Word: eisner
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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This time creativity carried the day, and the Eisner-Wells team took charge in September 1984. The Disney board ousted Miller, while voting Roy to the post of vice chairman. The Eisner-Wells duo flew immediately to Fort Worth to enlist support from Sid Bass, whose family was amassing a stake in the company (currently 17%). Bass was so impressed with Eisner and Wells that he promised to hold the stock for five years, an unusual commitment that would make Disney far less vulnerable to further takeover troubles...
...Eisner had been a latecomer as a Disney fan. Growing up on Manhattan's Park Avenue, he seldom watched TV or went to the movies. Eisner's parents -- his father a lawyer-entrepreneur and his mother the president of a medical- research institute -- strictly rationed his pop-culture consumption. Recalls Eisner: "For every hour of television I watched, I had to read for two hours." Eisner dabbled in premed studies as a freshman at Ohio's Denison University, but eventually found better chemistry in the literature and theater departments. The first time he saw a Disney film was several years...
...animators have plenty on their drawing boards besides feature films. Disney's DuckTales, the daily adventures of Scrooge McDuck and his grandnephews Huey, Dewey and Louie, is TV's No. 1 syndicated cartoon show. Gummi Bears, a Saturday-morning program on NBC, was largely Eisner's idea, based on a son's fondness for the rubbery candy animals...
While traffic at the parks was robust, new attractions were needed to lure repeat customers. When Eisner and company took over, some rides were growing corny with age, especially in the Tomorrowland section of the parks, as real- life events were surpassing Disney's futurism. Says Eisner: "The park has to be extremely contemporary. If it's not, the kids won't think it's a rad place to be. If it's not innovative, then intelligent people will be bored or go somewhere else...
...famed Walt Disney Imagineering group, a department of artists and engineers that Walt first assembled in 1952 to build Disneyland, had been sharply cut back before Eisner came aboard. He promptly revived the Imagineers, but with a difference. The group began to collaborate with the hottest show-business talent available, a strategy that enabled Disney to give its theme parks an immediate injection of Hollywood hipness. Enter Michael Jackson, who was recruited by Eisner to help write and star in Captain Eo, a 17-minute, $17 million movie musical in 3-D. Even more spectacular is Star Tours...