Get Woke, Go Broke: Disney Princess Edition

“I woke up on the floor of some Japanese family’s rec room, and they would not stop screaming.” – Anchorman

I knew that Disney® was broke when they wouldn’t give R2-D2™ a brother, only a transister.

As is probably obvious now, I like movies.  I think that they can convey complex ideas, and can exemplify that which is best in all of us.  When done properly, they provide a shared mythology that replaces the stories that we used to tell each other around the fire after a successful mastodon hunt.  They would sometimes even sing songs, I mean most people who killed a mastodon are in the mood for some Hairy Elephante.

Movies can be subtle propaganda.  Certainly, looking back there were large elements of mainly harmless propaganda added into the media that I watched growing up – trying to convince me to eat properly, brush my teeth, get enough sleep, and not start a criminal drug trafficking gang.

Data Point Number One is a Hollywood® movie that certainly has more wholesome values built-in, Top Gun:  Maverick.  Going as far back as the first Top Gun, the idea was fairly simple:  America and Americans were trying to be the good guys.  We were brash, we took Polaroid® pictures of Russian pilots, and we had shirtless, sweaty volleyball playing . . . dudes?

Well, at least Kenny can get spare parts if he has a footloose.

Okay, they did make some mistakes in the original.  But it was nationalist.  It focused on excellence.  And the latest version has some of the same notes.  Amazingly, people seem to like feeling good about their country and seeing excellence in action.  Top Gun: Maverick will end up making over a billion dollars.

So, mainly wholesome.  Sure there were some less wholesome parts built in there, but I’m still planning a post on propaganda.  Some of the propaganda has been awful, and lately, it’s been worse.  Hollywood® has recently been all-in on propaganda, and not the good kind.

That brings us to . . .

Data Point Number Two is Lightyear.  Disney® movies used to be a bastion of wholesome values.  Parents.  Kids.  There would be a conflict, but the end would almost always be resolved in a way that showed the importance of values.  Disney©, however, has decided to showcase a family arrangement of two lesbian moms.  This is a lifestyle that would have been:

  • Not legally enforceable across the country a decade ago,
  • Widely shunned two decades ago,
  • Subject to a visit from Child Protective Services thirty years ago,
  • Ruled out either of the lesbian moms to be able to work as a teacher forty years ago, and
  • Caused them to be burned as witches fifty years ago, though my timing might be off a bit on that one.

Jeff Epstein tried to give Hillary a high five, but she left him hanging.

Now?  It’s a lifestyle being celebrated as normal in a Disney® film.  To most parents (remember, it takes an actual woman and an actual man to make a baby, even in 2022) it’s not the propaganda that they want to have in the minds of their little kids.  I did the math, and (to the best I can find) 0.14% of kids were being raised by lesbian moms.

Add in people who are hard Lefties who buy their kids Transition Flakes™?  That’s your Lightyear audience.

Thus, it’s no surprise to me that the film failed.  Lightyear has greatly disappointed the folks at Disney® due to its poor financial performance.  People are simply declining to pay money to take their kids to become indoctrinated with the Latest Thing®.

Disney™ seemingly doesn’t care is actually blaming the audience, from some interviews I’ve seen.

I hear AOC met her boyfriend on Tinder®.  That must have been awkward.

It’s not just Disney®, though they’re the absolute worst today.  I’ve noticed that most movies made after, say, 2018, are awful.  It’s not just Coronachan, either.  It is the movie content.  I don’t know if all the screenwriters suddenly became activists after Trump was elected, but the movies became awful.

How?  They became drenched in Leftist propaganda.  If it were just that, it might be interesting entertainment.  But Leftism screws everything up.  Character development doesn’t exist, because Strong Woman can never, ever be inferior to Man, even if Strong Woman just started piloting starships and Man has been piloting them for decades.  Oh, and she’s stronger, too.  And can beat anyone but another woman in a fight.

I wonder why they didn’t call her Mary Sue?

Yawn.  It’s not even interesting, and combined with the bales of propaganda that gets thrown in, it just turns into a poorly written script that ends up making a movie that’s not very interesting.  What are the stakes when the hero is perfect from the first moment of the movie?

It isn’t just movies.  Books started to get infected with the same nonsense even before movies did.  For a time, I stopped reading fiction because the books ceased being enjoyable.  I thought it was me.  I thought that I had grown up, and science fiction has lost its appeal because I’d grown out of it.

Then I picked up an older book, (Lucifer’s Hammer, by Niven and Pournelle) and was happy to find it wasn’t me – it was that science fiction books started sucking, and for exactly the same reason.  Leftism kills everything that it touches.

I’ve noticed that most larger businesses don’t seem to care.  Star Wars® (another Disney© product produced some of the weakest, worst content ever.  Why?  Retreaded stories and a protagonist that wasn’t interesting because she was already the Best Ever® at everything.  Disney stock wasn’t impacted.

Until now.

If you pour root beer into a square glass does that just make it beer?

