"This drawing says 'Walt Disney' to anyone who knows what they're looking at," said Stein.

Stein says he bought what he believes is Walt Disney's prototype drawing of Mickey Mouse at a thrift store in New York City in 1984.

"I paid the man the $3 that he wanted for it and I walked away with a treasure," said Stein.

Experts in paper, ink and handwriting have convinced Stein he has a Walt Disney drawing from the late 1920's.

"This handwriting has been determined by Charles Hamilton who was the foremost handwriting expert at the time to be the handwriting of Walt Disney," said Stein.

But Stein says the Walt Disney Company still refuses to authenticate this drawing, so he continues to look for additional proof. He's trying to find a film clip shown on the MGM theme park opening or the Minnie Mouse special in 1989.

"The film clip shows Walt Disney doing this piece of art. I will offer $1-million reward for that film clip if we sell it for $10-million or more," said Stein.

A written response from a Disney attorney says Stein's contention that the drawing appeared on an easel next to Walt Disney in a Disney television show has previously been investigated and rejected.

But Stein's not giving up and says he'll sue the Walt Disney Company, if necessary.

"If they can bring evidence to court that proved it's not, fine let them do that. They can't, because it is," said Stein.

Stein says he'll continue to preserve his drawing of America's most famous mouse, until he has proof beyond any doubt.

The Scottsdale, Ariz.-based home builder has launched an online contest that runs through Aug. 20 with the winner able to choose a home in one of Taylor Morrison's communities in Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Nevada and Texas. The home will include a custom technology package and furnishings. A vacation for four to the Disneyland Resort in California also is part of the package.

Participants can visit the entry Web site, www.tmdreamhomegiveaway.com, once a day to register. They also may visit any Taylor Morrison community and receive a special code that offers the maximum number of chances available to enter the contest.

The Innoventions Dream Home debuted June 16 and features what Walt Disney Co. calls a "high-tech, high-touch" experience within a 5,000-square-foot home. Microsoft, Hewlett Packard, Life|ware and Taylor Morrison were also involved in the Dream Home project.

Airline customers have been complaining about service and United Airlines has turned to the folks at Disney, hoping a little customer service magic might rub off.

The artists behind the animated adventure needed to know how society deals with trash. That's because of the film's premise: what if the human race had to leave planet Earth and somebody forgot to turn off the last robot?

The robot in question is the diminutive but dutiful WALL-E (a.k.a. Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class) who has spent several centuries doing what he was built to do - collecting and compacting rubbish from a planet so overwhelmed by trash that the humans responsible for it finally had to flee.

Animators wanted to be authentic in those scenes where Wall-E rumbles through garbage dumps, loading refuse onto his shovel and then reducing it to neat compressed blocks.

"So we actually went to real recycling centers to see how they condensed trash and put it all together," director Andrew Stanton explains. "One of the fascinating things to us was that there already was a manner in which things were cubed and stacked that exactly matched what we wanted to do in the film for aesthetic reasons. So that worked in our favor."

It's taken more than a decade for the idea behind WALL-E to hatch, and when the film finally received the green light, Stanton and his colleagues at Disney's Pixar Animation Studios had no idea that it would emerge as an environmental story with a built-in appeal for the green movement.

"When you plan something early on, you don't have a crystal ball telling you what's going to be the current of the time five, six, seven years out," Stanton said during a visit to Toronto. "I was just going for what naturally made sense with the storyline I was doing. I wanted things that were 'gettable' visually - things that would make sense to an audience without explanation, even to a kid. The fact that trash is everywhere is an easy thing to visualize - as it is to show that it needs correction."

But at the very beginning, back in 1994, when Stanton and his screenwriting buddies got together for an idea session, he wasn't sure whether they had anything more than an interesting concept.

"We had the character and the initial situation - that this working robot's been left on earth - and that's where it stopped. I didn't know where that was going, I didn't know what it was about. I just knew this was the loneliest character situation I could ever encounter."

Those were the early days of Pixar animation. Disney had yet to release the company's first computerized creation, Toy Story, a film which was to revolutionize animation technology, but its youthful gung-ho artists were already overflowing with further ideas.

They had met to discuss future Pixar projects like A Bug's Life, Finding Nemo and Monsters Inc. But there was also this mere germ of an idea about the last functioning robot on earth.

"In that same early time that we came up with that situation, we also said, 'Wouldn't it be cool if it was sort of like R2-D2 (from the Star Wars films), that it spoke with the integrity of the way it was built?

