Micheal Eisner...

[smile]

fair enough - to each their own...
and it was a wonderful 5 years, but that doesn't excuse much of the following ten

anywho - may i ask in what year was your first visit to epcot?

 

[EricsBiscuit]

fair enough - to each their own...
and it was a wonderful 5 years, but that doesn't excuse much of the following ten

anywho - may i ask in what year was your first visit to epcot?

I was 4 months so 1992

 

[TwilightZone]

tends to happen when attention is lowered to the point of merely maintaining base functionality -
both could easily still amaze if the intent had been such

I think ellen was still "the nap ride" when it first opened too
but you do have a point with great movie ride.

 

[Kamikaze]

Animal Kingdom and the rest are Walt Disney ideas. MGM was Eisner and it has no magic and is the lowest attendance theme park Disney. I go there and people tell me they don't like it and the original Disney parks are much better. Alien encounter has no attendance and that was 100% Eisner. The stock price was in the toilet under Eisner. Walt Disney and his family including Roy have said that this is not the direction that the company is suppose to be going. My family voted to kick Eisner out with our shares then we sold them.
They lined up all their computer programmers to fire them one by one in an almost execution style and made them replace them with Indian foreign workers under a program design for people who are unable to get Americans to do the job by using some cloak and dagger style shell companies. This was even such a big deal, it was brought up in the presidential debate and Disney was mentioned by name for doing this. Lets not forget that they fired guy that came up with the Pixar technology for the crime of coming up with the pixar technology. They eventually had to buy it back in the form of Pixar. Everything they paid for Pixar was something they could have had for free if the did not fire that individual. Unfortunately when a company goes public, its selling your soul to the devil in order to get some short term money and one day the devil comes to collect. In Disney case, that devil is in the form of Eisner.

I can guarantee you the park would be much better today if Disney and his family remained in charge vs Eisner and his goons.

So Walt spoke from beyond the grave?

I'm thinking you are referring to the 'Save Disney' movement by Roy E (not Roy O - Walt's brother). That movement wasn't quite what it seemed, but Roy's name sure suckered a lot of fans into following him. Any 'movement' that includes a hostile takeover bid by another company isn't 'saving' anything.

If you look at what Eisner did for the first 15 years of his time as CEO, he really did save the company. He transformed TWDC from a studio with a couple of theme parks and other projects into a mega corporation. Is that 'Walt's vision'? No. But
a) Walt is dead and
b) Walt wanted to build a city. That was his vision.

Walt's vision of E.P.C.O.T. (Progress City) would have undoubtedly bankrupt the company, and we wouldn't even be here to discuss it or have 'Disney' parks to visit at all.

Its funny - Eisner came in when a hostile takeover was in the wings, and part of him being forced out was another.

 

[LAKid53]

Eisner (and Wells) saved Disney.

The lattter half of Eisner's reign is what soured his reputation.

Absolutely spot on. Sony was seriously considering acquiring Disney in the mid-1980s, that's how bad things were. Eisner and Wells expansions and moving the studios into more adult fare via Touchstone, put the company on the road to what it is today. Did he go off the rails those last years? Yeah. But Disney would be a completely different company today without him. Very possibly a unit of another company.

 

[LAKid53]

Animal Kingdom and the rest are Walt Disney ideas. MGM was Eisner and it has no magic and is the lowest attendance theme park Disney. I go there and people tell me they don't like it and the original Disney parks are much better. Alien encounter has no attendance and that was 100% Eisner. The stock price was in the toilet under Eisner. Walt Disney and his family including Roy have said that this is not the direction that the company is suppose to be going. My family voted to kick Eisner out with our shares then we sold them.
They lined up all their computer programmers to fire them one by one in an almost execution style and made them replace them with Indian foreign workers under a program design for people who are unable to get Americans to do the job by using some cloak and dagger style shell companies. This was even such a big deal, it was brought up in the presidential debate and Disney was mentioned by name for doing this. Lets not forget that they fired guy that came up with the Pixar technology for the crime of coming up with the pixar technology. They eventually had to buy it back in the form of Pixar. Everything they paid for Pixar was something they could have had for free if the did not fire that individual. Unfortunately when a company goes public, its selling your soul to the devil in order to get some short term money and one day the devil comes to collect. In Disney case, that devil is in the form of Eisner.

I can guarantee you the park would be much better today if Disney and his family remained in charge vs Eisner and his goons.

For someone whose family owned stock in TWDC, you know little about the past 30+ years of Disney.

