The New York Times has a must-read story on the upcoming Wii video game Epic Mickey, including more details about the plot and characters:

Epic Mickey, designed for Nintendo’s Wii console, is set in a “cartoon wasteland” where Disney’s forgotten and retired creations live. The chief inhabitant is Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, a cartoon character Walt Disney created in 1927 as a precursor to Mickey but ultimately abandoned in a dispute with Universal Studios. In the game, Oswald has become bitter and envious of Mickey’s popularity. The game also features a disemboweled, robotic Donald Duck and a “twisted, broken, dangerous” version of Disneyland’s “It’s a Small World.” Using paint and thinner thrown from a magic paintbrush, Mickey must stop the Phantom Blot overlord, gain the trust of Oswald and save the day.

Twisted, broken, dangerous, disemboweled? I’m shivering with ghoulish glee!

New York Magazine has a brief piece as well, including a YouTube link to this concept art (yeah, the soundtrack is irritating, but the little on-screen comments are worth it):

I do not think I have to tell you how excited I am that Oswald will play a major role.

Just as interesting, though, is the larger picture of Mickey makeover described in the New York Times article, of which Epic Mickey is just a trial balloon:

“Holy cow, the opportunity to mess with one of the most recognizable icons on Planet Earth,” said Warren Spector, the creative director of Junction Point, a Disney-owned game developer that spearheaded Epic Mickey.

The effort to re-engineer Mickey is still in its early stages, but it involves the top creative and marketing minds in the company, all the way up to Robert A. Iger, Disney’s chief executive.

Disneyland Paris, where nostalgic fans will be able to enjoy Star Tours 1.0 for the forseeable future!

My Jentasmic! column this week at Studios Central displays my level of enthusiasm for the upcoming Star Tours update:

It’s been over a month since the announcement at the D23 Expo that Star Tours 2.0 will be coming to both Disney’s Hollywood Studios and Disneyland in 2011, and I’m still mulling it over. Will I love this like the new Haunted Mansion, or are we headed for another Journey into Imagination without the freakin’ Dreamfinder?

Head on over to Studios Central to read the rest….

The hosts of Tank Riot Podcast are outrageously smart, irreverent, hip, and beyond geeky. And occasionally foul-mouthed, so don’t listen with the kids! But you owe it to yourself to find some time to listen to their discussion of the life and works of Walt Disney.

We discuss the life, works, controversies and urban legends of the animator everyone thinks they know. From Mickey Mouse in Plane Crazy to Donald Duck and Pluto, we discuss the animators like Ubbe Iwerks and the voice actors like Clarence “Ducky” Nash and Pinto Colvig that made the myths possible. Also: Where the Wild Things Are, Zombieland, Paranormal Activity, Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soapbox, Big Man Japan and more!

Disney history geeks probably won’t learn much new, although I’ll confess I didn’t know what the last words were that Walt wrote. But even if you already gots all the facts, this is good listening.

The Disney Podcast Network has announced a number of meets at Walt Disney World, running from December 10-13, 2009.

Add these of course to the meets scheduled by Celebrations Magazine, All About the Mouse Podcast,  WDW Today Podcast, and Those Darn Cats Podcast, and clearly there’s a critical mass of Disney Digerati in town that weekend! I’m sure we’ll see more events announced too; I’m trying to keep track of them all here on Broke Hoedown, mostly for my own convenience as my schedule spreadsheet develops.

For those of you looking for something a week earlier, there’s Pixelmania at Walt Disney World. and Mousemeets at Disneyland Paris.

Rumor has it that the D23 event December 12-13 sold out within minutes of tickets becoming available for sale, and that guests of D23 members were put on waitlists. I wonder how many tickets were sold?

I haven’t been blogging much lately. This is partly because October and November are traditionally my busy time at work. And perhaps partly because I started this blog with a lot of things to say, and now that I’ve worked through the backlog, keeping current just doesn’t take as many posts as it used to.

But there’s a bigger reason, a sweeter reason as well: Last month, I began graduate school, part time in the evenings. I’ve begun a Masters of Science in Administrative Studies, with a concentration in Innovation and Technology.

This feels both ironic and quite fitting, given that I spend a certain amount of my professional time encouraging computer science undergraduates to continue on to graduate school, and here I am in my 40’s just starting a Masters degree myself. One of the things I’ve heard, and have said many times myself, is that it’s easier to stay in school than to go back. If you take some time off school after your Bachelor’s degree, you may never manage to get back for that Master’s or PhD.

And I’m sure there’s some truth to that, as I try to readjust to doing homework in the evenings, and studying for exams, even while helping my teenage son to do the same. I feel a little awkward sometimes, being the oldest student in the class. At least the professors aren’t younger than me…yet.

But the deeper truth is that for me, going back to graduate school is easier than continuing on after my undergraduate work would have been. Because for me, the hurdle of figuring out that I even wanted to go to graduate school, that it was even an option, was too high at the end of my undergraduate career. My undergraduate adviser warned me that she wasn’t very good at mentoring, and she was right: She never encouraged me to continue my studies, despite my excellent track record.

