Walt Disney Company is the most successful at monetizing human nostalgia [audio] | Hacker News Reader

Walt Disney Company is the most successful at monetizing human nostalgia [audio]

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57 pointsspeckx58 comments

I have a coworker/friend who is a "Disney Adult" - she has an entire room in their 4br house that is designated to Disney paraphernalia, including a $16,000 swarovski crystal Cinderella purse and $3k jeweled mini mouse ears. They are members of Club 33 which is $33,000 a year to join and have a timeshare that was integral to a wider family drama fighting over the usage rights for. She will go on global vacations to visit Disney parks but not see any of the local sites.

That’s next level and might even be more than Disney adult. I spent a whole month last year at Disney Word and am doing it again this year but even I describe that as going too far.

Do you go into a park every day of that month? I found I was peopled-out after a week.

We do multiple trips. A few long weekends, one one week, and one two week. The two week one we have to take it easy. I also backpack and ski and while Disney is obviously real cushy when you’re getting up at 6am every day and doing 25k steps it’s surprisingly exhausting.

I enjoy Disney parks (though I would not call myself a "Disney adult") and I found the best way, if you can afford a longer stay, is to spend no more than half a day in the park, and visit each park twice, or three times for your favorites. (Personally, I was done with "Hollywood Studios" after just half a day.)

Of course in the current political situation I would never return to Florida, and Disneyland is much smaller.

> Disney Adult

That speaks to some serious developmental issues.

Reminds me of the book of oxymorons I read when I was a kid: who ordered the Jumbo Shrimp?

I try to view it like any other hobby one could obsessive over. It could be triathlons, or world of warcraft, or gardening, or rock climbing. Are any better than the others?

I think we ought to separate hobbies from consumerist/collectionism behaviours.

At least to me they are very different activities. Better is quite subjective though, again to me there's something better in hobbies that develop skills vs consumerist obsessions.

Nintendo is a close 2nd. They can keep selling the same damn game every 5 years and people will keep buying while complaining about it. Their consumers just can't help themselves. They think if they just buy Ocarina of Time one more time with newer graphics that they'll be able to fill the void in their life. But for Nintendo it's all gravy.

On the other hand I still play OoT on my original N64... when it gets boring I just wait another year or so and can play through again. Have been considering purchasing a PS2 because I never had one but spend very little time playing video games, not enough to justify it.

They truly are.

Star Wars is perfect example of it. Star Wars is now repetitive genre like police procedural or western except Disney owns it.

With few exceptions they have successfully frozen the franchise and just do the same things over and over again. Why change it as long as it makes money.The postures, scenes, phrases, characters, are done with constant repeat and minimal variation. "I've got a bad feeling about this" appears in every single Star Wars movie in some form. live action and animation series have it. They are not shy about it, they even make "I have a really good feeling about this!" jest once.

I noticed this during the campaign before The Force Awakens.

One of the ads was just a shot of the burned-out Darth Vader mask and nothing else - no tagline or logo or any other text that it was about a Star Wars movie.

It's as if the marketers were saying to their audience "you already know what we mean, right? We understand each other..."

They place an enormous trust in the cultural symbols they bought.

The amount of trivia that you must handle to be able to understand the latest movie is mind boggling. Disney should do education, because I would need to watch and study all the previous movies, which is probably a year worth of work, before I can watch subsequent releases. Perhaps not as hard work as studying linear algebra, perhaps, but still a lot of person hours involved.

The amount of information that the average fan retains about Star Wars is mind boggling, compared to their, say, knowledge of world geography.

I am also in awe of sports fans in a similar way. They command large swaths of dry, boring information such as world series stats with great enthusiasm.

A year of work? There are like 9 movies and a handful of series. If you don't watch the kids' shows it's a few weeks of casual watching

There’s like 100 episodes+ of clone wars, which make the rest of it make sense.

That's why I said "if you don't watch the kids' shows"

There's an ice cream shop around here that cashes in on nostalgia.

40 years ago, there was a dairy that made ice cream, and sold it in the summers on the side of the building. We'd go there as kids, line around the block, everyone loved it and it was a very popular and loved place.

It eventually burned down, the company stopped production, you know how it goes.

About ten years ago, someone built a clone of the old dairy's neon sign, rented a new building, and served generic hand-dipped ice cream (blue bunny brand?)

It's just regular ice cream. But they have the sign. And they can charge $8 an ice cream cone, and people line up just like they used to. Ridiculous.

Seems fine to me. If people like it why be a curmudgeon about it?

The old company made a mistake by not rebuilding, there was demand for ice cream at that location and somebody met that demand. Now people can eat ice cream under an old timey sign like they want to, good for them.

Something to be said for branding.

There's a pizza place by me called "slice of the 80's" that has tacky vaguely 80-s feeling styling.

Surprisingly its been around for over 15 years and not the flash in a pan pizza shop that tends to come and go. Heck, I dont even think its very good, yet it has survived.

that last sentence. it's been 15 years and you don't have a story about either how the owner suck that one time you went or there're awesome and you can't stop going there, but hey, you've seen their sign. I've never been there either but shit dawg

Why shouldn’t we judge people for dumbass consumer behavior/ interests?

Disney Adults are fucking weird and I’m not ashamed about saying it.

Wanted to disagree with you, because it’s not your business what consenting adults do, but then I saw stereotypical Disney Adult.

Do you hate joy? People like things. I’m more suspicious of someone who judges people for liking things.

