They didn’t squander it, the point of the character was to sell toys, LEGOs, stickers, etc. and I think they managed to take advantage of that to the fullest extent possible.
They had a perfect concept on their hands and squandered it
They didn’t squander it, the point of the character was to sell toys, LEGOs, stickers, etc. and I think they managed to take advantage of that to the fullest extent possible.
Ok, so funny thing, I worked at Disney's Parks Experiences and Consumer Products in late 2019 around the time when The Mandalorian was released and not a single one of us in that building knew...
Exemplary
Ok, so funny thing, I worked at Disney's Parks Experiences and Consumer Products in late 2019 around the time when The Mandalorian was released and not a single one of us in that building knew anything about The Child until the day it came out. Haha
In fact it was a frantic panic driven race from the moment the episode released to get products out as quickly as possible and there were VPs out for blood about the fact that Lucas Films/Star Wars told no one in the consumer products division and had kept The Child a secret. To put it in context, we knew about the end of Avengers: Endgame well before the movie came out so we could develop products around Iron Man's broken gauntlet, and we knew about the multiple Spider-Man variations in No Way Home WELL before that was announced publicly, but no one at Star Wars told anyone in the consumer products department about The Child.
God I was in so many heated and frantic meetings around that time. We had people from Lucas Films coming in with VFX renders of The Child and there were VPs practically screaming about why they hadn't seen this ahead of time.
Because not only because The Child was a hit with people all over social media literally BEGGING to have merchandise to buy, but also because everyone was trying to get product out for the holiday season, when product development usually takes months and we were all trying to do it in days.
That's why there were no official products when the show first came out and everyone was buying things off of etsy.
I have so many pictures of cursed "The Child" toy prototypes on my camera reel. Hilariously awful rushed abominations, one was even a baby Yoda with an ass crack.
So to put it simply, no the character wasn't originally created to sell toys, but Disney sure as hell milked it after the fact.
Also interesting side note, because of the frantic race to get products out, people in my department were flying to and from China with "The Child" prototypes, including Chinese factory owners showcasing products, and many people in my department all got super sick with horrible coughs and flu to the point it was being talked about as a bad bug going around. And this was before COVID-19 was officially announced in the US, but just months before COVID shut everything down. Some of us kind of wonder how much of a ground zero that building was considering the high concentration of travel and direct interaction a lot of people in that building had with China around that time. People were literally going to China and traveling from factory to factory, and people from factories all over China were coming into our office to present their prototypes.
Funnily, I recall some higher-up in production explicitly stated the reason they didn't tell anyone in marketing/merchandising about Grogu was because they wanted to keep it a surprise since many...
Funnily, I recall some higher-up in production explicitly stated the reason they didn't tell anyone in marketing/merchandising about Grogu was because they wanted to keep it a surprise since many leaks and spoilers originate from toy leaks. And I think that was the right move for the show's success. The internet exploded with talk of "Baby Yoda" when the show launched and gave the show a huge boost among even non-Star Wars fans. If Grogu got leaked weeks or months in advance via a toy, I think the hype would've lost momentum by the time the show actually released.
Also, interesting that you think your workplace got hit with Covid. I have an online friend who I suspect got Covid in Canada back in I believe October 2019. The school where she worked got hit with some mysterious super bug that went beyond the typical flu, and later matched up with a lot of Covid symptoms. Her area had some Chinese families who'd visited relatives in Wuhan around that time, so my guess is someone brought back one of the earliest strains of Covid.
Whatever it was screwed up her sense of taste and left her with a myriad of lasting health issues that she's still dealing with, so hopefully no one at your work had long-lasting effects.
A lot of folks think they got it in late fall of 2019 but the annual flu was a really rough bug that year. The spread would have been so different if random people across North America (including...
A lot of folks think they got it in late fall of 2019 but the annual flu was a really rough bug that year.
The spread would have been so different if random people across North America (including in the Midwest, coasts, Canada) all got sick before it had really even spread in China, so it's never tracked for me.
...we had a coworker return from china in december 2019 with a horrific respiratory infection which took out more than half our studio for about a month; it was particularly frustrating because...
