As The Hollywood Reporter notes, this marks the fourth year in a row that Disney has had to post this sort of loss thanks to a film, with John Carter joining other flops like Mars Needs Moms, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, and The Prince Of Persia: The Sands Of Time, yet outdoing them all in terms of costly failure. Undaunted, Disney helpfully reminded everyone in the same statement that it has both The Avengers and Brave coming out this year, and that it already makes billions of dollars all the time, because it is Disney.

A vintage tour around the newly opened Disneyland in 1957.

Disneyland's quietly becoming a bit of a video game star. In the last 18 months, it's provided the inspiration for two separate big budget releases: Junction Point's troubled - and dangerously lavish - Wii oddity Epic Mickey, and Frontier's lovely Kinect: Disneyland Adventures.
Yet while both titles share a central preoccupation - an aging resort on the outskirts of Los Angeles - the end results couldn't have less in common. Two games, one park: why are the final products so different?

To answer that question, it might be wise to start with the park itself - specifically, the park's rather strange relationship with reality. This is the relationship that both games, in their own way, are quietly obsessed with, and the best way of understanding it might be to examine the case of a landmark Disneyland attraction that opened back in 1969.


It's a story that cuts straight to the heart of what's so interesting about Disneyland -and why the place may seem so appealing to video game designers. The park's a nexus for many different worlds, and many different ideas, and they rub together in fascinating ways. Each ride is a combination of impossible landscapes and hidden engineering - a curious convergence of daydream and pragmatism that may be familiar to anyone who's ever put together an Elite or a Deus Ex. Each exterior, meanwhile, is a struggle between conflicting artifices: should it reflect the fantasy realm of the ride that lurks on the inside, or the separate, often unrelated fantasy of the park that surrounds it?

After taking five months off from launching new games, Playdom has a dozen releases planned for the upcoming fiscal year, several of which will finally leverage Disney’s big brand names.

In an interview in Silicon Valley, Brad Serwin, the COO of Playdom’s social games unit, said the company has finally started to come out of hiding after being acquired for $563.2 million, plus a $200 million earn-out, more than a year ago.

Disney is too big to invest in just for their video games, but I just wanted to note that Disney appears to be making great strides in social/mobile. Disney has been withdrawing and laying-off in their traditional console publishing business and investing heavily in social and mobile gaming. They definitely appear to understand what it takes to succeed in those markets and appear to be positioning themselves to be one of the winners in the long run. Prior to The Sims Social, Disney had one of the biggest successes on Facebook not from Zynga - in their hidden object game, Gardens of Time. They also currently have one of the top apps on iOS currently - Where's My Water? Now, Disney is planning a dozen releases a year on Facebook from their acquisition of Playdom:

1. The original film image.

2. The 3D Depth Map created by Robert Neuman, the 3D Stereographer on the film. Positive numbers refer to the amount of pixels the image will come out of the screen and negative numbers refer to the amount of pixels the image will go deeper into the screen, creating the 3D depth.

3. Grey Scale – The final image in the computer representation of depth. Darker images will be furthest away, and lighter images will be closer to the viewer.”

Walt Disney Co. (DIS) will cut about 200 jobs at its film division, or 5 percent of the workforce, said two people with knowledge of the plans, as the company realigns distribution and relies more on production from Marvel and Steven Spielberg’s DreamWorks Studios.
The reductions at Walt Disney Studios will be made during the week of June 13, said the people, who asked for anonymity because the decision hadn’t been made public. The unit has about 5,000 employees, including Marvel and Pixar.
Disney, which makes the “Pirates of the Caribbean” movies, is shifting its release slate toward Marvel and films distributed for Spielberg’s DreamWorks Studios, which makes its own movies. The company restructured its worldwide distribution operation last year.

He animated the Wicked Queen in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Geppetto in Pinocchio, Zeus, Vulcan, and the dancing mushrooms in Fantasia, and the stork in Dumbo.
Despite being one of the highest paid animators at Disney, Babbitt was sympathetic to the cause of lower echelon Disney artists seeking to form a union. For this he earned Walt Disney's everlasting enmity. After leaving the Disney company union and joining the "Screen Cartoonists' Guild Local 852", the regular union representing all of Hollywood animators, Babbitt was fired from Disney in 1941, an event that eventually led to the 1941 Disney animators' strike. Babbitt then served as one of the union leaders and negotiators.

Although Disney artists were the best paid and worked under the best conditions in the industry, there was discontent.[2] In The Disney Version, Richard Schickel writes, "Many of the employees had given Disney large quantities of free overtime during the drive to complete the 1937 Snow White", and despite the fact that Snow White was an enormous success, "instead of getting the bonuses they had been vaguely promised, they were faced with a string of layoffs... The salary structure remained crazy-quilt, and the only general wage increase Disney granted in those years was self-serving: he brought a number of workers up over the forty-dollar-a-week level, at which point, under the Wagner Labor Relations Act, they ceased being entitled to time-and-a-half for overtime."

