Progress City, U.S.A.

Let’s just cut to the chase – I’m a big fan of The Great Mouse Detective.

I’m also a firm believer that this modest 1986 feature is one of the most underrated gems in the Disney animated canon; more than just a solid stepping stone on the way to the later renaissance of feature animation, it’s a very entertaining film in its own right with more than its share of big ideas, funny moments, and interesting animation. To say that the film is overlooked is an understatement; it’s received little attention from the company since its release more than twenty (!) years ago, and I’d venture to guess that a number of fans have never even seen or heard of it.

The Great Mouse Detective (I prefer, rather pedantically, to call it by its development title Basil of Baker Street) has returned to home video via the rather absurdly titled “Mystery in the Mist” edition. Apparently all earlier releases were either some degree less mysterious or misty. I couldn’t detect the difference, but I assume it must be there since it’s in the title.

Anyway, this new edition, which hit stores on April 13th, 2010, is a rather bare-bones affair, with a brief making-of feature that was pulled from an earlier DVD release as its only bonus feature of note. The only new material here is a bizarre little featurette only tangentially related to the film, as well as the requisite slew of new trailers and promo videos. But, for the uninitiated, let’s first take a look at the film itself.

The Film

Dr. Dawson and Olivia Flaversham meet Basil of Baker Street, the Great Mouse Detective

In 1985, the Disney animation studios reached what is considered their lowest ebb when The Black Cauldron flopped upon release. As the recent documentary Waking Sleeping Beauty points out, Disney was defeated at the box office that year by the bottom-drawer TV spinoff The Care Bears Movie. A year later, in July of 1986, The Great Mouse Detective arrived in theaters.

The film was a smaller, leaner production than The Black Cauldron; that earlier release had been in development for around a decade, while Mouse Detective was made on a much smaller budget and a much tighter schedule. It was also the first of the Disney features to be predominantly created by the new generation of talent at the studio; directing alongside veteran storyman & animator Burny Mattinson and animator David Michener were Ron Clements and John Musker, who would famously go on to direct The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, and most recently The Princess and the Frog.

Based on a series of stories by author Eve Titus, The Great Mouse Detective takes place in the fog-shrouded gaslight era London of 1890. It depicts a world in which mice live in a society parallel to our own, with their own houses, pubs, and palaces carved out of the urban clutter. The titular Basil of Baker Street is a detective of great renown in the animal world; his signature magnifying glass, pipe, violin and deerstalker hat mirroring those of his more famous upstairs neighbor at 221B Baker Street, the human detective Sherlock Holmes.

Dr. Dawson and Basil of Baker Street consult with a new client

From his office beneath Holmes’s townhouse, Basil has made a name for himself by solving innumerable crimes through his combination of forensic science and good old-fashioned detective work. Even the great Basil’s skills, though, are taxed when faced with the nefarious schemes of his mortal nemesis (and the world’s greatest criminal mind) – the vile Professor Ratigan.

We’re introduced to Basil and his world via young Olivia Flaversham, daughter of a great mouse inventor and toymaker, who has just seen her father mousenapped by a gang of thugs. Alone on the streets of London, Olivia meets Dr. David Q. Dawson, just returned from the war in Afghanistan (!); as the rodent stand-in for the famous Dr. Watson, Dawson acts as our narrator throughout the film. The two meet up with Basil, enlist his help in finding Flaversham’s father, and in the process uncover an elaborate scheme by the evil Ratigan that threatens the very fabric of the Empire itself.

The insidious Professor Ratigan

The film is great fun; it moves at a very quick pace but never seems rushed or frantic. The characters are all appealing, and there’s some really fantastic voice work across the board. Most notable is Vincent Price’s work as Ratigan, a larger than life character that Price later would say was one of his favorite roles. Ratigan is a great villain and actually quite menacing; more to the point, he’s interesting, which always helps.

