Michael Eisner, from the 80's to the late 90's, did a great job as CEO, honestly. He may not have been Walt himself, but he clearly had a creative mind and was willing to try new things. He also did a great job at getting out in front of the camera and really selling the new additions to the parks. Of course, though, after Frank Wells's unfortunate death and the failure of EuroDisney, Disney went into complete dismay under Eisner. The early 2000's saw awful and lackluster theme parks such as Disney's California Adventure, Walt Disney Studios and Hong Kong Disneyland, unnecessary straight to VOD sequels to beloved classics, and terrible movies in the Disney canon such as Home on the Range, Chicken Little, and the Emperor's New Groove. I think a lot of us remember that time and just how bad it was for Disney.
In 2005, Michael Eisner stepped down and was replaced by Bob Iger. In 2006, he oversaw the purchase of Pixar, a wonderful animation company that had worked closely with Disney in the past. In 2009, The Princess and the Frog was released which started the beginning of the Disney revival which also saw Tangled in 2010, Winnie the Pooh in 2011, and Frozen in 2013. Finally it seemed as if Walt Disney Animation was back on track. In that same year, the Walt Disney Co. purchased Marvel. With the parks, he oversaw the complete remodel of Disney's California Adventure turning it into a well rounded theme park that really honored California's history as it was when Walt Disney lived here. This is not to mention the expansions to Hong Kong Disneyland, Disney's Animal Kingdom, and the Magic Kingdom. In 2013, WDC purchased Lucasfilm which seemed to be right at home in Disney seeing as Lucas was a big fan of the company and they had already worked closely together during the Eisner era.
Something has happened to Bob Iger in the past few years, however. What set of this change I do not know, but I want to say it really started with The Muppets (TV series 2015-2016). To be clear, prior to The Muppets reboot there were already problems going on with Disney animation losing its identity but I'm going to assign this to the fact Lasseter was the chief creative officer at WDAS and Pixar, who also were seeing a decline in quality. Back to The Muppets, the show was hated by the original puppeteers such as Frank Oz and even led to the firing of Steven Whitmire, the voice and puppeteer of Kermit. The show had taken the Muppets and stripped them of their charm in favor of racy humor. While The Muppets (2011) was a brilliant, The Muppets (TV series) suffered from a lack of character integrity. If you're unaware,
character integrity is a term used by Disney to make sure "friends of" Disney characters in the parks do not act out of character. For example, Cinderella would not attack a child. This is why they do not host the
Hyperspace Hoopla at Disney's Hollywood Studios anymore. While it primarily is used in regards to the theme parks, it very much can be applied to other mediums the characters appear in and this is what happened with The Muppets in their return to the small screen. The characters in The Muppets (TV series) just were not the characters from The Muppet Show.
The issues of character integrity is what brought me to actually write this post. In case you missed it, a trailer for Wreck-It Ralph 2 dropped today. In it, we see Ralph visit Oh My Disney.go, a mommy blogging site for all things Disney. We see The Muppets, Star Wars, Marvel, Disney, and Pixar all together in one place (between Ready Player One, Infinity War, and this, crossovers seem to be the thing with 2018). What happens then is Penelope, voiced by Sarah Silverman, enters a room where the Disney princesses live. Remember what I said about how Cinderella attacking a child would be out of character? Well, of course, that's instantly what happens when she sees Penelope; Cinderella breaks her glass slipper, something she would never do, and points the broken glass at Penelope, something she would never do. The entire sequence in the trailer is a self parody of Disney which is very much the lacking of character integrity that caused them to cancel Hyperspace Hoopla and, assumably, why Solo had to be almost completely reshot.
What's most important to address regarding this concept of having all the princesses together in a single movie is that this was
an idea by Michael Eisner for Fantasia 2000 (then called Fantasia Continued). This is how that went:
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Unlike Bob Iger, Michael Eisner did not go through with it and had people to listen to who actually knew what they were doing. They understood that self parody is harmful to their own brand. This could very well be assigned to what Bob Iger has spoken of before as "brand withdrawal."
In an interview with the Wall Street Journal in 2010, Bob Iger states this: "Any time you do something mediocre with your brand, that's a withdrawal. California Adventure was a brand withdrawal." Self parody is a perfect example of this.
In an article from 2011, Oren Aviv, former head of production for Walt Disney Studios, states, "You could make the argument that Disney has been reshaped in Apple’s image: brand over everything, and an emphasis on quality." Again, self parody contradicts this statement from Aviv.
It should be noted, this is not the first instance of brand withdrawal, lack of character integrity, and self parody in regards to Disney under Iger. You are all aware of my opinion on Mission Breakout no doubt, but it must be addressed as an example of these problems. In the attractions, when the doors open at the top of the tower, Rocket Raccoon says "Disneyland? That's thematically inconsistent," mocking the lack of effort put into the attraction. While the attraction does lack quality, calling attention to it only makes those matters worse. By not respecting itself, I have no reason to respect it, and that's the why self parodies can be harmful to a brand's name.
While on the topic of Mission Breakout I may as well also bring to light that, under Eisner, there were plans to change Space Mountain into Stitch Mountain. In other words, they were going to take a beloved classic and cheaply overlay it for, what was at the time, a hot property. Fortunately, Eisner was talked out of it. Unfortunately, Iger was not talked out of cheaply overlaying Tower of Terror, a beloved classic, with Guardians of the Galaxy, a hot property of the time. We are seeing this same kind of cheap overlay currently being done to Paradise Pier with the "new" Pixar Pier. Yet again, an instance of brand withdrawal by Bob Iger that he criticized Michael Eisner of with DCA when it first opened.
There's also the issue regarding Star Wars and Lucasfilm but, just like with Pixar's flaws being assigned to Lasseter, I'm assigning that more towards Kathleen Kennedy. Overall, though, I would say Bob Iger simply has been CEO for too long. While he's done wonders for the shareholders and the company as far as finances go, and even at a time seemed like he was really ramping up the quality of the company as a whole, it appears now that the Walt Disney Co. is suffering from the same brand withdrawal that it did in the early 2000's under Eisner but, unlike in the 2000's, no one is there to stop Iger. Self parodies, promoting brands where they do not belong, lowering the quality of products, and lacking character integrity are just some of the harm Bob Iger has done to the Walt Disney Co.'s brand in these past few years and it's only a matter of time before the general public catches on to see what the WDC has become.
