My childhood just died

[mogwai]

imagine this, if pixar did one episode of the simpons then? think about it...

[cron]

Nemo would have three eyes, that's for sure.

[Myxo]

Note to Disney:

http://imdb.com/title/tt0245429/

'nuff said.

Where the hell is this world heading?

It all points to Disney's next two animated features (this fall's Brother Bear and next spring's Home on the Range) being their last.

I know their last few "efforts" have been nothing short of crap, but come on? Totally abandon 2D?? Morons. It's all in the STORY! You can shove those show-off exploding pixels right up your arse if you haven't got a decent script.

So, after Eisner decided it was wise to start re-making classics in 3D, he's now cutting off all bonds to the past? Fuck him, I'm watching Snow White.  :x

[modage]

well it was John Lasseter from Pixar, who pretty much spearheaded getting them to distribute that in America and supervised all the dubbing and such.

[Jeremy Blackman]

Was is Lasseter's idea to dub it in the first place?

I mean, how much was he collaborating with Disney, because he wants to split from them too, right?

[modage]

not sure, macguffin might have to help me out on the details but i thought he pretty much convinced them to distribute the film here in the US.

[socketlevel]

my childhood died with the "Star Wars" Special edition butchering.  but then again it was reborn when i finally saw "The Goonies" 2.35:1 on dvd, it was like a whole new experience.

-sl-

[MacGuffin]

Walt Disney to Study Comcast Merger Offer  

NEW YORK - In a stunning move, cable TV giant Comcast Corp. proposed Wednesday to buy Walt Disney Co. for stock valued at about $54 billion. The Disney board said it would study the offer, which would create the world's largest communications company.

Comcast, the nation's biggest cable systems operator, said Disney chief Michael Eisner had rebuffed its request to talk earlier this week.

Comcast's proposal was made as Eisner is fending off criticism from former board members Roy E. Disney, nephew of founder Walt Disney, and Stanley E. Gold about his performance and lack of a succession plan as Disney's chief executive. Michael Citrick, spokesman for Disney and Gold, declined to comment on Comcast's proposal.

"This is a very exciting moment," Comcast chief executive Brian Roberts said in a conference call with investors and analysts. Roberts said the combination "would create one of the world's premier entertainment and communications companies, and, we believe, restore the Disney brand to prominence and the company to growth."

"The ball's in Disney's court," Roberts said.

Disney's board of directors released a statement later Wednesday saying it had received Comcast's offer and would "carefully evaluate" it. "In the meantime, there is no action for shareholders to take," the directors said.

Disney, which owns ABC and ESPN, and Comcast, whose businesses include the Philadelphia Flyers hockey team, together had $45 billion in revenues last year. Time Warner Inc.'s $39.6 billion in revenues last year made it the world's largest media and communications company.

In a news conference in New York, Roberts said he hoped to make the deal "as friendly and amicable as possible, as fast as possible," but he also noted that he was ready to abandon the proposed merger if need be. "We've walked away from big things before. Life goes on," Roberts said.

Paul Kim, senior media analyst at Tradition Asiel Securities, said that while Roberts' bid for Disney was not surprising, the timing was.

"It's going for the jugular," he said. "He is using this vulnerable time to force Disney's hand."

Kim also said Comcast is basically a cable company, and might be biting off more than it can chew. "I think they underestimate the complexity of being a broad-based media company," he said.

Comcast released a letter sent to Eisner indicating that Eisner had personally rejected Roberts' offer to enter into merger discussions earlier in the week. Roberts' letter called Eisner's refusal "unfortunate."

"Given this, the only way for us to proceed is to make a public proposal directly to you and your board," the letter stated.

On Comcast's conference call, Steve Burke, head of the company's cable division, told investors that Comcast believed it could greatly improve the performance of several of Disney's key businesses, including ABC, the ABC Family channel, animation and theme parks.

"We think job one is restoring the company to its previous levels of profitability," said Burke, who had worked at Disney for 12 years.

Under the merger, Comcast said it would issue 0.78 of a share of its Class A stock for each Disney share, and Disney shareholders would retain 42 percent of the combined company.

The deal values each Disney share at $26.49, a 10 percent premium over their closing price Tuesday.

In a sign that investors expect a nasty fight, Disney's shares shot up $3.36, or 14 percent, to $27.44 in heavy midmorning trading on the New York Stock Exchange, well above Comcast's current offer. Comcast's Class A shares tumbled $3.14, or 9 percent, to $30.79 on the Nasdaq Stock Market.

