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| MickeyXtreme's News Archive December 3-9 2006 | ||
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Saturday December 9, 2006 |
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Disney Workers Say Company is Destroying Jobs Mother says toy has potty mouth Hollywood bets on Mel's future as 'Apocalypto' opens 'High School Musical' cast is keeping its head in the game on its national tour Toon Disney Presents The "12 Days Of Christmas" Drivers, rejoice: Last leg of Western Beltway open Disney Honors Polk Teachers ABC orders more 'Money' episodes ABC pacts with Gurin to develop gameshow |
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Disney Workers Say Company is Destroying Jobs Central Florida News 13 - Folks heading to Disney World Friday were greeted with some workers outside the gates as they protested Disney's outsourcing of jobs. The rally was held by members of the Service Trades Council Union right outside the Disney Entrance on State Road 535. The union is upset with Disney for handing over hundreds of positions to a private company. "We see stable jobs at Disney, benefit paying jobs at Disney, decent jobs at Disney being destroyed by outsourcing. Disney appears to be deliberately creating a group of second class workers, an underclass who will not get the same benefits, rates of pay, work under the same conditions as other Disney workers," said Morty Miller, Union Member. The jobs include valet parking, kitchen cleaning, carpet cleaning, roadway cleaning and deep cleaning work. Many are in Walt Disney World theme parks. |
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Mother says
toy has potty mouth Mercury News - Her hair is bright red. Her mermaid tail lights up purple and green. She sings and says things like, ``The sparkles are so beautiful.'' But this week in San Jose, Stephanie Herrera, 40, who describes herself as a ``Christian mother with values'' says she heard Princess Ariel say something obscene: ``You're a slu-ut,'' the Disney doll seems to say with a smile, but only when you push her button three times fast, in a particular rhythm. ``It's horrifying,'' said Herrera, whose daughter, Juliana, now repeats the phrase. But it's unclear whether Herrera's complaint -- the first Mattel has heard about the Shimmering Lights Ariel doll -- will be a holiday refund nightmare, or a sales booster. Ariel is one of Disney's hottest princesses this season, as ``The Little Mermaid'' is being released for the first time on DVD. Mattel officials dispute Herrera's claim but said they would be happy to give her a voucher for a replacement. ``Sometimes this type of controversy makes a toy all the more desirable,'' said Stephanie Oppenheim, who publishes an independent toy guide, the annual Oppenheim Toy Portfolio. ``The more quirky toys tend to be more attractive to adult collectors.'' Oppenheim pushed Ariel's button from New York at the Mercury News' request. She heard the profanity, but only after listening extremely closely. Her mother, Joanne, who is president of the company, listened, too. She called out from the background, ``I just can't hear it.'' Whatever it sounds like Ariel is saying, however, ``doesn't sound purposeful,'' Oppenheim said. She advised parents to test the ``try-me'' buttons at the store before bringing toys home. ``I think this woman should calm down and get a new doll,'' she said. When Visali Scandalis, Mattel's brand liaison coordinator, called Herrera Friday to investigate her e-mailed complaint, he told her that he heard the phrase, but only because of the ``power of suggestion.'' Mattel spokeswoman Sara Rosales said she pushed the doll's button herself Friday morning, and discussed the issue with toy designers and marketers. No one heard anything unseemly. ``There's no possible way she could say that,'' Rosales said. Perhaps someone tampered with the doll, she wondered. Herrera insisted that wasn't the case. The doll is sold at major stores including Target, Wal-Mart and Toys R Us, and ranges in price from about $20 to $30. ``Children's safety and well-being are first and foremost,'' Rosales said. The issue first came to light early this week. Herrera's 19-year-old son, Erich, was goofing around with the new doll his sister got for her birthday last month. He was jamming up the button on Ariel's back. Juliana began mimicking the sped-up phrase. Played with at a regular speed, Ariel says three sentences very sweetly: ``You're a wonderful friend,'' ``Sparkles are so beautiful,'' and ``Life is the bubbles.'' She also sings a wordless tune that in the film makes Prince Eric fall for her. Herrera also bought several similar Ariel dolls at Wal-Mart, which she had planned to sell on eBay. She said she likes to sell the toys online for homebound people. Disney toys and movies are no stranger to controversy and sexual innuendo. When ``The Little Mermaid'' came out on video in 1989, some versions of the promotional materials showed a phallic tower atop a castle, which spawned an urban legend that it was prank by a disgruntled Disney illustrator. And some say they see the dandelions Simba plays with in ``The Lion King'' spelling out s-e-x. For now, Herrera has taken the shimmery doll away from Juliana, and replaced it with a Fisher Price manger scene. Juliana's not thrilled. Her mother said she would much rather be dancing around the apartment with a singing Ariel than a donkey and baby Jesus. As for Christmas presents, Herrera plans to play it safe. No princesses. Just in case. ``We're going to get her a Cabbage Patch doll,'' she said. |
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Hollywood bets on Mel's future as 'Apocalypto' opens Reuters - "Apocalypto," Mel Gibson's first film since his anti-Semitic tirade last summer, opened on Friday as Hollywood wondered whether his career, like the Mayan civilization the movie depicts, is doomed to collapse or poised for resurrection. Ushered into a crowded holiday-season marketplace with largely favorable reviews and ample media buzz, "Apocalypto" has defied easy predictions by industry analysts seeking to forecast its commercial potential. "We have to see whether all this awareness translates into box office. It's tough to call," said Paul Dergarabedian, president of box-office tracking firm Media By Numbers, who put the film's likely U.S. gross at between $13 million and $17 million through Sunday. Such a tally would pale in comparison to the $84 million bow of Gibson's last movie, "The Passion of the Christ" in 2004. But in a weekend when the multiplex is bustling with several big box-office contenders, an opening in the mid-teens may be enough to rank as No. 1. As a hyper-violent, R-rated movie with subtitles and a cast of unknown performers, the movie hardly fits the profile of a typical Hollywood blockbuster. Many reviews have praised "Apocalypto" as a gripping and visually spectacular work, though one with an exceedingly high quotient of blood and guts. Film critic Joe Morgenstern of the Wall Street Journal on Friday called it "the most obsessively, graphically violent film I'd ever seen." But he went on to hail it as "a visionary work with its own wild integrity." Yet he added: "seeing it once is enough for one lifetime." The film also is vying for attention against several other wide releases this weekend, including action thriller "Blood Diamond," starring Leonardo DiCaprio, and the romantic comedy "The Holiday," with Kate Winslet and Cameron Diaz. And all those films face formidable competition from the ongoing successful runs of the latest James Bond adventure, "Casino Royale," and the computer-animated dancing penguins of "Happy Feet." WALT DISNEY DISTRIBUTOR What "Apocalypto" has going for it is an aggressive marketing campaign by distributor Walt Disney Co. (DIS.N), with special attention paid to Spanish-language media, and intense hype surrounding the film's pedigree as the latest work produced, directed and co-written by the Oscar-winning Gibson. His July 28 drunken driving arrest and the public furor sparked by his anti-Semitic rant at police who pulled him over led many in Hollywood to speculate that Gibson may have done irreparable harm to his image and career. In the immediate aftermath of the scandal, Gibson, 50, issued repeated apologies, re-entered treatment for alcoholism and kept a relatively low profile. In recent weeks, however, he has gradually ventured back into the public spotlight to plug his film, culminating with Thursday's guest appearance on NBC television's "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno." Gibson has defied the odds before. "The Passion of the Christ," a graphically violent, Aramaic-language dramatization of the final hours in the life of Jesus, exceeded all expectations by grossing $612 million in worldwide ticket sales. That film's success turned in large part on an unusual promotional campaign aimed at Christian moviegoers and on controversy generated by criticism of the film by Jewish leaders, who feared it would foment anti-Semitism. Another of Gibson's intensely violent period pieces, his 1995 epic "Braveheart," won five Academy Awards, including Oscars for best picture and best director for Gibson. Leading online movie ticket service Fandango.com reported "Apocalypto" narrowly leading advance box-office sales for this weekend, accounting for 17 percent of the business as of Friday, compared with 16 percent for "The Holiday." A Fandango survey of potential moviegoers also found that 74 percent of those interested in seeing "Apocalypto" had previously seen "The Passion." |
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'High School Musical' cast is keeping its head in the
game on its national tour Associated Press - The parents milling around backstage are about the only thing in Disney's new $8.5 million "High School Musical" stage spectacular tour that look anything like, well, high school. Engineered by veterans of Rolling Stones tours and tricked out with intricate choreography, confetti drops and a giant backdrop screen for heartthrob close-ups, the concert was designed to wow the "tween" fans who made the TV movie a nationwide hit faster than Paris Hilton can say "hot." The snappy 90-minute stage performance zips along undeterred from the plot of the movie, a love story between a basketball jock and an academic decathlon nerd who upset their school's social order by auditioning for lead roles in a musical. Instead, the concert features the six stars as celebrities, rather than in their character roles, and showcases hits from the movie soundtrack. Lucas Grabeel, one of the movie's main characters, emcees the proceedings, giving frequent shout-outs to the audience and stringing together set pieces with good-natured onstage banter. Three cast members with newly released or forthcoming solo albums -- Vanessa Hudgens, Ashley Tisdale and Corbin Bleu -- do solo sets. The only cast member missing the concert tour is Zac Efron, who played the male lead in the movie. He is working on the movie version of the musical "Hairspray." Drew Seeley, who sang on the "High School Musical" soundtrack and co-wrote one of its songs, is touring in Efron's place. Nine trucks, 10 buses and about 90 crew members are accompanying the six performers on the 40-city arena tour, which began last week in San Diego on Nov. 29 and wraps up with a finale in Las Vegas on Jan. 28. It stops at KeyArena on Monday night. It's a professional schedule for a cast that is mostly new to the rigors of the road, though the stars are all professional actors, some with serious tween bona fides: Tisdale, who played comically evil drama queen Sharpay, is well known to fans of the popular Disney Channel sitcom "The Suite Life of Zack and Cody." "I'm freaking out!" exclaimed Monique Coleman as she bopped around backstage in San Diego before the show's last dry run. At 26, Coleman -- who parlayed her popularity into a stint on ABC's "Dancing With the Stars" -- is the oldest of the group. Minutes later, she was twirling across the stage in a pair of sparkling high heels she called "blinged out." The star of the concert is 17-year-old Hudgens, the Posh Spice look-alike who played Gabriella, the "brainiac" in the movie. Along with reprising duets from the soundtrack, Hudgens slinks through three songs from her new pop album as a giant rhinestone-encrusted "V" drops from the ceiling and her music video plays on the screen behind her. The "High School Musical" TV movie drew nearly 8 million viewers in its first outing on the Disney Channel last January, making it the top-rated basic-cable TV show that week. A repeat airing the very next night attracted more than 6 million viewers, according to the Nielsen Media Research group, making it the No. 2-rated cable show of the week. Since then, Disney estimates nearly 60 million people have seen the movie. What started as a bubble gum TV movie -- "Romeo and Juliet" meets "Grease" for the iPod generation -- has spawned a sing-along karaoke version, a triple-platinum album, cell-phone ring tones, a novel and, yes, countless real high school musicals. It has not been released in theaters. A sequel is set to begin production early next year for broadcast in August, and director Kenny Ortega said a potential Broadway production is in the early workshop phase. Spinoff shows are being planned for the Disney parks. Ortega won an Emmy for choreography on the movie in September, while the soundtrack was nominated for an American Music Award in the general pop category. According to Disney, the soundtrack is on track to be the year's top-selling album. It reached No. 10 on the Billboard pop-music charts two weeks after its release last January, hit No. 1 four weeks later and, after sliding down to No. 3, returned to the top spot again. At one point there were nine singles from the soundtrack on the chart in the same week. "If you'd told me a year ago I'd be here, I'd have laughed," said Ortega. "We went into this just to make a little $4.5 million movie. All this is extra." |
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Toon Disney Presents The "12 Days Of Christmas"
Toon Zone - Beginning December 14, Toon Disney will present its very first "12 Days of Christmas" event. The programming kicks off with Mickey's Once Upon A Christmas airing from 5:00pm - 7:00pm (ET/PT) as a part of "Toon Disney's Big Movie Show." Other programming scheduled to air during the 12 days includes Mickey's Magical Christmas: Snowed in at the House of Mouse, Mickey's Twice Upon a Christmas and Recess Christmas: Miracle on Third Street, among others. On December 25, Toon Disney will present an eleven-hour marathon from 9:00am - 8:00pm filled with animated holiday movies. The marathon schedule is as follows: Monday, December 25: 9:00am: Annabelle's Wish 10:15am: The Christmas Orange 11:00am: Mickey's Magical Christmas: Snowed in at the House of Mouse 12:30pm: An All Dogs Christmas Carol 2:00pm: Mickey's Once Upon a Christmas 3:30pm: Recess Christmas: Miracle on Third Street 5:00pm: An All Dogs Christmas Carol 6:30pm: Mickey's Twice upon a Christmas |
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Drivers, rejoice: Last leg of Western Beltway open Orlando Sentinel - By 7 a.m. sharp today, workers will roll back barricades, opening up the final 5.5-mile segment of a traffic-congestion release valve called the Western Beltway. It's ready to divert an estimated 48,000 motorists off car-clogged Interstate 4 near the southern end of Walt Disney World and around the west side of Central Florida.  With
today's opening, motorists now have a straight shot from
Apopka to south of Disney World.The road-dedication ceremony Friday had the trappings of political theater -- playing off the word western in the beltway's name. State Sen. Daniel Webster and a passel of contractors and officials stood on the new pavement in front of freshly planted palm trees, all gussied up in cowboy garb at the ceremony near the new tollbooth at I-4 near Sinclair Road. They smiled as "Miss Silver Spurs" rode in on a chestnut-colored horse across the white traffic lines, and the Ocoee High School band played the theme from the cowboy movie The Magnificent Seven. "Maybe we can say: 'Howdy, partner;' this is the Western Beltway," Webster, R-Winter Garden, said at the dedication, where a 33-mile swath of the beltway, also known as State Road 429, was formally named after him. (6 - 10 on map Represent the Western Beltway) Webster had pushed for the beltway on the west side of I-4 for about 20 years, saying that it was vital to Central Florida's economy. "Our economic engine is run on two things: moving commerce and moving people," Webster said. "You've got to have roads to do either." The $328 million project took 30 months to complete and forms a large piece of the 118-mile loop from Apopka south to Disney, east to Orlando International Airport and north to Sanford. With the region teeming with about 2 million residents and 40 million visitors each year, the beltway is envisioned as giving people a quicker route around Central Florida and easing traffic to theme parks. Orlando's beltway is unlike others because it doesn't form a perfect loop such as those circling Jacksonville, Atlanta and Houston. It's more like two halves, with S.R.429 on the west side of I-4, and S.R. 417 on the east. A few miles of I-4 connects the loop on the southern end. It has been a vision of traffic engineers and politicians for decades. Allan Keen, chairman of the Orlando-Orange County Expressway Authority, the agency that oversees the operation, said Monday that more needs to be done. The final leg, a 25-mile northern stretch between Apopka and Sanford dubbed the Wekiva Parkway, hasn't been built yet. The state agreed Thursday to spend $74 million in that area to buy key pieces of land to allow the project to go forward. "Our work is not yet finished," Keen said. "We must now turn our attention to the missing link." |
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Disney Honors Polk
Teachers The Ledger - Fourteen teachers from Polk County received Disney Teacherrific awards, sharing $32,000 in prize money. This is the 16th year that Disney has honored exceptional teachers from Lake, Orange, Osceola, Polk and Seminole counties at its Teacherrific Award ceremony. The winning educators and their schools received nearly $250,000. Each county received two special judges awards at $5,000 per winner and $2,500 per school, and two outstanding program awards at $2,500 per winner, $1,000 per school. In addition, top program awards of $1,000 per winner and $500 per school also were conferred. One teacher or group of teachers from each county also was awarded the esteemed Disney Teacherrific Award, which includes $15,000 for the teachers and $7,500 for their schools. "We are proud to be able to recognize and thank Central Florida teachers for all they do to inspire and develop our young people," said Diane Ledder, director of community relations at Walt Disney World Resort. "The honorees all incorporate the building blocks of healthy youth development into their classroom programs and support one or more of the four platforms of the company's community focus, DisneyHand - Helping Kids Shine: constructive use of free time, connecting with adults, character development and compassion." Since the Teacherrific Award program began in 1990, Walt Disney World Resort has awarded more than $2.7 million to Central Florida educators and their schools. The winners of the 2006 Polk County Teacherrific outstanding educational program, which awards $15,000 split between the teachers and $7,500 for the school, are: Denison Middle School's Anjanette Richard-Jones, Jeffrey Wells, Carole Endicott and Baringthon Brudy for their project "Plants, Pals and Puppets, Hooray!" For the project, 84 at-risk readers in sixth- through eighth-grade mentored 70 students in primary grades who also have academic challenges. Mentors participated in activities such as landscaping to improve school areas and a Puppet Theater to act out stories with puppets. Winners of the 2006 Polk Teacherrific special judges award, which gives $5,000 to teachers and $2,500 to the school, are: Bethune Academy's Deborah Congdon, Carol Richardson and Jessica Fredericks for their "Storm Troopers" program. "Storm Troopers" combined the study of meteorology with the platform of compassion. Students researched hurricanes, developed an action plan and created community- service projects. Dixieland Elementary's Arvilla Stokes for her "Families Building Better English," a Saturday tutoring program for multi-language families that involved senior tutors from a local church, high school students, school staff and community families. The winners of the 2006 Polk Teacherrific outstanding program award, which includes $2,500 for the teacher and $1,000 for the school, are: Boone Middle School's Elizabeth Broadaway for her "Take It Home" program that provided families with a computer, technology training, educational software and direct mentoring from the school to the homes. Auburndale High School's Patricia Butler for her "The Power Train and the FCAT Pledge" schoolwide program, designed to enhance awareness of fundamental math and reading skills while adding levity to the state testing program for accountability. The Polk winners of the 2006 Teacherrific top program award, which is $1,000 for teachers and $500 for the school, are: Lincoln Avenue Academy's Mijana Lockard, Ophelia Kieffer and Julie Stone for their "Bridge to Success" program, designed to remedy the academic and digital divide for students entering kindergarten while promoting personal responsibility, compassion, cultural understanding and commitment to community service. George Jenkins High School's Matt Townley for his "The Town to Town Art Project," in which his humanities students shared their knowledge and appreciation of the arts by purchasing, critiquing and giving art to educate students in distressed communities and local schools where the arts were not easily accessible. |
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ABC orders more
'Money' episodes Zap2it - "Show Me the Money" hasn't exactly been money in the Nielsens, but ABC is showing it some love anyway. The network has ordered six more episodes of the game show, which features William Shatner, a bunch of trivia questions and a bevy of scantily clad dancers who alternately increase or decrease a contestant's winnings. ABC announced earlier this week that the show will move from Wednesday to Tuesday nights starting Jan. 2. The scheduling change means ABC will be asking "Money" to take a bullet by airing opposite "American Idol," which returns to FOX in mid-January. It will also mean a double dose of Shatner -- a Shaturation, if you will -- on Tuesday nights, with "Show Me the Money" and "Boston Legal" bookending the night (comedies "Big Day" and "Help Me Help You" are in between). A preview of "Show Me the Money," drew some 12.4 million viewers when it followed "Dancing with the Stars" on Nov. 14, but it hasn't fared as well since moving to its regular time period the following week. In its regular timeslot, it's averaged 7.5 million viewers and a 2.1 rating in the key adults 18-49 demographic. Those are hardly stellar numbers, but in a somewhat soft time period it does rank second in total viewers. |
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ABC
pacts with Gurin to develop gameshow Variety - Network TV's gameshow fever shows no signs of letting up. ABC has said "ja" to "Wetten dass...?" (Wanna Bet?), inking a deal with producer Phil Gurin ("The Weakest Link") to develop a U.S. version of Germany's smash variety/gameshow hybrid. Skein has lasted for more than two decades on pubcaster ZDF. Its monthly Saturday broadcasts draw 16 million German viewers and 2 million more Swiss and Austrians -- a tally ZDF said makes it the No. 1 show in both Germany and all of Europe. Its dominance of the German market is such that the Teutonic version of "American Idol" takes the night off rather than compete against "Wetten dass...?" Gurin recently snagged the rights to the format from ZDF, made some additions and set up the project at the Alphabet. Sale comes in the wake of CBS' decision to develop a new "Name That Tune" as well as a kiddie genius quizzer from "Big Brother" exec producer Allison Grodner (Daily Variety, Dec. 7). NBC launches its third quizzer, "Identity," later this month, while ABC has two other gameshows in the works in addition to the recently launched "Show Me the Money." Original "Wetten dass...?" mixes celeb interviews and musical performances with segments featuring everyday Germans betting they can pull off bizarre or extraordinary stunts. "You get these real people who claim they can do something outrageous, like being dropped onto a chair from 50 feet in the air," Gurin said. Celebs then bet on whether they think the person can pull off the stunt. If they lose the bet, the celebs then do something crazy themselves (e.g., Paul McCartney leading a marching band). Details of the ABC version are still being hammered out, but the key difference will be the addition of a direct gambling element. Rather than celebs betting for fun, Gurin plans to have a team of contestants betting real coin on the outcome of the stunts. "We've made it more of a gambling show rather than a variety show," he said. "They'll be betting their way to a big cash prize." Gurin said the ABC project may still involve celebs or a mix of celebs and civilians. Either way, "It's meant to be fun and entertaining," he said. "The variety element comes from the kinds of stunts people do." This isn't the first time "Wetten dass...?" has journeyed across the Pond. CBS, via producer Gary Grossman, did a one-time special based on the format in 1993. "Wanna Bet?" reps the first project Gurin has sold to ABC. Much of his network work has been at NBC ("Weakest Link," "The Miss Universe Pageant") and Fox ("Test the Nation," "New Year's Eve Live"). On the quizzer front, the Gurin Co. -- which is repped by WMA -- also produces GSN's "Lingo." The game, from "Deal or No Deal" producer Endemol USA, involves contestants answering a series of trivia questions, then picking from one of 13 "Million Dollar Dancers," who each hold scrolls with dollar amounts printed on them. When players get answers right, their winnings increase by the amount on the scroll; wrong answers subtract from their haul. |
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Friday December 8, 2006 |
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Labor board alleges Disney violated labor practices Disney workers to rally today House where Walt Disney was born up for sale Seven Lessons of Walt Disney Build Your Own Lightsaber at Walt Disney World Cars rides off with three Grammy nominations Pan-kun the chimp working to promote Disney film Euro Disney - The takeover that never happened A high school for Mickey Mouse? Pleasure Island 21 and Over Walt Disney Pictures' Bridge to Terabithia Hannah Montana Soundtrack Ships Double Platinum Big themes, no tickets required Disney Goes Digital |
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Labor board alleges Disney violated labor practices ABC Action News - A federal complaint says the Walt Disney World Company violated labor laws when it displaced hotel custodial employees. The complaint was filed by the board that oversees labor issues between unions and companies. Disney has until December 14th to respond. A hearing is scheduled for February fifth. A Disney spokeswoman says the company has fully complied with their negotiated collective bargaining agreement and hasn't committed any violations. The complaint claims Disney changed working conditions without proper notice and failed to bargain with an employee union last year when 185 custodial workers were displaced. A union spokesman says Disney failed to bargain with them over what would happen when these workers were displaced. |
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Disney workers
to rally today Orlando Sentinel - In the past year, Walt Disney World has outsourced nearly 600 jobs to private contractors, and unions that represent nearly half of Disney's workers complain the cuts are unfair and are hurting morale. The job cuts of the past year affect about 1 percent of Disney's work force. Disney insists that no one has been laid off and that affected workers are offered other jobs at comparable wages, hours and benefits. Yet union officials and several workers who consented to recent interviews say the new job offers can be poor substitutes. The Service Trades Council Union, a coalition of six labor organizations at Disney World, plans to rally at noon today outside the Disney Crossroads gate. The union will protest Disney's decisions to give custodial, valet, bellhop, baggage handler, rigger and video tech jobs to private contractors. "Some people feel they're next. People are nervous over the whole situation. I've never seen people this upset over something in my 19 years here," said Tom Pierce, 58, of Dr. Phillips, a custodial worker who comes on at 5 a.m. Disney officials say the moves, which began in late 2005, have been relatively small and don't necessarily signal any trends. Spokeswoman Jacquee Polak said Disney World has long outsourced some jobs and will pursue any creative, smart and efficient business moves that make sense. "We realize the impact these changes are having on current employees and we are doing everything we can to minimize those impacts," she said. Disney World has 59,000 employees. The Service Trades Council unions represent approximately 29,000 of them and other unions represent 11,000 more. The cuts of the past year affect 583 jobs, according to a union count. The union that represents Disney's cleaning workers, Unite HERE! Local 362, wants to know what sorts of workers are replacing them, and what sorts of pay and benefits they get. Those questions form one of the issues in an unfair labor practice charge that the union filed and Disney disputed. It will be heard Feb. 5 before the National Labor Relations Board. "Are the employees of an outsource company required to live up to the same standards as Disney employees? Are they subjected to background checks, costuming and grooming policies, other standards that Disney requires of its employees?" asked President Morty Miller. "Disney has refused to answer and denied our information requests." While Disney may not have issued official answers, Polak replied that its contractors are required to follow Disney standards for employees, though wages and benefits are up to the contractors. "We are only going to work with partners that will maintain our very high standard of business service," she said. "It's the hallmark of what we do. It's the hallmark of the Disney experience. Guest service at Walt Disney World will not be compromised." Until recently, most of the cuts involved workers whom Disney customers normally never met, on either late-night or back-office jobs. But that is changing next month, when Disney turns over, by its count, 167 baggage, valet and bellhop jobs to Baggage Airlines Guest Service, the private company that now handles baggage transfers for Disney's Magical Express service. The Transportation and Communications Union estimates that 219 jobs will be lost. There's no indication that outside contractors can't clean or carry bags as well as Disney employees. One outside contractor said his workers probably clean hotels better than Disney employees, because cleaning hotels is all they do. John Knoepker, president Hotel Cleaning Services of Phoenix, said last month that his employees all are full time and receive benefits, though the pay and benefits might be lower than what Disney offered. "When a hotel provides their own in-house third-shift cleaning, they're not specialists in what they're doing. We specialize in what we do, nothing else," Knoepker said. "We don't pull our crew away from those jobs for any customer-service-related issues. That's covered by the in-house staff from the resorts. Our crew, we staff and train and maintain and supervise to do exactly the same job every night. They don't have to do guest runs." Yet the mix of cleaning and customer service is an important part of the job and one that Disney customers frequently expect, said former Fort Wilderness custodian Luz Martinez, 41, of Davenport, who left in November 2005 rather than switch to a day shift when her job was outsourced. "I was a custodian, I cleaned and took care of the guests. I was a runner also," she said. "I dealt with housecleaning, getting them what they needed." |
