Let’s be clear: I hate Disney and always have.
Didn’t like their cartoons as a kid, and I like their recent ones even less. I was a Warner Bros./Tex Avery child — and always will be. Give me Bugs and the gang, Heckle & Jeckle*, and Droopy Dog any day. Those were characters with personality, and who always comformed to the One Rule of Cartoon Humor.
The One Rule is: Half-naked animals with speech impediments abusing each other for no good reason is always funny. Disney always tried to take your breath away with their cartoons, and usually succeeded. And while “breathtaking” is a fine thing in Gothic cathedrels, mountain sunsets, and pricy breast enlargements, from cartoons I expect simply to be entertained.
And Disney’s corporate culture left me cold, too. Walt’s strange personal habits. His hypocritical diktats (like the one that his employees must be clean-shaven, while he wore a mustache). The enforced cheerfulness — vee haff vays uf making you haff fun. You are haffing fun, ja? Ugh.
So it’s with no small feeling of schadenfreude that I read this:
Roy Disney’s grass-roots effort to oust Disney CEO Michael Eisner appears to be paying off.
In a regulatory filing yesterday, Disney board member George Mitchell said the company is stepping up discussions to find a successor to Eisner.
The admission was made in two letters sent recently to institutional shareholders.
The letters, which were made public yesterday, said that while such discussions have taken place in the past they are now “more formal and frequent, and extremely detailed.”
And then this:
In a stunning move, cable TV giant Comcast Corp. (CMCSA) 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.
Vee haff vays uf mekking you take the golden parachute. You vill take the golden parachute, ja, Michael?
*Is anyone still showing the old Heckle & Jeckle cartoons? They were my favorites.
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