Philadelphia-based Comcast merged with AT&T Broadband in November 2002, making it the nation's largest cable TV company with 21 million subscribers. The company noted that merger in its sales pitch Wednesday.

"Our management team has a proven track record of successful integration of our merger partners," Roberts said.

Comcast also has extensive holdings in media content providers, with majority stakes in Comcast-Spectacor, the owner of the Philadelphia Flyers and 76ers; Comcast SportsNet; E! Entertainment Television; the Style Network; Golf Channel; Outdoor Life Network; and G4.

Separately, Comcast reported Wednesday that it swung to a profit of $383 million, or 17 cents per share, for the quarter ending Dec. 31 thanks to continued strong demand for its digital cable and high-speed Internet services. Revenues jumped 58 percent to $4.74 billion.

Last year, Roy Disney, the last Disney family member active in the company that his father and uncle founded in the 1920s, and Gold had called on Eisner to resign, saying he was to blame for a tumbling stock price, embarrassing management missteps and a focus on short-term profits over the company's core mission.

But others credit Eisner with turning a sleepy theme park company and also-ran movie studio into a major media conglomerate.

[MacGuffin]

Comcast not on Eisner's agenda

ORLANDO -- On the morning after what had to be one of the more trying days of his career, embattled Walt Disney Co. chairman and CEO Michael Eisner greeted financial analysts, colleagues and the media at his company's investor conference here with a brave face.

But discussion of Wednesday's unsolicited $66 billion bid by the Comcast Corp. for Disney was clearly not on his agenda.

"What are you gonna say today?" a reporter called out as Eisner made his way into the Fantasia Ballroom at the Contemporary hotel just outside the Magic Kingdom.

"I don't know," Eisner said. "I haven't written it yet."

If Eisner was making any last-minute alterations to the company message for Wall Street decision-makers during this two-day conference, it wasn't obvious. Although the timing of Comcast's announcement of its takeover bid was clearly designed to overwhelm the executives and analysts gathering here, the presentations from Eisner and other top Disney/ABC brass were business as usual.

During a quick, informal chat with reporters after the conference, Eisner said his mood was good and outlook positive but added that he could not discuss the Comcast bid.

"I can't talk about the process except to say, we will be meeting to completely analyze what has been offered to us, and we will respond."

During the presentations, Eisner and other division heads touted the company's future plans for feature films, ABC, ESPN and other cable outlets, syndicated radio shows, local broadcast stations, new technology, theme parks, retail operations, new consumer products and the Internet -- playing up the good, spinning the bad and generally ignoring the elephant in the room.

"I've been doing this 13 years, and I've never seen anything like it," Sanford Bernstein analyst Tom Wolzien said. "Yesterday was like a political campaign, and Eisner was running for re-election. This is his 're-elect me' speech."

The message from Disney was consistent throughout: The company's 19% earnings rise for its fiscal first quarter is just the beginning of a new age. Disney will continue to do more with less, cutting capital investments to concentrate on cross-promotion, repurposing of material and continuing brand extensions in ways that other less-diverse companies cannot.

Saying this was "an opportunity to shed bad habits," ABC Entertainment president Susan Lyne laid out ABC's continuing turnaround plans citing such upcoming series as "Stephen King's Kingdom Hospital," "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition" and the return of Regis Philbin to primetime later this month with an updated "Super Millionaire" version of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire."

Earlier in the day Jay Rasulo, president of Disney Parks and Resorts, touted new attractions like Mission Space, which he said is driving traffic not just into Epcot, but into all the parks. He also said the "lead up" to the 50th anniversary of Disneyland, will "be one of the greatest marketing opportunities of all time."

During a keynote luncheon address, former Sen. George Mitchell, presiding director of Disney's board, urged analysts to "examine the facts and evaluate the reality, as opposed to the perception."

While some observers have been blunt about Eisner's future -- "He's gone," analyst David Faber declared on CNBC -- opinion here among the 125 invited financiers and small media group appeared split, though just about everyone agreed that Disney is worth far more than the price Comcast has offered.

"It's not all that obvious that this is going to be that quick or that simple," Hal Vogel of Vogel Capital Management said, adding that he sensed little anxiety among the execs. "It's a business-as-usual mood."

"Disney has responded well," said Jack Liebau of Liebau Asset Management Co. in Pasadena, Calif. "The reality is Disney could well survive as an independent company with its management intact."

To do so, Eisner will have to convince shareholders that the decision to not strike a new distribution deal with computer animation pioneers at Pixar was the right one.

