Killing the Goose and Chroming the Golden Egg
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Killing the Goose and Chroming the
Golden Egg
An Operatic Fantasia On Corporate Integrity (Oxymoronic As That Phrase May Be)
by Rhett Wickham
For the past couple of weeks I’ve been thinking about how Ollie Johnston is poised to celebrate is 89th birthday on Halloween of this year. Off and on over the past few weeks I’ve reminded myself to find a minute to sit down and write him a note. It comes to mind almost by accident while preparing work of my own; watching scenes of Ollie and Frank Thomas in Ted Thomas’s documentary on the famous duo - "Frank and Ollie", for example. While surfing around on the "Beauty & the Beast" disc in preparation for a meeting with a young animation artist, I stumbled across something I typically skip over on DVD’s - "sneak peeks" or "coming attractions." I sat there, watching the previews for "Jungle Book 2," and it finally dawned on me exactly what I should write in my note to Ollie: my heartfelt condolences.
I feel compelled to pen my deepest sympathy to Ollie Johnston for having to watch one of his greatest performances desecrated for what appears to be little more reason than the Studio needing something to release in February - and all for lack of having produced anything more creative and original. Heaven forbid an audience would wait until something wonderful came to theatres. And heaven forbid Disney be what it once was - truly original at every turn.
Well, I think there’s plenty of originality left to be mined. And if he’s true to himself, Michael Eisner is the guy best poised at this place and time to mine it for all it’s worth.
As the Walt Disney Company seeks to recover from the losses of a limping economy that’s creeping toward stasis, wouldn’t it make sense to put into practice some of the more sound and proven philosophies of the great business leaders - including Eisner himself, who wrote in his 1998 autobiography - "Work In Progress":
"The company I felt most drawn to was Walt Disney. Ever since I first took Jane to see Pinocchio at the drive-in on Bruckner Boulevard, I had been fascinated by the unique niche that Disney occupied in the entertainment world. When Jane and I moved to California, we began taking our kids to Disneyland, and I was impressed by the enormous attention to quality and detail throughout the park."
So, where, exactly, is this attention to quality and detail now, Michael? Can you point to "Cinderella II" or "Mickey’s House of Villains" and highlight the same attention to quality and detail you and your wife experienced with "Pinocchio?" Are you as proud of that as Walt must have been of the original "Cinderella?" In your autobiography you also recall for the reader a meeting with Frank Thomas, and you quote Thomas as saying:
"One of Walt’s greatest gifts was his ability to get you to come up with things that you didn’t know were in you and that you’d have sworn you couldn’t possibly do…Everything had to get better and better."
Can you say that that’s the kind of inspirational leadership Tom Schumacher is providing to everyone in the animation division? Is "Jungle Book 2" proof of coming up with things that you didn’t know were in you? Is "Hunchback of Notre Dame II" ensuring that everything the animation division is doing gets better and better?
You go on to say, Michael, that in anticipation of heading up the Walt Disney Company you "still knew relatively little about Walt himself, who had died in 1966, but I admired his creativity, his commitment to excellence, and his fierce independence from the other Hollywood studios."
Sounds to me like you get it! That’s it, Michael! That’s what had so many of us cheering for you back at the start. So how can it be that now, as the Walt Disney Company (barely) celebrates the 100th anniversary of Walt Disney’s birth, the animation division is preparing yet another careless dilution of the once precious and unique films that defined the name Disney?