Walt Disney Company’s 100^th anniversary is a major milestone celebrated by Once Upon a Studio (Dan Abraham and Trent Correy, 2023). Although the hand-drawn animated short features 543 characters, it pays too little attention to the popular over-the-top antagonists even though some helm live-action films, reimagining them as antiheroes. Studying these characters allows us to examine changing attitudes toward habitual self-commemorators and the history of Disney’s self-commemoration.

Disney has often used new media platforms to circulate its desired company voice, whether on broadcast TV for “The Fourth Anniversary Show” of Disneyland (1957) or Blu-ray for the 50^th Anniversary edition of Sleeping Beauty (2009) with a video for “Once Upon a Dream” by Emily Osment from Hannah Montana (2006-11). Studying anniversaries enables us to assess how content and promotion entwine in relation to ongoing, yet evolving franchise characters. As Matt Hills puts it, “the media anniversary is premised on highlighting cultural endurance.”[1] Anniversaries are opportunities for brand management, which Adam Arvidsson describes as guiding “the investment of affect on the part of consumers” and “creating affective intensity, an experience of unity between the brand and the subject.”[2] Writing about the affective appeal of Audrey Horne in the context of costume and production design for the 25th anniversary conference on Twin Peaks (University of Salford, 2015) led me to understand that characters become variants of the originals as they branch off online and circulate in ways that do not always match the original.

I hope the term variant called to mind an image of Loki variants in an array of memorable costumes from the Disney+ series Loki (2021-), which uses a time-travel premise to transform Loki from a Marvel antagonist into an antihero (one variant among many). The wildly divergent Lokis have taken on lives of their own out of proportion to their limited screentime in the actual series. Like Audrey Horne, the Lokis are characters ripe for what I call textural poaching: the practice of repurposing top-of-the-mind textural content—a series’ most arresting elements of costuming, set design, and dialogue—and posting it to a visual interface. I ask my students to study this practice, which “pivots on the appropriation of the textural elements of the look and feel of a shot or sequence of shots.”[3] It complements Henry Jenkins’ famous concept of textual poaching, which involves “appropriating elements of a story world or characterization and utilizing them within original content.”[4] My contention is that textural poaching results in the circulation of “a textural impression of a series” in a visual and tactile sense, but it also enables variants to circulate alongside the original, perhaps even becoming more affectively resonant.

My interest in textural poaching led to a course assignment to evaluate the textual poaching of characters as they exist within Google Image aggregation, Tumblr GIF sets, or memes. Students create a visual analysis project, which broadens the range of possible characters, creative works, and perspectives beyond the assigned course screenings. The aim is to foster a collaborative learning environment and transform students into knowledge producers because they present to the class, which then appraises a heterogenous array of characters and varied perspectives. The presentations open discussions about the appeal and the shortcomings of various characterizations from across Disney-controlled studios and allow students a broad view of decoding, especially by viewers who reshape what they see as part of their engagement.

I added a second assignment on affective texturality, asking students to locate crew interviews that highlight textural poaching by the production teams of Marvel’s first two original Disney+ series, WandaVision (2021) and Loki, each often recalled more for intriguing production design than storytelling. The class investigates what members of the WandaVision production team poached from actual sitcoms and what they reimagined. A Marvel Studios: Assembled (2021-) episode informs us that the variations are meant to suggest that the familiar sitcom elements from episodes and title designs are seen through the lens of Wanda’s affective attachments to television.

Addressing issues of meaningful diversity in sitcoms, we consider what the production team and actors encode. Of particular interest is commentary by Teyonah Parris, who plays Geraldine in Wanda’s post-racial, suburban sitcom alternate reality. We use Kristen J. Warner’s theory of plastic representation to assess her performance,[5] as Parris reveals which textural aspects of African American sitcom characters she borrowed to create her dual character. Parris’s performance becomes disruptive to a simple determination of which character acts as protagonist and antagonist. The decoding of what is happening in her WandaVision scenes becomes more complicated because the series acts as a launchpad for Parris’ character in The Marvels (Nia DaCosta, 2023).

With all the character re-imaginings happening at Marvel and Disney and as part of the gender coding assessments that run throughout the course, we turn to Loki, contrasting the changing representation of that character from film to the Disney+ streaming series. Students are invited to bring in curations on MCU characters or unexpected juxtapositions between them and other characters on Disney+, while I place the series in cluster with Sleeping Beauty (Clyde Geronimi, 1959), the two recent Maleficent antihero re-imaginings, and scenes from Once Upon a Time (ABC, 2011-18) and The Descendants movies (Disney Channel, 2015-2019, and future sequels). Comparing these different iterations of classic characters can be quite intriguing to students who raise points of analysis for textural poaching assignments, this time emphasizing costume and production design. My comparison of Loki and the animated Sleeping Beauty aims to raise awareness among students about the textural contributions of production designers and demonstrate that the two works are connected through their reliance on sumptuous production design that exceeds the boundaries of its function of serving the story.[6] Costuming is added to the mix through readings on costume as typage and excess given how the antagonists in each are associated with horns, which appear in different ways in the comics, animated film, and live-action film. Focusing on gender coding, the discussion expands to include the CGI helm of the antagonist Hela (Cate Blanchett) in Thor: Ragnarok (Taika Waititi, 2017), and the role of the film in the shift in Loki’s characterization.

