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Notes -
I’ve sometimes heard that the left wing takeover of corporate America is a hollow one - they don’t REALLY cars about minorities, just look at umm their Middle East twitter accounts! They care about $$$ and aren’t true believers
I found an interesting counter point recently.
https://upstreamreviews.substack.com/p/high-republic-low-sales
This is what a corporation that has no idea what their audience is about, but does in fact know clearly what it’s ideology is about.
I’ll summarize the link but you really should read it for yourself, it’s astounding how bad Disney gets the Star Wars franchise: for instance, the books need to be (in addition to all the old touchstones of diversity etc) ANTI WAR. And then there’s the characters, who are somehow all androgynous.
The sales figures reflect an enormous lack of interest of enthusiasm. But it doesn’t matter for Disney - they get to spread the Good Word of gender ideology and anti fascism/anti traditionalism.
I don’t disagree that New Star Wars is pretty bad, but is it any worse than Marvel garbage, than Amazon’s Lord of the Rings, than the awful three Fantastic Beasts / Harry Potter movies, or than countless other recent bad genre fiction media? I don’t really think so.
And I’ll say something - Andor was one of the best shows I watched last year, and that was ‘Kathleen Kennedy Disney Star Wars’. As for the garbage, well, I don’t have to watch it. Andor’s existence is good enough.
That might have been a good argument, if all those other franchises haven't gone woke themselves.
Was it? Or did she finally let people who love Star Wars, and are still employed in Lucasfilm do their jobs?
Is there any way to tell? Look at her IMDB page, and sure she's produced some dreck recently, but she's also been a producer on some of the most beloved movies in history, not just Andor. (The most damning pattern I can see is that she was a producer for Indy 2,4, and 5 but was just listed as "associate" and "production executive" on 1 and 3...) But if she ruined Obi-Wan (somehow trampling over the objections of the other 5 executive producers) whereas she just let people do their jobs on Back to the Future (thanks to the other 2 executive producers) and Andor, what's the evidence for that?
There are 16 total producer credits on The Last Jedi, 10 on The Rise of Skywalker, and yet somehow they managed to create a trilogy that was a damn tug-of-war between incompatible-to-the-point-of-incoherency visions from each movie to the next. I don't see how that can be easily blamed on just one person. Maybe George Lucas pulled off the "flying by the seat of his pants" style of writing well enough that his successors actually didn't realize they needed a plan? Maybe the fact that audiences keep watching J.J. Abrams' "mystery box" setups expecting a decent resolution, like Charlie Brown trying to kick the football, is the root failure? Oscar Isaac may be a great actor (his performance was such a pleasant surprise in Moon Knight...) but even he wasn't able to read the line "Somehow, Palpatine returned" without his face betraying that he was dying a little inside.
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