"We passed on a deal that would not have been in the best interest of our shareholders," Eisner said during his brief remarks at day's end. "You'd be killing me today if you read the deal that we even offered them."

Eisner stressed that animation in all forms will remain a priority at Disney and that it will be stories, not technology, that drive the form. "Nobody goes to a Cinemascope movie or a Panavision movie," he said of live-action technology.

"Look, there was Walt Disney, and Walt Disney passed away, and we were still able to do animation without Walt Disney."

The tightly controlled event featured boat rides, park tours, fireworks displays and gourmet meals for the analysts. A phalanx of Disney public relations executives and security employees manned all corners of the ballroom, keeping the company executives mostly out of the line of fire and away from the media.

[Chest Rockwell]

[cine]

A real coup for anti-Eisners:

http://money.cnn.com/2004/03/03/news/companies/disney/index.htm

[MacGuffin]

'Range' animation might be put out to pasture
Los Angeles Daily News

If indeed Home on the Range is the last traditionally animated feature we're going to see from Disney in a while, then you can say the form is going out with a laugh and not a whimper. A high-spirited romp about three cows, a horse and assorted other critters looking to capture an ornery cattle rustler, the movie is notable for what it omits. There are no dead parents to grieve, no characters desperately looking to find their place in the world, no Important Life Lessons to be learned.

"We've made a big cartoon," says John Sanford, who co-directed the film with Will Finn. "And we don't apologize for it."

Trends in animation are cyclical and tend to peter out after about a decade. Obviously, the big thing right now is computer-generated 3-D animation, the art form honed by Pixar (Finding Nemo, Toy Story), Blue Sky (Ice Age) and Pacific Data Images (the Shrek movies). Outside of the sci-fi misfire Final Fantasy, which was aimed at fan boys, not families, there hasn't been a 3-D dud. Or as Finn puts it: "You don't have the Ed Wood of 3-D yet."

Conversely, after peaking with The Lion King, hand-drawn animated epics began to fall out of favor with audiences. Disney still had hits -- Pocahontas, Hercules, Mulan and The Hunchback of Notre Dame -- while other studios tried to emulate the formula (Anastasia and Titan A.E. for Fox, Quest for Camelot for Warner Bros.) without the success.

"Those were the years where the 'animated feature' was created," Sanford says. "You wouldn't hear the word 'cartoon' except in the pejorative sense. Everyone was trying to be serious and important. It was an interesting experiment, but people kept wondering, 'Where is the cartoon?' "

Adds Finn: "The Lion King changed everything. Don't get me wrong. It's a great movie and has a lot of cartoony stuff. But it also has a big important theme and an epic feel. And after its success, everybody said, 'That's what animation is: big, important lessons.' "

And don't forget the songs. Tossing out the 1990 sequel The Rescuers Down Under, Disney made eight consecutive animated musicals starting with The Little Mermaid in 1989 and running through Mulan in 1998. It was a phenomenal decade-long run, but by its end, studio executives noted the diminishing returns and figured the genre had run its course.

Composer Alan Menken, who racked up eight Oscars for his work on several of those musicals, thinks it might have been a hasty decision, based on the returns of the films that followed.

"The Little Mermaid certainly put the animated musical back on the map, and it remained pretty strong all the way through Hercules," Menken says. "But there was some feeling that audiences were tired of seeing it. People thought they were becoming predictable. I don't think so. Each movie was enormously different. But they decided to go off in a different direction."

And now after outright failures (Atlantis: The Lost Empire, Treasure Planet), middling successes (Brother Bear, Lilo & Stitch) and huge layoffs in its animated division, Disney is charting yet another new course. The studio has no traditionally drawn animated features currently in development, aside from a long-planned segmented sequel, Fantasia 2006. Disney's next major projects include the computer-generated comedy Chicken Little (2005) and an adaptation of William Joyce's comic fantasy-adventure A Day With Wilbur Robinson (2006).

Even famed animator Glen Keane has put aside pencil and paper to work on a CG version of the Rapunzel fairy tale, Rapunzel Upbraided, due in 2007.

If Disney's current direction makes Home on the Range feel like something from the antiquated past, that may be a good reason to celebrate and appreciate the charms of Finn and Sanford's "cartoon." It may not change your life, and the morals are sweet and understated. But as Sanford puts it, "I got tired of animated movies teaching me lessons a long time ago."

