Disney

Ethics Hero Elon Musk vs. Ethics Villain Disney

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Elon Musk is weird, impulsive, sometimes hypocritical and often infuriating. He is also a national treasure: a true Ethics Hero in the culture wars.

Back in 2021, Disney fired Gina Carano, one of the stars of the Disney+ series “The Mandalorian” because her social media posts were insufficiently supportive of the progressive cant Disney is obsessed with (to its financial and cultural sorrow). The triggering tweet was one in which Carano, a conservative (can’t have that in Hollywood!) compared Nazi Germany’s anti-Jewish propaganda to efforts by the political left to demonize people based on their political beliefs. Proving her point, Disney canned her, explaining, falsely, that her “social media posts denigrating people based on their cultural and religious identities are abhorrent and unacceptable.”

Carano is now suing Disney and Lucasfilms. Her complaint can be read here. She is suing under California law, which states that
“No employer shall make, adopt, or enforce any rule, regulation, or policy: (a) Forbidding or preventing employees from engaging or participating in politics or from becoming candidates for public office. (b) Controlling or directing, or tending to control or direct the political activities or affiliations of employees.”

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Ha! Disney Gets The Message!

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Discussing the last Ethics Alarms post about the totally botched live -remake of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” one of the most influential and ground-breaking (and popular, and profitable) films in Hollywood history, I told my wife, “If I were in charge of Disney, I’d just re-release the original in a restored version.”

And that’s exactly what the company is doing.

The best part about the move is that it implicitly rebukes Rachael Zeigler, the current Snow Of Color who foolishly trashed her own vehicle by calling the original dated and “weird.” It also commits the company to the ultimate version of the live-action rip-off emerging as an homage to its predecessor, not a rejection of it: all those kids who see Walt’s movie and love it are not going to like a live-version that defames Snow and her friends. Even Disney’s not that stupid. (Are they?)

Anyway, there is hope: the profit motive and the instinct to survive may have overwhelmed toxic wokism. Disney may have rediscovered the ethical virtues of competence, responsibility, and respect.

Disney’s Sunk Costs Fiasco, And Introducing “The Nelson”

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Disney, which has completely lost its way as a cultural icon, story-teller, entertainment source and exemplar, recently announced that it will be delaying its release of the live-action “Snow White” for at least a year after terrible publicity and a big-mouthed star made its $300,000,000 plus investment look shaky at best. Initially, the thinking was that the studio, recently the victim of one high-budget bomb after another, was just hoping to let all the controversy fade away, but no. The plan, it turns out, is to spend as much as another 100 million dollars to add CGI dwarfs, modeled on the animated originals, to the film and to remove whatever the hell these were…

…which was the DEI-driven, uber-woke Disney replacement for the iconic little fellas after a single short actor had complained that keeping that feature of the classic fairy tale would be uncool. The company really made an artistic decision this way. It really did. Morons. Walt would have rolled in his grave if he weren’t frozen stiff.

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Ethics Verdict: Disney Is Officially Incompetent

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Yes, those are “the Seven Dwarfs” of “Snow White and” fame, according to our national steward of childhood fantasy and iconic fables, the Disney Corporation. That photo is smoking gun evidence of insanity, a production shot from the upcoming live action version of the 1937 movie that made Walt Disney’s artistic vision a cultural force, now retitled “Snow White.” Of course Snow White is going to be Snow Of Color, as the actress playing the German fairy tale princess is Latina Rachel Zegler, who has already embraced the company’s current “screw tradition, common sense and legacy” attitude by tweeting, “Yes I am Snow White; no, I am not bleaching my skin for the role.”

You do recall why Snow White was called Snow White, right?

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As Disney Supporters Complain About Censorship, Disney Engages In Artistic Censorship And WrongThink Control

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Early in William Friedkin’s classic film “The French Connection,” Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle (Gene Hackman) argues with his partner, Buddy “Cloudy” Russo (Roy Scheider) regarding Russo recently sustaining a knife wound in a confrontation with a black drug-dealer:

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Doyle: You dumb guinea.
Cloudy: How the hell did I know he had a knife?
Doyle: Never trust a nigger.
Cloudy: He coulda been white!
Doyle: Never trust anyone.

