Tag: Disney

The Iniquitous Intent at Disney: When it comes to ‘The Book of Boba Fett,’ it’s all about a “Return to the Primitive”

It may seem iniquitous, but when you know a subject very well, it’s easy to see the changes over time and trace those changes to particular injunctions that contributed to a demise. And that is precisely what I saw as I looked at an earnings report for Disney stock and noticed how many shares BlackRock owned recently, then saw episode 7 of the new Book of Boba Fett on the Disney+ streaming service. The imprint of Larry Fink and his fellow board members of the World Economic Forum was unmistakable. Additionally, I used to write screenplays, and I have a good understanding of the politics of movie-making. When I was a young guy, I had several projects that won screenwriting awards at film festivals and made the circulation around Wilshire Blvd selling them, so I’ve been told more than once by the people of finance, “he who owns the gold rules.” So, I sympathize with what Dave Filoni, Jon Favreau, and even the original creator, George Lucas, went through to make this new show. They tried to do with The Book of Boba Fett, an original character from the old movies, bold and ambitious things. But at the end of the series, Star Wars fans were left feeling shortchanged. That’s the standard review of the show now that it’s completed, and a year of waiting left fans flat and looking for much more. It had some good stuff in it, but the overall message was filled with wokeness, and to my eyes, it points back to the owner of BlackRock owning too much stock in Disney and dictating creatively what ends up on the screen. I’ve seen it before in much smaller ways, and that is certainly the case with what is going on at Disney these days.

My review of The Book of Boba Fett is that its space meets Dances with Wolves. Clearly, the current makers of Star Wars projects, specifically Filoni and Favreau, used to enjoy playing with Star Wars figures, as I did. We are all kind of the same age, and when it comes to Star Wars, we just want to put what we wanted to see as kids on screen. Most people who watch these Disney+ shows and go to the modern movies feel that way; it’s more about childhood nostalgia than what is actually good about it. So it was strange to see the gunslinging bounty hunter from the classic film The Empire Strikes Back, running around in half the show dancing with Tusken Raiders around a campfire, acting like some hunter and gatherer. The purpose of the entire show became quite clear by episode 7, where Boba Fett and another bounty hunter called Cad Bane had a gunfight duel to the death, which was the ultimate climax and apparent purpose for putting the whole thing together. But this is where things get iniquitous, and the influence of BlackRock and other forces come into play. The show’s creators wanted to put on film what they thought about as kids, a gunfight with Boba Fett and some ultimate gunslinger. Woke Disney, essentially not run by Bob Chapek but by the owners of the most stock options, such as Vanguard and BlackRock, changed the story’s nature to reflect real-world tactical goals for global domination. That is clear by what Larry Fink puts in his ultra-liberal letters to CEOs showing the woke parameters for which the show must be done. 

When people ask, “what’s wrong with Star Wars,” well, I would point to the loss of ownership of George Lucas, who over time have listened to people like Larry Fink more in his old age than he would have like a 20 to 30-year-old. Star Wars was about standing up to people like Larry Fink, not being told what to do by them. So now that extreme characters of progressive causes are calling the shots on the finance end and sticking their nose into the creative process of the much more woke Disney than it ever has been before, Star Wars comes out as if Darth Vader made the movies instead of Luke Skywalker. I could recite the production meetings as if I had been there when the pitch for The Book of Boba Fett was made to Disney executives who had an eye toward stock prices and the massive control BlackRock has on it. “You want to make a Disney+ show about a villain from the original movies to win over the fans from all the mistakes that Kathy Kennedy has so far made? Well, you’ll have to make the bad guy into a good guy and to do that, we must make him identifiable with indigenous people, which parallels the gunfighter against the Indian in American history.” So from there, the show’s writers had to figure out a way to get their big gunfight with Boba Fett and Cad Bane done in a way that made the show sympathetic to Disney’s woke needs to stabilize their stock price. Ultimately, they had to make Larry Fink happy, and to do that; Boba Fett had to Return to the Primitive.

Fans feel shortchanged because the whole thing was out of character for Boba Fett. When he finally had his gunfight with Cad Bane, the bad guy beat Boba Fett to the draw not just once but twice. That meant that Boba Fett had to rely on the new skills he learned from the Tusken Raiders to defeat Bane with a Gaffi Stick in the end. It was like a gun duel with an Indian (native American), and the Indian winning with a bow and arrow. Undoubtedly, a hidden message implied that primitive traditions are superior to technology and that, ultimately, the West will fall to tribal unity. Again, I know this subject very well; I just wrote a book called The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business because I run into people like Larry Fink all over the world. They have been trying to promote China, indigenous people of all kinds constantly over the technology of the West for years. Such an assumption is at the center of Lean Manufacturing. And of course, Disney couldn’t have given me a better example of why I felt the differences between the West and the East needed to be pointed out in business transactions. The message behind The Book of Boba Fett was that in the end, to be the good guy and to beat the bad guy, the classic Star Wars villain had to learn to embrace the primitive tribes of Tatooine, the scary Tuskin Raiders. But in the original movies from 1977, the Tuskin Raiders were thought of as villains. That basic flip of the script is why people are so upset with the Disney-owned Star Wars productions instead of what George Lucas produced on his own originally. Once you start worrying about stock prices, woke politics, and the letters to the CEOs from Larry Fink, what you end up with is a bunch of garbage nobody wants. But suppose Disney wants to keep their stock price up. In that case, they have to do what The World Economic Forum tells them to do, and that is to bring down the West and to sell those asset bubbles to China, where their new world order will emerge under a communist flag and a foot on western civilization that is meant to choke it off, forever. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Disney’s ‘Eternals’ is All About Guys Kissing and Abortion: How people like Larry Fink are ruining the world

More news sites don’t talk about things like this one does due to freedom; I am freer than most anybody who would write an article like this, so the information never gets out. In most cases, everyone has a master, which is undoubtedly the case with Disney. After a horribly progressive movie like the Eternals, Disney is the obvious target for criticism. The same with how they have handled Star Wars. It’s easy to get mad at the traditional family company without realizing all the Woke politics that are going on behind the scenes, which are literally ruining the world, starting in America with our art and entertainment. To understand why Eternals is such a terrible movie, you have to understand the latest stock report of Disney, where they had a record-breaking quarter to close out the year. Yes, more people than ever are flocking to the amusement parks in Florida. People have been locked down with Covid, and they want to get out there and spend money on something, anything. So attendance is up. The new Spiderman movie was great, a Marvel production that ultimately boosted interest in the Disney + streaming service. Some things make the stock price look attractive, so the shareholders are happy and empowered to continue to do something as they have, which produced the disaster Eternals with all the arrogance that Woke culture could muster. However, I’m in a position where I am free to have an objective opinion about Disney, one that most in the industry just can’t because the money flow they need to live is controlled by the elements that are killing Disney, despite the smoke and mirrors that come through on the stock report. Disney is an asset bubble that is poised to burst, and the evidence is in the movie Eternals, which is now streaming on Disney + for all to see.