It has lost about half of its value since last year, with over $170 billion in market value lost.  This started before the big market slide with the Biden Bust.

Looks like there’s a line.  And looks like Disney© has found it.

Author: John

Nobel-Prize Winning, MacArthur Genius Grant Near Recipient writing to you regularly about Fitness, Wealth, and Wisdom - How to be happy and how to be healthy. Oh, and rich.

42 thoughts on “Get Woke, Go Broke: Disney Princess Edition”

  1. John, it appears you have reached the apez* of your game!

    *Ain’t it Sweet?

  2. Destroying everything is a feature to comrade lefty.
    Eventually a smoking crater of ruin will remain by the Ozymandias sign and then we can rebuild.
    You didn’t vote on burning it all down better?
    How about that democracy, comrade.
    Do it for the community because we’re all in this together.
    Standards are evolving and the problem with normal is that it always gets worse.
    COV-LARP round II in the fall after the Dominion/SmartMatic selections will make the first round look like the one and done appetizer.
    These things happen and Slim Pickins is never afraid.

  3. For those unaware of Lucifer’s Hammer.. I used to travel ~150K mi /yr, probably for about 15 years. When that book came out it quickly became a mainstay of the traveling public, It was RARE for MONTHS not to see it in the hands of multiple passengers on name-your-airline… good book.

    1. Agreed, IMHO the best of the Niven / Pournelle collaborations. I loved it when it came out, and the novel is still widely remembered decades after its publication…

      https://www.nature.com/articles/4531184a.pdf?origin=ppub

      Check it out (literally) online at Open Library here. As TechieDude notes, true creativity is something special and rare these days.

      https://openlibrary.org/works/OL510435W/Lucifer%27s_Hammer

      I rather doubt we will recover as well in our own future from the impact of Biden’s Hammer as the heros of this fictional story.

          1. He meant to say Greg Bear. 🙂 Start with Eon, or The Forge Of God, or Darwin’s Radio.

    2. Yup. I read it in the backseat of my parent’s car after I picked up a copy in the bookstore.

  4. Data Point:
    Never missing an opportunity to miss an opportunity, Disneyland, whose main income stream is locals who go to the park frequently, first priced them out, then eliminated their annual passport tiers, and as of now has also shut down selling the ersatz replacement, the not-so-magical Magic Key passes.

    Apparently regularly featuring live chimp-outs in Toontown, and illegal alien migras bringing their anchor babies to crap and piss all over the rides and public walkways, are not a selling point for getting people to come to the park either. I’ma go out n a limb, and tell them this isn’t the “diversity” you were looking for.

    Given the “choice” between a now $200/day ticket, requiring an unobtanium reservation as well as a ticket, precluding me from wandering a mile down the road on the spur of the moment, or getting a pass that’s unobtanium, I chose to let Disney suck it, and spend my money on things more worthwhile than Wokeneyland.

    And they can’t figure out why the locals who control their fate are staying away from Star Bores Disasterland – which was a multi-billion$$ flop before COVIDiocy – in droves.

    The only silver lining is that at last report, L.A.-adjacent Glendale is becoming energy independent, as soon as they figure out how to rig a dynamo to Walt spinning in his grave at Forest Lawn.

    So they’ve got that going for them.

    1. Ha! Great data point! Yeah, the parks are faltering, and the current economic situation is going to make those really, really painful.

      Stukas over Disneyland, right?

  5. I was a big Star Trek fan. However, now the entire franchise (starting with Discovery and continuing through Picard) has been taken over as a flagship for weekly doses of nearly unwatchable gay pride. Even the opening logo for Strange New Worlds has the Enterprise swooshing aroung leaving a rainbow wake (wink, wink). Last week SNW featured beat-you-over-the-head gay allegory as a trans woman literally took Pike’s captain chair out from under him. Pike is effectively a caricature as depicted, and next season’s upcoming Kirk on the show is rumored to be bisexual. Alex Kurtzman and his woke team have signed a contract through 2026 with Paramount+ to keep churning this stuff out. Don’t even get me started.

    For now I’m sailing on the Orville until Disney+ reboots Firefly. What could possibly go wrong?

    1. There was no greater original Trekkie than I but was all downhill after The Wrath of Khan and went over the cliff when Spock hooked up with Uhura. Every Star Trek has simply pulled the zeitgeist a few score or hundred years into the future. Maybe our Western civilization would live long and prosper if we’d gone to the stars instead of creating the Internet, but we shall do neither. When I was a kid I dreamed of riding a starship; today I just long for 1968.

  6. I wonder how the investors are feeling with their Disney stock. Those that bought low are probably wondering when to bail. Those that bought high are probably wondering if it’s too early for some brown water.

  7. Ever consider how little creativity is around these days?

    I can’t think of the last original book I’ve read or movie I’ve seen that was created in the last decade.

    They do a remake of a comic book, it makes money, and they literally wear it out. How many batmans do we need? How many iterations of spiderman?

