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Enter Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg, with a plan. The new Disney picture bosses ignored Star Wars-type space operas and exploited another familiar format: the adult comedy. Down and Out in Beverly Hills, Ruthless People and Outrageous Fortune were not the species of fantasy-comedies -- the sons of Son | of Flubber -- that Disney had more or less invented and every other studio was copying. The new Disney films had complicated plots crammed with philandering men and bawdy women. They found their antecedents in classic French farce (even as Three Men and a Baby is a remake of a French movie in the boulevard-comedy style). These were the rules: go big, move fast; a lotta laughs, a little sex. In tone the comedies were live-action cartoons. And they created, in the stock company of Richard Dreyfuss, Bette Midler and Danny DeVito, human equivalents of Mickey, Minnie and Donald.
They did more, in a commercial sense, than Walt ever achieved. The success of these comedies made Disney a major studio, not just a boutique. But if the product line was more varied than in the old days, Disney still had the most distinctive profile in the business. The films could be spiced with nostalgia (Tin Men) or social comment (Good Morning, Vietnam) or cop bravado (Stakeout and Shoot to Kill), but they all shared a surface sophistication and an invigorating mean streak. These were movies for adults, the missing piece of the studio's audience. Disney movies of the past, like the theme parks, had embraced a limited market: children and their doting parents. Now the company is reaching for urban teenagers and young adults -- the whole postnuclear family -- and it is grabbing them.
Traditionalists may mourn the loss of old values, the introduction of four- letter words, even the voracious ambition of this new movie conglomerate. But Eisner and Co. are simply, savvily, reflecting their times as Walt Disney deflected his. Perhaps today's children, bombarded by TV images of lust, violence, deceit and despair -- and that's just on the news -- no longer have childhoods. They surely don't have them the way Walt dreamed them and put them on film. The company's new bosses would have died of boredom if they had merely exploited Walt Disney's name and ways. Sure, they could have kept cashing in on the old goodwill for decades, but they couldn't mint innocence.
So they did what was needed to survive and flourish. They turned the cathedral into a mall. There's a multiplex cinema there, and all the films are Disney's. No way a young Michael Eisner could escape them now.