Swiss Family Robinson (1960)

In Maintenance Required, Madelaine Petsch plays a car mechanic named Charlie whose life is turned upside down after a chain repair shop moves in across the street and threatens to shut down her small business. To make matters even more complicated, the manager of the chain shop, Beau (Jacob Scipio), is a hot guy who she has a love/hate relationship with. He also happens to be “Bullnose”, the Reddit user she’s been messaging anonymously and is clearly in love with.

Over the course of the film, Beau thrives at his job and works to make his vintage electric vehicle dream a reality while Charlie flounders, unsure of what she’ll do with her life if the shop shuts down. Scipio and Petsch do have incredible chemistry together. There’s a scene early on where they play pool and you can feel the tension. It’s great casting for an enemies-to-lovers plot, which nearly saves the fact that Beau was unapologetically ruining Charlie’s business.

For this movie to work, I needed Beau to make a proactive decision to support Charlie even if it hurt him. If one person has power over the other’s career, the powerful person needs to make concessions. Maintenance Required never enabled Beau to do this, instead manufacturing plot points that allowed him to make seemingly nice decisions that were purely in his own self-interest. If you don’t think about it too hard it’s a fun rom-com, but I wish it had been easier to root for Beau.

Last week, Disney+ removed the films Peter Pan, Swiss Family Robinson, Aristocats and Dumbo from their children’s profiles, only making them available to patrons 7 years and up, with a disclaimer appearing before the film starts. Racist depictions of Black, Indigenous and Asian persons is what prompted the action- the disclaimer reading:

While the warning is somewhat of a step in the right direction, removing the films from their repertoire -in any capacity- takes accountability off of Disney for the mistakes they’ve made. Though the advisory in itself claims that they want to learn from the harm they’ve caused and incite meaningful conversations about inclusion- it seems as though any forward-moving action they take fails to do so.

What I would have loved to see instead is a more direct acknowledgement of the negative impacts their racist contributions have made to the media landscape as a whole, thus exposing multiple generations to their Othering misrepresentations and mockery of other cultures. Ideally, Disney would use their influence and resources towards a proactive countermeasure. “Stories Matter” is an initiative similar to what I’m describing: the effort acknowledges, and seeks to reconcile the negative racial depictions Disney has perpetuated over the course of their cinematic history. Where it falls short is that the standalone webpage doesn’t garner too much attention towards itself, going unnoticed by those who might benefit the most from its production. Additionally, it seems to narrowly avoid actual accountability, instead masking its ugly past behind inclusive and optimistic hopes for the future.

Supposing Disney produced, for kids’ and adult profiles alike, watchable visual media that not only directly addressed the instances in question that got these feature films banned from their site, but encouraged conversations between parent and child as to how these depictions are wrong, and how adopting them into one’s worldview can negatively affect those around you. A short miniseries, for example, would be able to engage children in a way a written warning never could. Moreover, it would provide parents with a resource or jumping-off point to facilitate discussions about race for which they may feel ill-equipped to conduct on their own. It would also be an honest effort by Disney to make the same investment in reconciling the harm they created, as they did to bring these depictions to fruition in the first place. A feel-good webpage hidden among the vastness of the internet will not even scratch the surface in undoing the damage that has been done, and neither will erasing the content from their vault.