Disney Lies

As a massive storm prepares to do extensive damage to Texas and Mexico, Disney marketing is rethinking their decision to promote WALL*E’s love of “Hello, Dolly!” by having a hurricane named after the film’s title character. “We probably should have thought it through a little more,” said recently fired director of Disney weather marketing Stormy Klutz. “But the weather bureau called at the last minute and we had to make a snap decision. It was just one of those things.”

Only time will tell if this will become a fiasco on the scale of Bambi’s pro-NRA ads or premiering High School Musical 3 at Columbine High School.

Even as the U.S. domestic box office receipts for WALL*E pass the 27 trillion Zimbabwe dollar mark, new controversy is brewing over some of the film’s more disturbing content. “I was really surprised by all the cannibalism,” said Stew Eaton, dubious spokesperson for Americans Against Theaters Exposing Youth to Outrageous Ugliness. “The robot steals a dead robots shoes, which is bad enough, but then we see that he has this trailer filled with containers of parts of his fellow beings, and he uses those parts to feed his own desire to survive — literally cannibalizing the dead so he may live! At the end of the film Eve is dragged into the circle of hideousness and feeds WALL*E bits of his fellows until he returns to life, but when he returns his mind is gone — because he has succumbed to what is obviously prion disease, a condition common among cannibals who eat brains!”

Eaton paused for a moment and asked us why we had stopped eating our lunch, then continued without waiting for answer. “And it wasn’t just the robot! Think about all those people on that space ship. They’ve been there 700 years, we don’t see signs that anyone ages, but there are babies being born. Why isn’t the place bursting at the seams? Because they’re drinking soylent green Slurpees, that’s why! The evidence is everywhere, clear as the Fourth of July. This might as well have been the Donner Party cartoon.”

We contacted Disney’s Ethics Officer for comment, but he was at lunch — and his secretary was missing. Coincidence? We hope so.

We have received several e-mails discussing the possibility that Pixar’s latest star, WALL*E is a proponent of copyright infringement. And it’s not just our readers who see the problem.

According to reporters at Unsubstantiated Rumor Magazine, former Disney CEO and Pixar unaficionado Michael Eisner has accused WALL*E of fostering music piracy by recording the soundtrack of a video tape. Noting that by making a copy of the music for himself WALL*E has “duplicated copyrighted content and distributed it to every sentient being left on the planet.” Eisner says he is willing to testify before the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee that, “the movie suggests to people that they can create theft if they buy WALL*E robots.”

Disney legal analyst and unofficial spokesperson Bill Manyhours responds to these allegations. “In the context of the film,” says Manyhours, “Hello, Dolly! would have been out of copyright for more than 700 years. Under these very specific, rigidly defined conditions, Disney does not see a legal problem with a user making a single copy of the soundtrack of the film for personal use, so long as no copyright protection schemes are circumvented. For the same reason, we do not see Wall*E’s attempt to hold Eve’s hand as theft of intellectual property even though he is clearly doing so in an attempt to recreate the action depicted in the film and this might, in another context, be considered an illegal digital-to-analog conversion.”

Manyhours added that, although he stands by his statements at this time, they may be impacted by pending Disney-sponsored legislation which would extend corporate copyright protection “into the foreseeable future.” He also asks us to remind our readers that making a copy of the portion of theWALL*E soundtrack that includes only the sounds of the portion of Hello, Dolly! that were copied by Wall*E is curently a violation of copyrights held by both Disney and 20th Century Fox, “so don’t even think about it.”

In an interview with Underwire magazine, filmmaker Andrew “Mr. Stanton” Stanton revealed that not only was his new feature Wall*E a sequel to the classic Silent Running (as we discussed yesterday), it was also inspired by other classic Sci Fi films. For example:

Alien: This inspired the scene of WALL*E being chased through air ducts by overweight people armed with flamethrowers. The movie also inspired Stanton to cast Sigourney Weaver as a voice that “bursts from the chest” of a computer system.

Blade Runner: Referenced in WALL*E’s bizarre unicorn-dream sequence (which, at press time, it appears has been cut from the final print of the film — look for it to appear in a DVD “director’s cut” release).

2001: A Space Odyssey: The first half of WALL*E has no dialog because there is so much poetic silence in 2001.

Outland: Wall*E was clearly modeled after Sean Connery (though he’s armed with a fire extinguisher instead of a shotgun).

Planet of the Apes: WALL*E is cleaning up after the “damned, dirty humans.” Also referenced in the scene at the beginning of the film where WALL*E is dismantling the fallen Statue of Liberty.

Star Wars: WALL*E is actually Eve’s brother, but they don’t discover this until after they “kiss.” Also, WALL*E’s movements are based on those of actor Kenny Baker.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind: Stanton claims that “a close encounter of the fourth kind involves robots cleaning up after encounters one through three.”

Tron: As a nod to this film, Stanton suggested that Disney purchase Pixar.

So now that you know all about the film, go out and see it!

You may be interested to know that Pixar’s new film Wall*E isn’t a standalone feature. Although it is not widely known, this feature is actually a sequel of sorts to 1972’s Silent Running, which starred Bruce Dern as a space-faring gardener armed with nuclear weapons.