Marvel created an alternate timeline for the streaming series’ Loki variant who branches off after the MCU events of 2012 by escaping the “sacred timeline.” He is immediately apprehended by the Time Variance Authority (TVA), where he later gains access to the archival footage of the post-2012 life of the original Loki. Screening the film archive inside Kasra Farahani’s beautifully designed Time Theater set serves several purposes. It is a “previously on” recap for viewers who have not seen or do not recall Loki’s “greatest hits” from the character’s decade-long film arc. It encourages viewers to watch other MCU films available on Disney+. It contributes to the character’s epiphany and elicits empathy from the viewer through a “ghosts of Christmas future” use of the pre-existing footage to alert variant Loki to what would have happened to him and his family in his original timeline.

The footage helps dismantle the ego of the Loki of the films and deflate his claims to destiny from his self-commemorative introduction: “I am Loki of Asgard, and I am burdened with Glorious Purpose.” This grandiose assertion has been integrated into many Loki memes. His status as fan favorite became obvious at the 2013 San Diego Comic-Con, as President of Marvel Studios Kevin Feige told Entertainment Weekly: “Did we know that after [Tom Hiddleston] was the villain in two movies, he would be bringing thousands of people to their feet in Hall H, in costume, chanting [Loki’s] name? No!” As the Loki variant on Disney+, Hiddleston is paired with Owen Wilson’s TVA analyst Mobius M. Mobius in a familiar television duo: the mismatched investigators. That they are often texturally poached is not surprising given how appealing Wilson is from his offbeat characterizations in Wes Anderson films like Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) and his roles in Night at The Museum (Shawn Levy, 2006) and Pixar’s Cars (John Lasseter, 2006). In 2021, a subscriber could find these films on Disney+, indicating that casting is another form of Disney cross-promotion.

Other units of the course provide opportunities for curations whether on the baked-in cross-promotion of Wilson and other actors on Disney+[7] or the appeal of the Loki-Mobius friendship in light of both the MCU’s pivot toward an ensemble of Super Friends and Disney Channel’s framing of its sitcom stars as “Friends for Change.”[8] Students might also address how the integration of pre-existing MCU footage into Loki parallels the kind of editing that Walt Disney favored for episodes of his television anthology series. This curation approach to teaching Disney+ gives students opportunities to share their diverse perspectives as they decode characterization, industry concerns, and cultural ideologies from 100 years of content, some of it featured on the main splash screens and some buried deep in the streaming library.

1. Matt Hills, Doctor Who: The Unfolding Event—Marketing, Merchandising and Mediatizing a Brand Anniversary (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2015), 4. ↑

2. Adam Arvidsson, Brands: Meaning and Value (New York: Routledge, 2006), 93. ↑

3. Definitions are from Jennifer Gillan, “Textural Poaching Twin Peaks: The Audrey Horne Sweater Girl GIFs,” Series: International Journal of TV Serial Narratives 2, no. 2 (Winter 2016): 09-24, DOI 10.6092/issn.2421-454X/6588. ↑

4. Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (New York: Routledge, 1992). ↑

5. Kristen J. Warner, “In the Time of Plastic Representation,” Film Quarterly 71, no. 2 (2017): 32–37, https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.2017.71.2.32. ↑

6. We look at production design by Loki’s Kasra Farahani and cinematography by Autumn Durald Arkapaw. We consider contributions of Eyvind Earle, Mary Blair, John Hench, and Marc Davis to the textures of Sleeping Beauty. We discuss what led the hand-inked film to be designed for presentation in Super Technirama 70 and for the Loki team to design some practical sets rather than use new ILM technology. ↑

7. Jennifer Gillan, Disney+ Reassembled: Lessons Learned from Netflix, Marvel, and Pixar Branding (New York: Routledge 2024), makes this argument and discusses Parris’ performance in WandaVision. ↑

8. Jennifer Gillan, Television Brandcasting: The Return of the Content-Promotion Hybrid (New York: Routledge, 2015) features a chapter on the Disney Channel Friend Economy and character brandcasting and one on Walt Disney’s 1950s hosted lead-ins. ↑