The Disney Lion King Disaster

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlGlcDAhIOM&ab_channel=Playcast

No! many thanks to my old boss Rick Segal from that period. Apparently the Disney Lion King was traumatic enough for him that he has saved that WSJ article for all of these years... and here it is.

The full text of the 1/29/1995 WSJ article:

Parents don't like surprises when they are buying products for their children. They pass over alien-looking goods for the comfortable, the familiar, the trustworthy. This is Walt Disney Co.'s domain, and the company's sacred pact with parents has built a $10 billion corporation.

So when 3-year-old Cailin Flaherty dissolved into tears on Christmas morning, it was the kind of event that shakes Disney to its foundations. Like thousands of other children who found Disney's The Lion King CD-ROM under the tree, she was disappointed when her dad couldn't get the program to work on the family computer: Video would freeze midframe. Dad, a software specialist working with a relatively powerful computer, wasn't too pleased, either, when Disney didn't respond to his repeated requests to fix the problem.

"I expected much better from a company such as Disney," Terry Flaherty wrote to its chairman and chief executive officer, Michael Eisner. "My confidence, as well as many others', in your company has been damaged."

Flaherty finally got a response from Disney almost two weeks ago. The company promised a technician would be in touch with him.

"We regret that customers have had incompatibility problems, and we are 100 percent committed to customer satisfaction," says Steve McBeth, president of Disney Interactive, the company's software arm. "We won't be satisfied until all compatibility problems are removed."

How could Disney - king of children's entertainment and moviedom's reigning box-office leader - fumble at what would seem to be its own game? The answer is a study not only in Disney corporate culture but also in Hollywood's awkward flirtations with computer technology.

Like other major Hollywood "content providers," Disney had been surpassed in the software universe by Silicon Valley upstarts with names like Broderbund and Electronic Arts, which built a huge business designing high-tech entertainment software for the home.

Although Disney has the most-recognized characters in the world, plus a reputation for cutting-edge technology in its animated films and theme-park rides, the company had been fitfully trying to master the software business since 1988.

Then, this past Christmas season, Disney decided it was time to pounce on the CD-ROM market. With a huge $3 million advertising campaign timed to the re-release of the highest-grossing animated film of all time, Disney pumped almost 300,000 units of the Lion King into Wal-Marts and Kmarts everywhere, and overnight produced the fastest-selling children's title ever. Consumers have bought more than 200,000 to date.

Disney executives, skeptical in the past when Hollywood seemed infatuated with new technologies, now say the company will build its computer-software division to a $1 billion business within five years - a fivefold increase from what it is currently estimated to draw. Disney won't disclose financial results for the software arm.

Clearly, such new business would be welcome in a company that, despite a decade of enormous growth, has lately seen its theme-park business stagnate and its movie division endure a major overhaul of top management. Disney wants to find profitable businesses in the interactive arena. But in a world worried about wiring and 500-channel television, the company remains focused on providing content for other people's systems.

Now, say company officials, one part of the puzzle is falling into place. As more-powerful, cheaper computers enter homes by the millions, a marketing and technical base is emerging that Disney officials believe will support the level of programming that has worked for it in other media. "Something fundamental has happened,"

McBeth contends.

For now, Disney and others are pinning much of their hope on CD-ROMs, the silvery compact discs that can store huge, though still limited, amounts of digital data. These discs hold enough information to produce acceptable color motion pictures and sound on computers. Theoretically, the CD-ROM market is big and mushrooming. Already 7.8 million home computers are thought to have the equipment that can read these discs, three times the number of just a year ago, according to industry consultant Dataquest Inc.

But in practice, an unknown amount of this equipment already is obsolete. And standards needed for software to mesh smoothly with home equipment are foggy. Disney, which had such success selling the Lion King CD-ROM, discovered painfully that it was another thing to make it work.

The venom set in on Dec. 26 and built as days and weeks went by and angry consumer messages went unanswered. Flaherty's missive was just one of thousands pouring into Disney by mail, phone and computer. "Is anybody out there?" asked a plaintive user on one computer-service board operated by Disney. Other messages complained of fundamental broken trust and corporate arrogance. "My whole family has a tarnished image of Disney right now," said an angry note. Still other writers threatened to cancel plans to visit Walt Disney World.

Disney officials first went on the offensive. They complained to the media that neophyte users didn't know what they were doing, that they had failed to read a tiny technical message on the bottom of the box and that many users' equipment was obsolete. More recently, Disney's public tone has grown humbler, and the company has increased its product support staff from eight employees when it introduced Lion King before Christmas to about 50 today, an unexpected expense.

As company officials now concede, the program was marketed with known errors, wrongly believed to affect only a minute percentage of computers. Also, a misjudgment was made that allowed Lion King to run only on computers with up-to-date sound equipment. (Other versions are now being sent to disappointed buyers.) But pressed by the approach of Christmas and the re-release of the film, Disney released the CD-ROM.

As with other home-computer programs published by Disney, technical work on Lion King was done by an outside contractor.

Closely held Media Station Inc. of Ann Arbor, Mich., used an elaborate "software engine" of its own design to stitch together sound and drawings by Disney artists. Final quality assurance was Disney's job. Disney says it was told by both Media Station and Microsoft Corp., which had produced sections of the software code, of the program's bugs.

When Lion King works, users find the elegant coloring and slickly drawn characters of the Disney movie.

Opinions of the 18 screens of narrative and three interactive games vary. In informal testing at Home PC magazine, "it was clear that children love Lion King; it was also clear that the love began before they sat down with the program," reports Editor Carol Ellison.

Though glitches are widespread throughout the software industry, Disney's approach with Lion King says much about its lingering unfamiliarity with the business. Companies specializing in children's computer programs generally go to considerable lengths to settle problems, having learned the hard way about parental angst and anger.

Far from jeering at Disney's badly stubbed toe, competitors worry that an angry public could reject all multimedia programming after the Lion King experience. "Companies might snicker at Disney and their problems, but in fact it's a problem for all of us," says Ron Gilbert, co-founder of Humongous Entertainment Inc. of Woodinville, Wash.