Acquired
02:25:03 · Ben Gilbert, David Rosenthal
[02:25:03] S0: Yes. Listeners, this is a great time to thank our friends at ServiceNow, longtime friends of the show. So if you are managing a large enterprise today, you've got AI everywhere. You've got copilots and models and agents all running across every team. [02:25:17] S1: And the promise was simple. Add AI and the results will follow. But enterprises are now realizing that the hard part was never adding AI. It's making it work. [02:25:27] S0: Right. It's gotta have the right context and connect to the workflows that matter. Plus, it's gotta be secure, stay governable, and still be able to take real actions. You get all that working together, and that's when magic happens. [02:25:39] S1: Yes. And for those, like, two of you out there who've never been to Disneyland, the magic isn't just from one great ride. It's from the whole experience being seamless. The daily parades, the sight lines, the characters appearing exactly at the right moment. It looks effortless, but behind the scenes, thousands of moving parts are being coordinated in real time from a control center that nobody ever sees. [02:26:01] S0: And that's what ServiceNow has been building for over twenty years, the foundation AI needs to succeed. And they've done it at scale. Over a 100,000,000,000 workflows, trillions of transactions, and the operational knowledge of how work actually gets done. That's why more than 85% of the Fortune five hundred work with ServiceNow.
02:26:01 · Ben Gilbert, David Rosenthal
[02:26:01] S0: And that's what ServiceNow has been building for over twenty years, the foundation AI needs to succeed. And they've done it at scale. Over a 100,000,000,000 workflows, trillions of transactions, and the operational knowledge of how work actually gets done. That's why more than 85% of the Fortune five hundred work with ServiceNow. [02:26:19] S1: And as the AI control tower, they're giving companies a single place to manage all of it, not just agents, but every AI system across your business. So listeners, if [02:26:28] S0: you are wrangling AI across your company, go check out servicenow.com/acquired and just tell them that Ben and David sent you. Alright. So we're coming out of the war. There's sort of a few moving parts here at Disney right now. So the revenue from the government has dried up. So the the thing that was putting them on sound financial footing is not there for the sort of quick revenue hits. The long term stuff other than the rereleases, they haven't stoked the fire in a while. Yep. So the strategy over these next few years is to sorta kick start, to try to do stuff that doesn't cost a lot of money but might have a lot of return.
02:27:04 · David Rosenthal, Ben Gilbert
[02:27:04] S1: And so they try a bunch of stuff. On the animation side, they do packages where they take a bunch of shorts and they package them together as feature films. These are movies that you almost assuredly have never seen called, like, Make Mine Music or Fun and Fancy Free, not big successes. The other thing they try in animation is to go back to the original Alice's idea of combining animation and live action. The result of that is the movie song of the south. Yeah. Which historians look back on as racist and deeply problematic, and Disney has never released on home video or streaming. So, not a big success for the flywheel there either. And for the first time in animation, there's now actually real competition in the marketplace. So before the war, Warner Brothers had started Looney Tunes, you know, with, like, Daffy Duck and Porky Pig and then Elmer Fudd and, of course, Bugs Bunny. Ironically, it's a former Disney story department employee, Charles Thorson, that does the initial designs for Bugs Bunny. And then in 1940, you know, same year, it all started to fall apart for Disney. Joseph Barbera and William Hanna start working together. They produce Tom and Jerry for MGM. So the other major studios [02:28:28] S0: And The Flintstones. [02:28:29] S1: Yeah. The Flintstones, of course. Yeah. The other major studios are starting to creep in on the animation game. And so by this postwar period, these other studios had grown in popularity and were really starting to rival Disney. Meanwhile, Disney, they go the other way, and they get into live action.
02:28:29 · David Rosenthal, Ben Gilbert
[02:28:29] S1: Yeah. The Flintstones, of course. Yeah. The other major studios are starting to creep in on the animation game. And so by this postwar period, these other studios had grown in popularity and were really starting to rival Disney. Meanwhile, Disney, they go the other way, and they get into live action. [02:28:47] S0: Yeah. They somehow had a bunch of cash tied up in Europe that they couldn't repatriate, so they needed to spend it in London. So they went and shot a live action film, Treasure Island, in London, which did well for them. Live action is far less expensive to create. You can do it fast, and they needed to do something with this cash. But, you know, you're not buying a lot of Treasure Island merch today. It's not durable like the [02:29:10] S1: the animated stuff. As we talked about earlier, live action doesn't feed the flywheel, at least for Disney, in quite the same way.
02:29:10 · David Rosenthal, Ben Gilbert
[02:29:10] S1: the animated stuff. As we talked about earlier, live action doesn't feed the flywheel, at least for Disney, in quite the same way. [02:29:17] S0: Yep. They started doing nature documentaries. They did one called Seal Island shot in Alaska. They also started studying the emerging TV medium to see if they should do something here. But at this point in time decide, basically not. But we'll watch it and see. We're very interested. But Walt Hart really was in animation. He wanted to get back to making animated feature films that push the envelope. Roy, meanwhile, hates this idea since the studio is not on good financial footing. It has lots of debt. Walt ultimately has to give an ultimatum that if we don't get back to this, then we should just sell the company. Like, what are we even doing here? In 1950, Roy capitulates, and the company went and raised another $2,000,000 to finance their next film, which was Cinderella. [02:30:05] S1: The first bright spot in a long time. [02:30:09] S0: And their first full length feature film in eight years since Bambi in 1942. [02:30:14] S1: And the way they made Cinderella was quite different. Right? [02:30:18] S0: Yeah. So Walt pounds the table to make this thing, and then he kinda realizes the way they are gonna make it feels compromised to him. Mhmm. Because the budget just can't be what they were blowing before in those early forties to try to really push the envelope.
02:30:18 · Ben Gilbert, David Rosenthal
[02:30:18] S0: Yeah. So Walt pounds the table to make this thing, and then he kinda realizes the way they are gonna make it feels compromised to him. Mhmm. Because the budget just can't be what they were blowing before in those early forties to try to really push the envelope. [02:30:34] S1: Yeah. There's a great quote from the animator Frank Thomas who worked on Cinderella. We planned Cinderella more carefully and shot it all in live action first so we could judge it. This was without costumes or a set. Just go on a soundstage and see whether that scene's going to work. Walt said, we can't afford to animate it and then change it. The animation has to be right the first time. Yeah. Not the mindset that they took into Snow White.