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House where Walt Disney was born up for sale WQAD, IL - It may be debatable whether a house recently put up for sale on E-Bay is a cultural landmark. But there is no doubt the North Side Chicago house was home to one very special person. The four-bedroom, frame house was where Walt Disney was born 105 years ago this week. The house was posted yesterday (Thursday) on E-Bay by owners Radoje and Barbara Popovic. Bidding starts at 280-thousand dollars for the home, built in 1893 by Disney's father, Elias. The Popovics, who bought the home for 190-thousand dollars in 2002, say they listed the house on E-Bay because they hope to find a buyer willing to do something special with a building of historical significance. Born December 5, 1901, Walt Disney lived in the house for four years before the family moved to Marceline, Missouri. |
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Seven Lessons of
Walt Disney Forbes.com - The essence of the life of Walt Disney, dreamer, innovator, entrepreneur and protean exporter of American culture--and dead for 40 years this month--has eluded biographers. Until now. The Hollywood historian Neal Gabler masterfully fills the gap with his 851-page Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination (Alfred A. Knopf). If you're in search of a long, satisfying holiday vacation read, this is the book. I read it from San Francisco to Miami (and back) and during our tenth FORBES Cruise for Investors in the eastern Caribbean Sea. So good was Walt Disney that I skipped a snorkeling trip in Grand Turk and a splash with the dolphins in Tortola. I will now publicly beg my abandoned wife's forgiveness. Honey, the book was that good. Enough gushing. Here's why I liked it. Walt Disney is the best business book I've read in years. That's not a high bar, as most books written directly to address business challenges are hopeless bores, of course. Of the few good ones, most are only indirectly about business. Last year I recommended as a terrific "business" book, Wooden on Leadership, by John Wooden, former head basketball coach for UCLA. A couple of years ago I hailed Rick Warren's The Purpose-Driven Church as a useful read. Just substitute "business" for "church" and it's all there. In Walt Disney Gabler takes us inside the heart and head of one of our greatest entrepreneurs. Here are some lessons Walt has to teach: An unhappy childhood doesn't kill. When Walt was 9 years old, his father, Elias, sold the failed family farm and bought a paper route in Kansas City. Elias put his boys to work. The youngest, Walt, "would rise early, in the darkness, to get his allotment of 50 papers. … He returned home at 5:30 or 6:00, took a short nap and then woke and ate his breakfast. … At times the cold and his tiredness would conspire, and Walt would fall asleep, curled inside his sack of papers." Out of this Dickensian boyhood grew Walt's vision of escape to a utopian world. That vision, of course, would inspire his animations and theme parks. Don't fall in love with money. Walt was a lousy businessman, by his own admission. His brother Roy handled all money matters. "[Walt] cared nothing for money except as a means to an end," writes Gabler. "Walt's only ambition was to make great cartoons." Time and again Walt and Roy would gamble all they owned on making breakthrough movies and, eventually, a theme park. Knowing the money could come and go, Walt, his wife, Lillian, and their two children lived modestly in a three-bedroom house. They rarely hobnobbed with other Hollywood moguls. Exploit the latest technology. During the mid-1920s Disney's main competitor was the New York shop of Max and Dave Fleischer, creators of Koko the Clown and, later, Betty Boop and Popeye. Disney's Hyperion studio had recently introduced Mickey Mouse in a silent short called Plane Crazy. Then came the technology of sound. Disney saw the potential. He innovated a way to synchronize sound and action, which spawned Steamboat Willie, the movie that forever propelled Disney ahead of the Fleischers. Disney spent his career looking for the technology edge. Demand perfection, but play loose. Walt often worked 'til midnight and demanded the same of his employees. In grueling "sweatbox" sessions he could ream an animator for a poorly drawn dwarf's thumb. But Walt also built a corporate campus with airy rooms, air-conditioning and top furniture, in the manner of today's coolest ad agencies or software firms. Dress, led by Walt, was casual. He encouraged pranks among the staff. Borrow from the outside. Flush from the successes of movie shorts featuring Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and the Three Little Pigs, Walt wanted to make a feature-length picture. But he knew the gag-driven pace of the shorts would wear out over 80 minutes. So, to prepare for making Snow White, Walt sent his animators to classes in acting, fine arts and even to classes on motion and gravity. Be a storyteller. If Walt Disney had one towering gift, it was this: He was an extraordinary storyteller. He used stories to convey his vision and inspire employees. In the winter of 1934 he gathered his top animators on a soundstage. "Walt was standing at the front, lit by a single spotlight in the otherwise dark space," writes Gabler. "Announcing that he was going to launch an animated feature, he told the story of Snow White, not just telling it but acting it out, assuming the characters' mannerisms, putting on their voices, letting his audience visualize exactly what they would be seeing on the screen. He became Snow White and the wicked queen and the prince and each of the dwarfs." The performance took more than three hours. "'He was a spellbinder,' recalled animator Joe Grant." Reinvent yourself when necessary. The huge success of Snow White created employee expectations that Walt couldn't fulfill. In 1941 Disney studio animators went on strike. Walt was shattered. He would never again feel the same passion for cartoons and movies. Thus began his wilderness period, which lasted a decade. Out of that period came Walt's inspiration for Disneyland, and he threw himself into the theme park. Where did Walt's second wind come from? Can't tell you--I'm out of space. Read Neal Gabler's fine biography on a great American businessman. |
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Build Your Own Lightsaber at Walt Disney World StarWars.com - Starting Friday, visitors to Walt Disney World in Florida will find an all-new Star Wars themed attraction waiting for them in the park's Once Upon A Toy Store -- the Build Your Own Lightsaber experience. Both Jedi and Sith alike are invited to "choose their destiny" and construct their saber of choice from a dazzling display offering scores of different design possibilities, including an exclusive purple-colored filter for fans of the signature Windu-hued blade.
With Walt Disney World's Star Tours attraction, Star Wars Weekends, and recently-installed Jedi Training Academy, the park is truly becoming a Star Wars destination for fans of all ages. The Build Your Own Lightsaber attraction adds an interactive component to the Star Wars park experience, which will cost $19.95 from beginning to end, no matter how elaborate the saber design (including double-bladed customs). Batteries are also included. Schoeneberg describes the experience:
Collectors should note that the Jedi and Sith pins are exclusive to this park and attraction -- they will only be available to those who complete the BYOL experience. In addition, the park plans to refresh the attraction every year with a new custom saber exclusive component or keepsake. While the attraction is currently exclusive to Florida's Once Upon a Toy Store at Downtown Disney, Schoeneberg says that there is always potential to expand the experience to other Disney Theme Parks around the world. Until then, fans should definitely put Walt Disney World on their list of holiday or summer destinations. |
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Cars rides off with three Grammy nominations Animated News - The nominations for the 49th Annual Grammy Awards were announced today, and the three nominations going to animated entries this year were all from Disney/Pixar's Cars. The film's album was nominated for "Best Compilation Soundtrack Album". Randy Newman picked up his 6th Grammy nomination, getting the nod in "Best Song Written For A Motion Picture" for the song Our Town. And a "Best Solo Rock Vocal Performance" nomination went to John Mayer for his rendition of Route 66. The winners will be announced on February 11, 2007. |
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Pan-kun the chimp working to promote Disney film The Daily Yomiuri - Chimp "celebrity" Pan-kun, famous for his regular appearances on NTV's animal show, Tensai! Shimura Dobutsuen (Thursdays, 7 p.m.), has been designated special campaign director for the upcoming Disney animated film: The Wild (Japan title: Raian o Sagase!), opening Dec. 16. The film features a father lion who sets out on a journey to search for his missing cub with the help of some animal friends. Film distributor Buena Vista International Japan "asked" the male chimpanzee to support the promotional campaign, believing "he can understand the animal characters' feelings more deeply than humans," an official of the company told reporters during a recent press conference. To promote the film, Pan-kun is scheduled to visit publishing and newspaper companies, while attending screening events to greet viewers. |
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Euro Disney - The takeover that never happened Reuters - Did they really want Disneyland Paris or was their takeover bid dreamt up in Neverland? The story of the takeover bid that never came from
Swiss firm Center-Tainment (G6P.F) for Euro Disney (EDLP.PA)
has all the ingredients of a good fairy tale, and has
left regulators and stock brokers looking for the heroes
and villains. "I don't know more than what I have read in the press. That's the absolute truth," Koch told Reuters by telephone. A week after Center-Tainment announced on Nov. 30 its bid plan and then did nothing, prompting France's regulator to impose a six-month moratorium on any offer, much remains unclear about the company, its financial backers and their motives. The company's shares have collapsed from around 20 euros to under 20 cents, making its mooted swap valuing Euro Disney shares at 11 cents impossible to finance with its capital of 10 million shares, each with a nominal value of 0.006 euro. At Thursday's closing prices, a similar bid would secure at most 16 million Euro Disney shares, or just 0.4 percent of Euro Disney's capital -- far from the 50.01 percent that Center-Tainment said it wanted. France's AMF regulator has launched an inquiry. "The affair is surprising from the start," Gerard Rameix, AMF secretary general told Les Echos newspaper on Friday. "First, it doesn't seem possible to launch a hostile takeover for Euro Disney. Second, announcing a takeover in advance pushes up the price, which is not to the initiator's advantage. Finally, they (Center-Tainment) don't appear to have enough liquidity for such an offer and the stock does not offer the necessary guarantees to make it an acceptable currency." Center-Tainment was not available for comment. Whatever the inquiry's outcome, the case has shone a spotlight on the way Europe's unregulated markets can breed takeover rumors affecting even regulated firms, and how authorities are powerless to stop them. It also illustrates differences in financial news reporting, with some media sceptical of the bid and others reporting it straight. HOLIDAY PARK For Koch, the story began in May when he was approached by representatives of Center-Tainment and asked to prepare for a listing on Frankfurt's unregulated open market, a process that involves drawing up a document for the exchange. He said he could not make available the document that was filed with Deutsche Boerse (DB1Gn.DE) about the firm, and that the people then representing Center-Tainment have since changed. Heiner Seider, a spokesman for the exchange, said the document could not be released, citing data protection rules. "Originally they planned to build a holiday park at Bremerhaven (in northern Germany). They had a small family park which was up and running near Kiel. As far as I know, that park is not included in Center-Tainment any more and the person who was responsible on the board has resigned," Koch said. Center-Tainment listed on Sept. 27, but volumes were very light, Koch said. As market maker, the brokerage offered an initial price of 1.35 euro, but the share did not really trade until Oct. 6, with 370 shares changing hands at 5 euros, he said. At the end of October, the price shot up to 30 euros -- prompting an inquiry from the Frankfurt exchange's own market watchdog, Koch said, and drawing attention from other brokers. It was about then that Andreas Lipko at the Berlin office of MWB Wertpapierhandelsbank learned of the share, and applied to the Berlin-Bremen stock exchange to make a market in it. The shares began trading there on Nov. 8. Lipko said there were no links or contacts between MWB and Center-Tainment. Berlin-Bremen bourse spokeswoman Eva Klose said such applications are standard, requiring only that the companies are listed on an international market elsewhere. A similar procedure was used by Baader Wertpapierhandelsbank to obtain a quotation for Center-Tainment on the Stuttgart stock exchange that started on Monday. A Baader spokesman said the decision was taken "before there was all this speculation". Koch said his only contact with current Center-Tainment Chief Executive Ulf Werner was on Nov. 30, the day of company's statement in Paris, when he called asking for information about the purported bid. "They did not send me anything," he said. According to Koch, up until the company's shambolic news conference in Paris, only around 5,000 of its shares had ever traded. Since, more than 9 million shares have changed hands - the equivalent of almost all its share capital. Recent weeks have also seen sporadic heavy trade in Euro Disney. On Sept. 18, its shares hit a record low 5 cents and volume hit an unexplained spike of 108 million shares -- compared with under 8 million on average in the past year. In a statement on Dec. 4, Center-Tainment said its goal, to achieve management changes at Euro Disney, remained unchanged. But it said it took seriously "indications" it had received that unnamed investors were selling its shares without actually owning them -- taking so-called naked short positions -- in order to make a share swap "unattractive". Koch dismissed the idea. "The only person who can go short and then just for one day is the market maker and believe me we are not naked short in this," he said. Another broker, who declined to be named, said the pattern of trading looked like someone trying to sell out their holding. "It's really professional selling," he said. The buy side in contrast was dominated by retail investors, he added. |
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A high school
for Mickey Mouse? Newton TAB - After last week’s “conversation” about the new Newton North High School, it finally hit me what’s bothering me so much about this whole thing: I’m being treated like a toddler instead of a thoughtful, considerate adult with real concerns and a clue. At last week’s forum, both sides made effective arguments, but there were some statements that really annoyed me, like the threat that if we did not accept the current plan as proposed that we would be back at square one. On the other side was the threat of the total collapse of all public infrastructures in Newton if we build a new high school, which will lead to tumbleweeds blowing through the broken streets of abandoned buildings throughout the villages. This is the equivalent of controlling a toddler with false empowerment statements such as: Do you want to wear the red sweater or the one with the elephants? That way the kid feels somewhat in control and misses the reality that they’ve been manipulated so you can get out the door. On the other side is that whole, “There are children starving in Africa,” admonishment when you push away the brussel sprouts. This all feels appropriate since the only other public school project that been fully designed by Gund Partnership was Celebration High School in Celebration, Fla., a school built for the Walt Disney Corporation.
“Wait a minute ... a high school for Disney?”
Celebration, Fla., is not a town or city that we think of as one. It is an unincorporated community that is run by a five-member board of supervisors who are employees of Disney elected to the council by landowners in the Reedy Creek Improvement District. RCID looks and acts like any local government, providing emergency services, roads, utilities and such, but the police force is Disney security (they allow Orange and Osceola County police to report incidents) and the community is a private corporation. In other words, it is subdivision of Disney. That’s right; the highly touted Gund has designed only one public school, which has gone through the whole process to completion, and it was built for Mickey Mouse. So am I the only one who gets the irony in the connection in how we’re being treated, and the fact that the guy designing our high school designed one for the ultimate toddler consumer corporate machine? Look, there is no doubt that Gund’s proposed drawings for North fit in with the statement at his Web site declaring, “The new high school, one of the most ambitious ever in Massachusetts...” There is also no doubt that the various buildings and schools designed by Gund Partnership are interesting and beautiful, but there are practical concerns that are being ignored while everyone is reacting to sticker shock and very real traffic safety issues. For example, passing time — the time it takes a student has to get from one class to another — is being tossed in as an afterthought. Yes, the majority of kids will be in the same area for the majority of the day, but what happens when your PE class on one end of the school is before or after your lab science on the other end and three floors away? Is that two-minute passing time enough to keep the student from being consistently tardy? Then there are the beautiful designs from an adult perspective that invite a level of adolescent mischief — such as a glass roof lower than upper-level classroom windows that open. Don’t even start me on some of the “cost-cutting” measures (such as removing central air conditioning from the HVAC system) that are being tossed around. So the question is how do we incorporate the concerns raised by people like Alderman George Mansfield — whose day job as an urban planner suggests we should listen to him — with the seeming rigidity of this plan? We are community of smart, caring people. The fact that we have so many professionals living here in Newton suggests that we are people with a clue. So why are we being treated like toddlers? Let me lay it out for you: I accept we need a new high school, not a renovation or hybrid. We’ve already, regrettably, passed those points. So the administration needs address the community’s very real and very thoughtful concerns. The people screaming about renovations and fixing the HVAC at the current North just need to let it go. What I want is a cost-effective high school that isn’t just going to look spiffy on some overly designed Flash-gone-wild enabled Web site, and I don’t think I’m alone in saying that. But until the administration shows they are willing to listen on that score, I’m probably voting against the site plan as it stands. I mention the Disney connection since I feel like we’re being treated like toddlers, but in the end, even the Mouse had to shell out only $30 million to build Celebration High School. We don’t have the Mouse’s revenue resources — which means this project needs to come in on or under budget in a real and timely fashion. |
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Pleasure Island 21 and Over
Cast Portal - Beginning the evening of January 1st, Guests must be 21 or older for admission to the BET Soundstage Club, 8TRAX, Mannequins Dance Palace, Motion, and Rock 'n' Roll Beach Club at Pleasure Island. The Adventurers Club and The Comedy Warehouse will continue to be open to Guests of all ages with Guests under age 18 accompanied by an adult. |
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Walt
Disney Pictures' Bridge to Terabithia Walt Disney Pictures - Visit the official website for Disney Pictures Bridge to Terabithia to view the trailer for this fanciful adventure set to open February 16th. Click the link below for the Official Site. http://disney.go.com/disneypictures/terabithia/ |
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Walt Disney Records - The soundtrack
to the smash hit Disney Channel Original Series Hannah
Montana has shipped double platinum (2,000,000 units),
with certification by the R.I.A.A expected within 30
days. The CD takes a significant jump to the #2
position on the Billboard Top 200 chart with over
157,000 units scanned for the week ending December 3,
2006 (according to Nielsen SoundScan). Additionally
this week, the soundtrack continues to reign at #1 on
both the Billboard Soundtrack Chart and the Billboard
Kids Chart, where it has topped both charts for six
consecutive weeks.
Released October 24, the Hannah Montana Soundtrack
shattered industry records as the first-ever TV
soundtrack to enter the Billboard Top 200 at #1. The
soundtrack went on to break additional Billboard
records when seven tracks entered the Hot 100 Singles
Chart, the most tracks by an artist in one week in the
history of the chart.
The Hannah Montana series is seen on Disney Channels all over the world and on DisneyChannel.com via streaming broadband video. In the U.S. year-to-date, Hannah Montana is #1 on basic cable TV among Tweens 9-14 and #2 among kids 6-11. For third quarter 2006, Hannah Montana is the #1 rated series on broadcast and basic cable TV among Tweens 9-14 and tied for #1 among kids 6-11. It is also seen Saturday mornings on the ABC Television Network's "ABC Kids." Hannah Montana is a live-action comedy series that follows typical tween Miley Stewart, who lives with her older brother and widowed dad, a songwriter. But unbeknownst to her friends and classmates, Miley has a secret double life - she is the world famous pop star Hannah Montana. Disney Channel is a 24-hour kid-driven, family inclusive television network that taps into the world of kids and families through original series and movies. Currently available on basic cable in over 89 million U.S. homes and to millions of other viewers on 25 Disney Channels around the world, Disney Channel is part of the Disney-ABC Television Group. Walt Disney Records is part of the Buena Vista Music Group, the recorded music and music-publishing arm of The Walt Disney Company. For more information, please visit Disney Records.com. |
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Big themes,
no tickets required
Daytona Beach News Journal - I felt the first pangs of guilt while zipping by Cinderella's castle aboard Disney's monorail. I wouldn't be stopping at the Magic Kingdom that day. And, despite the best efforts of that smooth-talking monorail announcer, I wouldn't be transferring to the Epcot train, or catching a bus to Disney-MGM Studios or Disney's Animal Kingdom, either. No, I was doing Disney without actually hitting any of the theme parks. Instead, I was heading to some of Disney World's lavish hotels in search of good shopping, even better dining and, most importantly, a little Christmas spirit. Make that a lot of Christmas spirit. While all of Disney World is decked out in holiday finery, its hotels are a site to behold, filled with lights, oversized trees and larger-than-life gingerbread houses. Each has that theme park "theme," without the crowds or expensive tickets. Here are a few itineraries to get you started: The Monorail Loop Feeling a little Scrooge-like? Then get to Disney's Grand Floridian, pronto. A lavishly decorated Christmas tree serves as the centerpiece to the grand lobby of this Victorian-inspired hotel. On this day, a six-piece band (perched on the second floor balcony) plays Christmas carols while visitors snap photos of a 16-foot-tall gingerbread house, made by Disney chefs. (The house doubles as a baked-goods shop.) If all this doesn't put you in a Dickensian mood, pop into the Garden View Lounge for afternoon tea. For fine dining, Victoria and Albert's is considered one of Disney World's (and Central Florida's) best restaurants. Reservations, along with evening attire, required. Fancy! From the Grand Floridian, you can hop aboard the monorail to two other hotels, the Contemporary and Polynesian. Although not as heavily decorated, the Contemporary boasts a top-notch restaurant (the California Grill) and is a good spot for watching the nightly fireworks. The Polynesian, with its Pacific Islands theme, is my sentimental favorite (we stayed there once when I was a kid). Kona Cafe brews a mean cup of joe, or a luau-style dinner show (Monday through Saturday night). The Beach and Boardwalk Head to Disney's Beach Club to check out more holiday handiwork from Disney chefs. Inside the lobby, visitors will find a life-size carousel made of chocolate. Yes, chocolate. The adjacent Yacht Club boasts another confectionery creation: a miniature mountain village made of candy. Yes, candy. (The model train that zips through it is, alas, not edible.) It's just a short walk from the Beach and Yacht clubs to Disney's Boardwalk. This hotel was made to look like a turn-of-the-century boardwalk, complete with carnival games (and barkers), roving entertainment and food vendors (nothing says Christmas quite like chili dogs and funnel cake). Stop inside the hotel's lobby to see Santa's Workshop (another chocolate creation from Disney chefs). Dine at trendy Spoodles (make reservations or expect a long wait) and end the night at Jellyrolls, a dueling-piano bar. Tips and Tricks Hotels on the "monorail loop" are near the Magic Kingdom. Beach and Boardwalk hotels are near Epcot and Disney MGM Studios. Once on Disney property, just follow the signs. Nonguests can visit hotel restaurants and shops (just have a photo ID handy). Parking is available, too (self-parking is free, valet is $7 and good for the entire day). Be warned, though. Hotel guests have parking priority. If a hotel lot is full (and that sometimes happens during peak lunch and dinner hours) you can't park there unless you have a confirmed dinner reservation. Peak hours or not, Disney restaurants are always crowded. Book a reservation before you make your trip. Call (407) 939-3463. Downtown Disney, the resort's shopping area, is also decked out for the holidays. Its centerpiece, Pleasure Island, recently changed its admission policies. Partygoers now pay per club, rather than purchasing an all-inclusive ticket. For more information, go to disneyworld.com. |
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Disney Goes Digital
Motley Fool - It's Monday night, and the smell of football runs thick at Disney's (NYSE: DIS) ESPN. The gridiron showdown promises plenty of action, but Disney's the one that will truly score. The ESPN.com website will generate 30 million hits on a Monday Night Football day. That's just the beginning. Thanks to a state-of-the-art digital facility at ESPN's headquarters in Bristol, Connecticut, it's no longer just a game. As fans watch on TV, ESPN is subdividing the game into digital bits spread out in real-time across all of Disney's platforms. From radio to online streams at ESPN360.com, the two teams on the field may be calling fly patterns and post patterns, but Disney is the one flying to post the content that it's collecting. For ESPN, the end zone is really just the beginning. CFO Tom Staggs painted just such a picture at the UBS 34th Annual Global Media Conference on Tuesday. Disney may be the ultimate family entertainment giant, but it's not approaching the digital age as child's play. Between movie downloads, ad-supported streams, e-commerce initiatives, and even Disney Mobile, there's a lot more to the Mouse House than you may think. Pixar is no toy story If occupancy rates remain buoyant, Disney may expand its hotel properties, but the emphasis will remain on making its existing parks stickier destinations. And even though Disney has added a new park in Florida every 8-10 years, don't start camping out for a fifth gated attraction to open. "I don't see another major theme park investment in the foreseeable future," Staggs said. It may be a different story overseas. The company is already in talks with Shanghai, but there is no timetable on a second park in China, or anywhere else for that matter. As for Pixar's expanded role, the leaders of the computer-animation pioneer have already had an influence on Disney's animation studio and attraction-creation process. Staggs admits that the plan is for Pixar to eventually average two annual releases, though it's clear that Pixar's fingerprints will be thankfully splattered all over Disney's other ventures. Spending on the future Disney spent $100 million in video game development this past fiscal year, and it's looking to invest closer to $130 million this year. In about five years, Staggs sees Disney spending about $350 million on development if things pan out. Disney is aiming to have its gaming strategy revolve around its branded characters -- which have become a pretty wide army. Five years ago, Winnie the Pooh and Mickey Mouse (and friends) accounted for 80% of the character-related licensing revenues. Nowadays, those two properties take up just half of the revenue mix pie. Disney is also investing in Disney.com. The site will relaunch next month with a Web 2.0 makeover, giving the popular destination more personalization and community-driven features. Video on screens big and small Staggs also discussed the video-on-demand deal with Comcast (Nasdaq: CMCSA). Disney will be providing movies on demand for the giant cable provider just 15 days after they hit the DVD market. Disney is also serving up ad-supported broadcasts of hit ABC shows. This doesn't mean that DVD is dead. Even though Cars didn't play as well as The Incredibles on the big screen, it should ultimately sell about as many units on home video. Staggs also feels that Cars will have an extended life as a brand in consumer products and ultimately theme-park attractions. The new Disney Mobile cell phone service offering will also be a worthy ambassador for Disney. The company is happy with the product so far. Aimed at the 8-to-13 year-old market, Disney is surprised to find a few teenagers subscribing to the service, too. It's a sweet spot for Disney, especially since moms drive the decision-making process in 70% to 80% of the cases (hence the ads that show its parent-friendly features), and Disney is a name that families have come to trust over the years. As easy as M-O-U-S-E A lot can change along the way. Disney obviously has big hopes for Pirates of the Caribbean 3 and Pixar's Ratatouille. Staggs also singles out other projects like Wild Hogs, Underdog, and the animated Meet the Robinsons as potential sleeper hits in 2007. Clearly, there's a lot going at Disney. Like that digital studio at ESPN -- one so vital that ESPN is opening a second facility -- these are the digital bits and pieces that will fuel Disney's future. Here's hoping that Disney knows how to slice them and splice them without ever losing sight of the importance of quality. |
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Thursday December 7, 2006 |
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Disney Launches Hannah Montana Products Disney film's stage version on tap Roy Disney at True-Life DVD Release Celebration Tonight Tech for Tots: MP3 Players by Crayola and Disney Disney, French retailer to create products Disney: No Plans To Spin Off ESPN Davey O'Brien National Quarterback Award Winner to be Announced Thursday Night New Theme Park Proposed in Disneyland's Shadow |
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Disney Launches Hannah Montana Products
Disney Consumer Products - After a tremendously successful series premiere on Disney Channel this Spring, Hannah Montana has captivated kids all over the nation becoming the #1 rated series on basic cable TV among kids 6-11 and tweens and topping the Billboard Top 200 chart with its original soundtrack debut in November. In response to its huge popularity, Disney Consumer Products (NYSE: DIS) today announced a new line of products inspired by Hannah Montana that will play up the themes of music, fashion and fun with an assortment of apparel, home decor, stationery, games, electronics, personal care and much more.
