Thursday, November 27, 2003

The Iron Horse

Lower ratings seem to agree with Larry King. Like most of his one-time fans, I've watched his interviews deteriorate over the last decade...watched him lob more softballs than all the ladies' baseball teams combined. For a long time, he seemed to think that it was less important for his guests to address important issues than for them to enjoy being on Larry King Live and want to come back. Maybe the guests did but audiences haven't been flocking back to him. But lately, he seems to be trying harder. Maybe it's better preparation by his staff. Maybe it's that he hasn't been divorced lately. Whatever it is, he seems to be trying harder.

The bad side of that is more shows about the Laci Peterson case, the Michael Jackson case, etc., and more bogus authorities. When Jermaine Jackson complained about the media giving air time to people who falsely claim to know his family, he probably had Larry in mind. I really wish King (and others on the cable news channels) would raise the standard of what constitutes an expert, an intimate friend or a spokesperson. Larry King Live keeps featuring these "panels" of six people, only one of whom has anything of substance to say.

But one thing Larry has to offer is a long friendship with most of his celebrity guests. He's lately out of his element on newsy topics but pretty good with show biz veterans...and he is kind of a legend. Saturday, CNN is rerunning a special show that ran on the 19th to celebrate Larry's 70th birthday. It started out as an hour with Regis Philbin but about five minutes in, Regis announces that the rest of the hour is actually a surprise birthday party for Larry. Dr. Phil takes over the host chair while Larry moves over to be guest on his own show, claiming to be utterly surprised. I suspect he was not, but you can judge for yourself if you catch it on Saturday. Most of the hour is a cavalcade of stars showing up live, via remote or pre-tape, to wish King a happy seventieth. The list includes Mike Wallace, Jay Leno, Nancy Reagan, George and Barbara Bush, Wayne Newton, Liza Minnelli, Dick Cheney, Tony Bennett, Sharon Stone, Madonna, Ross Perot, Bill Maher, Cher, Don Rickles, Jimmy Carter, and on and on. Weirdest of all is a live remote to Jerry Lewis in some hospital somewhere with an oxygen line taped into his nose. It's the oddest moment in a very odd hour.

• Posted at 8:38 PM · LINK

Mouse Hole

As this article in The New York Times notes, the Disney organization is struggling to make Mickey Mouse as popular as...well, as popular as Mickey Mouse oughta be. There are a couple of obvious reasons why he isn't, one being that his best work is being hidden. The Disney Channel and Toon Disney rarely feature the classic Mickey cartoons, and the home video releases have been more slanted to the collector market. The comic strips are gone and the comic books are sparse in their availability and tend to treat Donald and Scrooge as the superstars. Yes, Mickey presides over Disneyland and Disney World and is well-represented therein...but only because he has the job. He's increasingly becoming like one of those faux celebrities who is famous only for being famous. You wake up one morning and folks are insisting on his greatness but you never get to see it; ergo, you never fully accept it. So how is a kid to fall in love with The Mouse? And when Mickey's classic adventures are accessible, do they not seem a bit grounded in an earlier, unfamiliar era?

Those are good questions and the solution obviously has to do with generating great new Mickey adventures in several venues. But this brings us to a major stumbling block that inevitably diminishes every great character that is controlled by a corporation: Too Many Bosses. If you were to roam through the Disney organization, you'd find hundreds, maybe thousands of folks who have some sort of "executive" position and what they think is a clear take on what to do with Mickey. They're not all wrong but they're not all right in the same way. Which creates massive gridlock and unhappy compromises since they won't concede to having no say in Disney's signature asset. Not long ago at another big corporation which shall remain nameless (it was Time-Warner), I had a meeting with a mid-level exec who at that moment had nothing to do with Bugs Bunny...and boy, was she pissed. The lady had every intention of rising up in the Time-Warner hierarchy to better jobs with bigger salaries, and that meant she had to get some control over The Wabbit and his immediate cohorts. It was demeaning that she was excluded from Bugs projects, just as I gather it's demeaning in a non-entertainment company situation if you don't get to eat in the Executive Dining Room or tinkle in the Executive Washroom. Don't think that kind of thing doesn't happen in any corporate situation, and Disney is no exception.

Ideally, what Disney needs to do is to find one cartoonist or one small group and appoint them to be Mickey Dictators. Give them the power to define Mickey anew and to say no to anything that involves Mickey the way Walt once could...and did. But no one high up in Disney is about to exclude themselves from such decisions. This has always been true but it's truer now than ever. Once upon a time, people who went to work for a company like that envisioned long careers, staying there forever, if possible. The business has changed. Now, the mindset is that everyone's a temp, and you want to get as much as you can for as long as it lasts. That means rising up quickly in the company and not caring a lot about the long-term health of its properties, which leads to something as symbolic as Mickey Mouse being caught in umpteen tugs-of-war. Every office, every division wants a piece of Mickey, which means that key decisions are made, if they're made at all, by committee. With a committee, it may go in as a Mouse or a Duck or a Wabbit, but when it comes out, it's always The Camel. One of the main things that made Walt Disney as successful as he was was that he didn't have to fight anyone to prove he was in charge. And of course, he expected to be with the company for the rest of his life.

• Posted at 3:23 PM · LINK

Let's Twist Again

Here's a brief news story on the lawsuit 'twixt Todd and Twist. Nothing you don't already know, but it does indicate that some pressure is growing for the Supreme Court to get involved.

• Posted at 1:26 PM · LINK

No Claus for Alarm

And now, it seems Harvey Fierstein will not be playing Mrs. Claus in the Macy's parade. Here are the details.

• Posted at 1:12 AM · LINK