I was having such a good day. I read a great Grievous meme on Memebase, my Jar Jar Mimobot came in (and it's #66!!!!), I came up with some great I-III t-shirt designs I'm going to make if I can.
Then I read this.
So not only is Star Wars continuing to go to hell (thanks, hateboys), but the traditional Disney animation is gone too.
Disney, you're dead to me. I don't know at this point how much I'm going to be willing or able to give up seeing as you own so much that I love, but somehow, some way, I need to show you that this is NOT okay.
"Star Wars continuing to go to hell (thanks, hateboys)"
ReplyDelete"Hateboys" really have nothing to do with it- it makes perfect sense for Disney to shut down branches of Lucasfilm they don't need that would be competing with things Disney already has going on in-house, as well as supporting things that do make them money.
You also have to consider the company (and its animation department in particular) suffered a number of failures recently, so lay-offs were practically inevitable. I don't like it one bit, but it's really not a sign that things are going to hell in a handbasket.
I mean, Disney is a corporation. A massive corporation, and they're going to do what's best and most profitable for them. That doesn't excuse them or make it all okay, but this isn't something that should make them all of a sudden "dead" to you.
It's not just this. It's the latest and biggest in a number of things Disney has been doing since October. And I've been saying "give them a chance." They've enjoyed my benefit of the doubt as they cancelled everything we've been looking forward to, destroyed Clone Wars and LucasArts, slashed ILM to ribbons, and now all of this.
DeleteAnd by "Thanks Hateboys," I mean "Thanks for finally running Lucas out of the high seat and see where that got us." And nothing will convince me that the venomous haters didn't have at least something to do with the retirement and sale.
Everything Disney has done has been purely in the means of making a profit- of course they're gutting a lot of Lucasfilm branches because it doesn't make financial sense to keep them open when they already have inhouse departments that do the same thing (heck, with LucasArts, the company was wildly unproductive and had just suffered a string of failures. Disney's game department is immensely popular, so it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever to keep it alive).
DeleteI mean, the irony is this is what Lucas himself created. Star Wars practically invented the modern marketing and corporate system when it comes to film, and his system directly influenced companies like Disney and the like. This is what corporations do- they do what they can to make money and do as much as possible to keep from losing it- I'm sure you've heard the story of the scripting process of Red Tails.
And I should clarify by no means am I in favor of this. I hate what Star Wars did to Hollywood and despise the current corporate system. But Disney is the only company you've really singled out on stuff like this when they're far from the only ones doing it- I noticed you've never discussed what happened to Rhyhm & Hues, to name a relatively recent example. At this point it feels like you're just singling Disney out because they happen to have your favorite toy.
I'm singling Disney out because I thought they were different. I defended them. I expected this from anyone BUT them. They let Marvel run Marvel, and Pixar run Pixar. Sure there were some cuts, but nothing to this scale as far as I'm aware.
DeleteThings they helped Lucasfilm market at Celebration, when they knew they'd be taking the reins, gone. The division that created Disney, gone. I'm used to things falling into development hell, but this seemed particularly dishonest, not to mention boneheaded.
And they'll get away with it because the rest of us are too busy arguing about I-III to agree how to tell them what we really think.
I want to like VII-IX. I want them to be good Star Wars movies. But I'd rather have the things we were promised then see a single frame of the new films. It's not worth all this. I'm done defending Disney. They'd have to do a lot to make me trust them again.
Also, to my knowledge, Lucas never bought up a bunch of stuff just to dismantle it.
The reason they kept Pixar as is and Marvel as is is, again, financial issues- Pixar was making gigantic hits and filling a hole in their animation department, and Marvel filled a ton of gaps they needed (primarily comics and superheroes).
DeleteThere's reason to believe the only reason they bought Lucasfilm is for the Star Wars property, because the rest of it doesn't fill any presumed need for the company- it'll cost money (and most likely a lot of extra money) to keep it running, which is why they're gutting it as they are. There's nothing "dishonest" about it at all.
And you're right about Lucas, but Lucasfilm was never a strong enough company financially to do that sort of thing, so who knows what he would've done if he were CEO of a company like Disney. I don't make presumptions about his character so I'm not going to speculate, but Lucas is a businessman just as Iger is, and would most likely do what's best financially for his company.