    My youngest was a music performance major. Every time I went to her orchestra concerts, if it was a composer born after 1900, and the conductor (or worse the composer) explained the piece before they played it, I knew it was going to suck.

    1. George Gershwin, Erich Korngold (b. 1898), and Aaron Copeland (b. 1900) slip under your wire, but the only modern composers worth listening to don’t compose for the purely orchestral performance anyways.

      They’re people like Henry Mancini, Elmer Bernstein, John Barry, Jerry Goldsmith, James Horner, Hans Zimmer, John Williams, Randy Newman, Danny Elfman, David Holmes, and Michael Giacchino.

      And you’ve probably been going to their concerts for years. 😉

      1. With respect, Michael Nyman and Basil Pouledaris (Gattaca and Hunt for Red October/Starship Troopers) as well.

    2. Creativity implies that a certain, perhaps large chunk will fail. They want to make nothing but the same thing, again and again, but more Woke. Because they’re scared.

  8. “Lightyear” “Lightfoot”. I wonder how many people had the picture of the mayor of Chicago in their head and decided to take a hard-pass on the movie. Two-syllable names that start with “Light…” are toxic.

  10. What started out as a joke in these woefully woke times at Chateau TwoBuckChuck now elicits serious debate, to wit, WWFMMD?

    What would Fred MacMurray do?

    You couldn’t make a movie like The Absent Minded Professor today. Or risk the backlash from a relentlessly White, male-positive sitcom the likes of My Three Sons. Too Wholesome. Too layered in nuanced White supremacy. Too free of ideology. Nor could such a tall, dignified, straight, blindingly pale leading man even exist any longer here on Planet Hollywoke.

    These are indeed lean times for us dashing, devilishly handsome, Western European-descended bon vivants. I’ve heard rumors that James Bond himself has been made over into a blue-pilling, Hennessey-swilling, patriarchy-killing, lesbian-shilling black sooperchick, even as Sean Connery spins like a top in his grave.

    So, what would Fred MacMurray do?

    1. That’s easy.

      Fred would Murder, He Says, At Gunpoint, unless it was a Good Day For A Hanging.
      Since you asked.

      Tip your waitresses. Try the veal.
      I’m here all season.

  11. I wouldn’t say that everything recent is horrible. My wife loves action movies nearly as much as I do, particularly ones with a vengeance theme. Two we discovered recently: Wrath of Man, starring Jason Statham and Nobody starring some dude I don’t know and a woman who looks like a Disney mom from the mid aughts. The former is pretty tense, with none of Statham’s regular humor, but he’s a total bad@$$.

    The latter is equal parts awesome and funny. I mean really, Doc Brown as his Dad? Though these days he looks more like Uncle Fester. Nobody delivers on the promise that movies like History of Violence never did. Dude with a past in ruining people’s days goes on a well-deserved rampage through badguys. Sorta like the Last Boyscout (he gets beat up a lot) meets John Wick, with fewer guns.

    All that said, finding good movies is much more difficult. There’s so much crap, so much woke. The streaming services are 99.9999% garbage content. Anything good doesn’t stay available for long. On top of that, intermittent service interruptions ruin the fun. Anything I like, I try to get possession of.

    The patriotic, heroic, guy-fights-evil-and-gets-the-girl stories are better. They sell better, entertain better, and are well-loved. Sure, if you can be Dali and surprise people with counter-themes, you might just impress. But no one wants to watch an entire slate of Monty Python and the Hold Grail movies. It was special because it was so deliberately anticlimactic. But watching more than one of those gets tedious. And at this point, the artists and writer are just disguising lack of talent, creativity, and effort with mendacious antipathy and oikophobia. When you need to write a six paragraph intro to your garish and discordant oil painting in order for people to realize it’s actually genius, you aren’t a fine artist. You’re a con artist.

  12. I find that many foreign-produced shows and movies have achieved production values we formerly associated exclusively with US made stuff. If you can tolerate subtitles, many countries are now producing a lot of good content, and their scriptwriters have the creativity that seems to have become a lost art in the US, especially in the non-woke countries that aren’t so busy shoveling in political content.

    South Korea, Turkey, and even India are pretty good choices these days along these lines, along with Eastern Europe in general.

  14. Want good books, especially sci-fi/fantasy? Check out the authors in the Mad Genius Club. Not a dud among them. Oh, and Nathan Lowell. And Larry Correia, of course.

    Main stream sci-fi/fantasy went woke/broke in the late 1980’s/early 90’s. There was almost nothing good to read except Sir Pterry’s Discworld novels (which I didn’t discover until 2002, unfortunately).

    2. Can confirm. Dave Freer adventures are awesome, Cedar Sanderson writes some of my favorite skiffy YA, and Dorothy Grant is the modern Mary Stewart. Loads of great book recs every Sunday

  15. If you like Niven, and giggles, try Footfall. It’s actually a fun read: “they have thumbs!”.

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