I’ll still be blogging here, of course. In fact, if I can figure out a relatively small, publicly-traded company that has some connection to the Disney empire (yet remains an independent financial entity), and is preferably a retail or manufacturing operation, I may well post one of my papers here. Any suggestions for a company that fits the bill? Remember, it’s gotta be publicly traded.

If we can dream it, we can do it. I don’t know if I’ll succeed in this Masters degree program; I can only keep taking the next right step, writing my papers, doing my homework, showing up for class. But I do know that there were times that I thought it would be impossible for me to go to graduate school, and now here I am. Yes we can, yes we can.

Wait….don’t just stop at reading the image. More interesting by far are the discussions taking place in the comments on the Feministing, Sociological Images, and Feministe blogs. A few samples:

Maybe it’s out of life-long loyalty (and stubbornness) to Beauty and the Beast, but I have to disagree on Belle – it may not be perfect, but next to Mulan (who is, in a word, awesome), she is the most outright feminist of Disney characters. She calls Gaston “primeval” for his attitude toward women and books. She kicks the asshole out of her house when he proposes and starts a song about how “absurd” it would be to be his “little wife.” The whole town notes how weird it is for a pretty girl to be so “odd” and into books, and she just ignores the hell out of all of them. She independently seeks adventure. She leaves the Beast for what’s important to her – her father. But then, they fall in love. I don’t think it’s her sexuality that “saves” the Beast. It’s just  love. And I think even we can enjoy a wildly fantastical love story now and again. [from Feministing]

I find it a little funny as well that when we think about all of the men who “saved” these women, Aladdin is the only one and to a certain extent Price Eric, who are good guys in their own right, separate from the women. The Beast was a prick and the others had no redeeming characteristics other than the fact that they there were handsome. Which is really all a girl can ask for in a Disney movie. I find it ironic that Belle DID have the most going for her yet is treated the worst of all the Princesses by her Prince. [from Sociological Images]

I don’t really agree with a lot of the analysis in the pictures, but I think Disney movies are very problematic for all sorts of reasons they’re bringing up…and I think Mulan is actually one of the worst. The entire movie is reinforcing the notion that the only values worth upholding are traditionally ‘manly’ ones – and ‘manliness’ is defined through violence. Mulan even says at one point something about how she wanted to be something, make her life worthwhile… as if the lives of millions of Chinese women aren’t worthwhile! The whole movie is a gigantic romp through hatred of women and women’s cultures in favour of everything to do with men. Not to mention the utter racism – even putting aside the way over-the-top stereotypes of China, the villain in the film has FANGS and YELLOW EYES. Dehumanization, much? [from Feministe]

Agree or disagree, but you gotta go read more. It’ll make you think.

This week’s Jentasmic! column at StudiosCentral.org brings you a few snapshots from my August trip to Walt Disney Studios Paris. Here’s just one, for starters:

Ah, I wanna go back!

Funny thing….Disney apparently didn’t like this rendition of Snow White, and has contacted the ad agency in question, according to The Register. Funnier still is that Grumpy still looks, well, grumpy.

I suppose one could try to argue that Snow White and the Dwarves aren’t really owned by Disney, as they come from the Kinder- und Hausmärchen. I doubt one would get too far with that, though, especially since these are obviously styled to look like the Disney rendition.

Hat tip to my friend Hayden, without whose Facebook feed this one would’ve gotten by me.

And hey, on the topic of strange Snow White-related entertainment…..I found myself searching out this YouTube clip today, courtesy of snowlowe2:

Gotta love that hat in the finale!

Merryweather, Princess Aurora and Fauna visit the Aquarium during Dragon*Con 2009. (Hey Ken, did you see them? Got pics?)

Photo by pausitivespace on Flickr, hat tip to BoingBoing.

The one thing I hate about the idea that DisneyQuest will probably eventually close is that I fear they won’t move Cyberspace Mountain, but just let it die. I love Cyberspace Mountain, and was sad this summer that it’s gone from Walt Disney Studios Paris. Bill Nye in French, how can you argue with that?

But….looks like they might have me covered, what with the new The Sum of All Thrills design-your-own-roller-coaster attraction coming soon to Epcot. And being a geek, I’m intrigued by the math angle they seem to be working. From Raytheon’s press release:

“The Sum of All Thrills” will be a core component of Raytheon’s MathMovesU program, an initiative designed to engage middle school students in math and science, and help create the next generation of innovators for the U.S. It will be located in the INNOVENTIONS pavilion at Epcot, a unique area of the park that contains 100,000 square feet of interactive, hands-on exhibits that allow visitors to celebrate the inspiration and innovation that improve their lives and expand their horizons.

If you’re not a nerd, you might find the photo in the Orlando Sentinel a little sexier.