Speaker 1: Here's the one of the theories that I'm not gonna
Speaker 1: take credit for that. I can't remember who I heard
Speaker 1: this from, or maybe I should just take credit. But yeah,
Speaker 1: it's called the Disney proxy, and it's it can be
Speaker 1: more complicated, but the dumbest version, the most simplified version,
Speaker 1: is that you traumatize a kid. You introduce them to
Speaker 1: a cute little sidekick that's their savior, and then you
Speaker 1: sell that kid Chochke's related to their savior, and that
Speaker 1: in if your kid like so, here's here's the general
Speaker 1: premise is that you sit your kid down in front
Speaker 1: of the TV and you gotta go do taxes, you
Speaker 1: gotta go do dishes, you gotta go fix the car,
Speaker 1: whatever it is. You're like, I just need an hour
Speaker 1: to go and do adult stuff. So we're gonna PLoP
Speaker 1: you down in front of the TV. We're gonna put
Speaker 1: on a Disney tape because Disney is more or less
Speaker 1: like I can trust it. It's not gonna do something
Speaker 1: horrible to you. That's the sale right of Disney is
Speaker 1: like family friendly, so that if I go in the
Speaker 1: other room, I can just leave you to it. So
Speaker 1: when that happens, if you're five years old and your
Speaker 1: parent leaves the room to a five year old mind
Speaker 1: with maybe still developing the concept of like per object permanence, right,
Speaker 1: if mom leaves the room, mom might as well be
Speaker 1: dead until you know she comes back into the room.
Speaker 1: You're still figuring things out. So you put your five
Speaker 1: year old in front of this show. In that movie,
Speaker 1: Bambi's mom becomes the kid's mom because the kid's mom's
Speaker 1: in the other room. She's doing dishes or something. So
Speaker 1: now like you're bonding with this character or the dad
Speaker 1: of its lyon King, right, And then when the mom dies,
Speaker 1: this kid might for a five year old mind, it
Speaker 1: might be the first time in their life where they've
Speaker 1: gone through this psychological mental exercise of mommy died. What
Speaker 1: do I do? What do I do if mom died? Wow,
Speaker 1: I've never considered that before. What happens when my mom
Speaker 1: actually dies? And they start thinking, even if they're not
Speaker 1: actively thinking that the back of the head like seeds
Speaker 1: are being planted. So now it's kind of traumatic. If
Speaker 1: that's the first time you've ever thought about your own
Speaker 1: mortality or the mortality of your parents and your loved ones,
Speaker 1: it could kind of spiral you a little bit. If
Speaker 1: your head's not big enough to fully contemplate it, you
Speaker 1: still kind of get stuck in this trauma mode. So
Speaker 1: there's three main ways that happens in Disney movies. Either
Speaker 1: the parent dies, which is a pretty obvious one, or
Speaker 1: you get separated or lost. You could almost consider like
Speaker 1: maybe an Alice in Wonderland would be like this, maybe
Speaker 1: Mary Poppins would be like this, where the kids are
Speaker 1: removed from any authority figures and they're out in the
Speaker 1: world fending for themselves and it's unknown if they ever
Speaker 1: make it back. And then the third one is a
Speaker 1: more extreme version of that where you get kidnapped. But
Speaker 1: all three of these are forcing a young mind to
Speaker 1: actually go through via this process of oh my god,
Speaker 1: my mom just died, or oh my god, I'm lost
Speaker 1: and I might never get home, or oh my god,
Speaker 1: I was just kidnapped. So once they're in this new
Speaker 1: traumatic state, thinking new thoughts, the first thing that Disney's
Speaker 1: gonna do is put a very cute sidekick savior character.
Speaker 1: They're gonna save you. And what happens is that you
Speaker 1: now have this nlp anchor of in this case Thumper.
Speaker 1: We're gonna have a bunch of examples. And now, whenever
Speaker 1: you're gonna see Thumper, after you've seen this movie, you're
Speaker 1: gonna feel a little bit of relief. You're gonna be like, oh,
Speaker 1: I don't know why, but I feel like a little
Speaker 1: more at ease than I just did five seconds ago.
