Which is why, when Robert Zemeckis (the man behind all the movies above) declared in 2008 that he was going to remake The Beatles’ 60 psychedelic cartoon “Yellow Submarine” using his trademark digital filmmaking style, it bordered on sacrilegious. We already had those creepy simulacrums of John and George playing in Beatles: Rock Band, and we hadn’t heard anyone clamoring for more money to be made off of faux-sincere tributes to the band.

But up until today, “Yellow Submarine” was a work in progress, already optioned by Disney. Too bad this week happened to coincide with Zemeckis’ latest feature, the $105 million flop, “Mars Needs Moms,” produced by the director’s studio ImageMovers Digital. Disney took one look at the figures and politely backed out of the deal.

Which is actually disappointing. I know, I just said motion-capture technology is creepy and weird, but you know what else fits that description? “Yellow Submarine.” With access to 16 songs and the likeness of Ringo, Paul, George, and John, there was a possibility there (however slight) that Zemeckis could have produced a world as wonderful and weird as the original. It might not have looked like the universe inhabited by the band back in the 60s, but it would have been forced to make some bold – and possibly genius – choices on how to portray hyper-realistic psychedelia.

Then again, it could have been a disastrous train wreck. Maybe this way Disney will just license the film to James Cameron and we can have a version of “Yellow Submarine” that looks like “Avatar.”

It has not been a great year for the elder Cyrus. In October, he filed for divorce from his wife, Tish. Less than a week later, video of his daughter enthusiastically enjoying a bongful of what was later reported to be salvia surfaced. She turned 18 in November, ended her “Hannah Montana” Disney series to record-breaking ratings in January, and is now, by her father’s account, living a life that’s “a train wreck.”

Cyrus isn’t your typical showbiz dad. Long before his daughter became the biggest non-rodent in Disney history, he was already a hugely successful — and widely loathed — pop star in his own right. In 1992, the same year that Pavement released “Slanted and Enchanted,” the Beastie Boys released “Check Your Head,” and Dr. Dre released “The Chronic,” Cyrus and his achy breaky heart had the top-selling album. In the intervening years, his star went on the descent, partly, he says, because he was focusing on his family and perhaps partly because the public taste for his homespun shtick wore thin. Flash forward to a Disney comedy about an ordinary teenager with a secret life, and the rest of the story is written on your second-grader’s Hannah Montana backpack.

But as Miley, the young woman, started to outgrow Hannah, the tween idol, there were inevitable — and very public — bumps and grinds along the way.  Every parent has to deal with the drama of adolescence, the mistake making that goes along with it, and the bittersweet process of letting go. Few, however, have to negotiate their own celebrity while raising a child with massive fame. And no one but Billy Ray knows what it’s like to live with all that and face the consequences of a seemingly Faustian bargain with the powerful forces of the music industry, one that now has control over his daughter in a way that he does not. “The business was driving a wedge between us,” he claims.

And “this business” is big. Even as she awkwardly transitions from teen queen to full-blown adult star, Miley Cyrus remains a money-making machine. Her movies alone have made over $300 million.  And like a dispiriting number of other young Disney stars, she’s been on a grueling treadmill half her life, a teenager who represents the livelihoods of a slew of individuals with an entertainment machine. Billy Ray says that when news of Miley’s bong video broke, he called one of her handlers and was told “it was none of my business.” And in return for the snub, he now appears quite willing to bite the white-gloved hand that fed him so long.

Billy Ray is now working on his own new album, a collection of patriotic songs with the straightforward title “I’m American.” He claims he “never made a dime off of Miley,” of which he is proud. He’s getting on with the next phase of his own life, separate from the Hannah machine. But as a newly minted empty nester, he sees a daughter who sings that she “can’t be tamed” and knows he has no authority to even try.

“I should have said, ‘Enough is enough — it’s getting dangerous and somebody’s going to get hurt,’” he now says. “I should have, but I didn’t. Honestly, I didn’t know the ball was out of bounds until it was way up in the stands somewhere.”

How far, exactly, is the ball out of bounds now? To hear Cyrus, it sounds like his daughter’s problems are well beyond adolescent partying. He hints repeatedly that she’s in real danger, and that the industry that feeds on her fame is only encouraging her peril. Of course, a man who popularized the mullet may not always have the best judgment, and until the day Miley is getting all interventioned by Dr. Drew, it’s impossible to say how deep her private demons go. But her father’s pain is clearly as real as it is uncomfortably public. “Hannah Montana,” he says, “destroyed my family. I’ll tell you right now — the damn show destroyed my family. I’d take it back in a second. For my family to be here and just be everybody okay, safe and sound and happy and normal, would have been fantastic. Heck, yeah. I’d erase it all in a second if I could.” But he can’t. Hannah is gone and Miley has moved on, and all that remains in the remnants of their ashes is a man who drove his little girl straight into the best of both worlds and wound up in neither himself.