...we had a coworker return from china in december 2019 with a horrific respiratory infection which took out more than half our studio for about a month; it was particularly frustrating because none of us had accrued sufficient PTO to cover a four-week leave so we all ended up taking salary deductions over the holiday, to boot...
...we all tested negative for influenza so our doctors' best guess was some severe strain of the common cold; stories of CoViD didn't break until about a month later, which sure sounded like what had just wiped us out but we'll never know for certain...
...i'll note that when i eventually 'officially' caught CoViD after our return-to-office mandate in the fall of 2020, it felt exactly the same except recovery was about a week quicker...
I know a lot of people think they got it and didn't, but I also know whatever hit her school was bad. I looked up our initial conversation, and she said the symptoms that everyone experienced that...
I know a lot of people think they got it and didn't, but I also know whatever hit her school was bad. I looked up our initial conversation, and she said the symptoms that everyone experienced that autumn and winter matched up with the first strain of Covid in 2020. She was hit particularly bad compared to everyone else, and brain scans in February 2020 showed lesions in her brain thanks to her immune system attacking her brain as a result of whatever she had. Technically possible with the flu, but much more common with Covid.
The biggest sticking point really is how early it was. After checking again she said that the outbreak of whatever actually started around the third week of September, so it would've had to already be present and spreading in China in late August/early September. And like you said, the global spread would've looked very different if it was around that early. The main reason I don't write it off completely is just because she's been a teacher for many years and is thus very familiar with flu and other outbreaks, and isn't the conspiracy theory type or type to jump to conclusions without supporting evidence (actually quite the opposite). So while the timeline is shaky, altogether I'm disinclined to dismiss her suspicions compared to many of the other 2019 claims.
All that said, I wouldn't be surprised if Covid was around for a bit before being identified as... Well, Covid. The symptoms are similar enough to the flu that it wouldn't stick out as something else without a proper test. The biggest differences I can find are the incubation period, the contagiousness, the severity, and Covid causing a loss of sense/smell. So I do wonder if some of the "bad flu" cases from 2019 were actually an early strain that wasn't quite as bad. We'll likely never know for sure though.
While it’s a cool story (what are the odds that Disney caused the Covid-19 pandemic? I wouldn’t be surprised), I just really, really, seriously doubt this statement. There’s no way whoever came up...
So to put it simply, no the character wasn't originally created to sell toys, but Disney sure as hell milked it after the fact.
While it’s a cool story (what are the odds that Disney caused the Covid-19 pandemic? I wouldn’t be surprised), I just really, really, seriously doubt this statement. There’s no way whoever came up with the character did not have the profit motive in mind.
I’ve been to Disneyland, I’m intimate with Disney’s way of squeezing every drop of blood from anything they touch. I can never believe that this corporation does anything for anything other than profit.
Haha you can believe what you want, but I think the fact that there were no official products for The Child available for months after the episode aired, missing the holiday season, kind of speaks...
Haha you can believe what you want, but I think the fact that there were no official products for The Child available for months after the episode aired, missing the holiday season, kind of speaks for itself.
I think people sometimes flatten companies like Disney into one giant evil monolith, but internally it’s not that simple. At least before COVID, there were a lot of genuinely passionate artists, designers, creatives, and production people there who cared about what they were making.
And that includes at Lucasfilms and Marvel. I actually came from the entertainment side originally, having worked art department in the broader entertainment industry before I started at Disney.
The upper executives 1000% deserve your critique and only cared about money and exploitation, obviously, and they were the bosses of our bosses so they held a lot of strings. Like I hold a fat grudge against Bob Chapek personally, that guy is a soulless shill who gutted the parks of talent when he was VP of DPECP, and gutted the rest of company of talent when he was CEO. But the people actually making the work were not all just cynical corporate drones trying to sell toys. A lot of them cared deeply about the art and characters.
Like my boss's office was a museum of historical Disney merchandise, wall to wall Disney stuff from Star Wars to classic Disney.
At least before COVID. I really can't speak to anything after the covid layoffs.
I had been working with people who had been there so long they had designed the Disney stores that I remember when I was like six years old in the mid '90s, and they were all laid off during COVID.
