Just saw their ad-they are now pushing “Cinderella”. Now, Disney has a vast portfolio of films and TV shows, dating back to the 1940’s. Since much of this stuff is targeted at children, they can pull this stuff out every few years, and it is essentially “new”-to the current generation of kids.
Do they have a formal schedule of what is to be released? For example, I have been waiting for the classic TV series (“The Scarecrow”) to come out-when will we see it? And the movie “Old Yeller”-anyone know when that is due back?
I wonder if an estimate has been made of the monetary worth of the vault-it must be immense.
I’m sure it’s all about popularity and what will sell. Disney is sitting on LOTS of old movies and shorts that probably won’t be released in a big way, ever. It was exciting a couple of years ago when they started putting out those metal-boxed “limited editions”, because we got to see things that we hadn’t in years, like the 1950s Disney looks at the future of Space, or the film The Reluctant Dragon (along with other behind-the-scenes pieces), or The Mickey Mouse Club.
All the Disney real Life Adventure stuff, including movies like Jungle Cat and Perri (about a squirrel, based on a book by the author of Bambi. A real-life Bambi makes a cameo appearance in it), or The Vanishing Prairie or White Wilderness* These have been made available on DVD, but they aren’t particularly well-distributed. To my utter astonishment, I find that The Sword and the Rose and Disney’s version of Rob Roy and The Island at the Top of the World have all been released on DVD. Getting these on DVD will likely prove to be complicated and will cost more than your usual DVDs.
*(especially the version with the infamous staged “Lemming Suicide” Did Disney Fake Lemming Suicide for the Nature Documentary 'White Wilderness'? | Snopes.com )
Artificial scarcity. The Disney Vault is even explicitly mentioned on that page. Since the releases out of the Disney vault are for a limited time, customers are urged to buy the new release of the old stuff right now, because dog knows when they’ll be available again.
The vault is kept in Scrooge McDuck’s basement.
Song of the South is kept out of circulation due to fears that it would be considered racist by today’s standards.
I imagine that White Wilderness will probably never again see wide release, now that it’s public knowledge that the lemmings were killed for no good reason.
Back in the 90’s when it was VHS and I was managing a Blockbuster Video, industry magazines often referred to 7 years as the timespan. I never actually did the math myself, but it felt about right.
It truly is a brilliant strategy - or was, before streaming and file sharing. People went rabid over some of the Disney Masterpiece Classics, and would offer me literally hundreds of dollars for, say, The Little Mermaid. They simply would not believe me when I told them that I could not get it for them because it wasn’t for sale, even to me.
The real downside was that it became impossible to *rent *these movies, too. People quickly realized that their best chance of owning The Little Mermaid was to rent it, not return it, and pay the $99.95 “replacement” cost that the computer assigned to all moratorium films. But since I couldn’t actually get a replacement, that spot on the wall was just empty for years. Not a single store in our district had a copy after 1994.
I guess no one ever heard of copying.
Did Disney ever put restrictions on the rental of such movies? The stolen situation notwithstanding, if Disney wanted to have them removed from the sale market for 7 years, they might want to do the same for the rental market.
OTOH, if they disappeared from the shelves anyway, it would serve their (Disney’s) purpose without pressure on the stores.
If you’ve never seen it, you owe yourself the Robert Smigel video parody that’s easily found online: just google “Robert Smigel” and “Disney Vault”
Disney’s been doing this since long before DVDs and even VCRs. Since at least the 60s, they’ve had a policy of re-releasing their animated films to theaters on a seven-year cycle, on the assumption that after seven years there will be plenty of children who has never seen the film, and new parents willing to take them.
When videos came along, Disney worried about how to keep this going. At the beginning, of course, people just rented videos, but Disney did not want them to be available for rental all the time (especially since they didn’t make any money from rentals). They came up with the Disney vault idea around then – rereleasing films on a schedule and then having them available for only a short time. They also came up with the idea of doing something to make the release different – usually digitally remastering the film, or giving special features.
When things went to DVD, they were more in control; people bought more than rented them, and by doing a little something to improve the film, they could go back to the seven-year (or whatever) schedule. As rentals vanish, Disney will be able to dictate what’s available and continue to make money, even when they can’t add anything to the film.
Which is silly because in order to be offended by the racism, you have to manage to stay awake long enough to see said racism. Song of the South should be sold as a cure for insomnia.
And anyway, fears of racism didn’t stop them from releasing Dumbo or Peter Pan on DVD.
And we’re seeing a new wrinkle in this w/ the re-released 3D versions of movies like Beauty & the Beast, Lion King, and Finding Nemo (and I’m sure there are more to come).
So you have to swim through a giant pile of money to get to it?
Remember, I’m talking VHS. And Disney VHS had that technology which made copies flash bright and dark and generally look like crap. I forget what it was called, but it really did make copies - at least copies that people could make at home - not very desirable.
Macrovision.
And the fears of racism didn’t stop them from putting the music and the characters from Song of the South in the Splash Mountain ride.
Most people already know this, but just in case. . .
It was legally released on VHS in the UK, and on Laserdisc in Asia. So there are legal copies of it out there. 
I think Disney’s offical position on SotS is “No comment.”
ETA: And, yeah, it’s actually not particularly good once you see it.
You don’t have to, but everybody does it.
I hate Disney and even I have to give them credit for that. Its a good business plan that understandably came from such an evil entity.
Allow me to introduce you to Amazon.com.