A momentary digression of Disney-rage

While I am busily butchering The Little Mermaid for the amusement of my friends, I discover that Disney has, of course, outdone me. People. People. Have you seen this? Put in your mouthguards and stretch out your teeth-gritting muscles.

 
For those who don't want to watch, lemme sum up: Disney is bringing The Little Mermaid back to a few theaters for a limited run. The twist is that they are inviting children to bring iPads to play with a special app that will give them games to play (and sing-alongs to sing along with) synced to the movie--that is, while the movie is on.

As an aside, here, again, are words I've seen or heard too many times: "Experience the Disney classic... like never before." Is that what people want? If the trailer said, "Experience the Disney classic... exactly like you did in 1989," I don't know who wouldn't shell out.

(A parable, perhaps, for our time: I became aware of animated movies, more or less, in 1989. The "Disney Renaissance" was not a thing that was happening; it was simply a law of the universe that Disney made an excellent animated movie every year. Thus it had always been, for as long as I could remember anyway, and thus it would surely continue until the end of time. Thus it continued, anyway, until I was about ten, and I learned about the transience of things.)

I don't begrudge Disney the drive to innovate, in the abstract, but I think that this is one of those things, like cloning velociraptors, that science has made possible but human wisdom ought to prevent. I don't imagine that there is any shortage of rage about this. The idea of watching a good children's movie in a darkened theater filled with children who are distracted from the movie by glowing tablets is a horrific one to me.

Part of what frightens me is the thought that the folks at Disney didn't think The Little Mermaid could hold today's children's attention on its own. What frightens me more, though, is the thought that this is a test case and might catch on. The real potential of this gimmick isn't to enhance children's movies that don't need enhancement, but to pacify children during movies that couldn't otherwise hold their attention. There's a whole subset of the movie industry that serves no purpose but to temporarily hypnotize antsy kids during the summer, but don't think movie makers would pass something up that might let them get away with making even less interesting movies.

Today a children's movie has the relatively simple goal of holding a child's attention for about 90 minutes. But it still takes some work to do that. Even children demand a certain degree of novelty, coherency, and even intelligence (of a sort) from their entertainment. But what if the movie only had to play in the background while the child played a reskinned version of Bejeweled?

The app would be provided at the usual movie theater markup, of course.

That got grim. But don't mind me. All roads lead to the zombie apocalypse in my imagination lately.