Team Rodent - Carl Hiaasen [11]
As exorbitant as the mistake turned out to be, Disney could easily afford it. The company has experienced astounding growth in the fourteen years since Insane Clown Michael’s arrival, and he’s not shy about rattling off all the new ventures: radio and TV stations, cable systems, newspapers, books, home video, theatrical productions, computer games and programs, professional sports teams, and of course Times Square. Of all the new endeavors, the most expensive and ambitious was the acquisition of Capital Cities/ABC and its affiliated broadcast networks, which instantly gave Disney a huge self-marketing apparatus.
Perhaps Eisner is a true genius—a visionary, a brilliant motivator, a magnetic communicator. If so, you wouldn’t know it from the following communiqué, which Eisner sent to Disney shareholders and employees as part of the 1996 annual report:
Last week I was trying to write this letter in the living room of my family’s farmhouse in Saxtons River, Vermont, where I have been going for the Thanksgiving holidays for 35 years. At my side was the cover of the annual report with its hundred and one dalmatians staring at me, begging me to begin. But I was stuck. The Florida/Florida State football game, broadcast on ABC, was in the background and I found myself looking up every time I saw a McDonald’s/dalmatian commercial. Cute dalmatians everywhere, each one saying, “Get to work.” But then there was this overwhelmingly positive review from a Boston television station for our movie The English Patient that I had to listen to, and of course I had to take a call from Florida reporting excellent attendance at Walt Disney World. I then called our European headquarters to learn that The Hunchback of Notre Dame opened with extraordinary results in 12 territories, including France, Germany, Belgium, Switzerland and Holland. This motivated me to make more calls: dialing, still not typing. I found out The Rock would likely become the biggest home video rental of all time and that Toy Story’s video release was selling at superb rates. Finally I got the call that unlocked my procrastination. 101 Dalmatians was a smash. It would break every possible record at the box office for the Thanksgiving break. It was huge, massive! Now, as soon as the Mighty Ducks hockey game against the Chicago Blackhawks at the Pond in Anaheim on ESPN was over, I would finally begin to work. We wouldn’t have to change the cover of our annual report! The Dalmatians had come through!
Obviously, Eisner wrote the letter himself—no PR flack in his right mind would’ve sent out such hyperbolic twaddle. But as fulsome and windy as it is, the letter fairly depicts the company’s fast-tightening grip on the global entertainment culture. One cannot overstate Disney’s reach, and there’s no better example than Eisner’s superhyped 101 Dalmatians.
As soon as word got out that Disney was producing a live-action remake of its popular 1961 feature-length cartoon, puppy mills across America began breeding dalmatians like rats. It was a sure bet. Once the movie opened, thousands upon thousands of parents went shopping for puppies to put under the Christmas tree for their smitten children. Just as Eisner had bubbled: cute dalmatians everywhere!
Unfortunately, dalmatians aren’t the ideal breed for every family. They can be high-strung, snappish, and intolerant of youngsters. In other words: Not cute. Less than a year after the film’s release, animal shelters and Humane Societies got swamped with young dogs that had failed to deliver the cuddliness promised by their lovable big-screen counterparts. South Florida shelters reported a 35 percent increase in the number of dalmatians, many of them facing a sad and predictable fate. The story was the same all across the country.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not laying a single euthanized puppy at the feet of Michael Eisner. The parents who dashed out to buy those dogs should have known better;