Basil himself is great fun as a character, exuding a kind of manic energy that is both simultaneously in control of every situation but also just a hair’s breadth from running completely off of the rails. Basil is cool but awkward, confident and insightful but often oblivious. He’s a really fun character that Disney has completely abandoned – it occurred to me as I watched that while it seemed obscene to make two or three sequels to Cinderella, it would be perfectly natural and actually quite worthwhile to continue the serialized exploits of Basil. Barrie Ingham, who voices Basil, and Val Bettin as Dr. Dawson play well off of each other, and their brief appearance together in the making-of featurette was far too brief for my tastes.

The young Ms. Flaversham is equally well-executed, taking a character that could be irritating or saccharine and making her genuinely sweet. Her father, inventor Hiram Flaversham, receives a familiar Scottish brogue courtesy of Scrooge McDuck himself, Alan Young. Long-time character actor Candy Candido contributes his trademark gravelly croak to “a peg-legged bat with a broken wing,” and the great Basil Rathbone himself has a brief cameo as the voice of Sherlock Holmes.

Visually, the film has its highs and lows. The production design is by turns moody and cozy, and goes a great job of creating a very lived-in world for the characters. There are a lot of neat ideas and even “Easter eggs” – look for visual tributes to Dumbo, the Firehouse Five, and even the airship Hyperion! Overall the animation is quite good, but there are some glaring exceptions. Character animation on the leads is mostly great; Basil is dashing, and evokes Errol Flynn at times. Dawson is suitably pleasant, and young Flaversham is as cute as a young Scottish mouse should be. Their animation is fluid and full of detail, as are most incidental characters – there’s a lot of interesting character design here, and even bit roles and background characters seem very evocative of the period. Where things get rough, though, are the group scenes; the animation seems much more crude in the musical numbers especially. In one particular song the mouths of the “chorus” seem out of sync with the lyrics, and this makes me wonder if something musically was changed very late in the process. But while the crowd scenes seem dodgy due to a lack of time or money (or both!), there’s still a lot of great animation to be found. The exception among the main characters, unfortunately, is Professor Ratigan, who is hampered on occasion by lead animator Glen Keane’s trademark…. overexuberance.

No mention of the film’s animation would be complete without discussing the famous climax inside Big Ben’s tower at Westminster Palace, which marks the earliest prominent use of computer-assisted animation in a Disney feature. Computers were used to render the complex machinery inside the clockwork mechanism, allowing for complex and fluid camera movements within the whirling gears and cogs. The effect still works; perhaps due to its relative simplicity, or the appropriate meshing of technique and subject matter, the scene within Big Ben is still exciting, well staged, and impressive. It remains among the great action finales in Disney films and is a far more organic integration of computer-generated imagery than even many recent features.

Seriously, it’s really cool

In the end, perhaps one of the most entertaining aspects of the film is how different it feels from anything you’d get from Disney today. Everything aside from the title feels like it never saw a focus group, and there’s loads of stuff that feels downright bizarre in today’s pasteurized world – both Basil and Ratigan smoke, booze of various sorts flows freely throughout (“Rodent’s Delight”!), people are drugged and kidnapped and murdered, stilettos and daggers fly through the air, people wave guns around, and, oh yeah, there’s totally a showgirl mouse doing a striptease.

Yeah, you heard me.

I’ll just say that if you ever wanted to hear Melissa Manchester sing a song she penned for a showgirl mouse in a rundown sewer-side tavern, this is the film for you. There are a couple of other songs in the film by Henry Mancini, who also contributes the musical score.

Yeah, seriously, I was totally not kidding

All in all it’s a good time, and well worth checking out if you’ve missed it over the years.

The DVD

As mentioned, this new release is titled, rather ridiculously, the “Mystery in the Mist Edition”. Aside from a new transfer there’s nothing new of worth here; if you have the previous pressing of the disc you’re not missing anything. Well, unless you care that the new transfer includes the film’s original title cards whereas the previous DVD’s titles are from the film’s 1992 re-release when it was billed as The Adventures of the Great Mouse Detective.