Speaker 1: It might be you were walking down the aisle in
Speaker 1: Walmart and you saw a Thumper backpack. You don't know
Speaker 1: why you felt that way, but this is the reason.
Speaker 1: It's because sometime earlier in life, Thumper saved, like literally
Speaker 1: saved you and became your new parental figure. And you're
Speaker 1: gonna see this happen over and over again. Lying Ca
Speaker 1: is an example. You kill the parent, you introduce the
Speaker 1: cute sidekicks, You sell the chochkeys with the sidekicks, and up,
Speaker 1: even if it's not a kid that's dying here, you've
Speaker 1: got like an old man that loses someone gets a sidekick.
Speaker 1: The sidekick gets cool little chochkeys. Even in Frozen Frozen,
Speaker 1: she gets she ages a little bit, Her parents go
Speaker 1: away on a trip and just never come back. And
Speaker 1: then you get ol Off, and then Olof becomes an
Speaker 1: expensive Lorcana card or a Funko pop. Right. So, like
Speaker 1: this constant theme that I call the Disney proxy where
Speaker 1: traumatize the kid, introduce the kid to a cute little
Speaker 1: character that's then gonna be a happy meal toy or
Speaker 1: a lorcanic card or a or a sneaker or something
Speaker 1: out in the real world, and then just keep capitalizing
Speaker 1: on that for the rest of their life. Because and
Speaker 1: this is where Disney adults become so useful. Where a
Speaker 1: Disney adult is still feeling some sort of ease by
Speaker 1: seeing Thumb or even when they're like fifty years old,
Speaker 1: whoa bro.
Speaker 2: That is a deep rooted psychological manipulation, and I can
Speaker 2: definitely see how that works. As you were explaining that,
Speaker 2: I was immediately thinking to one of the first Disney
Speaker 2: movies that I ever saw, which was Tarzan. Tarzan the
Speaker 2: animated movie, and what happens in that Tarzan loses his parents.
Speaker 1: There's some theories that the parents and Frozen are the
Speaker 1: parents in Tarzan. Here's another fun This is my favorite
Speaker 1: part about Tarzan. If you look at the original story
Speaker 1: of Tarzan the premise. Again, this is like kind of
Speaker 1: Rosicruciani maybe, but it was that the blood of a
Speaker 1: British aristocrat was so inherently superior to any other race
Speaker 1: of human being that you could literally take a British aristocrat,
Speaker 1: drop them in the middle of a jungle and they
Speaker 1: would thrive. Not only would they thrive, they would become
Speaker 1: the king of the jungle. And that's what Tarzan is.
Speaker 1: Tarzan represents that British aristocracy is just inherently better than
Speaker 1: anything else in the world, and that it will always
Speaker 1: thrive no matter what environment you put it in.
Speaker 2: This is really crazy right here. I one percent believe
Speaker 2: this absolutely, that this is happening. And this explains why
Speaker 2: kids are so crazy about Disney movies because they've been
Speaker 2: traumatized by watching it, and then they get their best
Speaker 2: friend within that movie and they're put into that type
Speaker 2: of scenario even though it's not real life. They're watching
Speaker 2: a fictional version of it. And then the parents don't
Speaker 2: understand why they like these characters so much, especially in
Speaker 2: the beginning. You know, of course, people are now parents
Speaker 2: that grew up with a lot of the stuff, and
Speaker 2: I feel like even in the nineties or in the eighties,
Speaker 2: parents didn't really understand why their kids like these shows
Speaker 2: so much. But this explains it.
Speaker 1: And I think it's also really interesting to note that
Speaker 1: I think Disney found this formula out on accident because
Speaker 1: they came out with Bambi and something called the Bambi
Speaker 1: effect happened, or you can look up like Bambi syndrome.