The top stock owners of the Disney Company are the Vanguard Group, BlackRock, State Street Corporation, and Morgan Stanley. Vanguard, for instance, owns 137,572,834 shares of Disney stock. BlackRock, with all the Woke advocacy strategies of Larry Fink, owns 119,795,456. The shares go down to the local buyer who just wants to pad their investment portfolio with some entertainment options. But when you understand that these large investment firms believe they are too big to fail and control the world’s governments through finance, they become the next generation of tyrants on earth clawing for power. And in the case of Larry Fink, who comes up a lot these days when talking about all things Woke, we have to address the issue as a menace that has not been on anybody’s radar up to this point. Nobody talks about it because they most always have some financial stake in the company, like Disney. Even though the actual controls come from shareholder pressure, Disney doesn’t care about the ordinary people who might buy a few hundred shares of stock and post negative reviews about Eternals on some social media platform. The Board of Directors and ultimately the CEO Bob Chapek care about what BlackRock thinks about what they make, and when it comes to Eternals or Star Wars, the garbage that ends up on screen is precisely what Larry Fink wants. A Woke message that will poison the West and destroy it for consumption, China intends to take over the world and restore itself as the dominant power. Something they think about a lot and have people like Larry Fink to be their flaming arrows of warfare at the helm of all finance which ultimately controls everything. Bob Chapek may make a lot of money as Disney’s CEO, but he is not free to have an opinion on the matter. When BlackRock calls, or Vanguard, he does what they tell him because one thing Bob can’t afford to see happen is a quarter to quarter slide of the Disney stock price. And if Larry is displeased with the level of Wokeness coming out of Disney, then BlackRock could dump its stock and send Disney tumbling with a massive sell-off. And that would be the end of Bob Chapek, so ultimately, that is why the movie Eternals was so terrible. 

I had high hopes for Eternals. I had wanted to see it at the theater. Generally, the Marvel movies are great, so a film about some beings who inhabit the universe like white blood cells in a body and are born from planets seemed like a cool premise. But sadly, the whole point of the movie was to show guys kissing and to drag a nearly three-hour movie into an event of torture as it was a bunch of dysfunctional characters of all nationalities arguing over dumb things to ultimately have an abortion at the end of the movie to save the earth. The whole point of the Eternals was a kind of metaphor on abortion; to save mother earth, we had to kill the baby, the Eternal that was being born from it and was the point of 7000 years of human evolution. For the Eternal to be born, mankind had to create culture, which then fed the baby as it grew in the egg of the earth. So in that way, the Eternals became a vehicle for all the modern progressive causes that people don’t like, yet it was crammed down their throats with this monstrously bad film. The movie wasn’t about entertaining the audience; it was about forcing progressive politics down the viewers’ throats who thought they were showing up to watch the latest Marvel offering. And what they got was essentially the strategy of Larry Fink, large doses of progressive ideology that they thought would open the door to a modern political platform that embraced gay rights and forever abortions. The decision at the end of the movie to kill the Eternal so to save “Mother Earth” is so evident that it’s almost like sitting in an abortion clinic with a daughter who wants to kill a grandchild so that they can go clubbing later that night and not have the burden of being pregnant. It was bad, bad stuff. 

Yet Disney is the company that gets all the shots of criticism, and it will be Bob Chpeck who gets lacerated at the shareholder meetings if he doesn’t come up with some way to make Blackrock happy. The everyday people willing to spend $10,000 on a Disney vacation package in Orlando get ignored. Disney was built on solid Main Street traditional American values for the people who go to the parks, so they are willing to spend the money. But people like Larry Fink don’t really care about the money they make in their investment firms. They care about the power they have amassed through finance to control the creative process at companies like Disney, and it’s in that way that Eternals even found a way to make it onto a screen, and ultimately the Disney + streaming platform. Eternals breaks all movie-making rules and presents everything they don’t want into a movie to audiences. But the arrogance of Disney shows more than just a bad movie; it’s an assumption that the path of least resistance runs through the audience and not through BlackRock and Vanguard. Ultimately, who controls what Disney produces isn’t the fans, it’s the investment firms, and those investment firms feel empowered to impose Woke politics onto our culture at every opportunity. And Eternals was so bad that it’s almost a dare for the public to rebuke it. Otherwise, Larry Fink and the investment hounds beyond the stock prices will crush each and every one of us, or so they think unless we do and say everything they want, without a thought.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Mythic Realm: Understanding Elon Musk, Bob Iger shortcomings at Disney, the Build Back Better disaster, and why communism always fails

The Mythic Realm

I could actually write a book just about this topic of the Mythic Realm. Still, recently, an opportunity came up professionally where I had to talk to many political people and business people in the same Christmas setting.  I was near a whiteboard so I could tell the story of what I put on the video here contained.  The subject was a bunch of things that flow together to my eyes.  But to the groups of people, they understood some of it, but not all of it, because of the bubble concept that I explained in the video.  Most people all their lives never leave their bubbles of understanding, and I don’t look down on them for it.  I see it as a natural condition of the human race.  But when the topic of Elon Musk came up and all that he was up to, and understanding why Build Back Better is such a bad idea, or the vaccine mandates for Covid are so destructive, the answers to all those questions are often outside of the bubbles that people live in.  So I put together this little video to explain it to people who want to begin understanding some of these kinds of things, such as where economic power comes from.  It’s not the Political Realm or even the Business Realm.  All economic activity comes from the Mythic Realm, and it is there that we should always focus on creating more!

I also put in this article the WSJ interview with Elon Musk in its entirety where he said that the Build Back Better concept should be “deleated.” As I explained, Elon Musk is more shaman than industrialist, even living in a state of depravity to stay authentic to himself.  To my mind, our American society should be producing hundreds of Elon Musk types instead of a few here and there.  When I think of Elon Musk, aside from his tamperings with the political and business realm, I think of people like Thomas Edison, Tesla, the actual man, and Albert Einstein.  What people call genius, they say such things because, from their point of view in one of their social bubbles, the ideas from the realm of myth seem so extraordinary.  But really, it’s all point of view.  What always matters is the Mythic Realm because it is there where all ideas that generate all economic activity are created, which then cascades into all the organized elements of society.

I provided in the video an example about the aviation industry.  Where Prometheus came from stories about building fire or Indian legends about Thunderbirds who could fly, the idea for flight came from the human imagination in thinking what could be.  Then along came the Wright Brothers, who converted their bicycle profession into the first functioning plane.  From there, the political realm instantly saw the benefits, decided to utilize the airplane during World War I, and created rules and regulations for constructing airports, parts suppliers, and general aviation functions.  Then, of course, the Business Realm figures out what companies need to form to meet the world’s growing political need for airplanes.  And from there comes the Cultural Bubbles of all the individual companies that started making airplane parts and the workers who inhabit those cultures.  The exact trajectory of thought could be said to emerge from the auto industry, smartphones, everything that we consider economic value.  When I talk about intellectual currency, this is what I’m talking about.  Financial currency is needed to flow in the political, business, and cultural realms.  But intellectual currency is required to feed the Mythic Realm, and without that position, nothing new in economic energy is produced.  Therefore, the goal of our society or any society should always be to make more Elon Musk types, or even George Lucas, who created Star Wars.

