Disney To Aid Fire Relief ...and Target Piracy

When The Walt Disney Company announced yesterday that it will contribute $2 million to help victims of the Southern California fires restore burned areas, it was greeted with some sincere thanks and at least one perhaps cynical comment on the site called MiceChat.com: "Humm... I'd like to think that Disney is doing this out of the goodness of their hearts, but part of me thinks that the housing issue in Anaheim had something to do with this too. Make a good face for the people of the area and the council members against Disney suddenly look like bad guys."

Said issue is a tangled saga, well limned in The Washington Post, in which Disney has fought a developer (and his city council adherents) who wants to build 1,200 affordable homes on a tract close to Disney's special resort zone. The struggle is bitter, and has included fist fights between signature-solicitors for opposing sides and a skit in front of City Hall in which actors in "Evil Queen" and Mickey outfits ordered Disney workers to get out of town.

Let's just hope none of the impersonators get in a scrap in font of the kids with the actual incarnations of trademarked Disney characters who, the corporation also promised, will visit Qualcomm Stadium and other fire-refugee shelters in San Diego and Orange County this week. (We've already been badly spooked by the supposed footage of "Pluto Flips Out at Disneyland" at the BoingBoing.com site.)

(The cynics might be reminded that after Katrina hit in 2005, Disney's then-CEO Michael Eisner pledged $2.5 million toward the relief effort, with no compelling businesses stake in the city--though the company does have a thousand-room resort which simulates New Orleans among its Orlando properties.)

It's been two years since New York-raised, ABC-TV veteran Robert Iger, 56, ultimately emerged from the merger with Disney to take over for Eisner. One of his legacies was the company's under-performing California Adventure theme park, which opened in 2001. The company recently announced they well rename it, and in any event will re-conceive it at a tab reported to be $1 billion, more than the original cost. The five-year overhaul is meant to accord with something more akin to founder Walt Disney's original vision. (Another move on Iger's watch has been, despite close corporate ties with McDonald's and their movie-themed Happy Meals, to phase out trans fats from the parks internationally.)

The nods to the founder are not accidental, and yet Iger remains one of the calmer--and yet more innovation-friendly-- voices among the entertainment C.E.O.'s facing a slightly mystifying future. As Variety's Peter Bart has said, " Walt would warm to the more relaxed and informal Bob Iger, and might even welcome his perorations on the new media. After all, Disney himself was a self-styled futurist--a sort of New Age Davy Crockett."

Grilled by Merrill Lynch analyst Jessica Reif Cohen this year about the coming confrontation between the companies and the guilds, he said, with a conviction that made it sound less like boilerplate, "There's clearly a burning need for all those involved to recognize and accept that there's been a dramatic change that has swept over the industry."

Part of the change has been the scrap among the majors as to whether HD-DVD or Blu-Ray should set the standard for future high-def product, and based on Disney's robust sales of Pirates of the Caribbean on Blu-Ray--especially internationally where he's declared the format has a clear lead, he's said, "We believe it's a no-brainer that the industry should be behind Blu-ray." Iger and his Blu-Ray chum NewsCorp, in the person of Rupert Murdoch have made it clear that they really mean that Paramount, DreamWorks and others touting the competing format have, well, no brains.

Iger seems to regard most stopgap measures against piracy of content almost as more palliative than effective. At Forbes MEET II conference in Beverly Hills on Wednesday, he declared that the best means of curbing piracy is to improve and feature digital delivery. :""In order to combat piracy, you have to put the product out there in an accessible way. Let's fight piracy by putting the product out there well-timed, well-priced to the market."

That philosophy makes it all the clearer why the much-courted Steve Jobs agreed to have Pixar meld with Disney--the bosses understood each other very well. Jobs liked Disney's theme park component, Jobs told a gaggle of analysts, and that "they have animation int heir DNA." Just as important was what he quickly added: "And they are the only company that has Bob Iger, who we have grown to like a lot and to trust.

Iger's openness has made what could have looked like an engineered coup by Pixar look like merely smart business. He showed the audience a 30's-era Mickey Mouse cartoon (voice actor, Walt Disney), available at iTunes for $1.99, on his iPhone. "I know I'm a walking, talking commercial for Apple," he told the conference, " Why not? Steve's our largest shareholder."

ABC arguably set the pace for what's become aggressive move across the networks to draw viewers to their brand via the net. In a typical moment of sharing his homework with the industry, he told the conference that online episodes don't cannibalize TV because the average watcher online is younger than 30, while the average age of a prime-time viewer of ABC is older than 40. "You're capturing a completely new audience," he said.

That said, he has his limits. Asked by one of his a Forbes hosts why Disney hasn't made its programming available to file-sharing network BitTorrent, who noted that "are still fairly conservative about the environment they're in". Therefore, he advised, "We don't really want to put a Disney movie on a digital platform on the same page as 'Best Breasts on the Web."

(You fellas can stop right there. I have it on excellent authority no such site exists.

As of late afternoon, anyhow.)

(DIsney's Robert Iger and Dick Cook with MichelleTrachtenberg; photo by Getty Images)