Trading card games were banned in my primary school (elementary for you yanks). Even the rural wastelands of Wales couldn’t escape the allure of Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh. The former was banned before my time, but Konami’s effort was all the rage just as I was old enough to appreciate the draw of collecting rare cards and using them to battle against my friends. We would gather behind one of those shoddy looking temporary cabins and sit down by the steps with our decks in tow, ready to whittle down our life points in pursuit of victory. Well, mostly we just looked at the cool pictures and never bothered playing by the rules. Or at least used the anime’s logic.
Before we had a full grasp on reading comprehension, we’d engage with trading card games using the rule of cool and nothing more. My Dark Magician was going to lay waste to Kuribo, while a friend’s Charizard was obviously going to tear my Meowth a new one. For a little kid, this sort of logic made sense and we never questioned it, and that’s with characters and wild creatures we only recognised from either the cards or a few episodes of the animated show we caught on television after school. This information wasn’t as accessible back then, but with a game like Disney Lorcana, it would never have to be.
We all grew up with Disney. I can’t picture a person in my life who didn’t. It didn’t matter if they were burning through the same VHS copy of The Little Mermaid over and over again or tuning into Disney Channel every morning for reruns of House of Mouse and Lizzie Mcquire. While we all experienced Disney in wildly different ways, there was no escaping its influence as children even back then.
The films, characters, shows, and music were entrenched in our culture in much the same way they are today, and a trading card game which capitalised on that popularity could have quite easily taken over the world. Imagine walking into your local newsagents and finding a booster pack decorated with characters from Toy Story or Atlantis, knowing that within you’d be offered a selection of cards to hold dear and laud over friends at school. I would have eaten this up, and so would thousands of others in the mid-2000s.
Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh managed to capture our imagination despite being unfamiliar on the surface, with the cards emerging in the company of their respective anime and respective video games that would alter the landscape even further. We had to invest and learn about these properties ourselves by spending hundreds of hours exploring Johto in Pokemon Crystal or embracing the Heart of the Cards once a week on CITV.
Disney, however, was with us from the very beginning. In a household of seven siblings, two of which I shared a room with, we’d take turns picking movies to watch and games to play because there was only a single CRT screen to choose from, and most of the time we’d cycle through Disney films and shows we all loved with equal measure. A card game would have either torn us apart or brought us closer together, but either way it would have emerged a winner.
We would have all naturally gravitated towards characters or locations we thought were the coolest, and I’d have free rein to snap up all the Princesses while my brothers fought over the masculine characters. I would have furthered connections I’d made with films I already held dear, now in a new medium with infinite possibilities. Fast-forward 20 years or so and we’ve seen the dawn of Disney adults and a readily available selection of classics on streaming services. Things have changed, but the core appeal of what Lorcana offers hasn’t.
If all goes to plan, Lorcana will be a hit thanks to its nostalgic pull alone. Back then, it would have had a similar impact despite the lacking technology. No mobile app, podcasts or YouTube channels, just a card game about our favourite Disney titles for us to obsess over and waste our parent’s money on. It would have utterly transformed the media landscape back then, even if we never dared to learn the rules and only collected cards for the pretty pictures. I mean, let’s be real, that’s what most of us are doing now.