I always talk about Star Wars because, as a kids product, it does a great job of creating ideas in the Mythic Realm among people in our society.  There was an excellent interview with Bob Iger from Disney, who is stepping down now as CEO.  I think he did a pretty good job stabilizing Disney as a company, but his problem was that he spent his entire time as CEO in the border between the Political Realm and the Business Realm, where most CEOs and CFOs think all the real value is.  But when it came time to make more Star Wars movies, he was lost, and what he made was a bunch of corporate woke garbage.  The fans became angry at Disney because the new films and books were made by a guy who was obsessed with the titles he held.  He made a mistake almost all corporate people make, putting their imprint on something that flows out of the Mythic Realm, but that they never understand the ideas. They end up smashing them into the bubbles of business culture, assuming that everything will just work out.  But it never does.  That is why Elon Musk tends to disparage titles in these companies and offices.  In the Mythic Realm, he likes to have all the executives close to where the action is.  As a modern company, Disney does OK if it sells the fantastic work created by people like Walt Disney.  But because they live in their corporate bubble, people like Bob Iger are paralyzed to do anything new, much like the Chinese suffer from their centralized communism. 

This is essentially why socialism and communism never work because they insist on an old aristocratic European view of the world that never figured out these things.  I feel I can talk about it because, really, for the first time in mass culture, we have a time where we can look at all these elements as an entire whole.  I read so much and from so many different sources that it is evident to me.  I don’t know that such an understanding of social constructs would have been possible 100 years ago.  But with the benefit of hindsight and great modern examples of success in the Mythic Realm, we can see these things clearly now.  When I shared these insights with that large group, they all seemed to have an “oh my gosh” moment, so it seemed like a practical thing to discuss.  When we want to understand the world around us, whether it’s Build Back Better, Star Wars success under Disney, Elon Musk and his quest for Mars colonization, or the intricacies of why capitalism works better than communism at managing society, understanding the Mythic Realm is the key. I’ve said for years that despite all my interests, I appreciate nothing more than mythology because what humans do better than any other known form of life is generate imagination, and therefore a change in circumstances directly derived from the mind.  No matter what someone thinks about God, it cannot be questioned that the purpose of human existence is to use the imagination to continue expanding what goes on in the universe.  We are not so insignificant as a species to assume that nature rules over the minds of humankind.  But that humankind is part of nature and the ever-evolving process of creation which the universe craves.  And once you understand that, everything else makes a lot more sense.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Failures of Institutionalism: Disney’s New Star Wars Hotel Rejected by the Fans

Corporate Failure

To understand why and how liberalism is failing currently and will continue to fail, a great example of what’s to come was displayed when Disney released a preview video for their new Star Wars Hotel experience.  Fans had been waiting for over eight years for the opening of this more than a billion-dollar investment, and what Disney showed the public instantly went from ambitious hope to fandom scorn for the immense wokeness contained in the project.  I certainly wanted to give the project a chance. I would have liked to take my grandchildren and children to this hotel if it looked any good.   After all, I raised my family on Star Wars and the various stories of good and evil in such a modern storybook fashion.  But what Disney did with Star Wars and the hotel experience was full of contemporary liberalism in every way that we can see it failing, from the Biden administration to the global greenie weenies at the United Nations.  These people at Disney, who had infinite resources to spend on this hotel experience and Star Wars itself, didn’t understand what they had bought from George Lucas. They presented the ultimate failure of liberalism, which I found very interesting and relevant to our modern observations.  After a very long wait, the hotel is supposed to open in a few months, March of 2022.  The video itself looks like a child made it, and for what Star Wars means to people, everyone expected from Disney a lot more. 

Part of that billion-dollar investment went into making the Galaxy’s Edge experience at the two Disney parks in Florida and California.  My wife and I went to the one in Florida once it opened, and I thought it was magnificent for the price of a $100 admission ticket.  To see some full-scale props from the movies was worth the money.  I enjoyed myself and thought it was a great experience.  But this hotel experience was poised to be something like a “West World” experience, or Fantasy Island from the old television show where you came to Disney to realize a fantasy of living in Star Wars for a two-day affair.  And for that experience, it would cost around $6,000 to $10,000.  So naturally, what they were selling was very ambitious, and people were excited about it.  The point of releasing a preview video, which they did in mid-December 2021, was to book reservations for the rest of 2022 and into 2023.  But the video turned out to be so bad that the opposite happened.  People started canceling their reservations as soon as they saw the video because it looked and felt nothing like Star Wars.  I covered this problem years ago on a radio show with a guy who is now a Disney employee.  Way back in 2013, when this Disney Hotel was just announced, we contemplated the problem Disney would have with its anti-gun politics when Star Wars was all about guns.  How do you have fun with Star Wars without promoting “war?” When fans attended the hotel experience but couldn’t wear around their blasters, it wouldn’t feel like Star Wars, and that is precisely what the first problem was with the video promo. 

It looked like the people who developed the concept for the hotel were more in love with the movie, The Fifth Element rather than Star Wars.  The cantina singer as the feature in the video was a clear sign that the Disney creators thought Star Wars was all about funny colored aliens, space, and orchestral music.  They didn’t understand the heart and soul of what made the films so beloved in the first place. It’s the kind of corporate failure I see all the time and talk about extensively in my book The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business.  I wasn’t upset by the video, but it certainly solidified my plans for 2022.  There was no way I would spend $20-30,000 in 2022 to take my family to this Star Wars experience.  To understand their target audience at this hotel, the Disney planners would have done well to study the current video games, Battlefront, Call of Duty, and Fortnite.  With the amount of money Disney wants for the hotel, they should know that, at a minimum, they should be offering some kind of competitive laser tag experience, something that simulates pulse-pounding action with real consequences to the story.  People were not going to spend that kind of money to watch people sing and eat food.  But to be fair, the Disney philosophy had no chance out of the gate; as a woke company going after what they think is the emerging middle class of China, they are not prepared to tell Star Wars stories.  They believe that as a media company, they set society’s values instead of offering the products that society wants. It’s a fine line that they have lost, but it’s more a condition of modern liberalism in general and institutional failure on a massive scale.  Institutions are not powerful if they don’t embody what the public wants as a consumer class.  And Disney has lost its way the more corporate they have become and moved away from the foundations of Uncle Walt Disney himself.  That is the same thing that has happened to Star Wars the more they have moved away from George Lucas, who created the franchise. 