"And immediately we thought, 'Nobody will ever let us do a film like that.'

"We were just young guys who at the time were still figuring out how to do Toy Story. So we sort of put it on the mental shelf and went off to do all those other films everybody else knows - which pretty much took all our time for 10 years."

It wasn't until Stanton was immersed in his first directing assignment, Finding Nemo, that he started thinking about the robot idea again.

"Now that I had a couple of films under my belt and was a better writer, I was more fascinated with the challenge of what a movie like that would be like. So I really got serious about it in 2003, and I started to flesh out what you guys now know as WALL-E."

The movie introduces audiences to the solitary existence of WALL-E whose only stimulus outside of rubbish disposal comes from the pet cockroach who is his sole companion, a collection of discarded knick-knacks he's set aside and an ancient video player with fascinates WALL-E with its flickering images of scenes from an ancient movie version of Hello Dolly. But then his life changes when a sleek and attractive research robot named EVE (Extra-terrestrial Vegetation Evaluator) is dispatched back to earth by the exiled human race and discovers that WALL-E has inadvertently discovered the possible key to a blighted planet's return to health. WALL-E finds himself smitten with EVE and he follows her when she races back through the galaxy to a luxury space ship and the humans who await her findings.

The boyish, bearded and bespectacled Stanton says that, among other things, WALL-E is also a love story, although he concedes with a grin that he doesn't really think that robots are capable of emotion.

"I think it's unique to this movie frankly. It's very much of an animator's sensibility to want to give life to inanimate objects, which is pretty much the definition of an animator."

Animators also revel in challenges - and giving life and personality to a robot was a major task.

"It was so invigorating to play in such a subtle pool and to have everything so minute that when you did something as simple as a tilt of a head or a movement of the iris, it meant a lot and was the equivalent of doing huge broad action."

Much of WALL-E unfolds like a silent move with music and sound effects.

WALL-E communicates through squeaks, rattles and various other "robot" noises - his "voice" is the creation of Oscar-winning sound designer Ben Burtt, the artist who was also behind the voice of R2-D2.

"I wanted you to be as charmed as you could be with WALL-E, so that the more you believed there was this three-dimensional box sitting there, rusting in the dust, the more charming it would be when it came to life," Stanton says.

On calls with analysts and at investor conferences since November, Chief Executive Bob Iger and Chief Financial Officer Tom Staggs have argued that the second-largest U.S. entertainment company should be viewed as a stable global brand rather than a cyclical, hit-driven media business.

"I think we should be considered differently from our peers ... hopefully that translates into value as well," Iger said on Tuesday at the opening of the Toy Story Mania ride at Disney's California Adventure theme park in Anaheim, California.

Disney executives have been touting "the Disney Difference" -- the company's growing stable of characters, its ability to apply them to all its businesses and its growing global reach -- as elements that set the company apart from media rivals.

But some analysts, including David Bank of RBC Capital Markets, say as long as Disney derives so much of its revenue from movies, TV and theme parks -- 93 percent in 2007 -- it will be valued as a media brand, especially in a down economy.

"There is no way to get around the reality that Disney is a hit-driven business," Bank said, though he accepted that "a leverable brand does tend to get a premium" valuation.

At a multiple of 13.4 times estimated 2009 earnings, Disney shares trade above big names like Viacom Inc, at 10.6, and Time Warner Inc, at 12.2. But its price-earnings ratio lags consumer companies with similar brand power, including Coca-Cola Co at 15.7 times 2009 earnings, Nike Inc at 17.1, and Procter & Gamble Co at 16.7.

Disney's share price, having climbed out of a trough around $23 shortly after Iger took over, has languished in the mid-$30 range for more than a year despite three years of double-digit earnings growth and $16 billion in share buybacks. Yet analysts who follow Disney have a median price target of $40.

IT'S THE ECONOMY...

"I think the reason its (P/E ratio) is somewhat depressed is not because Disney is not a 'best of breed' brand -- it is concerns over the macroeconomy," Bank said.

To get the same treatment as a global consumer brand like Nike, Disney needs a larger overseas presence, Susquehanna Financial Group analyst John Shanley said. Nike earns about 62 percent of its revenue abroad versus 20 percent for Disney, insulating Nike against sales and fashion cycles, he said.

"As Nike grows internationally, that seasonality becomes less of a factor," said Shanley, a senior athletic and footwear industry analyst. "There is much more cyclicality in footwear than you are going to find in the Walt Disney business."

Iger and Staggs have argued that no other U.S. media brand can sell products around the world like Disney.

