As you may or may not know, Disney+ is changing things up with its next new original show, Prop Culture. Premiering tomorrow, all eight episodes of this behind-the-scenes exploration of different Disney live-action films will be available to stream. I’ve seen all eight episodes, and wanted to share some of my thoughts on the show today.
For the most part, I would recommend the project with some reservations. If you like films such as The Muppet Movie, Mary Poppins, Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, and Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, you may be quite pleased by learning about props and sets from these films, in some cases from the people involved in helping create them or use them on screen. The episodes are all around 30 minutes long, and efficiently paced and produced so that the energy never quite flags.
And depending on the film, there’s a surprising amount of major players involved in sharing their memories. Christopher Lloyd and Charles Fleischer talk about Who Framed Roger Rabbit in one episode, and Danny Elfman, Henry Selick, and Chris Sarandon do the same for Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas. Hell, in the Honey, I Shrunk the Kids episode, the host talks to Rick Moranis, who’s been fairly reclusive for the last two decades.
However. (You knew there was going to be a “however”.) There are a few areas in which the show feels a little too slight, at least for my tastes. At the very least, there are questions I could not stop asking myself. My first question was about the host, Dan Lanigan. I’m unfamiliar with him — and a brief search of him on Google implies that his online presence isn’t terribly huge — and I found him to be…y’know, fine. I did, however, wonder what this show would look like with a more recognizable host, or perhaps someone with a bit more comfort as an interviewer.
While Lanigan’s clearly a prop-collector at heart, a good deal of what he has to do on the show is talk with creatives about their experiences, and the results are a bit too surface-level. (You could, probably accurately, point out that any such show on Disney+ might seem surface-level, no matter the host.) There are a few points at which Lanigan reminded me of a much friendlier version of Al McWhiggin, the guy from Toy Story 2 who steals Sheriff Woody to sell him to a toy museum in Japan. He’s an extreme collector, at one point showing a chimney-sweep prop to one of the choreographers of Mary Poppins, who touches it with his begrudging acceptance. It’s not an intentional comparison, but one I couldn’t help but make.
The larger question I have is in regards to who Lanigan and the Disney+ team were able to get for interviews. As I mentioned above, they talked to Rick freaking Moranis, which isn’t exactly the hardest interview in the world, but it’s sure as hell not the easiest. Yet there are some notable absences from other episodes that made me wonder what happened.
I mentioned above that Henry Selick appears in the Nightmare Before Christmas episode, which shocked me. Here’s why: the episode up to his appearance goes out of its way to emphasize that this is Tim Burton’s story, never mind that he didn’t direct the film. Guess who doesn’t show up in the episode? Tim Burton. Most of the episodes, frankly, have some notable omissions in terms of performers and filmmakers, from the two leads of Mary Poppins to the directors of Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Pirates of the Caribbean and the star of Tron. (I know: Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke are getting on in years. But Dick Van Dyke filmed a Bernie Sanders campaign ad earlier this year. He’s clearly able to chime in when he wants.)
There are also niggling little errors that confused me. Lanigan, in voiceover, mentions that The Nightmare Before Christmas was released in 1991, which is surprising to hear since the film was released in 1993, not 1991. I had to rewind my screener multiple times to make sure I wasn’t making that mistake up. I hope they’ve fixed it in between the screener and the version you see. Who knows.
Anyway. Prop Culture is an interesting show. I hope it comes back for a second season. And I realize that some of the critiques above are largely impossible to resolve. It’s worth watching. But only just.