The first items will launch this month
including a collection of apparel, handbags and
accessories available at Macy's department stores
nationwide. Especially designed for tween girls (sizes
7 - 16), the new line features lifestyle sportswear
pieces incorporating key fashion trends and style
direction taken from lead character Miley Stewart's
duality (by day girl next door, by night pop star
princess). Ranging in price from $20-$39 SRP, the line
features detailed embellishments, enzyme washed
denims, embellished tees, crinkle voiles and foil
printing; while key pieces include: capris, bermudas,
tunics, double layered tops, shrunken blazers, sweater
knits, shrugs, skinny legged bottoms and jeans.
"Hannah Montana has resonated with kids and tweens with its relatable stories, sense of humor and its charming characters," said Lisa Avent, vice president of TV Licensing for Disney Consumer Products. "This new line of merchandise will extend the series beyond TV into a full lifestyle brand offering many ways for tween girls to celebrate their sense of style - be it casual or glamorous pop star." Also available this month is an assortment of stationery and self-expression items including posters, bookmarks, greeting cards, gift wrap and party goods at retailers nationwide such as Wal-Mart and Party City. A series of junior novels launched earlier this year and will expand in the spring. In 2007, Hannah Montana fans can look for a new line of cosmetics at Club Libby Lu, where girls can tap into their "inner pop-star" with a complete Hannah Montana makeover. A collection of Hannah Montana fashion dolls featuring Hannah's most recognizable looks will also be available at retailers nationwide. Home decor, consumer electronics, video games and toys will launch later in the year, while apparel and accessories will expand to other retailers including Dillard's. Hannah Montana is a live-action comedy series that follows typical tween Miley Stewart, who lives with her older brother and widowed dad, a songwriter. But unbeknownst to her friends and classmates, Miley has a secret double life - she is the world famous pop star Hannah Montana. Combining a stage persona with creative costuming, Miley discovers she can have the best of both worlds - the fame and fortune of a well-known singer and the fun of middle school with her best friends Lilly and Oliver, whom she has entrusted with her secret identity. Year-to-date, Hannah Montana is the #1 rated series on basic cable TV among Tweens 9-14 and #2 among kids 6-11. For third quarter 2006, Hannah Montana is the #1 rated series on broadcast and basic cable TV among Tweens 9-14 and tied for #1 among kids 6-11. Disney Channel is a 24-hour kid-driven, family inclusive television network that taps into the world of kids and families through original series and movies. Currently available on basic cable in over 89 million U.S. homes and to millions of other viewers on 25 Disney Channels around the world, Disney Channel is part of the Disney-ABC Television Group. About Disney Consumer Products Disney Consumer Products (DCP) is the business segment of The Walt Disney Company (NYSE: DIS) that extends the Disney brand to merchandise ranging from apparel, toys, home decor and books to interactive games, food and beverages, stationery, electronics and animation art. This is accomplished through the work of DCP's various lines of business: Disney Toys, Disney Softlines, Disney Home, Disney Food, Health & Beauty, Disney Stationery, Disney Publishing, Buena Vista Games, Baby Einstein, the Muppets Holding Company and Disney Shopping, Inc.'s catalog and disneyshopping.com. The Disney Store, which debuted in 1987, also falls under DCP, through stores currently owned and operated by unaffiliated third parties under licensing agreements in North America and Japan, and wholly owned stores in Europe. For more information about DCP, please visit our web site at www.disneyconsumerproducts.com. |
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Disney
film's stage version on tap
Pittsburgh Post Gazette - The mother of a preteen girl recently described the phenomenon of Disney's TV movie "High School Musical" as having "a life of its own." No less than Cabbage Patch Kids and Tickle Me Elmo before it, the movie, which has been running almost constantly on The Disney Channel for several months, has captured the imagination of tweeners and early teens to the point that even adults who have no children at home are aware of the film because of all the buzz. Besides the repeated showings on its cable channel, Disney has made a DVD version available and has released a stage adaptation to both professional and amateur theater companies around the country. One of the first to acquire the rights to perform the stage musical was Woodland Hills High School, which will present a concert version of the work at 7:30 p.m. tomorrow and Saturday at the school's auditorium. School district public relations director Maria McCool said the rare fall musical was as much about education as entertainment. "This is what we call our performance arts workshop," Mrs. McCool said, pointing out that students involved in the production must be taking or have taken the school's performance arts classes. Under the guidance of teachers Tom Crone and Deborah Talarico, students will direct, choreograph and handle the costumes, sound and lighting. In addition, two students will use their participation to finish their state-mandated senior projects. But, according to Mrs. McCool, the show won't be as much of an event as previously believed. The Disney Corp., never one to let responsibility to its young fans or their parents stand in the way of allegiance to shareholders, has considerably broadened the awarding of rights to the show from the original 17 schools around the country to a pretty much unlimited number, at least until professional productions, such as the one opening this year's Pittsburgh CLO season, begin in the spring. While technically a concert version, meaning there will be no sets or intricate staging, the 40 student performers at Woodland Hills will do a couple of choreographed dance numbers and will be wearing costumes appropriate to time and place. That shouldn't be hard because the musical is set in a contemporary high school. One caveat: There will be no reserved seating or advance ticket sales for "High School Musical." Woodland Hills' auditorium has about 1,000 seats. A recent production at South Fayette High School reported sellout crowds and waiting lists, so an early start might be the ticket to getting a ticket. |
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Roy Disney at True-Life DVD Release Celebration
Tonight
Animation World Network - Thursday, Dec. 7, 2006, at 7:30 pm, the American Cinematheque will be hosting a screening of Walt Disney's TRUE-LIFE ADVENTURES films in celebration of the DVD release. The TRUE-LIFE ADVENTURES -- a series of 13 groundbreaking film shorts and short features released between 1948-1960 that captured the wonder of animals and nature and won eight Academy Awards -- epitomize the magic of Walt Disney. In classics such as SEAL ISLAND, THE LIVING DESERT, THE VANISHING PRAIRIE and WHITE WILDERNESS, Walt blended his unique sense of innovation with creativity and technology to put together films that brought fascinating insights into the world of wild animals as well as attention to the importance of conserving our outdoor heritage. The acclaimed series made its long-awaited DVD debut from Walt Disney Home Ent. on Dec. 5. This program will consist of highlights from some of the most famous and popular entries. Roy Disney will be part of a discussion following the screening with Bruce Reitherman, Emmy-Award winning producer/writer/director/ cinematographer, and Paul Kenworthy, who filmed much of THE LIVING DESERT and THE VANISHING PRAIRIE. Moderating the panel will be John Canemaker. |
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Tech for Tots: MP3 Players by Crayola and Disney
 Gearlog, NY -
Babies love their music and want to jam
wherever they go. And they don't just want to borrow
mom or dad's iPod, they want their own player!
Crayola's 256MB MP3 player, just $50, it has a tiny
screen, an SD card slot and runs on one AAA battery.
Both headphones and earbuds are included. Plus it had
a cute, and easy to hold shape, too. It also has two
audio-out jacks so babies and their BFF's can rock out
together to Jack Johnson or Radiohead or what have
you.If your baby's not into eating crayons so much, but just loves Disney, then Mickey's here to save the day with the Digital Mix Sticks MP3 Player (image after the jump). It's a bit smaller than the Crayola player, and has only 128MB of memory, but it also has an SD/MMC slot. The built-in battery is rechargeable, and claimed to llast for 10 hours. It will play MP3's and WMAs, and comes with some Disney samples pre-loaded. M-I-C-K-E-Y. . . |
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Disney, French retailer to create products
Orlando Sentinel, FL - Carrefour SA, the world's second-largest retailer, said it will develop new lines of Walt Disney Co.-licensed toys, textiles and household goods. Seven Disney employees have started work at Carrefour's base for nonfood products in Ulis, France, strengthening an existing partnership between the two companies, according to a joint statement Wednesday. The two companies will create T-shirts with Disney cartoon characters and homewares such as bedsheets, blankets and drapes. Disney has similar arrangements with Wal-Mart Stores Inc. in the U.S. and Tesco PLC in the United Kingdom. "The presence of the new Disney team at Carrefour's offices will allow closer cooperation and perfect control of the process from development to distribution," the companies said. Carrefour has distributed Disney-branded products such as jeans and children's school supplies since 2002. The first jointly developed products will arrive in Carrefour stores in summer 2008. |
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Disney: No
Plans To Spin Off ESPN
MediaPost Publications - While Investment Bank UBS Values the ESPN unit at some $28 billion, Walt Disney's CFO said there are no plans to spin it off despite the potential payoff. "I feel pretty good about ESPN being part of the overall family as it is," said Tom Staggs, CFO of ESPN's parent. Staggs said that ESPN offers multiple synergies within the broad Disney portfolio. One of the more prominent examples--and a move that suggests how powerful the ESPN brand has become--is the recent decision to place sports broadcasts on ABC under the ESPN moniker. UBS says ESPN accounts for 40% of Disney's $70.7 billion market capitalization. Disney owns 80% of ESPN, with Hearst holding the remaining 20%. (Staggs spoke at a UBS investor conference Tuesday in New York.) Much of ESPN's value comes from its brand ID that allows it to establish beachheads on new platforms--although its recent ESPN Mobile venture failed--and that no doubt is key to Staggs' prediction that Disney as a whole can bring in $700 million in digital revenue in the next fiscal year, up from $500 million this year. A third of those revenues are from ad dollars, Staggs said. Regarding ABC, Staggs said the current scatter market is "solid but not spectacular," with mid-single-digit increases over upfront pricing. |
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Davey O'Brien National Quarterback Award Winner to be
Announced Thursday Night
NCAAfootball.net - Will it be Brennan, Quinn or Smith?
Tune in tonight at 7 p.m. EST
as the 2006 Davey O'Brien National Quarterback Award
winner is announced on the ESPN Home Depot College
Football Awards Show, airing live from the Atlantic
Dance Hall on The Boardwalk at Walt Disney World in
Orlando, Florida.
The O'Brien finalists are, in alphabetical order: Colt Brennan, Hawaii The winner will be honored on February 19, 2007, at the 30th annual Davey O'Brien Awards Dinner at The Fort Worth Club in downtown Fort Worth, Texas, along with Paul Hornung, recipient of the 2006 Davey O'Brien Legends Award, and the O'Brien High School Scholarship Award winner. Ten college football awards have joined forces to name their 2006 finalists on the ESPN Home Depot College Football Awards Show. In addition to the Davey O'Brien National Quarterback Award, presented annually to the nation's best college quarterback, participating awards include the Bednarik Award, the Biletnikoff Award, the Walter Camp Player of the Year Award, the Lou Groza Award, the Ray Guy Award, the Maxwell Award, the Outland Trophy, the Jim Thorpe Award and the Doak Walker Award. |
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New Theme Park Proposed in Disneyland's Shadow
Los Angeles Times - If a bold plan moves forward, there will be a $4-billion (yes, that's billion with a "b") theme park coming to Garden Grove, California. A Korean-based firm is proposing to invest $4 billion in a state-of-the-art theme park and three hotels on a site that is about 3 miles from Disneyland. But wait, there's more! The investors envision a full-scale destination resort and plan to pony up another $4 billion for an adjacent retail and entertainment center. The details are sketchy, but a Garden Grove official says that the city would like to see a cutting-edge park like Universal Orlando's Islands of Adventure. The Korean company has contacted MGM Studios as a possible creative partner for the project. There haven't been many new theme parks under development in North America recently, and certainly nothing of this magnitude. |
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Wednesday December 6, 2006 |
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Disney sells 5M copies of 'Pirates' DVD in first day of
release Pixar Founder Leads Disney into Another Dimension U.S. looks to Disney for welcome for visitors Iger wins over Wall Street and Main Street Disney Chief Executive Robert A. Iger is MarketWatch.com's 'CEO of the Year' for 2006 'Hannah Montana' Star Miley Cyrus Ready To Break Out, Hilary-Style A Concise, Relevant History of Disney Danny Elfman scores Meet the Robinsons for Disney Christian Pop Artist to be Featured Worldwide through Disney Kart Expo Partners with Radio Disney for ’07 Show, Proclaims Sunday Kids Day Ousted Disney movie boss resurfaces at DreamWorks Bonds Goes to Disney World Looking for a Job |
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Disney sells 5M copies of 'Pirates' DVD in first day of
release bizjournals.com - Walt Disney Pictures' sold nearly 5 million copies of "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest" on DVD in North America in its first day of release, Walt Disney Co. said Wednesday.  That number sets Disney's Buena Vista Worldwide Home Entertainment in a position to possibly finish 2006 with the three top DVD releases of the year with the Pirates movie, "Cars" and "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe," according to a Disney release. The first day sales numbers also put "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest" on track to potentially become the top selling live action DVD of all time, Disney said.Disney said that two versions of the movie were available, a 2-disk special edition DVD set and a single disk DVD. Burbank's Walt Disney Co. (NYSE: DIS) is the parent company of Walt Disney Pictures and Buena Vista Worldwide Home Entertainment Co. Buena Vista is the home entertainment marketing, sales and distribution company for Walt Disney, Touchstone, Hollywood Pictures, Miramax and Buena Vista products. |
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VOA - John Lasseter breathed new life into family
films by putting animators in front of computers. He
launched an animation revolution with Toy Story in
1995 and has kept innovating and entertaining
audiences around the world ever since, first as
creative director of Pixar Films and now in that same
capacity at the venerable Walt Disney Studio.
Woody, the old-fashioned cowboy doll, and his futuristic spaceman pal, Buzz Lightyear, became instant hits the world over when they first met on screen in Toy Story. They sprang from the imagination of John Lasseter, a boyish, round-faced man wearing wire-rimmed glasses and a flamboyant Hawaiian-style shirt. As he makes the dolls walk across a table, it's obvious he has proudly refused to outgrow playing with toys. John Lasseter and his team at Pixar Films brought Woody, Buzz and their toy box companions to life in the first-ever completely computer-animated feature film. Toy Story won John Lasseter a special Oscar before animation had its own category, and started an unbroken string of popular family films that he had a creative hand in, including A Bug's Life, Finding Nemo and this year's hit, Cars. It is a career that 49-year-old John Lasseter says he began pursuing as a teenager, growing up in Hollywood. "My mother was a high school art teacher - she had been that for 38 years - so art was always around our house," he recalls. "Then in high school I found a book on the art of animation and got really inspired to be an animator. I loved cartoons. I used to get up at six every Saturday morning and watch cartoons until the golf matches came on. So in high school I saw this book and it dawned on me: 'Oh my goodness; people actually make money doing this! That's what I want to do.'" And that is what he did. John Lasseter studied at California Institute of the Arts and on graduation landed his first job at theWalt Disney Company: not as an animator, though. He worked as a skipper on the Disneyland 'Jungle Cruise' ride. He soon got the chance to pursue his dream at Disney, where the art of hand-drawn animation had flourished, but by then - in the 1980's - had fallen on hard times. Lasseter tried to convince his bosses that new computer technology could add previously unattainable depth and dimension to animated films, turning them from two-dimensional or '2D' into more realistic '3D' images. It got him fired. Not long afterward, however, he joined up with a team of like-minded innovators to form a new company, Pixar, far from Hollywood, in the San Francisco area. There, they pushed the technology past what anyone thought possible and reached new heights of success. Lasseter says he's often asked if computer animation is going to replace hand-drawn animation. He insists that computers can never - and should never - replace artists. "The way I view it is that this is not a new art form; this is just a new medium within the art form of animation." He compares it to photography. "If you remember in art history, when photography first came in as 'the new technology,' everybody was saying that it was going to replace painting. But now, years later, there still is painting and there still is photography; both respected art forms. No one ever thinks about the fact that one is better or going to replace the other. They're clearly different. I believe that is what it's going to be like with computers and hand-drawn animation or live action or puppet animation. It has its own unique look." Now, in a twist that could have come from the plot of one of his movies, John Lasseter is back at Disney; but this time he's in charge. When the Disney Corporation purchased Pixar in a multi-billion dollar deal in 2006, he was named Creative Director of both animation departments; one of his first actions was to keep 2D animation from disappearing at the studio where Mickey Mouse sprang from a bottle of ink. "To me it is about what you do with your technology [and] what you do with your medium and how you entertain your audience. It's the story and the characters," he explains, insisting, "I have always believed that, of all studios in the world, Disney, who created the art form of the animated feature film, is the place where 2D animation should be made." In addition, John Lasseter is now principal creative advisor to the shop that designs new attractions at Disney theme parks, bringing his imagination to life in yet another art form. At home, in Sonoma, California, he has an office stacked high with the toys he loves so much; and it's where John Lasseter has the audience he tries hardest to entertain - his five sons who always get the first look at the latest ideas from this ever-imaginative innovator. |
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U.S. looks to Disney for welcome for visitors
Reuters - Faced with a decline in the number of overseas visitors and unpopular entry requirements, the U.S. government is turning to the Walt Disney Co. (DIS.N) and other theme park operators to brighten the country's battered image. With security much tightened since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the visa and entry processes are so unpopular that the country was ranked as the world's most unfriendly to visitors in a survey last month of travelers from 16 nations. Last January, the government promised to work with the private sector to ceate a more welcoming environment without compromising security. But the "Rice-Chertoff Joint Vision" announced by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and then Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff has yet to become reality. So far, applying for American visas still involves standing for hours in long lines at fortress-like embassies. Stern immigration officials at American airports often inspire fear, according to the survey. Enter the U.S. travel industry, which has watched with concern the parallel trends of rising anti-American feeling around the world and declining visitor numbers. Since Sept. 11, 2001, industry leaders say, the government has tended to see foreign visitors as potential threats, and the screening process reflects that view. "We have missed an opportunity to make people feel welcome," said Jay Rasulo, chairman of Walt Disney Parks and Resorts. "The whole process must be friendlier and more efficient. We must invest in creating a first impression of hospitality and friendliness at our borders." The Rice-Chertoff plan ranged from cutting waiting times for visas to a project to turn the international airports at Dulles, outside Washington, and Houston into models of friendliness and efficiency to be emulated by others. Progress on the "model airports" plan has been slow. Mid-level officials from the two departments and representatives of travel groups and three big theme park operators -- Disney Parks and Resorts, Anheuser-Busch Cos. Inc. (BUD.N) and Universal Studios -- made a first tour of Dulles in November. Houston still awaits a walk-through. The theme park experts saw considerable room for improvement, according to some of the participants. They did not want to be named until their recommendations are published in a White Paper assessing what progress has been made on the anniversary of the Rice-Chertoff initiative. One participant said the experts had taken note of the long, drab corridors at Dulles, long lines of visitors and a lot of empty immigration agents' booths, which added to the wait time. "First impressions are important," Rasulo said in an interview. "The first 100 steps in an airport are important. The entry sequence is what sets you in the mood to have a good time." CLIMATE OF FEAR AND FRUSTRATION So far, the entry sequence contributes to "a climate of fear and frustration," according to Geoff Freeman, executive director of the Discover America Partnership, a group set up in September to push for a better system. The partnership was behind the survey of foreign visitors and it also found that visitors fear American immigration officials more than they fear terrorism or crime. The Department of Homeland Security has questioned the survey's methodology and stressed that their first priority is to keep the United States safe. Travel industry leaders say that turning the United States back into a visitor-friendly country goes beyond bottom-line matters of lost revenue and jobs, though those are substantial. Statistics from the Travel Industry Association show that the U.S. share in world tourism declined from 7.4 percent in 2000 to 6 percent last year. A one percentage point increase would mean 7.5 million additional arrivals, $12.3 billion in additional spending, 150,000 additional U.S. jobs, $3.3 billion in additional payroll and $2.1 billion in additional taxes, it said. But more visitors would also help to reduce anti-American sentiment, which a series of global opinion polls have shown to be running at unprecedented highs. "Welcoming visitors into this country is Public Diplomacy 101," said Freeman. "Foreigners who have visited the U.S. have more positive attitudes than those who have not." The State Department, whose functions include shaping opinion in other countries, reports progress in making the application process for temporary visitors more transparent and in cutting down wait times, particularly in India and China. But a page on the department's Web site (http://travel.state.gov/visa/temp/wait/tempvisitors_wait.php) still shows, for example, a 101-day wait for Brazilians and a 71-day delay for foreigners applying in Toronto. According to the Discover America Partnership, the number of overseas visitors dropped by 17 percent between 2000 and 2006 and business travel in that period has dropped 10 percent. Last year, around 50 million overseas visitors (not counting Mexicans and Canadians) came to the United States, placing it third on the list of top destinations after Spain and France. |
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Iger wins over Wall Street and Main Street
MarketWatch - When Iger pulled the trigger earlier this year on the $7.4 billion transaction, many in the entertainment industry questioned the wisdom of shelling out that much money for a company that puts out a single product once a year. Sure, Pixar had been wildly successful, scoring more than $3.6 billion in worldwide receipts, but it faces rising competition from other Hollywood studios.
Yet the move accomplished several tasks for Iger and
Disney. It mended fences with Pixar chief Steve
Jobs, who had grown weary of the mercurial Michael
Eisner, Iger's predecessor. It also put in Disney's
camp the animation specialist that had trumped its
once-dominant position in the market. And it
represented a symbolic but critical return to
Disney's roots, seeming to quickly heal the deep
divisions that ailed the entertainment giant.