"We really have the most valuable brand in global family entertainment and in much of the space that we occupy, (we are) the only real brand that matters," Iger said.

The executives say they have cushioned businesses against economic swings: by introducing moderately priced vacation packages and hotel rooms at its parks, testing online ad sales and distribution to hedge against weak TV ratings, and cutting movie output to focus on Disney-branded family fare that can sell across all its units.

Crowell, Weedon & Co partner Douglas Christopher agreed that Disney's global brand equity is "great" but cautioned "you can't just take a brand like that and go into every market."

Disney would have a hard time equating itself with consumer staples like Coca-Cola or Procter & Gamble because of its past initial difficulties in international markets, as well as the nature and pricing of its products.

"When you are talking about purchases of $5 or less -- staples -- you can make that argument better, which is why you see Procter & Gamble trading at the high end of the range of (P/E) multiples," Christopher said.

Investors should instead reward Disney for its stable free cash flow and for fixing operational problems from the 1990s, as well as acknowledge its U.S. real estate assets.

"They have been delivering and the stock is the same price," Christopher said. "This is a company that is being valued as a sleepy old industrial company."

An increase in Disney's annual dividend, whose return is less than half that of Coke and P&G, could also make "a lot of friends" in the investment community, Christopher said.

Tuna Amobi, senior media and entertainment analyst for Standard & Poors Equity Research, said that while "there is something to be said for Disney's ability to spawn new franchises and monetize them," it does not fit a consumer products mold.

"I think that would be short-changing the other assets they bring to the table," Amobi said, adding that with those assets comes volatility.

Get a Fast Pass. This free service, which you book for, allows you to fix a time to come back to a ride and effectively jump queues.

Budget carefully, otherwise with so many tempting toy shops and fashion stores you could end up penniless. We agreed with Lily that she could have one major purchase a day.

Try to eat lunch outside the busy period between noon and 2pm inside the parks when it's far easier to get served. Or take a break and go to Disney Village restaurant area.

Measure your child or grandchild's height as there are restrictions on some of the more scary rides. You'd be miserable if you've stood patiently for half and hour and then not be let in. All the height restrictions are clearly marked on your free guides.

These games, however, take place not in carnival booths but in a 3-D gaming environment designed by Walt Disney Imagineers with some help from Pixar Automation Studios. In Midway Mania, there are no physical objects to hurl or fire at targets – no rings to toss, no darts to throw, no air rifles to point at sheet-metal ducks.

Instead, players first make their way past an animatronic Mr. Potato Head carnival barker, whose voice and schtick come from Don Rickles. Then they don a set of 3-D glasses and hop into swiveling ride vehicles that convey them to a series of virtual games. Not counting a practice pie-throwing round, Midway Mania has five scored games in all, each inspired by a different "Toy Story" character.

Once parked in front of the individual games, the players use a pull-string shooter to fire virtual projectiles at a large screen. The attraction tallies scores for all the players based on the point value of the targets they've hit. It even awards virtual plush toys, displaying them on each vehicle's on-board computer screen.

Though the games play out in 3D, the Imagineers have added another dimension to the game. The attraction also includes special effects in which game actions have real-world consequences. Throw a virtual dart that pops a virtual balloon, for example, and you get a puff of air or spritz of water in the face. Chrissie Allen, senior producer and director for the attraction, says the effects add a fourth dimension to the ride. "The world of the game completely envelops you," she says.

All of that immersive gaming may be a blast, sometimes literally. Yet Midway Mania has a serious side that makes all the fun and games possible. According to Jody Gerstner, Walt Disney Imagineering's executive director of show and ride controls, the attraction runs on one of Disney's most advanced automation systems to date. Built primarily around components from one of its corporate partners, Siemens Energy & Automation, the system marks the first time Disney has used industrial Ethernet in a ride control application. "We've done show controls over Ethernet before, but those don't involve moving people around," Gerstner says.

The automation system breaks new ground in other ways too. One is its scale. "It's the biggest system we've done, not geographically but in the number of control zones," says Gerstner. Another is in the amount of integration work that had to be done to weave the attraction's distinct game, ride and show elements into a seamless user experience. And the attraction is a great example of how the clever use of position sensors and software can take up the some of the mechanical slack in motion control systems.

Talk to Imagineers like Gerstner or Allen, and you will quickly get that they obsess about the entertainment value of the rides they create. And in that sense, Imagineering couldn't be more different than the engineering practiced by those who work on industrial machines. After all, when is the last time anyone had to design a fun form fill and seal machine?

