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Breaking Up With Disney
The things I left behind in 2024, part 1
Like many US-Americans, everything I watch on television now comes from Internet streaming services rather than cable or satellite. As these services have proliferated (and increased in price) over the years, my spouse and I have added and subtracted them as we see fit. In 2024, one service we said goodbye to was Disney+.
I first signed up for Disney+ in 2020, when they offered a deal with Fortnite where buying any avatar skin would get you three months of service. I wasn’t really interested in playing Fortnite as I dislike first-person shooters, but the game itself was free, and I calculated that buying the lowest-priced skin available would save me the equivalent of two months of Disney+ streaming ($7.99/month at the time).
Even at full price, Disney+ seemed like a good deal, as they had a lot of programming we were interested in; not only all the Disney movies but also Pixar, Marvel, and nearly every episode of The Muppet Show. As my spouse is an audio engineer, we have a good setup for watching films at home, which I preferred over going to movie theaters even before the pandemic. We got caught up on the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and enjoyed creative new series like WandaVision (which a friend of ours had a small part in) and She-Hulk: Attorney at Law.
Despite enjoying much of their entertainment, I felt conflicted about supporting Disney as a company. Last February, I posted about how few Black leading characters they have in their animated films. This led to a situation where there were no Black characters at all in their Dreamlight Valley game.
Even more troubling to me than this history of exclusion were Disney’s aggressively capitalist actions. Infamously, Disney’s lobbyists hold much of the blame for extensions of the length of time works are copyrighted in the U.S. Mickey Mouse, who first appeared in the Steamboat Willie short in 1928, only came into the public domain last January, and only for that particular film. (Twelve more Mickey…
