Word: disney
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...cathedral of popular culture whose saints were mice and ducks, virgin princesses and lurking sprites, little boys made of wood and little girls lost in wonderland. Virtually every child attended this secular church, took fear and comfort from its doctrines, and finally outgrew it. The achievement of the Walt Disney Co. under Eisner has been to recapture the audience's childhood and extend it into adolescence and beyond. Today customers keep coming back to the movies and theme parks long after they have outgrown short pants...
...most American children of the past half-century, a Disney cartoon feature was the sacred destination of their first trip to the movies. Disney taught kids what a film could be -- how it could blend sight and sound into enthralling art, how it could salve your soul and scare you to tears. Alone in the dark, awed by images bigger and bolder than any dream, children shuddered through a skein of traumas that Walt had devised for them: the outrage of kidnaping (Pinocchio), the ridicule of deformity (Dumbo), the death of a mother (Bambi). Long before the '80s scourge...
...Walt Disney was of course more than America's story-spinning uncle; he was the canniest businessman in Hollywood. His credo might have been the Jesuits': Give me a child before he's seven, and he will be mine for life. Once this shaman-showman had seized kids' minds, he could raid their piggy banks. And on that mountain of pennies he could build an empire. His cartoons and feature films sired comic books, toys, hit songs (Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?, When You Wish upon a Star, Zip-A-Dee Doo-Dah) and the ubiquitous Mickey...
...Anaheim theme park -- and filled it with old cartoons and his avuncular presence. When a Disneyland serial about Indian Fighter Davy Crockett stoked a brief frenzy for coonskin caps, the studio quickly sutured the three episodes together and released them as a theatrical feature. Minimal expenditures, more revenue. Then Disney launched an afternoon program, The Mickey Mouse Club, which introduced the Mouseketeers, a troupe of child stars who cavorted like stagestruck Cub Scouts and intoned the show's anthem-hymn ("Who's the leader of the club/ That's made...
...Film Historian Lewis Jacobs saluted Walt Disney as the "virtuoso of the film medium." Twenty years later, this Hollywood Paderewski was playing mostly Muzak. His studio's artistic growth had been stunted, by both the | demand for new product in two mediums and the creeping conservatism that afflicts almost any burgeoning corporation. Yet Disney was always a visionary entrepreneur; he still had magic to do. In the 1950s Disney made three business decisions that would sustain his company until the Eisner years. Decades later, they would profoundly affect the movie business...