I think Ale was thinking of Silly Symphonies
Snapple? 
I just hope Disney would merge with The Late Show with Conan O’Brien… then you’d have The Masturbating Country Bears
(sorry, chalk this up to posts that seem funny at 3am)
To be fair to Disney, Pixar’s end of negotiations caught them flat-footed. The first time Disney even heard the talks were off was when they heard it via the news media.
Not much else to add to this discussion thathasn’t already been said; Disney has been coasting for years, and it either needs a mercy killing or a radical revamp. Pixar is currently riding high in the catbird seat – there’s no reason to believe they can’t do great movies with any other studio, as long as John Lasseter is given free rein – and Eisner should have been offering everything down to free blowjobs to keep them with Disney. The shift to all-CGI movies at Disney sounds short-sighted to me, especially since the now-dead Florida studio was producing some quality stuff earlier (Mulan and Lilo and Stitch). Then there’s penny-pinching at the parks, along with the whole California Adventure fiasco, and… eh, let’s just say Eisner’s long past his prime.
Dunno what’s gonna happen next, but I’d love to see Walt Disney’s ghost come back from the great beyond and get medieval on Eisner’s ass. 
Hey now, I’m no fan of Eisner, but I love Disney’s California Adventure (especially with Tower of Terror opening in a few weeks). And to cut this off at the pass, I’m not naive when it comes to theme parks either; I’ve been to Disney World 8 times, Disneyland 3, Universal Studios Florida once and US Hollywood twice, and several 6 Flags. DCA is just a vastly different experience than Disney’s other parks.
Well, I’ll be the odd one out and saythat I didn’t like any of the mentioned films/cartoons mentioned that were made in the last 30 years, but that’s just me.
Now, doesn’t Disney own the great Ghibli studios ( of Princess Mononoko fame)? Are they to be abandoned as well? Losing their home team isn’t much of a loss anyway, since it’s steadily less profitable and more expensive from the time the Lion King onwards? And artistically, they died before the Nixon administration.
Similarly, the live movies were always pathetic, meant to be at best late saturday morning cartoon filler and now not even that. But shouldn’t we give them some slack for owning Miramax (Scream, lots of pretentious movies and the occasional good one)?
Also, other company liabilities, like Eurodisney seem to be going better. Overall, Disney is a holdings company now, and as such has no ‘core’ business, only vague interest sectors, and people running in the corridors muttering ‘synergy’. And in that respect, losing Pixar is not a sign of Armageddon. It’s still a loss however, and it’s obvious to all but the stockholders that this company would be better off killing the whole board of directors. Not that luck of leadership has killed off the Netscape/AOL/CNN/Time/Warner/EMI conglomerate… . But even then the concept of Disney taking risks seems farfetched. I think that they are the example given in The Bussinessman’s dictionary for “risk-averse”. Perhaps they should acquire some insurance companies. I’m sure they have some great Scrooge vault and Donald disaster clips they could use in the ad campaigns.
P.S. Forgot to mention the Go.com fiasco.
Disney doesn’t own Ghibli, they just have distribution rights iirc.
I say good for Pixar I’ve been a fan since pre Toy Story days. They deserve much better than Disney’s been giving them.
There’s much more going on here than anyone (including myself) realizes, and I assume there is much more corporate manipulation going on.
Firstly, Pixar and Disney really need each other. Pixar is a good company, but they’re not really a “big name” company yet. They need Disney for promotion because when they get down and dirty with it, nobody promotes their animation product like Disney does. But Disney hasn’t has a huge animation hit in a while and the animation departments they haven’t let go are stagnating. They have a fledgling CG department, but they don’t have the talent that Pixar does. Unfortunately, Disney owns the rights to both Toy Story and Monsters, Inc. Sequels to both are rumored to be in process and Disney going them alone can only screw them up badly. And I think deep in their hearts they know that.
Pixar can afford to wait. They still have two years left on their contract with Disney and anything could happen in that time. Even though they’ve had a number of courters, the word I get is that Pixar is not currently in serious negotiions with anyone.
Here’s where it gets interesting. Roy Disney (Walt Disney’s nephew) has recently resigned from the board of the Walt Disney Company along with fellow member Stanley Gold. They were prohibited from speaking out against Michael Eisner as long as they were board members, but since they’ve left have mounted an fairly intense campaign to oust Eisner at the next shareholders meeting on March 3rd. Since this announcement was made so close to the annual shareholders meeting, the feeling is that Pixar is aligning itself with the Roy Disney camp and are going to use this (along with the losing of Winnie the Pooh rights and an upcoming lawsuit about Who Framed Roger Rabbit proceeds) as leverage to oust Eisner, at which time they will come back with a new Disney partnership; possibly some sort of merger with (dare I say it?) Steve Jobs as the new CEO at Disney.
It’s also going to be an interesting time at the Academy Awards this year. “Destino”, the Disney / Dali collaboration is up for an Oscar as Best Animated Short. This was a project pushed along by Roy Disney. So Eisner can’t really do an agressive push for this film because it would run the risk of giving Roy a soapbox at the Oscars. many people feel that Roy is too much of a gentleman to do this at the Oscar ceremony, but would definitely use it as a chip at the shareholders meeting.
THIS could get interesting.
The last one would be Mirimax’s “Cold Mountain” (or maybe “My Baby’s Daddy”…I forget which one came out first). I believe the last film put out by the Disney label was the remake of “Freaky Friday”, but they have “Miracle”, starring Kurt Russell, about the 1980 US Olympic team, coming out Friday.
