Disney just cancelled a bunch of shows, including The Amazing Adventures of Sparky, Inspector Spectre, Knight Boat - The Crime Solving Boat, and Magalla Mugoola Mo. All classics, shot down in their prime. It’s a terrible loss for streaming, for television, for art, and for our culture as we know it. Now we’ll never find out what happened to the cat in Inspector Spectre. The thing is, all of these shows are made up, and that’s how these companies get you. They quietly cut shows few people watch, and everyone shrugs and says ‘who cares, it’s only Magalla Mugoola Mo’. But the fact these companies create and then erase these shows so casually is dangerous, and we should all care.
What Disney is doing is so much worse than cancelling too. Shows get cancelled all the time, even highly successful ones. It’s show business, ain’t no shows without the business. But cancelling just means they’re not making any more. It hurts when it happens to your favourites, but that’s life. What Disney’s doing is cutting, meaning these shows will be removed from Disney Plus entirely. Several of them were made specifically for the platform, were never shown on network television, and had no physical media made for them.
These shows haven’t just been cancelled. They have been obliterated. All that hard work, gone. Vanished. As if they never existed. Nobody who worked on these shows will ever get to show their children, nobody who loved them will ever get to find comfort in them again, no generation will ever turn them into cult classics. They’re just not here anymore. For people who worked on them behind the scenes, it also makes it harder for them to prove they worked on these shows at all.
The most headline grabbing show is Willow, given that unlike Inspector Spectre, most people have heard of it. Willow was a continuation of the classic ‘80s fantasy movie, and while it didn’t get the sorts of numbers for Disney that Stranger Things gets for Netflix, it seemed to have decent popularity. Maybe with a strong second season, a promo push, or just the luxury of time, it might have found its crowd. Now it’s dead and its ghost has been exorcised from existence.
Willow is particularly tragic because there was a lot of passion behind it. We can get used to labelling streaming shows as algorithmic and soulless, but Willow was a labour of love. I spoke to the show’s creator Jonathan Kasdan before it aired, and he told me about the connection he made with Willow as a kid. When working on Star Wars, undeniably a much bigger project, he kept begging for a shot at Willow, earning the blessing of George Lucas and getting star Warwick Davis to come back.
While Willow was technically an adaptation of an existing IP, it felt very different to the endless spin-offs we get on streaming. This was not executives sitting around asking ‘how do we get more Star Wars’, this was a man who wanted to create something meaningful based on what he loved as a child. And the show was fine! Good in parts, even! It felt like a first series that was finding its feet and trying to figure itself out, that likely would have improved with a second shot.
Instead, it’s dead. Who cares about the breakout performance from Ruby Cruz, now lost to time? Who cares that Erin Kellyman, quietly one of the most interesting emerging actors, showcased yet more range here? Who cares that this was one of the few pieces of live-action, Disney-made media that had queer relationships? It’s dead. More than dead. Evaporated.
There are 30 shows in total, and Willow is no more special than the others, it just makes for an interesting case study because it was given so little time. It’s less than six months since Willow dropped, and now it’s being wiped from the face of the Earth. It’s a desperately cruel cost cutting measure, and feels maliciously timed during the writer’s strike. But in doing so, it shows the importance of the strike. The studios hold all the power now - too much power. Whether you care about Willow, or indeed any of the 30 shows, doesn’t matter. If it happened to these shows, it can happen to yours too. All that work, gone.
Netflix has been under fire for cancelling too many projects, especially those before their time - I maintain that Cowboy Bebop had a camp vibe that, while different from the stellar anime, could have worked. It had a kitschy lil Robert Rodriquez thing going on. But it was cancelled while still in its release window, which is just monstrously stupid. It tells audiences ‘don’t bother’ before they’ve even given it a chance, and earns you nothing in the process. Still, at least those episodes are still online and not washed away like a stain.
Disney’s decision underlines our current media climate. Everything is content and everything is arbitrary. Cancellation was the way of the old world, when networks had specific programming slots and advertising dollars and new projects snd star vehicles and things were more tangible. Cancellation meant ‘don’t make any more’. But now that there are no time slots, no lead-ins, no carry over audience, no prime time, just content content content, the rules of success are different. And they’re secrets. If you fall short, you don’t just stop making things. The things you made get destroyed. It’s what the algorithm demands. That should scare you, whether you liked Willow or not.