The mistake was that the modern corporate Star Wars approach had all the tools for success right in their breadbasket, but they approached it all with the wrong philosophy, which carries over to the more significant message here.  If all the values of institutionalism were as they assumed, the Star Wars Hotel would have been a slam dunk for Disney.  They had the money.  They had the best and brightest of modern college graduates.  They had a proven brand that spanned decades as a money maker.  What could go wrong?  Well, wokeism, for one.  But deeper than that, it’s the corporate approach that fails in all companies to some degree or another, whether it’s McDonald’s, Wal-Mart, or Nike.  Once a product becomes affiliated with a political movement, such as globalism, it loses its use as art. It becomes simply a tool of a detached class of people stuck in their own versions of quicksand in life.  Star Wars was always about rebellion against tyranny.

Here were the Disney people all too happy to be a compliance culture trying to make a Star Wars experience for people, complete with masks indoors in a state-run by Ron DeSantis, who has been the best against such idiocy.  Because of their political intentions toward liberalism, Disney masks their employees and guests on purpose.  They didn’t have to, but they wanted to be part of that “woke” culture they think the world will be driven by.  In the video, they put out there were no signs of masculinity, which is essential because Star Wars was always designed for boys 8-12 years of age.  Trying to create an “expanded market” with outreach to girls and people of color has only destroyed the original base of the franchise.  So now Disney has made something that nobody wants.  Their target audience for this hotel experience would have been the Comic-Con types who would spend thousands of dollars on a Star Wars experience.  But now, they have all those types of people against them as they are insulted by Disney’s approach.  And after watching all this, it looked like our nightly news and the perplexity that many global institutionalists are having when they wonder why people don’t want Build Back Better, the CDC, or to be controlled by the United Nations.  When institutionalism and the necessities of individuals are not aligned, we can see these kinds of failures everywhere.  But what’s essential about the Disney case is that it proves that no amount of money can solve the problem and make people think something they don’t.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

They Killed James Bond: A warning to us all that nobody escapes from progressives

They Killed James Bond

Studios were surprised in Hollywood when the new James Bond film No Time To Die didn’t blow the doors off the box office over its opening weekend.  Like every other underperforming fool these days, they wanted to blame Covid, which governments created to commit election fraud, not that they killed James Bond in the movie.  Who thought that was a good idea?  After 60 years of narrow escapes, they found a way and a time for James Bond to die at the end of No Time To Die. They probably should have taken their own advice given to them in the title. It was just another disappointment that we are all getting used to strong, white, male characters that progressives think they can kill in stories and replace them with women or people of color for the sake of the visual aspects of things and that people would accept it.  Over the last two years, as we have waited for this movie to come out, the rumors of the next James Bond being a woman, a gay guy, or all kinds of other things have been discussed openly.  When the movie finally opened, enough people had enough.  It leaked out that this Daniel Craig James Bond was going to die, and people weren’t exactly in a rush to see it happen.  It’s not enough to make a technically good movie; James Bond is one of those special cases where he’s a hero who always gets away, like Bugs Bunny.  But then again, Bugs Bunny is pretty much banned these days too.  Any strong characters without obvious flaws in the mind of progressives are a danger to their politics, so they look to get rid of them and replace them with flawed, mortal characters who are easy to control by the government. 

This isn’t unique to the Bond film franchise.  I have written many hundreds of thousands of words about the failure of Disney to handle the Star Wars franchise.  It was astonishing that given all the great resources they had in Star Wars left to them by George Lucas, that they screwed it up so badly.  Yet when I saw The Force Awakens back in 2015, it was clear that when they decided to kill Han Solo, the plan was the same as Bond.  Kill off Anglo-Saxon white men in the public’s minds so their rule over mankind will end, starting with stories.  Then replace them with people of color and women, and make them like it.  That was essentially the goal of the new Star Wars films, and people rejected them so severely that the brand is now permanently damaged.  Disney has a new CEO who has been brought in to fix things.  Lucasfilm is also moving people around who like Star Wars to repair the brand, which will take years if possible.  I think they’ll make things better, but the damage is already set.  Some things you can’t tamper with.  If a character has a special place in people’s minds, you better treat them well and not take them for granted.  Otherwise, don’t expect to use them to drive box office results while at the same time appeasing all the anti-capitalist radicals who have infiltrated leftist thinking for communist domination of the world. 

Star Wars is an easy one to see because it’s so obvious.  As big of a company as they are, Disney never understood why people liked the film franchise.  Some of the plotlines they have introduced then rejected over the last several years indicate that Kathy Kennedy never understood why the films she was invited to produce worked, like the Indiana Jones films and all the Steven Spielberg projects she was a part of.  Because she thought she could interfere with what the public liked and that as long as space creatures and spaceships were flying around, that people would buy a ticket to her liberal propaganda.  Well, as it turns out, that’s not how things work.  People want heroes they can believe in.  People worth watching who manage to outsmart the bad guys. That’s why people buy a movie ticket.  Reality is tough enough.  When people enter a darkened theater, they want to see hope. 

I think movie box office results are some of the best votings there are.  People truly vote with their feet.  It’s not easy for Democrats to cheat the vote because they still can’t control what people like.  Ultimately people decide what they like and see and if they don’t want to see James Bond getting killed.  Then they won’t see it happen.  They might catch the movie on cable later, but they aren’t going to pay money to see it happen.  One of the clear political strategies that China has in mind for America and all the Davos insurgents is to rob our culture of hopes and dreams and instead show that even James Bond eventually gets it in the end.  Filmmakers seem to want to praise those types of people at cocktail parties rather than being blamed for being just another capitalist producer who put profits over the party.  The ultimate check on that power is to reject those films at the box office, which happened with the new James Bond film.  They killed Bond.  And the box office reflects that people didn’t want to see it happen. Just as Disney killed off Han Solo and thought they could replace him with some Dora the Explorer character, and they’d still make money.

Yet to continue to hide these things from the public, every time they get caught, Covid is used to hide the incompetence of the participants.  No Time To Die was supposed to be released in early April of 2020.  It has had its release date pushed back many times, finally hitting theaters in October of 2021, really at a terrible time for a Bond film.  This is what the Great Reset looks like, folks.  Incompetent people release their movies that used to be valuable to the public.  The public forgets about them and moves on to other things, and when the results don’t come out the way stakeholders expect, well then, they blame Covid.  Ultimately, governments have interfered with the marketplace, and the bootlickers have wasted more time appeasing them than actually trying to make a movie people want to see.  The governments are the new audience to appease, not the popcorn-eating public, and these projects are flat and boring.   And coming out of a disappointing time when governments tried to completely take over our healthcare with a made-up crisis in Covid, built in a Wuhan lab in China by Dr. Fauci NIH funding, movie producers are trying to take away anything that might be considered good in our movies and entertainment.  Their message to us is, “see, even James Bond gets it in the end.  Not even he can escape our power.” It shouldn’t come as a surprise to any of us, given what we have seen from authority figures in 2021.  The bad guys wrote this latest James Bond film as propaganda for the future they want to control.  That understanding makes me proud to see that people didn’t get suckered into it and decided to stay home.  No Time To Die didn’t come up short at the box office because of Covid.  People are starving for reasons to get out of the house.  They aren’t scared of the virus.  No, they don’t want to see one more icon of western civilization killed in front of their faces, which was the intention of the woke James Bond of this modern age.  People voted in a way that Democrats couldn’t steal, and it shows in the box office ultimately. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Meeting Timothy Zahn: How Comic-Cons predict the future of politics

