It’s 1993, and your grandma reveals she bought you a VHS copy of Aladdin. You’re thrilled until you discover it’s a cheap 40-minute knock-off that has nothing to do with Aladdin, Jasmine, and Abu. It’s called a mockbuster: It’s totally legal, quite terrible, and the reason it exists is absolutely wild.
Mockbusters are cheaply made copycats of popular Hollywood movies that first got big in the 1950s with creature features and other B-movies. Since then, we’ve seen everything from Transmorphers to Snakes on a Train. But the biggest mockbuster cash cow is ripping off Disney movies like Mulan, The Lion King, and Aladdin. There are two main ways smaller studios try to do this—sometimes, they’ll change the marketing for one of their existing movies to resemble something Disney is getting ready to release. Then, there are those that are seemingly made for the sole purpose of glomming onto the success of Disney’s biggest films.
-Beth Elderkin
Read more:
https://io9.gizmodo.com/the-wonderful-and-surprisingly-legal-world-of-disney-1844470729
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