This story regarding Disneyland's "Pirates of the Caribbean" ride was released on Wednesday.

That report was followed by this one earlier today, which attempts to put the claim in perspective.

Not exactly a denial. Whether it's true or not, it seems clear that this is something people would like to do.

And this blogger claims the the problem is not only real but disgustingly out of hand.

This seems like an odd way for Disney fans to go about things. I mean, clearly, the best way to get human remains into the "Pirates of the Caribbean" ride is not to cremate the body but rather to dress your dead buddy up like a pirate, drape him in gold jewelry, arrange him in a typically buccaneer-like pose, and wait for rigor mortis to set in.

Then you're only one sloppily executed Weekend at Bernie's-style ruse away from rolling your pal off the raft and into a suitable "chasing women with poultry," display. Perfect!

I guess this is where not giving a fuck about what happens to me after I die really comes in handy. The risk/reward here is dicey at best. Ideally, you end up spending eternity getting gawked at by dumpy, mouth-breathing tourists. Worst case scenario, you get vacuumed up by a 16-year old park employee and dropped into an Anaheim dumpster. Not exactly win-win.

The story mentions that the ash sprinkling got its start at the "Haunted Mansion," attraction. I'm not a huge believer in ghosts but the build-up of years and years of dead people's remains having been tossed into that house can't be great for keeping a place un-haunted.

I mean, how many corpses would it take to flip that place from fun ride to actual walking nightmare of undead agony? My guess would be, any number over ten. Indian graveyards are bad news and some of them must've been on the small side. Especially with the ones who moved around a lot. The Apaches and the... uh... those other guys, too.

The worst part is, no one would ever believe you. That's a horrific lot in life. "Nutball who claims he saw ghosts inside the ghost ride." That's a step above calling PETA and urging them to rescue the flying elephants you spotted being forced to carry children around in a circle all day.

Eventually, after enough people claimed to have seen ghosts, they'd have to create a book of ghost mugshots featuring all the "fake" Disney-sanctioned spirits from the ride. Guests would be asked to go through the book, describing and then checking off the phantoms they saw. If you reach the end of the book and there's still no sign of "Gary, the pleated, khaki shorts-wearing investment banker from Des Moines-ghost," who expressed a desire to "haunt" your vagina, they call in the professional exorcists...

Nobody wants that, right?




TheCoolerKing knows you're going to call him crazy, but he doesn't care. On his last visit to the Haunted Mansion, towards the end of the ride, he believes he witnessed a grim spectre appear in the cart alongside him. He's never told this to another soul...

Is it possible for someone to make a joke or maybe even actually insult someone without being accused of racism. It seems the answer is "no."

The most insulting revelation in that story is that "Desperate Housewives" thinks it's in a position to mock something. They try to write jokes on that show? Holy shit, you really do learn something new every day. I am honestly offended by this.

After I recovered from that piece of information, eventually... way, way later... I looked at the story. As much as I'd want to side with an Asian country over a shitty soap opera, I don't think I can.

Isn't the show (or anyone) allowed to make jokes at the expense of people, places and things? I mean, it's a joke. Laugh or don't but I don't see this as being a racist comment. You're telling me the honor and reputation of the Filipino people rests in the hands of a third-rate actress who once made a living kissing Dean Cain?

Or, putting aside the joke aspect, isn't the "character" uttering the line, allowed to be a racist? A subtle one, perhaps, but isn't that part of who she is? Is it wrong to portray a Nazi character as hating Jews? It's fiction, not some thinly-veiled propaganda.

Thirdly, making a crack about a certain country perhaps having less than perfect medical conditions may be ignorant (or not, in some cases) but it is not automatically racism. Some countries have better facilities than others This is a fact. Her criteria might be something other than just an assumption that all Filipinos are butchers. (As in, crude doctors, not the "Sam the butcher" type guys.) Maybe she's actually basing it on something tangible. I'm not saying this is the case, as I doubt the DH writers go that far, but we can't just assume it's a racist statement.

Then this happened.

