Читать книгу Understanding Disney - Janet Wasko - Страница 25

Of course, even without Audio-Animatronic Walts, the Disney legacy, as well as the Disney corporation, lives on. Even though the years immediately following Walt’s death may have been uninspired, the corporation survived. By the late 1960s, the company had established a strong diversified base, distributing its own films and television programming and generating revenues from merchandising and theme parks. By 1965, the company reported profits of $11 million.

However, around this time, only 45 percent of the company’s revenues were from film rentals. By the mid-1970s, the company had become even more reliant on park revenues and was proving to be rather sluggish, both in moving into newly developing distribution technologies (such as cable and home video) and in producing a wider range of media products. Perhaps Walt would have inspired the company to adjust to these changes. Perhaps not.

The aim of this chapter has been to sort out the background of the Disney company that emerges from the inflated and mythical depictions of its namesake. Accordingly, Douglas Gomery’s summary of the Disney company provides fitting closure:

The Disney company has not been a success story from the beginning. Like other capitalist operations it has had its ups and downs, heavily influenced by the uncontrollable factors of technical change, the business cycle, and war.

In the end we need to abandon the “great man” version of history. Walt was no genius, nor is Michael Eisner. We are the fools if we ascribe all the actions and strategies of a company to one man or woman. The Disney company is simply another capitalist enterprise with a history best understood within the changing conditions of twentieth-century America.⁶⁶

The next chapter discusses how the company established an expanded Disney empire through the end of the twentieth century and adapted and adjusted to the entertainment world in the twenty-first century.