The Maniacal Genius of the Disney Vault

Walt Disney Animation’s year-long centennial celebration is allowing fans the world over to share their favorite moments and memories from the studio’s century-spanning lineage of animated classics. The studio’s legendary output of spellbinding adventures, romantic fairy tales and showstopping musicals have touche countless audiences worldwide and transcende age gaps, becoming a share cinematic tradition that spans generations. While Disney’s animation library today is readily available to digitally stream at any time on Disney+ or bring home on Blu-ray on store shelves all year round, there was once upon a time when fans could only see and own films like The Jungle Book, Peter Pan and Cinderella for only for a limite time.

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Disney Animation Thrive Off Big Screen Exhibition

For the bulk of the industry’s early history, film re-exhibition was limite only to theatrical re-releases done years after a particularly successful movie’s initial theatrical run. If audiences didn’t see a film when it first came out, they either had no luck seeing it ever again or would have to wait for a theatrical re-release. The Disney studio took great advantage of this practice with its celebrate archive of classics as both a steady revenue stream and to ensure their animation efforts are remembere and continually present in the cultural zeitgeist across decades.

Hugely popular titles like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Peter Pan would receive re-releases at most twice a decade after their premiere up until as late as the 1990s. Parents who had seen Pinocchio on the big screen when they were young were given multiple chances over the years to see it again with their children, grandchildren and so on.

At the turn of the 1980s, the advent of VHS and home video prove its commercial viability and made possible the mass renting, owning and rewatchability of films in consumers’ homes. As it was still a new market, Disney had initially hesitate to share their animate films on VHS, due to fears that putting them on video would cheapen the brand prestige of the theatrically produce animation and discourage audiences from returning to the cinema to see them on the big screen, threatening the theatrical revenue stream. After all, if families are able to purchase Pinocchio on home video and watch it over and over again, why bother paying a ticket to see it in the theaters every decade?

Out of this corporate and commercial climate was born the infamous “Disney Vault,” the shrewd marketing gimmick that convince multiple generations to buy Disney’s animate films in massive volumes. Whenever an iconic Disney classic or even new release made its home video debut, it would only be in limite supply and even more limite circulation, creating artificial urgency for consumers to “bring home the magic” before it’s locke away in the vault for at least another decade. Even newly ’90s release films like The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin would only remain on shelves for a limite time before being pulle out of rotation, creating an even greater demand for them.

The Disney Classics VHS line was the original limite series to put films like Robin Hood, Dumbo and Bambi on home video for the first time before “locking them away in the vault.” The following Disney Masterpiece collection continued to put more of the studio’s films on video for the first time, while also re-distributing films from the Classics line in a new circulation before, again, “locking them away.” This marketing method not only prove successful for Walt Disney Home Video in moving copies of the same film in droves every few years, but would carry on and find a new life with the rise of the digital disc formats, resulting in platinum and diamond edition DVDs and as recent as the 4K Blu-ray signature collections.

While the “vault” poise itself as a method of preservation for the animate Disney library, in practice, it was a marketing device to withhold their most profitable films until the demand for them peaked every decade or so. While it may have been an ingenious bit of consumer manipulation that borderers on super-villainy, the “vault” periodically re-releasing films every few years gave Disney’s back catalog of animate greats a lasting power and perpetual sense of newness that few other films in history have been able to achieve across the past century.

Each new re-release of classics that “escape” from the vault was treate as an event, celebrating the lasting power of the films themselves and the studio’s legacy. As transparent as the practice was of reissuing the films to every new video format, each new edition was release with the intent to give the film new visibility and reintroduce it to those waiting to discover or re-discover them. Every new edition of films like Sleeping Beauty, Lady and the Tramp and Alice in Wonderland was given a new restoration “beyond their original brilliance.

” behind the scenes features and documentation that had never been before release and in some cases new sequences that made offere an entirely update version of the film, such as the case for the special editions of Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King that adde new entirely musical sequences create specifically for their new re-release. Features and restorations like these may have been considere superficial perks that warrant newer re-purchases of the old films, but in time, they became a part of the film’s legacies in their own right.

The true power and worth of the “vault” was not in how it limite the physical availability of each edition, but how it broadened the accessibility to them, continually reintroducing the films to newer generations with a farther reach then the theatrical re-releases did. Even in their 100th year, Disney has always been looking for ways to renew interest and awareness of their older animate films, whether through sequels, spin-offs and even lackluster live-action remakes. Throughout all the marketing tricks that Disney has pulled in regard to their animated library, the now defunct “Disney vault” helpe generations appreciate the timeless appeal of the films as art and encourage them to be resisted upon as they grew older.