Disney lost a lot of that passionate core and institutional knowledge during COVID. That's part of why I didn't go back when they offered.
And to make it worse, when they asked a lot of people to come back, they were trying to move the HQ to Florida, and everyone, including myself, was basically like "fuck that, fuck the weather, fuck the politics, we have our families here in LA."
Anyways, at this point in my life I'm pretty anti-capitalist and so I understand your point of view and I'm sure a lot of companies, including Disney, deserve that criticism, I'm just sharing my little personal slice of experience from that moment in time.
That Florida move was a real dick thing to do. My husband works as part of a program in Disneyland that is run from Florida. What that means in concrete terms is that the people who actually know...
That Florida move was a real dick thing to do.
My husband works as part of a program in Disneyland that is run from Florida. What that means in concrete terms is that the people who actually know what the goals of the program are and what the workers should be doing and producing are in Florida. So instead everyone actually running that program are overseen by retail managers who don’t really know anything about it, and if there’s a problem with quality or any confusion about what they should be doing it basically just gets done to best guesses.
Moving everything to Florida was basically a huge middle finger to everyone who works in Disneyland or even just cares about them. The experience of going to the park just keeps getting worse and worse.
It’s really easy to generalize anyone who is part of a group, it’s how our brains work. The bigger the group, the more folks won’t fit exactly the mold that has been created for it. This is...
It’s really easy to generalize anyone who is part of a group, it’s how our brains work. The bigger the group, the more folks won’t fit exactly the mold that has been created for it. This is especially true for companies, where it appears everyone must be there because they want to be and therefore buy into the company ideals.
I doubt that every single person working at Nestlé is evil hearted, but the company as a whole sure is. Are the custodians all evil? The admins? The folks who started there young and now can’t leave because they really need the insurance?
I hate him too, but what about his concept had potential? To me he’s basically an alien baby Jack-Jack (from The Incredibles). The gimmick was cute and amusing for like one season but there’s...
I hate him too, but what about his concept had potential?
To me he’s basically an alien baby Jack-Jack (from The Incredibles). The gimmick was cute and amusing for like one season but there’s nowhere for him to go or grow narratively given how slowly he ages.
Like he’s a 50 year old toddler, so it’ll be what, another 50 years before he can form sentences and another 100 until he reaches early adolescence? There’s nothing interesting you can do with him in Mando’s lifespan.
The show jumped the shark when they chickened out of committing to him leaving with you-know-who.
it was supposed to be Lone Wolf and Cub* -- but they strayed. The child sucks; no two ways about it. It would have been a good vehicle for an intro to Djarin's lifestyle, but once he delivers the...
it was supposed to be Lone Wolf and Cub* -- but they strayed. The child sucks; no two ways about it. It would have been a good vehicle for an intro to Djarin's lifestyle, but once he delivers the child, leave it there and walk off into the sunset.
The missed potential wasn't with Grogu at all, though. That's a pure cash grab.
Mando shouold have been a MOW (mission/monster) that plays out as an excuse to tour around the Star Wars universe, giving visuals to things we've only heard or read about --- deep fan shit.
* choose the knob and you will join me... choose the ball and you join your mother in death
Step 1. Pay the authors for the rights to things like The Bounty Hunter Wars Step 2. Clean them up and modernize them LIGHTLY. Step 3. Make a fuck load of money. I know it's easy to criticize but...
Step 1. Pay the authors for the rights to things like The Bounty Hunter Wars
Step 2. Clean them up and modernize them LIGHTLY.
Step 3. Make a fuck load of money.
I know it's easy to criticize but it blows my mind how much money is left on the table from fucking up adaptations or screwing with shit that ALREADY SOLD.
right! pekt is on this track too --- so much killer material in Legends... just sitting there waiting to be made. The other thing, so much is possible with THE VOLUME, too... and what do they do?...
right! pekt is on this track too --- so much killer material in Legends... just sitting there waiting to be made.
The other thing, so much is possible with THE VOLUME, too... and what do they do? dirt and sunsets.
I really wanted them to leave him, have him become a real padawan, and then fast forward some 10-20 years and have them meet back up in the next season and instead of a main character he could be...
