MousePlanet CEO Alex Stroup answers a couple of letters from readers in the first part of this week’s mailbag.
Patrick Stibbs writes:
When I was at the park in late October, a cast member was talking about the possibility of the Ball Brothers (sp?) literally buying Disneyland and selling it off. Was this guy just plain nuts, or is there any validity to this?
I don’t know who the Ball Brothers are (other than the dead founders of Ball Corporation, most famous for manufacturing canning jars) but I think it is very safe to say that that the latter option is likely.
Disney won’t sell Disneyland unless they decide to get out of the theme park business altogether and that’s not going to happen anytime soon.
Alex continues:
As soon as I hit Send on the last reply it suddenly popped into my head what the cast member was probably talking about (or the real old Disney history that may be percolating around as current rumor).
The brothers in question were probably the Bass Brothers. Sid Bass and his brothers are oil and real estate billionaires from Texas and played a big role in the major upheavals at Disney in the early 1980s.
In the early 1980s the Walt Disney Company was foundering and several Wall Street people came to the conclusion that the segments of the company were worth more than the sum total worth of its stock. So they began buying heavily into the Walt Disney Company, accumulating huge percentages of the outstanding shares. Once that happened, it was win-win for them. Either they’d accumulate enough power to begin selling off the pieces of the company (essentially spelling death for the company), or to fend them off the Walt Disney Company would have to buy back the stock at a significant premium so that they wouldn’t get the power.
The leader of the main group doing this was Saul Steinberg, though several others were involved. Disney first tried to make itself too expensive by acquiring other companies but eventually ended up paying the “greenmail” (as this practice is known), creating a huge profit for Steinberg and friends.
One of the companies acquired was Arvida Corporation, a land development company owned by the Bass Brothers. They were given positions of power within the company and provided enough financial support to make warding off the greenmailers possible. By the time the episode was over they owned more than 25 percent of the Walt Disney Company and were the powers behind the throne (working with Roy Disney and Stanley Gold) that overthrew then CEO Ron Miller and began the 20-year reign of Michael Eisner.
So, the Bass Brothers were active in preventing the company from being broken into pieces and sold off, but they were also heavily involved in the only era of Disney history when the selling of Disneyland was a serious proposition.
The Bass Brothers never showed much interest in the day-to-day management of the company, though they were solid supporters of Eisner through his tenure. And after getting hit hard by the stock market drop in 2001,their combined ownership of Disney fell below 5 percent and is probably now well below that number (no individual Bass brother owns enough to meet the reporting threshold).
So, if the cast member did mean Bass Brothers and not Ball Brothers, he was probably either telling the story of 1983, or somehow the story of 1983 has continued among Disney cast members as a current ongoing story. Regardless, it has the role of the Bass Brothers wrong.
Or it could be that the CM was talking about something else entirely.
Chris writes:
Thanks very much for the wonderful desktop backgrounds. I was wondering if there is any way you could provide higher resolution pictures for us with larger monitors. For instance my monitor’s native resolution is 1600×1200. Thanks very much for whatever you can do!
Thanks for you letter. It is an issue that comes up every time we publish desktops. I definitely feel the problem because I use a widescreen monitor with a resolution of 1280×800. Your e-mail was good because it prompted me to once again look at the screen resolution stats for people reading MousePlanet. A year ago, 1024×768 was by far the most common and this is even truer today with more than half of all visitors having that resolution.
800×600 is finally showing decline and in the last year seems to have fallen by about half and is now only the third most common resolution at 10 percent. A slightly squarer monitor (1280×1024) is now handily in second place at 15 percent. If we add a third size/resolution option this definitely should be it. Widescreen (1280×800) has 7 percent.
But after those three big ones, there are another seven screen resolutions with between 1 percent and 5 percent shares. Your resolution is ninth on the list, with 1.1 percent of the traffic.
Having revisited the stats I’ll definitely look at providing more options for the next and future sets. But to meet the requirements of the 10 settings that visit MousePlanet would not only require making 10 versions of each photo (auto-resized images don’t generally look as good as when done with appropriate software) but also with four different aspect ratios, which can be difficult depending on the photo composition.