Eisner prevent a takeover by Sony. Think about the 2nd golden age of Disney Animation....and who was running the company. Eisner recognizing movie goers tastes were changing and Disney Studios was becoming irrelevant gave us Touchstone, since Roy, Jr. was damn insistent that Disney only produce family movies. Touchstone gave us Beaches, Splash, Pretty Woman, Good Morning Vietnam, Dead Poets Society, Sister Act, Rushmore, Royal Tennenbaums, etc. If Roy had had his way, none of that would have happended.

 

[LAKid53]

Let us not forget that the battle between HD and Blu-ray was decided the minute Disney announced it would start releasing its films solely on Blu-ray. No other studio prior had that power. And that's because Eisner position Disney to be that studio.

I had both an HD and Blu-ray player prior to then.

 

[No Name]

MDE is accidentally partially responsible for the great name Splash Mountain! It was supposed to be called Zip-a-Dee River Run, which is clumsy and stupid. But Michael, in early signs of weakness, wanted the ride to synergize with the 1984 Tom Hanks's film Splash. Luckily no physical changes to the ride itself passed, but the name Splash Mountain did.

 

[slappy magoo]

Let us not forget that the battle between HD and Blu-ray was decided the minute Disney announced it would start releasing its films solely on Blu-ray. No other studio prior had that power. And that's because Eisner position Disney to be that studio.

I had both an HD and Blu-ray player prior to then.

Yeah but on the flip flop when DVD was just taking off as a technology Disney was incredibly reluctant, thinking it might cut in to their laser disc revenue . They seemed to more strongly back the mostly-pay-as-you-go DIVX disc fiasco that put many nails in Circuit City's coffin. But if memory serves even those weren't the animated classic movies so much as more modern Touchstone fare like Armageddon, and the movies weren't widescreen, all pan and scan as was the norm for DIVX. Then when they started their Gold Collection DVDs, they were also pan and scan (if the movies were a wider aspect in the first place, some of them were always academy ratio), they listed chapter selection as an "extra" (oooooo!) and they initially announced a MSRP of $34.98. And this was at a time when studios like WB were releasing discs packed with extras for usually no more than $30 MSRP. A lot of early adopters were like "Really? 35 bucks for no widescreen and no extras?" Then the day after the announcement of that price point, Disney announced they made an error in the pricing...they would be $39.99 MSRP and then the fans really went ape poop.

It's all moot now, Disney saw there was value in making the discs truly collectable, started jamming discs with extras and brought the price down - even though their discs tend to be amongst the more expensive purchase options, it's not as much as they were in those initial days.

But for a while it looked like they were really going to throw their weight behind DIVX which would have been interesting, and I wonder if the format would have survived (and perhaps even saved Circuit City) if Disney had backed it. Probably not, but we'll never know.

 

[LAKid53]

Yeah but on the flip flop when DVD was just taking off as a technology Disney was incredibly reluctant, thinking it might cut in to their laser disc revenue . They seemed to more strongly back the mostly-pay-as-you-go DIVX disc fiasco that put many nails in Circuit City's coffin. But if memory serves even those weren't the animated classic movies so much as more modern Touchstone fare like Armageddon, and the movies weren't widescreen, all pan and scan as was the norm for DIVX. Then when they started their Gold Collection DVDs, they were also pan and scan (if the movies were a wider aspect in the first place, some of them were always academy ratio), they listed chapter selection as an "extra" (oooooo!) and they initially announced a MSRP of $34.98. And this was at a time when studios like WB were releasing discs packed with extras for usually no more than $30 MSRP. A lot of early adopters were like "Really? 35 bucks for no widescreen and no extras?" Then the day after the announcement of that price point, Disney announced they made an error in the pricing...they would be $39.99 MSRP and then the fans really went ape poop.

It's all moot now, Disney saw there was value in making the discs truly collectable, started jamming discs with extras and brought the price down - even though their discs tend to be amongst the more expensive purchase options, it's not as much as they were in those initial days.

But for a while it looked like they were really going to throw their weight behind DIVX which would have been interesting, and I wonder if the format would have survived (and perhaps even saved Circuit City) if Disney had backed it. Probably not, but we'll never know.

I'm referring to Blu-ray, not plain DVD. That issue was long resolved by the time Sony and Toshiba decided to have a fight over improved disc capacity and resolution. And Disney ended it.

 

[slappy magoo]

I'm referring to Blu-ray, not plain DVD. That issue was long resolved by the time Sony and Toshiba decided to have a fight over improved disc capacity and resolution. And Disney ended it.

