i am literally offering $50 to any person who can find a definitive answer to this question: why was the famous movie the name of the rose (1986), starring sean connery, banned in the united states as of november 2020?
EDIT: SOLVED. disney did it.
so it turns out this isn’t the only movie this has happened to. see this article:
and then you can see this spreadsheet (go to missing movies) to find others.
thank you to people in the replies for telling me about 20th century fox properties being acquired and shuttered by disney and for the cocoon reference which lead me down the rabbit hole to a definitive answer. disney is really here to fuck us over.
Anyway, what I mean is artificial shortages and market manipulation like this are exactly why pirating from Disney is a moral good. Fuck their media monopoly, fuck their Disney Vault, it’s a pirate’s life for me.
Prior to the home video market era Disney regularly re-released their Golden Age films like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) in theaters on a cycle such that they would each be “in season” once per childhood. The Gremlins in the theater in Gremlins (1984) are watching such a re-release, I saw Bambi in Cooperstown, NY as a kindergartner or so. With the rise of VHS and then the late 80s–90s “Disney Renaissance” of new “classics” Disney carried over these limited windows of availability, even if the “once in a childhood” reasoning no longer applied.
