Word: disney
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...early '50s, as television usurped film's place as the most pervasive popular art, most movie studios sold TV rights to their pre-1948 films. Disney knew better; he knew his pictures had a shelf life. So he hoarded his booty, doling out the old animated features to movie theaters while airing the cartoon shorts on his own shows. When the pay-cable era finally arrived, the Disney Channel had a vintage supply of no-cost programming -- all thanks to Walt's farsightedness...
...Disney released The Shaggy Dog, the studio's first live-action comedy feature. The film -- about a teenager transformed into a talking sheepdog -- wasn't much, but it grossed $9 million on a $1 million budget (while the more costly animated feature Sleeping Beauty was earning only $5 million on a $6 million budget). The same elements of domestic fantasy, special effects and easy laughs were cloned over and over for Disney hits from The Love Bug to Splash. Hollywood's future auteurs were watching too. When they grew up they adapted the Shaggy Dog comedy-fantasy into...
...most dramatic innovation was the theme park, a spiffy, sanitized version of the old amusement park. Disneyland, and later Walt Disney World, were dazzling essays in salesmanship. The rides (such as Peter Pan's Flight and Snow White's Scary Adventures) promoted the films. The Disney characters strolling through the parks served as free commercials for the Mickey Mouse back scratchers, Goofy bikinis, "Totally Minnie" fashions and Donald Duck notepaper (with the warning READ MY LIPS) on sale in the parks' stores. And in creating roller-coaster rides with a story line, Disney helped shape the course of movie narratives...
...This Disney land was always a world so rich and rigid that it was ripe for satire. In 1954 Harvey Kurtzman's Mad comic book burlesqued the Disney cartoon world, with its talking animals wearing three-fingered gloves, its ducks in sailor suits but no pants, and a mouse named Minnie "with lipstick and eyelashes and a dress with high-heeled shoes; a mouse, ten times bigger than the biggest rat." This was mild stuff compared with a 1967 parody that Mad Alumnus Wallace Wood drew for Realist magazine. In the cheerfully scabrous "Disneyland Memorial Orgy," Walt's creatures behaved...
Walt's corporate scions were suitably outraged by this, but the worst was still to come. It is one thing to be defamed; it is another to be ignored, as the studio pretty much was after Walt Disney's death in 1966. Most galling of all, other people were working the old Disney wonder, and making it work at the box office. The Star Wars trilogy was putting a high-tech spin on the old Disney legerdemain. So, brilliantly, were Steven Spielberg's films: Close Encounters of the Third Kind used When You Wish upon a Star as a theme...