I cancelled my Disney + subscription. Partly because of the company’s capitulation to the fascist occupying regime, but also partly because it just wasn’t being used very much. Cancelled NetFlix at the same time. In that case, only because it wasn’t being used very much.
It made me think about the changes to Disney, the company and the American institution. Disney as a company has been around for a very long time. It was originally a family-run entertainment business. Movies, then theme parks, then sometime around the 1950s or 1960s a popular TV show that managed to boost both their movies and their parks. Walt Disney himself was the host, and I think that’s where the iconic images of the Snow White castle in the Magic Kingdom part of Disneyland came from.
In the 1960s and 1970s, Disney was an aspirational ideal. Every kid, including me, wanted to visit Disneyland, then when it appeared, Disney World. The Wonderful World of Disney was aired on Sunday evenings, I think, and it was probably the leading program among families with children. At that time television was the primary choice for home entertainment, and the selection of programs at any given time and place was limited to just a few. Where I grew up, there were four local stations: one each for the nationwide networks, and a fourth “independent” channel that seemed to be sporadically connected with other smaller networks. So there were at most four choices, and often enough none of them were very appealing to kids. The Wonderful World of Disney was something to look forward to all week.
Everything about “Disney” was wonderful for kids of that time and place. Hoping you’d someday travel to the park(s), waiting for the latest movie, the animated cartoons, and even the Mickey Mouse Club, another TV show I just remembered. That one even kicked off the careers of child stars who went on to adult stardom, which Disney is still up to.
Disney radiated quality. The technology in the rides in Disneyland was better than anything else, at least that we knew about. The special effects in the movies convinced us that a British nanny could really be magic. The animation was just better than Bugs Bunny or Woody Woodpecker, although to be honest it wasn’t always as funny.
And now? Disney theme parks seem to have turned into destinations for wealthy families. I’m not even sure how many there are. Their cruise ships actually offer more affordable vacations, and stop at Disney’s own private island. The company itself still makes some movies, but they’re not the anticipated events of the past. And the company now owns many other broadcasters, movie studios, and related businesses.
The thing is, the size of the company has not made them more independent, resilient, or reliable. Much less so in every case. Corporations usually pursue growth at all times, but the ones that really achieve extreme growth, like Disney, sometimes seem to become more vulnerable. They’re certainly much less creative or, as they prefer to say, “innovative.”
Instead of creating, innovating, or inventing, huge corporations simply purchase. A good example is Cisco Systems, the multi-billion-dollar networking vendor headquartered in San Jose, California. The company was founded in 1984, and did all of its own work and innovation for the first seven years. Then their acquisition strategy commenced. Since then they’ve acquired 149 companies, and 50% of Cisco’s business activity — that is, half of what the company actually does — is acquiring other companies. Acquisitions are more important to the company overall than any other thing they do. If their self-descriptions argue that what Cisco does is, say, networking or switching or manufacture those office desktop telephones that seem ubiquitous, well, they’re not being entirely straightforward.
Another enormous company, and one of the world’s largest, is Apple. They were founded in 1976 and did their own work a bit longer. But in 1986 they made their first acquisition, and as of 2019, CEO Tim Cook said “Apple acquires a company every two to three weeks on average.”
Corporations are usually pretty rigidly hierarchical and have priorities established at the top tier and enforced by budgets. The most important priorities may not be the largest items in the budget, but they’re the ones that have the bragging rights, and take precedence over many other things. When the biggest single thing a corporation does is shop for other companies and buy them, “innovation” is going to take a back seat, regardless of the corporation’s protestations.
It shows. The Disney name still has a certain cachet, but nowhere near what it once was. The name Apple still seems to stand for high quality tech gear, but the iPad was introduced 15 years ago, and the iPhone is nearly 20. Since then they’ve introduced watches, but as far as I can tell that’s about it. Apple is best described as a caretaker company maintaining high-end products but not offering much “innovation.” Disney is the same way; most of the movies they produce are just remakes of movies they produced before. Disney theme parks aren’t where you go to see the future, or astonishing technology. They’re pleasant nostalgia.
I wonder how much of the appeal of “make america great again” is really just based on nostalgia. The sense that society, and life, was better back before corporations started to succeed in an outsized way in their quest for growth, for enormity. In practice, of course, it’s enormity that’s fueling maga, from enormous personal fortunes to enormous corporations that have discovered, maybe to their surprise, that their size has rendered them more vulnerable, not less. I don’t know how well recognized this contradiction might be. But I think it’s important.
