Word: walts
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...will break ground this summer for a $2 billion Euro Disneyland near Paris, which is expected to open in 1992. At the Florida park, Disney is building $1.4 billion worth of new attractions. In animation, the company aims to release one new feature-length fantasy every year, an ambition Walt never achieved. Two are due in 1988: Who Framed Roger Rabbit? in June and Oliver and Company at Thanksgiving time. And coming to a mall near you is a Disney Store in which the company will sell thousands of licensed products, ranging from Rock Around the Mouse records to software...
Eisner's revival of Disney has made him the current king of Hollywood and the darling of Wall Street. More important, though, is that Disney fans have begun to recognize him as a corporate hero of sorts, a long-awaited, trustworthy heir to Walt. Eisner has established himself as a charismatic, young-dad figure by appearing each week as the host of the Disney Sunday Movie, where the husky-voiced executive clowns with Mickey, Minnie and other colleagues. "This job is so perfect for him," says Dawn Steel, president of Columbia Pictures and a former co-worker at Paramount...
Like so many companies started by a brilliant, autocratic entrepreneur, Disney almost did not recover from the loss of its original leader. Even though Walt, who formed the company with his brother Roy in 1923, was never talented enough as a drafter to draw most of the characters he invented, or even to duplicate his trademark signature for autograph seekers, he was a one- man show. As corporate legend has it, Disney dictated the entire narrative of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) from memory as his animators scribbled the tale onto storyboards. When Disney died...
...Walt Disney's successors were terrified of tampering with what had been a winning formula. When contemplating new ideas, they constantly wondered aloud, "What would Walt have done?" During the 1970s, Disney's top executives allowed the creative side of the company to wither while they focused their attention on real estate development, which seemed a surer bet. This outraged the largest individual stockholder, the late Roy Disney's son, also named Roy, who owned 3% of the company. "I remember thinking that if that pattern went on much longer, the company would become a museum in honor of Walt...
...longtime heir apparent at Disney was Ron Miller, Walt's shy but well- meaning son-in-law, who was made chief executive in 1983. Miller gamely tried to push the company out of Walt's shadow, primarily by starting Touchstone Pictures to enable Disney to produce adult fare without compromising the company's image. In 1984 the Touchstone label produced Disney's first hit in more than a decade, Splash, in which Daryl Hannah played a frisky mermaid. But by then the company's profits and stock price were already plunging. The same day that Disney released the film...