"He basically put his money where his mouth was
and put the program together and did it," said
Dick Cook, chairman of Walt Disney Studios, the
company's feature-film operation. "You know, I
think [that was] an awfully, awfully bold move.
But clearly [it was] strategically so smart
because it is at the core of our business."
The Pixar buyout was just one of many moves made
this past year that have won plaudits for Iger
from all quarters. He's reached out to many
estranged partners, freed Disney's corporate
culture from the micromanagement days under Eisner
and got the company looking toward the future. As
a result, the Dow component is firing on all
cylinders, exemplified by record earnings and a
more than 40% rise in the company's stock since
the beginning of the year.
It's also why Iger is the 2006 winner of
MarketWatch's CEO of the Year Award.
Iger's extending of the olive branch to Pixar said more about the new tone at the company and how he planned to depart from the path it had been on for more than two decades. Then, his new style worked to help patch up relations with Roy Disney, nephew of the company's founder, and Stanley Gold. Disney and Gold led a high-profile shareholder revolt that eventually ousted Eisner -- and called for Iger's head in the process. Once Iger made up with Pixar and the dissident shareholders, and made it clear that it was a new day for Disney corporate culture, the rest just seemed to fall into place. The problems stemming from the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks that took a chunk out of Disney's theme-park business are now distant in the rear-view mirror. Its ABC Television Network has leapfrogged from the bottom of the ratings heap to the top on the strength of such shows as "Grey's Anatomy," "Desperate Housewives" and "Lost." The network recently won the November sweeps among broadcast networks.
Heretofore lagging businesses such as Disney's
consumer-products division now show signs of
thriving under a newly invigorated company. And
Iger is pushing Disney into the latest phase of
the digital age by getting television programming
onto iPod devices and plans to take the company
much deeper into that realm. He's venturing more
aggressively in that direction than most of the
major media conglomerates.
Quick transformation
Disney's transformation under Iger seems to have
come at lightning speed, considering it was less
than three years ago that a shareholder revolt
brought the company to its knees.
Roy Disney and boardroom ally Stanley Gold had called for the removal of Eisner, as well as several other board members, and they got 45% of shareholders to agree. At the company's March 2004 annual meeting in Philadelphia, those shareholders backed Eisner's departure, prompting him to step down from his post as chairman. He gave up the chief executive post in September 2005 after 21 years at the company's helm. To say the choice of Iger, Eisner's handpicked successor, was met with skepticism would be an understatement. It was more blatant outrage, particularly on the parts of Gold and Disney, who accused the company of giving short shrift to other potential candidates such as eBay Inc.Chief Executive Meg Whitman and Pixar's Jobs, who also heads Apple Computer Inc.
Disney and Gold called for the company to embark
on a more extensive search. After Iger was in
place, though, they relented. Iger reached out
to them, giving Roy Disney the title of director
emeritus, and pledged an open relationship with
the former vice chairman.
And that relationship has been maintained,
sources close to Gold and Disney say.
Staying low
Before he became chief executive, Iger was
Eisner's second-in-command, and, while his name
was widely known, he didn't have the visibility,
or the aggressive public profile, of his boss.
With movie-star looks and a celebrity marriage
to TV journalist Willow Bay, the 55-year-old
Iger easily could have become a high-profile CEO
in his own right.
But, by all accounts, Iger has taken a lower-key approach, so much so that he would not comment for this story.
Whether part of his personality or a
calculated tactic, keeping his head down was
the only way for Iger to ensure he would
ascend to the top job, said James Stewart,
author of the bestselling book, "DisneyWar,"
which chronicles Eisner's rise to power and
ultimate downfall.
After a litany of executives -- DreamWorks
Animation's Jeffrey Katzenberg, Hilton Hotels
Corp.'s Stephen Bollenbach and former
superagent Michael Ovitz, to name a few --
left after having become perceived as threats
to Eisner, it was clear Iger needed to be more
understated to survive.
"I think the Ovitz situation indicated that
a true rival to Eisner was never going to
stay and succeed him," Stewart said. "Now I
do know enough, from hanging around Eisner
and talking with Iger, that [Iger] did bite
his tongue. I think he expressed his
business views, but he did stay in the
background, and it was sometimes hard for
him."
Eisner would not comment for this story but did issue a written statement. "Bob Iger and the entire management team have done a great job in the last year. They are making the right moves at the right times, which will keep the company competitive in the years to come," Eisner's statement said. New direction It was clear from the outset of Iger's tenure that he wanted to take Disney in a new direction. Known for running the company with an iron boot, Eisner had a reputation for alienating employees, vendors and just about anyone who came into contact with Disney, Stewart said. Iger's roots are in the more genteel Capital Cities/ABC culture, where he toiled for 20 years until Disney acquired the broadcasting operation in 1996. "It wasn't about the sun king at the center of the empire," Stewart said of Iger's time at Capital Cities. "It was about the decentralized decision making going down into the operating ranks. Iger always said that's what he wanted to do -- to emulate that old Cap Cities/ABC model. I wonder whether Eisner himself really thought through the implications of that, because it's so different from the way Eisner managed."
While it's been widely reported that
Eisner micromanaged to the point of
getting involved in office-décor
decisions, Anne Sweeney, co-chairwoman of
Disney's media networks, indicated that
Iger is definitely a hands-off manager.
"I think the most important thing he did was he gave me the job and then he let me do it," Sweeney said. "I've always had a lot of autonomy." Even though Iger cut 600 jobs from Disney's studio operations earlier this year and another group of about 160 animators last week, morale still seems to be high, according to numerous sources. Iger encourages debate and even dissent in the ranks, one insider said.
Drawing in Pixar
One of Iger's first official acts was to
make available the ABC hits "Desperate
Housewives" and "Lost" for downloading
at Apple's iTunes store. Right after the
first of this year, the content
available there was expanded to include
material from ESPN, ABC Sports, ABC News
and a multitude of other Disney
properties.
That alliance with Jobs' Apple, in
retrospect, might have telegraphed to
the business world that some sort of
Disney-Pixar pact was in the works.
The two had collaborated on a string of
computer-animated hits over 11 years,
but Pixar was bent on parting ways with
the entertainment giant while it was
under Eisner's control. In fact, that
was among the factors driving Roy Disney
and Stanley Gold's shareholder revolt.
Relations thawed once Iger took
charge, and on Jan. 24 Disney
announced its plan to buy Pixar.
Many on Wall Street remain concerned
that Disney paid too much for the
company, particularly since Pixar's
most recent effort, "Cars," didn't
perform as well as past releases,
though it is the year's
second-biggest-grossing film.
Growing competition from Katzenberg's
DreamWorks, News Corp.'s Fox, the Time
Warner studio Warner Bros. and others
could emerge as a major obstacle to
Disney-Pixar success.
But the deal made more sense as time
has passed, according to analysts.
"I think it's a steal," Sanders
Morris Harris's David Miller said.
He added that other studios didn't
do nearly as well with their
animated films this year, and he
said he believes Pixar films can
rise above the fray in coming years.
"The [rival] films just weren't that
good, and they don't have a brand in
that space," Miller said.
Iger quickly followed the Pixar deal
with another move that was applauded
in financial circles by merging
nearly two dozen ABC Radio stations
with Citadel Communications. While
Disney owns a controlling interest
in the new company, Citadel
personnel are running it.
iGer?
Far from feeling threatened by it,
Iger appears to have embraced the
online world more than most media
executives have. It's been reported
that more than half his time is
spent exploring new ventures
involving the online distribution of
content.
In addition to making content available to iPod devotees, Disney under Iger has expanded its downloadable movie selection and expanded its ABC.com site. The company also is examining wireless phone ventures and recently created a wireless telephone service tailored to children.
Iger's belief in the future of
online entertainment is so strong
that he has called for tightening
the window on theatrical releases
to deal with the growing threat of
illegal film downloads. He has
gone so far as to concede it might
be necessary to release DVDs
simultaneously with theatrical
films. That has ruffled the
feathers of more than a few
theater owners.
Model for reform
In June, Disney named a new
nonexecutive chairman to head its
board. John Pepper, Procter &
Gamble's chairman and chief
executive, was appointed to
succeed George Mitchell upon the
former U.S. senator's retirement.
Under fire for years over a
perceived inattention to
corporate governance, Disney
started moves toward reform
under Eisner's reign. The most
noteworthy event in that
evolution, however, was the
division of the chairman and
chief executive roles -- which
can hardly be characterized as
voluntary -- after the
shareholder votes were counted
in Philadelphia.
Some have called for Iger to
reunite the roles, but he has
declined. Further, Disney last
month announced it was creating
the new post of senior vice
president of corporate
responsibility.
As a result, Disney has gone
from a poster child for bad
governance to a model for
reform, according to corporate
watchdogs. As of Nov. 19,
Institutional Shareholder
Services gave Disney a Corporate
Governance Quotient score that
was better than 98.3% of all S&P
500 companies and better than
100% of media companies.
Where did Disney's governance
quotient stand, say, before the
2004 annual meeting at which
Eisner lost his chairmanship?
The company's 2003 rating was an
abysmal 22.2% compared with
other S&P 500 companies.
"They're now proactive instead
of reactive," said Patrick
McGurn, Institutional
Shareholder Services' executive
vice president and special
counsel. "Shareholders are
largely satisfied the company's
moving in the right direction as
far as performance issues."
At this year's shareholder
meeting near Disneyland in
Anaheim, Calif., Iger presided
over a markedly more subdued
affair than the gathering in
Philadelphia two years earlier.
Indeed, it seemed to soothe
shareholders, who were impressed
with Iger's plans for restoring
the company's core business:
animation. He yielded the podium
to John Lasseter, the Pixar
creative genius behind "Toy
Story" and numerous other
efforts, who now is overseeing
Disney's animation operation.
"I just like that [Iger]
understands the meaning of
Disney -- Walt Disney's dreams
and ideas," said Betsy Goode, a
longtime shareholder from
Cincinnati. "It's not all about
Bob."
Whether Iger is in a mere honeymoon period with shareholders and employees remains to be seen.
The July move to reorganize the
company's film unit to cut 600
jobs will result in fewer
movies. Most of the company's
films will come out under the
Walt Disney Pictures nameplate
as opposed to that of its
Touchstone unit. More of those
films than in the past will be
family-oriented.
That's a move that might have
ruffled the feathers of the
company a few years ago but now
seems to be accepted as a
precondition of long-term
health. Of course, it didn't
hurt that, at the same time,
Walt Disney Pictures' "Pirates
of the Caribbean: Dead Man's
Chest" was becoming the third
film ever to clear the $1
billion mark in worldwide box
office receipts.
"Financially, our results are so much better when we do a 'Pirates of the Caribbean' that's homegrown, something that was developed from an attraction built in 1966," said Cook, the studio chief. "And when we can do it right, it just lifts up the whole company -- whether it's publishing, consumer products or taking an attraction that was fairly old at the parks and making it new again."
Iger's also working on the
company's image. In October, he
said the company would eliminate
added trans fats from food
served at Disney parks. He also
vowed to use the Disney name on
products that limit calories,
fats and sugar.
That comes on top of the
numerous philanthropic projects
the company continues to
sponsor, contributing to such
causes as Gulf Coast
post-hurricane rebuilding, a
national memorial for Dr. Martin
Luther King Jr., and the
Make-A-Wish Foundation.
The question at this point is how long Iger can keep it up.
Coming attractions
After the company issued another
in a series of strong quarterly
reports last month, investors
let some of the air out of
Disney's stock, wondering
whether it might be nearing a
peak. It since has started to
climb back up.
Chuck Oberleitner, an editor for
O-meon.com, a Web site that
follows all things Disney,
agreed that Iger had done well
in his first year, but he said
he's curious to see how he
follows up. "I would like to see
him get a couple more years
under his belt," Oberleitner
said.
In addition, it's evident that
some portion of Disney's
recovery effort was in motion
before Iger took the helm.
Stewart said several ultimately
successful ABC moves were made
by underlings Lloyd Braun and
Susan Lyne, such as developing
"Housewives" and "Lost," but
those executives were let go
while Eisner remained in charge.
And, in Stewart's view, Iger is
adept at nurturing others'
successes.
"I have to hand it to ABC that
even since they capitalized on
that success, they've built a
strong schedule and made, I
think, some very smart moves,"
Stewart said. "And I think Iger
deserves a lot of credit for
that."
Stewart pointed out that
Disney's plan to put out fewer
films per year is a gamble in
itself. Fewer films in the
marketplace could easily
translate to fewer hits.
And the Pixar acquisition,
strategic sense aside, could yet
backfire. Pixar may be due for a
flop after seven straight hits.
If its next release,
"Ratatouille," doesn't do well
in its June 2007 release, Disney
may wonder whether it should
have shelled out 11% its own
worth for Pixar.
"It was bold," author Stewart
said. "It solved a lot of
problems that developed in that
relationship. The one thing that
I would say is it does seem like
a full price."
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Disney Chief Executive Robert A.
Iger is MarketWatch.com's 'CEO
of the Year' for 2006
MarketWatch.com - MarketWatch.com, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Dow Jones & Company (NYSE:DJ), and a leading provider of business news, financial information and analytical tools, today announced that Robert A. Iger, president and chief executive of The Walt Disney Company, has been selected as its "CEO of the Year" for 2006. Mr. Iger, who was appointed to the post of chief executive on Oct. 1, 2005, was selected by MarketWatch senior editors from a field of five candidates nominated by MarketWatch journalists. The other candidates were Ginger Graham of Amylin Pharmaceuticals Inc., Lawrence Kellner of Continental Airlines Inc., Steve Sanger of General Mills Inc., and Jeffrey Sprecher of IntercontinentalExchange. Mr. Iger was selected based on four criteria: performance for customers over the last year, performance for shareholders, performance for employees and corporate governance initiatives. "All of our finalists had outstanding years and the debate over who should win was brisk," said David Callaway, editor-in-chief of MarketWatch.com. "But Bob Iger stood above the rest. Not just for how he helped boost Disney's share price after several tough years, but for how he mended fences with dissident partners, reformed the management culture, and presided over the $7 billion buyout of Pixar, which arguably returned Disney to its animation roots." Mr. Iger's award will be presented at a ceremony hosted by MarketWatch and Dow Jones editors and executives early in 2007. Past winners include Meg Whitman of eBay, Raymond Mason of Legg Mason, and Ed Zander of Motorola. Separately, MarketWatch announced that Ramesh Pandey of XeChem International Inc. has been named "CEO of the Year" for 2006 by MarketWatch users. Other candidates included Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., James Sinegal of Costco Wholesale Corp., and Steve Jobs of Apple Inc., among others. Besides participating in a poll, MarketWatch users actively tapped social networking sites, message boards and other viral online tools to encourage voting for their favorite nominees. |
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'Hannah Montana' Star Miley
Cyrus Ready To Break Out,
Hilary-Style
MTV - As the star behind the "Hannah Montana" phenomenon, actress and singer Miley Cyrus has been likened to Disney Channel archetype Hilary Duff lately. And ... well, that's pretty perfect. "I am, like, a big Hilary Duff person. My family, like, loves her," Cyrus said recently on the set of her hit Disney show. "And it's cool, because she started 'Lizzie McGuire' at the same age that I [started 'Hannah Montana'], so the way that I am doing the business and everything is kind of following her footsteps. So watching her grow as an actress and a singer is helping me as well." Since March, when "Hannah Montana" debuted to 5.4 million viewers, Cyrus has been the toast of the tween set. And when the soundtrack to the show spent two weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard albums chart last month, it set up the 14-year-old daughter of country singer Billy Ray Cyrus (remember "Achy Breaky Heart"?) for a crossover career like a Duff, Lindsay Lohan or JoJo. And not only is anticipation extremely high for the second season of "Montana," but Cyrus is looking at two more possible returns to the top of the albums chart in 2007. She just finished recording new music for the show and is now focusing on her own album, which will be all about her, not the "Montana" character. "It's a lot different from Hannah just because I don't want to mess up the show. [I want to] make sure people see the difference between Hannah and Miley," Cyrus said of her album. "It's got a little bit of a rock vibe and two songs have kind of a miniature rap. I'm well aware that I can't rap to save my life, but getting to have fun with that and kind of do cute little raps is fun." For those not in the know (i.e. anyone with a driver's license), "Hannah Montana" chronicles the misadventures of a normal teenager named Miley Stewart who also happens to have a secret job as pop singer Hannah Montana. "And then, this season, they just added a new character for me, which is Lou Anne, my country cousin," Cyrus said of the upcoming second season. "So now I've got three roles on 'Hannah Montana,' so I'm busy." Fans should also keep an eye out for more personal lyrics. "Most songs for the first season reflect the show, with Miley or Hannah making sure the other doesn't get caught or whatever," Cyrus said. "[The producers] had to make sure that everyone understood the characters, but our season-two songs are more speaking out to the fans." Like her Miley character on the show, Cyrus describes herself as a small-town girl (she's from Nashville, to be exact) with normal teenage problems like, you know, getting in trouble with her dad, who plays her father on the show. "The worst part isn't working on the show together, it's the drive to the set," Cyrus explained. "He doesn't tell me I'm in trouble until I get in the car and he has 45 minutes just to sit there and talk about it and I can't escape. Or it's the silent treatment for an hour, which is really awkward." Although her mother manages Cyrus in real life, her father handles the duties for the TV show, which otherwise seems to closely parallel her life. "They did an episode where Robby Ray, his character, is getting ready to go back out and be a star again himself, and he chooses to be Hannah Montana's manager instead because he likes watching his daughter follow his dreams, which is like my dad," Cyrus said. "But watching him pretend to make all the important phone calls and stuff is funny." |
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A
Concise, Relevant History of Disney
Research and Markets has announced the addition of Spotlight on Television 2.0 Leaders: The Walt Disney Company, to their offering. Disneys groundbreaking agreement to sell TV shows and movies on iTunes could generate around $324 million in sales for the company in 2008, a new revenue stream that reflects just one of the entertainment and TV giants innovative forays into the TV 2.0 sector. Our exclusive analysis of Disneys current and projected sale of downloadable video is spelled out in Spotlight on Television 2.0 Leaders: The Walt Disney Company, the latest report in our series that takes a close look at the companies shaping the new video-over-the-Internet and mobile TV businesses. More than any other single event, Disneys landmark deals to deliver TV shows via Apples iTunes store helped usher in the new era of Internet-delivered TV. Now, Disney stands alone among its studio peers in selling hit films on iTunes. Both of these bold moves have handed Disney a growing source of new revenue, one that promises to climb from only $44 million this year, to $150 million in 2007 and over $320 million in 2008. Despite the growth prospects, however, downloadable TV show and movie sales will still represent a tiny percentage of Disneys overall revenue, less than 1% of the media and entertainment leaders current annual revenues. But Disneys TV 2.0 initiatives cover a broad spectrum of activities, many of which -- such as the streamed delivery of ad-supported primetime TV shows on the web -- represent far bigger businesses than the sale of downloadable video. This Spotlight report on Disney spells out these opportunities, which include: -- Disney-owned ABC Networks ad-supported web-based delivery of hit TV shows including "Desperate Housewives," "Lost," and "Greys Anatomy." -- Disney-owned ESPNs efforts to mount online-only premium channels made available to viewers only through broadband service providers. -- ABC News pioneering of 24-hour online video news networks. This data-rich report also delivers the background and financial analysis you need to fully understand where this TV 2.0 leader is coming from and where Disney might be headed. The report also delivers: -- A concise, relevant history of Disney, with a particular focus on the developments that relate to Disney's TV 2.0 efforts. -- A complete snapshot of Disney's varied lines of business, with the latest financial results for each of the companies major activities, complete with 16 charts and four tables. Content Outline: |
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Danny Elfman scores Meet the Robinsons for Disney SoundTrackNet - Just before the Thanksgiving holiday, the score to the new Walt Disney Feature Animation film, Meet the Robinsons, was recorded at the Sony Scoring Stage. Directed by Stephen J. Anderson, this computer-animated film is about Lewis, an orphan who dreams of finding a family. His journey takes an unexpected turn when a mysterious stranger named Wilbur Robinson whisks him away to a world where anything is possible: the future! There, he meets an incredible assortment of characters and a family beyond his wildest imagination, The Robinsons, who help lead him on an amazing and hilarious adventure with heartfelt results. Helping Lewis along his journey is award-winning composer Danny Elfman, who wrote the score for the film. Pete Anthony conducted the 90-piece orchestra, which included a sizeable brass section and saxophones for color. The music was orchestrated by Steve Bartek, Edgardo Simone and Dave Slonaker, with Dennis Sands engineering. |
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Christian Pop Artist to be Featured Worldwide through
Disney
Christian Today - American Christian pop artist CALI has been selected by Radio Disney as its featured Incubator artist for December.  As
part of the campaign, the twenty-year-old's debut
single "Get Up" will be world-premiered, as the music
video will also be made available exclusively on the
Radio Disney website for a limited time.
