On Tuesday, Nov. 12, all of our childhood and current favorites was made available at the push of a button when the highly anticipated Disney+ streaming service launched.
Robert Iger, CEO of The Walt Disney Company, announced Disney+ roughly a year ago — and the hype train was on the tracks immediately.
A feature of Disney+ is that it has all of the Disney Channel original movies and TV shows, not to mention the entire library of Disney and Pixar animated classics. That means we get to be welcomed back into worlds like “Hannah Montana,” “Suite Life of Zack & Cody” and “Wizards of Waverly Place.”
Marvel Studios and Star Wars also have a multitude of original content that will eventually become available, but the pilot episode of the new Star Wars show “The Mandalorian” from show-runner Jon Favreau was available at launch. The first episode of “The Mandalorian” was good, not great, but I’m still excited for the rest of the season and I think it shows a lot of promise.
A plus is that all of the original shows on the service will be released weekly.
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The layout and design of Disney+ is easy to navigate and is separated into categories of Marvel, Star Wars, Disney and Pixar. As soon as I downloaded it onto my Fire TV and signed in, I spent probably half an hour just basking in the glorious content that is going to most likely drop my productivity by about 80%.
Once you click into the Marvel category, for instance, you have access to not just the majority of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) catalogue, but also classic Marvel animated shows like “X-Men,” “Spiderman” and “The Fantastic Four.”
You can also watch a mini documentary on the future of the MCU through Disney+ titled “Marvel Studios: Expanding the Universe.” The MCU TV shows won’t be available until 2021, but the movies and cartoon shows alone are enough to get your Marvel fix.
Same goes for Star Wars. As of now, eight of the 10 films in the franchise are available, along with the animated television shows. The Skywalker saga comes to an end in December, and Disney+ has everything you would need to re-watch before the release of the movie.
The Disney and Pixar animated library is fully available on Disney+ with the earliest movies like “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” and the most recent “Ralph Breaks the Internet.”
Disney+ has a crazy amount of movies I’ve never heard of. Am I going to watch them? You bet.
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One nitpick I have would be that there is no recently watched or continue watching section as there is on Netflix. It’s hard to know where you left off on whatever show you were watching.
Hopefully that will be addressed in a future update.
Disney+ is ad-free and costs $6.99 a month, compared to the $13.99 for Netflix and $11.99 for Hulu. It is available on platforms like Roku’s, Xbox, Playstation, Amazon Fire TVs, iPhones and Androids. For Verizon Unlimited customers, the service also provides a free trial for a year as well.
With a multitude of original and classic content, Disney+ brings access to iconic films and TV shows. Star Wars and Marvel providing original series will certainly peak the interest of a lot of people, and if that doesn’t do it, classic movies like “The Lion King,” “Toy Story” and “Finding Nemo” will certainly be enough.
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