okay, there are many legitimate reasons to dislike disney, but can we please stop using “disney tells stories based on folktales!!11!!!” as one of them? pretty please, with cherries?
Why is this not a legitimate reason? Isn’t it sad, to see all the most iconic and familiar-to-most-children forms of folk tales be under copyright?
…The problem isn’t that Disney makes stories based on folktales, though. Honestly, I don’t think the problem is even the copyright. (Though that sure doesn’t help.) The problem is that Disney has the brand recognition and the deep pockets to freeze out anyone else who tries.
I know, it’s a subtle distinction. I’m going to use dolls as an example, because Special Interest Hell. Bear with me for a second.
A while back, Mattel made a doll line called Ever After High. Ever After High had a gimmick- it was a doll line based on fairy tales, but instead of being based directly on the fairy tale characters themselves, it was based on their children. This meant that they could create iconic and memorable designs for the characters without being accused of ripping off Disney’s designs.
This is an original “basic” Ever After High doll:
The dolls are almost fully articulated- they have 360 degree head rotation, articulated shoulders, elbows, wrists, and knees. Their costume designs are complicated, often featuring multiple layers of fabric and lots of accessories. Each doll came with a stand, a hairbrush, and a bookmark that told their “story”. They retailed for $16.99.
The dolls came in two factions: “Royals” (the children of heroes) and “Rebels” (the children of villains). Each one had a backstory and a motivation, and they had an accompanying webseries that told those stories.
(I swear there’s a reason I’m going into Excruciating Detail.)
Even though I didn’t like the sculpts… Ever After High was a pretty good doll line, and it was moderately successful. It brought in 53 million dollars- not nearly as much as Barbie, but still a decent profit.
… Disney didn’t sue Mattel for this. Copyright never got involved. But they didn’t need to sue. They did two things that killed Ever After High dead.
The first was that they took the license for the Disney Princesses away from Mattel and gave it to Hasbro. Since that’s, obviously, a big money-making license, that was a pretty nasty punishment.
But the other thing Disney did, the thing that I think was what properly killed Ever After High… they massively expanded the merchandising for Disney Descendants.
…Now, it looks like Disney Descendants was already in the works when Ever After High started coming out. I don’t think Disney got so OMGSCARED of Ever After High that they made a product directly to compete with it. And I can’t say anything bad about the movies because a) I haven’t seen them and b) I think @bpd-dylan-hall will kill me.
But the two franchises share some notable similarities- they’re about the teenage children of fairy tale characters, who are split into two factions: “hero” and “villain”. They’re very ‘modern’, with colorful hair and flashy, iconic designs.
This is a basic Disney Descendants doll:
I own both Ever After High and Descendants dolls, and I gotta say: the Descendants are way lower quality. They’ve got almost no articulation- just wrists, hips, and knees. They don’t come with a stand or many accessories. Their costumes are much simpler, and most of the designs are screen-printed on. They’re not crap dolls, don’t get me wrong, and I like their sculpts more than EAH- but by comparison, they’re not very good.
But that made one important difference: The Disney Descendants basic doll retailed at $12.99.
Now, riddle me this: if you’re the parent of an eight-year-old girl who loves dolls, which are you more likely to get: the high-quality expensive doll with a lot of small parts she’s likely to lose, or the cheaper one with a brand name on it that you recognize?
Disney was able to massively undercut the competition. Mattel couldn’t keep up. They made cheaper versions of the Ever After High dolls -they went for $9.99 or so, they’re absolute garbage, and collectors and kids both hated them.
Mattel hasn’t officially canceled Ever After High. But the show’s not coming out anymore, the dolls aren’t on shelves anymore, and we haven’t heard anything about either since 2017. Disney won, and they won hard.
If Disney didn’t have the kind of money they do, if Disney didn’t have the kind of clout they do, this wouldn’t have happened. I mean, sure, all doll lines end eventually, that’s the way of the world, but Disney deliberately undercut the competition. Depending on how much dolls cost to make and ship, they might even have been making them at a loss.
But Disney could afford to do it because they’re Disney.
The only time anyone’s ever really been able to successfully make a fairy tale franchise without getting shot down by Disney was Shrek, and that’s because Disney didn’t want to touch the aeShrektic with a ten-foot pole. They were scared they’d ruin their image. Any other time anyone does anything with fairy tales (or princesses, or talking cars, or talking fish, or pirates, or…) Disney can make their own version and sell it at a loss, driving their competitors out of business. They have more money than God. They can afford to lose money on one theme park, let alone one toyline or one movie.
