The Walt Disney Company
- Alternate meanings: Disney (disambiguation)
Its movie studios include Walt Disney Pictures, Touchstone Pictures, Hollywood Pictures, Miramax Films, and Dimension Films. Disney also owns the American Broadcasting Company (ABC) television network (since 1996), The Disney Channel, and ESPN's family of cable television networks. Disney's music division includes Walt Disney Records, Mammoth Records, Lyric Street Records, and Hollywood Records. The company operates the Disney Vacation Club resorts and ESPN Zone restaurants. It owns Hyperion Books, Disney Publishing Worldwide and the Walt Disney Cruise Line.
Disney operates many resorts and theme parks at Disneyland Resort, Walt Disney World Resort, Disneyland Resort Paris, and Tokyo Disney Resort. Hong Kong Disneyland is under construction and set to open in 2005. Disney uses its own terminology at its theme parks: park customers are called guests, Disney employees are called cast members, any area which can be reached or seen by a customer is onstage, and employees-only areas are backstage. Newly-hired cast members go through a course named Traditions in which the four "keys" of the theme parks - Safety, Courtesy, Efficiency, and Show - are taught, along with instructions such as "When pointing out something to a guest, always use two fingers or your entire hand, never a single finger."
The company also owns the Mighty Ducks of Anaheim hockey team and owned the Anaheim Angels baseball team, which was later sold to businessman Arturo Moreno. It also handles licensing of Disney products and sales through the Disney Store, Disney Publishing, and Disney Interactive.
Some librarians have objected to Disney's lobbying of the world's major legislative bodies into passing repeated retroactive copyright term extensions, calling it "manipulative" and "absurd". As well as the general limitation on the public domain that this implies, critics are quick to point out that Disney has made much of its fortune from stories that have passed out of copyright, such as Snow White, Cinderella, and Sleeping Beauty.
After witnessing the box office failures of some of its recent animated films and the stellar successes of computer-animated films from Pixar, Disney has decided to shift its production from "traditional" hand-drawn animated films (which in recent years have incorporated much work done on computer) entirely to computer-animated films. The last traditionally-animated film produced by Disney was Home on the Range. Its first computer-animated film will be Chicken Little. Disney has fallen under much criticism for this change in direction, especially as fans see the strength of a movie as its plot and its characters and not as the technology used to make it. Additionally, by laying off all of its hand-drawn animation staff, Disney has released into the job market a large number of skilled artists who have a grudge against their former company and who could be very attractive to Disney's competitors. Disney is becoming a direct competitor to Pixar in a market dominanted by the latter. Disney has failed to renew its contract with Pixar to release Pixar's films under the Disney name, an arrangement which had been extremely profitable to Disney and whose termination means that Pixar is now free to pair up with a competing studio.
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2 Notable feature films under the Disney label 3 Notable television series 4 See also 5 External link |
Notable feature films produced by the studio over the years include:
This includes those by the subsidiaries.
Timeline
1923-1939
1940-1966
1967-1984
1985-1999
2000-
Notable feature films under the Disney label
1930s
1940s
1950s
1960s
1970s
1980s
1990s
2000s
Notable television series
See also
External link