Video & Audio

It looks good; really good, in fact. Most of the film’s action takes place in the span of a single night so the film is generally darker than most, but the colors in the new transfer were richer than I remembered. It’s far from washed out and it’s mostly free from dust and various other artifacts of its age. It’s good to see Disney at least giving a lesser-known film a respectful digital cleanup. The film is presented in the 1.78:1 aspect ratio.

The soundtrack, in Dolby Digital 5.1, is nice and clear, but due to its age doesn’t feature a lot of fancy surround effects. There’s some nice swooping sounds when Basil and Ratigan are soaring around London in dirigibles, but otherwise it’s just a good, high-quality audio track.

Bonus Materials

There’s not a lot here as far as bonus materials, which is a real shame. The making-of featurette, The Making Of “The Great Mouse Detective” (7:50) is ported from the previous DVD release and looks to have come directly from some television special in the 1980s. It’s fun to see young animators like Glen Keane at work, as well as Vincent Price and the other voice talent. Roy E. Disney also makes a welcome appearance. But it would have been even better to have some current interviews, and perhaps a better look at the actual creative process behind the film and the groundwork it laid for later features.

Also from the original DVD release is a Sing-Along Song for Professor Ratigan’s number, The World’s Greatest Criminal Mind.

New to this release is an odd little nut of a feature called So You Think You Can Sleuth? (4:40). From the blurb on the DVD package, I thought this was going to be one of those awful set-top games that appear on every release. Instead, it’s a short summary of the history of private detectives and forensic science, which culminates in a “mystery” for the viewer to solve. You’re presented with a mystery, conveyed via static black-and-white photos, in which you must determine whether your mother, father, sister, or slouchy unemployed uncle stole all the cookies from the kitchen. It all happens so quickly that you don’t really get a chance to realize how strange it all is until it’s over.

And that’s pretty much it. There are the requisite trailers for upcoming Disney films, which are pushed via the irritating “FastPlay” feature, and this really creepy thing with the actors from The Suite Life trying to hype kids up to pester their parents into buying a Blu-ray player (ironic, since Disney didn’t see fit to release The Great Mouse Detective on Blu-ray). That little gem is even listed as a “Bonus Feature” on the DVD package. Sad. Then there’s one more promo video, which is perhaps the strangest thing I’ve ever seen on a Disney DVD. It starts off like a trailer, and for the life of me I thought it was a promotion for the next video in the Tinkerbell franchise. Oh, look it’s Pixie Hollow. Oh, Pixie Hollow is in danger. Oh, it’s because of DVD piracy.

What?

Yes. According to Disney, and I swear this is true, DVD piracy will DESTROY THE MAGIC OF PIXIE HOLLOW FOREVER. So the next time you start up bittorrent, please remember: you’re killing Tinkerbell. Sleep tight, kids!

The Shallow Stuff (aka the Package)

The Great Mouse Detective comes in a standard-issue black keepcase with a cardboard slipcover. The cover art is the typical eye-gougingly awful Disney marketing artwork with off-model characters crammed in the frame accompanied by bare-bones Adobe Illustrator fonts. There’s no artwork on the disc, and no inserts in the case aside from a coupon for 100 Disney Movie Rewards points and a flier for, again, Disney Blu-ray.

In Summary…

I find this film really, really enjoyable. I think it’s underrated and fun, and really kicked off the renaissance of Disney animation in style. Yet it’s hardly heeded even in fan circles; in the recent film Waking Sleeping Beauty little is said about it except for the controversy surrounding its title change, and much more attention is given to the subsequent Disney release Oliver & Company. Perhaps this is understandable as Oliver was a more profitable release; while The Great Mouse Detective was a modest success it was bested at the box office by Don Bluth’s An American Tail. But The Great Mouse Detective has aged far better than Oliver; the story feels more timeless and less calculated.

While this “Mystery in the Mist” edition has little to recommend it in the way of bonus features, it’s still worth checking out if you’ve passed on previous releases or somehow missed the film altogether. The film’s the thing, after all, and this is a good one.

