Taking a look at some Princess merchandise
Putting out Princess merchandise is like printing money for Disney. You can go to any Disney Store and at least a third of it is filled with princess items from clothes, shoes, dolls, toys, sleepwear, make-up kits, purses, candy, CDs, key chains, books of all kinds to, of course, DVDs. At the parks, whole stores are dedicated to these gals. Stage productions and ice spectacles have been created to feed this frenzy. Disney has now started a Pirate & Princess ticket event at the Magic Kingdom. An odd combo for sure, but a hit nonetheless.
I will focus specifically on the DVDs Disney has put out to take advantage of the interest seemingly every young girl in the US of A has in them. More specifically, I will discuss the Princess Stories and Princess Sing-A-Longs which my daughter absolutely loves. For older girls, Disney has recently released Princess Party DVDs which are more interactive with games, recipes and the like. Those are a little advanced for my toddler but I’m sure I’ll get there someday as she gobbles up anything with Cinderella, Jasmine, Belle, Aurora, or Ariel on it.
The sing alongs are fun for the little ones in particular. They take a portion of the movies and plunk it down like a music video with the words scrolling on the bottom. Volume One contains many of the classics like “Whole New World”, “Beauty and the Beast”, and “Once Upon a Dream.” Volume Two has less of the classics and more second-string songs like “Something There” or songs from direct-to-dvd sequels such as Cinderella 2. Volume 3 really delves into obscurity. Presumably a Volume 4 would be scraping the bottom of the barrel. Still kids love them and there are some fun bonus features like karaoke and dance-alongs.
The Stories line of DVDs is less compelling. These invariably include three or four stories, two of which always seem to be from the Disney Channel series-Little Mermaid and Aladdin. Unfortunately, the animation on those shows was less than spectacular as were the basic plots. There are also stories based on older personalities like Cinderella and Snow White. However, these are simple narration over slow moving frames much like someone reading a picture book. It seems to me that Disney could have put in a little effort and created short cartoons instead of cheaping out on us. Some of them are interactive to a small degree and kids, anyway, seem to like them, which is I suppose the point.
Today’s merchandise review is by Mike, contributing writer to Mouse Extra