Speaker 1: But essentially, after Bamby came out and everyone saw Bambi's
Speaker 1: mom die and here's this adorable Bamby yawning and mom,
Speaker 1: where are you mom? Right, like, people were upset and
Speaker 1: there was actual legislation and cultural change where it became
Speaker 1: less acceptable socially to hunt and eat deer, and it
Speaker 1: actually got so out of control that there became an
Speaker 1: overpopulation issue with deer, and then they had to start
Speaker 1: aggressively overcoming the deer because they had let it go
Speaker 1: and checked for too long again because of like like
Speaker 1: public pressure that people saw the Disney movie and complain
Speaker 1: to their local you know, politicians, and it changed the
Speaker 1: landscape for the worst. And I think when this happened first,
Speaker 1: Disney was like, Okay, that's interesting, Like we have some
Speaker 1: real power here. We have to be a little bit
Speaker 1: more careful now about how we wield this power. But
Speaker 1: I think also the when they realize, oh, if you
Speaker 1: kill the authority figure, it does something extra even though
Speaker 1: it's just a cartoon, it does like something beyond what
Speaker 1: anyone was expecting. So again, I feel like that when
Speaker 1: they killed Bambi's mom, it was like a happy accident.
Speaker 1: They were like, oh, what was this. Let's keep trying
Speaker 1: this out, And then over the years they make it
Speaker 1: so that it's almost like a formula. And then you've
Speaker 1: got movies that can do this over and over again,
Speaker 1: where they can kill characters over and over, like Coco
Speaker 1: is a good example, where like they have regular death
Speaker 1: and they have like a second death, so now like
Speaker 1: everybody to die and see their loved ones die and
Speaker 1: go back to like it gets But again, then that
Speaker 1: one's almost like a logmarthic function, whereas this is like
Speaker 1: the most simple algebrake version of that first.
Speaker 2: Wow, they just kept repeating the same formula over and
Speaker 2: over and over again.
Speaker 1: So here's here's what I would consider the darker side
Speaker 1: of Disney. And we won't get too much beyond this one,
Speaker 1: but it's so easy to ruin a Disney movie for yourself.
Speaker 1: If you look into it just enough, you're you're gonna
Speaker 1: find something that's gonna be like, Eh, I wish I
Speaker 1: didn't know that. So here's my example is that Sword
Speaker 1: in the Stone was probably my favorite Disney movie of
Speaker 1: all time. I absolutely love this movie. I think I
Speaker 1: saw it the most times out of anything. Where this
Speaker 1: one gets kind of weird is just if you look
Speaker 1: at the original author Sword in the Stone by THH. White. THH.
Speaker 1: White was this old old guy that didn't develop any
Speaker 1: adult relationships with anyone, and he fell in love with
Speaker 1: a twelve year old boy when he was in his
Speaker 1: late fifties, and that a lot of the work and
Speaker 1: a lot of his diary entries basically we were just
Speaker 1: talking about this constant struggle that he was going through
Speaker 1: that if he wanted to express the love that he
Speaker 1: had in his soul, that society would reject him, and
Speaker 1: that it was like the most painful thing ever and
Speaker 1: his a later biographer basically said that this turned him
Speaker 1: into a Sado massachist. That he he might have had
Speaker 1: some like pretty strong other diary entries that never made
Speaker 1: it to like the full public light. But anyways, when
Speaker 1: you start learning about this guy's actual background and then
Speaker 1: I'm like rewatching Sword and Stone and I'm just like Damn.
Speaker 1: Here's this old guy that looks kind of like him
Speaker 1: smoking the pipe, lives out in the middle of the woods,
Speaker 1: and he's luring an orphaned boy to learn all about magic,
Speaker 1: and he's not allowed to go home and tell any
Speaker 1: of the alts about it. All of a sudden, now
Speaker 1: it's like the story of Sword in the Stone and
Speaker 1: the story of an old guy that literally lured a
Speaker 1: young twelve year old away from his family to try
Speaker 1: and teach him magic as a you know, a euphemism.
Speaker 1: So here's just an example of I mean, if another
Speaker 1: maybe a darker one who would be like powder, but
Speaker 1: we're not going to get into powder because it's not animated.
Speaker 2: Well, that's kind of the story of the original Star
Speaker 2: Wars trilogy too, Obi Wan King Obi an old man
Speaker 2: luring a teenage boy into the woods to teach him magic.
Speaker 1: It's a story as old as time itself.