As Profits Soar, the Disneyland and Disney World Magic Is Dying | Hacker News Reader

As Profits Soar, the Disneyland and Disney World Magic Is Dying

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36 pointsourmandave20 comments

What I’ve passively learned about Disney as an adult over the years has made my opinion of them steadily deteriorate. Just as an example, their destruction of sensible IP expiration. The magic for me has been dead for a while.

Me too. My parents owned a small jewelry store, my dad was a jeweler. They used to buy little silver charms from a wholesaler at "the mart" downtown and then re sell them, as one did. One day a guy in a suit with a briefcase walked in, looked at their stuff, and handed them a lawsuit about 3 deer silver pendants that they bought from the wholesaler. The details are fuzzy in their memory but they ended up out $800, the pendants and my families like for Disney shattered. I can understand Mickey mouse or daffy duck but a deer? They weren't pleasant about it to them either. The kind of company that actively decides to put effort toward that kind of thing and doesn't have discretion in their interactions with people has lost its way.

That deer had a name, Bambi. Your parents were reselling unlicensed Bambi pendants. Did you avoid using the character name purposely in an effort to make your parents more sympathetic?

While we're on the topic of Bambi, here's an excerpt from its wikipedia article:

> The copyrights for Bambi, a Life in the Woods were inherited by Anna Wyler, Salten's daughter, who renewed them in 1954. After her death, Wyler's husband sold the rights to Twin Books, a publishing company which subsequently filed a lawsuit against Disney, claiming Disney owed it money for the continued licensing for the use of the book. Disney countered by claiming that Salten had published the story in 1923 without a copyright notice, thus it immediately entered into the public domain. Disney also argued that if the claimed 1923 publication date was accurate, then the copyright renewal filed in 1954 had been registered after the deadline and was thus invalid. The courts initially upheld Disney's view; however, in 1996, the Ninth Circuit Court reversed the decision on appeal in Twin Books Corp. v. Walt Disney Co., 83 F.3d 1162 (1996).[76][77]

I find the juxtaposition of Disney's highly zealous defense of this supposed intellectual property, and active destruction of the public domain, vs. its own questionable claims in the first place, and recourse to the public domain when suits its purposes, quite deeply ironic and hypocritical. If anything, specifying those deer to be Bambi-related only deepens my antipathy towards Disney, and sympathy for OP's parents.

If you are my parents, how do you tell the difference between a deer pendant and an "unlicensed Bambi pendant"? It's like half the size of a penny, not much room for detail. It's not as if my parents intentionally knowingly did so, they genuinely thought it was a deer, not a Bambi, and the point is that there isn't really a way, that's the craziness of it. It's not like a sports jersey where it's clearly being done intentionally. What, are we going to say that any taxidermy deer is a knock off of Bambi now? Any sculpture of a lions is from the lion king?

Bambi has a very distinctive look. If you put a dozen tiny deer pendants in front of me I could pick out which ones were Disney's Bambi and which weren't.

Not in this case, the pendant was a deer pendant not a Bambi pendant (why I chose the words I did). I love how you automatically choose to trust a random suit from a giant company and not an individual from a small mom and pop business that's literally closed and has nothing to gain.

In my experience small mom and pop businesses are no more trustworthy than giant companies.

Ok, you don't trust big businesses, you don't trust small businesses and mom and pop type small town stuff. I think that's everyone. You don't trust anyone.

In this case, I can assure you my parents were on the up and up. You don't run a small business in the same place in a community for 35 years by cheating and being dishonest or selling knockoff goods. Unfortunately my father got to the point where he couldn't work anymore during the pandemic and we had to shutter our beloved family business of almost 40 years. Thanks for randomly throwing shade on my families business, our heritage, with no basis or motive at all.

get a grip

> That deer had a name, Bambi

If someone from Disney is reading this: there is a former american president who uses the name of the one of the Disney's duck. /s

Same thing happened to me while casually reading SFGate articles, which were loaded with puff pieces about Disneyland. Even when trying to hide all the gouging, it still made the place look miserable.

Its impossible to pressure wash away how bad its gotten, which makes my truly great memories of the place as a kid even more sad.

That Shanghai-Covid Disney story seems like the peak. Trapped inside, with rides running until you get a negative test.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/31/business/disney-resort-shangh...

My dislike for Disney has grown by the year. This is a company that takes public domain stories, changes the actual story but keeps the title and then copyrights that 'version of the story'.

As examples read the originals of 'Peter Pan' and 'Alice in Wonderland' and 'Cinderella' and then watch the Disney bastardisations.

> Later, I asked the person, “How many Mickey Mouses could be in the park at once, so long as they don’t cross paths? This man looked me dead in the eye and said to me, “There’s only one Mickey.”

Strange quote to end on.

I feel like they should just go upper class only. Offering a poor experience to middle class folks where they’re constantly cut in line by richer people can’t be good.

They’re at the mercy of queueing theory here. As much as we want to blame them for raising prices, the parks are too crowded.

It’s 5k for a family for 3-4 days if you stay at a resort

If the parks stay crowded despite the high prices, what solution would make people happy? Lower prices with a limited number of tickets? Perhaps with some lottery system? Seems unreasonable to ask a business to forgo profits and not use supply and demand pricing. I don't agree with the point about pricing.

The bad upkeep seems pretty bad given the park's culture and the high prices.

This feels similar to one aspect of gentrification. Someone can pay…just not you anymore.

exactly. as long as people are willing to pay they'll continue testing the upper limits of that price.

160 USD to enter? Am I reading this correctly?

No, it's $179 after the recent increase.

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