The main kid with all the lines is black, so it evens out.

It's weird. Disney was trying to market Mulan as an action movie due to a hole in their marketing towards boys at this time. They had all sorts of ideas to try to fix it, including a "Disney Heroes" line, which was going to be the male version of the Disney Princesses. Disney Heroes included Aladdin, Peter Pan, and Hercules. I remember working at Toys R Us at the time, and they rolled out this entire aisle of exactly the same stuff as the Disney Princess aisle, but blue for boys. It rotted on the shelves, unsold. It wasn't until the Pirates of the Caribbean movies that were able to make a dent into the action figure market. Most of the decision to spend billions of Star Wars and Marvel was based in this hole in their marketing.

At this point, Disney is a consumer brand that sells branded characters to outside lifestyle merchandise firms. If there is an item that exists, they can put a Disney character on it, and tie it into a broader marketing scheme. Pixar still makes new IPs, but Disney does not. They can't take the risk. To launch a new Disney IP, they have to invest billions of dollars into making the movie, making the appendent marketing, the theme park attractions (even on a temporary basis, they'll pour a ton of money into a niche film, like they had dudes dressed up as Daft Punk walking around Disneyland for the Tron remake), and then they have to convince the makers of dry goods and fast food to slather their IPs on their product. The brilliance of just buying Star Wars and Marvel is that generations of brand loyalty go into the IPs, and they didn't have to build any of that. The real danger here is that Disney has no internal loyalty to these brands, and if Star Wars suddenly became outre with the kids, which is not totally impossible, that particular IP would be shelved and they'd move on. Occasionally you'll get a nice niche IP like Gravity Falls or the Ducktales series, but those are just padding for the hours of time they have to fill on the cable networks they're saddled with. Disney Channel used to be a premium network but now it's a basic cable station with paid advertising, so it has to compete directly with Nickelodeon.

I type way too much about Disney whenever it comes up. It is fascinating to me.

Mulan was eventually drafted into the Disney Princesses line, where she gets to wear pretty dresses despite the fact that 1) she's not a princess and 2) she sang an entire song in the movie about how she doesn't want to wear pretty dresses.

For an extra fifty cents they'll go peepee in your coke.

the magic of modern moviemaking

The pretense of "celebration" has always seemed really bizarre to me.

"Harry, you wrote your report on a napkin."

"Yes, Bob."

"And you just wrote 'mushu pork' and 'dragon statue'. Would you care to elaborate?"

"Oh, that was just a joke. Some of the fellas said they were going to tell you I passed out in front of the uh, restaurant. So, I just wrote that as uh, part of the joke."

"I see, and your ideas for the movie?"

"There's a dragon who is a statue and he comes to life...and his name is...Mushu."

*sigh* "It'll do. I guess."

"Really?"

"Yeah, write it up, we're on a deadline."

"Cool. Hey can we get Eddie Murphy as the dragon voice?"

"What?"

"Yeah I'm...I'm still a little drunk."

"Get out of my office."

done

He's generically white looking enough that as long as he didn't brag about being in a McDonald's commercial he probably would have been fine.

That black kid totally outed him to the school. He looks like the kind of little asshole that would do something like that.