So, I finally used that Disney+ gift certificate I got from my sister back in 2020 and signed up for the service.
I mean, why not.
First impressions… I’m glad I did. There’s a lot there, in some ways more than I had expected. So there’s a lot to watch and a lot to learn.
I like having the ability to go and watch some of the stuff I missed from my girlfriends that first time around. There’s a bunch of TV movies like Girl Vs. Monster, Bad Hair Day, and other, similar flicks that I’ve always wanted / needed to watch but never really got the opportunity to. So… those are on the list, for sure.
I also like having the ability to rewatch classic stuff that I liked as a kid but haven’t seen since. I mean there’s the animated classics of course, but also movies like The Nutty Professor, and The Apple Dumpling Gang.
Alot of the content on Disney+ is bringing back a lot and I mean a lot of memories. Way more than I had expected, and in way more ways than I ever anticipated. It’s kinda surreal. Seriously.
Well… where do we even begin with all this, lol.
Ok, well.
Uhm… okay. Well.
I saw a few episodes of Olivia Rodrigo’s show, Bizardvark (I know that that’s not how it’s spelled, but IDC, lol). Wow did they include tons of me in those episodes. They seemed to build the whole of… everything, the characters, the props, the situations… I mean, everything, off of shockingly specific stuff that happened in my childhood. Somehow, these people remember more about the details of my parents’ old house than I do. In one scene they recreated down to the smallest detail the old house’s bathroom and bathtub. I mean, they had an exact replica of the tub, with the same water handles, the same drain and handbars, the same curtain, and it was all the same color, etc. Really weird and uncanny. I mean, if I had tried to remember all of those details on my own, I could not possibly have done so with that amount of accuracy.
It was like peering into a portal created by a time machine, or something. What even the fuck is happening, lol.
It almost seems as if the people making these shows lack their own memories, or something, and are just using mine in place of theirs.
At any rate, I will be watching Olivia Rodrigo’s movie, and her documentary, and then I will be spending more time with her, like everyone knows and expects I will. I mean, this is what they flat out told me would happen, pointedly and repeatedly, in the series. And it looks like they were right.
This stuff is so… uncanny it’s almost as if Olivia was manufactured, or something, specifically to be one of my girlfriends. Like she was made to order. I mean, if I’m reading the series correctly, they almost come out and say this directly, even.
Or maybe not even “almost”. Honestly I wonder.
I remember joking around with Debby Ryan once when I told her that she and the other Disney girls seemed like they were hatched underneath Epcot or something. At the time I thought that idea was ridiculous and hilariously dumb.
Now… uh… well. I mean… it’s not impossible, I guess.
How else do you even explain some of this stuff?
Olivia seems just… made to order. If you take Victoria Justice, Debby Ryan herself, a touch of Olivia Holt, a pinch of Taylor Swift, a hint of Bridgit Mendler, and a dash of Selena Gomez, and you put all of this into a blender, you get Olivia Rodrigo. Even her name seems designed to trigger certain things in my subconscious.
And I’m not talking just about her music, or her personality. I mean, even her looks, down to her facial structure, hair type and specific body shape. All of it, taken together as a genetic package, just seems designed to fit into a certain part of my mind.
I’ve been holding off a bit on her, just because of this. Because… what even the fuck, lol. Sorry but this is just a little confusing, or something.
Or something.
IDK.
Seriously, what the fuck is going on here, actually? Does anyone actually know the complete story, or are we all just lost here?
IDK.
At any rate, I like a lot of what I see on Disney+.
I like the animated shows for sure. I’ve been watching Star Vs. the Forces of Evil a lot lately, usually while riding the exercise bike. It’s a lot of fun. Great show.
Star herself is one of my girl alters, of course. I think she used my twitter account a few times, probably to tweet to Disney stars, natch. I think I remember her tweeting Bella Thorne. Kinda cool to see how she got her own show.
TBH I pity people who are new to all this trying to figure it out, haha. I mean, if even I can’t make sense of it…
LOL.
Well, whatever.
I will watch pre- Tom Jacobsen stuff for sure, just to get away from myself a bit. Thank God I have the opportunity to do this.
I have fond memories of watching classic live-action Disney stuff as a little kid in Grandma’s house. In some cases I only saw some of those movies with my grandparents. Like, IDK, Bedknobs and Broomsticks, and Apple Dumpling Gang. It’ll be nice to see those again, and maybe reminisce a little about how things used to be.
I saw the original Alice in Wonderland the other day. Awesome movie. Gorgeous animation. Fantastic music. Great voice acting. Took me back for sure. I wore out the VHS back in the day. Well worth a rewatch.
Man do I wish for simpler times, sometimes.
I wish the original Alice shorts were there but I guess you can’t have everything. And I’m probably the only person who would watch them anyways.
