Last year, I learned that Disney wanted to trademark the Día de los Muertos, a very Mexican tradition that focuses on remembering the dead, celebrating their lives and gathering family and friends to do so in a lively manner, full of color and with specific rituals. They backed off after the article I wrote exposing it (although at the time I just thought of it as a cool way for kids all over the world to learn about this), mostly because it prompted a petition online that got thousands of signatures and a lot of angry Disney fans.
Of course, I later understood that you couldn’t trademark a tradition like that. Commercializing on the folklore of a culture to benefit a major company and not precisely the country where that tradition hails from, just wasn’t right. Disney pulled back altogether and decided not to touch the subject again. Although it was a victory for the Día de los Muertos advocates, it was a great loss for Disney. Not too long after the whole situation blew up, calmed down and eventually was forgotten, Fox announced that they’re releasing an animated film based on the Día de los Muertos. READ MORE.
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