Launched in early 2005, Radio Disney Incubator features musical acts under the age of 21 through exclusive audio features on the Radio Disney network and exclusive content on Radio Disney's website. The online features allow fans to listen to music, view photos and read more about these up and coming artists. Radio Disney can be heard in 97 per cent of the United States on over 50 radio stations, XM and Sirius satellite radio and digital cable & satellite TV music provider, MUSIC CHOICE. CALI’s high-energy pop/r&b blend and energetic live shows have attracted a lot of attention these past several months. CALI co-headlined the 2006 Camplified Tour with fellow teen act Kristy Frank (Universal/Ruffnation). Sponsored by Fender, Sonic Bids and PopStar! Magazine, the summer tour has previously hosted such up and coming acts as Fefe Dobson (Island Records), Skye Sweetnam (Capitol Records), Nikki Flores (Epic Records), Katelyn Tarver (American Idol Juniors) and Rose Falcon (Columbia Records). CALI followed her first major tour with appearances at select dates of the 2006 Shoutfest Tour, sharing the stage with Christian artists such as Jump5, Krystal Meyers, Jars of Clay, Skillet and more. Her live show includes a DJ, dancers and complex choreography, as well as pre-show "dance clinics" before many live events. CALI has signed with Nashville-based management company Waypoint Entertainment, and together they have crafted her upcoming self-titled CD, produced by Darrell Vanzant, Ric Robbins and Sam Mizell, with help from mixing engineer Steve Hodge - whose credits include Janet Jackson. Insisting on not being labelled as another pre-fabricated, manufactured pop artist, CALI made songwriting with substance a priority. "I have a strong desire to reach tweens, teens and beyond with a wholesome message," says CALI. "I wanted to get a really fun feel, but I also wanted to put a message behind it and that’s where my faith comes in. This is who I am, so I don’t feel like I should do it any other way.” |
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Kart Expo Partners with Radio Disney for ’07 Show,
Proclaims Sunday Kids Day
Who?Won - Kart Expo International presented by Sodi Kart has announced that it has partnered with Radio Disney for the '07 edition of its annual consumer karting show which will be held on February 24-25, 2007 at the Renaissance Schaumburg Convention Center in Schaumburg, Illinois (NW Suburban Chicago). In addition, it has also announced that Sunday February 25th will be designated “Kids Day” at the event. “Children and young adults are the future of our sport,” said Darrell Sitarz, Expo Director, “and Radio Disney is a direct portal to that target audience. Kids start racing at 5 or 6-years old in this family-oriented motorsport; one of the few sports where boys and girls, men and women can all participate. And once someone, be it a child or adult, sits in a race kart and understands the beauty of the sport, you’d be hard pressed to get them out of that seat,” concluded Sitarz. And as part of the Sunday “Kids Day” program, Radio Disney will present an interactive “Party Patrol” stage show complete with games, prizes, music and fun for the whole family. The live show will begin at 1:00 PM. In addition to the Radio Disney show, kids and their parents can learn all about go-karting in a free “Kids and Karting” seminar presented by Kart Expo. Now in its 15th year, Kart Expo International is the world’s largest go-kart show featuring karts and karting equipment from at least 10 different countries in over 400 booths. Kart Expo is produced by the Kart Marketing Group, Inc. headquartered in Illinois. The 2007 show is presented by Sodi Kart and is sponsored by ROC Timing, Rock Island Grand Prix, Supersport Timing, SuperKart Illustrated, Formula Car Magazine, The Inside Track, International Racing Association, e-KMI.com, KartFax.com, KartSearch.com and KartGear International. Chicago’s Radio Disney AM1300 is a 24/7 music destination for kids and young adults. It’s the home of cool music that kids are passionate about and families enjoy together. Radio Disney has more than 50 affiliates nationwide and is also available on XM and Sirius Satellite Radio. The Renaissance Schaumburg Convention Center is located at 1551 Thoreau Dr, Schaumburg, Illinois. For more information, log on to www.e-KMI.com, email: karting@msn.com or call 630-653-7368. |
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Ousted Disney movie boss resurfaces at DreamWorks
Reuters - Six months after she was ousted as head of Disney's motion pictures group, Nina Jacobson has landed a production deal at DreamWorks. The three-year, first-look pact is effective January 1. The move is a sort of homecoming for Jacobson, who was a senior executive at DreamWorks before taking over as president of Walt Disney Motion Pictures Group in 1998. At DreamWorks, she helped develop "Antz," which began as an idea of hers. "I'm very proud to be able to welcome Nina home," DreamWorks principal Steven Spielberg said. At Disney, Jacobson was behind the "Pirates of the Caribbean" movies and developed a broad slate of films such as the female-targeted "The Princess Diaries" and "Freaky Friday" and the sports-oriented "Remember the Titans" and "The Rookie." She also developed strong director relationships with the likes of Wes Anderson and M. Night Shyamalan. She lost her job in July as part of a restructuring that saw Disney decide to focus more on family films than adult-oriented fare. |
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Bonds Goes to Disney World Looking for a Job
New York Times - Barry Bonds, a man in search of a job, barreled through the lobby of the Dolphin hotel at Walt Disney World today looking like someone who would rather be anywhere but in the land of Mickey and Minnie Mouse. Bonds, who has 734 career homers, appears to be attending baseball’s winter meetings to try and convince a team that he could help them win in 2007. He needs 22 home runs to eclipse Hank Aaron’s all-time record. Since Bonds’s negotiations with the San Francisco Giants have stalled, and there has been almost no interest from other teams, he presumably figured he could boost his chances of signing a contract by meeting again with the Giants and perhaps other teams here this week. Bonds is seeking a one-year, $18 million contract with a vesting option for a second year. The Giants initially considered Bonds a $10 million a year player, but, as salaries have escalated in a fertile market, they would probably be willing to pay him a bit more. “We’re not in the same ballpark yet,” General Manager Brian Sabean told KPIX, a San Francisco television station. When reporters approached Bonds between the hotel’s east and west elevator banks, he asked a San Francisco reporter, “How are you?” But when Bonds was asked why he was here, he said, “No comment, guys.” Bonds, flanked by several of his agents, kept walking briskly until he reached an empty elevator. As Bonds waited for the elevator to depart, one of his associates, who weighed about 80 pounds less than the hulking Bonds, stood in front of the elevator doors so reporters could not enter. |
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Tuesday December 5, 2006 |
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| ~ HAPPY 105TH BIRTHDAY WALT ~ | ||
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Disney
movie studio, parks profits up Walt Disney reaches highest price seen since May 2001 Disney buys London sports channel to expand ESPN Euro Disney 'bidder' misses deadline Taxes and Disney an up-and-down ride MLB executives head to Disney World Disney Secret Lab employees ink deal Everydog trots back with Disney shorts revival Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest on DVD Whoops (your ad here) Disney DVD Game World The Cheetah Girls 2 on DVD Disney Job Fair ESPN Plans European Expansion Disney Pixar's Cars juice drink drives into stores Disney on Ice skates into Raleigh |
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Disney
movie studio, parks profits up Reuters - Walt Disney Co. (DIS.N) sees improved margins at its theme parks and continuing profitability improvements at its film division in fiscal 2007, its chief financial officer said on Tuesday. Disney shares hit a new 52-week high, rising more than 2 percent to $34.20 on the New York Stock Exchange. "We feel very good about how our business is positioned," CFO Tom Staggs told a Credit Suisse analyst conference in New York. "I think you are going to see improvement in margins in theme parks ... (and) continued improvement in profitability in (Walt Disney) Studios. He also said the company, whose fiscal year started Oct. 1, expects the "Cars" DVD to sell as well as its mega-hit "The Incredibles." The latter animated film, released in 2005, has sold 16 million to 17 million DVD units domestically, a Disney spokesman said. The "Cars" DVD sales were expected to drive retail sales of "Cars" merchandise to the same levels in fiscal 2007 as in the prior fiscal year, or about $1 billion, of which Disney gets royalties, Staggs said. "That's a pretty strong result," he said. For its television business, Disney's ABC network sees advance sales for its prime-time advertising rising in the mid-single digit percentages from last year, he said. The media networks division was also benefiting from a strong performance in both viewership and advertising sales from ESPN's Monday Night Football. As for newer media strategies, Staggs said Disney would raise its investment in video games to $350 million per year in the next five years from last year's $100 million. |
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Walt Disney reaches highest price seen since May 2001 MarketWatch - Shares of Walt Disney (DIS)were trading up nearly 2% at a 5 1/2-year high, and have now gained 14% in the past three months and 42% since the end of 2005. The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday that the media and entertainment giant agreed to buy a London-based cable TV channel, NASN Ltd., which has the rights to U.S. sports leagues including the National Football League, Major League Baseball and the National Hockey League. The deal was reported to be worth from $107 million to $120 million. The stock, a component of the Dow industrials, was last up 1.7% at $34.02, and reached a high of $34.08 in intraday trading, the highest price seen since May 23, 2001. |
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Disney buys London sports channel to expand ESPN bizjournals.com - Walt Disney Co.'s ESPN Inc. has agreed to purchase NASN Ltd., a London-based cable channel as part of a strategy to broadcast more American sports in Europe and expand ESPN, according to the Wall Street Journal Tuesday. As part of the deal, ESPN will also receive NASN's exclusive rights to show National Hockey League and Major League Baseball games in Europe and the exclusive rights to the National Football League in some parts of Europe. The purchase price was not disclosed, but the Wall Street Journal estimates it between $107 million and $120 million. NASN Ltd., also known as the North American Sports Network, is currently owned by private equity firm Benchmark Capital Europe and Irish sports broadcaster Setanta Sports Holdings Ltd. ESPN also plans to put its name on the channel,which has more than 6 million subscribers in 26 European countries, at some point, according to news reports. The purchase will allow Disney to expand its ESPN operations in Europe, which now consists of the ESPN Classic channel, a soccer Web site and a unit that sells shows to European networks. ESPN Inc. is 80 percent owned by ABC Inc., which is a subsidiary of The Walt Disney Co. (NYSE: DIS), which based in Burbank. |
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Euro Disney
'bidder' misses deadline The Associated Press - France's Financial Markets Authority said Tuesday that a bid for Euro Disney SCA, announced last week by a little-known Swiss leisure company, failed to materialize ahead of a deadline set by the regulator. Center-Tainment AG held a news conference Nov. 30 to announce a planned bid, saying the formal offer was delayed because its attorney was ill and refusing to give any details of its financing or backers. The company, listed in Frankfurt, would now have to wait six months before making any new bid, after missing the Monday evening deadline. Euro Disney, which operates Disneyland Resort Paris and is 40 percent-owned by Walt Disney Co., says it had not been informed of any planned bid. |
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Taxes and
Disney an up-and-down ride LA Times - The Walt Disney Co. must be wondering if Orange County put Goofy in charge of tax collections. After overestimating the value of Disney properties in Orange County, county officials issued refund checks to the company totaling more than $5 million. But Disney officials discovered the county had sent the company too much — about $3.9 million too much. Disney brought it to the county's attention two weeks ago and returned four checks issued by the county, officials said Monday. The episode is the latest in a series of flawed assessments involving Disney properties. From 1994 through 1997, the county inflated Disneyland's property value by a total of $240 million, resulting in a refund of about $2.6 million. In one case, the county confused a ride being dismantled with one being built. Webster Guillory, the county assessor, said the excess refund checks were issued because of a duplicate entry in the computer system. "Between Disney and my office, we are correcting the error that was created," Guillory said. A Disney spokesman said he did not have enough information to comment. David Sundstrom, the county's auditor-controller, said Disney is the county's most complex taxpayer because frequent redesigns alter the value of its properties. Disney routinely appeals its tax bills. "They're constantly building and rebuilding on the same property, so they have a lot of corrections," Sundstrom said. "That level of refund isn't a huge surprise." After all this, Disney still is owed nearly $3.7 million from overvaluations separate from the other errors, county officials said. The checks aren't in the mail — Sundstrom said the refunds will not go out until the tax roll errors have been corrected. |
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MLB
executives head to Disney World Associated Press - Baseball's top executives have converged on Disney World for the sport's winter meetings, and they brought their checkbooks. Not for the theme parks - which manage to separate the surplus cash from many a tourist - but for the annual free agent bazaar that has seen prices rise this offseason like no other since December, 2000. "The market has definitely spiked. There's no doubt about it," said Boston Red Sox general manager Theo Epstein, who arrived with his top lieutenants on Sunday. "It's clear that there's a lot of available money to be spent, probably more holes on teams than players to fill them." The Red Sox figure to be in the middle of things again this year as they shop enigmatic outfielder Manny Ramirez, whose eight-year, $160 million contract was part of the 2000 bull market. That same year, Alex Rodriguez signed a record 10-year, $252 million deal with Texas. Both contracts proved regrettable when the market cooled in subsequent years. But that hasn't stopped the Chicago Cubs from giving Alfonso Soriano a $136 million deal or the Houston Astros from throwing $100 million at Carlos Lee. "I don't know that we're back to the days of 2000-01," Epstein said, noting that the new collective bargaining agreement has increased revenues throughout the sport. "There can be big contracts signed that aren't necessarily irresponsible signings. It seems players and teams are both doing well right now." Among the top free agents available are Barry Bonds, who is closing in on Hank Aaron's all-time home run record, and Oakland lefty Barry Zito. Bonds' agent, Jeff Borris, was angry that the Giants didn't offer salary arbitration to the 42-year-old left fielder, coming off a $90 million, five-year contract with San Francisco. Scott Boras represents Zito, who spent his first seven seasons with the Oakland Athletics and is the top free-agent pitcher in a market desperately seeking arms. Boras, known for pushing for high prices, also represents Japan's Daisuke Matsuzaka. Boston bid $51,111,111 just for the right to negotiate with the Seibu Lions' ace under baseball's posting system; they have a Dec. 14 deadline to reach an agreement or he will return to Japan and Boston would keep its bid. The New York Yankees offered $26,000,194 for Kei Igawa, projected as a No. 4 starter. Jason Schmidt is among the other big-name pitchers on the market. But some teams are staying away from big-name free agents, preferring to concentrate on lower-priced players and trades. "We're going to sign them to the value we think is right, not what the market is dictating," St. Louis Cardinals general manager Walt Jocketty said. "The market right now is kind of silly, and it may continue to be silly." Some players regarded as less-than-top-line stars have gotten huge contracts, a group that includes outfielders Gary Matthews Jr. ($50 million over five years from Los Angeles Angels) and Juan Pierre ($44 million over five years from Cubs). After opting out of the final three years and $33 million of guaranteed money from the Los Angeles Dodgers, J.D. Drew is in the final stages of completing a $70 million, five-year agreement with the Red Sox. "I don't think anyone anticipated this spike a year ago. Otherwise they would have locked up all their players," Epstein said. "There are a lot of clubs with holes to fill so it should be an exciting meeting." All that money has caught the attention of commissioner Bud Selig, who repeatedly has warned teams about making lengthy big-money deals. But he said he isn't ready to draw any conclusions on whether teams have gone too far. "I want to let this whole thing play out, then I'll make a judgment," Selig said. "It's a little too early yet." |
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Disney
Secret Lab employees ink deal Variety - Employees at Disney's Secret Laboratory CGI feature animation production arm have unanimously ratified a three-year deal. The new contract follows the outlines of the current pact for Local 839 of the Intl. Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees. Deal, which covers about 300 staffers, was recommended unanimously by the Disney employee negotiating committee. Key deal points include a minimum wage rate increase of 75¢ in year one, followed by bumps of 3% and 3%; employer pension contributions increase by 25¢ per hour, retroactive to Aug. 1; a pension increase of 10% (trust fund balances permitting) kicks in in 2009, retroactive to August; sick leave increases from five days per year to 10 days; and employer health care benefit contributions increase by 25¢ an hour. |
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Everydog trots back with Disney shorts revival Guardian Unlimited - The Goof, as Walt Disney called him, is back. Nearly 50 years after Disney shifted focus from short cartoons to feature-length animation, the company has decided to return to the form. The first short will be a reprise of the "how to"
series popular in the 40s and 50s in which Goofy plays
the American Everydog, befuddled by the complexities of
modern life. In How to Install Your Home Theatre, Goofy
will attempt to do just that with, Disney promises,
comical results. The move comes as the people behind Pixar, the studio that made Toy Story and Finding Nemo before being bought by Disney, exert their influence on the famous name. "Shorts have always been a wellspring of techniques, ideas and talent," said Lion King producer Don Hahn. "It's exactly what Walt did." Disney used shorts as a training ground for his animators before embarking on his first animated feature, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. The new shorts include the Ballad of Nessie, about the Loch Ness monster, and Golgo's Guest, about a Russian border guard who meets an alien. |
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Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest on DVD Buena Vista Home Entertainment - Today, everyone's a pirate as the world celebrates International "Talk Like a Pirate Day," and to kick off the rabble rousing, Disney Home Entertainment announces the highly anticipated DVD release of Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest. The action-packed worldwide film sensation will make its Disney DVD debut on December 5th. Starring Johnny Depp as that mischievous, heroic rogue Captain Jack Sparrow, this epic adventure has taken audiences by storm. The film's Theatrical opening weekend was the biggest in U.S. boxoffice history, and the high-seas Hollywood tidal wave continues with a worldwide box-office gross of over a billion dollars to date, making it Disney's most successful movie of all time.
To launch the "Talk Like A Pirate Day" festivities, Disney Home Entertainment is unleashing "Dead Man's Mail" (www.deadmansmail.com), an interactive site and emailable interface hosted by a rogue talking skull with a penchant for dressing up. Tips on the site for speaking like a true Pirate of the Caribbean are guaranteed to get tongues wagging. To send your own customized animated pirate email and put a touch of high seas swagger in your speech, visit www.deadmansmail.com. Single disc: U.S. $29.99 (SRP), Canada $36.99 (SRP). 2-disc Special Edition: U.S. $34.99 (SRP), Canada $41.99 (SRP), from Walt Disney Home Entertainment. |
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Whoops (your ad here) The `Pirates: Dead Man's Chest' disc comes with the usual bloopers. Not so typical is the corporate sponsorship. The year's box office champ, "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest" (Disney $35), sets sail today in a special two-disc set with a treasure trove of extras. There's even a documentary on the revamping of the popular Disneyland ride to incorporate characters from the films. Other added attractions include a lengthy documentary on the arduous production, a detailed examination of star Johnny Depp's costume, hair and makeup, the computer creation of Davy Jones and the Kraken monster, footage of the world premiere in June at Disneyland, producer Jerry Bruckheimer's photographs from the set and unassuming commentary from screenwriters Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio, who discuss the challenges of writing two sequels in succession. Perhaps the oddest feature is the blooper reel, because it has a corporate sponsor: Verizon Wireless. "Dead Man's Chest" isn't the only DVD arriving today with a corporate tag — the Emmy Award-winning fifth season of Fox's "24" (Fox, $60) features a Toyota-sponsored preview of the first episode of the upcoming sixth season. The seven-disc set has documentaries on casting, the cinematography and music scoring, 23 extended and deleted scenes, a 100th-episode reel and pictures from the upcoming book "24: Behind the Scenes." The discs also feature numerous audio commentaries, including one on the first episode with star and producer Kiefer Sutherland and director Jon Cassar. |
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Disney DVD Game World Buena Vista Home Entertainment - Walt Disney Home Entertainment announces an exciting, all-new innovation in Disney DVDs: Disney DVD Game World. Combining the traditional fun of classic board games with interactive and immersive 3-D game environments, these DVD games are perfect for families who want to enjoy time together. Inspired by the favorite characters from Disney's most popular films and the worlds they live in, the DVD games feature multi-level boards and thousands of mini-games, trivia questions, and activities for up to 4 players. Because the games use virtual game pieces and spinners and play on standard and mobile DVD players, they can also be enjoyed during holiday travel on flights or long road-trips. The first two titles in the Disney DVD Game World series are: DISNEY PRINCESS EDITION, where players get the chance to become a Disney Princess, and DISNEY DOGS EDITION, where you can adopt your favorite Disney dog to compete in the race to win the Blue Ribbon Challenge. Free demo versions of the titles can be played and sampled online at www.DisneyDVDGameWorld.com. Both DVD games feature animation created specifically for this new product line with Disney characters speaking to players for a fun and interactive gaming experience. With built-in randomization and a huge amount of games, activities, and trivia questions, players are unlikely to ever play the same game twice to ensure repeat playing pleasure. The perfect way for families to play together, Disney DVD Game World DISNEY PRINCESS EDITION and DISNEY DOGS EDITION both premiere on December 5. Each is available for $29.99 U.S. (S.R.P.), $36.99 Canada (S.R.P.).
Become a Disney Princess! The beloved Disney Princesses Ariel, Cinderella, Snow White, Mulan, Jasmine and Sleeping Beauty actually talk to players while players compete in this entertaining DVD game. The setting is a new enchanted Castle, a creation inspired by all six Princesses. Featuring various chambers including the Magic Wand Space, The Tiara Space, The Jewel Space, secret castle rooms and chutes to the dungeon, the rooms ultimately lead to the Royal Ballroom, where players can win the game and be crowned a Disney Princess. With multiple mini-games, activities, and video clips from everyone's favorite Princess films this is a completely immersive and entertaining game-based DVD experience. The intelligent board game design tracks players on the board and automatically keeps score. With over 250 different games, 250 animations, activities and trivia questions, it is unlikely that players will play the same game twice.
Players adopt their favorite Disney Dog in order to win the Blue Ribbon Challenge. Players are immersed in unique 3-D environments, including virtual worlds from Oliver & Company, Mickey's Toon Town, Lady And The Tramp, 101 Dalmatians, The Fox and the Hound and other Disney Dog films. With over 1200 different trivia questions, plus 15 different categories of game play, the Disney Dogs Edition delivers a multi-leveled gaming experience that is both fun and challenging. The game can be played under two settings: "Puppy Mode" for kids and families, and "Pedigree Mode" for true Disney trivia buffs. |
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The Cheetah Girls 2
on DVD Buena Vista Home Entertainment - "The Cheetahs" Go Abroad in a Music-Filled Disney Channel Original Movie Loaded With Exclusive Bonus Features, Including Never-Before- Seen Extended Ending
Starring hugely popular young star Raven-Symoné (Disney Channel'sThat's So Raven), and the trio that's launching a 40 market concert tour this fall -- Adrienne Bailon , Sabrina Bryan , Kiely Williams ") – plus the international music star Belinda Peregrin, Lynn Whitfield (TV's "Without A Trace") and Lori Alter, "The Cheetahs" get the opportunity of a lifetime when they make their way to Barcelona, Spain, to perform in an international music festival. Along the way, the "amigas Cheetahs" learn that, although their paths are not the same, they are lucky to have lasting friendeach other for the journey. Directed and choreographed by Kenny Ortega (Emmy Award-winning director/choreographer of "High School Musical"), the premiere of The Cheetah Girls 2 on Friday, August 25 was the most watched DCOM premiere in history drawing 7.8MM total viewers. The Cheetah Girls 2 Cheetah-licious Edition DVD is available for U.S. $26.99 (SRP) and Canada $29.99 (SRP) |
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Disney Job Fair Central Florida News 13 - Walt Disney is looking for a few good men and women to spread some magic this holiday season. The park is hosting a weeklong job fair for seasonal, part-time and full time positions. The Company will also offer a $1,000 new hire bonus for quick service foods and housekeeper positions, and for character performers. The job fair will be held December 4 through December 8, from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. each day at the Disney Casting Center on 1515 Buena Vista Drive. |
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ESPN Plans
European Expansion
TheStreet.com - Disney's (DIS) ESPN said Tuesday that it agreed to buy a U.K.-based cable sports channel, NASN, that brings sports from North America to a European audience. NASN, or the North American Sports Network, is owned by private equity firm Benchmark Capital Europe and Setanta Sports Holdings Ltd., a sports broadcaster based in Ireland. The channel has more than 6 million subscribers in 26 countries. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but The Wall Street Journal reported that NASN was being sold for $107 million to $120 million, including debt assumption. The Journal cited a source familiar with the deal. "Growing our business in Europe is a key strategic initiative for us," said Russell Wolff, managing director of ESPN International, in a press release. "We expect NASN, which has performed well and created a unique market position, to be a strong addition to our portfolio. ESPN has a leadership position in sports media around the world, and we look forward to bringing the same passion, quality, excitement, and insightful journalism to sports fans in Europe." As part of the deal, ESPN will have rights to show National Hockey League and Major League Baseball games in Europe. The channel also will have the exclusive rights to the National Football League in some parts of Europe. Currently, ESPN's operations in Europe are limited to its ESPN Classic channel, a soccer Web site and a business that sells some sports shows to other European networks. The Disney subsidiary plans to put its name on NASN and use to broadcast ESPN programming in Europe. Shares of Disney recently were trading up 44 cents, or 1.3%, to $33.88. |
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Disney Pixar's Cars juice drink drives into stores Retail Bulletin - A new Disney Pixar's Cars orange juice drink with natural mineral water is driving into the multiple retail sector to coincide with the release of the smash-hit movie on DVD. Available as packs of three 200ml cartons in outers of nine, the new drink has no added sugar and is the latest in a series of healthy, fun and refreshing children's drinks to be produced by the UK's leading specialist in children's drinks, Calypso. Cars joins the popular Disney Princess juice drink to create a powerful ‘his and hers' offer for children in the three-to-eight year age group. Both contain fruit juice blended with natural mineral water from Calypso's own approved source, and both are a rich source of Vitamin C. “Since its launch in July, Cars has become one of the hottest properties around and is now the number two brand in toys,” said Richard Cooke, Calypso's Sales and Marketing Manager. Richard Cooke confirmed that all existing children's drinks, including Finding Nemo water as well as Toy Story and The Incredibles smoothies, were already fully compliant with new guidelines on healthier food and drink introduced by Disney in the US. Each three-pack carries a recommended retail price of 69p with individual cartons featuring different pictures and details of Disney Cars stars including rookie race car Lightning McQueen and his love interest, Sally. |
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Disney on
Ice skates into Raleigh News 14 Carolina - Imagination meets reality this week in Raleigh. Disney on Ice presents “Princess Wishes” in the newest live production coming to the RBC Center. Robyn Sudkamp plays Ariel from “The Little Mermaid” in the production. She talked to anchor Tracey Early about the production. Please view the video for this interview. The show starts December 6th and will run through December 10th. Tickets range from $16 to $66. |
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Monday December 4, 2006 |
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Pirates Sequel
on DVD Tomorrow Ahead of the Bell: Yahoo, Disney at UBS Disney's Animated Response ABC Sweeps Into Success Disney Animation Resurrects Cartoon Shorts, Cuts Staff Disney Channel set to make `Famous Five' Disney Celebrates Walt's 105th Birthday Laugh Floor Comedy Club Sign Up walls Down Information 'celebrities' descend on Disney Mexican pop group RBD visits Pirates of the Caribbean Disney Adventures launches in India Cast of "High School Musical" star in "Walt Disney World Christmas Day Parade" Wonderful World New Musicals Sought for ASCAP/Disney Workshop in LA |
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Pirates Sequel
on DVD Tomorrow
Johnny Depp returned to the sea and sailed away with the year's biggest hit. The blockbuster sequel has Depp's woozy buccaneer Capt. Jack Sparrow trying to weasel his way out of a mortal debt owed to Davy Jones, who rules the bottom of the ocean, with Jack's pals (Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley) in tow trying to save his soul. The movie comes as a single DVD with a blooper reel and commentary from the screenwriters or in a two-disc set with a treasure trove of other extras. There are featurettes on Depp's rascally character, which earned him an Academy Awards nomination for the first movie, "The Curse of the Black Pearl," and on Bill Nighy's slimy Davy Jones, along with segments about the cast's sword-fight training and the special effects that went into creating a giant sea beast. The two-disc set also has a look at the new incarnation of Disney's "Pirates of the Caribbean" theme-park attraction, which inspired the movie franchise. Since the extras do not include a look ahead at next summer's third "Pirates" adventure, it's a fair bet there'll be another "Dead Man's Chest" DVD release out then with a sneak peek at the third flick. DVD set, $34.99; single DVD, $29.99. |
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Ahead
of the Bell: Yahoo, Disney at UBS Houston Chronicle - UBS kicks off its 34th Annual Global Media and Communications Conference Monday, part of which will focus on entertainment companies and digital media. The four-day conference will feature presentations by more than 85 companies, including Yahoo Inc., Walt Disney Co. and News Corp., among others. Analysts are hoping to gain insight into digital media investments, DVD cycle status, mergers and international expansion. In a note previewing the conference, UBS said it believes media investors should focus on three advertising-related themes in 2007: the growing role of non-media marketing; increasing divergence between advanced and emerging markets; and media stocks shifting sensitivity to advertising. News Corp. is expected to provide an update on its digital initiatives, led by MySpace, as well as detail progress at Sky Italia and plans for future capital returns. Disney also is expected to speak on digital issues, including the revamped disnet.com, Disney Mobile and video games. UBS said the company also should provide insight on growth opportunities at more mature core businesses like media networks, theme parks and the studio. On Tuesday afternoon, Yahoo will present updates on its Panama initiative to analysts, as well as speak on fourth-quarter display sales and the health of the rich media/video online advertising market. |
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The Motley Fool - Now that Pixar is in the Disney
(NYSE: DIS) bloodstream, it seems that a few of
Disney's in-house animators are being shown the door.