Click to buy

This trip to the misty moors of Never Never World is less entertaining than most, as it lacks that most important element of any good story about unbuilt attractions – pictures! Unlike many of our other stories, too, this is not a project that Disney had committed to building or negotiations that they initiated themselves. Still, it’s an interesting and poorly known event in EPCOT’s history and certainly caught my eye.

After Walt Disney Productions announced the World Showcase project in 1974, they approached dozens of nations about participating in the new development. Over the years, though, this recruitment proved difficult. The 1970s weren’t a time of economic prosperity for anyone, and it was difficult to convince politicians to part with millions of dollars for theme park attractions when they had to worry about their next election. When the EPCOT Center concept was re-announced in 1978, with a combined Future World and World Showcase, Disney abandoned attempts to recruit governmental participation. Instead, they selected a short list of desirable nations and focused on approaching corporations in those countries who were used to spending money for advertising purposes.

This approach allowed Disney to recoup some of the costs of building the international pavilions, which weren’t able to profit from the deep pockets of American industry like the Future World attractions, and it allowed EPCOT to feature some key nations whose governments hadn’t been willing to participate. Unfortunately, it also limited the scope of the pavilions to what could be supported by willing sponsor companies; this generally meant the elimination of intended ride attractions in favor of shops and restaurants. It also meant that nations without willing companies, like Spain, were left for later; the long-planned Equatoral Africa showcase was abandoned because the only companies Disney could find to sponsor the pavilion were located in apartheid-era South Africa.

After Phase I of World Showcase had been built, later additions were supposed to have been funded by the nations themselves. This can be seen by the Moroccan government funding their national pavilion, but the scheme was obviously abandoned as Norwegian corporations helped support that pavilion’s construction in 1988; no other pavilions have been added to the park since.

We know the most prominent failed attempts to build pavilions afterwards; the 1990s saw talks break down with the Russians and the Swiss, and there was another botched attempt to bring Spain to EPCOT earlier in this decade. These were Disney-initiated talks, as far as I can tell; the only public attempt that I can recall of an outside party trying to solicit participation was also in this decade, when Korean businessmen spoke to the press about trying to interest Disney in a South Korea pavilion.

Then there’s this story, which dates all the way back to 1986. Back then, when Disney was still in the business of adding to World Showcase, there were serious attempts by the Indian government to secure their own place in EPCOT.

INDIA APPROACHES DISNEY ABOUT EPCOT PAVILION
THE ORLANDO SENTINEL – Thursday, December 18, 1986
By John Hill of The Sentinel Staff

Representatives of Walt Disney World and the government of India will meet Friday to discuss the possibility of that country opening a pavilion at Walt Disney World’s Epcot Center, both groups said Wednesday.

But the spokesmen cautioned that the discussions are preliminary and that no agreement is likely soon.

”We have been working at it for quite some time,” said Vijay Kumar, political officer at the Indian Embassy in Washington. ”We have been in touch with Epcot , but it is still in the very basic stages.”

P.K. Kaul, India ’s ambassador to the United States, will meet with Disney officials Friday, Kumar said. Kaul could not be reached for comment.

Kumar said the Indian government has no specific plans for a pavilion but wants to find out what Disney would require if one were built.

Bob Mervine, a Disney spokesman, said the company gets inquiries from foreign governments and developers ”regularly” about building new pavilions in Epcot ’s World Showcase. While the company is satisfied with the 10 pavilions it has now, he said, there is room for seven or eight more.

”At this point we are basically reacting to queries that are coming to us,” Mervine said.

Any addition would have to complement the existing pavilions in the Epcot complex, Mervine said. It would have to be an entertaining exhibit in itself, he said, and would have to provide its own financing.

The 10 existing pavilions at the Epcot complex represent Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Japan, Morocco, the United States, Germany, Italy, China and Mexico. An eleventh pavilion, for Norway, is under construction.