I really wanted them to leave him, have him become a real padawan, and then fast forward some 10-20 years and have them meet back up in the next season and instead of a main character he could be a side who shows up now and then to help. Mando was a great main character and involving the kid arrested the development of mando.
The Mandalorian is captured by bounty hunters on behalf of a Hutt crimelord and is frozen into a carbonite slab. Generations later, what looks like a Jawa merchant wanders into the Hutt palace....
The Mandalorian is captured by bounty hunters on behalf of a Hutt crimelord and is frozen into a carbonite slab. Generations later, what looks like a Jawa merchant wanders into the Hutt palace. After a thermal detonator threat scene referencing episode VI, the merchant is able to sneak into the dungeon, where he takes his hood off. It is in fact adult baby Yoda, who has managed to track down his frozen guardian together with a rag-tag gang of scoundrels who only know of the Mandalorian by legend.
He finds the Mandalorian in a pile of other carbonite slabs and carefully undoes the freezing process before he whispers to the now awake, but weak and blind Mandalorian: "Somehow still alive, the emperor is"
When I see Star Wars things now I always wonder how Disney had so much material prewritten for them in the form of the Extended Universe, that they could have easily adapted/rewritten as movies...
When I see Star Wars things now I always wonder how Disney had so much material prewritten for them in the form of the Extended Universe, that they could have easily adapted/rewritten as movies and instead chose to make the sequel era movies instead.
right! All they had to do was do Legacy of the Force to bring in the kids, have Jacen Solo /Darth Caedus, Ben Skywalker flirting with the darkside like his father... etc etc --- that series has...
right! All they had to do was do Legacy of the Force to bring in the kids, have Jacen Solo /Darth Caedus, Ben Skywalker flirting with the darkside like his father... etc etc --- that series has everything and opens op for lots of movies hitting the perfect demos.
If I were doing it, I'd do Legacy... for sequel movies, Thrawn trilogy as a limited series (one season per book), somehow find a way to get Darth Bane as two seasons, a nice four part Scoundrels heist, and more. They were really on the right track with Rogue One, but failed miserably.
So much potential thrown out the window for stupid Ben Solo.
I started with the Thrawn trilogy and quickly crushed around a hundred other novels or so since. The EU (only Legends) is so good.
... you know your movies suck when Caravan of Courage: An Ewok Adventure doesn't look so bad. :)
I still need to dive in to the EU. It's been on my reading list for ages, but I just haven't gotten around to it yet. Not sure why I never got around to it, but one of these days I'll enjoy those...
I still need to dive in to the EU. It's been on my reading list for ages, but I just haven't gotten around to it yet. Not sure why I never got around to it, but one of these days I'll enjoy those books.
Most of my EU content exposure was through Star Wars video games.
do Thrawn then Darth Bane -- sooooo good. I had no idea how many novels there were when I started. Pretty much anything from Timothy Zahn is good -- if you're into audiobooks, Marc Thompson is...
do Thrawn then Darth Bane -- sooooo good. I had no idea how many novels there were when I started. Pretty much anything from Timothy Zahn is good -- if you're into audiobooks, Marc Thompson is great. Most of the books have sound effects and shit too, which is fun.
I found the idea that this is better than Andor so preposterous that I assumed they meant best Star Wars movie out of secondhand embarrassment for the writer.
I found the idea that this is better than Andor so preposterous that I assumed they meant best Star Wars movie out of secondhand embarrassment for the writer.
Give's me "OH I LOVE BIG SPACE EXPLOSIONS" vibe. But my next question would be what did that reviewer think of the Abram's Star Wars movies and to see if they reviewed them.
Give's me "OH I LOVE BIG SPACE EXPLOSIONS" vibe.
But my next question would be what did that reviewer think of the Abram's Star Wars movies and to see if they reviewed them.
