Originally published at: Disney's Strange World looks like a great throwback | Boing Boing
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looks like a loving send-up to the comics and b-movies that imagined the year 2000 being replete with jet packs and hover cars.
Disney is going to keep trying to get this one right.
I understand why they stick with it. It’s been part of the company’s cultural DNA since at least the 1964 World’s Fair. I just don’t know if young people are all that optimistic about a future under threat from the climate emergency, economic inequality, and resurgent fascism.
If this one doesn’t connect, I’d suggest a new Rocketeer movie set in the U.S. in the late 1930s where he battles Nazi spies working in cahoots with greedy right-wing American industrialists to replace the New Deal with some pollution-heavy economic “solution” (bring in a fictional second try at the Business Plot for extra fun). Rocket packs and other retro-tech, yes, but also things that today’s kids can relate to.
[they’re already doing a Rocketeer sequel for Disney+ starring David Oyelowo as a Tuskegee airman who becomes the new Rocketeer, so maybe they’ll hit gold that way…]
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I don’t think the movie Tomorrowland failed because the kids today are insufficiency optimistic about the future. I think it failed because it was trying to sell a terrible, Ayn-Randian vision of the future in which the fate of regular folks depends on the whims of an elite group of extraordinary individuals who have a plan to build a model utopian society to inspire the rest of us, and don’t believe that silly things like laws should apply to them. When the plan fails and the utopia they were trying to build goes to shit, the movie ends with them deciding to try the exact same plan again, rather than use their extraordinary resources to help improve the world that we actually live in.
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I think kids saw exactly what you describe in that movie because they’re not optimistic about the future. In their lifetimes, all they’ve seen offered in response to the three great crises of our time are the same techno-utopian market-based solutions spearheaded by supposedly extraordinary visionary tycoons like [snicker] Elon Musk. Of course the movie’s message fell flat and it flopped at the box office.
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I think it’s perfectly possible to be optimistic about the future being better than the present while also hating the film’s message about relying on an arrogant, elitist secret organization being the ones to bring it to us. That organization was literally trying to take the best and brightest people away from the regular world in order to build their utopia instead. A different ending might have been able to save that movie. Maybe.
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man, that looks fun! thankee for the headsup. Will it be revealed that they’re stuck in the animator’s body all cellular level ala Fantastic Voyage? nahh.
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Yeah I legitimately expected that the big pivotal moment of the movie was going to be about the citizens of Tomorrowland finally realizing that they were the problem for abandoning the rest of society instead of engaging with it and maybe even learning a thing or two. Then the movie could end with the so-called geniuses leaving their ivory towers to help create a sustainable utopian world here on Earth.
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Not to mention routinely sending murderbots to cover up the very existence of Tomorrowland at all costs.
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Looks cool. But I think it looked less cool the moment they went to colour.
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