Silent Running is largely about three robots who are taking care of what is left of Earth’s plant life while certain other robots — not mentioned in the film — are trying to clean up the planet so that the plants can be reintroduced. The Disney connection is made clear by the robots’ names — Huey, Dewey, and Louie.

There are parallels in the films’ dialog as well. Silent Running: “Take good care of the forest, Dewey.” WALL*E: “Take good care of the planet, WALL*E.”

Tomorrow, we’ll look at a few more classic films that served as inspiration for WALL*E.

We have a couple of corrections to yesterday’s post on the new Pixar movie, WALL*E. Namely:

1. The movie’s title is supposed to be in all caps — WALL*E, not Wall*E. (Apparently, Wall*E — with the lower-case letters — is street slang for wall paper infused with ecstasy.)
2. We were less than accurate when we quoted some moron who said that Carol Channing is the voice for Wall*E’s ship’s computer. The ship’s computer is actually voiced by Sigourney Weaver. (Carol Channing played the title character in Alien.)
3. The scene where characters vomit to the tune of songs from Yentl is in Shrek IV, not Shrek III, and in fact the song they vomit is not from Yentl, but is a medley from Funny Lady.
4. We should have had a “spoiler alert” tag before the paragraph about Eve accidentally crippling WALL*E with the surplus rocket launcher, and should probably never have mentioned her subsequent suicide at all.

Sorry ’bout that!

Reviews are starting to appear for the new Pixar film Wall*E, and although some are less than five-star (such as Roper and Phillips’ review, which includes words like “tiresome,” “forbidding,” and “the”), most are lauding the production (such as “Movie Reviews for Sale,” which says, “This is absolutely, positively, the best film I have ever or will ever see if I live to be a million.”)

But what people aren’t talking about is the copious product placement in the film. “It’s the first time that Pixar has really sold out,” says self-aggrandizing film historian and delusional semi-psychopath Fred Friedskul. “You’ll see products from A1 Fire Extinguishers, the BnL corporation, and Thinkway Toys. But even more blatant is that blatant blatancy of the product placement for the new remastered DVD release of Hello, Dolly! Seriously, has Barbra Streisand sunk so low that she has to to advertise her movies in kids features? As if the Yentl references during that Shrek III vomit scene weren’t bad enough. You wouldn’t catch Carol Channing doing this kind of garbage, which is why the fact that she’s the voice for Wall*E’s ship’s computer all the more ironic.”

Even so, we’re betting it’ll be the best Disney movie with a main character who’s a cockroach since Mickey’s Metamorphosis!

It has been announced that, due to sluggish toy sales and lack of overwhelming interest, Disney will not be making films of the entire Chronicles of Narnia series as originally planned. Instead, the third film — Voyage of the Silver Horse and His Last Nephew’s Battle — will be the last in the series.

In 1948, Disney began making a series of nature documentaries under the heading “True Life Adventures,” and they have churned out these marvels of nature continuously ever since (with only a brief hiatus from 1960 through 2007 when someone misplaced the company’s National Parks Service permission slip). Most fans will remember the first True Life Adventure, Stud Goat Nellie (the first nature film with synchronized animal sounds), in which such sights as a hand-cranked musical cow and a mouse operating a steamboat appeared on firm for the first time.

Disney has announced that they are renaming the True Life Adventures series. According to Babe Pigflinger, a hallucinatory Disney spokesanimal, “The new title, Disneynature, leaves out the ‘true life’ moniker so that our storytelling is not hampered by slavish attachment to reality. But the inclusion of the word ‘nature’ proves that the documentaries have not in any way been ‘de-natured’ by the change. Get it?”

According to Walt Disney Studios chairman Duck Crock, the newly renamed series will be under the direction of Chimp-Francois Calamari, a French guy, and will be produced in France “to be closer to nature.” Disney CEO Rodent Tiger stands completely behind this project, ready to pounce if necessary, but Calamari is not concerned, saying, “Tiger is a good man who can jump 20 feet, but I am safe because I am only 10 feet away from him so he’ll go right over my head and maul my boss.”

Among the features currently in production:

• Earth (feature-length study of dirt)
• The Crimson King (in-depth look at the things living in Stephen King’s imagination)
• Oceans (stalking the stars of Oceans 11, Oceans 12, etc., in their natural habitat)
• Orangutans (how long does it take an orange to get a tan?)
• Big Cats (Rosey Grier, Isaac Hayes, Samuel Jackson, etc.)
• Naked Beauty (Uma Thurman, Angelina Jolie, Samuel Jackson, etc.)
• Chimpanzee (the wacky adventurers of mismatched truckers Chimp and Zee)
• Lemming Flingers (nature documentary filmmakers at work and play)

The Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles (a city in California) is currently hosting an exhibit of items related to the Pixar film Cars.

We were rather disappointed in the displays. Many of them were framed artwork that was supposedly from the movie, but everyone knows that Cars was computer animated so there was no hand-drawn art. How dumb do they think we are. There were also some little statues of the characters, but the film wasn’t claymantion either. Very, very deceptive.

One nice feature of the exhibit was a gallery of full-size Cars characters in costumes as if they were in different Disney films. Below is a photo of Lightning McQueen in Pirates garb. Also present were Mater, dressed as Winnie the Pooh, and Doc Hudson as Tinker Bell.