I know, that's why I began with "on the flip flop," it's a separate issue, but also a reminder that sometimes Disney's not all that quick to bet on the winning horse.
And I'll also point out that the high-def format war coincided with the video game format war between Xbox 360 and Playstation 3. And even though the sales figures for both consoles were comparable, Xbox 360 didn't have a built in HD DVD player, it was an add-on. The PS3 out of the box was also a blu-ray player, which made it a more attractive format in the first place as so many more people were already getting a player in their homes. Maybe it's a chicken-egg discussion, but it's plausible that Disney saw how PS3 was selling, knew that as a result there were already significantly more blu-ray players in homes than HD DVD and that was a factor in their decision to avoid HD DVD.

 

[LAKid53]

I know, that's why I began with "on the flip flop," it's a separate issue, but also a reminder that sometimes Disney's not all that quick to bet on the winning horse.
And I'll also point out that the high-def format war coincided with the video game format war between Xbox 360 and Playstation 3. And even though the sales figures for both consoles were comparable, Xbox 360 didn't have a built in HD DVD player, it was an add-on. The PS3 out of the box was also a blu-ray player, which made it a more attractive format in the first place as so many more people were already getting a player in their homes. Maybe it's a chicken-egg discussion, but it's plausible that Disney saw how PS3 was selling, knew that as a result there were already significantly more blu-ray players in homes than HD DVD and that was a factor in their decision to avoid HD DVD.

True. But some studios were doing both. And we all know Sony was going all in on this one having lost the Beta-VHS battle, even though Beta was the better format.

 

[slappy magoo]

True. But some studios were doing both. And we all know Sony was going all in on this one having lost the Beta-VHS battle, even though Beta was the better format.

True, that. AV quality just wasn't as important at the time as the convenience that VHS provided over Betamax. You could maybe get 3 movies on one betamax in extended play mode, if they were all short and you could find the 100 minute tapes (could only ever seem to find 90 minutes myself). But VHS gave you 6 hours in extended play. So you easily fit 3 movies recorded off of HBO on there, maybe even 4! Who cares if you can't make out facial features? VOLUME VOLUME VOLUME!

 

[LAKid53]

True, that. AV quality just wasn't as important at the time as the convenience that VHS provided over Betamax. You could maybe get 3 movies on one betamax in extended play mode, if they were all short and you could find the 100 minute tapes (could only ever seem to find 90 minutes myself). But VHS gave you 6 hours in extended play. So you easily fit 3 movies recorded off of HBO on there, maybe even 4! Who cares if you can't make out facial features? VOLUME VOLUME VOLUME!

Very, very true. Who cares if video quality declined as I recorded Law & Order over and over and over again on my 6 hour VHS? I just bought another tape at the grocery store.

 

[slappy magoo]

Very, very true. Who cares if video quality declined as I recorded Law & Order over and over and over again on my 6 hour VHS? I just bought another tape at the grocery store.

But if there were a movie coming on Showtime or HBO you knew you wanted to keep and you wanted it to look as sharp as possible but it was an hour and fifty minutes, the high quality of Betamax was irrelevant because you had to shift to long play. Bad enough you could never record a high quality copy of the Godfather 1 OR 2 without going to LP. Or worse, a classic movie was coming on your local PBS station, but you forgot it was pledge drive time, so the movie would go over 2 hours but you didn't know so you tried to be cognizant of pausing but then you screw up and don't really hit pause one time, then when you think you're hitting record, you're actually pausing so you get half of My Fair Lady and then a bunch of tuxedoed beggars offering you tote bags and umbrellas for $75.

 

[bjlc57]

Michael Eisner made one giant mistake ..Not hiring Katzenberg or promoting him to Disney President when Wells was killed.. To this day.. I believe the True Disney Dream died on that mountain top along with Disney President Wells..

 

[Goofyernmost]

Michael Eisner made one giant mistake ..Not hiring Katzenberg or promoting him to Disney President when Wells was killed.. To this day.. I believe the True Disney Dream died on that mountain top along with Disney President Wells..

I suppose, but, Eisner didn't like Katzenberg for whatever reason. Things went well with Wells because they were able to work together. I doubt that the Eisner/Katzenberg team would have had much success at collaboration. Also who's to say that Katzenberg had anywhere near the talent to manage that Wells had.

 

[danyoung56]

I'm actually surprised I don't have more misspelling given most of the posts were from a phone that's about two sizes too small for my hands.

Sorry. I know I come across snippy, but I don't really mean it. Most stuff is just funny to me!

 

[TrojanUSC]

He also destroyed Disney's cash machine. Eiser was responsible for pushing Disney movies into the homes and out of the theaters. Prior to Eiser if you wanted to see Snow White you waited the 7 or so years until Disney pushed it out to the theaters again or didn't see it at all. Eiser pushed all the movies out to make a fast buck, and while it has continued to serve them well as technology went from VHS to DVD to BluRay with each iteration given Disney the ability to resell the same movies over and over, the reality is when the movie gets to a format that doesn't require upgrading you don't get to make as much off the movie as before because there will be enough discs of the movie in circulation that it doesn't demand the same premium as before. It was only by luck that technology kept changing or the money Disney pulled in from classic movies would have pretty much dried up 20 years ago. Eiser was the poster boy for quick buck at the expense of long-term revenue.

