Duck and cover
Disney’s strange history will be included in the launch of its streaming service
Disney decided to mine our collective nostalgia to hype its new streaming service Disney+ this week by tweeting out images of nearly everything it has ever made — except, of course, Song of the South — in one giant thread that sprawled over several hours.
The marketing ploy seemed intended to generate buzz around its library, which thanks to various mergers and partnerships now includes everything from Marvel Cinematic Universe to National Geographic specials to the Star Wars franchise to Disney Channel original movies. But it also reminded us all of the incredibly strange stretch of movies Disney made from the early 1970s to the mid-1980s, when it tried transitioning from corny children’s fare to edgier pictures — often to hilariously disastrous results.
Disney has faced a few bumps in the road en route to becoming the behemoth it is today. At the beginning of 1941, after Pinocchio and Fantasia flopped (only to be revived years later), the company was $3 million in debt. (All figures in U.S. dollars.) A cartoonist strike later that year certainly didn’t help matters. To remain afloat, the company produced and distributed U.S. propaganda, funded by the government, before finally recovering with 1950’s Cinderella.
For about two more decades, the company continued making children’s movies like these, but it hit a wall in the 1970s.
It spent the early part of the decade pumping out animal-based fare including The Barefoot Executive (about Kurt Russell and his chimpanzee, who can predict which television shows will be hits) and The Million Dollar Duck (which is not about a family with a duck, as you might imagine, but about a family with a goose that lays golden eggs).
For the most part, these movies were not good. In fact, most of these movies were very, very bad. The Million Dollar Duck was reportedly one of three movies Gene Siskel ever walked out on. His partner-in-criticism Roger Ebert called it “one of the most profoundly stupid movies I’ve ever seen. It is a movie about a duck that gets an overdose of radiation and starts laying golden eggs. It is also about the people who won the duck, and about how greed and avarice appear in their lives, and about the lesson in love and understanding that the father gets when his son runs away with the duck and becomes trapped on a ladder between the ledges of two tall buildings, and about how the father gets a fair trial from the American judiciary system.”
More importantly to Disney, these movies failed to rake in as much money as its animated films during this period, such as Robin Hood and The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh. At the same time, special-effects-laden thrillers such as Jaws and Star Wars were dominating the box office. So Disney decided to follow the trend by turning its attention to the decidedly un-disney genres of horror and science fiction.
The most notable of these films was The Black Hole, at
$20 million the most expensive movie Disney had made up to that point, also its first to earn a then-scandalous PG rating. The space opera, which centres on a spaceship encountering a black hole, was meant to be Disney’s version of Star Wars, a property it would eventually acquire. It did well enough, earning $36 million at the box office in addition to revenue from merchandise, as well as Oscars nods for cinematography and special effects.
So it continued down that road, making movies like Dragonslayer, Tron, Something Wicked This Way Comes and The Watcher in the Woods, a straight-up ghost story.
To distance the hallowed brand name from these newer films, Disney created Touchstone Pictures. That’s the main reason that when we think of Disney today, we generally remember the animated classics and hokey live-action kid flicks.
These days, of course, Disney seems to own just about everything. And as the company made clear with its massive Twitter thread, nearly all of these things will be on its streaming service. It’s been four decades, but finally The Black Hole and Bambi will once again live side by side in perfect harmony.