Predicting the Future by Going to Comic Cons

It’s no different from predicting the weather or an upcoming earthquake.  Some measurements are quite scientific that can be used to measure cultural ability and political sentiment.  For me, those measurements don’t come from the nightly news cycles or the hours of daily talk radio and podcasts, but I learn a lot from places like comic book stores and Comic Cons, such as the one they recently had in Cincinnati during September of 2021.  My daughter is a well-respected artist, and she was at that show and invited me to come on her opening day to help out, which I love to do.  It exposes me to different kinds of people where my age group is not well represented.  Most of the Cincinnati Comic-Con of 2021 were in the 20 to 30-year range.  Last year the event was canceled due to Covid, so I wasn’t sure what we would see.  Happily, the event was a great success, well attended, and there were lots of great costumes elaborately displayed, which I think is wonderful to see.  Mythology at work, where ideas work in people’s minds driving to manifest some form of reality.  From the mind of fantasy to the existence of at least a costume.  When I see that, it tells me that the participants recognize something in these fantasy stories that are attractive to them and care enough about those things to make them into reality.  As I think about the world and the problems that we have in it presently, many of the people in a comic con are at least doing the first step in solving those problems, recognizing that there is one.  Now their recognition may not be rooted in a realistic solution, but the first step in situation solving of any kind is in seeking alternatives to the present reality.  If the world is messed up and these people find comfort in fantasy, well, that says something to me, and I discovered that the Cincinnati Comic Con environment is full of great young minds looking for something positive in their lives.

I have written extensively about Star Wars in the past and how the future progressive problems for the political class currently at work in the world would fall apart.  The latest trilogy of films that have upset Star Wars fans is a perfect barometer for how progressive woke policies are destined to be destroyed in the coming years, especially in the United States.  The America First movement will only pick up steam. The Disney strategy of seeking market expansion in places like China and other places in the world was already showing signs of falling apart before Covid hitting in 2020, paving the way for the United Nations Great Reset.  People, the kind of people who go to Comic Cons, see through a lot of the nonsense.  They don’t care if Disney sells its products to China or some other communist country.  But if they screw around with characters and make them political, well, then there will be trouble.  When Disney and Kathy Kennedy at Lucasfilm decided to kill off Han Solo in the first movie of the new trilogy, they wanted to kill off toxic masculinity and put in his place a girl.  That didn’t go over too well, to replace the gunslinger of space and replace him with a person who had no idea who her parents were and what her job was.  The mistake of Disney to erase the Star Wars past and replace it with some woke, warless future wasn’t going over well with fans.  And they rejected Star Wars sending the studios into a frenzy trying to repair the damage.  Because ultimately, that’s what it always comes down to.  That will undoubtedly be the case in the world regarding electric cars, windmills, health care, and taxes.  Progressive intentions might sound good in an academic setting, but people ultimately decide what they want when it comes to reality. 

A few booths down from where my daughter was, I could see the great Star Wars author Timothy Zahn signing books, all of which I’ve read.  He had his latest book, which I hadn’t yet, book II of the Thrawn Ascendency series, so I went down there to speak with him and talk to him a bit.  It was a rare opportunity, and I couldn’t pass it up.  Now Timothy Zahn is a great guy and a great ambassador for the Star Wars brand with Lucasfilm and Disney, so I’m not going to reveal the contents of our discussion. He’s the creator of the expanded universe.  He started the novel-writing after the movie Return of the Jedi, so I had to ask him how he felt about Disney coming in and screwing it all up by changing the entire story with their dumb movie The Force Awakens.  But I’ve read his Thrawn books since then, and I know where he’s going with this recent series, and after talking to him at the Cincinnati Comic-Con, I am just glad that he’s out there. He’s a great dude, and he and some others now at Lucasfilm with Kathy Kennedy, now pushed into the background, are going to fix up Star Wars and win back their fans.  Listening to him talk only confirmed what I had said about everything 5 or 6 years ago.  And here it was, all happening, just as I said it would.  Zahn held his nose like a lot of people do when they work for big corporations.  I know many people who work at Disney; some are very dear friends who have done the same.  But what I know and have known, which these people suspected also, is that they’d wait out the storm until the corporations learned their lesson and had to adjust to the market conditions. 

Globally, the political hacks think they are in charge and utilize various methods of communism and socialism to regulate all existence.  But when I go to events like these comic cons, it just reminds me that the mind of humankind is still in charge.  The kinds of things people decide to spend their money on and the type of stories they find attractive still indicate what the rest of the world will do.  For instance, even with all their woke corporate policies and insults to Uncle Walt and his frontier America, Disney bent the companies back to facilitate communist China.  But when Disney tried to release their new Marvel movie Shang-Chi to China, the communist country turned them down.  Disney has gone way out of its way to appease China, even sticking Asian characters into Star Wars not because they needed to be but because Disney was sucking up to China.  Well, China sees the wave of the world, and they know that they are in trouble for their part in manufacturing the Covid crises and election fraud, and they are lashing out.  And Disney is the one getting slapped.  Was it worth nearly ruining Star Wars to get a communist government to play nice?  Well, Disney learned too late.  Their actual audience is in America, and they need to cater to that audience.  As I was talking to Timothy Zahn, I saw many Star Wars characters coming up to him looking for an autograph.  I even saw Mara Jade.  But you know what I didn’t see.  Nobody was dressing up as Rose, the Asian girl from The Last Jedi.  The movie that Star Wars fans hate.   What is evident at these kinds of events is that the rest of the world will follow politically.  And the direction will not be toward more totalitarianism.  But to freedom, justice, and the American way. 

Rich Hoffman

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Companies Aligned with China are Failing: It’s not a good idea to bet against America

There has been panic which I’ve explained before to those concerned about the amount of power corporations have.  The worry is that corporations will force us to accept vaccine passports to move around the country, that they’ll push us out of amusement parks if we don’t get woke policies, and that they’ll regulate our lives by generally denying us fun and happiness.  It is essentially the Chinese model that we are seeing play out in the opening days of the Biden administration. Companies like Disney and Coka Cola, who have global aims, have placed their bets that the way to those international markets is through the communism of China.  That is essentially the bet of the NBA, an organization made up of socialist players to go global China style.  So, they are ignoring American markets treating us like garbage because they are going for what they think is a bigger prize in the world of tomorrow under a one-world government ran by the United Nations and influenced by communism. That’s how we arrived here, but I have explained it a different way, and my bets are placed opposite of the international trend.  Those who are betting against America are going to pay for it in a big way. 