Everybody loves a freebie – a truth born out every time someone fires up the T-shirt cannon at a sporting event. And hospital swag is nothing new. It’s routine to send new families home with a new diaper bag full of products that the baby brands hope will encourage consumer loyalty, from diapers to pacifiers. Until just three years ago, New York City was discharging mothers whose own milk was still coming in with cases of infant formula — not a confidence-inspiring move.

And while no Magic Kingdom outfit is going to stand between an infant and mom’s lactation, Disney’s gambit does raise questions about the branding of babies and the privacy rights of parents. Disney is sweeping into hospitals on the coattails of Our365, a company that offers in-hospital portraits and online photo sharing for new parents.  So don’t just swaddle Junior up a Simba bodysuit, get an image of it and post it for all the family and friends to see on the Internet! Oh my God, these Disney people are geniuses.

When you opt to push out a kid in a hospital, you find yourself on all kinds of lists you didn’t even know you’d been put on. For a year after my first daughter was born, I was deluged with junk mail for baby products and a free subscription to a dopey, doctor’s waiting room parenting magazine. I also got phone calls at home from one of the big diaper brands, asking if I wanted to buy in bulk. And here’s the thing — maybe I did. A new parent pretty much spends the first three months of her child’s life in a David-Bowie-in-Berlin-style blackout. She is, in her own way, as vulnerable as that little bundle of joy she just cannot get to stop screaming at 4 in the morning. Disney, which isn’t stopping at bodysuits and will be launching a full product line from baby food to strollers, knows that. It’s even considering a new program to offer free theme park tickets to pregnant women. (Next, I suppose, mouse ears for fetuses.) Today, your infant is just a little meatloaf wearing Ariel’s face on her torso; blink and she’s become a 5-year-old who won’t go to school without her tiara. Believe it, there is no greater gateway to a child’s consumer indulgence than a mother’s exhaustion and dependence on familiarity.

My own family certainly hasn’t been immune to Disney’s charms over the years, many of which are formidable. When I consider the last decade of my daughters’ lives, I see Nemo and Tinkerbell and Ariel there in the pretend games they play, the board books that got them excited about reading, in the catchy little tunes they have a limitless endurance for hearing. If Elmo can be on baby products, why not Mickey? But while I have no truck with Disney’s products or the movies themselves, there seems something borderline cruel in the relentlessness of the company’s branding, and the notion of the mouse at the delivery room door, waiting to swoop in and imprint our infants. Or, as Disney Baby more romantically prefers to put it, “creating magical moments right from the start.”

Disney is surely part of many of our children’s magical moments. But for a new family still in the ostensibly safe space of the hospital, even Snow White could tell you:  Just because somebody’s offering you a tempting delight doesn’t mean it’s the healthiest idea to take it.

As a mother of two young Barbie-loving daughters myself, I was riveted by Orenstein’s blend of self-deprecation and outrage — and eager to talk to her during the New York City leg of her book tour about baby princesses, the insidiousness of pink and, of course, Hannah Montana.

One of the things that really distinguishes your book from so many others out there is that you manage to talk frankly about the pitfalls of raising girls right now without scolding parents.

That was very conscious. I didn’t want another book out there to make parents feel bad about themselves. I’ve tried to be very honest and personal in my writing, and not distance myself as an “expert.” When you read Simone de Beauvoir, knowing that in her personal life she made some foolish choices, don’t you wish that was in her work? I’m very much a fellow traveler on the journey. Even the title of the book is supposed to let you know I don’t have all the answers. Parenting is very much in the moment, and we make a lot of our choices on the fly. I just want to tell parents what’s happening out there, so they understand what’s going on with that 21-piece Disney princess makeup set.

It seems that even for a veteran on the subject of  girls, you were blindsided by a lot of what you encountered out there with your own kid.

Oh yeah. Everything is changing so fast. When I wrote the initial New York Times story about princesses, I was concerned that maybe by the time the book came out it wouldn’t be as relevant. Instead it’s even more resonant.

You write a lot about the explosive rise of the Disney princess industry, and of the proliferation of  “girl” versions of everything –  and how it winds up confining them in “the pink box.” It feels like this is really a story about how girls are being groomed from birth to be consumers.

Even before they’re born! Another writer told me that when she got her sonogram recently, they didn’t tell her, “It’s a girl.” They said, “It’s a princess!” So now you’re already a princess while you’re still in the womb. And then you hear for years, “You’re so pretty,” until suddenly you’re not pretty enough. But you know, maybe if you buy these things to fix yourself you’ll be pretty.

Even 50 years ago, children would get a gift or two on Christmas or their birthdays. They weren’t spending and shopping all year round. And I think parents are getting really fed up with this stuff.

And yet, parents are the ones paying for all those “Diva” onesies. Why do adults buy into it?

Because they think it’s ironic and funny? Because it seems harmless? A generation ago, your mother would have been horrified at a T-shirt that said, “Spoiled.” Why on earth would you want your child to be spoiled?

Do you think some of this “Spoiled” culture is a reflection of a growing narcissism in general?

I think if you’re a 40-year-old who’s all Botoxed and trying to dress like a 15-year-old, it’s going to be hard to tell your 6-year-old not to dress like a 15-year-old too.