That exchange has been excised from the versions of the film used on Turner Classic Movies, iTunes and Criterion. The film’s distributor, 20th Century Fox, was acquired by Disney before the scene disappeared. It is artistic censorship, straight up; no more acceptable than painting over the breasts Reubens paintings, or bleeping out “damn” is Rhett Butler’s famous kiss-off to Scarlet (as was done regularly when the movie began being shown on network television.)

Again, we are faced with deciding whether the motives here were stupid or sinister. I probably vote for both. The accelerating effort to declare the word “nigger” as taboo regardless of intent, use or context is pure attempted mind-control and Orwellian WrongThink totalitarianism—now embraced, as in other totalitarian tactics, by most of the Left and the Democratic Party. It is also unprincipled pandering to Critical Race Theory extremism. The rational mind boggles at what canonical works of art and literature face permanent scarring if the practice is allowed to take hold. Just off the top of my recently repaired head, I can think of several superb films that include “nigger” in the dialogue, like “The Shining,” “In the Heat of the Night,” “To Kill a Mockingbird,” “Mississippi Burning,” “Pulp Fiction,” and of course, “Blazing Saddles.”

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More Disney Ethics: The NYT Movie Critic’s Review Of “The Little Mermaid” Highlighted What’s Wrong With Disney’s Wokism, But Conservatives Didn’t Notice

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Ah, the curse of confirmation bias! So determined are conservative pundits and bloggers to condemn the New York Times as being a full conspirator in the effort to wokify U.S. society and culture that it missed the paper’s movie critic admitting that the movement wasn’t working. Wesley Morris, who is clearly Democrat, progressive, and an African American, began his review of the already controversial live action version of “The Little Mermaid” thusly:

The new, live-action “The Little Mermaid” is everything nobody should want in a movie: dutiful and defensive, yet desperate for approval. It reeks of obligation and noble intentions. Joy, fun, mystery, risk, flavor, kink — they’re missing. The movie is saying, “We tried!” Tried not to offend, appall, challenge, imagine.

“Dutiful and defensive, yet desperate for approval. It reeks of obligation and noble intentions.” That’s a perfect, if incomplete, description of what political correctness and the cultural fascists of the Left have wrought. But because the critic appended  “kink” at the end of “joy, fun, mystery, risk, flavor,” the qualities he felt the movie was missing, that word was all the critics of the critic could see. “NY Times ripped for piece lamenting lack of ‘kink’ in new ‘Little Mermaid’: ‘The left sexualizes kids'” Fox News announced, and it was typical.

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I Have To Ask: What Is Disney Doing And Why?

/ Jack Marshall / 57 Comments

For a couple of weeks now, I’ve been planning a long post examining what Disney’s mission and methodology need to be in 21st Century America. Walt’s creation faces an important challenge and a difficult one, and I would hope that the people responsible for guiding a company whose role in shaping U.S. culture has been both successful and beneficent as well as profitable are up to the task. They had better be, for the sake of the culture, not merely stockholders.

I was well on the way to devising a post I felt would be perceptive and provocative when I saw the video above. That stopped me cold. I wasn’t exactly optimistic about Disney, which has been a major positive influence in my own life, being able to safely navigate around the cultural icebergs in the roiling societal seas ahead before I watched the thing, but now I am as confused as I am depressed.

The classic starting point for ethical analysis is “What’s going on here?” In this case, it is more appropriate to ask, “What THE HELL is going on here?”

I’m open to suggestions.

Lyric Political Correctness In “The Little Mermaid”: Not Unethical, Just “The Great Stupid” Doing What It Does…

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

From the Ethics Alarms mailbag came an inquiry about the latest kerfuffle over the upcoming live action version of “The Little Mermaid.” There are two great production numbers in the original, both sung by a crab: the Academy Award-winning “Under the Sea” and the more sedate “Kiss the Girl,” in which Ariel’s devoted crustacean friend urges Prince Eric, Ariel’s secret love, to take the plunge and kiss the magically land-bound fish-woman.

