1998 Was a Lousy Year For Disney*

Obviously, the asterisk in the title is Mulan. Which is one of the two things I wrote about back when we discussed 1998 as Year of the Month on The Solute, before that folded. (The other is Innoventions. This is obviously part of the problem.) I don’t redo stuff I covered over there; I just port my old articles over to link to them here. It’s fine. We all know Mulan is a damn fine film. It’s not the best of the Disney Renaissance, in my opinion, but that is a really high bar.

And then there’s everything else Disney seems to have put out that month. Now, I’ve said repeatedly that I limit myself to primarily things produced by Walt Disney Studios/Walt Disney Pictures/whatever they’re calling themselves in the era in question. I’ve made exceptions, but very few of them. So okay, A Bug’s Life is fine and I do have things to say about it. Armageddon is bad and I do have things to say about it. And I really need to watch Beloved. But none of those count for the column, even if they count more than, say, Kiki’s Delivery Service, which was merely distributed in the US by Disney.

The rest of the year, however, was dire. I’ve filled a blind spot this month that frankly could’ve stayed blind with Mighty Joe Young. I’ve got another one to be filled later this month with Halloweentown. I’m going to remind you that Halloweentown was made-for-The Disney Channel, another thing I seldom cover for this column on the grounds that made-for-The Disney Channel stuff is usually pretty bad. There are exceptions, but not enough of them. Life’s too short for seeking out movies you know will be bad and probably in a bland way.

Admittedly that’s not true, from what I know, of Meet the Deedles. I chose not to see that one because it turns out I hate myself less than I thought I did. The entry for it on the Disney wiki I use for some of my research has a very badly written page about it, and I don’t care enough about the plot to read the two exceedingly long paragraphs of plot synopsis. It’s worth noting that what little I did read makes it clear that it’s about a pair of spoiled rich kids, and the only two artists on the soundtrack I recognize are the Mighty Mighty Bosstones and Cherry Poppin’ Daddies.

I know I’ll get a lot of heat for this, but what I am pretty sure is bland is the Parent Trap remake. No, I haven’t seen it. By the time it came out, I was an adult, and I grew up on the original. Which is by no means a perfect film, but it does have some room for the trauma that Susan and Sharon would have experienced, among other things. I also believe that, the further forward in time you get, the less practical the concept is. It barely makes sense in 1961 that a judge would have allowed it and that neither parent has anyone in their life who would let the girls know.

Sure, I’m willing to be paid (on my personal Patreon or similar) to watch it, which I suppose is more than I can say of Krippendorf’s Tribe, admittedly Touchstone and therefore not eligible. (I guess you could pay me enough if you wanted to but dear Gods you have to have better things to spend your money on.) But it really does feel as though the Disney and Disney-adjacent properties are only bland if they’re lucky. I have seen Armageddon (also Touchstone), and it manages to be both bad and bland, which is kind of impressive. Sorry to the cousin of mine who’s in it, but it’s not like he doesn’t know. Ben Affleck surely does.

Television? Okay, I’ll be fair; I’ve never watched PB&J Otter, though I’d probably laugh myself sick every time their home at Lake Hoohaw got mentioned. How did Disney let them get away with that name? Bug Juice is a reality show about summer camp, and I couldn’t possibly. The Hercules TV series? If I don’t want to watch the movie, why would I think the TV show could be any good? Out of the Box doesn’t sound bad for preschoolers, but I don’t even have one in the house anymore; my youngest is in fourth grade.

The Famous Jett Jackson. Okay, maybe it’s good. But I’ve never seen it, and to do it justice I’d have to watch all sixty-five episodes—unless it is bad, because I never force myself to watch an entire bad TV series. Either way, I’d have to deal with the death of its young star, Lee Thompson Young. Who wasn’t even thirty when he died, and whose family started a foundation to fight the stigma against mental illness and getting mental health care in the US. As a bipolar person myself, I support that foundation, but I’m not sure I can handle all that baggage right now.

As for the made-for-The Disney Channel movies? Forget it. You Lucky Dog, starring Kirk Cameron, is about a guy who can read dogs’ minds. Kirk Cameron. As a guy who can read dogs’ minds. You might actually have to pay me more to watch it than you would to get me to see Hercules. Brink!, per the wiki I use for this sort of thing, is “set in the backdrop of aggressive inline skating.” Starring one of those actors you know if you’re unhealthily into Disney, so of course I know multiple of his roles. (He was Sid in Toy Story and Toy Story 3.) And other than Halloweentown, that’s it.

Toon Disney? Yes, that debuted in 1998. Mostly just playing older animated stuff that already aired on ABC or The Disney Channel. There’s the rebranding of the Enchanted Tiki Room, “Under New Management,” but that was exclusively at Magic Kingdom, so I never saw it. Walt Disney World is Anthony’s beat, not mine. He’ll be the first to tell you that I was lucky to have missed it.

What I could talk about is the cynical nature of rebranding it in the first place. The next year would see a similar rebranding of the Swiss Family Robinson treehouse at Disneyland. And I think this is in part because this is the era that started to ignore more aspects of Disney history. Never mind that the Enchanted Tiki Room is an iconic aspect of Disney history; you can get more butts in seats if you slap Iago and Zazu all over it. In theory. If it didn’t suck, which by all accounts it did. But maybe visitors don’t know it sucks, and they do know who those characters are but not José, Michael, Pierre, or Fritz, so let’s slap a familiar face or two on it.

Disney was making some of its greatest films in this era. This is not a controversial opinion, though my son was startled at how long it took me to answer which one is the best—and I told him the answer might be different if he asked me tomorrow. There are generally considered to be ten Renaissance movies, and I think seven of them are pretty damn good, with most even being solidly classics. One is meh, and two are in the rare pantheon of Disney Animated Features I’ve Never Seen. But that’s still an impressive record for any stretch of ten movies from any studio with only Ghibli having a similar streak ever.

There was, however, a corporate culture that had gotten pretty comfortable with being on top. And when Pixar shook their throne a little, well, they bought Pixar. But I think this is when we started getting a corporate culture that was afraid to take risks. And risks, frankly, are what the Disney brand is built on. I try to maintain a warts-and-all view of Walt, who was in several major ways a terrible person. But unfortunately they went from locked into what-would-Walt-do through a stretch of, let’s be honest, mostly failed experiments to “we’re rich and let’s stay that way.”

People are often shocked when I mention the various times in the studio’s history that they were on the verge of bankruptcy, and the corporate culture these days is clearly “never again.” But the only way to innovate is to take risks. For all his failures, Walt took risks. Snow White was a risk. Disneyland was a risk. (Treasure Island was a way of keeping money they couldn’t get out of the UK.) The next stretch of Disney was a lot more experimental than this one, for good or ill; not all those experiments were successful. But avoiding those failures was just a symptom of what was already there in 1998.