On September 30, Eisner resigned both as an executive and as a member of the board of directors, and, severing all formal ties with the company, he waived his contractual rights to perks such as use of a corporate jet, a Golden Pass and an office at the company's Burbank headquarters. Eisner's replacement was Bob Iger. One of Roy Disney's stated reasons for engineering his second "Save Disney" initiative had been Eisner's well-publicized but financially unjustified dissatisfaction with long-time production partner Pixar Animation Studios and its CEO Steve Jobs, creators of shared hits Toy Story, Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo, and other critically acclaimed computer animated motion pictures. This estrangement was quickly repaired by successor Iger upon Eisner's exit, and on January 24, 2006, the company announced it would acquire Pixar in an all-stock deal worth US $7.4 billion, catapulting Jobs, also co-founder and CEO of Apple, Inc, to Disney's largest shareholder with 7% of the corpor

As they say in the digital world of TRON, “Greetings, Programs!” Today, we’re sharing concept art that gives you a first look at the new party we’re calling ElecTRONica. I’m told it’s the greatest nighttime dance party to ever rock Disney California Adventure park.

Here is Walt Disney's original idea for EPCOT. The film was made for the Florida Legislators so that the state would give the company the self-governing rights and permissions it needed to build its giant theme park, resort, city utopian thing.

In addition to reintroducing Oswald to the world, Spector has stated that his other main goal with Epic Mickey is “making Mickey cool again.” This is no simple feat. At one point, Mickey Mouse was Hollywood’s biggest star (seriously), and is still possibly the most recognized character in the world (who doesn’t recognize the three-circle outline as Mickey’s head?). However, in many ways, his personality has decayed over the years. In the first decades of his existence, Mickey was adventurous, mischievous, and sometimes downright nasty. As time went on, his personality was split up among other characters (for example, his temper went to Donald Duck), and he became the straight mouse to a larger cast of characters. By the end of the century, Mickey wasn’t so much a character as an icon, little-used outside of theme parks and merchandise. Although there were attempts to revitalize the character (for example, the comparatively edgy 1995 cartoon Runaway Brain), for the most part, Disney was

Tapulous has been acquired by Disney. The iPhone gaming startup with several hits on its hands was founded by Bart Decrem, who will join Disney as a senior VP. COO Andrew Lacy is also joining Disney as a senior VP. Disney is very interested in social and mobile gaming, having recently invested in Playdom’s $33 million round.

Living Character technology is always growing by leaps and bounds, the latest advancement is already being tested at Disneyland. Meet and Greets may never be the same:

Disney employs hundreds of thousands of undocumented enchanted broom workers

The new take on Mr. Iger? Let us count the ways: One of the most aggressive dealmakers in media (the $7 billion purchase of Pixar, the animation studio, and the $4 billion acquisition of Marvel, the comic book publisher and movie studio); a risk-taker who isn’t afraid to make decisions that rankle Disney’s own troops (ripping apart the wiring for how the company does business in Europe); and a guy who, more than any of his big-media counterparts, is retooling antiquated industry practice, particularly when it comes to movie-making.

In short: blockbuster C.E.O.

The big news this weekend was the opening of the new Paradise Park area at Disney's California Adventure park. The new Victorian-style 1920s public park-themed plaza will be able to accommodate 9,000 guests for the upcoming World of Color nighttime water show, and will offer an interactive play fountain and and a new multi-purpose state for performances during the day. Elsewhere in the park, the first section of steel framework has gone up for the new Little Mermaid dark ride, and Cars Land construction continues. Elsewhere in the Resort, work continues on Disneyland's Rivers of America refurbishment, and Ridemakerz begins its remodeling and expansion project in Downtown Disney.

Now Disney has returned to Wonderland with Tim Burton, an original with an understanding of Carroll’s genius. There are differences; Burton, who began his career at the Disney studios, has done his own thing but, most importantly, his lush re-imagining has not lost sight of the original works. True, it is not as frightening as the John Tenniel illustrations, except for Burton’s Jabberwocky, which is brilliant. Alice is older, more bewildered, but game and on the run from her own problems. The Mad Hatter has become less crazy and more tormented, a romantic hero.

In the books the prevailing message is that nothing is as it seems. Carroll’s philosophy was framed by melancholy filtered through an awareness of how funny and futile life is. The Walrus weeps for the oysters, but he does eat them. Carroll, the quiet, Oxford University maths don, created a surreal world rooted in logic and shaped by a prevailing sense of order and an awareness of menace that comes from within.

The original version of Disney's classic "Fantasia" featured a character called Sunflower, a little black centaur handmaiden. Sunflower was an extremely insulting caricature, a blithely racist stereotype of the "servile grinning nigger" variety. Her sole function in the film was to eagerly polish and shine the hooves of the tall, sexy Aryan centaur women who glared down their petite noses at this scuttling servant whenever she got underfoot in her haste to make Mistress pretty.

"Is there anything that Boondock Saints guy touched that didn’t get ruined?"