The movie, which began life five years ago under the title Sweatin' Bullets, has gone through a number of changes over the years after settling on its initial story line of having the cows be the heroes instead of the cowboys. In fact, Menken, working with a new lyricist, Glenn Slater, wrote the first of the film's six original songs back in 1999. Singer k.d. lang recorded Patch of Heaven, a sunny Western swing tune that you could imagine Gene Autry singing, before Finn and Sanford came on board as directors.

Other songs -- the manic Yodel-Adle-Eedle-Idle-Oo, which incorporates the William Tell Overture, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and the 1812 Overture in a yodeling break, and the plaintive Bonnie Raitt number Will the Sun Ever Shine Again -- were added after the story shifted in direction numerous times.

"It was an unorthodox process," says Menken, who has won Oscars for his score and songs from The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin and Pocahontas. "But that's always the case with original stories. They're the toughest. But I'm really happy with the outcome."

Says Home on the Range producer Alice Dewey Goldstone: "Alan was a little nervous when we made the title change to Home on the Range. He said, 'I think there's already a song with that title.' His genius, though, is to come up with something that will have kids today thinking that his song is THE Home on the Range."

Menken, 54, calls Home on the Range a "musical hybrid" in that it features musical numbers sung by the movie's characters as well as songs that are used to comment on what's happening on screen.

"Break-into-song moments are problematic these days -- not for me, of course, but for people running things," Menken says. "The trend is to have the songs underneath the action, like in the Pixar movies, or what Phil Collins did with Tarzan and Brother Bear. I love those films, but what I write is musicals, and I hope that we get back to doing musicals someday. But Home on the Range used enough of my musical-theater chops to keep me happy."

Given how the studio is using Menken's name and songs to market the film, it might surprise audiences to know that he hasn't worked on a Disney feature since Hercules in 1997. And while there are a number of projects sitting in various levels of development, Menken has no current assignment from the studio.

"I hope things change," Menken says, adding quickly with a laugh, "and you know what? They always do."

[ono]

So basically, Disney is setting out to make the Ed Wood Plan 9 From Outer Space or rather Heaven's Gate of 3-D animation.  Bully for them!

[MacGuffin]

Iger Said to Be Eisner's Choice at Disney

Michael Eisner has told Walt Disney Co. directors that company president Robert Iger is his "preferred choice" to succeed him as chief executive of the media giant, according to a newspaper report published Sunday.

Eisner told board members Iger "would be an excellent guardian of the Disney assets," he said in an interview last week with the Los Angeles Times. "There's nobody," Eisner said, "who has a better education and training to do that job."

The question of who would succeed Eisner has grown more critical during an ongoing campaign against his leadership by former directors Roy E. Disney and Stanley Gold. At the company's annual meeting in March, shareholders withheld 45 percent of their votes for Eisner.

But despite the infighting, which stripped Eisner of his chairman title, it's unclear when he would leave the company. Eisner's contract expires in 2006, but it could be extended.

Iger, whose contract expires in September 2005, has recently met with investors and executives and told the Times he would like the top job.

"I have a right to be taken seriously. I feel I know the company well. I have the knowledge," he said. "There comes a time when it's appropriate to say, 'Hey, this is a job I'm interested in.'"

Eisner has not always supported Iger so strongly, but the two have been working more closely after Iger defended Eisner and the company following criticism at the March meeting.

"We are clearly now much more partners than in the past," Eisner said.

[MacGuffin]

Eisner Will Step Down

Disney chief informs shareholders he will ankle his position when his contract expires in September 2006. Source: FilmStew.com

Most people give two weeks notice. Disney CEO Michael Eisner has given two years notice. In a letter to the board released Friday, Eisner said he plans to step down as the Walt Disney Co.'s chief executive when his contract expires in September 2006.

The 62-year-old Eisner has been in charge of the entertainment conglomerate for more than two-decades. His decision comes six months after he, who became chief executive in 1984, barely survived a controversial battle led by retired board members and major shareholders Stanley Gold and Roy Disney, a nephew of founder Walt Disney. The result of that was Eisner stepping down from his position of Disney chairman but keeping his power as CEO.

Most analysts believe two years is plenty of time to find a successor. Eisner has made it clear that he believes Disney President Robert Iger would be the best choice for his successor. Iger has noted that he would accept the job if offered.

Other contenders for Eisner's position could include News Corp. CEO Peter Chernin; former Viacom Inc. president Mel Karmazin; Jeff Bewkes, who chairs Time Warner Inc.'s entertainment and networks group; Tom Freston, co-president of Viacom; Yahoo Inc. chairman and chief executive Terry Semel; and Steve Jobs, the chief executive of Pixar Animation Studios Inc. and Apple Computer, as a long shot