Since Disney owns ABC and ESPN, I remember there being some connection between the leviathan that is the Disney Corporation and Al Michaels moving over to do the Sunday Night Football commentary on NBC with John Madden. That connection, I assumed, was nothing more than a run-of-the-mill sports announcing superstar signing away for a buttload of cash (that's right, I used the term buttload). Little did I realize, before coming across this Wiki, that this business deal had deeper, darker roots than I ever would have imagined.From Wikipedia.org:
Oswald the Lucky Rabbit
....the new series, "Oswald the Lucky Rabbit", was an almost instant success, and the Oswald character, first drawn and created by Iwerks, became a popular property. The Disney studio expanded, and Walt hired back Harman, Ising, Maxwell, and Freleng from Kansas City.
In February of 1928, Disney went to New York to negotiate a higher fee per short from Mintz. Disney was shocked when Mintz announced that not only did he want to reduce the fee he paid Disney per short, but that he had most of his main animators, including Harman, Ising, Maxwell, and Freleng (notably excepting Iwerks) under contract and would start his own studio if Disney did not accept the reduced production budgets. Universal, not Disney, owned the Oswald trademark, and could make the films without Disney.Disney declined Mintz's offer and lost most of his animation staff. The defectors became the nucleus of the Winkler Studio, run by Mintz and his brother-in-law George Winkler. When that studio went under after Universal assigned production of the Oswald shorts to an in-house division run by Walter Lantz, Mintz focused his attentions on the studio making the "Krazy Kat" shorts, which later became Screen Gems, and Harman, Ising, Maxwell, and Freleng marketed an Oswald-like character named Bosko to Leon Schlesinger and Warner Bros., and began work on the first entries in the Looney Tunes series.
It took Disney's company 78 years to get back the rights to the Oswald character. In a move that sent sports broadcaster Al Michaels to NBC Sports for their Sunday night NFL coverage, the Walt Disney Company reacquired the rights to Oswald the Lucky Rabbit from NBC Universal in 2006.
2 comments:
How do you think ole Al feels about being taded for a cartoon bunny. More importantly, what would Joe Theisman be worth, comparitively speaking?
I think Theisman would rate a single animation cel from the short-lived Hanna-Barbera 1972 cartoon series, "The Amazing Chan and the Chan Clan." And that's being generous. Maybe if they threw Kornheiser into the deal...
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