Here are the original lyrics:

There you see her
Sitting there across the way
She don’t got a lot to say
But there’s something about her
And you don’t know why
But you’re dying to try
You wanna kiss the girl

Yes, you want her
Look at her, you know you do
Possible she wants you too
There is one way to ask her
It don’t take a word
Not a single word
Go on and kiss the girl

Sing with me now
Sha-la-la-la-la-la
My oh my
Look like the boy too shy
Ain’t gonna kiss the girl
Sha-la-la-la-la-la
Ain’t that sad?
Ain’t it a shame?
Too bad, he gonna miss the girl

Now’s your moment (ya, ya, ya)
Floating in a blue lagoon (ya, ya, ya)
Boy, you better do it soon
No time will be better (ya, ya, ya, ya, ya, ya)
She don’t say a word
And she won’t say a word
Until you kiss the girl

Sha-la-la-la-la-la
Don’t be scared (sha-la, sha-la-la ya, ya, ya)
You got the mood prepared (woah, woah)
Go on and kiss the girl
Sha-la-la-la-la-la
Don’t stop now (sha-la, sha-la-la ya, ya, ya)
Don’t try to hide it how
You want to kiss the girl (woah, woah)
Sha-la-la-la-la-la
Float along (sha-la, sha-la-la)
And listen to the song
The song say kiss the girl (woah, woah)
Sha-la-la-la-la-la
The music play (ya, ya, ya, ya, ya, ya)
Do what the music say
You got to kiss the girl
You’ve got to kiss the girl
Oh, don’t you wanna kiss the girl
You’ve gotta kiss the girl
Go on and kiss the girl

Via the surviving member of the team that wrote the songs in “Mermaid” (and better yet, “Little Shop of Horrors”), Alan Menken, we learned this week that Disney, which is too woke for its own good these days (and ours), ordered up some lyric changes in the song because “people have gotten very sensitive about the idea that [Prince Eric] would, in any way, force himself on [Ariel].”

Oh, please.

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Disney Continues Its Transformation Into The Great Stupid’s Cultural Corrupter

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Disney’s animated/live action feature “Song of the South” (1946) is, to say the least, not a metaphorical hill worth dying on. The animated sections are excellent, but Walt, for reasons known best to him, decided to ignore good advice from various members of the black community who advised him not to use the movie to romanticize plantation life, with happy slaves singing away in the Land of Cotton where old times are not forgotten. “Song of the South’s” version of the Old South makes “Gone With The Wind” seem like the “1619 Project” by comparison; shame on Walt, who spoiled any chance of Joel Chandler Harris’s American folk tales being preserved in our culture.

Of course, Walt’s lapse of judgment doesn’t mean, or shouldn’t mean, that people who want to see the movie (and the screen legacy of African-American actor James Baskett, who deserves to be remembered) ought to be prevented from doing so. 21st Century Corporate Disney, however, has fully embraced the paternalistic view that big media companies and the government know best, so “Song of the South” has been treated like those photos of old Soviet leaders who fell out of favor: erased, banished. Nope, sorry, can’t see it, folks: it will make you racist, or if you are properly woke, cause an aneurysm, or something.

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If It Is Unethical For CNN To Continue Putting Don Lemon On The Air, What Do You Call ABC Allowing “The View” To Rot Brains Daily?

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Yes, that was fake Republican Ana Navarro spreading the word that blacks and Hispanics get sent to jail for years for stealing a pack of cigarettes. “The View” is the most-viewed news and talk program in daytime television, and is run by the ABC News division. The ABC News division is permitting outright, flagrant false information to be communicated to its dim and ignorant audience by this coven of fools. They make Don Lemon look like Edward R. Murrow.

ABC, do recall, is owned by Disney. Continue reading →