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by dave5104 1640 days ago
About your Disney+ example, I do wonder why it seems that a lot of content like that isn't available on the platform.

Are there streaming rights issues? Are they holding back content to drip feed content drops for as long as they can? Did they determine that some content isn't worth digging up the tapes and preparing for streaming?

2 comments

Disney has always made a big deal out of the "Disney Vault"—back in the VHS days, they tried to replicate the scarcity of waiting until a movie was showing in a local theater by arbitrarily refusing to sell copies of some of their movies for years at a time. I believe they continued this practice with DVDs and Blu-Rays, though not nearly as widely.

This seems likely to be part of the same philosophy.

I wonder also how much of the older content is self-censored for e.g. political correctness reasons.
That’s certainly seems to be true for Kundun (1997).

The Chinese Communist Party wasn’t happy the film was made in the first place and would probably ban Disney from their market if it was available for streaming in the USA.

It’s quiet, limited sale on DVD is still tolerated.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kundun

This is indeed true of movies such as Disney’s Song of the the South. You won’t find that anywhere;; even eBay prevents sale of the DVD.

Cartoons have also been censored:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censored_Eleven

https://deadline.com/2021/03/pepe-le-pew-space-jam-2-new-yor...

Many cartoon shorts from the 30s and 40s with blackface and other offensive material has been edited. I can’t find references right now, but have noticed this personally.