Now I love traditional Disney.  I think Walt Disney is one of the great entrepreneurs of our American history.  I have no problem sharing Disney with the rest of the world.  If Disney is broadcasting American values, it’s a great thing.  Disney the Man.  Not Disney, the corporation that woke leftists and Democrat presidential hopefuls now run.  I would offer that these new leaders of corporate Disney, Coke, and the NBA—among others—don’t know what they are doing and have over-leveraged their influence over the American population.  For instance, Disney thinks people are so hungry for their Disney+ service, their amusement parks, and their many restaurants and hotels that they will put up with crazy, radical communist policies in trade for fun.  I would offer that people reject those services in favor of freedom and that market pressures will shift away from those corporations to other options.  Such as Facebook and Twitter assumed that they would have control over the flow of information, but instead, options are erupting everywhere.  The Facebook model is now dying as we speak as well as Twitter.  Their influence is waning due to their activism against President Trump and his 70 million voters.  Disney is suffering the same fate; they are losing billions of dollars in their commitment to wokeness, and I don’t ever see them recovering.  Their decision to leverage their entertainment assets against American traditions is costing them as they speak, and the brand damage is incalculable. 

I have wanted to return to Disney World for a vacation, so I occasionally watch video vlogs of people who cover the parks in Orlando, and what they are reporting is embarrassing compared to my experiences in the past.  Disney World as a vacation spot has been one of the best locations on earth for entertainment.  Not only do they have a collection of the best rides that are anywhere, but they have great employees who carry the company message of happiness and enthusiasm for life.  But this move by the company to go full woke, to empower all the radical leftwing causes, the Black Lives Matters types, the gun grabbers, the rainbow gays on Disney characters, the transgender policies have ruined that positive employee interaction.  I didn’t help to shut down for Covid and never fully restaffing.  With the theme parks at a much-reduced capacity, waiting times excessively high only to be greeted with more and more Covid restrictions, the brand of Disney has been whittled away during the election year of 2020, and their gamble will not be paying off.  You can see it most in the many specialty shops that are closed and appear to be gone forever, the little chocolate shops and souvenir spots that are seldom ever open anymore because of the declined attendance.

This past week, Ron DeSantis in Florida removed all emergency Covid restrictions, so Disney cannot blame the government for its temperature-taking and mask mandates.  That is a liberal policy from the management of Disney as a company that wants to see central government restriction to get the payoff of a culture shift from America to China, where they placed all their bets.  And those bets are now in the multibillion dollars.  That is why they are trying not to show panic, but they look to have lost their pre-2019 market share forever.  The evidence was in the fan reaction to the Gina Carano firing from the Star Wars Mandalorian series because she came out on Twitter as a conservative.  The way that Disney fired her showed they have no idea what is driving market forces these days, and when Star Wars fans rebelled by canceling their Disney+ memberships, the company had to attempt to fix it by hiring her back, or at least to let the fans know they were thinking about it.  With Florida now without Covid restrictions, yet Disney insisting on keeping them going costing themselves even more billions by the month, there are many more Gina Carano-like concessions they will have to make in the future to attempt to regain market share.  That might help.  I might revisit the parks, but I’m not going to spend a lot of money there to see a bunch of closed restaurants, lines that are socially distanced, and having to wear a stupid mask in the hot Florida sun over a communist attempt at insurgency by the management of the Disney Company. 

That has been my message from the beginning of this woke attempt by companies to steer us into political directions.  Money rules, and they can’t cheat that vote.  People ultimately have the power over their corporations, and the best way to make them honest again is by hitting them in the pocketbook. Don’t buy their crap and watch how fast they give up their communist dreams.  They should have never listened to the China playbook.  The market share was never going to come from the East, and stealing it from America was never going to work.  It might have looked good on paper to people too stupid to ask the obvious questions.  But now, the dollars and cents are telling the story quite well.  It’s not just Disney either.  They make an excellent example because their brand is so well known and significant.  Watching them fall the way they have provides a glimpse into smaller corporations that are just as bad off but not obvious to the public.  The NBA gained popularity because of Larry Bird and the great competition with Michael Jorden.  People will be turned off by athletes taking up communist causes.  The corporations themselves do not set public policy; they are created to fulfill a public need.  And so long as they do that, they will make money.  When they think they can steer that policy, they will fail every single time.  The NBA has seriously damaged their brand, likely forever also.  It took a long time to build and only a few years to destroy.  Good luck in China, where they don’t have the money to support those types of endeavors, and they never will.  So, fret not; you have a lot more control over this wokeness than you think.  It’s already coming apart, so let it fall apart.  There are plenty of other things in life to do.  We don’t need companies that aren’t pro-American.

Cliffhanger the Overmanwarrior


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Nobody Should Care About China’s Box Office: Reaching a market of over a billion people can’t justify surrendering to communism

What I have always loved about Star Wars, aside from the obvious creativity that it takes to make the movies, is that they are in and of themselves positive stories that don’t get hung up on negativity. Yet the theme of our day is negativity, because if people are in a state of discontent they may be open to the offerings of some political class. It was probably always this way to some extent, but its really bad now, where negativity is insisted upon by certain sectors of the world, as a culture. Yet, its not always easy to see, but when something like a new Star Wars film comes out, the pop culture reaction to it is an obvious measure that we can all see and touch. And it was never clearer as to what the intentions for our society is than in reporting on the new Star Wars film, which was probably the most positive film I’ve seen by anybody in a long time, and one that certainly stands for goodness. Clearly the intent of the characters in the movie were to make clear choices about good and bad behavior. So of course the focus on the reviews was that this latest movie, The Rise of Skywalker is that it is the most poorly reviewed film since The Phantom Menace, and that it has bombed in China at that box office, see the Variety article below:

https://variety.com/2019/film/news/star-wars-the-rise-of-skywalker-flops-debut-china-1203449672/’

This is why I write so much about Star Wars, the movies are very positive and defined about what good and evil should be—as any kid’s fairy tale would. That makes them as a work of art a wonderful measure about social values and the motivations of our cultural forces. Further, I would offer that communism has been the functioning plan for many years, especially those college trained as all media people are to some extent, certainly in the case of writers of these types of articles like Patrick Frater a defense of China and its communism is baked into their view of the world, and by attacking films that are distinctly American points of view, China continues on with the mission they’ve had all along and is constantly assisted by universities and their products to advocate for and against certain types of cultures. The effort becomes grossly obvious when entertainment trades make it so obvious such as trying to slam a movie as successful as The Rise of Skywalker which made over $177 million domestically over its opening weekend and will continue to do well at the box office over the long Christmas week. Especially when the news around the world that in just a few days it made $376 million globally. That is hardly anything to sneeze at, or to ignore, culturally.

