Trouble On the Disney Board of Directors?

This is an interesting development. Safra Catz has resigned from the Disney Board of Directors.  She’s been there for only six years and that’s nowhere near mandatory retirement for a board member. I suppose I should post Disney’s boilerplate statement:“Disney CEO Bob Iger said in a statement, “Throughout her tenure on Disney’s board of directors, Safra has provided invaluable insight that has helped shape the company’s long-term strategic planning amid a rapidly changing technological landscape that affects our businesses. Her...

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Is Gatwa Out?

Is Gatwa Out? ...as the Doctor, I meanThere was an interesting little article from That Park Place:"A new report claims that The Walt Disney Company is seriously contemplating exiting its business relationship with the BBC and Bad Wolf Studios and leaving Doctor Who following the most recent season that posted the worst viewership numbers in the show’s entire history.""...a source close to the Doctor Who production informed him that Disney will “need to make a decision” on whether it...

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14,000 Members of Disneyland’s Castmember Union Have Voted to Strike

99% of the four unions that represent Disneyland California workers have voted to authorize a strike.From The Vulture:"On Friday, the Disney Workers Rising Bargaining Committee, which comprises four different unions representing 14,000 Disneyland park employees, released a statement declaring that 99% of their members have authorized a strike, meaning they would not show up to work at the parks if implimented. While that doesn’t mean a strike has been scheduled, it does mean that the union can implement a strike as...

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The Dark Herald Does Not Recommend: The Acolyte (Part III)

(This is absolutely the last one, I… I have to move on)Story.“A story succeeds for fails in the style of its telling.” You’ve heard me say that a thousand times.  Less frequently, but just as important I often ask, “Knowing how the story ends, would you want to read it again?”No one wants to hear this story again.This story fails so drastically that I truly hope it gets sent to the Iron Vault of Tax Write-Offs.   Supposedly, this cost...

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The Dark Herald Does Not Recommend: The Acolyte (Part II)

(I really hadn't planned to make this a three-parter but I had to stop and put together a valedictory for Bob Newhart. The third part should probably be up tomorrow at the usual time.)The Star Wars Lore fifty-car-pile-up.Why make a prequel?  There’s rarely a good reason for it. There are exceptions of course.  The Silmarillion was a prequel that laid out just how vast the mythology of Middle Earth really was.  It worked for the Godfather Part II where you...

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RIP Bob Newhart

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZgdUWXf8jJk We were totally scammed and we loved it!It was easily the greatest ending to a television comedy in history. I never even heard the lines I was laughing so hard. It was without question a "you had to be there to understand" moment. There had been all kinds of rumors going around about how Newhart would end. Mostly they'd promised something really intolerable. That Bob, who had been a fixture in our lives throughout the 1980s was going to be...

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The Dark Herald Does Not Recommend: The Acolyte (Part I)

(I have to break this into two parts, I can’t examine this much bad in only 1500 words)This is the LucasFilm project where the last of the superfans, The Star Wars Advocates finally walked away. The opposite of love is not hatred, it’s indifference.  After this, they don’t care anymore. It’s not just that this show took Star Wars canon, rolled it up in a carpet, threw it in a dumpster, poured gasoline on it, and set it on...

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2015: Disney’s Watershed Year

2015 was the year that Bob Iger made the decisions that set Disney on a course to oblivion. It was the year he made the choices that changed it irrecoverably from Walt Disney's company to Bob Iger's.Several factors converged that year that would turn Disney into the trainwreck it is today. A lot of people blame Covid but truthfully that just accelerated a process that was already in motion. These factors in no particular order were; the...

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The Sons of Theseus – The Detective Heroes

It’s ironic that Batman’s boyhood hero was Zorro.  The Mark of Zorro was the movie that little Bruce Wayne had talked his parents into taking him to the night of their murder.  The irony is that Zorro is an Outlaw hero whereas Batman is every inch a Detective hero.The Detective hero is an American invention.  During his time editing various magazines, Edgar Allan Poe would publish logic puzzles that were extremely popular with his readers.  This appears to have led Poe to the creation...

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Goodbye Shannen

Shannen Doherty has lost her fight with breast cancer.  Given the events of the weekend, it’s all too easy to overlook the passing of one of the great genre actresses of Generation X and that would be a shame.Doherty started out as a child actress in the early 1980s.  Her first appearance was in the Chariots of the Gods futureman hippie babble show, The Phoenix, where she played “Little Girl.” Her next three parts were in varied genre projects The...

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