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Disney is safeguarding its future by buying childhood, piece by piece

economist.com

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Re: Disney is safeguarding its future by buying childhood, piece by piece

#161

Post by chetanahuja »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #151
chetanahuja wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"At a certain point as a parent, it's kind of like, it doesn't really matter what we do." Congratulations. You've discovered the true essence of parenting ;-)

Not sure if you're being fun or patronizing, but I'll assume the former in good faith. Regardless, this is a highly contrarian position. In fact a recent article [1] comes to the same conclusion, as well as how controversial said conclusion is. [1] http://quillette.com/2015/12/01/why-parenting-may-not-matter...

I'm being partly facetious, but only partly. I've thought the same thing to myself so many times about my kids too ;-)

Re: Disney is safeguarding its future by buying childhood, piece by piece

#162

Post by EGreg »

zekevermillion wrote: post #141
EGreg wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you really want blatant commercialization, see Pokemon, Digimon, Yu Gi Oh etc. The latter at least had an interesting plot, and deeper characters. But both are basically cheap adaptations of Japanese anime -- draw a few frames with action lines, sell millions of trading cards. Compare that to, say, Spiderman for FOX Kids in the 90s. Every scene was carefully animated and the plot was deep. And to prove it's not ju…

Well I generally agree that titles today are super lame compared to the awesomeness of my own childhood. But it's hard to remove my own subjective nostalgia from the equation, as someone pointed out above. It may be possible that there is almost too much focus on "quality" now but it's the wrong kind of quality -- lack of errors, linear predictability, control of financial risk in the business of storytelling. Today'…

I honestly think I'll raise my kids watching 80s and 90s cartoons and not show them iPads til they're 6 or so. I don't want them to wind up like this kid:

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=aXV-yaFmQNk

Re: Disney is safeguarding its future by buying childhood, piece by piece

#163

Post by olewhalehunter »

soylentcola wrote: post #160
olewhalehunter wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My main gripe is that of symbolic brainwashing; allowing millions of children to view media from a global corporation that asserts that the inner world of your mind acts in a specific way using constant mini-deities, asserting that "abstract thought" is risky, and enforcing psychological cliches is dangerous.

I guess I see where you're coming from and I agree that we're all entitled to our peeves and things that just rub us the wrong way. That said, I look at these sorts of films like the old fables and many newer children's stories: they personify various aspects of life (in this case, emotions) in order to simplify them at first glance for easy recognition and then as a vehicle to show where those seemingly simple thing…

The danger in this is programming children, and especially the largest global children's media conglomerate, one whose track record is defined by hegemonic ethnocentrism... programming children, to believe that they can tell who the "good guys" or "bad guys" are, what the "positive" or "negative" emotional reactions to events are, targets or images that the giant media machine behind each movie gets to decide. I also refuse to accept that there is or should be a universal "language for storytelling" and it should be a little creepy that most if not all of the participants in this comment tree grew up watching Disney's media, and that if for some reason one doesn't want to see another image associated with Disney again or have their children influenced by them, one literally has to run into the wilderness or leave the planet (but good luck finding an areospace organization without Star Wars fanboys).

Re: Disney is safeguarding its future by buying childhood, piece by piece

#164

Post by olewhalehunter »

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #133
olewhalehunter wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, children have better things to do than watching television shows owned by Disney and OP's article details why.

Why are you still limiting yourself to Disney? Your complaints apply to basically 100% of all cartoons, and quite a lot of live-action children's programming, e.g. Sesame Street.

See my response to soylentcola

Re: Disney is safeguarding its future by buying childhood, piece by piece

#165

Post by olewhalehunter »

isolate wrote: post #122
olewhalehunter wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any evidence those labels aren't a product of linguistics and culture? Two things developed during childhood that Disney is working to profit from? Did those professionals grow up watching Disney movies?

The labels are based on experiments and are cross-cultural.

Are you insinuating those cross-cultural experiments predate the institutions of culture and language that produced them? Sounds a bit like time travel.

Re: Disney is safeguarding its future by buying childhood, piece by piece

#166

Post by joering2 »

GFK_of_xmaspast wrote: post #25
joering2 wrote: post #19

Many of you will downvote me for sharing this, but parents will appreciate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwUwchCeeI4 DO NOT let your kids watch Disney!

Saving you a click, the title of the video is "Illuminati Hypersexualization of Children Exposed! Disney Pedophilia and Satanic Rolemodels".

Did you watch it?

Since when is youtube about reading titles?? This title is misleading; it's all about Disney as empire.