The problem with Disney is that it’s a monopoly. and like any other monopoly, Disney can freeze out anyone who tries to compete with them. I think if you trustbusted Disney- left them with their animation studio and maybe their theme park division, but took away Pixar and Marvel and ESPN and all their television outlets and all the other crap they own- they’d have a harder time undercutting everyone else. you’d see more stuff based on folklore and fairy tales, and it’d have more than a snowball’s chance in hell of being successful.
“But capitalism rewards innovation!”
No. Capitalism rewards capital.
apologies for careening into this long post with even more long but i wanted to chime in with another note on this whole saga because i too a) hate capitalism and b) live in doll hyperfocus hell and, dude, it gets worse.
disney did not just kill ever after high with disney descendants/taking their literal toys and going home by rescinding mattel’s disney princess license, they also arguably killed unrelated doll lines, including my personal favorite, monster high. here’s how:
when mattel lost both disney princesses (directly) and ever after high (indirectly), they lost a big chunk of their single-digits demographic and began scrambling to find a way to recover it through existing properties that disney could not freeze them out of. at this point, their biggest moneymakers in the doll category were, in order, barbie and monster high. of the two, monster high was the newer, more niche, and the one they were more willing to gamble, given that barbie was and still is their flagship property.
what this meant for monster high was a massive and disastrous makeover. i won’t go into too much detail about the monster high line in Ye Olden Days or we will be here forever, but like ever after high (which was originally a spinoff of monster high), the dolls were known for their high articulation, detailed outfits and accessories, the effort that went into each distinct character, and their mid-tier price point. even their “budget” doll lines had never cut back on articulation before, just on the clothes and accessories. but now that they were trying to regain their footing among the parents of kids younger than the tweens to whom monster high had initially been marketed, they decided the thing to do would be to reboot the series with the girliest character as the new main character, more cutesy, big-eyed, smiley face molds, way less articulation, cheaper clothes, very few or no small parts, and a much cheaper price point.
basically, they figured that older kids and collectors would still be happy with higher tier collector barbies, and that they had nothing to lose throwing monster high under the bus, if it came to it. they were half right in the sense that driving monster high into the dirt didn’t sink them, but they hadn’t counted on the fact that monster high had been bringing in revenue to which they would otherwise not have had access. that being from adult collectors who specifically liked monster high’s horror origins. we didn’t just like fancy, expensive dolls, we were coming from a position of already being familiar with the properties that monster high was riffing on, and enjoying the “creepy” part of their creepy/cute asethetic.
everyone, and i do mean everyone, despised the monster high reboot. adult collectors hated it, kids either hated or just outgrew it, and the parents who had disliked the line for being “too scary” or “too mature” were not won over. the lead designer who had invented and grown the line from the ground up, garrett sander, quit mattel. monster high, in its objectively awful new incarnation, floundered on for like maybe a year before it was quietly shelved.
don’t get me wrong, these were all mattel’s own shitty decisions, disney didn’t force them to kill monster high. but the position that they found themselves in, of trying to fill a revenue vacuum created by the loss of disney princesses/ever after high, was due entirely to disney deciding to undercut the competition in what they saw as “their” market. and mattel is a HUGE company! they are not some underdog indie toy-maker, and they engage in these same shitty practices when it comes to actual indie toy-makers that jeopardize barbie‘s profits. but disney is bigger, and richer. enough so that they can strangle other billion-dollar companies if they step one toe out of line.
like, dolls are my special interest, yes, but i think it is, objectively, an incredibly interesting example of the flaw in thinking that capitalism encourages competition. you cannot compete with a monopoly.
fwiw, seven years down the line, mattel is attempting a re-reboot of monster high that is meant to appeal to the adult collectors that they drove away, with a faithful return to the original designs and quality. they started with what was an obvious stress test of super limited, expensive collectors edition doll versions of stephen king properties, which is about as adult-aimed as it can get while still being fashion dolls, and it was a massive success. so we’re looking at a full reboot in 2022, complete with tv show and movies. there’s rumors that they are also trying to court garrett sander into coming back and designing for them again but that's more hope than substance. either way, time will tell whether this reboot has any staying power.
but hey, you know what they’re not trying to reboot? yeah, ever after high.
