It’s December 23rd and that can only mean one thing: Happy Festivus! As we’ve done in years past, we thought we’d celebrate the Festivus season by reflecting on the year in Disney in a way that would make Frank Costanza proud, including the traditional Airing of Grievances, the Feats of Strength, and a celebration of Festivus Miracles. It’s a Festivus for the rest of us!
The Airing of Grievances
“I’ve got a lot of problems with you people! Now, you’re gonna hear about it!”
The tradition of Festivus begins with the airing of grievances. While we admire most of what The Walt Disney Company does over the course of a given year, there is always room for error and bad decisions. Here are some of the ways Disney let us down in 2022:
Disney+’s interface
For a platform that’s been pumping out a tremendous amount of content as of late, Disney+ really doesn’t seem to care about you finding it. And despite the company surely knowing everything about you and your taste at this point, the lack of customization on the streaming services main landing page is kind of startling. The most prominent feature on Disney+’s home screen is a rotating banner that occasionally buries new releases all the way under the sixth or seventh screen! Don’t you think the system is smart enough to highlight the latest episode of a show it knows you’ve been watching or a different piece of content it could recommend from your previous selections in this space? Meanwhile, although Disney+ does technically offer a Group Watch feature, it’s almost useless. It’s understandable that a family friendly platform may want to only allow a set of emoji reactions to prevent kids from sending inappropriate messages to each other… but if the platform can host Deadpool, then we should have the option to launch a real chat feature. No wonder this thing lost a billion dollars last quarter.
Animation disrespect
Speaking of Disney+, as our resident animation nerd Tony has bemoaned, the streaming service proved to be the exclusive home for a number of animated features in recent years, including Pixar’s Turning Red earlier in 2022. Of course, Disney did try releasing two animated films in theatres this year — Pixar’s Lightyear and Walt Disney Animation’s Strange World — but both, for lack of a better word, bombed. But is it any wonder that these film’s would fail on the big screen when you’ve conditioned viewers to just wait 45 days and see it at home? Hopefully Wish can turn the tide next year and remind viewers (and Disney!) that animation is worth seeing in theatres.
Spin the wheel and find out your theme park visit price
You know that meme of Zach Galifianakis in The Hangover with all sorts of mathematical equations and symbols flying around his head? We can only imagine he’s trying to book a Walt Disney World vacation. As if the resort’s date-based pricing system wasn’t nebulous enough, the addition of park-specific prices (just for 1-Day tickets at this point, thankfully) and a floating Park Hopper upgrade option price just makes the whole thing even more confusing. At this point, as our section headline suggests, maybe guests waiting to enter Magic Kingdom should just spin a large Price is Right-esque wheel to get their ticket pricing — that would make nearly as much sense.
On top of that, this fall, the Disneyland and Walt Disney World Resort moved their apparent cash cow Genie+ from a set price to a demand-based one. While this is in line with how theme park tickets operate these days, the difference is that a family planning a trip can see how much tickets are before arriving at the resort. That’s not the case for Walt Disney World guests as Genie+ can’t even be purchased in advance and, thus, have to wait until the morning of their visit to see what the damage is. Luckily there is a solution here: don’t buy it!
Park reservations
How is it that Walt Disney World is just now getting around to the point where someone buying a 1-Day ticket automatically gets a park reservation for the DATE-BASED TICKETS they’re buying? Look, we all know why the park reservation system was put into place and why it could have usefulness outside of its initial necessity. However, in its current form, reservations only add to the confusing park admittance policies and piss off Annual Passholders. With a new Bob in charge, there’s hope that the park reservations will finally die. So will this grievance make it to our miracles list next year? Time will tell.
The Feats of Strength
Mrs-Potato-Head copy
And now, as Festivus rolls on, we come to the feats of strength. 2022 may not have been a great year for Disney overall but they did flex their muscles at home and abroad. Here are a few examples:
Disney+ has 164.2 million subscribers
Yes, we were teasing Disney+ about its interface earlier, but, hey 164 million people is nothing to sneeze at!
Hocus Pocus 2 finds major success
It only took about 25 years or so but Disney finally caught on to the fact that people seem to like Hocus Pocus. So, this year saw the release of the highly anticipated sequel that garnered a big audience. Not only was the movie the biggest Disney+ film premiere in the U.S. to date but also set a record for streaming minutes by a movie on Nielsen’s weekly chart, drawing more than 2.7 billion minutes of viewing from September 26th to October 2nd. Not too shabby for a follow up to a famous theatrical flop.
Festivus Miracles
What other explanation can there be? These were truly Festivus miracles:
The Bob Swap
We all thought about it, but how many of us really believed it would happen? And, even if you did see it coming, who expected it to come on a Sunday night right as a Disney Legend was set to take the stage for a live Disney+ stream? Having Bob Iger back in the Mouse House won’t magically fix what ails the company as of late but it does give us reason to hope. Miracle!
Carousel of Progress gets an update (sort of)
Seemingly out of nowhere, Disney decided to show some love to the long-outdated Carousel of Progress scene this year. These changes weren’t huge — mostly just updates to hairstyles and clothing — but they were fun nonetheless. More importantly, it suggests that the beloved attraction isn’t as close to death as many fans have feared.
The Beauty and the Beast 30th Anniversary Special was pretty good
ABC’s live Disney musical specials have been fun enough, but there’s always a bit of hesitation on our part. That was heightened with the recent Beauty and the Beast 30th Anniversary special as it was revealed that the show wasn’t actually going to be live this time, which seems to take away a big part of the appeal. Nevertheless, the program managed to break the mold and do some really interesting things, resulting in an enjoyable production that succeeded in its goal to honor and celebrate a classic film. Will we be revisiting the special over the animated masterpiece in the future? Probably not. But at least it feels like a step up from the live-action remake!
Dunna nunna nuuuh nuh nuh
One of the first Festivus Miracles we celebrated in this series was Spider-Man’s arrival in the MCU. Now, at long last, we’ve finally got some X-Men… or at least an other-dimensional X-Men Professor and a mutant or two. As exciting as it is just to hear MCU characters say the word “mutant,” that musical stinger is gold, Jerry, gold! We’ll be hearing much more of it when X-Men ‘97 comes to Disney+ but, in the meantime, we’ll be dunna nunna nuuuh nuh nuh-ing to ourselves over in the corner.