Disney Series Kickoff -- Our Feature Presentation

Like many other ideas that I’ve outright pilfered from my friend Jordyn at Popped Density, I’ve wanted to do a blog series for a while. Yes, there’s Bluthanized, but that’s a whole separate blog, rather than a set of recurring features. After foraging around for ideas, I figured anything worth doing once is worth doing again, and straight jacked another idea from Density: starting immediately, I am going to do a series of blogs on the Disney canon of Animated Features.

As a child of the 90’s, you may be unsurprised to know that I am a Disney-phile. Even in a time when quality animation was at an all time high (Cartoon Network, The Disney Channel, Nickelodeon, and Fox Kids were just a few of my outlets), I’ve always preferred the cleanly-drawn, family friendly approach the Disney took (compare an episode of “TaleSpin” to one of “Rugrats” and tell me if you spot a difference). I have been fortunate enough to have held onto my love of Disney even into my adulthood, and having more disposable income has allowed me to purchase some of my favorites from back in the day.

One of these things is not like the others...

Yes, this idea is far from original (hell, The Antagony and Ecstasy already did all 49 of them in far more detail than I can ever hope to match), but it’s one I hold near to my heart; as mentioned above, I love the Disney movies, and this will be a fun way to accomplish three tasks:

1) View every movie in the Disney canon – I’ve seen a good chunk of the features, but not all of them yet, and I’m intensely curious about some of the lesser-seen features like Saludos Amigos and The Black Cauldron

2) Keep my writing skills sharp – I’m not sure if you folks have noticed (with any luck, you haven’t), but I can often run into writer’s block about what to make my entries on, to the point where deciding to write on for an entry can be more difficult than doing the doggone thing. This will give me a set of guaranteed entries

3) OWN every movie in the Disney canon – That’s right, chubies, my DVD self is going to house all of them one day. Prior to this entry, I was actually waiting until I got to 15 movies before I started, so I would have some breathing room between buying them, but now that I’m at 15, I can find a nice balance between purchases and watching the ones I already own. Besides, with the advent of Disney Blu-ray, this seems like as good a time to start collecting them as any.

No time like the present.

So how will I be going about this momentous task? I briefly considered doing them in chronological order (starting with Snow White and ending with Tangled, because heaven knows it’ll be out on Blu-ray by the time I finish), but that sort of thing only serves a more academic and historical context; let me put it this way, do you want to read six straight entries on the package films of the 40’s?

No, instead I will be doing it the way I have dealt with most of my college career: blundering through it in a random fashion. That is, barring the first five entries (which I have selected out of my already-existing library), I will be randomly selecting what I will write about out of a hat (a nice Irish one I picked up at a garage sale for a buck). This ensures unpredictability and variety, or at least give the series a lack of direction and nice feeling of incoherency.

My weapon of choice for the next little while

I will continue to make additional entries on music, video games, and other Diversion 2.0 things, but this will be a bit of continuity in an otherwise anarchic and loosey-goosey blog format. Entries will be prefaced with the series title, in lieu of my name-based inside joke (seriously, no one knows what I’m referencing in my Where The Wild Things Are entry title), and posted on an at-least-weekly basis (famous last words).

Speaking of the title, this will be something I will need help with, and I will be reaching out to all of my faithful readers (ha) for suggestions! I’d like something that feels descriptive and simple, but I’ll settle for Juno­-style pretentiousness if it comes to that.

Anyways, this is a taste of what’s to come from Diversion 2.0 in the next little while. I hope this will be to your satisfaction, and if not, there’s always Bluthanized (or the inevitable sequel, where Jordyn and I take lots of drugs and marathon the 20^th Century Fox animated feature canon).

PS (10/13/10) - I've decided to call the series Our Feature Presentation, named after the announcement that let you know when the previews on the Disney VHS were over (say it with me: "And now, our feature presentation"). We'll see if this works or not.