Archive for March 31st, 2010
Waking Sleeping Beauty
We highly recommend going to see Waking Sleeping Beauty, a documentary about Walt Disney Animation in its darkest days (the abysmal Black Cauldron) through its renaissance and creative zenith in the mid-90s.
It’s fascinating for a great many reasons.
(1) We love the classic Disney fairytales, even when they are complete misses like Princess & the Frog or weird mashups of fairytales and real-life or literary stories, like Pocahontas and Hunchback of Notre Dame. We’ll see every Disney animated movie, at least once — but only repeatedly watch the best of them, like Sleeping Beauty, The Little Mermaid, and Beauty & the Beast. All it takes, honestly, to start the waterworks is the merest hint of “Tale As Old As Time”, sung by either Angela Lansbury or Celine Dion. And someday we all hope to earn an epitaph as perfectly poetic as Howard Ashman’s, “the man who gave a mermaid her voice and a beast his soul”. To see how Ashman was brought into Disney to bring that voice and soul to projects was an incredible treat.
(2) We remember seeing The Black Cauldron in theaters and thinking how terrible it was. It was the first time in any of our lives that we saw people actually get up and leave the theater and not stay until the end credits (which some of our mothers always made us watch to the very end, because people worked hard on the film and it was disrespectful not to see their acknowledgments). That movie was just terrible. In Waking Sleeping Beauty, we learned it made less than The Care Bears Movie at the box office — and that movie was bad, too. Though we still love us some care bears.
(3) It was amazing to see what a simple ragtag operation Disney Animation was, even when creating Little Mermaid and Beauty & the Beast. Sure, they had studio millions behind them, but the core of everything done was just a group of oddballs and misfits working hard at what they loved, creating magic. We found that truly inspiring — and hope others watching the movie realize that they, too, can create magic like that if they set their minds to it, work hard, and never give up no matter what the challenges are.
(4) The movie briefly touched on the episode where corporate raiders tried to take down Disney and sell it off into constituent parts in the 80s, the way Richard Gere’s character in Pretty Woman used to take apart companies, break them up, and make more from their destruction than he would have running them. Years ago, we read a book called something like Raiding the Magic Kingdom, all about this episode. The movie doesn’t go that deeply into the “greenmailing” that went on, but a Jewish New York corporate raider came dangerously close to destroying Disney for profit — in the book, it’s noted one of the only things that stopped him was the Jewish community, who refused to allow this man to take down Disney because it was an American institution and they were afraid of a massive backlash against Jews everywhere for destroying part of Americana. So, instead, that corporate raider “greenmailed” Disney into buying back all his shares at a huge profit to himself, lest he bring the whole company down.
(5) It’s amazing how much the personalities of the executives, and their interactions with one another, impacted the company.
We’ve said many times before that the entertainment industry is a great deal like politics. These movies showing the behind the scenes of a movie studio make us think about all the behind the scenes in Congress, campaigns, and the White House. It’s fascinating to watch archival footage of Disney executives insisting Pocahontas was going to be a massive hit, while The Lion King was sure to be a mediocre success. Those fools also believe The Black Cauldron would be the greatest Disney film of all time.
In retrospect, all of these bad decisions are easy to spot, and hindsight is 20/20.
We can’t help thinking about the Democrat Party in this way, and looking at everything they have done to produce their own Black Cauldron with this Obamacare bill. Every time we read another propaganda piece in the NY Times or TIME claiming this will help Democrats in November, we’re going to remember all of those suits at Disney who deluded themselves to believe some of their worst films were going to be their biggest successes.
In Waking Sleeping Beauty, it was clear the amount of time and energy invested in bad ideas became too great for anyone to put the brakes on these projects and let cooler, saner heads prevail. They set themselves on a course to destruction, investing everything in bad ideas, and the structure of the company and all its employees just wouldn’t allow them to change direction mid-course to avert the disaster we in the audience knew was coming.
That’s so similar to what we feel today, watching the reality of Obamacare set in.
America will be okay in the end, because the coming elections and court challenges will see to it that this madness is put in check — but the Democrat Party will never recover from what it’s done to itself.
Just as Disney’s self-inflicted wounds and myopia almost did it in more than a few times.
See You In November Video
Everyone who has the talent and time to make videos like this should start doing it. It’s very cute, and very well-done. The more of them the better.
Research: Can you find all the companies who are stating how much of a hit they'll take under Obamacare this year?
Can you list in this thread all the companies that have announced how much Obamacare will cost them this year?
So far, we’ve seen:
(1) Boeing = $150 million hit
(2) Prudential = $100 million hit
Please include a link to the source article.
All of this should be compiled into a table that also shows how much the average worker at these companies makes.
Then, we can figure out just how many jobs will be on the line because of Obamacare’s costs — since we all know full well salary and bonus cuts in the C-suite won’t be used to make up for those lost millions, and shareholders won’t allow any less dividends to be paid to them.
That $150m at Boeing and $100m at Prudential will be recouped by the companies in higher costs passed on to customers, as well as savings from layoffs.
What other companies are telegraphing their job cuts while announcing their Obamacare financial hits?
Say what you want about Nancy Pelosi, but Drudge is right, she looks great
Drudge ran a headline this morning noting how great Nancy Pelosi looks for a 70 year old.
We don’t think she’s a good Speaker of the House. We believe she might actually be a criminal, in that she knew about the abuses of Congress critters like Eric Massa and Charlie Rangel long before they came to public light — not to mention all the lies she’s told and underhanded games she’s played in her quest to undermine our national intelligence agencies.
We’ve met her in person and she’s rude, dismissive, and aristocratic. She has about a minute’s worth of prepared speech to deliver to a member of the public on about a dozen topics, and after that she seems lost, confused, and more than a little panic-stricken as she frantically blinks some kind of code to her handlers to be moved on to the next person waiting to shake her hand.
But, we need to give credit where credit is due and note how right Drudge is — she does look amazing for 70. To be honest, she looks great for 40.
If we didn’t know how old she was, we’d swear she was in her early 50s, tops.
It’s a real shame she doesn’t take care of the country, and our Constitution, as well as she does herself.
And that she doesn’t share her anti-aging secrets with the rest of us.
Wednesday Open Thread: March 30th, 2010
What’s on your minds this Wednesday?
What are people talking about in your part of the country?