BURBANK, CA—Citing nearly a billion dollars of pent-up consumer demand for entertainment featuring an infant version of an already beloved character, a new report released Wednesday by Gower Street Analytics concluded that Disney’s decision not to call its upcoming Star Wars film The Baby Yoda Movie would cost the studio roughly $900 million. “By naming the film The Mandalorian And Grogu, Disney is leaving money on the table from consumers who have no idea who Grogu is but would immediately take out their phones and buy a ticket for any movie of any genre with ‘Baby Yoda’ in its title,” said report author Heather Flynn, who cited a poll in which 81% of potential moviegoers responded “Who the hell are they? Is this a Lord Of The Rings thing?” when presented with marketing materials for the upcoming film. “We found that while Disney will likely recoup its budget, a film titled either The Baby Yoda Movie or Baby Yoda: The Movie would have broken multiple box-office records both domestically and overseas. This catastrophic mistake could upend Disney’s market position if the studio doesn’t at least add the words ‘Baby Yoda’ to the poster somewhere.” At press time, Disney had changed the title of its 2027 Star Wars film from Starfighter to Chewbacca’s Big Day Out.
I’m just imagining Michael Winslow doing all the voices and weird sound effects for this new drive time show. Just kidding, we all know that they’d just be voiced by Frank Welker.
I’m just imagining Michael Winslow doing all the voices and weird sound effects for this new drive time show.
Just kidding, we all know that they’d just be voiced by Frank Welker.
I still think it’s hilarious that they have had baby yoda Christmas decorations for years. Since before he had the name “grogu” I saw him on people’s lawn with a Santa hat. It’s quite anachronistic.
I still think it’s hilarious that they have had baby yoda Christmas decorations for years. Since before he had the name “grogu” I saw him on people’s lawn with a Santa hat. It’s quite anachronistic.
I expect it to be kind of fun but to also highly annoy me unless I turn my brain completely off while watching it. It’s probably worth seeing so I can enjoy the likely 10 hour Red Letter Media...
I expect it to be kind of fun but to also highly annoy me unless I turn my brain completely off while watching it.
It’s probably worth seeing so I can enjoy the likely 10 hour Red Letter Media takedown of it afterwards.
The shows operate on the same logic as Filoni's animated shows for eight-year-olds. This has always been the case. And it's why I don't even know if I haven't seen all of the seasons of the...
The shows operate on the same logic as Filoni's animated shows for eight-year-olds. This has always been the case. And it's why I don't even know if I haven't seen all of the seasons of the Mandalorian.
I hate everything about Grogu. They had a perfect concept on their hands and squandered it; basically the entire sequel era in a nutshell.
They didn’t squander it, the point of the character was to sell toys, LEGOs, stickers, etc. and I think they managed to take advantage of that to the fullest extent possible.
Ok, so funny thing, I worked at Disney's Parks Experiences and Consumer Products in late 2019 around the time when The Mandalorian was released and not a single one of us in that building knew anything about The Child until the day it came out. Haha
In fact it was a frantic panic driven race from the moment the episode released to get products out as quickly as possible and there were VPs out for blood about the fact that Lucas Films/Star Wars told no one in the consumer products division and had kept The Child a secret. To put it in context, we knew about the end of Avengers: Endgame well before the movie came out so we could develop products around Iron Man's broken gauntlet, and we knew about the multiple Spider-Man variations in No Way Home WELL before that was announced publicly, but no one at Star Wars told anyone in the consumer products department about The Child.
God I was in so many heated and frantic meetings around that time. We had people from Lucas Films coming in with VFX renders of The Child and there were VPs practically screaming about why they hadn't seen this ahead of time.
Because not only because The Child was a hit with people all over social media literally BEGGING to have merchandise to buy, but also because everyone was trying to get product out for the holiday season, when product development usually takes months and we were all trying to do it in days.
That's why there were no official products when the show first came out and everyone was buying things off of etsy.
I have so many pictures of cursed "The Child" toy prototypes on my camera reel. Hilariously awful rushed abominations, one was even a baby Yoda with an ass crack.
So to put it simply, no the character wasn't originally created to sell toys, but Disney sure as hell milked it after the fact.
Also interesting side note, because of the frantic race to get products out, people in my department were flying to and from China with "The Child" prototypes, including Chinese factory owners showcasing products, and many people in my department all got super sick with horrible coughs and flu to the point it was being talked about as a bad bug going around. And this was before COVID-19 was officially announced in the US, but just months before COVID shut everything down. Some of us kind of wonder how much of a ground zero that building was considering the high concentration of travel and direct interaction a lot of people in that building had with China around that time. People were literally going to China and traveling from factory to factory, and people from factories all over China were coming into our office to present their prototypes.