What a bunch of sissies. I don't understand, did you mean to imply that, for real, Filipino medical schools were inferior, or was it a joke? Then why apologise? Other than the fact that you pass yourselves off as a comedy show, you shouldn't be apologising for anything. People are allowed to offend people. Or they used to be, anyway.

Man, if I ever visit the Phillipines I better be able to eat off those fucking hospital floors.



TheCoolerKing continues to be a huge supporter of Filipino icon and "Destroyer," Manny Pacquiao.

If movie studios love anything, it’s a sequel.

But what’s a movie studio to do with all of their potential movie franchises that might not be the next Spider-Man, Pirates Of The Caribbean or Harry Potter? Well, they make sequels to them anyway. But what about those movies that are just aching to be sequelized but might not have the same box office draw of Daddy Day Care, Hostel or National Treasure?

That’s where the “direct to DVD” sequel comes to the rescue. By skipping over the hassle and expense of an actual theatrical release (not to mention the hassle and expense of paying to bring back the original cast or director), movie studios have been able to summon forth a nearly endless deluge of sequels to movies you probably forgot even existed in the first place.

Have you been prowling the aisles of your local video store, clenching your teeth and muttering “Damn, I fucking loved Road House, but I really dislike Patrick Swayze”? They made a sequel just for you. Have you been writing fan-fiction based on Behind Enemy Lines only without Gene Hackman, Owen Wilson or a decent special effects budget? Your movie studio pals have made your dreams a reality.

One of the biggest proponents of the direct to DVD sequel has been Disney. Disney’s never been shy about cranking out a sequel, as anyone who’s had to sit through Herbie Goes To Monte Carlo or The Shaggy D.A. will tell you. But until the home video era Disney mostly shied away from making sequels to their animated feature movies, with The Rescuers Down Under being the (rather obscure) exception. That changed in 1994, when the combination of raging consumer demand for all things Aladdin and the quite understandable yearning to tell Robin Williams to go fuck himself led Disney to have their TV animation division whip up the Williams-free direct-to-VHS sequel The Return Of Jafar. Despite the shoddy low-budget animation, The Return Of Jafar sold over 10 million copies on VHS and made Disney enough cash to relegate anyone making any “art vs. commerce” complaints to the same dusty cryogenic storage container where Disney executives keep Walt Disney’s frozen head. Um, allegedly keep Walt Disney’s frozen head. Disney even created a new animation division, DisneyToon, to handle future direct to video animated titles.

Over the next 13 years, DisneyToon churned out what can only be described as an avalanche of cheap to make yet oh-so-profitable direct-to-video (and later direct-to-DVD) animated titles, over 30 of which were sequels to Disney’s theatrical animated movies. Hey, kids, did you love The Lion King? Then you’ll probably pester your parents into buying The Lion King II: Simba’s Pride and The Lion King 1½! Why watch Cinderella again when you can buy Cinderella II: Dreams Come True or Cinderella III: A Twist In Time? Who hasn’t been yearning for Bambi II?

In a further cost-cutting movie, some of DisneyToon’s “sequels”, such as Hercules: Zero To Hero and Kronk’s New Groove were actually 2-3 episodes of the spin-off animated TV series edited together, slapped on to a DVD, and then sold for $29.95. Then there’s the flood of ”Disney Princesses” DVDs.

Hey, when you’re saving up money to release theatrical blockbusters like Treasure Planet, you need all the help you can get.

Of course, animation purists complained that this endless torrent of cheaply made animated sequels was “pretty embarrassing”, but who listens to animation nerds anyway?

Well, when the animation nerds in question are Steve Jobs and John Lasseter of Pixar the answer is “when Disney buys your company for over $7 billion and puts you in charge of their entire animation division”.

Those animation nerds recently took their revenge upon DisneyToon. Shortly after taking over, they handed down a mandate: once production wrapped on The Little Mermaid III, DisneyToon had to stop making sequels based on previous Disney animated movies in favor of focusing on original titles. Production on other planned animated sequels was halted, so you may want to cancel your preorders for The Aristocats 2, Chicken Little 2: The Ugly Duckling Story or Meet The Robinsons 2: First Date.

So artistic concerns finally triumph over crass commercialism in the Magic Kingdom?

