Disney’s sword of self-immolation

There is bitter irony in the monogram emblazoned on the hilt of their souvenir saber

A couple of days ago, my kids asked me to take them outside to play. My youngest grabbed his swords and his scooter as he ran out the door, while his sister brought her bicycle. After they had tuckered themselves out, my son ran inside saying he was too tired to pick up his toys and bring them in. As I bent to retrieve one of the synthetic scimitars, I was struck by a bit of delicious irony. This particular plastic blade was gifted to my son during one of our trips to Walt Disney World by a parent who had grown weary of his son waving it around. 

Sidebar: I admit it - I grew up loving Disney. I saw Disney movies, I had Disney toys, and most of all, I loved going to Disney World. For several years, we had annual passes and took our children twice a year to what once was “the happiest place on Earth.” I enjoyed Disney World so much, that I even took a part-time contracting position working for a travel agency specializing in Disney, a role I no longer hold for reasons of conscience (as you will shortly understand). Now, back to our regularly scheduled program…

The family who gifted it to my son had received it at an attraction, a meal in Cinderella’s castle (at those meals, they used to give magic wands to little girls/princesses and swords to little boys/princes - I’m not sure they would anymore since my understanding is they no longer distinguish between boys and girls). The satire is found in the name of the attraction: Cinderella’s Royal Table, the initials of which are inscribed on the hilt of the sword as seen in the close-up below (no, it is not a doctored image):

It seems inadvertently, Disney manufactured the “sword” on which it first began to skewer itself. Though there were some signs at the time, who would have imagined that Disney would go so woke as to not only embrace the concepts touted by the proposition bearing those initials, but that they would strive to become the avatar of wokeness itself.

Early gleanings of Disney’s descent into Critical Race Theory could be seen when the movie Song of the South was virtually erased from history, with the exception only of the remnants found in one ride at the park - Splash Mountain. Splash Mountains themed with characters from Song of the South like Br’er Rabbit, Br’er Fox, and Br’er Bear. Though these characters and tales of them predate Disney’s adaptation by decades, and Br’er Rabbit was actually a folk hero, he and his co-horts were considered too racist and Disney set about the task of replacing the cast of Song of the South, who for decades accoutered the ride, with characters from The Princess and the Frog. Putting a fictional colored character in a ride is, in their ostensible opinion, anti-racism in action, comparable in their minds, I assume, to removing a Native American from a package of butter, ousting a real black woman from a bottle of syrup, and nixing a real black chef from a box of rice.

Similarly, to display just how intersectional they could be, when they refurbished the Pirates of the Caribbean ride, fully updated with the face of Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow on many of the animatronics, an animatronic woman in a scene where she was being sold by pirates along with several other women (a scenario which would more likely than not be historically accurate) was reimagined as a woman pirate (how historically likely is that? - wait…what’s a woman?) selling the townspeople’s possessions which she purportedly plundered. However, at this point, Disney’s seppuku was not yet complete.

When the Florida state legislature passed their Parental Rights in Education bill, a bill that was, by critics, popularly mischaracterized as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, Disney promised to fight to have it overturned. This revealed an underlying level of misopedia heretofore unimaginable from what is likely the most prolific family entertainment company in history. That a company whose revenues had relied on entertaining children now sought for people to have the right to sexualize those same children was beyond appalling. Still, the internal one-upmanship had not peaked.

Around the same time that Florida’s governor DeSantis signed into law the Parental Rights in Education bill, undercover video revealed that a Disney executive by the name of Latoya Raveneau had a “not-at-all-secret gay agenda” to queer as much of Disney’s kids’ programming as she could. Raveneau, a producer for Disney Television Animation, began inserting LGBTQ content into every corner of content she was able. This agenda was fully supported by Disney corporate president Karey Burke (Burke claims to be “a mother to two queer children actually, one transgender child and one pansexual child,” a statement that makes me question her parenting prowess if not her psychological well-being in general).

Disney’s all-out assault on sensibility was not limited to children’s television cartoons. Disney started adding, little by little, LGBTQ+ content to movies. A somewhat hidden moment in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker was lamented by the alphabet mafia for being too unnoticeable. Hints of the new direction began to appear in Marvel movies like Captain Marvel and Avengers: End Game. Eternals added an openly homosexual hero, yet it’s first weekend at the box office disappointed, grossing only $71 million after original estimates had it hitting $80-85 million. The movie cost $200 million before marketing, advertising, and distribution costs, and its overall gross wasn’t too impressive. After these, they really started targeting kids in theaters.

Lightyear, the apparent backstory for the Space Ranger made famous by the Toy Story movies, was a box office flop, losing over $100 million for Disney. Though most are well-aware that parents rejected the animated film due to rumors of a “gay kiss,” Disney looked for other causes and wrote it off as having had an unclear message and purpose. Choosing not to learn from this mistake, however, cost Disney once again. Enter Strange World, a Disney animated film portraying Disney’s first bi-racial gay teen. This movie made Lightyear look like it went to infinity and beyond, beating Lightyear’s loss by almost double - that’s right, Strange World lost an estimated $197 million for Disney. Still, Disney is so bent on being woke that they refuse to acknowledge the reason for their box office flops. What has Disney’s wokeness earned them? Well, just look at their market performance since May 2021: 

Disney’s stock price has been plummeting and is now half what it was two years ago. This is what happens when a company betrays its customer base. Disney decided being woke was more important than running a profitable entertainment business.

Other companies, rather than receiving education by example, are following in Disney’s steps. There are few at this point, I suspect, unaware of Bud Light’s Dylan Mulvaney debacle. After a (not really?) campaign involving the man-who-claims-to-be-a-woman Mulvaney, Bud Light sales dropped 11% the week of April 8. The following week, sales dove another 21%. According to CBS “News,” two executives involved in the campaign have now been put on leave.

Not to be outdone, as if men winning at women’s sports wasn’t insult enough, Nike followed up by tapping Mulvaney to be their newest sport bra model. To say the public’s reaction has been fiery would not be hyperbole. Since Nike’s decision, amidst calls for a boycott of Nike, a new fad has arisen on TikTok: the “Burn Bra Challenge.” That’s right, women are setting their Nike bras ablaze in protest of the company using a man to model women’s underwear.

These companies seem to want to prove true the tired trope of “go woke, go broke.” It seems that, despite the devastating financial results, corporations now find more import in pushing politics than profiting from the sale of products and services. Will any of them take a lesson from these disasters? Apparently, not Disney. It is to the point that their park placards could be reasonably revised to read “Walt Epstein World” instead. They refuse to open their eyes to the source of their woes, and now they are forced in a second round of layoffs to expel thousands more employees, with a goal of axing over 7,000 in total. I suppose this should come as no surprise from a company that seems hardly able to imagine new content, and who, aside from remaking old classics, turned to recasting villains as misunderstood heroes with their victims as the nouveau foils (Maleficent in the original Sleeping Beauty movie claimed to be “the mistress of all evil,” yet in the Maleficent movies, was a spurned wood nymph who was betrayed by Aurora’s father, King Stefan, and though she sought vengeance, in the end repented and herself saved Sleeping Beauty). Perhaps these companies should take to heart the old (biblical) axiom, “Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil…their root will become like rot…” Disney’s rot began years ago, and now they are falling on a sword of their own making.