Man, I can believe Grogu was responsible for the spread of Covid-19 to the US.
I still love him.
Funnily, I recall some higher-up in production explicitly stated the reason they didn't tell anyone in marketing/merchandising about Grogu was because they wanted to keep it a surprise since many leaks and spoilers originate from toy leaks. And I think that was the right move for the show's success. The internet exploded with talk of "Baby Yoda" when the show launched and gave the show a huge boost among even non-Star Wars fans. If Grogu got leaked weeks or months in advance via a toy, I think the hype would've lost momentum by the time the show actually released.
Also, interesting that you think your workplace got hit with Covid. I have an online friend who I suspect got Covid in Canada back in I believe October 2019. The school where she worked got hit with some mysterious super bug that went beyond the typical flu, and later matched up with a lot of Covid symptoms. Her area had some Chinese families who'd visited relatives in Wuhan around that time, so my guess is someone brought back one of the earliest strains of Covid.
Whatever it was screwed up her sense of taste and left her with a myriad of lasting health issues that she's still dealing with, so hopefully no one at your work had long-lasting effects.
A lot of folks think they got it in late fall of 2019 but the annual flu was a really rough bug that year.
The spread would have been so different if random people across North America (including in the Midwest, coasts, Canada) all got sick before it had really even spread in China, so it's never tracked for me.
...we had a coworker return from china in december 2019 with a horrific respiratory infection which took out more than half our studio for about a month; it was particularly frustrating because none of us had accrued sufficient PTO to cover a four-week leave so we all ended up taking salary deductions over the holiday, to boot...
...we all tested negative for influenza so our doctors' best guess was some severe strain of the common cold; stories of CoViD didn't break until about a month later, which sure sounded like what had just wiped us out but we'll never know for certain...
...i'll note that when i eventually 'officially' caught CoViD after our return-to-office mandate in the fall of 2020, it felt exactly the same except recovery was about a week quicker...
I find it useless to argue anecdote against science. Everyone with that story is equally certain they had COVID, regardless of any risk of exposure.
I know a lot of people think they got it and didn't, but I also know whatever hit her school was bad. I looked up our initial conversation, and she said the symptoms that everyone experienced that autumn and winter matched up with the first strain of Covid in 2020. She was hit particularly bad compared to everyone else, and brain scans in February 2020 showed lesions in her brain thanks to her immune system attacking her brain as a result of whatever she had. Technically possible with the flu, but much more common with Covid.
The biggest sticking point really is how early it was. After checking again she said that the outbreak of whatever actually started around the third week of September, so it would've had to already be present and spreading in China in late August/early September. And like you said, the global spread would've looked very different if it was around that early. The main reason I don't write it off completely is just because she's been a teacher for many years and is thus very familiar with flu and other outbreaks, and isn't the conspiracy theory type or type to jump to conclusions without supporting evidence (actually quite the opposite). So while the timeline is shaky, altogether I'm disinclined to dismiss her suspicions compared to many of the other 2019 claims.
All that said, I wouldn't be surprised if Covid was around for a bit before being identified as... Well, Covid. The symptoms are similar enough to the flu that it wouldn't stick out as something else without a proper test. The biggest differences I can find are the incubation period, the contagiousness, the severity, and Covid causing a loss of sense/smell. So I do wonder if some of the "bad flu" cases from 2019 were actually an early strain that wasn't quite as bad. We'll likely never know for sure though.
While it’s a cool story (what are the odds that Disney caused the Covid-19 pandemic? I wouldn’t be surprised), I just really, really, seriously doubt this statement. There’s no way whoever came up with the character did not have the profit motive in mind.
I’ve been to Disneyland, I’m intimate with Disney’s way of squeezing every drop of blood from anything they touch. I can never believe that this corporation does anything for anything other than profit.
Haha you can believe what you want, but I think the fact that there were no official products for The Child available for months after the episode aired, missing the holiday season, kind of speaks for itself.
