Decoding Disney: Amelia Steinbach

Four Seasons Resort Orlando has announced that it will partner with The Walt Disney Company to offer its hotel guests “Extra Magic Hours,” a privilege that was, until recently, only extended to guests at official Disney hotels. However, now guests at seven hotels in the local area will also gain this access. Extra Magic Hours at Disney mean that only specific people will be allowed into the park, and will consequently face shorter lines and significantly less crowds. I can understand why Disney would do this for financial reasons. However, it does seem to severely limit specific access to the park solely to people who can afford much more expensive hotels, and this seems problematic to me.

On Thursday, shareholders of the Walt Disney Company voted on a compensation plan for Disney’s CEO, Bob Iger. He would make “ up to $48.5 million a year over four years plus an equity grant worth about $100 million.” This plan was likely initiated by Disney’s recently closed deal that will give them tens of billions of dollars worth of Twenty-First Century Fox programs. This would be in comparison to his most recent salary in 2017 of about 36 million dollars. The shareholders rejected this plan, though the vote was close, with only 52% voting against, and 44% voting in favor (the other 4% of shareholders abstained from voting). This vote was non-binding, so it is possible that Iger will still get the raise. However, the chair of the board’s compensation committee noted that the board will take the shareholders’ votes “under advisement.”

My final essay for Writing 101 discusses how Disney has improved its portrayal of female characters over the last several decades, and the work they still have to do in order to produce empowering role models. There are certainly still problems with the princess movies of today, though I usually do not view them as worse than the originals. However, this article points out that there are actually several problematic aspects of these films - and some of them are new (as in, they are problems that were not evident in the First Wave films). In this reflection, I going to focus, in particular, on those more modern issues with Disney. First, in comparison to the original Disney princess films, female characters actually make up a lower percentage of the dialogue than they did seven decades ago. With the exception of Brave and Tangled , all of the Disney princess movies from 1989 to 2013 have somewhere in between 15% and 45% of the dialogue being held by women, with an average of around ...

The Walt Disney Company and fast-food giant McDonald's have announced a partnership! Beginning in June, 2018, McDonald's will begin to include Disney-themed toys (specifically, Incredibles 2 ) in its Happy Meals. In addition to this inclusion of disney-themed toys, McDonald's will also begin to follow Disney's guidelines for nutrition in its food. Disney tends to emphasize vegetables, fruit, and whole grains a bit more than McDonald's, so the partnership is perhaps not such a coincidence, as McDonald's has also announced that they will be limiting the maximum amount of calories for a Happy Meal to 600 by the year 2022.

On February 27th, the Walt Disney Company announced that they would be investing the equivalent of nearly two and a half billion US dollars into building upon Disneyland Paris in France, which was originally opened in 1992. This may seem quite ambitious, especially after France, and Europe in general, suffered decreases in tourism numbers after numerous terrorist attacks. However, those numbers jumped back up for France in 2017, helping to justify Disney's massive investment. Considering the fact that Disneyland Paris is Europe's most popular theme park, this could end up being a huge payoff for Disney. Specifically, the company hopes to include new areas dedicated to Spider-man, the Hulk, Frozen, and Star Wars. They should be opened beginning in 2021.

As I have previously mentioned on this blog, The Little Mermaid was my absolute favorite Disney princess movie when I was a little girl; I loved the idea of an ocean setting and mermaids. We even performed “Under the Sea” during my fifth grade chorus concert, reinvigorating my love for the film at ten years old. I did not think much about the film again until my high school independent study on gender inequality. Once I started to examine the movie with a new lens, I was not too pleased that I had been allowed to see such a film at such a formative age. I mainly watched clips and read articles for my independent study, so this was my first time watching the entire movie, beginning to end, in quite some time. After watching it, I continued to be frustrated about several things, including the image of the mermaids, the portrayal of Ursula, the lyrics of “Poor Unfortunate Souls,” and, honestly, just the general plot of the movie. I know that all of the Disney princesses are ridic...

During the second week of February 2018, Walt Disney World and Disneyland increased their entry prices. The price of each entry option was heightened anywhere from a couple dollars to over ten dollars more. The price for a family of four to attend Magic Kingdom park in Orlando, FL for one day now amounts to $526. Personally, I am not super surprised that Disney is raising its prices; I imagine that, from a business perspective, this is the ideal change. Disney is so enormously popular; people plan out entire trips just to visit the parks. For this reason, I doubt that the amount of people who attend the Disney parks will actually change all that much. Most people will probably be willing to pay the higher prices, increasing Disney’s revenue pretty extensively over time. However, I think that the socioeconomic class diversity at Disney (to the extent that it exists...) may end up decreasing. While people obviously have to have a certain amount of wealth in order to ...