Geoff Carter is an excellent and smart writer who, among other things, produces the Disney-centered blog YourSouvenirGuide (but don’t hold that against him). In the post Ten things Disney could have done to geek up without buying Marvel he explains both why Disney buying Spidey was a bad idea and how they could have leveraged the properties they already own.
My favorite suggestion:
9. The Disney Princesses: Teach them kung-fu and arm them with wrist-holstered blades and pistols.
Works for me.
Pay attention True Believers – it’s clobberin’ time.
For years the criticism, such as it was, of Disney’s marketing was that it missed boys. It is a fair criticism, though this doesn’t seem to have hurt the bottom line all that much. Disney knows how to connect with girls and women just fine. They are tuned into the tiaras, fairies and flowers like nobody knows. It explains why all their later (non-Pixar) animation was in fact formulaic: Bad boy, princess with true heart, add schmaltz and (after Aladdin) really schmaltzy uninteresting romantic soundtracks. Even Lion King – ostensibly a story about men and boys – was about the boy having an emotional experience that could only be of interest to girls.
Well, if you can’t beat ‘em, buy ‘em. Disney today said it is buying Marvel Entertainment for $4 billion. (And to think I remember when comics cost a quarter.) A note to The Mouse: more blood, less music. Also, no more Hulk movies. Hmmm, will this be enough to get me to go to another Disney park? Probably not.
I hope Stan Lee got a big cut of this.
In a way too weird post-modern zeitgeist moment, Captain America — a very popular image of the US throughout the world — is being killed off by Marvel Comics. Now I know that there’s no such thing as actually dead in the world of comic books but it’s hard to believe they would have done this under Reagan. Or even Clinton. It could have been worse: They could have had him kill himself. Boy oh boy is this image going to be grabbed by pundits, the residents of Greater Blogistan and other idiots like me.
So over at Magnosticism, O’Regan reveals that he is The Flash, according to the Superhero Personality Quiz. Having played softball with Mr. O’R., I had reason to be suspicious about the accuracy of this test. Then I took it and found out it was 100% accurate.
You are Spider-Man
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You are intelligent, witty, a bit geeky and have great power and responsibility.  |
Spidey and I go way, way back.
We are almost exactly the same age — he was born a couple of months before I was in 1962. Through my brother, Master Sgt. Collateral Damage, I became a devotee of Spidey and all things Marvel, hating DC comics with a passion that would be unequaled until I became a Red Sox fan and learned that The Yankees were even more terrible than Dr. Doom. (There’s actually some justification for this brand devotion. At the time DC comics were all set in an idealized world where the only people ever allowed to frown were bad guys. They had more in common with movie serials like Buck Rodgers than anything I saw in my life. Nearly all dialogue ended with an exclamation point! Marvel brought superheroes back to earth, as it were, giving them real problems and issues to deal with when they weren’t saving us mere mortals from the likes of Paste Pot Pete and Galactacus. This was big stuff at the time. … but I digress …) I learned to read from Spider-Man and his attitudes had a huge aesthetic influence on me. I blame him for the fact that my favorite movies when I was a youngster were the Marx Brothers and Hepburn/Tracey comedies. My most-read book when I was a ‘tweener: Catch-22. Yossarian and Peter Parker were cut from a very similar cloth. Spider-Man wasn’t perfect though. I’m still not a big fan of arachnids.
All of which leads me to say, “Hey Flash … next time could you run the bases a little faster?”
Over at Brandweek: Marvel Turns To Its Friendly Neighborhood Soap Opera for Help
Why do I always miss the best sales? Earlier this week, Fred Kropp of Madison, WI, bought an 8-foot tall fiberglass pink flamingo from the city of Oshkosh for $715. “The city posted the flamingo for sale for $2 after police picked it up a few weeks ago as found property that was never claimed.” Memo to self: Start hanging out at police auctions. (And yes, I do believe this is the largest such creature since Divine shuffled off this mortal coil.)
To my mind, the purchase of Marvel is one of the few missteps the Mouse has made under Bob Iger’s reign. Disney isn’t getting a hell of a lot for its money. The theme park rights to the characters will continue to be held by Universal. And the movie properties .. will remain the properties of Sony, Fox and Paramount for the forseeable future. …. Four billion dollars spent to wait out contracts and to see if Avi Arad and Jerry Bruckeheimer will duke it out in Thunderdome.
Collateral Damage 