I feel like this used to be more true, and is getting less true each year. With covid they really did a lot of negative things related to the parks. They cancelled a lot of things ( magical express, free magic bands for resort guests, etc) raised prices and overall began to focus on “shareholder value” over guest experiences. They also really messed up the Star Wars IP and seemed like anything for a quick buck, and became unable to make original stories. In 30 years they should revisit this and they will probably find they took a nose dive. The people who made the nostalgia are long gone, and the new guard is slowly burning it all away.

The share went up in as part of the streaming frenzy during Covid, crashed in 2022 like everything else, and has been flat ever since. Basically got a bump for Disney+ for a while, but didn’t create “shareholder value” besides that.

It's a podcast so I can't skim it for sources, but I wonder if Oldschool Runescape by Jagex is a competitor for the title. They've made hundreds of millions off rebooting an old game

just ask Codex to do that for you. Or whatever AI client you're using. I'd do it do it but my laptop is closed andon the other side of the room from me.

Blizzard is the first example that comes to my mind with monetizing nostalgia with World of Warcraft. I must say, the feeling I have when randomly hearing similar tunes in Dota 2 which sometimes seemingly sounds like Elwyn Forests soundtrack is quite something.

If I remember correctly, Jagex revived the Old Runescape basically accidentally when they were going to shut it off. Needless to say, it worked for them very well. I love the visual, music and the feeling of first exploration which sometimes washes me over when I'm watching some Old Runescape lore videos.

Damn. Being a kid when first games were created was truly something.

Zug Zug

Nostalgia is also powerful way to trick yourself to think things were better when they were not.

"Nostalgia is death" - Bob Dylan

I have to agree, and feel looking back is bad for you

I feel if they really were, they'd revisit the 2D animation style that all the classics were in and release new movies in it.

Instead, they seem to have largely settled on the Pixar style for "new" IPs, while mechanically producing live-action remakes for every classic.

I don't really get the strategy.

Look at the C-suite. It's full of people from tech and even bio-tech. It's the California strategy of buying up competitors and attempt a monopoly.

It's no surprise they let their own brands completely languish.

I mean, they did do the whole Mickey Mouse series which was excellent. My favorite by far being Croissant de Triomphe: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zCaxXQdkfPk

The day they stopped making these was a sad, sad day for me as far as entertainment goes. Loved that series, closest thing I've enjoyed to classic Looney Tunes.

You won't convince me that this title doesn't belong to Activision Blizzard.

whatever the formula you want to use, it's something something times something equals dollars and whoever has the more dollars wins and well I love the shit out of Blizzard for being formative during my childhood but I'm sureWalt Disney has more money than Blizzard does. Or whoever owns Walt Disney.

Walt Disney is also making new things (the most popular franchises among today's childs aren't reheated old stuff, they are new franchises: Frozen and Moana).

Blizzard on the other end hasn't made anything that was not nostalgia farming for a decade. And besides Overwatch you have nothing new in this century. That's a lot for a company that's barely 30 years old…

The second last time Blizzard launched a new franchise, Mulan had just been released…

Frozen and Moana are 10 years and older now. That doesn't seem new?

From what I read about blizzard it seemed like Activision wanted them to treat wow like cod

> Frozen and Moana are 10 years and older now. That doesn't seem new?

That's 10% of the life of the company. And they are just the most striking success of the last decades. Many other movies were made in the meantime. Obviously we cannot expect every attempt to become a generational franchise.

> From what I read about blizzard it seemed like Activision wanted them to treat wow like cod

Activision merged with Blizzard in 2008. At that point the last original game from Blizzard was already 10 years old. Blizzard has been milking its three franchises for the entire 21th century.

*21st

What about the Final Fantasy series by Square Enix.

The game series that creates a whole fresh world and story for most of its games, and that has shifted across and flirted with genres other than the one it started with? That resisted “when’s the final fantasy 7 remake?!” requests and a guaranteed pile of cash that started almost as soon as the original game was released, until very recently finally releasing a remake that actually does interesting things with the game rather than just being a lazy cash grab?

They risk alienating fans (and, often, do so-alienate them) way too often to put them in this category, I think, and specifically for the reason of having failed to play it safe and target nostalgia.

As someone who loves the old turn-based games, nostalgia bait has been pretty light in general. World of Final Fantasy is the last game that really did it for me.

Activision Blizzard isn't even the most successful video game company at monetizing nostalgia. Nintendo easily holds that crown.

Parents want to relive their childhood and experience things they never had the opportunity to through their kids. They also want their children to have similar positive experiences they once had. We all watched Disney movies on replay and were glued to the TV whenever Mickey Mouse came on, parents today allow their kids to do the same. Disney capitalizes on this and bets on it being a recurring, generational, funnel for producing future customers.

Who's the best at monetizing non-human nostalgia?

Isaac Asimov

Possibly Coca-Cola or another company that makes the nostalgia more about a physical product (or even addiction) than childhood memories.

I would say MAGA like parties created all around the world. They are basically a back to from 50's to 80's franchise now. The disco songs, the golden snickers, the superheros, the tacky parties and costumes, how the women are depicted... a lot of retro-revival here.

I see someone recently watched Technology Connections' new video on ceiling fans.

https://youtu.be/_KWdCqpXB7A?t=1017

The Critical Drinker would beg to differ (look him up on YouTube).

>Walt Disney Company is the most successful at monetizing human nostalgia.

Coca-Cola has a much larger market cap than Disney, and the Coca-Cola brand is very intentionally a nostalgia-driven, golden age, remember the good times brand.

Coke doesn't own the copyright to any of my nostalgic childhood memories, while Disney certainly does!

According to the World of Coke in Atlanta, all positive memories that you possess are associated with Coke.

This is also the messaging you'll find at the Guinness museum in Dublin.

At least the beer is good there.

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