Jules wrote:^^ Somehow I doubt Criterion or any other boutique label would touch SotS. There's too much risk of a backlash. Maybe I'm wrong.
Your last point made me think that perhaps the reason the Disney shorts are not so well-known is because Disney has allowed them to slip into obscurity. The same could be said for the lesser-known WDAS films.
Well eventually the film is going to slide into the public domain and I can't imagine the film will be completely ignored then. Although I've also heard that Disney has plans for their early releases and how to to deal with them when they are in the public domain so we'll see.
The reason the Walt era is so classic now is because the studio didn't let those films disappear into obscurity. They kept re-releasing them and hailing them as classics until they were considered classics. The 90s suffered from the fact that Disney only cared about the Big Four and decided films from Pocahontas onwards aren't worth promoting because they didn't sell as much merchandise as TLM, BATB, Aladdin, and TLK. In the late 90s-early 2000s, they still made an effort to promote Pocahontas, Hunchback, Hercules, Mulan, and Tarzan, but because these films weren't easily marketable for the Disney Princess or Disney Villains franchises, they became ignored. Pocahontas and Mulan are only still somewhat around because of their tenuous connections to the DP franchise.
The live-action films are also completely forgotten because Disney never really bothered to keep them in the public consciousness generation after generation besides Mary Poppins and Old Yeller.
Big Disney Fan wrote:JeanGreyForever wrote:While the public may not care about the Disney shorts very much, they shouldn't pretend like they don't exist either especially considering that they serve as the foundation of the company. The Mickey, Donald, and Goofy ones in particular as well as the Silly Symphonies.
Like I said, if the public didn't care, I don't think they would have put the shorts up at all. But considering that there are at least a handful of shorts available, if not the entire library, there must be some members of the public who do care, and there are some people at Disney who don't pretend they don't exist. Otherwise, the shorts wouldn't be there.
I don't know, there's a lot of junk on Disney+. Some of the early Disney Channel films for example won't have much of an audience but Disney is afraid of a dearth of material so they've been trying to include as much content as possible, which was also an incentive to purchase Fox. Some of the shorts are classics they can't afford to ignore like Steamboat Willie and Three Little Pigs but there's a reason they haven't felt the need to include every Silly Symphony or every short from Donald or Mickey's respective libraries. Not to mention, there's no easy way to find them all precisely because Disney didn't feel there was an audience who would want to binge-watch a bunch of old Pluto cartoons.
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