The Strange Case of Meryl Streep and The Disney Conundrum
Walt Disney was a complicated man, but Streep’s criticisms should have been aimed to those that run the company today.
As an animation historian, its a hard thing to swallow when Hollywood gets into spats about its past.
One such case has taken the animation world by storm, Meryl Streep made a mention about Walt Disney’s issues with Jewish, Minorities and Women.
Hollywood, cheered in response. Well, most of Hollywood.
As you see, the animation side of the business took things a little more forcefully.
Cartoon Brew, once both worked on by Jerry Beck and Amid Amidi (now Amid is the full owner and editor of the site), did a rebuttal against Meryl Streep and her comments.
The problem is? There may have been no need to.
She was making a point of going after the man because she cannot go after the company.
One wonders why would she go after the man (Walt Disney) to promote the actress (Emma Thomson)?
The issue stems from what Disney does now (or has done in the immediate past) from what they did in the far past.
Disney ran the animation theatrical world for nearly 35 years. They pretty much created the modern day princess meme in the United States. The sad truth was that after 1984, the Disney that was known for those movies, were now existed by name alone.
By the very early 1990's a new Mickey Mouse club was formed, the club had names like Spears, Aguilera, Timberlake. These names later became the biggest superstars of their era, but not without breakdowns and mistakes.
Disney (the company) “COULD” be blamed for this, but we know human beings arent perfect, right Miss Streep?
Oh, what makes this more interesting (and really only one of the two things you can blame Disney(the company) is that they moved away from action animation (The Gargoyles, Remember that series that Greg Wiseman created?) and focused on the next “Mickey Mouse Club” like franchise females — such as Cyrus, Hudgens, Devato, and Gomez. We know what Cyrus has done, Hudgens did during her time in Disney, Devato’s issues and Gomez’s in and out of relationships and rehab for alcohol…
Again, you could blame the company and Mrs Anne Sweeney — a favorite friend of Streep for promoting such filth over Emma Thomson.
But then again, why go after the dead man, while his company has taken over most of the animated world, and possibly the majority of all sport in the world (E.S.P.N) and maybe the rest of the planet in 10 to 15 years?
Where are the questions about Modern Day Disney today? How the scripts for some of their “kids series” have changed? (tumblr is your friend folks). That Disney have to create a committee to figure out how to change all of the history of the post Star Wars canon — throwing billions of dollars away? How about Marvel, now having three main movie canon for Spiderman and X-Men/Fantastic Four confusing the audience instead of giving Sony and Fox their share of the profits?
How about the reasons why John Carter Really failed? Is that the reason why Star Wars was bought? If Disney couldnt handle the progenitor of Star Wars, how much more they can handle Star Wars? And why France, was the only one to accept The Lone Ranger despite all of the issues with the story and the quarter of a billion dollar train chase?
Is it me or is Miss Streep talking up a tree that everybody has picked from?
It seems that truly — animation no longer has a power structure to bounce off of, or to reach towards. Seth MacFarlaine has become just as powerful as Disney was in his hayday, but he has no major production company to speak off outside of the Fox Family (once called News Corp now 21 century Fox). His recent work about “Its a Good Day For Pie” was lauded for its animation, but continued the trope in certain ways about Disney. But none of Hollywood would even care about the real problems in Disney.
Because talking about the dead is much more simpler than dealing with the problems today.