Hello, it’s me, The Blog Complainer. I have been quite busy this week keeping up with five important tasks:

1. Eating, sleeping and every other basic human need.
2. Tying up social and work commitments for the year so I can chill out for the holidays.
3. Me time. (Which is mainly gaming and writing my book.)
4. Planning for what to do in the following week.
5. Lastly, keeping up with all of the movies and shows I want to watch.

Except for number 2 of course that’s pretty much how all of my weeks go. I won’t bore you any longer with my personal life let’s talk about Disney+ shall we.

At the time of creating this post Disney+ has only been out for just under a week where I live. It’s another streaming service that you will have to add to the load of streaming services that you already juggle with your bank account. God I miss the simpler times when there was just one really expensive box that had all of the cool stuff you wanted, but it had ads on it so I’m not sure now.

I don’t ask for much when I stream something. All I want is an easy interface to navigate, a good selection of things to watch and for it to stream with no hiccups to upset my chill-out time. As a service Disney+ works well enough that every time I log in I feel more forgiving of it’s faults.

I tested Disney+ on my iPad, my laptop, a chrome-caster and my PlayStation 4. All of them had issues, whether that be a sound delay or crashing because I jumped back too far. The laptop has the better interface in my opinion as it’s only a few clicks to access everything I need, while the other versions involved going through about five different menus just to change my profile picture!

So what does Disney+ offer? For only 9 bucks a month you will have access to almost every Disney property you can think of. From all of your favourite Disney classics to those obscure ones that you remember from your childhood. ‘Oh yeah, I remember Cool Runnings, wonder if it holds up?‘ There is also some Disney Channel stuff too even some old ones like Hanna Montana or Kim Possible.

If you’re not into those there is always the National Geographic. If you want to know where all the action is try out the Star Wars or Marvel content. Pretty much all of the movies are here and a good variety of TV shows from both companies, so this should keep you occupied for a while. Though with Marvel it’s only the Disney portion currently available. If you wanted to watch the new Spider-Man films then too bad because Sony owns that! There are Spider-Man TV shows available, but not the best one unfortunately. If you wanted the X-Men then you’re going to be disappointed too.

Let’s talk about the Fox stuff as the list is very small. It’s only just romantic comedies and Home Alone. As of now the most adult thing on here besides maybe the MCU movies is Avatar and The Simpsons. These stand out as being the most different on this service. The Simpsons is probably the only reason why the kid filter exists. I don’t mind revisiting things from my childhood for some quick nostalgia, but I’m a big boy now and I need more than The Simpsons although I must say Disney+ is way more generous with the 29 seasons of the Simpsons on offer as opposed to Netflix offering just 5 seasons of South Park and Spongebob.

Finally let’s end this with the Originals because Netflix already took the [Insert your company name] Original format. To be honest this section is quite disappointing. This may have something to do with over half of this stuff coming out in 2023. As of now I feel I am too much of a fossil to get behind most of this stuff. The Kristen Bell show, the Forky shorts and most of these kid centric shows do not appeal to me. The High School Musical show and The World According to Jeff Goldblum do spark my curiosity enough to check them out when I am bored.

Now for what I did check out, starting with the worst one The Lady and the Tramp remake. I reviewed the original movie over 8 months ago and can’t remember much about it except it was definitely better than this. It has the same problem as those other remakes, it feels soulless and animated dogs look better than weird looking real dogs. Lady and The Tramp did have a better connection in this one but they sounded a lot more wooden. It’s like watching two empty vessels trying to recreate James Cameron’s Titanic.

It’s pretty damn forgettable. There’s little to take away from it except the songs were okay and there are two gay dogs! Finally South Park isn’t the only one to discuss the very important subject matter of homosexual dogs!

Lastly I watched the first three episodes of The Mandalorian and it’s definitely the selling point for this entire service. So far I’m not overly wrapped in it, but I think it really deserves some credit for feeling like it was made by real humans, and more importantly Star Wars fans, instead of some factory robots. It’s a slow moving show with a faceless straight man we know nothing about just doing his thing and it’s uneventfully boring.

I don’t mind The Mandalorian guy. He is the best Disney Star Wars protagonist thus far. My problem is it just isn’t that interesting watching some guy walking for a bit then having to fight some ugly CGI creature. That’s episode 2 in a nutshell! That’s for video games! In a show you need something interesting to happening on the planet or else have some side character for the main guy to play off.

It’s too late now, but this show would be way better if every episode was standalone but with some overarching narrative building up over the whole season. Every episode can have a fun adventure, a new set of characters and we can have a chance to develop this one note main man. Though episode 3 did look more promising so we’ll see how this plays out.

My final thought on Disney+ goes as follows:

• I’m a bit old for all of the content, but I’ll hang onto it because it’s cheap and it might come in handy later on when more interesting originals pop-up.

That Lady and the Tramp movie gets a 2 or a 3/10 because I want these abominations to spend an eternity with all of the other forgotten Disney movies on this service. The Mandalorian gets a so far not too shabby rating from me and Disney+ as a whole gets a 6/10. Nice try Disney, but Netflix has much more variety to sink my teeth into. More Disney related content coming very soon and I have been The Blog Complainer, signing out.