Annual Disney+ Rant 2025

As of this morning, my bank account is $208.61 lighter. It’s worth noting that this has gone up a hefty chunk since last year, and while they’re dabbling in handing me stuff from Hulu and ESPN (not that I watch much of the former or any of the latter), it’s still not a package. A lot of the good stuff from Hulu shows up as “unlock this by giving us more money.” I have not checked to see if I have free access to Jimmy Kimmel, on the grounds of not actually liking Jimmy Kimmel very much, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if part of the reason by fee went up over twenty bucks was fallout from that whole thing.

Look, am I peeved that they aren’t just giving me Only Murders in the Building and having done with? Yeah, a little. There’s no good reason not to. There’s no good reason not to just combine the services for the lower price they were already charging me, or offering it to me with ads if I don’t want to pay more, or whatever it takes. But as always, my real problem with Disney+ has a lot more to do with what isn’t available out of the Disney vaults, and if anything, that’s a situation that gets worse as they remove things without saying a word.

We talk every year, I think, about how they should be giving me Make Mine Music. Okay, I grant you, there are not a ton of people excited over the idea of segments featuring Nelson Eddy, Benny Goodman, and the Andrews Sisters. The height of popularity in 1946 doesn’t mean people nearly eighty years later care. But until they do, the animated features will remain an incomplete set. When I mention that it is, people assume I’m talking about Song of the South, but no—I mean the actual fully animated features. There’s one missing and has been all along. I know the package films are uneven; even Fantasia has segments some people don’t like. But come on.

It’s too depressing to me—and the search function is too erratic—to go looking for the available films of the classic Disney stars, but I can promise you I’ve had to resort to other means pretty regularly again over the last year. Sure, I’m sometimes writing about the more obscure shorts, but there’s something inherently wrong about still having to at best pay money to Amazon to rent the movies I want. And that’s if Amazon even has it; Never Cry Wolf turned out to be on YouTube, which has also been my source for a lot of the shorts.

Yes, again, part of the problem there is that their search function sucks if you’re not looking for something by title. Searching “Hayley Mills” doesn’t show you Pollyanna even though Pollyanna is still available. You’d think they would have fixed that by now; it’s been literally years. “Kurt Russell” brings five results, one of which is “unlock Bone Tomahawk by giving us more money,” and while I’m mildly impressed that it includes The Fox and the Hound, what it doesn’t include is Guardians of the Galaxy Volume I’ve forgotten what number he’s in. And I can’t even unlock having Tombstone.

But even with the caveat that the search function is broken, searching “Walt Disney” gives you four results featuring the man during his lifetime and two documentaries exclusive to the channel. Plus a spattering of shorts he directed himself, Saving Mr. Banks, stuff with “Walt Disney World” in the title, and a few irrelevant things including Wish for some reason. This is, let’s be clear, insufficient. And it’s the strangest failing of the service, that Walt himself is so invisible on it.

Was Walt problematic? Of course he was! Walt Disney was a man born in 1901 who spent some of his formative years in Missouri, for the love of Gods. That he wasn’t more problematic is a bit surprising; look at some of his contemporaries. He was a year older than Strom Thurmond and Charles Lindbergh. But among the stuff that doesn’t come up if you search his name are still “Mars and Beyond” and “Man in Space,” both of which feature an actual war criminal.

I want Make Mine Music. I want the Gallagher series. I want all of the nature stuff. I want it to be trivially easy to browse the service and find something out of the Vault. I still want curated playlists by big names—I’m sure Kurt Russell and Jodie Foster would be willing to do it, for example. I want them to stop removing things after saying initially nothing would ever be removed from the service. I want the promise of what a true Disney streaming service could be, a Disney Criterion Channel if you will, even if that’s just a subset of the same streaming service that gives you access to Madame Web, Freakier Friday, and A Very Jonas Christmas Movie.