Well, Pixar needs Disney a lot more than Disney needs Pixar. Pixar needs Disney for the reasons you mentioned, but Disney doesn’t, from a financial standpoint, need its animation division anymore (from an emotional and historical standpoint, it might).
Yeah, I did forget, actually :smack: I’m going to have to rent that when it comes out on DVD.
Haunted Mansion and the new Freaky Friday are nigh-universally agreed to be forgettable pieces of crap. I didn’t know that Disnay had a hand in Cold Mountain.
Hardly. Freaky Friday was a cheapy to make comparitively. It only cost 26 million and has so far grossed over 110 million, and is doing reasonably well in it’s DVD release. There was also talk that Jamie Lee Curtis should have at least been nominated for an Oscar as she was for the Golden Globe. Opinions vary as to whether the movie itself was “crap” but business-wise it was one of Disney’s biggest successes this year.
Disney owns Miramax Studios, which made Cold Mountain.
Personally, I’m predicting that Disney will collapse in five years’ time when angry torch-wielding mobs burn down their corporate headquarters following the release of It’s a Small World: The Movie.
Wait a minute… A company that’s built on its animation is shutting down all work on their 2-d animation, and parting ways with the folks who did their 3-d? Isn’t that sort of like a hamburger, with no bun, and hold the beef? Pickles, onions, and special sauce don’t get you too far by themselves.
Quoth Achernar:
Even further back. The big elegant staircase in The Little Mermaid was computerized, and I think that there were some CG shots of distant traffic in Lady and the Tramp. But I would call The Lion King the milestone, because for the first time, you couldn’t tell that it was done on computer.
As for Pixar, I would absolutely say that they’re a Big Name now, and can survive (and even thrive) without Disney. When I think of Toy Story or Finding Nemo, I don’t think Disney. I think Pixar. And wasn’t Shrek Pixar without Disney?
Lady and the Tramp was made well before CG was being even thought of. The first Disney movie to use any CG was The Great Mouse Detective with it’s internal views of the tower of Big Ben.
Shrek was Dreamworks. But it’s a good example of what someone besides Pixar can do. I just don’t think that Disney has the talent yet to pull off a good CG film. (Anybody remember Dinosaur?) And I don’t think that Pixar (yet) has the marketing pull that the Disney name does. The problem is that with their closing of their 2-D shops, Disney is putting all of their eggs in the CG market, which so far they are just not ready for.
My take as a long time Disney watcher is that Eisner has to go. He has gone from savior to egomaniac (and he may have been an egomaniac all along, but he did take the company out of doldrums as bad as any they are in now). Also that fortunes are cyclical. Disney is in no worse shape now than they were in the 1970s (the Herbie movies? A series of lackluster animation that lost money?). The late 1980s and early 1990s were particularly good to them, they had the market cornered on mainstream animation in a time when it became hugely popular, they were able to take advantage of changes in technology - first by moving their movies to VHS, then DVD. The mini baby boom made their products very popular, and cable allowed them to extend their reach. And they went through great expansion - theme parks, hotels, cruiselines, ABC, ESPN, record companies, publishing outfits, Broadway shows
But the world is changing. There is more competition for traditional (and non-traditional) animation, and the market is not as hot as it was. Its more difficult for a company to be diverse than it was - the ABC acquisition never went well. They have a ton of hotel rooms in Orlando, and have been hit by a shrinking and more competative travel industry - it used to be that Disney had to maintain a few hotels in down times and the theme parks, now the hotels themselves can be a significant drain.
They haven’t yet learned (but I think are starting to) that just because they are a 900 lb gorilla doesn’t mean they can’t lose lawsuits (i.e. Pooh) or bully people around in negotiations (i.e. Pixar)
They’ve made some amazing missteps - missing out on LotRs (though I would have passed on three movies based on an unfilmable trilogy by some barely known splatter director myself - and they are getting something like 5% of the take for owning the rights in the first place, so its not all bad), dissing Pixar (even they had to know that for three years people have discussed Pixar being unhappy with their relationship with Disney - this is like having an All-Star rookie and continuing to pay him league minimum until he hits arbitration). But some good successes as well (their cruise line launched just six years ago and comes close to selling out or sells out almost every cruise. And ESPN is a powerhouse.)
But Disney is part of the American landscape - it will change - all things do and it will have to. But Mickey Mouse will survive. He has become part of the American mythos.
Heh…I’m wishing they’d televise the March 3 shareholders’ meeting. That’s some potentially amazing corporate soap opera right there.
If I had some money, I’d buy a couple of shares of Disney stock right now just to have the right to the play-by-play…
Freaky Friday had a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 89%. That’s a pretty good critical respnse.
Disney live action movies have been pretty good lately. Aside from Lilo & Stitch, their home grown animation hasn’t been very good lately. A lot of the problems with the parks are 9/11 related. Letting Pixar go seems like an incredibly stupid decision, but until they make a deal with someone else, they’re not officially gone.
If you mean PotC, it’s out now. Enjoy!
Obviously, what will happen next is that one of the two, either Eisner or Disney, I don’t know which, will team up with a comical sidekick who’ll teach him what he really needs to bring Disney back out of its hole. Then, after a heroic battle and some catchy songs, Disney will live happily ever after…until they decide to make more money on it by doing a direct-to-video sequel.
I’m sure that’s the way that will happen. I saw it in a movie by a studio made by some dead guy whose name I can’t remember.