I was not prepared for this: Every year on Dec. 24 at 3 p.m., half of Sweden sits down in front of the television for a family viewing of the 1958 Walt Disney Presents Christmas special, "From All of Us to All of You." Or as it is known in Sverige, Kalle Anka och hans vänner önskar God Jul: "Donald Duck and his friends wish you a Merry Christmas."

Frankly I wanted to tell these idiots to go fuck a tree. But Iger is like, Steve, you don't understand, it's the brand, okay? It's the brand, Steve. We're not Apple. We don't have millions of hypnotized zombies out there who'll buy a bag of broken glass and razorblades as long as it has our logo on it. We're selling to kids, Steve. Kids and their parents. We're Disney. That name is all we've got. It stands for something. It stands for innocence, and purity, and childhood. We can't have even a tiny blemish on that name. It's an incredibly fragile brand. It's all built on trust. The tiniest mistake, this can all go up in smoke.

"[If] you peek behind the walls you see that they're flats held up with 2x4s," Spector said. "And so I wanted to create -- of all the games I was pitching since I left Ion Storm, were about creating a world that was more than a movie set, where you could scratch beneath the surface and there was more going on there. And so this whole paint and thinner mechanic really plays into that because you can dynamically change the world to suit your needs. So dynamically changing the environment to solve problems is kind of what it's about."

ESPN, the sports broadcaster owned by the Walt Disney Company, is working with Irish researchers on ‘‘sensor web technologies’’, to develop cameras that can automatically respond to the movements of sports people. ESPN plans to use the technology to automate the recording of sports events with high-tech cameras that respond in the same way as a human director.

Disney Stores, which the media giant is considering rebranding Imagination Park, will become more akin to cozy entertainment hubs. The chain’s traditional approach of displaying row after row of toys and apparel geared to Disney franchises will be given a high-tech makeover and incorporated into a new array of recreational activities. The goal is to make children clamor to visit the stores and stay longer, perhaps bolstering sales as a result. Over the next five years, analysts estimate that Disney will spend about $1 million a store to redecorate, reorganize and install interactive technology.

Disney's "Imagination Park" concept apparently carries several other Apple-like aspects to it, from in-store theater areas to mobile checkout technology for sales associates. The concept has reportedly been approved by the Disney Board of Directors, and the company is currently negotiating with landlords to secure the high-profile locations necessary for the concept.

The game's plot revolves around "forgotten" Disney characters. Obscure characters from long-forgotten cartoons and rides have been cast into a dark world of broken-down machinery and very bitter attitudes.

Having seen Disney’s slate, it’s easy to see why they bought Marvel: There’s very little there for young boys. Cars, perhaps and arguably Toy Story but they both skew to a younger demographic than Disney’s ever-growing legion of Princesses.

Walt Disney Co., the world’s biggest media company, outflanked Hollywood competitors while enhancing its film lineup with the $4 billion acquisition of comic-book pioneer Marvel Entertainment Inc.

An Imagineer (officially known as a Walt Disney Imagineer), is an employee of Walt Disney Imagineering, or any other employee of The Walt Disney Company given that title. Nearly all Imagineers work at the headquarters in Glendale, California, developing ideas and attractions for Disney parks. During the construction of a major project, Imagineers sometimes are deployed to work on-site for six months to a year.
Imagineers may include artists, writers, architects, landscape architects, engineers, model builders, construction managers, technicians and designers.

A dark ride or darkride is an indoor amusement ride where riders in guided vehicles travel through specially lit scenes that typically contain animation, sounds, music, and other special effects. The name can be misleading, since a dark ride does not have to be dark – it is simply enclosed, so it is only illuminated by artificial means.

Cory explains his fascination with Disney.

Since his first talking appearance in Steamboat Willie, in 1928, Mickey Mouse has been voiced by just three men of whom Wayne Allwine was the most recent. He joined Disney studios as a post room worker in 1966 before moving on to the sound effects department. He began working with Jimmy MacDonald, who had been the voice of the ubiquitous rodent since 1947, eventually taking over from him in 1977. His voice appeared in the 1983 film, Mickey's Christmas Carol and he went on to appear in Who Framed Roger Rabbit and The Prince and the Pauper. He also worked on the sound effects of Alien Nation and Star Trek V; The Final Frontier. In 1991 he married Russi Taylor, the voice of Minnie Mouse.

Have you ever wondered what the characters in Finding Nemo and Wall-E would look like if they were human?

World of Illusion one is my favourite.

Disney’s House of the Future had the clean simplicity prized in the 1950s as relief from decades of frayed patchwork, jury-rigging, and make-do clutter caused by Depression and war. But the spare white form had been warmed with curves. Each quadrant was a streamlined seamed pod, a crossbreed: half jet fuselage, half legume. And, as with an airplane or a beanstalk, the structure rose aloft, flying on a plinth above its house lot.

Animation from the 1930s that's still pretty impressive.

The thoughts of Disney's Imagineers as they compare the past and present of Disney's theme parks.