Thank you, again, for raising the question.
Continuing on the theme of desktop photos and photography, MousePlanet photographer and staff writer Frank Anzalone answers reader questions in response to his photo articles and desktop images. Sharon Hodges writes:
Thanks for the wonderful pictures in your article this week. I have already changed my desktop.
I am looking forward to the other pictures that you have said are on the way.
Thank you for the nice words! I just love walking through Walt Disney World with my camera… Even though you might have been there before, you never know what you are going to see!
Keep watching MousePlanet for that next series of desktop images! It should be fun to sit at your computer and see what makes you smile (while you work)!
Tony R. writes:
Frank… Thank you so much for the new batch of desktops. This is one of the things I have personally missed a great deal from MousePlanet. Being a native southern Californian who was a Disneyland regular in my youth, the only way I can enjoy the sights of the parks with any regularity these days is through other people’s images as I now live in the Midwest.
Your images in particular have always been of exceptional quality and composition, but I assumed for whatever reason it was no longer feasible for you to provide them on this site. Thanks again for bringing them back, and please put up some batches from Disneyland. After reading about all the changes there in the last few years, I am dying to see the place (maybe it’s time to book a trip…) Looking forward with great anticipation to your next post of desktops…
Thank you for the kind words! I just enjoy looking for those “Disney moments”…
There will be more desktop images posted on MousePlanet soon (more from Walt Disney World), and actually, I am heading to Disneyland this weekend—the first weekend that all the holiday décor will be up! I was planning to wander with the camera and see if I can capture some of those Disneyland holiday images (for myself and for desktops). I’m not sure if they will be posted here in time for the holidays, but keep reading MousePlanet to see!
Mary Waring writes:
Just wanted to say thank you for the beautiful holiday desktops on MousePlanet. They are the nicest ones I’ve ever seen. I’m enjoying one on my computer right now!
I am so glad to share those images with you! I know there are going to be more desktops on MousePlanet in the near future so keep watching for them!
Have a great holiday!
b52hbuff asks:
[From the Disneyland holiday desktop article]… a question about ‘Main Street Wreath’: Was the background in this picture blurred due to aperture? Or was the background blurred in ‘post processing’?
That is a technique using a large aperture, a faster shutter speed and a telephoto lens. Standing back and zooming in on a subject will ‘compress’ the depth. Pulling that all together, you get the wreath on Main Street with the castle appearing closer (and blurred); no Photoshop was used on that picture.
Bruce Pantani writes:
When I opened MousePlanet this morning my first thought was “those guys stole my image”. The similarities are really amazing—great minds think alike and all that… Take a look:
That is just too coincidental! Your picture is awesome. You never know what weather you get there; I love the clouds that you captured in your image.
It was such a fun vacation—we were there with friends that have never been to Disney World, so we just walked their legs off! They got used to me though when I would make them wait until the monorail came into the frame.
Keep up the great shooting!
Steven writes:
Just wanted to drop a line to compliment you on your Disney photography. I also went to the 50th Anniversary exhibit in Oakland and quite enjoyed it.
I was disappointed that photography was not allowed, but glad you were able to snap some pictures. I have gear close to yours (D200 & D70), but I’m still learning.
I was quite fortunate and honored that I was able to shoot that exhibit. I did shoot it with no flash—per their request. The most extraordinary single piece for me was the original Herb Ryman concept drawing of Disneyland. I did not realize how big it was. And the detail! Awesome!
I used to use a D100 before I got the D2x. That D200 is a great camera! The only reason I do not have one at the moment is because I just bought a d80 instead (I almost bought that D200). It is about half the weight of the D200. I wanted a ‘vacation camera’. Silly as it may sound, if you carried that D2x camera all over Walt Disney World just for vacation, you would get tired, too! I did this last vacation at Walt Disney World with the D80 and one lens—period! I got some great results. Check out some of the desktop photos on MousePlanet.
