I need help: Sourcing the claim that Disney is the reason Worlds are not allowed to cross over.

[LucemFerto]

Hello, everyone!

I am currently working on a video, and I wanted to talk about why, while Kingdom Hearts is nominally a crossover, there are very few actual crossovers between Disney Worlds (unlike other Disney crossover titles such as Infinity, Mirrorverse, Dreamlight Valley, etc.). Now, when I look at discussions anywhere, everyone says it's a restriction that Disney put on Square when the first game was developed.

But I cannot for the life of me find a source for that.

Some go as far as to claim that Michael Eisner didn't want it to rival the other big Disney Crossover at the time, House of Mouse, but without a source that's not useable. Do you guys know if there's a source on these claims anywhere?

 

[Antifa Lockhart]

It is well-documented!

Those disney crossovers exist because they're not the REAL versions of those characters.
I found a document that goes into extreme detail on Disney's involvement and cites its sources, it should help you: https://docs.google.com/document/d/...2Tz7NHE9-8ylbEI/edit#bookmark=id.5tjukuwtwyxx

 

[MATGSY]

For what it's worth, KH wasn't the only example of this happening. Disney's Extreme Skate Adventure was a skateboarding game skaters & skate parks based on Tarzan, Toy Story, & Lion King. But there was no crossing over allowed. You could only play as the Toy Story characters in the TS themed levels for example. But there were 2 generic human skaters created for that game who could skate in every level without restriction.

& then there's Disney Infinity, the toys-2-life competitor to Skylanders. In DI there's 2 main modes: Playset & Toybox. Toybox was a freeform level editor that let players play as any of the characters they a figure for but by it's nature was largely dependent on user created content being halfway decent. Playsets were the big story modes of DI, & were each based on a different Disney owned property. Each playset could be thought of as roughly equivalent to a KH world. Players could only plays as the specific characters that were a part of any given playset: I.E. only Jack Sparrow, Barbossa, & Davy Jones could be played in the PotC playset.

 

[Ernest-Panda]

The better question is why are explicit crossovers forbidden? All those examples listed above just make me think "why even bother with these multiple IP works to begin with?"

 

[LucemFerto]

It is well-documented!

Those disney crossovers exist because they're not the REAL versions of those characters.
I found a document that goes into extreme detail on Disney's involvement and cites its sources, it should help you: https://docs.google.com/document/d/...2Tz7NHE9-8ylbEI/edit#bookmark=id.5tjukuwtwyxx

HOLY MOLY, this is extremely helpful and super interesting! Thank you very much for linking this!

 

[PikaPal]

Disney's Extreme Skate Adventure was a skateboarding game skaters & skate parks based on Tarzan, Toy Story, & Lion King. But there was no crossing over allowed. You could only play as the Toy Story characters in the TS themed levels for example. But there were 2 generic human skaters created for that game who could skate in every level without restriction.

I have that game on PS2 and while I really did enjoy the game a lot, it was still a bit disappointing to find this out.

It would have been a lot of fun to have Woody messing about in the Lion King world or Simba in the Toy Story world.