Re: Disney is safeguarding its future by buying childhood, piece by piece

#167

Post by GFK_of_xmaspast »

joering2 wrote: post #166
GFK_of_xmaspast wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saving you a click, the title of the video is "Illuminati Hypersexualization of Children Exposed! Disney Pedophilia and Satanic Rolemodels".

Did you watch it? Since when is youtube about reading titles?? This title is misleading; it's all about Disney as empire.

The abstract is "Exposing subliminal sexualizing content aimed at young children from Hollywood, TV shows, Movies, and the pedophile fashion industry. Disney channel and Disney movies exposed. Young girls being turned into miniature sex kittens. Illuminati brainwashing and destruction of Morality", and the preview image shows a young girl drinking out of a penis-shaped bottle.

Furthermore, there are comments (never read the comments) like " This truly shows we live in a sick ass perverted world even looking at the scene from a reality show at the 28:00 mark that the fat bitch is telling little girls they should make the audenice think they are naked to that i say sick ass world there would be no way in hell that this type of shit would've been on tv 30 years ago & if it ever did make it on tv back then every tv watchdog group across the country would have called for the networks to take shows like this off the air....."

Even furthermore, the suggested video page has videos like "Dead babied in Your Food", "Martin Lawrence EXPOSES Illuminati", "Lil Wayne says the Illuminati is changing the world for the Mark of the Beast".

EDIT: One of the suggested videos is of clear importance to the Hacker News community: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbldNqL6LOI

Re: Disney is safeguarding its future by buying childhood, piece by piece

#168

Post by deciplex »

oldmanjay wrote: post #159
deciplex wrote: post #45

Basically nothing about Disney's strategy would be wrong, or even harmful, provided copyright terms were something reasonable rather than infinite as a practical matter. By now anyone should have been allowed to make "The Force Awakens" and without paying $4.1 billion for the privilege, either.

You are actually talking about how you believe you should be able to profit selling the original movies, if you're complaining about copyright. Trademarks are what prevent you from making a new Star Wars movie and those don't expire on a schedule.

If you make a movie called "Star Wars", sure. But (and please correct me if I'm wrong) making any derivative work, i.e. using the characters and stories - fan-fiction basically, would fall under the copyright regime. That's what I'm talking about.

Re: Disney is safeguarding its future by buying childhood, piece by piece

#169

Post by nikdaheratik »

anon4 wrote: post #145
samfisher83 wrote: post #13

It seemed like new star wars was a remake of the old star wars. I think people people know what they like and they just want it repackaged in a slightly different form. Surprised they haven't gone out and brought out hasbro and mattel.

For all the hype, ep 7 doesn't have one bit the originality ep 1 had.

Well, originality isn't everything if your "original" idea is poorly executed and doesn't have much of a story to begin with.

OTOH, it can be argued that ep. 4 is basically a ripoff of kurosawa + WW2 fighter movies... in SPACE! So it's some people are maybe taking all these movies too seriously if they expect great artistic cinema out of them.

Re: Disney is safeguarding its future by buying childhood, piece by piece

#170

Post by pbhjpbhj »

lambda wrote: post #153
matrixagent wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OP didn't seem outraged to me, just a bit disappointed. Which I understand, because "at some point" is still far away for the new Star Wars movie. I do think that any discussion of a movie is a spoiler. It depends, but from friends I don't even want to know if they liked a movie or not as I know them and their taste so well that I will deduce things which will influence my experience. I want my experience as pristine…

When I say "at some point", I don't mean that that's the timeline for a particular movie. I mean at some point in your life, it is better to let go of the idea of walking into a movie in a completely pristine state with no expectation about what will happen in it. Otherwise, either you have to cut yourself off from all media and conversation that might possibly reference the movie, or try and convince everyone you mi…

>it is better to let go of the idea of walking into a movie in a completely pristine state with no expectation about what will happen in it //

I actually managed this pretty much with the new Star Wars movie - but then on the way in to find the screen was greeted with a massive poster showing lots of info about the movie. I averted my eyes. Then at the entrance there were sales staff touting character drink cups which successfully spoiled a couple of the characters who would feature heavily.

After the movie I watched a BBC program which supposedly reviewed the Star Wars franchise and promised no spoilers. Pretty much the entire plot and many of the scenes could be determined from the content they gave.

The problem I have nowadays is that trailers seem to include the entire plot, all major characters, all the best effects, all the most emotive scenes; ostensibly the entire movie in digest. These to me are very poor trailers.

Generally I agree with your points however, lambda.

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