I also really wish Song of the South was there as well. Couldn’t they just slap a disclaimer on it? Seriously. I saw it back in grade school, in class. Granted, this was in the 80’s, but still, it’s not that “bad”, really, or even at all. Couldn’t they counter any accusations of “racism” by pointing out that the movie took home the first Oscar for a racial minority? I mean, seriously. Why not?
Speaking of the disclaimers, Christ, they are annoying as shit. They even put one of those on Aladdin, for fuck’s sake. That doesn’t even make logical sense. The Arabs and Persians in past centuries were Caucasians; they were and still are White, descendants of the Visigoths, Aryans and warlords like Alexander the Great. There is nothing ethnically “wrong” with Disney’s Aladdin and it’s Caucasian voices or cultural references. Even today, the upper classes in the Arab world across the board look strikingly European and / or Jewish. They look nothing like the people on the street. Mohammad, if he existed, probably looked like me.
But, that’s a different essay, for sure.
So I saw Aladdin and one of it’s straight to VHS sequels, lol. I mean, why not. The sequel was unabashedly dumb but it had it’s charms. I mean, they gave the bulk of the important musical duties to Gilbert Gottfried, of all people. I actually laughed at the idea of that. But… it was dumb fun, something to have on when playing a video game or something.
I have zero interest in anything Star Wars. Gods, have my opinions about that franchise changed over the years.
I mean, this is another essay in and of itself, but egads, am I bored to shit of Star Wars. I’m just sick beyond sick of the franchise.
The last movie I saw in a theater was The Last Jedi, and God, was that fucking movie boring as hell. It just dragged and dragged on and fucking on. It was boring, self absorbed to the extreme and overlong. Rian Johnson massively fucked up.
The 8th movie in a 9 movie franchise is not the time to be “experimental”. Seriously, what was he thinking? What a jackass.
And Sci-Fi at any rate is clearly not his genre. Seriously, WTF was he doing? The film was like 2 and a half hours of pointless floundering. It sucked, and the critics who liked it were wrong.
I checked out after TLJ and honestly that’s it for me.
When I was younger, there were a batch of film critics that went against the grain made it clear that they didn’t like Star Wars, and didn’t like the influence the series had on our culture. I thought they were just out of touch. Now, I see their point.
This old debate comes to mind. I think I get what Simon is saying better, now.
I talked about film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum before on this blog. He hated Star Wars. I mean, he actively hated the franchise and it’s influence. He thought that Empire was a bad movie and IIRC correctly never bothered to watch Jedi. I thought he was just being, IDK, stubborn. Now, I get the points he was making. I don’t agree fully, but yeah, I get it, now.
People took Star Wars wayyyy too seriously, and they put a bunch of shit in the franchise that didn’t belong there. I think the best movie in the series by far is the original cut of the first movie (what was released as Star Wars back in the 70’s) with each subsequent film just getting worse.
Star Wars is a masterpiece, maybe the best pop movie ever released by Hollywood, Empire is really good, but not on par with it’s predecessor, Jedi is very good, almost as good as Empire, and then you get the special editions, which were not as good as the originals, and then it just gets progressively worse from then on. TPM is better than Clones, which is better than Sith, which is better than TFA, etc. TLJ was outright bad, and the last movie, whatever it was called, was just dreadful.
I can see the franchise critics’ point, now. The series has an inherent shallowness to it. Any attempt at making it seem more “deep” or whatever only ruins whatever good qualities the series has, because there’s no way to make a big budget retread of Flash Gordon deep.
Contemporary racial and sexual politics, in particular, have no place in the series, and can only ruin it’s good qualities.
I read some reviews of Obi-Wan online, and it seems like it’s just more predictable shit. I won’t be watching.
Same with Marvel. I’ll watch the 80’s and 90’s stuff, mostly for nostalgic purposes. Not interested in the new stuff. That world was fascinating when it was new to me, back when I was reading 80’s Avengers comics on my bedroom floor. Back when the comics themselves were well written with some incredible world building between the different series. The foundations were so nice that I could build on Marvel’s world with my own little worlds for the characters.
The Disney stuff… I’m sure, just can’t compare. And it won’t. So I won’t bother with it.
But, this essay is already too long, again.
I will watch a lot of the stuff on Disney+ for sure. All of the old animated films definitely. Everything from Pixar for sure. All of the shorts, yes. The old live-action stuff, classic Simpsons, yes, absolutely.
Can we get the old Mickey Mouse stuff on there, too? Not just Steamboat Willie, but everything. What about the old Mickey Mouse Club shows? That would be fucking awesome.
And, now that I’m thinking about ex-girlfriend Debby Ryan yet again, why not Radio Rebel? Or that other movie she did about a 16th birthday, or whatever.
Needless to say, there is more that needs to be explored, here. Probably a lot more. Probably many volumes more.
I might write about this subject again.
We’ll see.