The Walt Disney Company
From ArticleWorld
The Operations
Walt Disney Company mainly operates in the spheres of Studio Entertainment, Parks and Resorts, Media Networks and Consumer Products.
Walt Disney Studios is another name for Studio entertainment unit headed by Chairman Dick Cook. Groups involved in this unit are Buena Vista Motion Picture group & Disney’s Buena music Group. Buena Vista motion Pictures group , a collection of movie studios includes Walt Disney Picture, Touchstone Pictures & Hollywood Pictures. Disney’s Buena Vista Music group includes Walt Disney records, Mammoth Records, Lyric Street Records and Hollywood Records. This unit also includes Walt Disney Theatrical and Disney’s Distribution companies: Buena Vista International and Buena Vista Home Entertainment.
The Works
Walt Disney’s most successful subsidiaries are its animation studio. Walt Disney was very successful in producing traditionally animated films. The traditional animated films are hand drawn animated films in which Disney took a very well known fairy tale and injected distinctive American flavor and added popular style songs to turn them into animated musicals. In short an animated, musical, American style. This kind of animation began in 1938 with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. It was hugely popular soon, and was then followed by films of same genre like Cinderella in 1950, The Sleeping Beauty in 1959, The Little Mermaid in 1989, Beauty and the Beast in 1991 and Aladdin in 1992. By this time, the era of hand made animation films had come to an end with the advent of computerized animation sometime later. The first computerized animation film to roll out from the studios of Walt Disney was Chicken Little in 2005. Walt Disney Studios the company’s main film and television facility and corporate headquarters is located in Burbank in California. Parks and Resorts are the other popular units of this huge group. Disney operates a total of nine theme parks and resorts. With two at Disneyland Resorts, four at Walt Disney world resort, two at Disneyland Resort, Paris, and one at the Hong Kong Disneyland Resort. Walt Disney Imagineering, Walt Disney Creative Entertainment, The Disney Cruise Line, Disney Vacation Club and the chain of ESPN Zone Sports theme restaurants also operate under Parks and Resorts units.
With the merger of Capital Cities and American Broadcasting Company, the media network of Walt Disney was established. Disney also owns a group of cable network including The Disney Channel, ABC Family, Toon Disney, The ESPN group et al. through ABC, Disney Also owns ten local television stations and 26 local radio stations. Disney also operates its Hyperion Publishing Company and Walt Disney Internet group through media network Disney consumer product unit includes Disney’s Merchandising and licensing business . It has also produced Disney Adventures –the Children’s magazine.