Discover the magic behind the music with Larry Blanks' unique podcast. Join Larry as he sits down with Broadway and West End Stars and film and TV professionals to uncover the secrets of musical theater orchestration, music arrangement, and more. Whether you're an aspiring composer, a seasoned musician, or just a musical theater enthusiast, this is your backstage pass to invaluable insights and education. Don't miss out, tune in and listen to my podcasts wherever you get your audio fix. Get inspired by the maestros of the stage and screen today. Coming up, it looks like we're going to have to get used to watching a lot less Star Wars on Disney Plus. Plus also update on some new Bluey episodes and also the cancellation of 911 Lone Star. But before we go any further, make sure you do hit that subscribe button to keep up with the latest Disney Plus News. Hi everyone, I'm Roger here from what's on at DisneyPlus.com. It's time for a quick Disney Plus News roundup. Let's start off with talking about Bluey, which is going to be returning for some brand new episodes in October. So there's going to be seven new episodes dropping and they're going to be consisting of these little mini episodes. There's going to be tattoo shop, phony, blocks, government, drums, brownie bear, and whirlpool. They're all going to be arriving on Disney Plus all around the world, except for in the United States. On October the 7th, they'll also be shown on the Disney Junior channel as well. So again, this is going to be a huge thing. This is all part of the mini episodes, to kind of the way of continuing on. Just doing another batch of these mini episodes, dropping at a later date. Kind of a great way of really continuing on with this great success of this series. It is just blowing out of the part. Bluey is just so, so popular. It's every single day, the most popular show on Disney Plus. And even just, not even just on Disney Plus, across all platforms, it is consistently out doing everything else on the news and chart. There is just something special about this series. And there's no wonder that Disney wants to continue getting new episodes to try and keep getting you back in, because people just keep watching this show over and over and over again. But let me know. Are you excited about having some brand new episodes of Bluey? Love to hear your thoughts on this in the comments below. Shifting gears now, let's now talk about the cancellation of 911 Lone Star, which is going to be returning for its fifth and final season later this year. So this series is created by 20th Television, and it is kind of a spin-off of 911. Now, this has kind of got a weird kind of complicated system. And I'll be honest, I wasn't really that surprised by the cancellation, because last year, the show got delayed due to the strike, and they just decided to hold it back a year. Apparently, the actors options ran out earlier this year, and they didn't renew it. So there's a couple of reasons for this. Primarily, it's because this show airs on Fox in the United States. It's available the next day on Hulu and Hulu and on Disney Plus. But internationally, it's also released on Disney Plus. The big key problem with this show is this is kind of like a leftover of the Fox deal from 2019. Fox that kind of broke off of it, continued to like license new content from Disney and keep obviously filling up its channel. So over the last few years, it has been slowly filling up with its own content, rather than being reliant on 20th Television. And this is kind of one of the last big ones. Now, last year, it was revealed that the main show 9-1-1 had been canceled by Fox, but ABC quickly stepped in was like, "No, we love that one. Thank you very much." And it was a big success when it moved to ABC. It's not expected that that's going to happen to Lone Star. This one's going to be the end of it. Though, there was kind of some mentions in an article, Deadline, that maybe looked at doing a spin-off in another city like Las Vegas or something like that. So that might be a way of them moving forward and kind of continuing this brand. Obviously, they like doing these big like dramas with fire crews and ambulances and all this kind of stuff. It's just a good kind of easy story. There's always kind of something happening each week, and it's just a great way of continuing these stories moving along. So yeah, it's coming in. And like I said, I'm not surprised by this. I think most people saw this one coming a mile away, but also the problems with this show is Fox was paying a license fee to Disney for it, but apparently the show was costing more and more to make. And they were actually kind of in some ways losing money, so they were putting that up elsewhere and getting money from it that way. But essentially, we're getting to that point of Fox is only really going to be licensing so much stuff. And they've been drastically kind of cutting back. And they've only got a few shows really kind of left now. I think mainly like found a guy at Simpson's, Bob's Burgers, etc. And I suspect they will at some point also do the same thing as Disney's going to put the price up for the Fox and Fox is like, well, did we really need it? So yeah, so 911 Lone Star is coming to an end. But at least we know in advance, we know we're going to be getting the new season to kind of wrap it all up, which I think is I think it's great sometimes when you get that kind of confirmation because it actually is going to be coming to an end. But obviously, we're just seeing them making all making a lot less shows moving forward to try and save money. And this is just one that I'll be honest. I, as I said, I expected it to happen, but I'd love to know your thoughts on the cancellation of 911 Lone Star. Let me know in the comments below. Shifting gears now, let's now talk about Star Wars. Now we have