Podcast Corner: Corporate Disney story is riveting stuff

Theme parks, management, movies, tech — it's all covered in this pretty compelling podcast

Walt Disney, cartoon /film producer.

Disney is listed on the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) list, amid Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza, as one of the companies to pressure for its ties to the country. The company is a sprawling conglomerate. Of course, it’s the family-friendly 'House of Mouse', which also owns Marvel and LucasFilm, responsible for Star Wars, but Disney is so much more than that.

Its suspect business tentacles are not explored in this summer’s season of Vulture’s Land of the Giants, but nonetheless, it’s an entertaining exploration of the vast company, as illustrated by the episode titles: Disney is a TV Company; Disney is a Theme Parks Company; an Animation Company; a Cinematic Universe; Disney is Bob Iger’s Company.

The final episode of the six-part season, released on August 14, is about how Disney is now a tech company too.

Walt Disney, centre; with Disney chief executive Bob Chapek (top); Michael Eisner (bottom right); and Bob Iger (bottom left)

Land of the Giants has been running since 2019, clocking up 10 seasons on the biggest companies in the world, such as Amazon, Tesla, Meta, Apple, the Google Empire, gig-economy delivery apps, and last year’s Twitter Fantasy. At the heart of the Disney Dilemma are succession issues that would leave Jesse Armstrong licking his lips.

Of course, in the beginning there was Walt Disney, the brainchild behind Mickey Mouse and the theme parks which define Disney and drive its revenues to this day (its experiences unit reported operating income of $2.2bn in quarterly reports last week). He thought of the original Disneyland, opened in the 1950s, as a middle American’s reminiscence of youth. Walt died in 1966 and for the best part of two decades, Disney drifted, until Michael Eisner took over in the mid-1980s. He oversaw its resurgence, Beauty and the Beast, released in 1991 and the first animation to be nominated for best film at the Academy Awards, perhaps marking its high point, or at least heralding its return to top of the mountain. But then Pixar and Toy Story arrived and Disney started to look stale again. Bob Iger took over the reins from Eisner in 2005.

His own succession story with Bob Chapek, around the time when covid first hit in early 2020, is more entertaining than most series you’ll find on Disney Plus. (“There’s all this [stuff] about ‘Chapek is Bob Iger’s hand-picked successor’. I always rolled my eyes when I saw that. Yeah, hand-picked to fail!” posits one contributor.

Land of the Giants does a great job telling all these stories and more, a different narrator and expert in the field detailing the theme parks, the films, and so on. It may not sound like high-summer fare but it’s a riveting series — one of the best of the year so far.