Subliminal messages work everytime…

(Thanks, Jeaux Janovsky, via 9gag.com)

Disney director and animator Bill Justice passed away today, just one day after his 97th birthday. Besides animating on many of the classic Disney features like Bambi, Fantasia, and Peter Pan, he directed numerous projects at the studio and helped popularize paper cut-out animation, which has experienced a major resurgence in recent years.

Here are the opening titles he directed with X. Atencio for the film The Misadventures of Merlin Jones:

Below is a press release from the Walt Disney Company with details about his 42-career in animation and Imagineering:
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Calling all Disney completists! The George Eastman House in Rochester, NY, one of the first and finest film archives in the USA, has begun posting several of their rare shorts online. Among the first, Walt Disney’s live-action dental hygiene film, Clara Cleans Her Teeth (1926). This is the best and most complete version of the film I’ve seen. There is a wee bit of animation at the 8:43 mark, but this is otherwise a obscure piece of live action Disneyana. Clara is played by Walt’s niece Marjorie Sewell. You can watch it if you CLICK HERE—and don’t forget to brush!

(Thanks, Leonard Maltin)

After learning about the obscene pay of Viacom’s top honchos, it saddens me to report that Disney’s CEO Bob Iger is barely managing to eke out a living. According to the Associated Press, the Disney Company awarded him only $28 million in 2010, or $55 million less than Viacom’s Philippe Dauman.

Iger’s compensation breaks down as following: a base salary of $2 million, a performance-related bonus of $13.5 million, and stock options valued at $11.8 million. The hard-luck Disney chief also earned $798,433 in additional compensation including use of company aircraft and security-related costs. His compensation package was attributed to a 24 percent in Disney’s share price at the end of the company’s fiscal year on October 2. Also, Disney’s fiscal 2010 net income rose 20 percent to $3.96 billion and revenue grew 5 percent to $38.06 billion. Click here to download the 118-page PDF of Disney’s SEC filing.

I went to a Cracker Barrel for the first time last weekend where I discovered this exclusive CD they carry (buy it here). The stock photo of Walt holding a pointer that kind of looks like a conductor’s baton is a nice touch. If Cracker Barrel can fool customers into believing what they serve qualifies as food, then there’s no reason they shouldn’t be able to convince their clientele that Disney was some kind of a music legend.

Our friend J.J. Sedelmaier sent us these scans (click thumbnails at left and below to enlarge) from a 1945 book, Movie Lot To Beachhead, by Editors of Look Magazine (which has a spread on Private Snafu in Booby Traps on pages 56 and 57). J.J. sent the pages promoting the work Disney was doing for the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, in particular the film, The Unseen Enemy (1945 – aka What Is Disease?). This film was part of a series of simple, but very effective, educational films produced during the war as part of the studios Good Neighbor Program – which you can read about more in-depth in J.B. Kaufman’s highly recommended, South of the Border With Disney. The pages are intertesting, but it gives me an excuse to post the rarely seen film itself (above), which boasts simplistic graphics, contemporary with UPA techniques, conveying an important lesson on disease prevention with limited animation.

See the rest of the scans after the jump:
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I knew it seemed a little familiar…

(Thank you, Ivan Guerrero)

Apparently, Epic Mickey wasn’t nearly as epic as it needed to be to save Disney’s gaming division. On Monday, Disney Interactive Media Group, which lost $234 million in the most recent fiscal year, laid off nearly 200 employees out of its 700-person staff. More layoffs are anticipated soon.

Among the casualties is Vancouver’s Propaganda Games, which made the underperforming game Tron: Evolution. There were also layoffs at Austin-based Junction Point Studios, which made Epic Mickey, another underperforming title according to PC World. A Wall Street Journal article summarized that, “Disney appears to be focusing its future efforts in the games business on newer categories like social games, sales of which have been growing more quickly than traditional games and with a greater potential for profit because of the efficiencies of online distribution.”