The problem is one that I have pointed out often, especially coming out of Hollywood for more than a couple decades now, where Chinese companies have been buying up interests in film studios and even trade magazines. They have been trying to do to American markets what they do internally in China as communists, and that is to control everything at every level. I mean give me a break, Star Wars was beat at the box office in China by Ip Man 4: The Finale, and that is very fishy. Instead of making the story about the Chinese box office being a failure of Star Wars to reach an audience, the story is really about how China as a government controls such box office numbers so that they can protest against western ideas influencing their country, especially when the protests in Hong Kong are fueled by those same western ideas. The box office numbers themselves do not tell the story, but our media which has been heavily influenced by the Chinese even from such a far reach uses the known measurements that China controls to attempt to shape the kind of stories that are told in our culture—which the rest of the world obviously loves as they were.

I admired Disney, which is a big global company that wants to please everyone, because they allowed the filmmakers of Star Wars to get back to what made the films popular with fans and The Rise of Skywalker is a love letter back to them full of very positive storylines that don’t get hung up on negativity. The previous installment The Last Jedi was taking a turn to the dark side in all aspects and critics loved it. But the fans didn’t. As I said at the start of this article, one way to control people is to take away from them hope, disconnect them from options so that they will be forced to embrace a way of life that the controller wishes to impose. When Star Wars looked to be taking a negative “realistic” tone with this modern trilogy, critics loved the film, but when the box office diminishing returns started showing that fans were leaving, Disney had to make some decisions and listen to the fans, and return to the kind of storytelling that Star Wars has always been for people—which is not the trend of the world full of communists in China that still have global plans.

I doubt that Patrick Frater from Variety is an open communist, but I would bet that he’s likely an anti-Trump political personality and that the whispers of his college days speak to him in copious amounts, and that the roots of those whispers were sympathetic to the type of society that China has been trying to export for decades. Star Wars obviously stands against that sentiment. While in the states, Variety has been very supportive of Star Wars so long as they could view the Resistance as being anti-Trump and liberal. However, the reality is that Star Wars has always been a small government love letter and few stories in the history of storytelling has ever shown how a government can be great one day, and on the next turn into a mass manufacturer of dystopia and scandal. The enemies of American ideas I would offer are those who have also been giving bad reviews to The Rise of Skywalker. While Disney has tried to make everyone happy, especially with the ridiculous lesbian kiss at the end of the movie as if to throw a bone to the dogs, ultimately there is no way to shut out the negativity that comes from the press because the goal is to attempt to keep people from being enchanted by the positive messages of Star Wars, since it is control over mankind that is at stake.

This movie is just one more example of why China is ultimately irrelevant. Nobody can make movies culturally that China and America will enjoy together. If a film studio tries to make movies that China will like, American audiences will push it away. And if the story is too “western” then China will shut it down in their markets. This is the nature of this entire battle yet I don’t see any evidence from the trades in dealing with the issue properly. That is because they are part of the problem and when they can, such as in this Variety article, they must take down any challenges to China as a communist culture. To save Star Wars, Disney had to choose, and they went with traditional western storytelling as they should. Nobody cares about China’s stupid contributions. Its worth dropping a $100 million at the box office, which is likely what it cost. But that money will be made up many times over in the other markets before its all said and done, and Disney will be rewarded for their choice, even if the trades like Variety are rooting against it for all the reasons stated.

Rich Hoffman

What Disney Calls Magic is what Chick Fil A Calls Competency: Taking away the excusses to happiness

People have been wondering why as a grown man who could go anywhere in the world why my wife and I went to Disney World for vacation, without any kids. Well, there were a lot of reasons, but one of the main ones is something I don’t hear a lot of people talking about, but its at the core of their theme park business model, and its very similar to Chick Fil A. What Disney sells is happiness, its in their mission statement which is clear the moment you enter the property in Orlando welcoming you to the happiest place on earth. Obviously the first thing that cynical people think of in Disney are the huge expenses and the long lines, but there is a reason everything costs so much yet is so extraordinarily crowded. Its essentially for the same reason that Chick Fil A is crowded every afternoon just for selling chicken, it’s because as a company, they don’t make excuses for failure and have a can do spirit on everything, and that is precisely what people are looking for at the Disney Parks, and why I specifically wanted to vacation there. I’m a very positive person and professionally everywhere I have turned over the last year and a half was some drag asser looking for every little excuse not to do something, and it was driving me crazy. It had been time for a Disney vacation.

That doesn’t mean that what you get at Disney is happiness. I watched carefully during my vacation the other people who were looking for the same thing as me, but obviously were not so inclined to experience such a product as Disney calls “magic.” Magic is the word for it, because in reality, its only the performance of illusions, not some mystical energy created to manipulate the impossible. Magic to create happiness is a series of tricks designed to evoke in the user a feeling they couldn’t get anywhere else, but not all people are prepared to experience it. So they can go to Disney World and spend many tens of thousands of dollars, they can have their magic bands and take the shuttle from the airport to the parks without paying all the tolls on the highways between the two, and all they’ll see are long lines and misery. They’ll complain later that Disney World is all about just making a buck and is for kids as they seek some psychological distance between their present reality and any future attempt at happiness. For many people, they do not want to be happy, because there is responsibility in it, so even going to Disney World can’t do it for them. But on this trip, I wanted particularly to study Disney as a company and how they maintained their brand so I was watching with different eyes than I normally would in times past.

One thing that was obvious, and likely the key to their success at Disney was that all of their employees were taught to buy into the philosophy, like Chick Fil A. You don’t go to Disney to hear excuses about why this or that can’t or won’t happen. With them anything is possible. Any request from a customer is entertained, and it’s done so with a smile on their faces. As I went everywhere and asked lots of questions of what they call “cast members” a personality trait emerged that was part of their employee development. The customer was always right, and the employees of Disney were taught never to complain, or to let it out that they disagreed with those very valuable customers. Everything was on time; no rides or attractions were shut down because they didn’t have enough employees to operate the activities. Nothing stopped at Disney World due to massive call offs of a weak labor pool to draw from. To make the parks work magically each day, it literally took tens of thousands of park employees to make the massive operation run. If 10% of their work force didn’t show up for work on time there would be big problems in selling that happiness, yet Disney didn’t have that problem at all. The reason why is the key to the answer.

To conduct my experiments my wife and I stayed in Kissimmee and spent some time out of the park interacting with the various work cultures there to draw some long-held conclusions that I have had. In years past, whenever we went to central Florida, we would meet at the family condo over in Cape Canaveral, and a fair amount of socializing was always part of the trip. This time, we didn’t talk to anybody, we just conducted my experiment spending a lot of time at all four Disney Parks, eating and interacting with their various resorts, and crawling over every inch of their Disney Springs development. We used all their various transportation systems and even talked to the janitors who walked around the park cleaning up the trash. I purposely looked for the ugly side of Disney, any peeled paint, any decaying wood, any sign of shortcuts toward the magic illusions that Disney was so obsessed with creating. Then once the parks closed, or before they opened, we would eat and shop down in Kissimmee and the differences in culture were obvious.