Several reports over the weekend had the family
entertainment giant letting go of as much as 20% of
its 800-strong workforce. Pixar's headcount,
supposedly, won't be chopped.
After a string of mostly lackluster productions, Disney has whittled away at its ink-and-paint staff in the past. This move appears tame by comparison. It's also not a very surprising decision. The company had already indicated that it was hacking away at the number of live-action features it would be producing, so it's only natural to see it follow suit in non-Pixar animation. In the past, cynics would have considered a move like this to be retreat. It just doesn't feel that way these days. Under CEO Bob Iger's leadership, terms like "addition through subtraction" and an emphasis on quality over quantity aren't likely to draw snickers. Disney really does feel like it's coming together as a quality family entertainment powerhouse, even if it had to acquire some of the key parts -- like Pixar -- to get there. Steve Hulett, an Animation Guild representative that Reuters cited in its story on the matter, claims that Disney is lengthening its production timeline on new releases from a year to 18 months. That doesn't sound like the move of a company trying to skimp on costs. It sounds like a commitment to quality. Pixar and DreamWorks Animation (NYSE: DWA) have come to rule the computer animation space, in part because of their longer development cycles. Better stories and crisper animation have helped set their efforts apart from many of their rivals, as well as from some of Disney's rushed theatrical and direct-to-video offerings. Yes, you can produce rendered magic in a hurry and on a shoestring budget, but it's not worth the near-term cost savings. Disney fell into that trap during the latter half of Michael Eisner's tenure, and it began to pay for it dearly in brand-sapping duds and a $7.4 billion bailout in the form of a Pixar purchase. As long as it leans on the Pixar gray matter, which has done nothing but serve up classy epic after classy epic, Disney's future will be brighter than its bleaker recent past in in-house animation. |
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ABC Sweeps Into
Success
Forbes - Network television programming was so routine during the past November sweeps period it almost made you yearn for the days of blockbuster over-the-top spectacles filled with sex, explosions and Al Capone's vault. Well, we shouldn't get carried away. These days sweeps doesn't mean much in the TV ratings war because the country’s major TV markets are wired for daily Nielsen ratings information. So, while the sweeps period--which ended on Nov. 30--was still peppered with a few big events, the networks relied heavily on their normal prime-time fare. The business-as-usual technique proved successful for the Walt Disney Co. (nyse: DIS)-owned ABC. The network’s major sweeps event came on Nov. 15, when the results show of reality hit Dancing with the Stars drew close to 28 million viewers. Much like its reality juggernaut, the network danced its way into first place in the coveted 18-to-34 demographic that advertisers pay a premium to reach. In fact, it edged out the other broadcast networks on all but one night of the week. (Thanks to freshman darling Heroes, General Electric (nyse: GE)-owned NBC took Monday night, averaging close to 3 million viewers during prime time in the beloved 18-to-34 demo.) ABC has Grey’s Anatomy and Desperate Housewives, as well as solidly performing newcomers Brothers & Sisters and Ugly Betty, to thank for its sweeps success. The network’s newly introduced series Big Day and Day Break failed to make the dent ABC had hoped for. pr It was CBS (nyse: CBS) crime procedural-heavy schedule, which includes the CSI family as well as Criminal Minds and Without a Trace, that slid the network safely into second place among the 18-to-34 viewing audience. (In total sweeps viewers, CBS took the crown.) What didn’t fare as well was 3 Lbs., a new medical drama starring Stanley Tucci that CBS trotted out during the period. Much to the network’s dismay, the series premiere--as well as the ensuing episodes--was a low-wattage affair. And then there was Fox. Much like rival CW--the recent merger of the WB and UPN--the News Corp. (nyse: NWS)-owned Fox network has little to brag about this fall. In addition to the laundry list of canceled shows, Fox is still back-peddling from the highly controversial O.J. Simpson interview that almost was. |
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Disney Animation Resurrects Cartoon Shorts, Cuts Staff
The New York Times - Walt Disney Studios has several animated short films in production now intending to release them along with new feature films as a bonus. The new shorts will be used to train animation talent and spot potential new directors for animated feature films, and will be done in both traditional hand-drawn animation, 3-D computer-generated animation, or a combination of both. The first short to go into production next year, "How to Install Your Home Theatre," will restart the famous "How to" series of shorts starring Goofy, and will be co-directed by Stevie Wermers, the first female director at Walt Disney animation. In another story, the Times is reporting that 160 positions will be eliminated from the animation unit, a move interpreted by many industry watchers as signaling a move away from quantity towards higher quality. |
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Disney Channel set to make `Famous Five'
Monsters and Critics - The Disney Channel is set to create a cartoon out of British author Enid Blyton`s 'Famous Five,' but has decided to update some of the 60-year-old language. The company has made a promise that there will be no 'lashings of ginger beer' and happiness will not be referred to as 'gay' in the new cartoon, the Times of London reported Monday. Disney will develop a 26-episode cartoon to be produced in Britain with the aim of airing on the Disney Channel in 2008. Disney and Chorion, a British company that owns the rights to the books, will work together to give the 1940s stories a contemporary twist. Adding that even though some of the old-fashioned phrases will be changed, the project will remain true to the spirit of Blyton`s characters. The president of Disney Channel Worldwide, Rich Ross, said that producing 'Famous Five' is part of Disney`s new strategy to increase growth in local markets. 'We realize that if we`re going to be a global network then we need to solicit material from around the world,' another Disney representative, Gary Marsh, added. |
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Disney Celebrates Walt's 105th Birthday Disney is marking the occasion by digging deep into the vault, dusting off an award-winning classic and making it into DVDs. Walt Disney's nephew, Roy Disney, was part
of the crew of a series called "True Life Adventures."
Disney said the shows were his uncle's ideas. "He was very much into nature because he grew up on a farm, and he loved animals. It grew out of that love of the real world." Fifteen True Life Adventures were made between 1948 and 1960. Eight of them won Academy Awards. |
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Laugh Floor Comedy Club Sign Up walls Down |
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Information 'celebrities' descend on Disney |
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Mexican pop group RBD visits Pirates of the Caribbean
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Disney Adventures launches in India Moneycontrol - Infomedia India Ltd., the country’s leading special interest publications company, today announced a strategic alliance with Disney Publishing Worldwide India (DPW), a division of The Walt Disney Company India Private Limited, to launch ‘Disney Adventures,’ one of the world’s most widely circulated tweens and kids’ magazine, in India. This launch also marks the first launch of an international magazine for Indian tweens and kids here. The first monthly issue of Disney Adventures magazine priced at a nominal cover price of Rs. 40, is targeted at Indian tweens in the 8-13 age group and features compelling local content including a special feature on Bollywood Hit – Dhoom 2. One of the world’s most widely circulated tweens and kids’ magazine, Disney Adventures,’ is globally recognized as the tweens favourite magazine. The international format has been adapted to capture the imagination of Indian tweens and kids, and has over 35% local content. The 100-page monthly publication will feature the Indian tweens’ favourite Disney and Bollywood characters, comic pages, jokes, games, tech news and reviews, fashion, and contests. Other Indian language editions for this magazine are also being considered.
The magazine was first published in the
“Our tie-up with Disney is a perfect fit for the two
brands as we are leaders in our respective space and
will complement the strengths of both the groups. The
tweens’ magazine sector in
“Kids and their families have an affinity for Disney
content. The launch of Disney Adventures significantly
advances our strategic priorities, which include -
first and foremost - delivering high-quality,
compelling creative product to consumers across all
platforms” said Rajat Jain, MD, The Walt Disney
Company ( |
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Cast of "High School Musical" star in "Walt Disney
World Christmas Day Parade" |
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Wonderful World Once upon a time, in “Bambi,” Disney had sought to catch the living soul of nature on film. Now he was leaving it for dead. Within three years, his new monument would outstrip Yellowstone, Yosemite, and the Grand Canyon as a tourist draw. His attention was turning to grander but more manageable things, as if the batting of a doe’s eyelashes, or little April showers going drip-drip-drop, were no longer quite suited, or satisfying, to a man of the world. His ambitions rose, and with them went the plaudits of his followers; in 1962, Lillian and Dorothy Gish, two of the patron saints of Hollywood, traveled to Oslo to argue that Disney should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Even now, forty years after his death, the slight figure of Walt himself is almost impossible to pick out from the parti-colored throng of movie clips, projects, and moral tendencies that march under the banner of “Walt Disney.” Say the name to most people and you know what will flash onto their mind’s eye: unashamedly bright hues, flying elephants, singing bears, corporate dominance, happy endings, and a helping of values that slip down as easily as ice cream. How did we arrive at this blinding apotheosis? One attempt at an answer, the most comprehensive to date, is provided by Neil Gabler, in “Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination” (Knopf; $35). Gabler takes more than eight hundred pages to tell and note his tale, which sounds excessive, but then Disney himself was a model of unflagging thoroughness, and, as Thumper would say, if you can’t do nice annotations, then don’t do nuthin’ at all. He was born Walter Elias Disney, on December 5, 1901, in Chicago. His father, Elias, was at that time a carpenter, and the first Disney-like note in the story is struck when we learn that Elias built the wooden cottage on Tripp Avenue in which his son was born. He helped to construct two more dwellings nearby, and you half expect to hear that one of them was rented out to dwarfs. One of the problems for Gabler, as for any biographer of Disney, is that he can hardly start to recount the exploits of his subject without sounding like the narrator of a Disney TV show. When Walt was four, he and his family moved to Marceline, Missouri, where, in Gabler’s words, he often spent languid afternoons fishing with the neighbor boys for catfish and bowheads in Yellow Creek and skinny-dipping afterward. In the winter they would go sledding or skating on the frozen creek, building a bonfire on the shore to keep warm. Sometimes Walt would tag after Erastus Taylor, a Civil War veteran, who would relive his battle exploits. (“I don’t think he ever was in a battle in the Civil War,” Walt later said, “but he was in all of them.”) That last quotation drills us straight to the core of Disney’s appeal. Far from chiding the old man for his fabrications, he is fondly and supportively amused. To be gripped by a story, especially one that is trawled from the past, is everything. To realize that it might not be true, or that it might have been blown up out of all proportion, is no big deal. Changing its proportions, in fact, could be just the ticket, because what are fables if not stories that have been lofted out of the reach of regular experience, no longer scratchable by the quibbles of common sense? As for blowing up, there is no better method for showing an image to a crowd—taking a mouse-size mouse, say, and throwing it onto a screen, where it assumes the dimensions, and some of the pluckier habits, of a man. Marceline educated Disney. It taught him how to cherish good times, as if preparing them to be the objects of a later nostalgia. Was it really the case that when Buffalo Bill came to town he stopped his buggy mid-parade and asked the young Walt to join him? Did crusty old “Doc” Sherwood really give Walt a nickel for sketching his horse, Rupert? Another version of the story, cited by Gabler, has the doctor hanging the finished picture on the wall. Either way, Disney had done his first piece of business as an artist, and, according to his older brother Roy, it remained “the highlight of Walt’s life.” There would never be a time, indeed, when art was not a business, although what attracted Walt, throughout his career, was not so much the money that people traded for his art (that would be Roy’s territory) as the eager numbers in which they came to view it, as if reassuring its creator that his dreams were just like theirs. Disney was hardly alone in locating bliss in some lost zone of childhood, and in striving to reconstruct it in the movies; without that primary impulse we would have no Andy Hardy, no “Meet Me in St. Louis,” no “Citizen Kane.” Disney taught the world to look back without anger, and he traced that look to a horse. Rupert was his Rosebud. Elias farmed in Missouri, without much joy, and in 1911 the Disney's moved again, this time to Kansas City. There Elias ran a paper route, enlisting Walt and Roy as his delivery boys. Walt would get up for work in the dark, before school, and on Sundays he had a double load, which meant skipping church. (That was no loss. The grown-up Walt never went to church—a difficult smudge for those who acclaim him as the purveyor of all-American ways.) In later years, according to Gabler, “he talked of how the route and its demands—the unyielding routine, the snow, the fatigue, the lost papers—traumatized and haunted him.” One thinks instantly of Dickens, and of his toils in the blacking factory. In each case, what scarred them was not pain—a job is a job, after all, and there were children everywhere subsisting in more brutal conditions—but sameness, without the prospect of relief. A thin-skinned, fanciful child will remember as torment what tougher spirits would regard as routine. Both Dickens and Disney came to believe, with a kind of humiliated pride, that their sufferings placed them in good stead with the travails of ordinary folk, who would henceforth be diverted by entertainments that would never lack for incident—that would, whatever their other qualities, swarm with animation. As G. K. Chesterton wrote, irrefutably, “Dickens did not write what the people wanted. Dickens wanted what the people wanted.” In “Walt Disney: Hollywood’s Dark Prince,” published in 1993, Marc Eliot lays out a gothic account of Disney family life (“Elias would march Roy and Walt to the woodshed and dispense his brutal punishments”) and of its aftermath in the mind of the adult Walt. Gabler concedes that Elias Disney was a sour and angry man, embittered by his failure to hold down a job. (His two older sons, Herbert and Ray, left home early to seek their fortunes elsewhere.) But does that set him apart from a thousand other fathers of that time? If Walt was goaded into a frenzy of achievement, it was not because of a monster at his back but simply because, as a natural optimist and clown, he saw no profit in the deflated and the dour. Crowned “second dumbest” in the class by a teacher in Kansas City, he nonetheless found favor by performing comic turns (he did a mean Chaplin) and, in Gabler’s laconic account, “decorating the margins of his textbooks with pictures and then entertaining his classmates by riffling them to make them move.” By the time of the Disneys’ next uprooting—to Chicago, in 1917—we sense an acceleration in Walt, with the father’s restlessness (Elias was now employed by the O-Zell jelly-and-fruit-juice company) echoed in the hale, try-anything momentum of the son. Walt enrolled in night classes at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts, and his high-school magazine labeled him “Artist,” as if his fate could not be erased. A guy could go far on a riffle. Instead of which, Walt Disney went to war. Or, at any rate, he tried. In 1918, at the age of sixteen (he altered the documentation to add a year), he enlisted in the Red Cross Ambulance Corps, but it was too late. Even so, after the Armistice, he was shipped to France—“an interesting place,” he noted, although the highest dividend of his time there was a purse of three hundred dollars that he won at a craps game in Neufchâteau. By October, 1919, he was back in America, and setting out on the rising slope that would lead to Mickey Mouse. Returning to Kansas City, he found work as a commercial artist, joining forces with a taciturn, big-browed colleague called Ubbe Iwwerks to form their own company. (One of the delights of Gabler’s book is the roster of proper names, many as rubberized as cartoons: Earl Scrogin, Friz Freleng, Grim Natwick, Pinto Colvig, Hardie Gramatky, Dr. Rufus von KleinSmid, and the Dr. Seuss-worthy Gus Van Schmus. Ubbe Iwwerks changed his name to Ub Iwerks, which didn’t exactly help.) Walt drew print advertisements, then animated advertisements on film—or, at least, cutouts that could be moved and photographed, to give the impression of continuous action. By 1921, he was preparing for his own cartoons, lasting six or seven minutes, to be screened in cinemas ahead of the main features. Laugh-O-Gram Films, Inc., was registered the following year, with Disney listed as its president, despite the fact that, as Gabler points out, “he was still a minor and legally too young to be a corporate officer.” Just like going to war. The two hundred and ten pages of biography that whisk us from May 18, 1922, to December 21, 1937—or, if you prefer, from the creation of Laugh-O-Gram to the première of “Snow White”—read like a headlong thriller. The reason is clear. There is nothing more inspiring than to be in on the birth of a new art form or a new technology, and Disney was there for both. He was already using cels—transparent sheets of celluloid, which allowed him to manipulate the characters against a fixed background—but it was an artist friend named Rudy Ising who proposed that they draw directly on the cels instead of gluing images onto them. From a distance, that idea seems obvious, but these folk were having to make their medium up as they went along, fuelled by the sort of rushed and sleepless inventiveness that is barely conceivable beyond American shores. They were flying blind, and they were heading for a mouse. “The first Mickey Mouse was made by twelve people after hours in a garage,” Disney recalled. I would give a great deal to have been a fly on that garage wall, or a spider in the rafters. Already, Walt had acknowledged the lowliness of his own draftsmanship, and he was relying on the superior skills of others. That first Mickey picture, “Plane Crazy” (1928), was largely the work of Iwerks, who cranked out up to seven hundred drawings a day. He duly received a credit, but—and the question has dogged Disney scholars ever since—should he therefore get the credit? If Disney remains a test case for artistic contribution, that is because he threw out the romantic notion of what an artist should be and the distance at which he should hold himself from society. Disney was up to his neck in society—not high society, which held no appeal, but in appetites and aspirations so widespread, so sweet and low, that we scarcely bother to articulate them. It is true that Disney cartoons were not physically sketched by Disney, but you might as well complain that Henry Ford was not to be found underneath a Model T, tightening nuts. Disney, in fact, was a tightener from the first, incessantly churning out gags, pulling apart and fixing the gags of others, and pained by the sloppy and the slack. “Snow White” was finished in a panic, and years later Disney was still fretting over the shortcomings of his heroine—not her ethical decision to hang out with a large group of small men, but the wobbles in her construction. “The bridge on her nose floats all over her face,” he said. He became an industry, but the one thing that links the industrialist, whatever the product, with the auteur, whatever the form, is obsessive pedantry—the will to get things right, whatever the cost may be. The best joke about Walt Disney is that he was not a good businessman. Anyone schooled in the legend of Disney the capitalist ogre must at some point deal with the fact that money, in itself, did not concern him. He didn’t know how to spend it, throwing no lavish parties, dressing casually in sweaters and pants, and dining on cans of beans; he earned far less of it, for years, than seems economically possible, and plowed what did come along straight back into the company; and, as for raising it in order to finance his ventures, he tended to lunge into contracts without weighing what lay in store. (Roy described the first decade of Disney Studios as “bacon and eggs without the bacon.”) Walt’s early days fit the bill of the classic struggler, and Gabler tells of a Kansas City dentist hiring Laugh-O-Gram to make short films on dental hygiene, and of Disney being unable to go and close the deal, because “he had left his only pair of shoes at the shoemaker’s and did not have the $1.50 he needed to retrieve them.” Even after he arrived in Los Angeles, in 1923, with a bagful of confidence but little else, he and Roy could not start up Disney Bros. until they had secured some family loans—twenty-five dollars from Roy’s girlfriend and five hundred from their Uncle Robert, who split the loan into four installments and charged them eight per cent interest. Do I hear the first, faint quack of Scrooge McDuck? The problem with borrowing cash to make a cartoon was that, likely as not, you would hit a new wrinkle as you went along. It would be a wrinkle that neither you nor your backer had foreseen, but the challenge of ironing it out would be far too tempting to skip. In October, 1927, for instance, America woke up to “The Jazz Singer.” By May, 1928, Disney was calling a halt to the production of silent cartoons. “Damn it, I know how fast film goes,” he was heard to say, “but how fast does music go?” In late June, “probably around eight o’clock” (Gabler is most gripping when at his most precise), a scene from what would become “Steamboat Willie,” starring Mickey Mouse, was projected onto a bed sheet and watched in trepidation by the studio’s employees. One man with a harmonica and others tapping pencils on spittoons positioned themselves with a view of the sheet but out of sight of the audience, and tried, until two in the morning, to match the noise to the spectacle. Further experiments came and went. A tryout with an orchestra, on September 15th of that year, was a notable flop, but Disney’s letters and memos of the time sound like lines from popular songs: “Old Man Opportunity rapping at our door”; “Slap as big a mortgage on everything we got”; “ ‘Are we downhearted?’ HELL NO.” That clarion call should be borne in mind whenever Disney is berated for his cheerfulness. Again, it echoed the good cheer of Dickens: not a vapid exhortation to enjoy the easy life but the half-desperate will to soldier on even when trouble has a paw in the door. Thus, in 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt was inaugurated in March, “Three Little Pigs” came out in May, and before long this curt, boisterous fable was being praised for reflecting—and positively boosting—the pick-me-up gustiness of the New Deal, guaranteed to chase away the lupine ravening's of the Depression. The fact that it was one of the first Disney projects in color (all those rounded, pleasurable pinks) was hardly going to harm its prospects, and if Walt’s new fixation was to banish black-and-white, well, such eager boyishness was never hard to sell. To praise somebody as a man of his time is vague and often condescending, but with Disney the claim could not be more exact. Well after he had ceased to make promotional films in favor of clean teeth, he retained the capacity to read a national mood and answer its demands, as though on private commission. If the song had run, “Don’t Be Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf,” it would have sounded like a public lecture or a distressed parent. To ask the question “Who’s afraid?” put Disney at the level of the playground. It was a taunt, and it waited for the shout of an answer: “Not me!” To understand Disney’s advance, you need to go to Paris. In particular, you need to go to Paris before January 15th, to the Grand Palais, which is home to an exhibit of Disney’s art. This in itself is astounding. To the French mind, Disney represents the arrowhead of American cultural assault, and if America were to return the favor it would need to mount a major retrospective of soft, unpasteurized French cheese at the Metropolitan Museum. The show is predicated on the belief that Disney engendered much that was rich and strange in the iconography of the twentieth century and that the dissemination of those icons, however fiercely you object to it, makes his collected works as potent as those of any other artist. When you read in Gabler’s book that by 1935, before the arrival of full-length Disney features, Mickey Mouse was responsible for the sale of five hundred million movie tickets around the world, you must admit that the Parisians have a point. The exhibit gathers some of the most delicate artwork that was summoned into being by Disney’s wand. There is a wonderful gouache of the sorcerer’s cavern, from “Fantasia” (1940), with the shell-like spiral of staircase winding up into the ominous dark. Below it hangs the same scene, this time in oil on paper. The sole addition is the figure of Mickey creeping along, his ears throwing bulbous circles of shadow on the opposite wall. What, the show invites us to ask, has happened here? Is it not funny, and fitting, that a cartoon hero should tiptoe through a scene from German Expressionism, the New World prankster dropped into a roomful of old European fears? Or does it mark the irredeemable progress from seriousness to kitsch, the hijacking of art for the advancement of the crass, which Disney-haters pinpoint in his style? The debate is deepened by a wonderful double act in the second room of the show, where sequences from early Disney are projected next to matching clips from masterpieces of live-action cinema. “The Mad Doctor” (1933), in which Mickey is strapped to a table beneath a descending circular saw, is juxtaposed with the laboratory scene from “Frankenstein” (1931) which suggested it. Charlie Chaplin is force-fed by machine, in “Modern Times” (1936), and in “Modern Inventions,” made the next year, Donald Duck is duly force-painted with shoe polish. As for “Fantasia,” what plunderings it required! First, there is the bewitching, sky-high devil who towers over the town in Murnau’s “Faust” (1926), and his no less lofty descendant in the “Night on Bald Mountain” section of the Disney film. And, yes, there is Mickey and that staircase, and here is its source: the flickering shadow steps of “The Golem,” directed by Paul Wegener way back in 1914. Who did the borrowing here? Who knew about Wegener films? It comes as a shock to read that Disney and his wife, Lillian, whom he married in 1925, “socialized throughout the 1930s with the Spencer Tracys,” and that it was Chaplin—a Disney addict from the start, and a wellspring of advice—who wired Walt on the first night of “Snow White” to predict that “all our fondest hopes will be realized tonight,” because for much of Gabler’s book you get a sense that Disney’s operations ran in a vacuum of their own devising. I knew that “Steamboat Willie,” the first Mickey film with sound, was a nod to Buster Keaton’s “Steamboat Bill, Jr.,” but nothing in the biography had prepared me for the intense cross-referencing of the Paris show. Only when you study the artists who were lured to work for Disney does the story click into place. Not only were they encouraged to watch, and steal from, as many new releases as possible, in every genre; their own tastes, which ran to the great illustrative artists of Europe (Honoré Daumier, Gustave Doré, and Arthur Rackham), also seemed to equip and armor them for the parade of fairy