The Pixar deal was a frank admission that Disney's venerable animation factory had run out of gas. Not long after Disney bought Pixar, John Lasseter gave an especially revealing interview to Fortune magazine, where he told of Iger experiencing a remarkable epiphany when attending an opening-day parade at the ceremonial launch of Hong Kong Disneyland. As Lasseter recalled: "[Bob] was watching all the classic Disney characters go by, and it hit him that there was not one character that Disney had created in the past 10 years. Not one. All the new characters were invented by Pixar."
Obviously Pixar is a veritable fount of creativity right now. But Marvel?
Name one character that Marvel's invented in the past ten years that ranks with Spider-Man, Captain America, the Incredible Hulk, or Iron Man.
Too hard? Try the last 20 years.
Okay, okay, try the last 30.
Still having trouble?
Enlighten me if I'm wrong, but the most recent Marvel character with iconic status anywhere close to the characters above is Wolverine, who first appeared in 1974--35 years ago.
(Same with DC, if not worse. You might make a case for Firestorm (1978), but he doesn't have nearly the name recognition of Wolverine.)
So while there may be a certain degree of creative vitality left in Marvel's decades-old characters, perhaps more than Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, Disney hasn't exactly bought something new. If new was what Disney really wanted, they may find that they and Pixar may be helping Marvel more than the other way around.
2 Comments:
You're not wrong. Marvel has essentially been regurgitating itself since the late 1970s or so. Disney, though, has been regurgitating itself since the 1950s, at least. When was the last Mickey Mouse cartoon produced? Or any of the classic Disney characters? At some point, they stopped being characters that appeared in stories and became "properties" that could be licensed.
The same is essentially true about Marvel's cadre of characters, and deliberately so. From a corporate perspective, stories are commodity items -- ubiquitous and valueless except in bulk. The characters, however, have value because consumers will buy the characters, even when the vehicle is a steaming load.
Really, the Disney/Marvel deal is no different from any company buying any asset -- it's all about how it's developed, repackaged and resold.
On the DC side, you should definitely count Sandman and Swamp Thing, which took classic characters and spun them so far that they were unrecognizable. And that was only 20 years ago or so.
Did you hear they're making a movie based on Asteroids, the video game?
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