Part of the Negligible Demographic, I Am
I gave over 83 minutes of my shortened day today to accompany Lilly and Ann to College Road Trip, a Disney confection now playing at theaters nationwide, soon to be a faint part of the enormous archive of Lower Mediocre. Or maybe Upper Bad.
The movie wasn't for me, anyway, but I will give it credit for presenting Donny Osmond (now pushing 50) as one of the more demented characters I've seen in a movie recently. Since it was a Disney G movie, however, his dementedness had no menace in it. He was happy wacky zany dad, about as believable as a pig that can use a computer, which the movie also featured.
There was also one line that make me laugh. Not because it was funny, but because it was strange. It involved a man wearing an eyepatch who claimed, "I got stabbed in the eye [pause] at Georgetown!" See, told you it wasn't funny. It wasn't even true in the context of the story. But when you're in the theater with a movie like this, you latch onto whatever you can. It was borderline absurd in a movie of the firmly ridiculous.
The imdb tells me that over the weekend, this movie was number two at the box office, which means that Disney has hit its demographic once again. I'm not in that demographic, but Lilly and Ann are, and they were both entertained by the movie. I was only useful as the source of funding for the target demographic.
posted by Dees Stribling @ 9:04 PM
1 comments
1 Comments:
Since you're the provider of funds, obviously Disney has to consider your opinion, too. If the movie is too awful to go to, or to expose your daughters to (even if they might enjoy it), Disney won't get your money. So they'll try to produce something that will appeal to the demographic without risking the funding. It reminds me of an article I read a number of years ago on dog food formulation. What dogs really like, the experts said, is something that's been dead a couple of days and smells like it. The manufacturers have to consider, however, that human beings - who have the money and buy the dog food - generally find carrion offensive. As a result, the makers of dog food have to work out a compromise between the taste of dogs and the sensibilities of the dogs' financial backers. Not that I'm comparing children to dogs, of course. ANK
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