We were staying only two miles from the entrance to Animal Kingdom and Hollywood Studios the entire time along RT 192 which had a lot of great Gatlinburg types of tourist traps that I love so much. Only the employees almost everywhere we went sucked, and I mean, they sucked big time. We went to Joe’s Crab Shack which was just a stone’s throw to the south of Animal Kingdom, off the Disney property and it was obviously mismanaged in a terrible way. It took 15 minutes for someone to even ask to seat us, even with most of the place full of empty tables. Then we were told it would take an additional 15 minutes to seat us. When I asked why, they told us that they had a few call-offs and that they were running behind. Disney operates hundreds of restaurants, hotels, rides, and other vendors and I don’t think they would permit any of their employees from making such a ridiculous statement. Why would a business make their mismanagement problems the problems of the paying customer? Its an absurd concept, so we left Joe’s Crab Shack and looked for other options. And we found the same behavior everywhere else, including a Cracker Barrel

Our hotel had half dead slugs running the place, the room cleaners kept forgetting to give us new towels, coffee packs and whatever we asked for because they were not engaged in maintaining our happiness. They were just going through the motions like the rest of the world. Disney by contrast didn’t permit such excuses and that was obviously part of what they called magic. From the airport in Orlando to the surrounding establishments around the Disney World property, the contrasts were obvious, and a key to the success story. It really came down to a management decision to take away the excuses of unhappiness. If people wanted to see the strings and hidden chambers of the magic show, they could. But Disney would not be responsible for it. Their whole thing was to take away the excuses to be miserable. If people chose to be miserable anyway, that was on them.

I am one who likes to be happy, so it didn’t take much for me to enjoy that level of competency. In such a “can do” culture it doesn’t take much for me to respect such a thing. The cast members no matter how important their roles were in the customer experience held to the company motto and it was obviously successful. It shows what can be done when a company has expectations from their employees to behave a certain way and to ensure that the customer experience from their side is positive and excuse free. And in that, there are lots of lessons for the outside world to come to grips with, which is precisely why I chose this vacation over other options, which I’m glad I did.

Rich Hoffman

The Great Work of Disney Imagineers at Disney Springs: Every zoning board in America should pay attention to the good work there

One of the things I was most curious about, regarding the Disney Springs renovation from what used to be called Downtown Disney, to its present form, was why the Imagineers felt they had to create a fictional back-story about what is essentially a shopping and entertainment destination. I have always loved Downtown Disney and when Disney bought Lucasfilm back in 2012 I had a strong feeling they would do good things with the Indiana Jones property and was excited to see what it might be. I was a little surprised that the creation of Jock Lindsey’s Hanger Bar was one of their first projects so upon landing in Florida during a recent vacation it was the very first place I went. I couldn’t wait to get there as I had been watching the re-construction of Downtown Disney into Disney Springs for much of the last decade and I had to see, smell and touch everything.

My point of reference for these kinds of places is Atlantis from the great book Atlas Shrugged, the kind of world that if human creativity was left alone to do its thing, what kind of great things could we make. The closest I can think of anywhere in the world is the Disney managed properties of Disney World, for which Disney Springs is a part. I don’t care that things are so enormously expensive there, because like the book Atlas Shrugged, the value for money and any other currency is in the product themselves. Disney sells happiness, and if you have enough money, you can buy some. Their Imagineers are happy to give you happiness, so if you can afford it, you can purchase for yourself. But its not free. So using that as my guide, I was delighted to visit the place and compare it to other places around the country that I admire, particularly a shopping complex in my hometown called Liberty Center which I love quite a lot.

But what mystified me, even as a person who understands the importance of mythology in everything, is that Disney created this fake backstory about Disney Springs and even Jock Lindsey’s Hanger Bar and that as guests we were supposed to accept it in the same way we might accept some reality from the theme parks they are so known for. In fact, just about every new hotel and construction experience on the Disney property in Florida these days has some kind of made-up backstory which I found perplexing until I visited the place for myself. Even watching the construction updates from a distance for several years really couldn’t bring context to the effort until you physically visited a place like that.

Upon seeing the creation of the springs at Disney Springs I understood immediately what the Imagineers were going for, its what I would call a “conceptual faculty,” the ability to see an abstract concept in your mind so that you can bring it forth into a reality. By creating all these back stories for stores and restaurants at Disney Springs the designers were able to use mythology to elevate the construction and its psychological impact on the consumers. Normally it would be up to the companies who become tenants at such a place to set the tone of a project, but in this case the backstory of the concept allowed all participants to align the scope of the project to a unified vision, and it was pulled off brilliantly. For me it was quite a magical moment to spend the afternoon in Jock Lindsey’s looking at all the relics from his past in chasing Indiana Jones all over the world and to stroll a few short steps from that front door to the fantastic springs of Disney Springs with all the commercial activity situated around it.

The thing that struck me most about Disney Springs is that in no way in the world would any zoning board trained at today’s colleges approve such a plan and allow an entertainment district like Disney Springs to be built along the many natural springs that are found all over Florida. The political bureaucracy would be mind bending dull and laborious. It just wouldn’t happen. So to sidestep that little problem, Disney Imagineers just created their own lakes and springs so that commercial development could take place around it, and the result would be spectacularly beautiful. The result as I could see it was essentially John Galt’s Atlantis where great creations from great people were on full display without the imprint of local and state governments regulating fun beyond recognition. That is largely because Disney controls what happens on their property to the most extent that any modern company could. I don’t think it would be possible to build something like a Disney Springs off the Disney controlled property due to local regulations picking it apart until there was nothing left.

Even at Galaxy’s Edge, the new Star Wars land which I will be talking about alot, the backstory that was created for it as a project gave the Imagineers something to build to, a way to conceptualize the project and overcome whatever problems came before it. Such a method of approaching a construction project had really improved Disney Springs since my last visit and the overall approach of the entire network of theme parks. This point hit me hard while traveling on the new Skyliner system of gondolas that are now connecting Hollywood Studios with the Epcot Center. Many of the hotel complexes that had been created recently along that gondola path all had similar backstories as were used to create Disney Springs and the elevated mythology had propelled the scope of the projects to a much higher level than would have otherwise been achieved using traditional building methods at the development stage. This ability Disney has been using with its Imagineering department to help guide all their construction departments had yielded results in the final presentation they wouldn’t have achieved any other way.

To that effect I was greatly impressed by the work at Disney Springs. I would say that the complex alone would deserve its own vacation destination, but for me it was only one very small part of my trip experience into enjoying the fantastic work of the Disney Imagineers. Locals obviously were taking the place for granted, but it was clear to me that what was happening there was very unique. It would be great to see other places utilize the same methods to push up their own projects to such bold levels. Like John Galt’s Atlantis the mind of mankind has shown time and time again that it can do better than nature, and if nature is in the way, that we can simply build over it and do a much better job. As a company I’m sure Disney wants to appease the climate activists, but clearly as an organization their ability to put story before sentiment has helped their creative people in the Imagineering department do things they otherwise wouldn’t be able to do. The results are obvious and very exciting. Even if I was a little skeptical, it quickly became clear that this approach was something everyone should be doing, and it was a wave of the future that was not so obvious except in seeing the results firsthand.

Rich Hoffman