It's all in the pee pee tapes and the dark confines of Maddow's 30 million dollar wine cellar.
Up yours hillarywoodland.

Amadeus 48 म्हणाले...

Ahhhh...don't you yearn for those simpler days when Richard Schickel's "The Disney Version" was considered a scandalous takedown of Walt and the Magic Kingdom?

The twisted jerks that run Disney now make Walt look like the secular patron saint of wholesome, traditional values.

madAsHell म्हणाले...

The Stories Matter team privately flagged

Black Stories Matter!!

effinayright म्हणाले...

Definition of a mermaid: "Too much fish to fry, not enough woman to love."

Another old lawyer म्हणाले...

The senior Disney leaders have too much time on their hands, or perhaps there are too many of them for the real work that is being done, if this is what they spend their time on.

The work that corporate leadership spend time doing are often baffling to those down the organization chart, but always sends implied messages about priorities.

GrapeApe म्हणाले...

Disney made the mistake of hiring folks who didn’t understand how to maintain their lane. Don’t get involved in adult stuff that confuses children. Just stop it, you idiots.

mikee म्हणाले...

I wonder why the PC woke crowd at Disney doesn't see what is happening: The Chinese Communist Party is to be kept happy, because of market share, and the PC woke crowd arguing for diversity, inclusion, antiracism, and most obviously LGBTQ+ activism are the first ones being censored out of Disney there, and sooner rather than later, here.

And it's not go to the corner for a time out. It is up against the wall for such ideas and such people, with only a blindforl and maybe a nonPC cigarette before the order to fire.

Ann Althouse म्हणाले...

"wanting legs for terrestrial ambulation would be my thing in my mind! I have not seen movie however!"

Watch it. It's very good.

You seriously believe her heart's desire is to walk on dry land? No. Her desire is the love of a man. She wants to marry this prince.

Eleanor म्हणाले...

I taught oceanography to high school and middle school kids for years, and the subject of mythical sea creatures was a fun pre-holiday class when the kids had mentally checked out. Not once did the question of how mermaids have sex come up, and I had the kind of students who would have asked if it had occurred to them. If for no other reason than to hear me say, "The Magic School Bus doesn't go there."

Jupiter म्हणाले...

"(the Little Mermaid desperately wants legs, i.e., a crotch):"

Presumably, so she can ride a bicycle.

Original Mike म्हणाले...

"From "Disney, Built on Fairy Tales and Fantasy, Confronts the Real World/The entertainment behemoth spent decades avoiding even the whiff of controversy. But it has increasingly been drawn into the partisan political fray" (NYT)."

The Real World? I don't recognize your world as the one I'm living in, NYT.

Amadeus 48 म्हणाले...

Where do you think those two fish tails in the Starbuck's logo come from? What do they imply?

If a mermaid is going to seduce a sailor, she has to have the equipment.

Sebastian म्हणाले...

"I think they should be proud of making such a strong female villain."

Yeah, yeah, but we can't have that, and anyway, race trumps gender, so skin color overrides the equality achieved by female evil.

BUMBLE BEE म्हणाले...

So... Today's Disney knows what a woman is and wants, but a female Supreme Court Justice is clueless about same? No wonder Fentanyl is going over so famously wit da yutes!

Joe Smith म्हणाले...

I am done with Disney.

We didn't go to the parks often, but when we did it was a lot of fun.

But that was 20 years ago before the commie, woke crowd took over every corporation in America.

Someday I will be a grandfather, and I will have a ton of money with which to spoil my grandkids.

But Disney won't get a dime (worth about five cents these days)...

Static Ping म्हणाले...

As becomes a problem with most mature organizations, Disney is infested with people who want the benefits of being a high ranking executive - the money, the power, the prestige - while having minimal to no skills that would qualify them for the position and/or no passion for the business, they now being the equivalent of the leisure nobility. The problem gets only worse at this point as the only people who can challenge these people are more the same; all the competent people have been purged as a threat. If there are any in the business that do not qualify as useless, they are either buried down the organizational chart with no hope of promotion unless they "convert," or they are the equivalent of a supervillain who if they ever get power will direct the company to their personal needs. There's probably a few supervillain in Disney's power structure at this point.

An organization can continue onward for a time in this state, the success of the past propping up the rot, but it eventually will collapse in bankruptcy, merger, or hostile takeover. It just takes a long time for something like Disney to get to that point, though do not be surprised that when it happens, it happens quite suddenly.

michaele म्हणाले...

I watched the embedded clip and Ursala definitely gives off a drag queen vibe. In today's world, doesn't any member of the "letter" group trump race? I see her flamboyant purple and deep throaty voice as a celebration of the drag queen persona.

Michael K म्हणाले...

My 6 year old loved "The Little Mermaid" and I am sure sex never entered her mind. She named the cat "Belle," but a few months later I had to change it to "Bill." Great cat, though, and I'm not a cat person.

robother म्हणाले...

I remember thinking as I watched the Little Mermaid with my daughter decades ago that Ursula had to be a caricature of some specific hard-ass Hollywood agent (or maybe stage mom).

J Melcher म्हणाले...

Lilo and Stitch (the movie, not the abominable TV episodes) is incredibly problematic for both Left and Right. The Left surely should hate how it portrays public schools (full of clueless adults who tolerate and even encourage bullies) and government workers (Cobra Bubbles -- a child protection officer -- is literally a spy on a mission to break up a family) and bureaucrats in general with their misinformed and misguided goals (using humanity as a resource to protect mosquitoes, an endangered species) ... there are heroic ideals of the Left unskewered.