I think people sometimes flatten companies like Disney into one giant evil monolith, but internally it’s not that simple. At least before COVID, there were a lot of genuinely passionate artists, designers, creatives, and production people there who cared about what they were making.
And that includes at Lucasfilms and Marvel. I actually came from the entertainment side originally, having worked art department in the broader entertainment industry before I started at Disney.
The upper executives 1000% deserve your critique and only cared about money and exploitation, obviously, and they were the bosses of our bosses so they held a lot of strings. Like I hold a fat grudge against Bob Chapek personally, that guy is a soulless shill who gutted the parks of talent when he was VP of DPECP, and gutted the rest of company of talent when he was CEO. But the people actually making the work were not all just cynical corporate drones trying to sell toys. A lot of them cared deeply about the art and characters.
Like my boss's office was a museum of historical Disney merchandise, wall to wall Disney stuff from Star Wars to classic Disney.
At least before COVID. I really can't speak to anything after the covid layoffs.
I had been working with people who had been there so long they had designed the Disney stores that I remember when I was like six years old in the mid '90s, and they were all laid off during COVID.
Disney lost a lot of that passionate core and institutional knowledge during COVID. That's part of why I didn't go back when they offered.
And to make it worse, when they asked a lot of people to come back, they were trying to move the HQ to Florida, and everyone, including myself, was basically like "fuck that, fuck the weather, fuck the politics, we have our families here in LA."
Anyways, at this point in my life I'm pretty anti-capitalist and so I understand your point of view and I'm sure a lot of companies, including Disney, deserve that criticism, I'm just sharing my little personal slice of experience from that moment in time.
That Florida move was a real dick thing to do.
My husband works as part of a program in Disneyland that is run from Florida. What that means in concrete terms is that the people who actually know what the goals of the program are and what the workers should be doing and producing are in Florida. So instead everyone actually running that program are overseen by retail managers who don’t really know anything about it, and if there’s a problem with quality or any confusion about what they should be doing it basically just gets done to best guesses.
Moving everything to Florida was basically a huge middle finger to everyone who works in Disneyland or even just cares about them. The experience of going to the park just keeps getting worse and worse.
It’s really easy to generalize anyone who is part of a group, it’s how our brains work. The bigger the group, the more folks won’t fit exactly the mold that has been created for it. This is especially true for companies, where it appears everyone must be there because they want to be and therefore buy into the company ideals.
I doubt that every single person working at Nestlé is evil hearted, but the company as a whole sure is. Are the custodians all evil? The admins? The folks who started there young and now can’t leave because they really need the insurance?
Yeah, that’s true. Equally depressing
George Lucas also had the same idea with the original trilogy. He knew kids would want the toys.
I hate him too, but what about his concept had potential?
To me he’s basically an alien baby Jack-Jack (from The Incredibles). The gimmick was cute and amusing for like one season but there’s nowhere for him to go or grow narratively given how slowly he ages.
Like he’s a 50 year old toddler, so it’ll be what, another 50 years before he can form sentences and another 100 until he reaches early adolescence? There’s nothing interesting you can do with him in Mando’s lifespan.
The show jumped the shark when they chickened out of committing to him leaving with you-know-who.
it was supposed to be Lone Wolf and Cub* -- but they strayed. The child sucks; no two ways about it. It would have been a good vehicle for an intro to Djarin's lifestyle, but once he delivers the child, leave it there and walk off into the sunset.
The missed potential wasn't with Grogu at all, though. That's a pure cash grab.
Mando shouold have been a MOW (mission/monster) that plays out as an excuse to tour around the Star Wars universe, giving visuals to things we've only heard or read about --- deep fan shit.
* choose the knob and you will join me... choose the ball and you join your mother in death
Step 1. Pay the authors for the rights to things like The Bounty Hunter Wars
Step 2. Clean them up and modernize them LIGHTLY.
Step 3. Make a fuck load of money.
I know it's easy to criticize but it blows my mind how much money is left on the table from fucking up adaptations or screwing with shit that ALREADY SOLD.
right! pekt is on this track too --- so much killer material in Legends... just sitting there waiting to be made.
The other thing, so much is possible with THE VOLUME, too... and what do they do? dirt and sunsets.
