David Hinckley
Updated Monday, August 31st 2009, 12:50 PM
Updated Monday, August 31st 2009, 12:50 PM
Maybe I'm just bitter over not being allowed into Disneyland in the 1960s because my hair was too long.
But I'm nervous about this morning's news that Disney is buying the Marvel Comics universe.
It's not that I dislike Disney animation and characters. I don't. I've been charmed all my life by "Peter Pan," and the core crowd of Mickey, Donald and Goofy have earned their props as pure Americana.
But Marvel has always stood for something else. Where the Disney characters have over some 80 years been the comic establishment, the Marvel folks have been the outsiders, the round pegs in a world of square holes, the spider webs in a world of brooms.
To see them ushered inside the Disney tent, no matter how handsomely they're compensated, stirs what Bob Dylan once called "a restless hungry feeling that don't mean no one no good."
Now I'm sure all sides will assure us repeatedly that this deal won't affect the integrity of the Marvel characters.
Disney will declare, not illogically, that it wouldn't be paying $4 billion for a brand that it intends to change. You don't buy Pepsi-Cola and rename it "Brown Bubble Water."
It's also true that Disney has used subdivisions to market products, like R-rated movies, that it doesn't feel fit the Disney brand.
So maybe the Mouse really doesn't want to swallow the Marvel world. Maybe Disney really will leave creative control to the Marvel people and mostly just use Marvel as an endless source of material for lucrative new geek films.
But still, there's this little voice — it sounds a little like Tinker Bell, come to think of it — that says big corporations with valuable, well-established images eventually tend to make all parts of their empire conform to that image.
That at the very least they eventually reshape all parts of the empire to fit the mothership's "corporate management style."
It's not that the X-Men or the Hulk will suddenly sprout mouse ears. The dangers are more subtle — maybe a little shift in emphasis toward marketing, a little less creative experimentation, a little less of the irreverence that made Marvel worth $4 billion in the first place.
In the history of animation and comics, of course, Disney and Marvel haven't really been direct adversaries.
The original gnat buzzing around Disney, back in the 1930s, was Warner Bros., whose animators felt Disney took itself a little too seriously and began a guerrilla satire campaign with the likes of Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny — scruffy characters who clearly enjoyed tweaking Disney as part of their own first-rate comedy.
Marvel's most direct rival, on the other hand, has been DC Comics – which, it's true, is owned these days by another large corporation, Time-Warner. Where DC heroes like Superman and Batman were basically 100% good guys with a few incidental issues, Marvel heroes are neurotic, occasionally slow and, okay, sometimes downright messed up.
In the glow of Spider-Man's movie stardom, it's easy to forget that that even clean-cut all-American Peter Parker has always had a tense private life, has been constantly vilified in the Daily Bugle, and had to wait many years and several movies before he even finally seemed to get the girl.
So they had to work harder to get where they were going, and we often had a lot more fun watching them do it.
For many years, in any case, the comic fan universe reflected a friendly split between Marvel and DC fans, just as the animation fan universe was split between Disney and Warner Bros.
These showdowns were good for everyone. The creators will all tell you that the presence of strong, popular competition pushed them to be better, and that in turn expanded the audience.
The simple point, then, is that we don't only have room for different styles and approaches, we need them.
If everything is gathered under one umbrella, the only thing that gets better is the corporate bottom line. What we don't need is the comic/animation world's version of Microsoft.
Fortunately, technology being what it is, creative urges have plenty of places to spawn these days. The spirit of irreverence isn't going anywhere.
Meanwhile, I'll just hope that little voice in my ear is worried for nothing.