Mervine said Disney has heard suggestions for pavilions featuring Africa, Spain, Israel and Soviet Union but has no plans now to build any of those.

As I mentioned, Disney would later take second looks at adding both Spain and Russia to their roster; India, though, hasn’t been mentioned publicly since. I’m sure that the original plans for EPCOT in the early 1970s involved some discussion with India, and it’s possible that some design work was done at that time, but aside from this article the participation of India really wasn’t mentioned after the final official pavilion lineup was announced in 1978. Personally, I think this is a shame. India is a nation rich with history, art, architecture and folklore. And really quite wonderful food. There would be a wealth of material from with to draw; more than a single pavilion could hold. While India now gets some slight representation in the Animal Kingdom, that has more to do with architecture and animals than with the culture itself.

India is one of the world’s largest nations, and has become a burgeoning economic engine in recent years; it’s a market, in fact, that Disney has doggedly attempted to penetrate. Perhaps, in all these megamillion-dollar deals for film distribution, merchandising and television outlets, a case could be made for a pavilion at EPCOT?

Previously, on as the Eisner turns, we’d seen our doughty new CEO wrap up his first complete year at the helm of Disney alongside his stalwart counterpart Frank Wells. Profits were on the rise, due in no small part to Eisner’s affinity for raising prices at the popular Disney resorts while cutting costs. There had also been a great expansion in film and television production, as Eisner focused less on new investments in the theme parks and more on expanding the studio’s release slate. Projects initiated under previous management, like the Disney Channel, Touchstone Pictures and a European Disneyland, continued to develop. Work also began on plans for the Disney-MGM Studios park in Florida, as well as a studio-themed attraction to be built on property adjoining Disney’s actual studio lot in Burbank.

More important for us, though, is that 1986 marks the first time that Eisner signs the annual letter to stockholders by himself, claiming that Frank Wells decided that Eisner should go it alone with his inimitable folksy style. This means less formal recitation of statistics than in Eisner’s first two years, and the advent of the pseudo self-deprecating homespun references that would turn the shareholder reports into annual letters from wacky Uncle Mike. We get our first solid mentions of the Eisner kids – those lovable scamps! – and even some in-laws to boot. From now on, the letters would become triptychs through the Disney world – a year in the life of Uncle Mike. So allons-y!

To Our Owners and Fellow Disney Employees,

This annual report marks the third since Frank Wells and I have come into the company, and I thought (or rather Frank thought) that I should write our report in the same somewhat informal style that I frequently use during the year to fill in your Board of Directors.

Last year we began this annual letter with an exclamation: “what a year it’s been!” Some of us felt that bold statement could be bad luck, that it might never happen again, and that we were being too confident. (Of course during my eight years at Paramount, in moments of uncertainty, I felt every successful movie or television series we had was the last hit we would ever have – maybe the last good idea or good movie any living person would ever see – but luckily it was not.) We let the “great year” statement stand.

I begin the 1986 report by saying, “What a Year It’s Been! II, The Sequel!” But 1986 was not merely a sequel to 1985. It topped it, and revenues and earnings (naturally gratifying because that is how we are judged); surging attendance at our parks; an impressive number of live-action hit movies (defying my usual fears); a widening presence in network television and syndication; continued vigorous growth of The Disney Channel; the development of new markets and business relationships in mainland China and Europe.

Revenues climbed to nearly $2.5 billion during fiscal 1986 from some $2 billion the previous year, an increase of 23 percent, and this increase occurred during a time of relatively low inflation. Net income rose 43 percent to more than $247 million, or $1.82 per share, up from $173.5 million or $1.29 per share in fiscal 1985.

For the second straight year, those results set company records. Equally important, earnings per share more than doubled 1984 levels and return on equity continued its improvement to 19 percent. (Three or four years ago, as a relief from reading mediocre scripts and treatments, I read books and articles on how to manage during times of rapid inflation; I cannot really say it was a waste of time, for I can now recognize how truly significant our progress has been given the current period of modest inflation.)