I really wanted them to leave him, have him become a real padawan, and then fast forward some 10-20 years and have them meet back up in the next season and instead of a main character he could be a side who shows up now and then to help. Mando was a great main character and involving the kid arrested the development of mando.
The Mandalorian is captured by bounty hunters on behalf of a Hutt crimelord and is frozen into a carbonite slab. Generations later, what looks like a Jawa merchant wanders into the Hutt palace. After a thermal detonator threat scene referencing episode VI, the merchant is able to sneak into the dungeon, where he takes his hood off. It is in fact adult baby Yoda, who has managed to track down his frozen guardian together with a rag-tag gang of scoundrels who only know of the Mandalorian by legend.
He finds the Mandalorian in a pile of other carbonite slabs and carefully undoes the freezing process before he whispers to the now awake, but weak and blind Mandalorian: "Somehow still alive, the emperor is"
When I see Star Wars things now I always wonder how Disney had so much material prewritten for them in the form of the Extended Universe, that they could have easily adapted/rewritten as movies and instead chose to make the sequel era movies instead.
right! All they had to do was do Legacy of the Force to bring in the kids, have Jacen Solo /Darth Caedus, Ben Skywalker flirting with the darkside like his father... etc etc --- that series has everything and opens op for lots of movies hitting the perfect demos.
If I were doing it, I'd do Legacy... for sequel movies, Thrawn trilogy as a limited series (one season per book), somehow find a way to get Darth Bane as two seasons, a nice four part Scoundrels heist, and more. They were really on the right track with Rogue One, but failed miserably.
So much potential thrown out the window for stupid Ben Solo.
I started with the Thrawn trilogy and quickly crushed around a hundred other novels or so since. The EU (only Legends) is so good.
... you know your movies suck when Caravan of Courage: An Ewok Adventure doesn't look so bad. :)
I still need to dive in to the EU. It's been on my reading list for ages, but I just haven't gotten around to it yet. Not sure why I never got around to it, but one of these days I'll enjoy those books.
Most of my EU content exposure was through Star Wars video games.
do Thrawn then Darth Bane -- sooooo good. I had no idea how many novels there were when I started. Pretty much anything from Timothy Zahn is good -- if you're into audiobooks, Marc Thompson is great. Most of the books have sound effects and shit too, which is fun.
“best Star Wars in years” is a low bar considering the last movie came out almost 7 years ago and was an absolute turd.
It’s also unlikely to be true since Andor is the best Star Wars content since Disney bought it.
I found the idea that this is better than Andor so preposterous that I assumed they meant best Star Wars movie out of secondhand embarrassment for the writer.
AFIK it’s only one review that called it the most entertaining Star Wars film since the Original Trilogy
I feel like that would be the "free space" in a "Star Wars Reviews" Bingo card.
There's also the "end of the world" review free space.
Give's me "OH I LOVE BIG SPACE EXPLOSIONS" vibe.
But my next question would be what did that reviewer think of the Abram's Star Wars movies and to see if they reviewed them.
Report: Decision Not To Call Film ‘The Baby Yoda Movie’ To Cost Disney $900 Million - The Onion
Money-shot-in-waiting
I know the lil guy isn't baby Yoda, but still, he needs to be baby Yoda.
Grogu? get tf outta here.
The troop is one stupid name short of a morning radio host team.
"Yoda, Grogu and The Fuzz on KBBL 99.7 in the mornings!"
I’m just imagining Michael Winslow doing all the voices and weird sound effects for this new drive time show.
Just kidding, we all know that they’d just be voiced by Frank Welker.
I still think it’s hilarious that they have had baby yoda Christmas decorations for years. Since before he had the name “grogu” I saw him on people’s lawn with a Santa hat. It’s quite anachronistic.
I expect it to be kind of fun but to also highly annoy me unless I turn my brain completely off while watching it.
It’s probably worth seeing so I can enjoy the likely 10 hour Red Letter Media takedown of it afterwards.
The shows operate on the same logic as Filoni's animated shows for eight-year-olds. This has always been the case. And it's why I don't even know if I haven't seen all of the seasons of the Mandalorian.
Under 1 hour - the restraint!