Disney Headlines for April 26th, 2023
Disneyland suffered a fire, forcing Florida officials to regulate monorails. Or something like that.
This week highlights some odd Disney Headlines.
The Best $650 Million Disney Never Spent
Do you know who Chelsea Peretti is? If you’ve ever watched Brooklyn Nine-Nine (and you really should!), you know the actress as Gina.
Well, Chelsea is great, but her brother is kind of an idiot.
In fact, he threw away $650 million because some Disney people didn’t laugh at his off-color jokes. That’s a real thing that happened.
According to Vanity Fair article written by Ben Smith, a former BuzzFeed editor-in-chief, Bob Iger tried to acquire BuzzFeed for $650 million in 2013.
In fact, Iger viewed the deal as a foregone conclusion because his “deal guy” at the time, Kevin Mayer signed off on it after Disney checked BuzzFeed’s books.
Alas, Jonah Peretti, Chelsea’s brother and the CEO of BuzzFeed, required convincing. And that’s where the story gets wild.
The person in charge of BuzzFeed really only liked one part of the deal. He would be “one of 13 people reporting directly to the most successful CEO in modern media.”
As for the money, Disney offered a staggering $650 million for a tech/news/social signals company of questionable value.
Peretti should have jumped at the chance. But the deal collapsed in the weirdest way possible.
Iger invited Peretti to speak at a Disney event and provided the BuzzFeed co-founder with a prized slot on the itinerary.
Peretti proceeded to tell several off-color jokes, none of which merited a reaction from the crowd.
Remarkably, Peretti took this as a sign that Disney people were out of touch rather than that his jokes were inappropriate.
BuzzFeed backed out of the deal. Now, the company just laid off its entire news department just to survive.
Within three years, Iger narrowly avoided what would have been atrocious deals with Twitter and BuzzFeed. Sometimes, it’s the deals that you don’t make that define you.
You Said You Wanted a Fire-Breathing Dragon
I laughed at this story the last time it happened, and I’m giggling a bit right now. It’s fine as long as nobody suffered an injury, which they thankfully didn’t.
Still, history has repeated itself at a Disney theme park as Maleficent caught fire during a Disneyland performance on Saturday night.
You can recall this remarkable visual from a few years ago:
Now, we have this:
Obviously, you may wonder why this keeps happening. Machines break, and anything flammable comes with some risk.
Once an accident occurs, the maintenance team should identify the accident and ensure it never happens again.
The technology at Fantasmic! isn’t exactly the same as the one controlling Maleficent in the Festival of Fantasy parade, but that’s a nitpick.
An error like this simply cannot happen again. Now the question becomes, “Why did it?”
In the interim, Disney has suspended its pyrotechnics at all its parks. I’m not talking about fireworks, but all fire effects will remain offline indefinitely.
Disney must perform an inquiry into what went wrong, determine causality, and guarantee that history won’t repeat itself a third time.
The whole thing is wild. This happened twice in five years and once on each coast.
Whatever protection is in place here isn’t foolproof. Disney needs another failsafe, if not multiples.
While the story itself is funny, this error does underscore two aspects of Disney’s fight with Ron DeSantis.
If the governor had waited a week rather than rushed his anti-Disney speech, he could have used this for leverage.
Right now, the governor has made himself a punching bag in conversations like this:
That’s on-air panelists who can’t breathe because they’re laughing so hard. And the one panelist is absolutely right.
The faces of the kids would be priceless!
Is Disney Oversight Needed?
Disney’s recent snafu presented the ideal opportunity for Florida’s legislature to claim that theme parks require more oversight.
That’s true in broad strokes but not of Disney. As recently reported, the new legislation specifically targets Disney, as Scott Gustin wryly notes:
Yeah … that amendment is pretty specific, eh? https://t.co/jBrsXIHWZC pic.twitter.com/GGCAtkBfDM
— Scott Gustin (@ScottGustin) April 24, 2023
That’d be like Wisconsin lawmakers crafting legislation against former MVP/Super Bowl quarterbacks the Packers had traded over the last 20 years.
They can call the law anything they want, but it’s anti-Aaron Rodgers/Brett Favre legislation.
The same idea applies here. Florida has singled out Disney for more governmental oversight even though the state already receives accident reports.
Do you know who has claimed the two most serious ones over the last several years? It’s Universal Studios, who once claimed a paralyzed man had suffered “numbness.”
Similarly, Universal described a boy with a crushed foot as suffering “foot pain.” I’ll bet.
In short, some theme parks abuse the privileges the state has given them. Disney isn’t one of those. At all.
Disney fans should know that your favorite park stresses safety above all else, which is why incidents like this are so newsworthy. And I’ll emphasize that nobody got hurt.
Many Disney injuries involve elderly people suffering accidents while boarding or exiting a ride cart.
I mean, when Universal Studios lists “headache,” my first thought is Scanners, but that’s just me.
Still, the point is that Disney conducted itself nobly with regard to theme park safety. And yet…
Florida Will Inspect Monorails
As part of the DeSantis war on Disney, lawmakers have provided the government with unique oversight over the monorail.
I suspect it’ll play out like this:
If I were the “inspector,” I’d abuse my position to drive the monorail.
That’s not the play here, though. Instead, Florida is threatening something more insidious.
The plan empowers the inspector to shut down the entire monorail line to perform an inspection. Yes, this punishes guests much more than Disney.
After all, the company already has your money by this point. But the Orlando Sentinel does make an excellent point.
The monorail has experienced its fair share of mishaps over the years.
The current tram line at Walt Disney World has operated longer than any previous one at the parks.
Florida is using this move as a bluff/posturing, while many Disney analysts are saying, “it’s about time!”
Presuming FDACS officials act reasonably, this one turn of events is a positive for Disney fans.
If FDACS starts shutting down the monorail randomly just to annoy Disney, that’s something altogether different. We’ll see how this one plays out.
Notably, Disney sounds most concerned about CS/SB 1604: Land Use and Development Regulations, a bill about land use in the Disney area.
The company has rallied its lobbyists against that particular measure. So, keep an eye on that one as a future Headline.
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