I am currently driving down to Miami
with the Men’s Crew Team for our spring break trip. As we began to enter the vicinity of Florida,
our coach commented, “Who wants to stop by Orlando and visit Disney
World?” While this comment was a joke,
and no one gave it a second thought, it had me thinking about just how big of a
name Disney is. It has gotten to the
point that Florida is synonymous with Disney World, and vice versa. After all, my coach is a graduate student
studying something engineering-related, and it has likely been a while since he
last watched a Disney film on his own. On top of all that, there were other
interesting places that we could have checked out on the road from Duke to
Miami, but Disney World was the one that really stood out.
I have a feeling that the familiarity
of Disney’s name is only going to continue to increase, as Disney continues to
build theme parks around the world, and broadcast films in multiple countries.
Disney will no longer be a name that is popular only in the United States, but
it will be big across the industrialized world.
We see Disney making moves for this to happen, not only with their theme
parks, but also with TV shows and movies being released with more diverse
characters, and in multiple languages, to attract a broader viewership base. While this can be a good thing, it will be
especially important to make sure that we do not take everything in these films
for granted, and that we make sure the messages being told are ones of
acceptance and harmony.
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