But on the Right, who can help but criticize the alien Pleakley, at best a transvestite and at worst a bi-sexual pervert who infiltrates a human family. (After arriving in a U.S. state as an -- of course -- illegal alien.) Jumba the mad scientist is not only an alien but presents obvious racial identity behind a fig-leaf of mock-Russian accent....

I could go on for hours longer that the run time of the movie itself. But obviously it's provocative.

In the way most great art should be.

Iman म्हणाले...

Disney leadership has made some critical errors in judgment and they have recently begun to reap what they have allowed their “fantasy-minded” talent to sow. They will continue to do so, at least until the adults step up.

rhhardin म्हणाले...

I'd call the easily triggered "people of culture."

The Vault Dweller म्हणाले...

(the Little Mermaid desperately wants legs, i.e., a crotch)

I had never thought of it that way. I just thought it was so they could be physically together. And by physically together I mean physically together in the same location, dry land. Plus she gets her legs early on, and the bulk of the movie is about her finding her voice. (Her singing voice is what initially attracted the prince as well) I suppose an argument could be made that for relationship to work it can't just be sex her finding her voice shows what is also needed for a relationship, but I don't know how many children are thinking that way.

Eleanor म्हणाले...

In the original story by Hans Christian Andersen, the little mermaid sees the prince on her first visit to the surface of the ocean. and what she wants is a human soul and to be able to live on the surface with him. Mermaids seduced sailors who had been at sea for a long time with the lure of sex, but the sailors entered the water to get to the mermaids and drowned. No sex. Just death. As a "little mermaid" seeing humans for the first time, how would she have known she needed a crotch? She wanted to be fully human. The original story has strong religious undertones.

farmgirl म्हणाले...

You think crotch? Like met people don’t procreate in a sexual way?
She wanted to walk… that’s how I understood it. She wanted to live beyond the sea. Dreamed of it.

The crotch was just a bonus.

n.n म्हणाले...

The bigot, you say. There are people with handicaps. There are people with dark, light, and white skin. We all start life from conception, evolve as babies, then learn to walk. Diversity, Inequity, and Exclusion (DIE) breeds adversity.

n.n म्हणाले...

how would she have known she needed a crotch? She wanted to be fully human. The original story has strong religious undertones.

Secular overtones with an evolutionary range guided by the only known fitness function: man, woman, be fruitful and multiply. The religious undertone expands the human experience with a moral outlook (e.g. individual dignity, individual conscience, intrinsic value), understanding, and development.

Howard म्हणाले...

I miss the old days when Disney fed his cartoon artists Magic Mushrooms

pchuck1966 म्हणाले...

"...increasingly drawn into the partisan political fray."

Excuse me but Disney is injecting itself in to the partisan political fray. They are consciously charging into it at full-speed.

Lucien म्हणाले...

So marine mammals cannot mate because they don't have legs? How long have they been extinct?

Kate म्हणाले...

Well-written characters don't need trigger warnings. Ursula is one of the best. James Woods' Hades is so good that the Left still watches "Hercules".

Tinkerbell definitely needs a warning. Hell, just excise her from the print.

Lurker21 म्हणाले...

Disney, Built on Fairy Tales and Fantasy, Confronts the Real World

Ah, but is it really the "real" world? When mom went to see Snow White or whatever it was back in the 1930s, it was fantasy, but somehow part of reality, because there was general acceptance of what reality and what the real world were. The unquestioned simplicity of good and evil had a solidity that made it in some way real and substantial. Yes, people weren't as good or as evil as the characters on the screen but people knew which characters were good and which were evil. Understanding that was (or was assumed to be) grasping reality.

In a more complicated world, where everything is up for interpretation and nobody agrees about anything, does discussion (or censorship) bring us any closer to any "reality"? When anything can be or mean anything, how do you know whether you are getting closer to reality or just getting lost in the forest of interpretations? And whose reality are we talking about anyway? Do we still have a common, agreed upon reality? Is endlessly scrutinizing things to see what people who can get offended by anything will be offended by likely to bring us closer to a common understanding of what is real and what things mean?

This all symptomatic of our present condition. Today, "reality" and "truth" don't come from getting your facts right, but from following the right narrative. We rework fictional stories to make sure that they don't offend anybody that we don't want to offend. The scary thing is that the media takes the same approach when it comes to the supposedly factual news.

Gk1 म्हणाले...

"Disney is infested with people who want the benefits of being a high ranking executive - the money, the power, the prestige - while having minimal to no skills that would qualify them for the position and/or no passion for the business, they now being the equivalent of the leisure nobility."

This is the best explanation for Disney's self destructive behavior I've read so far. Like the NFL owners who thought kneeling during the national anthem was hugely popular with fans, only to watch in horror as their ratings sank and fans burned their season tickets. They really need to get out more.

Disney is bitten by the "woke" bug and will no longer provide quality entertainment as it will be polluted with this garbage until it sinks "Under the Sea"

Brian McKim and/or Traci Skene म्हणाले...

"...mannerisms inspired in part by those of a real-life drag queen..."

Which are inspired, in total, by...

Brian McKim and/or Traci Skene म्हणाले...

"...mannerisms inspired in part by those of a real-life drag queen..."

Which are inspired, in total, by...