Disney is everywhere — so much so that even saying that seems redundant. The company has had a meteoric rise in recent years, with 9 of the 10 highest-grossing films of all time directly tied to their company (Jurassic World being the only exception). Unlike many other classic film houses that have produced box office-topping blockbusters, however, Disney is far more obsessed with image. Disney is family-friendly, Disney is clean, Disney is old, jolly “Uncle Walt” and a permanently smiling Mickey Mouse. This image is omnipresent whenever the company creates a documentary, from Walt Disney’s The Magical World of Disney to modern Disney Plus shows like The Imagineering Story. However, there’s a new generation of documentaries coming out, ones that aren’t afraid to shine a light on Disney’s dirty laundry and many mistakes. These documentaries aren’t found in movie theaters, nor on any streaming service on the market — instead they’re on YouTube, a new, more focused and inquisitive look at the company and its history coming not from the mouse’s mouth, but from the fans themselves.

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YouTube Allows Creators To Be Niche but Still Find an Audience

There’s a bit of a joke on the internet that for whatever strange obscure topic one can think of, there’s an hours-long YouTube documentary dissecting it. These videos (often called video essays) cover a myriad of topics, with creators going deep in depth on any topic one can think of. The wonder of the internet is that even if these videos' focuses are incredibly niche and small, their viewer count and audience engagement are anything but. One might balk at creators like Harris Michael Brewis (known online as Hbomberguy), who produce approaching two-hour long videos on topics like the origin of a sound effect in Roblox, but that video is sitting at around six million views at the time of writing. When it comes to YouTube, the customer is not only always right, but always catered to.

Without having to justify the project to any middle manager or wary producer, creators can get as niche as they wish when analyzing content that they find interesting. As is the case for one of the most successful Disney YouTubers in recent memory, Kevin Perjurer, creator of the immensely successful channel Defunctland. The channel’s primary focus is on (as the name suggests) defunct and out-of-service theme park attractions or theme parks themselves. His topics range from immense well-known failures such as Action Park (which has its own separate documentary Class Action Park) to far more obscure duds such as the low-budget Pennsylvanian dark ride Garfield’s Nightmare. It might seem like the channel is too niche to support a healthy fanbase, but many of his videos have view counts in the millions, with one even exceeding over sixteen million views, this video being the 1 hour 43 minute Disney Fastpass: A Complicated History. This video is not about any specific theme park attraction failure, but the psychology of queuing and the now-defunct "Fastpass" system.

The documentary’s premise feels like it should be, by all metrics, a boring and listless mess. Imagine having to pitch the idea of an hour-and-a-half-long video about something as boring as lining up for an amusement park attraction to a studio. However, the video remains the channel’s most-watched video by a factor of around 12 million views, and for good reason. While the documentary’s immediate premise might turn one off, it’s in its execution that the gold is found — diving deep into the psychology of how these complicated systems work while also shining a light on the manipulative tactics that the company has used in recent years to fleece more money out of its parkgoers. The passion in the project was so strong that the YouTuber even paid an engineer to design an entire virtual software program to simulate theme park attendance. It’s a story that’s not only fascinating but would only be possible in a fully creator-owned platform like YouTube.

These YouTube Documentaries Balance Nostalgia With Legitimate Criticism

There’s been a few major Disney documentaries made by the studio itself in recent years, one of the most recent ones being Leslie Iwerks’ 2019 Disney Plus docuseries The Imagineering Story. Like Defunctland, the docu-series delves into how the biggest Disney theme parks were designed and made, with the assistance of interviews and scores of archival footage. While the series is an interesting watch, and more candid than Disney usually allows, there’s still that Disney “sheen” attached to it. The series feels a bit too precious with some of its source material and doesn’t feel as comprehensive as a documentary about such a big company with its fair share of missteps could be. The series leaves out a few big debacles and disasters that the company would prefer forgotten, which leaves the usefulness and bias of the series itself up for serious debate.

All the problems with the official releases are absent in fan-made content such as Defunctland; the disasters aren’t to be avoided, they’re the main attraction. Black eyes to the company, such as the disastrous launches of parks such as Eurodisney (now Disneyland Paris) and Hong Kong Disneyland, are given full videos to chronicle their failures on the channel, the former even getting multiple parts to showcase the full-scale of the debacle. However, one thing that sets the series apart is that all the criticism and documentation on failure come from a place of deep heart and clear affection for these attractions and understanding for the people who get excited about them. Perjurer never seems to place himself on a level above his audience or his topics; he can joke about these things, but it always feels like he has the cred to properly do so. Like other YouTubers such as Jenny Nicholson, there’s a palpable heart, passion and charm to all of these videos that makes one care about these things even if you didn’t have an opinion on them before.

Another such video that’s proven to be a success was Perjurer’s recent investigative dive into the history behind the Disney Channel theme song. The channel is no doubt a nostalgic piece of history for many and Perjurer again doesn’t short-change or wave off any of this when creating his documentary. Rather the video acts as a counterpoint to criticism of some things as “low art” when they still matter to their respective audience as much if not more than “true art.” It does the legwork that a corporation like Disney doesn’t in terms of properly crediting artists and creators that contributed to its success while further showcasing just how deep and insightful these kinds of documentaries are despite being on YouTube.

It’s the clear passion, the love for the work mixed with the professional edge and ability to speak truthfully that makes these documentaries and analysis videos so much more engaging than any corporate-approved documentary that the mouse itself could put out. Disney is a huge part of our lives these days, whether we like it or not; it’s a monolithic titan of our current culture, whether it’s the parks, their movies, their TV shows, anything. With any goliath, we need a countermeasure, something that can properly point out the cracks and missteps in something so unapproachable and huge. Defunctland fills that niche quite well, and here’s hoping that it remains open to the public for a very long time.