tales and children’s classics on which Disney had his eye. What he gathered was a gang of wanderers, outsiders, and post-European misfits. So did many other producers (that is half the story of Hollywood), but animation held a peculiar attraction for the lonely and the avid, who craved nothing more than pencil, paper, and peace. There was Vladimir (Bill) Tytla, born in Yonkers, the hefty son of a Ukrainian father and a Polish mother. Wolfgang Reitherman had been born in Germany, the last of seven children; he would wind up directing “The Jungle Book.” Milt Kahl, too, had a German father, who abandoned the family. (In a company questionnaire, Kahl listed his hobby as “sexual intercourse.”) Art Babbitt had lived like a bum in New York before he turned to art. Ward Kimball remembered a shiftless childhood, attending twenty-two schools. Marc Davis, in Gabler’s words, “was the son of a first-generation Jew of Russian extraction who traveled the country with a mind reading act before landing finally in Klamath Falls, Oregon.” There’s a whole novel concealed in that sentence. In one sense, Disney’s choice of subjects was bizarre. How would all these feudal formulas—the princes who crown the climaxes of “Snow White,” “Cinderella,” and “Sleeping Beauty”—play in a modern republic? In the event, they scarcely mattered. Nobody leaves those movies pining for the unfailingly limp human males into whose arms the spunky heroines fall. Indeed, to criticize the Disney corpus as pap ignores the fact that pap was the thing that Disney, at his best, did worst of all. What lodges in the brain, after Snow White has been yanked out of her glass casket, is the macabre punch of the buildup: the poisoned apple rolling from her outstretched hand, the witch transfigured from a snotty Joan Crawford figure to something yet more disturbing. (Her voice was provided by Lucille La Verne, who is said to have managed the transition to a cackle by the simple expedient of removing her false teeth.) As for the sight of the threatened girl haring through the forest, pursued by a posse of swirling leaves, with the branches clawing at her clothes, it possesses not just the sharp-toothed, half-Teutonic atmosphere that Disney could reliably conjure from his artists; it is also edited with a violent sophistication that chops straight into children’s dreams. For a moment, it looks like Eisenstein. It is no surprise, then, to learn that the director of “Battleship Potemkin” and “Ivan the Terrible” was a Disneyphile. “The work of this master,” Eisenstein claimed, “is the greatest contribution of the American people to art.” His comments on the subject, part of a book begun in 1941 and never finished, are available in a French edition of 1991; within three pages, the Russian has lauded the “absolute perfection” of the American’s achievement and linked his name to those of Fra Angelico, Hans Christian Andersen, and St. Francis of Assisi. Disney the anthropomorphist is conjoined with La Fontaine as someone who grasps, and dramatizes, the relentless way in which animals “hold up to their older brother—man—a deforming mirror.” It is the moral and social upheaval that is promised by such deformation which galvanizes Eisenstein, who worships the elasticity of cartoon characters, ascribing to it what he calls a “literalization of metaphor.” We talk of horseplay, of somebody who drinks like a fish and winds up as sick as a dog, but we stop at the metaphor; Disney somehow breaks through the language—not difficult, in the days when he was still shooting silent pictures—and locates the brute behavior that lurks behind it. He is not humanizing animals; he is decivilizing ordinary life, which is a far more subversive path to take, and sometimes he weeds out the human factor altogether. The animator’s trick, once more, is to rediscover the spirit, the anima, that breathes life into our descriptions of the world. When Donald Duck bursts through a door or pops round to see a friend, the bursts and pops are plainly there to see. In “The Opry House,” a short from 1929, Mickey Mouse, giving a concert piano performance, has to quell an insurrection in his instrument. Two keys turn rough and have to be subdued, and at one point the whole piano turns around and, bucking its hind legs, kicks him like a mule. That is why Eisenstein chose to deal with early-period Walt. There was insolence and devilry in the artwork, and a definite dash of arousal: selected portions of Mickey would stretch and squeeze, as if his entire shape were tumescent. Take “The Barn Dance,” a seven-minute hoedown of music, mutilation, and rivalry made by Walt Disney in 1928, in which Mickey Mouse takes Minnie to a dance. He keeps treading on her feet, and the more he treads the more his own feet fatten and swell, till they reach the size of anvils. By now he is stamping on her legs, one of which grows so long and thin, like a strand of black spaghetti, that she stops dancing, ties a loop in it, reaches into her bloomers, pulls out a pair of scissors, and cuts off the excess. She also takes revenge, without hesitation, by turning to a second suitor—who is huge and overbearing, with a predatory leer. The little guy, however, isn’t beaten yet. He finds a balloon, shoves it down the seat of his pants, floats over the intruder, lands in front of his girl, and starts to hoof once more. No cartoon balloon, however, has ever gone unpopped, and “The Barn Dance” closes with Mickey, deflated and re-cuckolded, gazing into the camera and weeping inky tears. How far could Disney have gone with these bendable bodies? Did he ever, in the hideaway of his nightmares, draw something like this? These breasts are nearly as large as the woman herself, and they have nipples on them that turn sequentially into pursed lips, dripping spigots, traffic lights, beckoning fingers, then lit-up pinball bumpers. The real policeman is not completely real, after all. He has cartoon eyes that stretch out of their sockets like paired erections, locking on the cartoon woman’s breasts with their fanciful nipples. She takes her breasts off and gives them to the real policeman, and he creeps furtively away, clutching the gift closely like a fearful secret, his eyes retracting deep into his skull as though to empty it of its own realness, what’s left of it. The passage comes from “Cartoon,” a short story collected in Robert Coover’s 1987 “A Night at the Movies.” The phrase “its own realness” is awkwardly put, but the awkwardness feels right, because it matches the uneasy pact, familiar to all animators, between ordinary experience and the outlandish world that they have made. (Sometimes, as in “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?,” from 1988, the two collide head-on.) “I definitely feel that we cannot do the fantastic things based on the real unless we first know the real,” Disney said, setting his sights on what he termed the “plausible impossible.” It was a deal that he would refine in the string of full-length masterworks that he delivered between 1937 and 1942: “Snow White,” “Pinocchio,” “Fantasia,” “Dumbo,” and “Bambi.” Sex, of course, has been utterly stripped from these works, not just because of the children in the audience, and the reinforcement of the Hays Code of 1934, but because Disney was by now demanding greater gravity, in every sense, from his artists. The characters would no longer balloon at will, like the Mickey of “The Barn Dance,” but would keep their feet on the ground, with all the moral purpose that such a stance implied. Heaven knows how that felt to a lover of mutability like Eisenstein, but it was essential to the smooth running of the longer narrative; if the dwarfs could ooze through keyholes or suddenly grow to be man-size, Snow White would be less inclined to mother them. Realism in the backdrops, too, became all the rage; the Paris exhibit includes exquisite backgrounds for “Pinocchio” (the most ravishing of all the films), some of them painted on glass. Only if Geppetto’s workshop and the hamlet in which it stood (modeled on the Bavarian town of Rothenburg ob der Tauber) struck the eye as architecturally sound and furnished with a welcoming warmth would we accept the presence of a top-hatted insect as narrator. “What they can’t do these days!” Jiminy Cricket exclaims. As those capacities multiply, what is to stop the inventor? Good taste? A terror of excess? Neither is much of a brake in a global enterprise. The desire to press ahead, and to develop the next big thing, is what finally turns both the Paris show and Gabler’s biography into sad affairs. Disney was badly scalded by a strike at the company in 1941, which earned him a reputation, especially among union men, as something of a tyrant—although one might argue, in retrospect, that nobody could craft a film as persnickety and labor-intensive as “Pinocchio” and expect to make much of a profit. (If you added together the man-hours spent on the artwork for “Snow White,” they would total two hundred years.) The options were unpalatable—cuts in the workforce or a falling-off in quality—and Disney, who managed to end up with both, would never again enjoy the same bond of trust with his artists, or the same liberty to push animation to its limits. To compare “Pinocchio” with “Peter Pan,” released in 1953, is to pass from the embrace of magic to the selling of a cute idea, from the densely detailed to the dismayingly flat. The bestowing of life upon a wooden child is a perfect symbol of the animator’s art, whereas the flying lesson that Peter gives to the Darlings has the air of a cocky stunt. Disney himself was under no illusions. “We’re through with caviar,” he said. “From now on it’s mashed potatoes and gravy.” The case against Walt Disney, which remains as sturdy as the fact that it can never win, is only in part a grudge against his films. Many parents, for instance, take issue with the merchandise, although it is nothing new. Thanks to Gabler, we are introduced to Herman (Kay) Kamen, an ungainly marketing wizard from Baltimore, who, in his four years at Disney, from 1933 to 1937, increased the licensing of Disney products by ten thousand per cent, and who boasted that his finest feat was “getting the Three Little Pigs up in lights in New York’s strictly kosher Ghetto, and making them like it.” I am sure that if Kamen were alive today he would be nudging me toward the Seven Dwarfs’ Cottage Limited-Edition Cuckoo Clock, available online for a mere hundred and ninety-nine dollars. I could sit and watch the time while wearing my Grumpy Loafer Slippers, noted for their “handsome suede accents.” Formerly priced at $16.95, they are now a steal at just under ten bucks. So many treasures, so little time. To the seasoned protester, however, Exhibit A is and always will be Disneyland, followed swiftly by its sister parks in Orlando, Paris, Tokyo, and Hong Kong. In 1955, the year Disneyland opened, the company earned more than twenty-four million dollars, which meant that “for the first time in seventeen years,” as Gabler writes, “Walt Disney Productions was flush.” From the start, there was no mistaking the symbolic clout of the place. Disney may have designed it to hover between the child’s and the adult’s view of reality, like a magnified toy (the stores tapered from nine-tenths scale at ground level to seven-tenths at the top), but behind that cunning lurked a weird presumption—a yearning to corral the world and cut it down to size. Then, there were the inhabitants. The enduring glory of animation was that it could cram exhilarating depths of energy onto a two-dimensional surface; Mickey Mouse is by his very nature more antic than Chaplin and more volatile than even the Marx Brothers in their windmilling prime. To pluck him from that kinetic environment and stuff him into a synthetic suit, with a fixed grin and a padded ass, may be to grant him another dimension, but it is also, and more disastrously, to slow him down. Mickey ceases to be the fount of chaos; he is now a lumbering doll, made soft and safe. It is that smoothing of rough edges which distresses the cineast, appalls the political cynic, and tempts generations of iconoclasts. Hence the recent scandal, which spread across the Internet, in which employees dressed as Mickey, Minnie, Chip, Dale, and other favorites were filmed simulating sex at Disneyland Paris. It was a heresy waiting to happen. No such outrage punctuated my own visit, some years ago, but even a morally upright trip left a definite dent in the spirits. Standing in the rain on Main Street, grimly biding one’s time in the hope of a high-five with Goofy: is there a more foolproof way to break the will of a man? I would have had more fun waiting for Godot. It was in the wake of Disneyland that cultural disdain of Walt began to stir. By the nineteen-sixties, commentators were seething. Vincent Scully wrote in Life, in 1965, that “Disney caters to the kind of phony reality that we all too readily accept in place of the true. Mr. Disney, I’m afraid, has our number.” Scully was discussing architecture, but you can imagine his terms of indictment being applied to almost any practice of the present day, starting with television and political spin. Disney has somehow become shorthand for the cushioning with which, knowingly or otherwise, we protect and console ourselves against experience: “All the conflicts of the real world, the nerve centers of bourgeois society, are purified in the imagination in order to be absorbed and co-opted into the world of entertainment.” That comes from “How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic,” a celebrated broadside written by Ariel Dorfman (later the author of “Death and the Maiden” and other plays) and Armand Mattelart. It was published in Chile in 1971, two years before the counter-revolution and the installing of a military regime, when it was banned. The book is a wrathful besmirching of what its authors identify as “the laundering process” in Disney, and its conclusions have filtered down into the consciousness of bien-pensants around the world. As so often, the left offers the most acute analysis of commercial enterprise and its use as propaganda without knowing quite what to make of the results, and some of the logic would strike even Pluto as a mess. You cannot, for instance, berate Disney for reinforcing the hegemony of the nuclear family and also argue, as Dorfman and Mattelart do, that “it is Disney who is the worst enemy of family harmony.” As they observe, “there is one basic product which is never stocked in the Disney store: parents.” It’s a good point, though. Uncles and nephews, giddy from their lack of responsibility, swarm through the comics and films. Substitute parents—Snow White, Geppetto, Bagheera, and Baloo—slide into place to fill a need, and even Bambi, before he is orphaned, is for all practical purposes the product of a single parent. His father is seen in full patriarchal splendor, lording it over the females, on a high rock: a distant pose that will be recaptured by Simba’s father, fifty-two years later, in “The Lion King.” The preferred Disney habit is to mix yourself an instant family, stirring together a handful of unlikely acquaintances; even “Lady and the Tramp” is more of a buddy picture than a romance, despite the spaghetti-linked kiss and the crossbred puppies at the end. It is a habit that endures to this day, as in the “Toy Story” films, made by Pixar under the aegis of Disney. To judge by the conduct of Buzz Lightyear and Woody, Disney has bequeathed us not so much a vision of sanitized domesticity as a ramshackle guide to the art of brotherly love. Would he have fancied himself as Buzz, in guileless pursuit of the infinite, with only the Woodyish Roy to keep him in check? Disney once claimed that his films were not made for children. If so, that is both the most touching and the most frightening thing about him. He saw the child in us all, and treated us accordingly. He took charge of Neverland, and his chosen audience, orphaned by the rigors of adult life, was a billion Peter Pans. The profound irony of Disney is that, long ago, he was a hero to the left. Whether or not he aimed to compensate for the severity of his own father, his adult family of choice was the one that he chose to fabricate in the great days of Mickey, on Hollywood’s Hyperion Avenue. It ran along the lines of a utopia. “Sometimes we have good old-fashioned scraps, but in the end things get ironed out and we have something we’re all proud of,” Disney said. By the time work began on “Snow White,” the setup was more like a medieval guild, with artists hastening to work in the morning, compulsory life-drawing classes, baseball games on the lot (married men versus singles), no time clock, and, according to Gabler, “three sick days in any given week with full pay before anyone investigated.” Disney, he continues, “was constantly on the lookout for any employee who he felt might be underpaid, and he would then instruct the payroll office to make a salary adjustment.” When “Snow White” finally appeared, he made good on his promise that everyone concerned would get a bonus, which he declared would be equivalent to three months’ salary; the total cost to the company was seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars. “This place runs on a kind of Jesus Christ communism,” Disney said. How, then, did Disney acquire his reputation as a kind of dark messiah—“Hollywood’s Dark Prince,” as Marc Eliot labels him? What Eliot offers is a pathological horror story, in which the unhappy child makes bitter, long-range amends by becoming quietly anti-Semitic and loudly anti-Communist, and maintaining friendly relations with the F.B.I. (J. Edgar Hoover designated Disney a “Special Agent in Charge contact” in 1954.) His main grouse to the authorities seems to have concerned Herbert Sorrell, the union leader who had inflamed the Disney strike in 1941. Over all, Eliot’s accusing tone is too melodramatic for Gabler, who finds scant evidence of anti-Jewish sympathies in Disney and prefers to present him as a connoisseur of control—a man who believed he could put the world to rights, or at least restore it to some level of pre-lapsarian order. In 1963, the publicity director at Disneyland told Kevin Wallace, a reporter from this magazine, “You never know when you’ll bump into Walt prowling around the park in an old sweater, checking on whether a dead light bulb he reported a week earlier has been replaced.” At an indefinable point along the scale of Disney’s triumph (and he cannot be alone in this regard, among the great barons of American success), the perfectionist impulse was warped into a compulsion. When the artists of the mid-nineteen-thirties found Chesterfield butts in their ashtrays in the morning, they suspected that Walt had been snooping around their desks at night and spying on their work. Is that behavior the forgivable flip side of genius, or does it foretell the Disney who appeared as a friendly witness before the HUAC hearings in the fall of 1947? “I feel that everybody in my studio is one hundred per cent American,” he assured the committee. He was on his way to becoming “Uncle Walt,” that figure of faintly sinister geniality who bestrode the postwar scene. The joshing, scruffy Disney who used to sprinkle enthusiasm, like fairy dust or fever, upon his willing employees grew both touchy and untouchable. According to Eliot, he shot footage of Kirk Douglas and his sons Michael and Joel as they rode a miniature train around the Disney household, and spliced it into an episode of “Disneyland” without permission; Douglas took legal action but dropped the suit. “You can’t sue God,” he remarked. By this stage, Disney’s career was a glare of fame and wealth. It was also a tragedy, in that neither of those shining grails had impelled him to enter the business in the first place and because he was obliged to squander most of the capital that he had accrued as an original artist. The heraldic grandeur of “Sleeping Beauty” (1959) has its fans, but it feels like the frozen leftover of another age, as if in thrall to the spell of Maleficent. There is a sorrowful cameo in Gabler’s book, not long before Disney’s death, when the ailing master sits down to survey his latest product: “He spent most of the rest of the afternoon watching a rough cut of ‘The Happiest Millionaire’ and wept throughout.” Were those tears of gratification, or was he missing Mickey? We have all been children, and many of us have children of our own; in the twenty-first century, that puts us squarely in Disney’s debt. We may resent that state of affairs, but to no avail. Although I can open Kipling’s “The Jungle Book” and start to read, in my ear the boom of Phil Harris—Disney’s own choice for the voice of Baloo—is already starting to kick in, blaring “The Bare Necessities” and drowning the original text. Cruella De Vil is my archetype of the knife-thin diva, with a lunatic’s burning eyes. (In the words of Ward Kimball, who worked for Walt over many years, “Almost all of his villains were either women or cats.”) As for Mary Poppins, the gratifying standout of Disney’s final years, she demonstrated his preternatural, Prospero-like knack for conjuring a spirit from thin air (Julie Andrews was nothing like the Mary of the novels) and persuading us that she had always been around. She is the least witchy of his dominatrices, and in her prescription for the pleasures of industry she comes close to the appeal of Disney himself: In every job that must be done
The work ethic transmuted, with a click of the fingers, into a lark: what better alchemy for an America ineluctably on the rise? Disney was the sorcerer-in-residence, and what we have yet to measure, in reviewing the range of his potions, is the strength of the aftereffects. Did he gull us into a fatal simplicity, or was our thirst for Disneyland and its accompanying fables already present, just waiting to be slaked? That was Disney’s own contention—that we all had a Marceline, Missouri, secreted in our hearts, or deep in our common memory, and that his task was to set it free. “I have no recollection of ever being unhappy in my life,” he once said. That is both wishful thinking and bad remembering. Everyone recalls being distressed by the death of Bambi’s mother, and of his stick-legged pining in the snow, but how many of us recall what happens next? The oblivious birds strike up an immediate chorus: “Let’s sing a gay little spring song, tra-la-la.” The episode is closed, like a trapdoor. And so it is with Walt Disney. He succumbed to lung cancer in 1966, but the legend of him barely missed a beat, and his legacy, visible in everything from our viewing habits to our voting patterns, remains bewildering. In the wonderful world of Disney, death is at worst an accident and at best a blip. Immortality beckons, for mice and men, and life, being a show, goes on. |
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New Musicals Sought for ASCAP/Disney Workshop in LA
Broadway World - As part of its continuing commitment to nurture new American musicals, The ASCAP Foundation is seeking new musicals for the 12th annual ASCAP Foundation/Disney Musical Theatre Workshop in Los Angeles. Serving once more as artistic director for the workshop is Oscar and Grammy-winning composer/lyricist Stephen Schwartz whose credits include the Broadway smash Wicked, Godspell, Pippin, the Walt Disney films Pocahontas and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and the Dreamworks' film The Prince of Egypt. The workshop will take place January 29 & 30 and February 12, 13, 19, 20 & 22, 2007, at 7:00 p.m. sharp, at the Disney Feature Animation Studio lot in Burbank, California. Workshop participants will have the opportunity to present selections from their original works in progress for professional critique. Each session will feature prominent guests from all aspects of musical theatre, including producers, directors, critics, performers and composers. Past panelists have included Quincy Jones, Lynn Ahrens, Stephen Flaherty, David Zippel, Jason Alexander and ASCAP President Marilyn Bergman. Writers interested in applying for participation in The ASCAP Foundation/Disney Musical Theatre Workshop in Los Angeles should submit the following: -- A CD of four (4) songs with lyric sheets Send a complete submission package to: Michael A. Kerker All submissions must be received by Friday, December 22, 2006. PLEASE NOTE: Space is limited. Submissions will not be returned. For further information, please call Michael Kerker at 212-621-6234, or go to www.ascap.com. The ASCAP Foundation/Disney Musical Theatre Workshop in Los Angeles is part of an ongoing series of workshops sponsored by The ASCAP Foundation to nurture new American musicals. The workshops are free of charge and are open to everyone, regardless of performing right affiliation. Founded in 1975, The ASCAP Foundation is a charitable organization dedicated to supporting American music creators and encouraging their development through music education and talent development programs. Included in these are songwriting workshops, grants, scholarships, awards, recognition and community outreach programs, and public service projects for senior composers and lyricists. The ASCAP Foundation is supported by contributions from ASCAP members and from music lovers throughout the United States. Visit www.ascapfoundation.org for more information. |
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Sunday December 3, 2006 |
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What's scariest at Universal? The slow decay...Why leave
Disney property? Disney-approved divas Don't let Disney dominate trip to Orlando Disney uses Hispanic marketing agency to promote 'Apocalypto' Warner/Chappell Music, Disney Music extend sub-publishing agreement Disney Women: Hot or Not? Musical craze hits stage Xbox 360: Disney/Pixar's Cars Review Disney tries out new talent in an old form, the cartoon short Performing LIVE at Disney Grad Nite 2007 |
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What's scariest at Universal? The slow decay...Why leave
Disney property? Orlando Sentinel - Jaws has lunged out of the water yet again here at Universal Studios. Alas, I am not terrified. Poor old guy. Maybe it's just because I'm old, too. But his skin looks worn. Teeth that had been white daggers of death now appear decayed with gingivitis. Jaws is a Walter Brennan shark these days, impotently yelling at the tourists to stay out of his front yard. Meanwhile, over at Back to the Future, more tourists bounce around in aging DeLoreans, chasing Biff around on a screen that has what looks like holes in it. This is sad indeed. The once mighty Universal Studios, the park that put Disney-MGM Studios to shame, is being neglected to death. It not only has fallen far behind Disney's movie park, it has slipped to second-tier status among all the major parks. I fear it is only a matter of time before neighboring Islands of Adventure is dragged down with it. My purpose here is not to denigrate Universal. I have long trumpeted these parks. This column is intended as a wake-up call to save them from becoming Six Flags over Orlando. Universal has had too many owners, none of them committed to the theme-park business. And so it seems there has been no long-term strategic planning, no continuing investment in upgrades. Consider these movies on which rides are based: Earthquake came out in 1974 and Jaws in 1975. Back to the Future, which featured Michael J. Fox as a teenager, came out 20 years ago. Terminator 2 came out 15 years ago. This is your dad's theme park. Once, its rides were top-of-the-line. But now when you go in Twister, the cables that swing a cow through the air are painfully visible. It looks like an Ed Wood production. The only major ride Universal has opened in five years is the Revenge of the Mummy roller coaster. The big new show, Fear Factor Live, is based on a television series slipping into the abyss of ratings. It is no surprise that attendance has been steadily declining since 2004, despite numerous ticket discounts. Meanwhile, down I-4, Disney is decked out in all its Christmas splendor with new attractions galore. The Osborne Family's Spectacle of Lights at MGM-Studios is stunning. The Fantasmic show is the best I've ever seen. The Lights, Motors, Action! Extreme Stunt Show is a blast. A new production at Animal Kingdom, Finding Nemo -- The Musical, is ingenious. It is Broadway quality. This follows the addition of a top-notch new coaster, Expedition Everest. After adding the popular Soarin' ride at Epcot, Disney followed with a Nemo ride for the kiddies. Combined with all this new stuff are multiday passes that basically give tourists free admission after four days so they can see it all. Why leave Disney property? Disney is out to bury Universal, and Universal is not fighting back. Universal can surrender, put in a Publix at CityWalk and convert its parks to a new urbanism, condo/roller coaster mixed-use development. Or it can overhaul the Studios park and upgrade Islands of Adventure, bringing both up to 2006 standards. Cutting back and extracting more profits is not a viable long-term strategy, not when there is a Mouse nearby that is much scarier than any shark. |
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Fort Wayne
Journal Gazette, IN - Even over the
phone, it was obvious that the Cheetah Girl was
wincing.
