When Disney+ started, we paid $76.50, including taxes and things, for a year of service. For the second year, the price went up from $69.99 to $79.99. Which is a hefty jump to look at it, but over a year it’s more negligible. I have the money sitting in my bank account right now for next year’s Disney+ subscription. I don’t know exactly how much it’s going to be, because they don’t charge me until Sunday and therefore I don’t have the tax yet and don’t want to math. But this year, my membership will jump from $79.99 a year to a whopping $139.99 a year—and the service still isn’t what I expect of it.

I am, let’s be real, far from the only person to be observing that the movie selection on various streaming services is inferior to what we all kind of expect from them. However, that’s definitely part of my anger. When the service was announced, it was more or less promised that they would be opening the Vault in a way it had never been opened before. The implication, at least, was that Disney movies would become fully available. Now, there was the mumbling agreement that, no, that didn’t mean Song of the South, stop asking. But certainly you had every reason to expect that the entire catalog of the Official Disney Animated Canon would be available, and not even that is.

I am privileged enough to have next year’s Year of the Month stuff plotted out already. And, yes, it will once again include the occasional educational film that not even I expect to be accessible. (I think we’ve got a WWII VD short coming up in November! Also, um, a piece about a Song of the South rerelease.) On the other hand, a lot of it is just average midcentury live action stuff, and some of it is in the “never you mind how I’m getting it” category. Why should “Nature’s Strangest Creatures,” a True-Life Adventure, be missing?

Yes, the finale of Loki was emotionally devastating, the more so because my familiarity with Norse imagery made me get a reference or two I’m not sure everyone did. And I’d imagine those a shade younger than I are happy at seeing all their old Disney Channel favourites. And, sure, they did finally get around to adding Zorro, which is nice. However. The amount of Wonderful World of Disney on the channel is disheartening. It’s pathetically small, and while some of it has aged like milk (hi, Swamp Fox!), some of it is still as fun as it was the day it aired.

Also, that jump in cost is almost double what it started at in 2019. That is a huge jump. The content simply isn’t worth it, especially given they’ve been taken things off even though they insisted they wouldn’t. That, they did tell us. They lied. Now, I’m still paying that bill on Sunday. (It would be nice if you’d help out with it by contributing to my Patreon or Ko-fi!) We do use it, and after all it’s far from the only unnecessary Disney expense of my lifetime. But they need to recognize that the profit won’t increase forever, and they need to give us value for our money.