Sorry but I do not know what planet you are on but releasing movies once every seven years in theater is not a good business model in the late 80s when literally every other studio was making moves to home video. It was seen, at the time, as the next great frontier for distribution. The company literally raked money in from home entertainment, both from sales of theatrical films and the cheesy direct-to-video sequels (though an argument can be made that these were bad for the brand). They, smartly, created the "Disney vault" mythology to entice buyers to purchase VHS tapes during a limited production run before it would be unavailable for an extended period. This allowed them to "eventize" the releases. Tons of market studies were done at the time that found families were unlikely to keep revisiting the theater for the same film but the home video market was lucrative as the films could be shown repeatedly to kids. Had Disney not ventured down this path, there would have been countless criticisms from industry analysts and shareholders would not have been happy. Again, every single studio was doing it.

As far as Eisner, he gets an incredibly bad reputation thanks to his last few years which were a disaster for the brand and the parks division. He sadly let the strategic planning group take over the company and it contributed greatly to lots of creative problems and this cost him his job. However, it must be remembered that Disney, when he came aboard, was a fledgling little company that most expected to be divided up and sold. It was his tenacity that led to the resurgence of Disney animation, the creation of Touchstone and Hollywood Pictures that proved enormously profitable and, of course, the acquisition of ABC which started Disney on becoming the behemoth they are today. On the parks side, it was Eisner who bought into the idea of untapped millions in Orlando and demanded international expansion of the business unit. In Florida, they built a record-number of hotels, massively improved the dining offerings (until the Dining Plan came along and ruined them again) and built two new very popular theme parks, along with two water parks. Those who think his tenure was somehow bad for the company or an unmitigated failure clearly haven't done their research.

 

[thomas998]

Sorry but I do not know what planet you are on but releasing movies once every seven years in theater is not a good business model in the late 80s when literally every other studio was making moves to home video. It was seen, at the time, as the next great frontier for distribution. The company literally raked money in from home entertainment, both from sales of theatrical films and the cheesy direct-to-video sequels (though an argument can be made that these were bad for the brand). They, smartly, created the "Disney vault" mythology to entice buyers to purchase VHS tapes during a limited production run before it would be unavailable for an extended period. This allowed them to "eventize" the releases. Tons of market studies were done at the time that found families were unlikely to keep revisiting the theater for the same film but the home video market was lucrative as the films could be shown repeatedly to kids. Had Disney not ventured down this path, there would have been countless criticisms from industry analysts and shareholders would not have been happy. Again, every single studio was doing it.

As far as Eisner, he gets an incredibly bad reputation thanks to his last few years which were a disaster for the brand and the parks division. He sadly let the strategic planning group take over the company and it contributed greatly to lots of creative problems and this cost him his job. However, it must be remembered that Disney, when he came aboard, was a fledgling little company that most expected to be divided up and sold. It was his tenacity that led to the resurgence of Disney animation, the creation of Touchstone and Hollywood Pictures that proved enormously profitable and, of course, the acquisition of ABC which started Disney on becoming the behemoth they are today. On the parks side, it was Eisner who bought into the idea of untapped millions in Orlando and demanded international expansion of the business unit. In Florida, they built a record-number of hotels, massively improved the dining offerings (until the Dining Plan came along and ruined them again) and built two new very popular theme parks, along with two water parks. Those who think his tenure was somehow bad for the company or an unmitigated failure clearly haven't done their research.

The number say otherwise when you compare the money they pulled in from rereleasing movies vs outright sales of the movies on VHS. The Disney Vault you speak of was created after the made the Eisner move and dumped the movies onto the market. It was an attempt to put the genie back in the bottle. If they had never sold the classics (Snow White, Cinderella, Peter Pan etc.) they could have easily kept printing money year after year. Rerelease Disney classic every quarter over and over... And the market studies supported that plan. There are only a certain type of Disney movie that wouldn't have worked because they would have been dated, like the awful life action movie such as Super Dad. What you are failing to realize is that while a family wouldn't take little Billy to see Peter Pan every year, by the time they release Peter Pan 7 years later little Billy was no longer their target audience it was now little Billy's little brother or the neighbor's kid. So think a family wouldn't go back doesn't hold up, the years that they did those types of releases proved that it was a viable strategy.