“I’m sorry, I know we’re supposed to do this interview right now,” Kiely Williams said, “but I’m getting my hair done, and it hurts. It really, really hurts. I’m hurting. Can we do this another time?” Well, at least that saves us the trouble of trying to conjure some new metaphor to describe the painful process of creating pop stars. Williams is a 20-year-old member of the Cheetah Girls, which to a grumpy cynic might appear to be a hybrid of the Spice Girls and some perky new advertising campaign for Cheetos. Dismiss them if you will, but the Cheetahs are part of the big surprise in pop music in 2006 – the Disney factor. The soundtrack to “The Cheetah Girls 2,” a Disney Channel made-for-TV movie, debuted in the Top 10 on U.S. pop charts this summer and has sold 459,000 copies. That makes it a sister success to the best-selling album of the year, “High School Musical,” which has become something akin to “Grease” for the middle-school set. And the group released the soundtrack to the TV show “Hannah Montana” Oct. 24. “It’s been amazing, there are so many exciting things going on,” Williams said of the Year of the Mouse in music. It was a week after the hair-pulling and she was on a tour bus in Northern California, hanging out with her fellow Cheetahs, 22-year-old Sabrina Bryan and 23-year-old Adrienne Bailon, wending their way toward a stop at the Gibson Amphitheatre in L.A. a few days later. The giggly trio passed the cell phone around and talked about themselves and their fans in the sort of language you usually find on back pages of yearbooks. “The shows are getting better every night, and for a lot of these fans, these shows are probably their first concerts,” Bryan said. “That’s a great feeling for us.” The Cheetah Girls franchise began with a series of books written for girls by Deborah Gregory. That spawned a 2003 made-for-TV movie on the Disney Channel and then the sequel this year, which took the characters to Spain for a talent competition. The general plot premise: An ethnically diverse group of young women aspire to music stardom and learn life and love lessons along the way. Their concerts are a mix of pre-recorded skits, scripted dialogue and a loose plot line that makes the event feel like a taping of the old “Donny & Marie” show or, come to think of it, a highly polished high school musical. On the concert stage, there are three girls, but in their movies, Raven-Symone, another franchise player for Disney Channel as the star of “She’s So Raven,” is a sometime member of the Cheetahs. It’s sort of like Neil Young with Crosby, Stills & Nash, except totally different. Disney is not new to this business of minting young female stars with crossover appeal. There was Hilary not too long ago, Britney and Christina before that, and in those early days of television, Annette Funicello. The multicultural Cheetahs’ style is a new-look version of the animal prints favored by Josie & the Pussycats, and there’s a dash of Bratz, the dolls that give bling and urban attitude to the toy shelves that once belonged to Barbie. Musically, their songs sound a little like Madonna here or a lot like TLC there, but the lyrics are all Disney-approved messages of self-esteem, perseverance and diversity celebration. Backup singers are hunky but polite. “I think girls like us because we’re different – you know, our backgrounds, our cultures, the texture of our hair, the things we like – and that’s like them and their friends,” Williams said. “That’s the way it is today, and they like seeing that in us.” It’s easy to mock any music scene that appeals to the very young, but in 2006, it would be foolish to dismiss any of these performers. Critics are hailing Justin Timberlake’s new album, and let’s not forget that he once wore the Mickey Mouse ears, too. There was even a history lesson at the Gibson Amphitheatre show; toward the end of the Cheetah Girls set, they brought up on stage Mylie Cyrus – the “Hannah Montana” star who happens to be the teen daughter of “Achy Breaky Heart” singer (and “Hanna” costar) Billy Ray Cyrus – to join in a rendition of the Cyndi Lauper hit “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.” Throughout the audience, the youngest fans looked up in surprise as their suddenly revived parents joined in the chorus. You could read the question in their expressions: How do you know this song? |
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Don't let Disney dominate trip to Orlando
The Wichita Eagle - The public image cultivated by Walt Disney World in Orlando, Fla., is one of benevolence, sweetness and light. In fact, the Disney organization is a fierce business competitor determined to keep you within its own theme parks for every day of your Orlando stay, even if you come to town for a weeklong stay. In the 1980s, when Universal Studios announced construction of a theme park of motion-picture attractions ("Ride the Movies"), Disney rushed its own MGM Studios park to completion. In the late 1990s, when nearby Busch Gardens enhanced its animal attractions with "Edge of Africa," Disney rushed to create its zoological park Animal Kingdom. Even the U.S. government isn't safe -- Disney's multimillion- dollar Mission Space astronaut ride at Epcot is a direct threat to the simulators that draw tourists to nearby Kennedy Space Center. Most recently, in 2005, Disney's Magic Your Way ticket pricing lowered the per-day cost for people who spend several consecutive days at its theme parks ("pay less per day the longer you stay"). Never mind that the vast majority of visitors are satisfied to visit Disney for only a few days. Whereas families spending a week in Orlando used to visit Disney on days one to three, and then devoted days four to six to Orlando's other noteworthy entertainments, they now are being enticed into lingering on Disney property by the considerable economy of lower ticket prices for longer stays. I'm unhappy about that. Although Walt Disney World is a remarkable achievement in tourism, it would be a terrible mistake to spend your entire Orlando vacation on Disney property. Orlando hosts seven of the nation's 10 most popular theme parks, and three of them -- Sea World, Universal Studios and the stunning Islands of Adventure -- are not Disney properties. Neither is the stirring Kennedy Space Center, where you can see an actual space shuttle being readied for a launch. If you refuse to leave Disney's campus, you're missing a lot. Just recently, Universal has struck back by offering a price of $85 (including tax) on the Internet for the right to spend all week at the Universal theme parks in Orlando (that compares with a price of $67 for single-day admissions to the Disney properties). And this coming June, Universal will add a permanent production of "Blue Man Group" to entice guests to stick around well into the night. Moreover, the four non-Disney theme parks currently offer an Orlando FlexTicket for about $190, which gives unlimited entrance for up to two weeks to Universal Studios, Islands of Adventure, Sea World Orlando and the Wet 'n' Wild water-slide park. The FlexTicket can be bought in any of the four parks. What's a good overall strategy? In my opinion, most people will be more than satisfied with a schedule that calls for one Disney park per day for a total of two or three days. Disney's MGM Studios (which is neither a working studio anymore, nor has much to do with MGM) is probably the most skippable of the Disney holdings, with Animal Kingdom a close second. Don't let Disney pricing lure you into staying a minute longer than you really need to. After all, the few dollars you "save" in buying a multiday or weeklong ticket will surely be spent on the overpriced food and souvenirs you buy on those extra days spent at Disney. And your Orlando experience will be all the richer if you allow yourself time to experience its many flavors -- as well as the fun of Busch Gardens in Tampa, only a 90-minute drive away. |
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Disney uses Hispanic marketing agency to promote 'Apocalypto'
Allentown Morning Call, PA - To cultivate awareness for ''Apocalypto'' in the Hispanic community, Disney has relied on the Arenas Group, headed by Santiago Pozo. The Beverly Hills-based company is one of the oldest Hispanic marketing agencies in entertainment; clients have included Disney and ABC Entertainment, Universal, PBS and DreamWorks. Arenas has had a long-standing relationship with Disney, working on 10 pictures a year, many of them family films. Disney, like all major studios, has come to recognize the moviegoing habits of Hispanic audiences and fully integrates them into their marketing efforts. On some films, Hispanics represent as much as 40 percent of the moviegoing public, industry sources say. It was Arenas, sources say, that reached out to Los Angeles' Latin Business Association, whose chairman, Rick Sarmiento, came away so impressed after seeing ''Apocalypto'' that he persuaded his board to confer the Chairman's Visionary Award on ''Apocalypto'' filmmaker Mel Gibson at the group's Latino Global Business Conference and Digital Expo at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Beverly Hills. Gibson appeared at the Nov. 2 luncheon to accept the award and, after a Q&A session with Sarmiento before the luncheon crowd, screened about 10 minutes of his film to resounding applause. Don Martinez, a founder and board member of the LBA and a senior marketing partner at the Domar Group, an executive-search company focusing on bilingual and multicultural hiring, was among those in the audience who came away impressed and believing that the Hispanic community would embrace it. ''Just looking at brief parts of the film, I will tell you, it gave me goose bumps,'' he said. As for Gibson's anti-Semitic tirade, he added: ''I look at it this way. He's a human being just like you and me. Regardless of what happened, we need to move on. … People do make mistakes. He screwed up. So what? Move on. This is an opportunity to move forward.'' Jorge Corralejo, a fellow LBA board member, has not seen the film but noted that despite Gibson's efforts most in the Hispanic community are unaware of it. ''I can't tell you anybody who knows anything about it,'' he said. ''It's going to be a tough sell. It takes money to spread the word.'' |
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Warner/Chappell Music, Disney Music extend
sub-publishing agreement
Phoenix Business Journal, AZ - Warner/Chappell Music Inc. has extended its sub-publishing agreement with Disney Music Publishing across most major markets in Europe and South America, the company said Monday. Warner/Chappell will continue to administer the rights to more than 10,000 titles in the Disney music catalog, along with the company's future film and television releases. The agreement includes all classic and contemporary Disney compositions originating within the Walt Disney Co.'s business units including animated feature films, live action feature films, animated and live action television, Walt Disney Records, The Disney Channel, theme parks, and various Disney-related ventures. Terms of the agreement were not disclosed. Warner/Chappell is the publishing arm of New York-based Warner Music Group Corp. (NYSE: WMG). Disney Music Publishing is part of the Buena Vista Music Group, the recorded music and music publishing arm of the Burbank-based Walt Disney Co. (NYSE: DIS). |
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Disney Women: Hot
or Not?
Cinematical, CA - Okay, so it might be a bit creepy for an adult to admit that an animated character is hot, but come on, Jessica Rabbit wasn't really bad, she was just drawn that way, right? Animated characters have been sexualized since the early days of the genre because sex sold just as well back then as it does today. It's pretty evident when you check out all of Disney's animated leading ladies that they've been drawn to look appealing to the eye, going back as far as Snow White and Tinkerbell. (An interesting side note here, according to this interview with Margaret Kerry, who was the character model for Tinkerbell, she claims that her real name is Tinker Bell, two words, although Disney officially has it as one. Her interview is pretty fascinating, check it out.) The Being a Man Spot over at fanpop has a list of Disney's top ten hottest women, and there are no real surprises on the list. What's notable are the omissions like Jessie from Toy Story 2 who was both sassy and smart, and Daisy Duck, who sort of falls into the creepy Wayne's World category of Bugs Bunny in a dress being attractive. Daisy had a fair amount of sass as well, and she didn't take Donald's nonsense either. That has to count for something, because she definitely wore the pants in that pants-less relationship. The real question is, what effect does the traditional Disney female image have on young kids? Not everyone is a fan of the oversexed and vivacious look that runs rampant in the Disney-verse, arguing that it gives little girls an image to live up to that is far from what a normal person looks like, and that is sets a very limiting stereotype of what a heroine can look like. Barbie has faced the same sort of criticisms, especially during the whole "Math is hard!" fiasco, yet both Barbie and the Disney women are still created to look like pinup girls. Is this a good thing, or a bad thing? What do you think, Cinemites? |
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Musical craze hits
stage
Edmonton Sun, Canada - The parents milling around backstage are about the only thing in Disney's new $8.5-million High School Musical stage spectacular tour that look anything like - well, high school. Engineered by veterans of Rolling Stones tours and tricked out with intricate choreography, confetti drops and a giant backdrop screen for heartthrob close-ups, the concert was designed to wow the "tween" fans who made the TV movie a nationwide hit faster than Paris Hilton can say "hot." The snappy 90-minute stage performance zips along untethered from the plot of the movie, a love story between a basketball jock and an academic decathlon nerd who upset their school's social order by auditioning for lead roles in a musical. Instead, the concert features the six stars as celebrities, rather than in their character roles, and showcases hits from the movie soundtrack. Lucas Grabeel, one of the movie's main characters, emcees the proceedings, giving frequent shout-outs to the audience and stringing together set pieces with good-natured onstage banter. Three cast members with newly released or forthcoming solo albums - Vanessa Hudgens, Ashley Tisdale and Corbin Bleu - do solo sets. The only cast member missing the concert tour is Zac Efron, who played the male lead in the movie. He is working on the movie version of the musical Hairspray. Drew Seeley, who sang on the High School Musical soundtrack and co-wrote one of its songs, is touring in Efron's place. Nine trucks, 10 buses and about 90 crew members will accompany the six performers on the 40-city arena tour, which began in San Diego a few days ago and wraps up in Las Vegas on Jan. 28. It's a professional schedule for a cast that is mostly new to the rigours of the road, though the stars are all professional actors, some with serious tween bona fides. Tisdale, who played comically evil drama queen Sharpay, is well known to fans of the popular Disney Channel sitcom The Suite Life of Zack and Cody. "I'm freaking out!" exclaimed Coleman as she bopped around backstage in San Diego before the show's last dry run. At 26, Coleman - who parlayed her popularity into a stint on ABC's Dancing With the Stars - is the oldest of the group. Minutes later, she was twirling across the stage in a pair of sparkling high heels she called "blinged out." The star of the concert is 17-year-old Hudgens, the Posh Spice lookalike who played Gabriella, the "brainiac" in the movie. Along with reprising duets from the soundtrack, Hudgens slinks through three songs from her new pop album. The tour follows Disney's success with another concert series based on its TV musical The Cheetah Girls, which laid the groundwork for the success of High School Musical. Cheetah Girls director Kenny Ortega, a veteran choreographer who worked on Dirty Dancing and Ferris Bueller's Day Off, created and directed High School Musical. He said the stage show was a natural extension for a pop phenomenon. "We all have other projects we could be doing, but we wanted to get out there and do this for all the fans." The movie drew nearly eight million viewers in its first outing on the Disney Channel last January, making it the top-rated basic-cable TV show that week. Since then, Disney estimates nearly 60 million people have seen the movie. What started as a bubble- gum TV movie has spawned a sing-along karaoke version, a triple-platinum album, cellphone ring tones, a novel and, yes, countless real high school musicals. It has not been released in theatre. A sequel is set to begin production early next year. Ortega won an Emmy for choreography on the movie, while the soundtrack was nominated for an American Music Award. According to Disney, the soundtrack is on track to be the year's top-selling album. "If you'd told me a year ago I'd be here, I'd have laughed," said Ortega. "We went into this just to make a little $4.5-million movie. "All this is extra." High School Musical has only one Canadian stop planned so far: Jan. 2 in Toronto. |
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Xbox
360: Disney/Pixar's Cars Review
Video Game Generation, NC - It took awhile, but finally the game based on the movie Cars has arrived on Xbox 360. Featuring enhanced graphics and exclusive content it’s certainly better than what came before it, but the $20 higher MSRP over last-gen versions and late arrival make it a tough sell. As with most other versions of the game, Cars’ Story Mode takes place in the open-ended world of Radiator Springs. Taking place after the events in the movie, Story Mode is basically a series of individual events strung together with cut-scenes between them. Players can explore the town and Ornament Valley to their heart’s content, collecting Bolt icons for bonus points and visiting various hot spots to trigger events. The world is surprisingly large for a children’s game (although nowhere near the size of a proper sandbox title like Gun), full of various cliffs, side roads, and other landmarks to make exploration interesting for younger children. Events are divided up into three different types: Road Races, Piston Cup Races, and Mini-Games. Road Races make up the bulk of the game, as players will compete in over 20 different ones while advancing the game’s plotline in the process. Piston Cup Races are basically NASCAR-lite, with all other mechanics removed allowing the player to focus on simply going as quickly as possible around each speedway. Finally, Mini-Games feature a nice variety of entertaining games based on events in the movie, such as Tractor Tipping with Mater (blow Mater’s horn at tractors while avoiding Frank and other obstacles) and chasing down speeders as Sheriff. As you’d imagine from a kid’s game, the actual race mechanics are fairly simple. While vehicles can leap, use boosts, and perform power slides, the first two are rarely needed to win any given race. That’s because the A.I. rubber bands to an absurd degree, making it nearly impossible to lose until close to the end of the Story Mode. Should you happen to fall behind, the other drivers will virtually stop and wait for you to catch up. And once you get ahead, they generally keep things fairly close until they all mysteriously fall back quickly on the last lap. The effect is somewhat reversed during the Piston Cup Races however, as the rubber band A.I. actually serves to keep each race closer than it should be. On the whole though, this has the net effect of making the game a little too easy, even for the audience it’s aimed at. As far as extras are concerned, collecting bonus points (both from icons scattered around Radiator Springs and points earned for doing well in a race) opens up a surprisingly large amount of unlockable items. These include new vehicles, concept art, alternate paint jobs, and even scenes from the movie. Two players can also race against each other in the versus mode split-screen, which is a little lacking given that most racing games support up to four split-screen and some form of online play. There’s also an Arcade mode, where anything unlocked in Story Mode (as well as other bonus games) can be played at any time. Graphically, Cars looks nice with well-animated characters, an interesting game world, and plenty of vibrant colors despite the desert setting. It may be a bit too vivid for crabby old adults, but children will no doubt enjoy the game’s look as they did the movie’s. Unfortunately there are a number of minor glitches, such as the car getting stuck on various objects and unintentionally driving on two wheels after not quite flipping over on a steep hill or large boulder. There’s also a lot of scenery pop-up at a pretty close distance, which is especially distracting during the race sequences. Given that this game is based on a Pixar movie, naturally both the soundtrack and voice acting are very nice. The soundtrack features a number of classic driving and pop tunes, including “Rock This Town” by the Stray Cats, “Free Ride” by The Edgar Winter Group, and features several other well-known artists such as Los Lobos, Lynryd Skynyrd, etc. The voice actors are also an accomplished bunch, including George Carlin, Owen Wilson, Larry the Cable Guy, Pixar veteran John Ratzenberger, Paul Newman, and the rest of a rather large cast that’s just as eclectic as that mix. Fortunately they didn’t treat this product lightly, almost universally pulling off their characters with the same spirit and gusto as the film itself. Unfortunately however, the Piston Cup Races are marred by a repetitive announcer that doesn’t even get all of the calls right (ex: saying I had lost a spot when there wasn’t anyone even around me) as he’s repeating the same few sentences over and over again. Bottom Line: If you have a young one that’s still a Cars fan, and you haven’t picked up another version of the game for him or her yet (with the possible exception of the ultra-simple PC version), then this makes a decent purchase when looked at on its own. However, unless your only console is an Xbox 360, you’ll most likely find that one of the numerous last-gen versions is a much better value. |
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Disney tries out new talent in an old form, the
cartoon short
International Herald Tribune - Moviegoers who have become inured to ads and trivia quizzes before the film may soon be getting something that's old enough to seem new: cartoon shorts. After a hiatus of nearly 50 years, Walt Disney Studios is getting back into the business of producing short cartoons, starting with a Goofy vehicle next year. The studio has released a few shorts in recent years, but they were more artistic exercises than commercial endeavors. The new cartoons, by contrast, spring from an effort by a new leadership team at Pixar Animation Studios, now a Disney unit, to put the company back at the forefront of animation, with a form that it pioneered. "The impetus comes from John Lasseter, who takes the idea from Walt Disney and 100 years of film history," said Don Hahn, producer of "The Lion King" and "The Little Match Girl," during a recent interview in his studio office. "Shorts have always been a wellspring of techniques, ideas and young talent. It's exactly what Walt did, because it's a new studio now, with new talent coming up - as it should. I think the shorts program can really grow this studio as it grew Pixar, as it grew Walt's studio." Although audiences today are more familiar with his feature films, Walt Disney's reputation was originally built on shorts. In the 1930s, "A Mickey Mouse Cartoon" appeared on theater marquees with the titles of the features, and Disney won 10 Oscars for cartoon shorts from 1932 to 1942. He used the "Silly Symphonies" to train his artists as they geared up to create "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs." But after World War II, Disney phased out short cartoons because of rising production costs and minimal revenue. Hahn said the new shorts would be screened in theaters along with Disney films. "You pay your 10 bucks to see a movie," he said, "and you get a surprise you hadn't counted on." The new shorts will be done in traditional two-dimensional animation, computer graphics or a combination of the two media, depending on the story and the visual style. This is not the first attempt at such a revival. Warner Brothers tried to bring back the classic Looney Tunes characters in new shorts in 2003, but they proved unsuccessful, and most of them were never screened theatrically. Chuck Williams, a veteran story artist who will produce the new films for Disney, said they did not have to become a profit center to perform a real commercial function. "They allow you to develop new talent," Williams said in an interview at the Disney studios. "Shorts are your farm team, where the new directors and art directors are going to come from. Instead of taking a chance on an $80 million feature with a first-time director, art director or head of story, you can spend a fraction of that on a short and see what they can do." It is not surprising that Lasseter is using short films to train and test artists. He and his fellow Pixar animators spent almost 10 years making shorts, learning how to use computer graphics effectively before they made "Toy Story" and the hits that followed. Pixar continues to produce a cartoon short every year, and it has won Oscars for the shorts "Tin Toy," "Geri's Game" and "For the Birds." With "How to Install Your Home Theater," the return of Goofy's popular "How to" shorts of the 1940s and 1950s, a deadpan narrator explains how to play a sport or execute a task, while Goofy attempts to demonstrate - with disastrous results. The new Goofy short is slated to go into production early next year. Over the years the studio has tried unsuccessfully to update the classic characters. Deters and his female co-director, Stevie Wermers, for instance, unhappily recalled "Disco Mickey," the 1979 album that suggested the trademark mouse could boogie like John Travolta. The cover featured Mickey in a white suit and open shirt, swinging his hips. Disney also intends the new talent to reflect an increasingly diverse work force. For most of its 100-year history, American animation has been the creation of male artists. But that situation, too, is changing. |
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Performing LIVE at Disney Grad Nite 2007
Disney World News - Until the clock strikes 4 a.m., Disney Grad Nite supercharges two fun-filled spring weekends with wall-to-wall surprises, attractions and exciting live entertainment... all packaged only for high school grads. This year's Disney Grad Nite offers a once-in-a-lifetime celebration full of top-name musical performers, thrilling Theme Park attractions, Themed DJ Dance Parties and more! And don't forget to kick off Disney Grad Nite right by adding a Blast-Off Party to your schedule. It's easy for your senior class advisor to plan a trip. See Next Steps or call 1-877-939-6884 to speak with a Disney Representative for details on arranging your graduating class' big night. Students must wear proper attire, and your group must be accompanied by at least one chaperone. Book today! Admission is limited and available on a first-come, first-served basis. Disney Grad Nite 2007 promises to be the biggest and best celebration yet! On April 20 & 21 and April 27 & 28, 2007 your high school senior class can gather for an exclusive, all-night party at Magic Kingdom Park. Once our gates open, seniors have exclusive use of the Magic Kingdom Park, tricked out just the way they like it. They will get to enjoy:
Walt Disney World Resort is the perfect location for your senior class trip: there's more to do in one place than anywhere else! Planning your visit around Disney Grad Nite makes the trip even more memorable. A variety of Ticket Packages are available to maximize your fun. Specially priced Theme Park, recreation, meal and accommodation options are available. Blast Off to Graduation Excitement Add a Blast-Off Party to your schedule and kick off Disney Grad Nite 2007 right. Choose from these locations: "Party on the Wild Side" Blast-Off Party
Magic Kingdom Blast-Off Party Event Components and Entertainment Subject to Change without Notice. |
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| Back News |
The
new attraction, which utilizes parts from Hasbro's
customizable lightsaber toys, follows two other
Hasbro-sponsored attractions recently installed in the
park, the Build Your Own Potato Head and Create Your Own
My Little Pony Playset. "The guests love it because it
gives them the opportunity to create a completely
customized toy," says Disney Theme Park Toy Developer
Brad Schoeneberg. "The opportunity to Build Your Own
Lightsaber and complete your training as a 'Jedi' or 'Sith'
is definitely a dream come true for children of all
ages." Making dreams come true is the order of business
for Disney's "Year of a Million Dreams" campaign
currently underway at Disney Theme Parks. 
"Guests
can 'Choose Their Own Destiny' by deciding to build a
custom lightsaber for the Jedi or the Sith. They will
choose from a variety of parts to create their own
custom saber or they can create one that is similar to
the saber of one of their favorite Star Wars
characters. The saber is electronic, with authentic
saber light, sounds and vibrations. Upon completion of
the saber the guest will tell the Disney Cast Member at
the register whether they created a 'good' or 'bad'
saber. Based on this distinction, the Disney cast member
will give them the Jedi or Sith pin."
Today,
everyone's a pirate as the world celebrates
International "Talk Like a Pirate Day," and to kick off
the rabble rousing, Disney Home Entertainment announces
the highly anticipated DVD release of Pirates Of The
Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest. The action-packed worldwide
film sensation will make its Disney DVD debut on
December 5th. Starring Johnny Depp as that mischievous,
heroic rogue Captain Jack Sparrow, this epic adventure
has taken audiences by storm. The film's Theatrical
opening weekend was the biggest in U.S. boxoffice
history, and the high-seas Hollywood tidal wave
continues with a worldwide box-office gross of over a
billion dollars to date, making it Disney's most
successful movie of all time. 
DISNEY
PRINCESS EDITION 
DISNEY
DOGS EDITION 
All
new to Disney DVD, The Cheetah Girls are back in the
hugely successful Disney Channel Original Movie, The
Cheetah Girls 2, available on November 28. The Cheetah-licious
Edition DVD is packed with exclusive bonus features
including 2 versions of the movie – the
never-before-seen extended version with an exclusive
song and the sing along version where fans can sing
along with on-screen lyrics. It also includes Cheetah
Tips where the girls provide tips on how to be "cheetah-licious"
and the Music Video "Dance With Me" featuring Mexican
recording artist and co-star of "The Cheetah Girls,"
Belinda Peregrin and Drew Seeley. 
Amidst
a flurry of streamers and basketballs, and backed by
hundreds of marching band members and cheerleaders,
four members of the "High School Musical" cast (L-R):
Lucas Grabeel, Corbin Bleu, Monique Coleman and Ashley
Tisdale, perform Dec. 2, 2006 on Main Street U.S.A. at
the Magic Kingdom in Lake Buena Vista, Fla. The
quartet was taping a segment for the "Walt Disney
World Christmas Day Parade," scheduled to air Dec. 25,
2006.