Like all engineers, though, the Imagineers still have to hit hard engineering targets related to safety, throughput, uptime and installation cost. And hitting all those targets in this case called for a control technologies that should appeal to those who design machines for factories rather than theme parks.

Fun with Ethernet

Midway Mania's overarching control system actually consists of three sub-systems, one each for the ride vehicles, the games, and show elements. Ethernet is the common thread tying everything together.

The ride controls, which govern the movement of the vehicles through the attraction, run on two kinds of industrial controllers. The central wayside controller, a Siemens 319 PLC, manages the vehicle flow through the attraction. "The wayside controller is the traffic cop," Gerstner says. Each vehicle also has an onboard controller, a Siemens 315 PLC that handles programmed speed profiles, position data gathered from sensors, safety measures and diagnostics.

For vehicles to move through the attraction, the vehicle's onboard controllers wirelessly communicate their position data over ProfiNet RT to the wayside controller. That central controller then generates a signal, which goes out over a proprietary, hardwired network to the 397 busbar zones on the vehicle steel track. That signal is then transmitted back to the individual ride vehicles through a brush shoe that contacts the busbar Gerstner calls this control out a "go, no-go PWM signal." It tells individual vehicles whether they have permission to proceed at their programmed speed, whether they should stop or whether they should proceed at a reduced speed.

The game controls likewise have both centralized and onboard elements. A centralized PC-based gaming controller distributes gaming data from each ride vehicle to a bank of computers that run all the gaming software. The massive computer farm for Midway Mania houses more than 150 computers in all, including one Windows XP PC from HP for each of the attraction's 56 game screens. The on-vehicle controllers handle game information specific to each vehicle, such as the positioning of the shooter and onboard score display.

As with the ride controls, the centralized and on-board gaming systems communicate over wireless Ethernet, sharing the onboard wireless infrastructure with the ride controls. Physical connections between the game computers take place over a standard 100 Mbit/s Ethernet network – with the exception of a gigabit backplane between the switches in the main game controller.

Both the ride and game control systems share a wireless link to get data off the vehicles. On the vehicle is shared Siemens SCALENCE W access point module on the vehicle which couples with SCALENCE W access points off the vehicle via a leaky coax cable along the track. Olaf Scheel, a Siemens engineer who served on Midway Mania's design team, the wireless system has been "hardened" to prevent any intrusions or denial of service attacks. And he notes that on the ride control system, safety is ensured by the one-way nature of wireless communication. "The onboard controllers only send data," he says. They get their go-signal only through the hardwiring.

Aside from the ride and game controls, the system has additional PCs for its show controls, including a rack of computers that run the attraction's special effects. These, too, are nodes on the standard Ethernet network.

Working Together

Taken individually, Midway Mania's individual control systems are pretty straightforward, but it's how they work together is what determines whether attraction soars or falls flat. "The hardest part of the project was defining all the software interfaces between the game, ride and show controls," Gerstner says, noting that all three systems have to be closely coordinated to deliver that seamless user experience.

The game and ride control systems, for example, both coordinate their efforts at all times. During normal operations, the game controller needs to know where the ride controls have parked vehicles relative to the game screens. That task is trickier than it sounds. Gerstner says the electric motors, right-angle gearboxes and pinch-rollers that move the vehicle have a certain amount of play in them. So do the mechanical brakes that stop the vehicles in front of the screens. "We had to find a way to compensate for the variation inherent in our mechanical system," he says.

The game and ride controls also mount a coordinated response to back-ups or delays, which could be caused by someone triggering one of the attraction's many pressure-based safety devices or even a slowdown in the vehicle loading process. "We know back-ups happen," Gerstner says, "but system does the right things even when everything isn't perfect." Those right things include launching game sequences, such as an extra practice round if users get stuck in front of one screen for too long. They also include more theatrical responses, such as an announcement voiced by "Toy Story" characters.

Many of these coordinated efforts require the ride and game controls to use position data gathered by two complementary tracking methods. The first uses Pepperl+ Fuchs binary proximity sensors, four of which are mounted beneath each ride vehicle, to pick up a set of absolute position markers scattered at strategic locations along the track. "These give us an indication of where each vehicle is in the building," Gerstner says.