Our fiscal 1986 financial results are given the full attention they merit in other sections of this report, and I am sure they will be studied and restudied by business experts in the months ahead. For me they constitute no more, no less than a numerical representation of the countless exceptional accomplishments of Disney employees during the period.

Of course I love the figures, but what these numbers cannot convey is the long-range significance of those accomplishments and their portent for the years ahead. We are convinced that many of these achievements are merely an early indication of an enormous reawakening at Disney, a renaissance sure to occur when talented new people blend their fresh ideas with our company’s traditional values.

Considering that heritage and the specific achievements of 1986 – covered in detail in the pages that follow – our company expects to be increasingly successful into the 1990’s.

In addition to being the industry leader in theme parks and resorts, the strongest reason for a lot of our optimism is the remarkable progress that continues in our motion picture operations. Almost overnight Disney became number one in average box office gross for all titles released in 1986 and among industry leaders in overall box office results – by far the most successful live-action film year in the company’s history.

We turned out quality films… on schedule… under tight budgets, and we began to prove that we can produce them in the quantity expected of a major studio. We have a team of executives, led by Jeffery Katzenberg, Rich Frank and Roy Disney, who work exceptionally well together. We have a good time and share the pain of the creative process, which is always a difficult one. To succeed, the cross-utilization of resources and ideas is critical. When I come to the studio with what I think are the most original thoughts (mostly arrived at by stealing an episode involving my children, their friends, their mother, their doctors, dentists, coaches or our 16-year-old’s girlfriend) only to hear how we already have that idea in development, I return to my office knowing not only do others have good ideas but comedic home lives as well. We have fun collaborating, and more than occasionally move forward on a movie or television idea that sounds original.

Just as we have expanded our moviemaking capacity, we have taken steps to assure that our films will be properly financed. As you can tell so far in this letter, as confident as we are, we are also extremely cautious. So, to help us sleep through the whole night, it’s gratifying to know that Silver Screen Partners II and III, both limited partnerships, have raised almost half a billion dollars, demonstrating the financial community’s continued confidence in the Walt Disney Studio team.

Another significant achievement continues in network television. Last year “Golden Girls” received 15 Emmy Award nominations and won for best comedy series. It remains among the top ten rated programs this season.

Equally important, “The Disney Sunday Movie,” which returned last February, has built additional momentum. These weekly movies not only keep the Disney name in the public consciousness today, thus promoting our parks and consumer products, but promise to be extremely valuable in syndication here and abroad. Its success is particularly pleasing to all of us because it takes so much work.

By doing the host spots, I have confirmed that I still stoop and I still speak too quickly, but I am happy to report my son’s threat that he would never again go to school if I hosted “The Disney Sunday Movie” did not become a reality.

In a little more than a year, syndication has emerged as a major new revenue stream for the company. Again a great group of executives have forged a company that deserves much more space in this letter than the printers will allow.

Two other areas providing growing revenue streams are The Disney Channel and Home Video. The channel boosted subscribership 25 percent in 1986, while the Video Division led the industry in almost every category. My dilemma is how do I adequately show you how wonderful these executives are and how well they are running their areas? Trust me!

Okay – now to the gold!

Under Dick Nunis, things are happening at the parks that should attract visitors far into the future. The Disney-MGM Studio Tour, about 18 months from completion, will represent a third gated attraction in Florida and give Walt Disney World a whole new dimension. The studio itself will provide facilities we increasingly need as we reach full stride in movie production.

If Walt Disney World, Disneyland and Tokyo Disneyland are any indication, we’re got a lot to look forward to near Paris. Euro Disneyland will open there sometime around 1991 in a suburb 20 miles east of the city. Finally, and to my parents’ great satisfaction, my high school French will pay off, of course with some additional tutoring.

By now “Captain Eo” (our 3-D Michael Jackson event film) is hardly a secret. It opened at Walt Disney World and Disneyland in September to an astonishing response. And yesterday I rode our finished George Lucas “Star Tours” ride which is beyond “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.”

