Editing Disney (section)

=== Decline and renaissance ===
After Walt got a taste of building theme parks, he fell for utopianism. Believing the lessons learned from building Disneyland could be applied to building a better city, he and a small group of like-minded yes-men became increasingly distracted with buying up large swaths of Florida to found an Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, like [[/v/|Rapture]] but above the water (most of the time) and with less Ayn Rand. As a result, the company wasn't paying attention to trends. While they did a brisk business in shorts and other programming for ABC, they missed the bus when it came to ''made for television'' animation. This left the field open for studios like Hanna-Barbera, Filmation and a resurgent Warner Bros. What they lacked in quality (and how) they made up for in quantity, shutting Disney out of the children's television market for decades as producers discovered that cartoons were WAAAAAY more profitable if you used them as commercials for as much merch as you could shove out the door. (While Disney pioneered merchandising as early as the 1930s, it was generally done as a supplement to the art, which was expected to stand on its own. The newer studios just used art to sell merchandise.) They continued to repackage their old shorts for broadcast but there were only so many of those to go around, and the trickle of new ones dried up as theatrical animated shorts died off in the early 60s. The pace of new Disney feature films dropped to one every few years, with lower-cost live action family films increasingly filling in the void.[[File:Eilonwy.gif|left]]
Walt's death brought an INSTANT end to the envisioned EPCOT project, with the land and buildings that were already paid for getting rolled into Disney World. What followed was essentially a lost decade of cost cutting and rummaging through Walt's notes for half baked ideas to keep the company going through the 70's. Tired of this creatively bankrupt environment, Don Bluth and several other key animators prominently quit to form their own studio and went on to dominate children's movies in the early 80's. The absolute low points of Disney's dark age came for live action with the aptly named "The Black Hole" and for animation with "The Black Cauldron"; "Black Hole" was an absolute turkey, and while time has been kinder to "Black Cauldron" it was a massive bomb on release that didn't know what it wanted to be. Disney was out of ideas, reduced to copying Star Wars and adapting random fantasy novels.

This would not stand. Tired of watching the company simultaneously sink and burn, a coalition of shareholders led by the surviving Disney family brought on Michael Eisner from rival Paramount to straighten things out. The first decade of his tenure was a string of successes. Eisner brought in Roy E. Disney (Roy Disney's son) to turn around the animation department, finally giving it the resources it needed to compete with Don Bluth's studio. Roy spearheaded a collaboration with Stephen Spielberg that gave us ''Who Framed Roger Rabbit'', which won three Oscars and still stands as ''the'' best combination of live action filmmaking and animation ever. He also put further resources into improving the studio's technology base, which had barely changed since the 60s; this was the beginning of their highly lucrative collaboration with Pixar, and the CAPS digital production system which enabled shots that were impossible with physical cels. The cold war ended and a booming 90's economy juiced park sales. Finally realizing he couldn't afford to treat TV as just a side business, he launched Disney's first cable TV channel and redefined 90s kids' childhoods with the legendary Disney Afternoon series. But like General Lee in the Civil War, Eisner would have his Gettysburg, a mistake that would break him forever... and it was Euro Disney. 

Euro Disney almost destroyed the company. Had it been attempted later in the 90s, with more debt, it WOULD have bankrupted Disney. The park was a gamble; centrally located among some of the richest economies on the planet with construction costs eventually reaching 22 billion francs, it was too big to fail... and it failed, because they hadn't counted on typical French contrarianism and a continent-wide recession making its loan payments unsustainable. It would be years before it turned a profit. It caused every park under construction to grind to a halt. Projects too far along to be cancelled outright had to be severely cut back, while potentially more lucrative long term projects like Disney Regional Entertainment (which planned to go after "family entertainment centers" like Chuck E Cheese) died. Frank Wells (who had been hired from WB as a counterweight to Eisner's ego) died in a helicopter crash and Eisner, previously a bold thinking risk-taker, became a defensive and embattled CEO firing anyone who looked like a threat to his position; this brought an end to their animation dominance as Jeffery Katzenberg was kicked out only to go found Dreamworks. (This wasn't all bad though, since Katzenberg had tried to turn Toy Story into an Adam Sandler comedy.) Their only really groundbreaking move during this time was to buy ABC.