Well, sort-of. There might be some additional, less altruistic motives behind the slapdown of the Disney sequel factory.

Additional motive #1 could be spite. Pixar and Disney have a very rocky past when it comes to sequels, dating back to the days when Michael Eisner was Disney’s CEO and treated Pixar with the level of respect traditionally reserved for crackwhores. Toy Story 2 was originally intended to be a cheap, non-Pixar direct-to-video sequel. Unable to talk Disney out of the idea since Disney owned the rights to the Toy Story characters, Pixar took over the production, turning it into a theatrical release. After Toy Story 2 earned over $240 million at the box office, Eisner then claimed that since it was originally conceived as a sequel, that it didn’t count as one of the five films Pixar was contractually obligated to produce as part of their distribution deal. Oddly enough, that didn’t endear Disney to Pixar, and relations between the two companies soon got to the level of fuckoffitude where Eisner was calling Pixar’s movies artistically “pretty pathetic”. Eisner went as far as to announce the creation of a new Disney animation studio, Circle 7, that would focus on making CGI animated sequels to previous Pixar titles, starting with Toy Story 3. To nobody’s surprise, the first decision made by John Lasseter after Pixar was bought by the post-Eisner Disney was to shut down production of Toy Story 3 and nuke Circle 7 from orbit.

Additional motive #2 seems to be good old-fashioned clashing egos. What may have sparked the decision to reign in DisneyToon’s sequelmania was when a rough cut of DisneyToon’s upcoming CGI-animated movie Tinkerbell was shown to the new Pixar overlords and John Lasseter declared it to be “unwatchable”. Since Tinkerbell was supposed to be the start of a planned four-movie series and a new “Disney Fairies” franchise, this wasn’t good news. Upon receiving copious notes and suggestions from Lasseter, it’s reported that Sharon Morrill, the president of DisneyToon, instructed DisneyToon animators to make two separate versions of Tinkerbell. One was pretty much a fake version based on Lasseter’s suggestions, intended to distract him while DisneyToon simultaneously cranked out four Tinkerbell movies based on the original script. This ruse was discovered during later screenings, sending Tinkerbell literally back to the drawing board. Guess who’s not running DisneyToon anymore?

Oh, for all of you who’re saying “Hey, wait, wouldn’t a Tinkerbell movie count as a sequel, being based on Peter Pan and all?”, the reason it’s not being cancelled is because it won’t feature Peter Pan or Captain Hook, thus making it technically not a sequel. The fact that Disney stands to make a shit-ton of money off of it compared to the declining sales figures for most direct-to-DVD product has nothing to do with anything.

Really.

The Walt Disney Company recently unearthed a time capsure that Walt Disney had written in 1956. The letter had been placed in a time capsule, sealed for fifty years. The letter was recently opened and it's contents published in Disney Newsreel. Some of its contents are strangely accurate, as Cory from BB said. I thought one item from the message was interesting enough to be highlighted.[PDF]

There's a certain reverence in Mr. Disney's words, whether he was anti-Semitic or not, a sexist fuck, or really a nice guy that bent his life toward the pursuit of general "escapist mechanisms." When I think of Disney's representation of the future through his "Tomorrowland," I think of Ray Bradbury's conception of science-fiction, that is that science-fiction is "sociological studies of the future, things that the writer believes are going to happen by putting two and two together." Or that you take some element the is currently happening, and project it into the far flung future. That element, because of its hyperbolic condition as a thing existing many years from now, comments on it in the present. The Jetson's flying car, for instance, illustrates that in the future every individual will still have a car (as opposed to some sort of mass transit). This comments on the centered importance cars had in the 1950's, and have to this day.

Disney, surrounded by high hopes for technological innovation, the humility of the space race, and a world where modern globalization is creating a very important and very real human dialogue, saw a future without war—world peace was simply inevitable. And I think that despite the modern Disney Company's hegemonic claim to the world's myths, that sentiment, the sentiment of a peaceful and utopian future, both valued and hallowed, shouldn't be Walt Disney's sentiment about the world, but humanity's epitaph about Walt Disney.

[via BoingBoing]