These days I carry a bit of enmity for Disney. I feel that their being a massive economic powerhouse has allowed for them to influence the entire media industry to a severe degree, and they have used that influence to kill creative endeavors across the cultural landscape that do not fit in with their conservative sensibilities.

This isn't a new thing, just what has eventually happened after the adoption of their creative policies in the 80s after several failures culminating in the Black Cauldron, paired with successful competition in the form of Don Bluth (perhaps my favorite lead animator of the 20th century). I cannot fault them for this change, animation was a competitive industry then even if now is massively moreso.

The changes made at Disney led directly to the animation renaissance of the 90's, with the Little Mermaid, Aladdin, the Lion King, etc etc. The entire animation industry boomed at the time, and we have countless classics that are still held in high esteem today, even outside of Disney.

However, the media industry chose to destroy 2D animation by the 2000s, failing to market Titan AE (2000), Treasure Planet (2002), and Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas (2003), and resulting in a complete shift toward computer animation, which was and is still largely non-unionized.

This is of course symptomatic with other phenomena inherent in the American cultural landscape, and is not a large surprise to anyone who was watching the evolution of American cultural-economic thought.

However, that does not change the fact that Disney was an intrinsic part of my childhood, and has solidified itself as a happy memory for me.

My Dad always liked Mickey Mouse, especially liking the Brave Little Tailor (1938). He himself grew up with Disney, and unfortunately had Song of the South (1946) as his cherished childhood favorite. Let's leave it at that.

My Dad recorded many Disney shorts on VHS for me, mostly of Donald Duck who became my favorite. I have such fond memories of Truant Officer Donald (1941), Donald's Snow Fight (1942), and Lucky Number (1951). These shorts became a lot more precious to me after my Dad recorded over most of my cartoons with as much coverage of the Gulf War as he could get. He felt it was the start of a new political order on magnitude with World War III, and as a political scientist in my adulthood, he had a solid point.

I was still rather heartbroken to lose those cartoons, even if he did replace them with more. But by that time, Disney cartoons had become rather rare to find on VHS in the places he tended to look, which was mostly the checkout line at the grocery store. He replaced them with old Merry Melodies that also became very precious to me, but as my childhood continued on Disney products took on a "premium" quality to me in their relative scarcity.

In the 7th grade, when I first started experiencing clinical depression, one of the joys in my life was staying up all night on Saturday into Sunday morning to catch old Disney shorts at 5am. Sometimes it would even be the Donald Duck shorts I loved the most. Afterwards would be this neat Canadian show called the Raccoons (1985).

Sometime in either 1997 or 1998, my Mom and Dad took me to Disneyland one friday night in early August. We got into the car around 10pm and my Mom and Dad wouldn't tell me where we were going. We drove down Highway 1 all night long, until we drove through the Hollywood Hills nearby the big sign all lit up in the night. We slept for handful of hours at one of the beaches while some people did an obvious drug deal nearby and then headed off to Disneyland to get there right as it opened.

To say it was the best day of my life up until that point would probably be accurate.

I rode on Space Mountain three times, the Indiana Jones ride at least twice, explored Tom Sawyer Island with my Dad, was on TV with a robot, ate hamburgers while orchestras played the Star Wars theme, explored the park by myself for hours and met up with them randomly eventually.

At one point, my Dad got me to ride on Splash Mountain with him. My Mom opted not to as she was not keen to ride a vertical drop down a waterfall. It was Br'er Rabbit themed, who was featured heavily in Song of the South. As we rode the log up the river higher and higher, the music became more and more ominous. Finally as the opening into the sky approached, the music was deafened by the waterfall. We went over and it went straight down.

I felt my heart all the way down at the bottom of my bowels. I blacked out for a moment for the first time in my life. As we emerged from the darkness we found ourselves in this golden field with all the characters from Br'er Rabbit in a chorus singing Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah, and a wave of reassurance washed over me and I imagine that's what entering heaven must feel like. From behind me, my Dad said "I definitely will never be able to do that again- my heart almost couldn't do it this time" and I just laughed.

We stayed all day long until they closed at midnight after concluding an amazing show with a pirate ship, fireworks, giant monsters, the whole shebang.

I don't even remember the return trip at all. When I got back, the other kids were so jealous, one even going as far as to accuse my parents of child abuse for driving all night. I don't know why my parents suddenly decided on the trip, I had begged to go now and again in my childhood like every kid did in the 90s, but they never showed any interest, sometimes being hostile to the idea. At one point, my Mom told me we wouldn't go to Disneyland since they already went in the 70s with my brother. Being able to go when I was still a kid in the 90s is one of my most cherished... what's the opposite of a regret? It's one of my most cherished that.

And so Disney obviously has built a tremendous amount of childhood good will that keeps it afloat and maintains its media war machine.

It has used its influence to water down Marvel and introduce various kinds of imperialist themes to the world at large, while promoting art that is rarely anything other than ultimately bland and focus-grouped into patronizing mediocrity. Anything they create that turns out to have some great artistic merit is quickly discarded, such as the Owl House. And of course, its practices infect the rest of the industry standard, dooming many promising cartoons to ignoble ends.

And so these days I consume my Disney media with either curated nostalgia or pirated curiosity, usually of the morbid sort and rarely sober. Perhaps this whole megacorp cyberpunk dystopia is just a phase and I might find myself at the foot of Splash Mountain again someday. But as it stands, I have only some cherished memories to hold on to.