We brought “Circus Fantasy” to Disneyland last spring. It was such a hit that a similar show will return this March. In the fall, a traditional state fair sure to attract large audiences will be staged in the park, and earlier this month, I saw our plans for a Halloween themed “kind-of-scary” weekend at Disneyland that also proves we do not always need new steel and concrete attractions (capital investment) to attract guests.

Meanwhile, we’ve turned our attention to satisfying a real need at Walt Disney World – more hotel rooms on the property. Our first step was to complete a major expansion of existing Disney facilities.

Next, we broke ground for The Grand Floridian Beach Resort, due to open in 1988 with 900 new rooms. We also plan extensive, moderate-priced lodgings, again filling a demonstrated need.

For those of us who enjoy the development of movies and television, hotel development is our new and exciting challenge at Disney. I know that while budgets, strategy meetings, overhead expense discussions and other management responsibilities are crucial and necessary for proper returns on your investment, creative development, as my 13-year-old says, is “rad.”

Worldwide, enthusiasm for Disney consumer produces continues to grow, with items from high-quality apparel and watches to books and toys being licensed on six continents. (My in-laws loved the Mickey Mouse outdoor thermometer we gave them for Christmas.) By the way, this year, for the first time, Disney publications will be sold in Hungary and Yugoslavia.

Florida-based Arvida Disney Corporation continues to pursue a wide range of enterprises. At scores of Sun Belt sites in the Southeast and California, Arvida is planning and building homes, shopping centers, hotels and leisure-living facilities.

While The Walt Disney Company continues to be driven from a creative point of view, we now have the financial sophistication and vigor to complement our entertainment strengths. Under the direction of Gary Wilson, our executive vice president and chief financial officer, we have assembled a strong and experienced financial management team and have put into place the discipline and controls necessary to achieve our continued growth.

I have always believed that the creative process must be contained in what we call the “financial box,” financial parameters that creative people can “work” in – but the “box” is tight, controlled and responsible. Gary Wilson has the key to the “box.”

Our primary goal is to maximize shareholder wealth by maintaining earnings growth with high capital productivity. Gary has established a strategic planning group to guide us toward achieving this goal.

We see vast potential in Europe and Asia. That thought was on our minds in October when we went to mainland China to announce an agreement to air our weekly half-hour animated cartoon series, “Mickey and Donald,” on the China Central Television Network.

The trip was one of the most interesting five days I have had at Disney. Maybe it was interesting to me because we are “in” early and can see the great potential there; maybe because we targeted a goal toward a China policy and, under Frank’s guidance, we realized that goal; maybe because the unknown and mysterious to me has now become clear and touchable; or maybe because I was simply happy to get back to the office. Or maybe it was all of the above, plus sharing the trip with my 8-year-old, who now knows his father better and had real knowledge and “I know more than you” on a subject like China that he can use against his older brothers.

Our prospects look uncommonly bright, now and for the future.

The fundamentals are in place. The name “Disney” retains its old magic. The strength of the company as a whole stands behind each of our individual enterprises. The opportunities remain boundless.

Most of all today’s Team Disney – 32,000 employees whose common ground is loyalty and energy and imagination – stands ready to carry our successful company forward into the 90’s.

I guess in a way we must deal with this success the way we deal with our children. We know our children are the best, the brightest, the most attractive, but we should be restrained in our enthusiasm. However, it’s hard to show humility when I am likely to start 1987’s letter with yet another parody – maybe even “The Son of What A Year It’s Been!”

Frank Wells and I send warm regards.

December 15, 1986

Michael D. Eisner

Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

So, that’s another year down.

Note that Eisner leads with news from the studio; indeed it had been the most moribund segment of Disney’s business before Eisner arrived and expanded the production slate. Low budget live-action comedies Down and Out in Beverly Hills and Ruthless People brought in the highest grosses, alongside the Scorcese-directed drama The Color of Money.

