#walt-disney-history

#walt-disney-history

In early 1991, the composer Alan Menken took a keyboard to St Vincent's hospital in New York to visit his friend and creative partner, the lyricist Howard Ashman. Ashman was in the final stages of Aids-related illness, but was determined to finish his work on Disney's Aladdin.

Nineteen-year-old Mabel Tanaka has always used nature as a means of calming her volatile emotions, decompressing in the silence of the placid pond near her house with her beloved grandmother by her side. But as Mabel grows from a sullen teen to a young adult, her coping mechanisms fall away one by one. Her parents move away, her grandmother dies, and the pond, the last stable place in her life, is deserted by the wildlife that once gave her so much comfort, and scheduled to be paved over for a new highway.

The Disney Experiences segment just delivered record quarterly revenue of $10.006 billion, and D'Amaro built that machine. The segment generated $9.99 billion in full-year operating income for FY2025, making it the company's most profitable division. A CEO whose fingerprints are all over that result is not a liability.

Ever since I was little, I've been a die-hard Disney fan - in fact, most of my T-shirts, hats, and sweatshirts have Mickey on them. I've been to Disney World in Florida more than 20 times and to Disneyland in California more than 10 times. Every time is better than the next, and it's all worth every penny. That's even as the cost of visiting Disney parks has increased over the years, thanks to factors including inflation, rising labor costs, and changes to its pricing approach.

Here's how this quiz works: below, you'll be asked to type in the name of one character for every letter but X.

It was October of 2023 when Daily Wire decided that their war on liberal chocolate bars and razors should be extended to Disney and one of the company's classic fairy tales: Snow White. If you don't remember or only vaguely remember the project, that's because it was never actually made. A teaser trailer starring former Daily Wire employee Brett Cooper was released though, suggesting Snow White and the Evil Queen would directly take on Disney's live action remake.

D'Amaro, 54, has been serving as chairman of Disney's theme parks and experiences division, the unit that generates the majority of the company's operating income through its parks, cruises, and consumer products. He will succeed longtime CEO Bob Iger, who returned to the role in 2022 after previously leading Disney from 2005 to 2020. The move caps a multiyear succession process closely watched by Wall Street, Hollywood, and fans of the company around the world.

Josh D'Amaro appears to be the frontrunner in the race to be Disney's next CEO, and the Mouse House's latest quarterly earnings showed why. Disney's experiences business, which D'Amaro oversees, is the backbone of a company that's being weighed down by the struggling pay-TV business and isn't yet lifted up by its streaming profits. And when that part of the business sneezes, the stock catches a cold.