While crucial for generating the go-no go signals and controlling the flow of multiple vehicles, proximity sensor tracking lacked the resolution needed to register the vehicle to the game screen. So the Imagineers added a second tracking system that can determine vehicle position within an inch. It uses a Banner laser sensor, again under-mounted on the vehicle, to read graduated strips placed in the floor near the parking locations for each game. This fine-positioning system helps compensates for all the variation inherent in the mechanical system. "The game doesn't care if the car parks in the same spot every time. It just needs to know where each car has actually parked, and it can compensate." Gerstner says.

Positioning data also plays a key role in determining the position of the shooter relative to the game. An algorithm in the game software determines position using data from the three encoders on the shooter itself along with another encoder that measures the amount of swivel on the ride vehicle turrets. "Turret swivel is superimposed on the rotational axis of the shooter," Gerstner says. The shooter-position algorithm also takes the vehicle's actual parking position into account. Gerstner describes this positioning algorithm "very complex," but adds that it still made more sense than trying to come up with a separate sensing system. "We had enough accuracy to mathematically determine the position of the shooter tip with data we already had," he says.

A New Approach

Midway Mania's controls embody a couple of important departures from Disney's traditional way of engineering large control systems. Gerstner points out that the company's larger attractions tended to have point-to-point I/O in the past. That design approach can be clearly seen in square footage set aside for I/O cabinets in a room adjacent to Midway Mania's massive computer farm.

Much of that control room remains empty, however, since the ride controls take up just two cabinets. Gerstner attributes much of the control system's physical economy to the Siemens' distributed I/O and to the Ethernet backbone that ties all the control systems together. "Ethernet simplified the wiring and all the associated touch labor," he says. "To be honest, I don't know if we could have done this project using our traditional architecture. It would have taken a lot of copper."

Another departure for Disney is in its use of a centralized controller in an attraction of this scale. In previous rides with a similar zoned busbars – such as its Rocket Rod ride – Disney had to distribute the controllers around the rides. "We couldn't go centralized because of the challenge of processing and send permissible signal out to all the zones," Gerstner says. The 319 had speed and power to overcome that problem. "It's a screamer," Gerstner says.

In fact, central PLC and the ProfiNet RT had more than enough processing muscle and speed for this application. Scheel notes that the central PLC scans and execute the code for all 397 busbar zones in 32 milliseconds. "We could go faster if we had to, but there was no need," he says, noting that ProfiNet RT can update every millisecond if necessary.

The network, owned by the Walt Disney Company, is expected to announce on Monday that full episodes of prime time shows like "Lost," "Desperate Housewives" and "Ugly Betty," along with short clips and game highlights from the cable network ESPN, will be accessible through the independent video site Veoh.com.

Like YouTube, Veoh features short, user-submitted video clips. But lately it has also mixed in material from large media companies like CBS, Viacom's MTV Networks and USA Network. Veoh Networks, based in Los Angeles, is backed by the former Disney chief executive Michael D. Eisner, along with other private investors.

The deal with Veoh is ABC's second agreement to stream free, advertising-supported shows on a Web site other than its own or its broadcast affiliates'. Last fall, it struck a similar deal with AOL. Though it is not disclosing financial arrangements of the Veoh deal, ABC said it was paying Veoh for the traffic driven to its programs and commercials, which ensures Veoh will heavily promote ABC's offerings on its home page.

"These types of partnerships allow us to reach our fans and viewers in a much deeper and more meaningful way," said Matt Murphy, the senior vice president for digital media distribution at Disney and ESPN Media Networks.

Mr. Murphy said the company was considering other distribution deals with sites like YouTube and Hulu. "This is a world where you have to constantly re-evaluate your business and constantly look at partners and how they are running their businesses," he said.

ABC's eagerness to expand distribution may be a reaction to other networks, which are moving faster to propagate their programming across the Web. Fox and NBC have pooled their content on the jointly owned Hulu.com, which syndicates their shows on other sites, including MySpace and Yahoo. Programs from CBS appear on more than a dozen sites, like Joost, MSN, Bebo, AOL, Veoh and Comcast.com.

ABC has pursued the more cautious strategy in an effort to preserve its ability to present programming in its own proprietary, full-screen media player, which it developed with the Utah-based Move Networks. The player displays high-quality video and makes it impossible for viewers to skip the commercials. Veoh will use the ABC media player to show ABC and ESPN programming on its site.

For its part, Veoh hopes the deal will help position it as a hub for all full-length television shows. "You are practically seeing a mad rush of networks clearing rights and digitizing their shows and getting partners to showcase their shows," said Dmitry Shapiro, Veoh's founder and chief innovation officer. "They now realize that most of their viewership happens outside their own sites."