Mouse Ears Over Moscow

Sunday, June 3rd, 2007

While we shouldn’t expect to see Mouse Ears Over Moscow, Disney is moving into Russia:

Now, Walt Disney Co. is getting ready to do just that. The creator of Mickey Mouse and Cinderella is planning to sprinkle its moviemaking fairy dust in the land of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. By yearend, Disney expects to start shooting its first film in Russia with Russian-speaking actors, likely based on traditional children’s stories. “We want Russian families to go to the cinema to watch a Disney movie, but this movie need not be produced in Hollywood,” says Marina Jigalova-Ozkan, managing director of Disney’s Russian operation.

The film—the first of many, the company says, though it’s not revealing details—is part of Disney’s new push in Russia. The entertainment giant opened its Moscow office just over a year ago and now employs more than 50 people. A new Russian-language Disney TV channel is due to be launched this autumn. In January the company teamed up with Sony Pictures Entertainment to create a joint venture for distributing Disney films in Russia. And Disney on Ice, a skating show featuring the likes of Snow White and Sleeping Beauty, came to Russia for the first time in May, selling out shows in Moscow and St. Petersburg. “Russia is a priority country,” says Andy Bird, president of Walt Disney International. “We see the potential for growth for several years down the line.”
[...]
Today, Disney is making real money in Russia. Overall box office sales in former Soviet lands are expected to hit $590 million this year, up from just $18 million in 1999. Disney has benefited more than most from that jump. Its box-office receipts last year climbed to $50 million as Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest became Russia’s best-selling foreign film ever, with sales of $31 million. The latest installment promises to do even better: Helped by a barrage of prerelease publicity, including billboards four stories high, the swashbuckler attracted 2.3 million viewers and $14 million in sales on its opening weekend, a Russian record.

Posted in Media | No Comments »

gaikokumaniakku: >One could protest that for every disgruntled student who cuts class, there’s an enthusiastic student sucking the marrow out of college. >what, if anything, is “the marrow of college”? The marrow is the culture that values the knowledge that can be preserved in books. Colleges still have some of their old books of knowledge, but I question whether the people in charge of the colleges are teaching students to engage with the knowledge. It seems the desire to learn things that are...
gaikokumaniakku: >“Science!” Has died and been buried. …46 years of my life… It is better to struggle for a worthy vision of truth discovery than to surrender and willingly embrace ignorance. This gives us a small measure of cold comfort as we endure the collapse of civilization. The *spirit* that moved Galileo is not dead. We may not live to see it manifested. We may die in the smoldering ruins of decadence, but the spirit will prevail even if we might not live to see it.
gaikokumaniakku: So bankers trick young people into getting loans in order to chase useless diplomas. But Caplan does not suggest hanging the bankers. Why does Caplan love bankers so much? Perhaps he should be persuaded to write a follow-up book titled _The_Case_Against_Usury_ .
Isegoria: That Onion piece is from 2003, so The Simpsons beat it by three years.
James James: “The Simpsons” made the same joke in 2000: President Lisa Simpson: As you know, we’ve inherited quite a budget crunch from President Trump. How bad is it, Secretary Van Houten? Milhouse: [shows a chart] We’re broke. Lisa: The country is broke? How can that be? Milhouse: Well, remember when the last administration decided to invest in our nation’s children? Big mistake.
Bob Sykes: Combined with the replication crisis, it appears that “Science!” Has died and been buried. Vox Day’s anti-science diatribes are beginning to sound like the centrist, moderate position. 46 years of my life…
Bruce: State education fills the niche of a state church. Patronage for bossy verbal loyalists. Like a state church, it may fulfil higher functions as well.
Phileas Frogg: “Many Americans imagine public education operates on a shoestring budget. Private education, in contrast, looks so pricey it’s implausible government does much to make it affordable. Both perceptions are wildly at odds with the facts.” I can confirm this by direct personal experience. Calculating the cost per student for the local public school district for which I serve as a board member, you get $30,000/student annually. The local Catholic school I taught at managed to spend...
Wanweilin: Bounded freedom, it’s called liberty.
Jim: Phileas Frogg: “No, just start at Wikipedia, move onto google, try archive or project Gutenberg, and finally, just buy a book from Amazon on the cheap.” In other words, what, if anything, is “the marrow of college”?
Phileas Frogg: A guy standing there lecturing, even a highly entertaining and captivating lecturer, is competing with the internet, both from an information efficiency and entertainment standpoint. He’s screwed. Best I can tell it looks like auditing rates have dropped by around 40% since 2005, and I can imagine they were higher even before that if we go further back. Add in the fact that college education has been, “democratized,R 21; and universalized, and it’s no wonder fewer...
McChuck: It’s hard enough to figure out what classes are even being offered by the average university. Learning who teaches them, along with where and when the classes are held, is generally a secret more closely held than most military plans.
Phileas Frogg: Raw ability vs Signals about ability Some disassociation is inevitable as per Goodhart’s Law, but total alienation is practically impossible (despite some of our best efforts).
Bob Sykes: Which degree you get is far more predictive of future income than mere levels of degrees. Degree field is also an indirect measure of IQ. It requires substantially more native intelligence to earn a mathematics or physics degree at any level than to get a Ph. D. In the humanities or social sciences.
Felix: “I don’t think our public schools have been working hard to assimilate everyone into our shared culture in a long, long time.” The key word is “our”. Schools, world-wide, certainly teach a shared culture. Out in the sticks there may be a few unenlightened, deplorables of the lower orders who have issues with that shared culture. But, pfft.
Gaikokumaniakku: “In 2003, the United States Department of Education gave about 18,000 randomly selected Americans the National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL).” Of course, these must have been 18,000 randomly selected white Americans, to make a reasonable comparison with the historically white population of the majority of America, right? … right? The ghost of William Shockley is hovering silently over me and shaking his head from side to side in a manner I can only interpret as ominous.
Phileas Frogg: Every educational concern or observation in the modern world comes down to this: “Unless and until we finally accept that people are no more equal in their educability and intelligence than they are in their ability to sprint 100m, dunk a basketball or stand 7 feet tall, we will continue to waste limited time, energy, and resources on solving a problem without a solution: men are not equal.” God needs all sorts. And yet, every class of person projects their narrow measure of...
Jim: The labor market pays you for what you know now… The “labor market” is a centrally planned, authoritarianly organized corporate economy, a free market for employers as against employees, not a free market for employees as against employers. Fortunately, the Singularity is poised to render mutational load a thing of the past.
Isegoria: Caplan’s response would be that almost no one uses any of those skills, and those skills don’t generalize or transfer, at least not for most people most of the time.
Gaikokumaniakku: Geometry can be taught in many ways. Knowledge of proofs might be more useful than knowing the volume of a sphere. A bigger problem is that school is intended to reinforce the social order. If schools taught students how to resist cops and lawyers, government would find maintaining power to be more difficult. Another angle is skills versus facts. I probably don’t need to know the year in which Shakespeare wrote (a fact) but I certainly do benefit from understanding how Shakespeare...

Isegoria

Mouse Ears Over Moscow

Leave a Reply

Search

Recent Comments

Categories