(Fuck, I'd put up the link. Didn't show....here's the NY Times article):
No Golden Years Yet for a 75-Year-Old Mouse
November 24, 2003
By LAURA M. HOLSON
LOS ANGELES, Nov. 23 - The Walt Disney Company celebrated
the 75th anniversary of Mickey Mouse as a cultural icon and
corporate totem last week, but some business analysts
wondered whether it could have been a retirement party.
Despite the hoopla, which included a party at Walt Disney
World in Orlando, Fla., for the unveiling of 75
hand-decorated Mickey statues, the mouse's popularity is
waning.
Revenue of Mickey-related products sold by Disney's
consumer products division, for example, has shrunk to less
than 40 percent of the division's $2.3 billion annual
total, down from 50 percent during the peak in 1997,
according to Disney executives. Winnie the Pooh merchandise
is now outselling Mickey items.
Even the company's own research suggests that the
75-year-old mouse is becoming increasingly difficult for
Americans of all ages to relate to - particularly children,
whose entertainment world is filled with online computer
games and other distractions.
"Mickey hasn't really changed, and I guess the question is,
have the times passed him by?" said Tom Wolzien, an analyst
at Sanford Bernstein & Company who covers Disney. "I think
they've had chances to upgrade the character, but they
haven't done a lot with it."
Disney, though, is now trying hard to find Mickey's
21st-century footing - an effort for which it bought
additional time last January when the United States Supreme
Court upheld the extension of the Mickey Mouse copyright
through 2023.
Helping lead the Mickey makeover is Andy Mooney, the
president of Disney's consumer products unit, who joined
the company four years ago from Nike. Eighteen months ago
he set up a secret 1,000-square-foot room in Glendale,
Calif., not far from Disney's Burbank headquarters. He
stocked the room with Mickey watches, stuffed animals,
comic books and thousands of other Mickey-licensed
merchandise. Television monitors played Mickey Mouse
videos, clips and shows from all eras, including the
company's most recent animated series, the Disney Channel's
"House of Mouse."
Representatives from every Disney division toured the war
room, including the chief executive, Michael D. Eisner, and
the president, Robert A. Iger. Mr. Mooney said. "We found
there was no consistency," said Mr. Mooney, noting that
retailers, too, had been complaining about the product
line. "To be candid, they beat up on me to put energy into
Mickey Mouse."
Mr. Mooney said he had whittled the number of Mickey
products the company offered in the United States, hoping
to improve Mickey's cachet.
More than a year ago, the company began selling retro-style
Mickey Mouse T-shirts and other clothes in trendy
boutiques. The clothes were also given to celebrities, and
the paparazzi have captured the actresses Sarah Jessica
Parker and Jennifer Aniston, among others, wearing the
shirts, which Mr. Mooney said have become the consumer
products unit's fastest-growing item.
And Disney is not above drafting Mickey and his friends
into civil service. Starting next summer, Disney characters
will be featured on a series of postage stamps that will be
released yearly through 2006.
Mickey is competing against streetwise and sophisticated
animated newcomers like Viacom's SpongeBob SquarePants. So
Disney is literally taking Mickey to the streets, painting
black and white murals of him on the sides of buildings
around Los Angeles.
Disney is also planning new feature films, including next
year's "Three Musketeers," the first full-length film
starring Mickey Mouse and his friends, and for 2005 the
first computer-animated Mickey movie, "Twice Upon a
Christmas." The movies will not be released in theaters,
instead going straight to home video, under the theory that
it can be difficult to muster cinema-size crowds for
animated characters older than many of today's children's
grandparents.
But age alone might not be Mickey's problem as much as the
burden of carrying corporate responsibilities far heavier
than playing an engaging cartoon character.
"Mickey seems to be more of a spokesperson," said Herb
Scannell, president of Nickelodeon Networks, which is home
to SpongeBob SquarePants.
Some within Disney think so too, and they want to change
that perception. On a recent afternoon in his offices in
Burbank, Ken Shue, the affable director of global art
development for Disney Publishing Worldwide, rifled through
drawers stuffed with thousands of original drawings from
original comic books and strips as well as hardcover books
of all the Disney characters.
He gingerly pulled out sheets of early comic strips of
Mickey and Goofy from the days when the founder, Walt
Disney, who died in 1967, was active in the creative
process. "When Walt was around we didn't have as much
regulation as we do now," said Mr. Shue, who joined the
company nine years ago. "When I came in I was told we had
to conform to a standard."
Indeed, several Disney employees interviewed said the
company employs a team of executives, often referred to as
the "Mickey Police," who monitor Mickey's image.
In the 1930's and 40's Mickey had much more edge to his
personality, Mr. Shue said, because the comic strips were
drawn by adults who wanted to entertain themselves as much
as readers. He pointed to one early strip, in which Mickey
must save Goofy from a dogcatcher who has threatened to put
him in an execution chamber.
Mickey Mouse comic strips were published in newspapers from
1930 to 1993. But after a redesign in 1976, the mouse
became "a more homogenized, more corporate Mickey," Mr.
Shue said. "You could make the case Mickey lost his flair."
Maybe, at age 75, the mouse simply cannot be all things to
all masters.
One Disney executive, Mr. Shue recalled, wanted to create a
book about Mickey Mouse set at the theme parks because
"kids could identify with it." But Mr. Shue and a number of
his colleagues balked at the idea because, unlike the
Mickey on television or in books, the character at the
parks does not speak (in part so that any number of people
in costumes can play him).
"What can be more anti-animation than that?" asked Mr.
Shue. "That Mickey doesn't talk. That's not necessarily
what we want to bring to the printed page."
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/24/business/media/24mouse.html?ex=1070702106&ei=1&en=01a26d2bd00c165d
― Nichole Graham (Nichole Graham), Monday, 24 November 2003 22:27 (twenty-two years ago)