Peter Schneider

I leave, Nina leaves, Ornavieve and DeCook take over.

Then there's this insane period of massive change in turnover between Eisner leaving, Iger getting the job, Peter Schneider coming in and kind of doing his thing and looking at it from the perspective of the way an animator would look at live action.

Then you have Rich Ross come in and kind of blow up the whole business by shutting Touchstone down, really saying they're only going to be focused on the brand, holding up the severed head of the movie proposal.

It's like, we're not doing this anymore.

Um, by the way, that unit's management team, at least at the time that, for Bob's initial visit, uh, would've been as follows.

There was Peter Schneider, who was the president of Walt Disney Feature Animation.

There was Roy E. Disney, Walt's nephew, vice chairman of that part of Disney Studios, and then there was Jeffrey Katzenberg, who right up until Michael Eisner booted him out of the Mouse House, uh, that would've been September of '94, uh, he had the final say when it came to everything that Feature Animation did.

Anyway, as Chapek recounts in Behind the Castle Wall, and I'll qu- I'm quoting directly now from the books, Bob told these guys, "There's a lot of demand for Aladdin.

'Absolutely not,' the head of animation group told me." And when Bob pressed the point, asking why this Disney executive was so dead set against Feature Animation creating a sequel to Aladdin, he was told, "Our animators are world-class and want to keep creating, not make derivative slop.

A sequel is way beneath them.

They would never even consider it." It's like, okay, so this is the part of this week's Fine Tuning where I say shenanigans, because, well, look, Bob Chapek, in this portion of his memoir, is either outright lying or having a moment of very selective memory, because there is just no way that Peter Schneider would've forgotten about a movie that he himself had, had green-lit, which was The Rescuers Down Under, uh, which Disney had sent out into theaters some three years previous.

It was Disney's big holiday release for November of 1991, and I, I don't really need to remind listeners of this specific podcast, the one about animation, but The Rescuers Down Under was the sequel to The Rescuers, which was Disney's smash hit release for the summer of '77.