seen since Bob Igo return to CEO at the end of 2022. He has been going on a drastic kind of cost cutting measure, drastically reducing the amount of stuff that's being released, not just on Disney Plus, but on Hulu and all the linear channels as they just realize they were making way much too much stuff. And people just weren't watching it. And also, more importantly, both Marvel and Star Wars, and even Pixar to some degree, was really struggling from trying to create too much content and was taking his eye off the ball and it was suffering. So they kind of hit the big pause button on Star Wars. And we haven't really seen a huge amount of stuff going into production for a while now. The only other thing is they had a lot of stuff already in the camera, the stuff they were working on post production for. You know, we've just seen the acolyte wrap up. And obviously, we're going to be getting skeleton crew coming up in December. So that'll be running in like December and January. And next year, we'll also be getting at the second season of Andor. Plus, we know that they're going to be starting filming on the second season of Ahsoka next summer. So that's probably going to be 2026, maybe 2027. But the days of us getting like two to three live action series a year from Star Wars are over. We are no longer going to be getting that this year's and next year's going to be kind of the end of that. According to industry, inside of Daniel Orichman, who says that Disney are now going to be cutting back, it says, I'm hearing that several series are in development. But it seems they plan to release only one live action series per year starting in 2025. Now, I'm not really surprised by this action. It's kind of something that you can see instantly happening, just the way that they've been drastically slowing down how much stuff they're making, the announcements we've not been getting anything really like that. You know, and the days of us getting announced was like D23. And then you were getting stuff like Disney past a day out just making less stuff. And yes, Star Wars is going to be one of those things. Now, super hero fatigue and Star Wars fatigue and franchise fatigue. A lot of this is being put down, you know, then putting out too much stuff and it's on the audience. But I also think from a creative point of view, especially from the Star Wars side of things, they have just been, it feels like throwing spaghetti against the wall to work out what's good for them. I don't think it's a good idea that they've been jumping around all the different time zones of when they're making stuff. I think they need to be a little bit clearer because your general audience can't work out what's going on that quickly. And there's a little bit, probably a little bit confused by them jumping around so much. Like, when's this show? Oh, this one's this one. This one's that one. I know some people like it, but I think now we're really going to see them kind of just, as I said, just focusing now on one major show. And that hopefully will increase the quality, maybe even increase the length of those episodes, because I know a lot of people complain about the length of like the Marvel and Star Wars shows and that they're not proper TV. Again, being British, I've grown up on short seasons. That's kind of just been the way it always has. I don't really see a problem with that. But compared to the big long running shows, these short seasons generally don't look great. But also, there's been some of the seasons of the Star Wars shows, which you literally feel like they just cut a movie up. And that's, and some of them just feel like, you know, they just had stuff thrown in the middle of them that they maybe necessarily didn't need to. And I'm hopefully, when they move forward, they'll have a better idea, maybe move more into like a story of the week kind of thing. They did a little bit more of that with Mandalorian than they did with the other ones, which I think worked a little bit better for that show. But yeah, we are now going to be in the zone where we're probably only going to be getting one show a year. Now, where we're not includes are the like, the animated series as well, where we're not going to get some more of them, you know, that can help fill in the gap. Also, we're going to start getting movies again in 2026 with the Mandalorian and Grogu and there's other ones planned. But I, you can kind of, you know, see what's going on here there. If they're cutting back on how much they're making, and the fact that we've not really heard about them really filming anything Star Wars related for a long time now, it kind of all sort of sounds like, yeah, we filmed a lot of stuff. We need to get all this stuff out. The only good thing is really is that, you know, we still have got skeleton crew and Andor. So we know we're good for at least a good number 18 months. But after that, yeah, I think it was time to get used to only having one major Star Wars series a year. I think we're probably going to be seeing the same thing with Marvel, maybe two of them. They probably a little bit more space and scope to do a little bit more on that. But yeah, the days of us getting free live action series and an animated series, maybe actually, I think one of you even had two animated series that's gone. You know, those days are long gone. And I'm I'm hopeful really in some ways that that makes Star Wars feel a little bit more special. I think that was the problem with some of it. It just wasn't the days when you would get that Star Wars logo and you get goosebumps. The simple truth is it was happening every week. It does not have the same impact. But let me know. Do you agree with this? Do you not? Love to hear your thoughts on that in the comments below. But on that now, guys, thank you very much. See you guys soon. Fighters. [BLANK_AUDIO]