For all the talk of “fresh blood,” though, big profits were taken from re-releases; over the course of the year the studio reissued 101 Dalmatians, Sleeping Beauty, Lady and the Tramp, and – yes – Song of the South (which I saw in the Flick theater in Shelby, N.C.).

Speaking of movies, note Eisner’s odd lack of confidence in his own products. I find it an odd admission that he’s always surprised that their releases don’t flop. Also note the sinister talk about Gary Wilson holding the key to the “financial box” in which the “creative” people must work. Then there’s a throwaway line about Wilson creating the strategic planning group. To Disney fans, that’s like finding a one-paragraph mention of Darth Vader’s birth announcement in an old newspaper. It seems innocuous at the time, but in a few years planets would start blowing up and millions would die.

Of course, we get a good mention for each of the three kids, in-laws, wife, and his son has a 16-year-old girlfriend too! And don’t 13-year-old kids talk so funny with the slang and such?

What else… a few months after this letter was written, Disney would sign the final agreement for Euro Disney, and later that year would sell off the Arvida division of which they seemed to think so highly. But that’s all a spoiler alert. Then there’s all the talk of China, which would lead to years and years of negotiations that have yet to reach their full bloom.

Lastly, there’s the first mention of a country fair. Namely, Eisner’s attempt to bring a country fair to Disneyland. Now, I don’t know what happened to our dear CEO as a child that made him pine for ferris wheels and taffy pulls, but his tenure at Disney can in many ways be seen as a lengthy and stealthy campaign to make us go to the fair. Why? The world may never know.

By now, probably every blog out there has covered the death today of singer Michael Jackson. While I won’t pretend to be much of a fan of Jackson – at least of anything he’s done in the last 25 years – it is shocking and somewhat jarring to have a figure that was such a massive phenomenon during one’s childhood disappear. Despite Jackson’s more-than-questionable behavior of the last decade or so, it’s hard not to believe that he never had a chance. Perhaps I’m over-sensitive to this since it overlaps with my work, but it never fails to amaze or infuriate me how much parents can screw up their own kids’ lives.

Anyway, we’re not here for my psychoanalysis. The reason Jackson has appeared on every Disney blog this evening is that he himself was perhaps the most famous Disney fan in the world. Renowned for his constant trips to Disney parks in various odd disguises, and his propensity for renting entire floors of Disney World resorts, Jackson modeled many aspects of his own Neverland Ranch after Disneyland. He was also a prolific collector of Disneyana; recent auction catalogues reveal a wealth of Disney-related items including many major pieces created specifically for Jackson by Disney animators and Imagineers.

Jackson’s most obvious Disney connection is Captain E.O., the 3-D science-fiction film that played in EPCOT from 1986 until 1994 and in Disneyland, Tokyo Disneyland and Disneyland Paris during the same time frame. Directed by Francis Ford Coppola and produced by George Lucas, the film is even more bizarre in retrospect but certainly captures the feeling of the era in which it was created. You can find links to Captain E.O. on nearly every other Disney blog this evening, so I thought I’d re-post this video from 1986; taken from that year’s Very Merry Christmas Parade, it features a segment with parade host Ben Vereen previewing the new EPCOT attraction.

Again we travel to 1986 via the magic of Progress City Public Access TV. This time we take a look at what’s new at Walt Disney World that year – note that it’s all at EPCOT Center. The clips are framed with the device of our noble hosts picking their favorite things at Walt Disney World; how strange that they happen to be the three newest attractions!

First Joan Lunden and spawn take us to The Living Seas, then Ben Vereen and pal Hooter drop in on Captain E.O. Finally Regis is there to show us his favorite attraction in Walt Disney World – the new World Showcase lagoon show Skyleidoscope. I really wonder how serious Regis was about his selection procedure. Skyleidoscope might be unfamiliar to more recent Disney fans, and is sure to make you say “wha?” In fact, looking at it now, it resembles a lower-tech version of a lagoon show from Tokyo DisneySea.

So soak up that 80s goodness courtesy of the 1986 Very Merry Christmas Parade: