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MNSSHP Hocus Pocus Merch - Read if You Went on Friday!

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MNSSHP Hocus Pocus Merch - Read if You Went on Friday!

timeerkat

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As fellow MNSSHP'ers know, the Hocus Pocus merch was not available at the party. I emailed Merchandise Guest Services today to ask about it.

I attended the Mickey's Not So Scary Halloween Party on Friday. I was hoping to buy the new Hocus Pocus pin and shirt, but it was unavailable. I heard that the Hocus Pocus merchandise had been delayed. I wanted to reach out to you to see if there will be a way to purchase the items either online or over the phone once they are available, since I live in California and will not be able to attend the event any other day this year.

Thank you!



And I got this reply:

[FONT=&amp]Hello Tessa,[/FONT]

[FONT=&amp]Thank you for contacting Merchandise Guest Services. Unfortunately, the Hocus Pocus merchandise is currently unavailable and we do not have any further information on whether or not these items will be available for purchase at a later date.[/FONT]

[FONT=&amp]I apologize for the inconvenience and we would like to offer a different, complimentary Limited Edition Halloween pin. Please provide a full name, address, telephone number and proof of your Halloween party ticket from Friday, 8/25 and we will ship the pin to you as soon as it's available.[/FONT]

[FONT=&amp]Thank you for your understanding.[/FONT]


I can't tell from the phrasing if it will be just any random Halloween pin or an exclusive pin they're making for this, but hey, either way, free pin. (Though I do hope they finally release the merchandise, or SOMETHING Hocus Pocus!)

So if you attended the party on Friday, I would contact them ASAP. I emailed them at Merchandise.Guest.Services@DisneyParks.com.
 
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Heard in one of the pin lines at the Event someone bought about 12 boxes of the mystery pins and got about 10 exact duplicates in the boxes??
 
I bought two boxes and both were Donald and Mater, so I got really lucky with the chasers. One person who I talked to got seven boxes of Donald and Mickey. But yeah, the randomness of the mystery boxes was AWFUL.
 
So more about the Hocus Pocus merch.

You may have seen my post in the 2017 Pin Releases thread:
People on facebook have pointed out the style is VERY similar to the ghastlies? If Disney hired an illustrator, or used one of their already existing ones, to do the artwork for Hocus Pocus and it was ripped off of this without any permission or anything that could be a big legal screw up and someone will definitely be out of a job. But, if they did have permission or it was done by this person then others are speculating that the shipments just didn't arrive in time?



Well... All of the Hocus Pocus merch has now been pulled from even the Halloween merch preview on Disney Parks Blog.
It will probably never surface now. While you can't copyright an artistic style I'm wondering if there are other related issues going on. I mean,
Winifred looks almost EXACTLY like the center knitting Ghastlie character (these Ghastlies designs have been around since at least 2011 from what I'm seeing). If this is the case someone at Disney seriously screwed up. This is a ton of lost profit for them and I could definitely see one or more people losing their jobs over this screw up.



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So more about the Hocus Pocus merch.

You may have seen my post in the 2017 Pin Releases thread:



Well... All of the Hocus Pocus merch has now been pulled from even the Halloween merch preview on Disney Parks Blog.
It will probably never surface now. While you can't copyright an artistic style I'm wondering if there are other related issues going on. I mean, [/COLOR]Winifred looks almost EXACTLY like the center knitting Ghastlie character (these Ghastlies designs have been around since at least 2011 from what I'm seeing). If this is the case someone at Disney seriously screwed up. This is a ton of lost profit for them and I could definitely see one or more people losing their jobs over this screw up.



pszMKh5.jpg

zoI1CRI.jpg

This would not be the first time something like this happened! In 2013, the stores released some Alice merch that was later pulled after someone accused Disney of stealing her concept. Post about the accusation here: http://www.cartoonbrew.com/disney/d...and-artwork-from-a-college-student-80797.html

I don't know the full outcome, but Disney definitely pulled the questionable items from the stores. I was very lucky that my mom bought me the shirt as a birthday gift when it was released. These almost never turn up on eBay, either. So I can never get rid of mine, haha.
 
I don't know about that... Hocus Pocus came out in 93, and that Ghastlie looks an awful lot like Bette Midler in the movie. I would not be surprised at all to find out that she was inspired directly by it... That seems a bit of a fishy explanation to me.
 
They even pulled the preview images of the Hocus Pocus MNSSHP 2017 pin off the preview board by 4:30 at the event. When I went over to take a look at it, it was gone and the cast member who was discussing the pins said "oh, it didn't make it over" and I was like "um, I've seen pictures of it so I know it was here at some point!" LOL

I got my response from Merchandise Guest Services today as well. Same as Tessa's.
 
All of the Hocus Pocus merch has now been pulled from even the Halloween merch preview on Disney Parks Blog.

