It’s way too easy to snipe at Disney for the changes it makes to various characters and franchises since to be fair it’s being done to keep everything marketable and family-friendly enough to keep the viewers coming back and the material capable of being viewed by kids that don’t know how to take certain situations and jokes. But there are moments when one can’t help but think that the Mouse House’s standards are bit wonky since there was a single joke in the Guardians of the Galaxy movie that could have easily been left in without doing any real harm, though James Gunn had to take it out apparently. The joke, as provided by MovieWeb, goes like this:
- Quill: I come from a planet of outlaws, Billy the Kid, Bonnie & Clyde, John Stamos.
- Drax: Sounds like a place that I would like to visit.
- Quill: Cool. (cut)
- Drax: And kill many people there.”
Seriously the joke doesn’t sound all that bad as it definitely keeps in line with Drax’s very dry and serious character, but perhaps it had something to do with the John Stamos reference, or perhaps the whole ‘kill many people’ part, but Disney wouldn’t sign off on this idea it sounds like, which is a little odd really since Disney has allowed content that’s a lot more controversial than this in the past. But oh well, that’s just how things go apparently, since the Mouse House has a reputation for being hypocritical when it comes to what they will and won’t allow. For those that want proof just take a look at a lot of the content that’s allowed to be used for various Marvel and Disney movies, then see how it stacks up to that particular line of dialogue. Keep in mind that James Gunn was released at one point from service for things he’d said years before that had little to no bearing on his time spent working Guardians of the Galaxy vol. 2, though Disney was quick to bend the knee and take him back when the backlash really started to hit.
This is why Disney is hard to take seriously however, as the company appears to want to do and say the right thing, but then tends to swing wide of the mark too often when it comes to actually DOING the RIGHT THING. In a sense Disney is akin to an inexperienced individual that is doing the right thing because of peer pressure, someone that has to make a great number of mistakes just to figure out the difference between right and wrong. Of course seeing how Disney isn’t entirely inexperienced it would be more akin to a knee-jerk reaction in which they’re attempting to save face by distancing themselves from the ‘problems’ that they face when it’s found that they’re associated with those that some folks in society have deemed as ‘less desirable’ at the moment. In this instance it almost feels as though Disney was attempting to be proactive but somehow stepped over the line between sense and nonsense. James Gunn has actually stated that he’d love to put the moment back in, but at this point it’s not bound to happen.
With everything that Disney has allowed into its movies and shows it’s hard to imagine just how the editorial team really operates since there are times when some content that feels extremely controversial is kept in, while other stuff that’s barely noticed is axed. Keep in mind that this is the corporation that now owns franchises such as Deadpool and Aliens, so it’s hard to say what to expect once they start trying to do something with said properties, especially since a lot of what was taken over during the Fox merge is known to be less than family-friendly. This is one of the reasons why it feels as though Disney taking over so much of Hollywood, albeit the fact that they’re still not the biggest corporation, is kind of a bad idea. Not only is Disney widely known as being kid and family-friendly, but it’s know by now that Disneyfieng anything these days means dulling down a lot of the edgier material and making it something that will pass with perhaps a mild raise of the eyebrows from the editorial board. In other words, if it’s still considered to be safe for kids to watch then it will pass, meaning the violence isn’t going to be bloody, the jokes are going to be clean enough, and the whole experience is going to be more or less eye-rolling simply because it’s been toned down so much. To think that one exchange between Peter and Drax would have been seen as fringe is kind of hard to believe, but then again, this is Disney, it’s not too hard to think that they’re attempting to perform unnecessary upkeep on an image that isn’t going anywhere.
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