So what do we do to protect our daughters from becoming princess bratz?

Well, when I was on the “Today” show, I told Ann Curry, “Just lock them up in towers until they’re 18.”

We all live in the world. There was a story in the Times a few months ago about how little girls who watch “Hannah Montana” are more likely to bully, but kids whose parents try to make them behave more age appropriately are likelier to be bullied. You don’t want to have either of those scenarios. Our job is to raise our daughters to be thoughtful and inquisitive and ask questions, and I can see already the ways my 7-year-old is doing that.

There’s incredible plasticity in developing minds. They get progressively rigid as they get older. So if you as the parent are saying no to these messages — not all the time, because you have to say yes sometimes too — and setting the right limits, it will have an effect.

But people will ask, what’s the harm of a little dress-up and fantasy? Isn’t that normal?

Disney will tell you that their princess line is “age appropriate” and they are absolutely right. They swoop in right at the age boys and girls are figuring out they’re different. But you can celebrate being a girl in different ways. For Halloween this year, Daisy was Athena — the goddess of war and wisdom.

I remember when I wrote “Schoolgirls,” parents would tell me things like “I only let my daughter play with trucks.” That’s not the point! You don’t want to send the message that things that are feminine don’t have value. But stuff like royal play, with kings and queens and knights, is appealing to both girls and boys. It doesn’t have to be so narrow.

OK, I need you to tell me something good now. What gives you hope for our daughters? What’s getting better?

Places like Salon. And Jezebel, and Slate. The fact that people are writing and having conversations about these issues. That’s very important. My daughter Daisy, and how seeing smart and strong she is. The women I know who are complicated and conflicted and caring. That’s what gives me hope.

I think of the food analogy too; 10 years ago, we didn’t know what trans fats were or what was in school lunches. But because people wrote books and asked questions and got organized, things are changing. Now even McDonald’s is pushing “healthier” menu options. And if we can make McDonald’s blink, we can make Mattel and Disney blink too.

And then there’s “Tron.” The science fiction flick about a hacker who gets sucked into the virtual world was a modest success when it was released in 1982, but its digital special effects and ahead-of-its-time storyline quickly made it legendary in nerd circles. I was a high school student and massive dork (not necessarily in that order) at the time, in a town whose domination by Stevens Institute of Technology made it fertile soil for lots of “Tron” obsession. Today, movies about vaguely heroic computer dweebs get nominated for Golden Globes. Back then, “Porky’s” was more the order of the day, and “Lawnmower Man” was still a decade away.

In the ensuing blossoming of the digital world, “Tron” was for years a beloved artifact from the dawn of the era. In certain circles, you could just throw the word “Tron” out into the group and hear a story about how it changed somebody’s life. How it ignited an interest in computers. How easy and fun everything was before all the goddamn firewalls. And the “Tron” franchise has endured very nicely, spawning first arcade and then Xbox games for everyone who ever longed to get lost in the grid.

So when the first teaser trailer for the long-awaited sequel “Tron: Legacy” appeared at Comic Con two and a half years ago, happy little eeps of joy rose in the backs of throats across the land. Another “Tron”! With Bruce Boxleitner and Jeff Bridges reprising their original roles! Can I buy my tickets nowwwwww?

You’d think, then, that with the long-awaited release of “Tron: Legacy” now imminent, Disney would be flogging the original within an inch of its virtual life, cashing in on a few generations’ worth of golden geek nostalgia. But it’s not. You can get the out-of-print, 8-year-old 20th anniversary edition on Amazon for about $140 now. And you can wait till sometime next year for original “Tron” director Steven Lisberger ‘s remastered Blu-ray edition, which has no release date yet. And you can’t get it on Netflix.

Why, in the midst of a marketing push so aggressive it includes track suits  and a revamping of theme parks to make them more Trontrastic, would the mouse be holding out so? Could it be because … the original movie itself isn’t that great?

The last time I saw the original in its entirety, I may have been sporting a Human League haircut, but a few memory-jogging conversations with even the most die-hard old fans — and some painful YouTubing — reminded me of the dark truth: Those old effects look quaintly primitive today. Chances are your kid can dream up better digital movies on her phone. And the plot itself? Well, it’s really plodding. Some might even call it tedious. And if true believers are skeptical, imagine how the old “Tron” might go over with our attention span-challenged, special effects-gobbling young. How can we sell them Jeff Bridges in a helmet after they’ve seen “Avatar”?

Maybe when we do finally see it again, we’ll discover that after all these years, we’re not so much in love with “Tron” anymore as we are with the idea of “Tron.”  Just as we love the old “Electric Company,” Wacky Packs and the playground we don’t remember ever being this small, we love what they were for their time, and we love the memory of who we were at the time too, with fresh eyes that could widen in delight at stuff that we take for granted now. And Disney surely knows that. That’s why it’s hyping the daylights out of the new “Tron,” and leaving the old one, like a prom dress we can no longer zip up, in the back of the closet. It’s not that it isn’t still adorable: It’s just that it’s out of style, and probably doesn’t fit anymore.