Huh, the images and wording in the article were scrubbed of any mention of the Hocus Pocus merch, but they left all of the comments regarding it below. I can see someone just now reading the article and then reading the comments and getting very confused.
 
That is super interesting. I was thinking that the Ghastlie artist is who they hired for the merch art as it is so close. So, I did some research. The Ghastlies appear to be a fabric pattern for Alexander Henry Fabrics. On the Alexander Henry site, they describe that the style is inspired by Edward Gorey (who passed in 2000). I cannot find the name of the fabric design artist, but I would not be surprised if it is the same freelancer and was hired by Disney to design the merchandise.

One cannot copyright or trademark an art style. If the Ghastlie character designs themselves are trademarked, then there might be a conflict with the fabric company. Or there really could have been an issue with delivery, although it is odd the entire line of merch was pulled.

I guess in the end the reasoning doesn't matter. It's a shame that really cute pin will likely never be released.
 
That is super interesting. I was thinking that the Ghastlie artist is who they hired for the merch art as it is so close. So, I did some research. The Ghastlies appear to be a fabric pattern for Alexander Henry Fabrics. On the Alexander Henry site, they describe that the style is inspired by Edward Gorey (who passed in 2000). I cannot find the name of the fabric design artist, but I would not be surprised if it is the same freelancer and was hired by Disney to design the merchandise.

One cannot copyright or trademark an art style. If the Ghastlie character designs themselves are trademarked, then there might be a conflict with the fabric company. Or there really could have been an issue with delivery, although it is odd the entire line of merch was pulled.

Being as how a handful of people were able to purchase the Hocus Pocus magic bands before they were pulled it's safe to say the delivery issue is not the story.

And with the Edward Gorey style-as-inspiration thing is how you do "inspiration" right. It's similar in that it's mostly thin, sketchy, hand draw-style linework. It conveys the essence of his work without being a copy. The Hocus Pocus illustrations are just way too close to the source material.

I've had to deal with similar issues at work. This is how I explained a few ways this could have happened on another message board:

I can tell you how this may have happened since I deal with this fairly often. Professionally I am a designer and many of the things I work on have a lot of exposure throughout the globe so I have to be cautious when things like this happen. It's possible the project manager sent over some images of the Ghastlies to the illustrator and said "I want it done in this style." Some of the project managers I've been dealing with with my clients lately seem to not understand that you can't just rip off someone else's artwork. I get TONS of reference from places like Etsy, Pinterest, and Google. These conversations tend to work like this: "I found this photo on Google and I love it, I want to use it on _____" 'Sorry, we can't do that. That photo is copyright to someone else. Just because you found it on Google doesn't mean you can use it.' Of course we've used some of those references as inspiration for our work, but we are careful to make it different enough to simply be "inspired by" whatever it is they sent.

It's also possible that the illustrator is the one who made the decision to use the style. That person may not have brought it to the attention of the project managers that they used it for style reference. I feel like if they had, a good project manager would have asked for more changes after seeing the two next to each other. They're simply WAY too close and legal would have lost their minds over it LONG before it went into production.
 
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Being as how a handful of people were able to purchase the Hocus Pocus magic bands before they were pulled it's safe to say the delivery issue is not the story.

And with the Edward Gorey style-as-inspiration thing is how you do "inspiration" right. It's similar in that it's mostly thin, sketchy, hand draw-style linework. It conveys the essence of his work without being a copy. The Hocus Pocus illustrations are just way too close to the source material.

Two additional thoughts:

1. It's really, really suspicious that they have pulled ALL images/references to this merch. If it was delayed, they wouldn't bother. Stuff gets delayed all the time after it's announced, and no one feels the need to edit the post to REMOVE everything. It suggests the materials cannot be seen/displayed anywhere.

2. Disney really only needs to feel "threatened" in some way to have pulled the stuff. Even if they feel they have a legitimate defense for the similarities, it will cause a PR nightmare (at least) if people are running around the Internet speculating (like we are, ha ha) on the source material. Any type of actual legal measure, from a "cease and desist" to a settlement with the artist, if necessary, to a court case (which they'd likely rather avoid), requires time and money. It's much easier, in light of ANY potential issue like this, to just scrap the whole thing. They're out the production costs on the merchandise, but it's probably much, much cheaper than any type of payout they'd have to make later if someone brought a charge of infringement against them.
 
I just got the Halloween 2017 Headless Horsemen pin in the mail from Disney. At first I thought it was part of the LE Pin of the Month thing but then it dawned on me this might be the replacement pin for the MNSSHP Hocus Pocus pin. Has anyone else that wrote in received it?
 
HOCUS POCUS MERCH HAS SURFACED AT THE PARK

They used the new frame with the Villain silhouettes but threw in the Sanderson Sisters in last year's style.

Soooo that's confirmation that the artwork they were using WAS too close to the Ghastlies and some lawyers were involved.

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