Departure of Eisner as CEO Could Halt Nude Cartoon Changes
Now that a changing of the guard is underway at the Walt Disney Company and CEO Michael Eisner will be gone by early fall, security analysts who follow the media giant are hoping that the move to put clothes on Winnie the Pooh characters will be quietly dropped.
“It has to be one of the more bone-headed ideas to ripple through the Magic Kingdom, and I was appalled to find that Eisner and his inner circle were taking it seriously,” said Raymond Jamison, an analyst at Misty City Securities, a Chicago-based hedge fund that specializes in entertainment companies.
“All it took was one quote-quote family values organization to raise the question of pants for Pooh and Piglet and Eisner caved right in,” he said.
Analysts for firms that hold millions of shares of Disney said that putting clothes on the Pooh characters in response to family values groups would inevitably lead to clothes for Donald Duck and — worse — clothes for Mickey Mouse himself. Clothes, they fear, would open Disney to public ridicule and erode the value of Disney stock, which has lagged in recent years.
“Put clothes on one Disney character that until now has gone through life either completely naked or mostly naked and you start down a very slippery slope with a great, big ugly mud pit waiting at the bottom,” said Spencer Abraham of Bayou Water Partners, a New Orleans hedge fund.
A spokesman for Disney, while acknowledging that “clothes for some of our characters has been under consideration,” would not comment on whether Eisner’s departure next fall and the elevation of long time Disney executive Robert Iger to CEO would bring an end to the character clothes issue.
Clothing Disney characters, particularly those who wear no pants and theoretically have their genitals exposed, was first raised by National Family Wholesome Values, a conservative group based in Sioux City, Iowa that has been critical of nudity in the media.
“While it is obvious to anyone looking at Winnie the Pooh that his genitals have been airbrushed out by the artists, the mind automatically airbrushes them back in, and that is what we find unacceptable,” said Leland Kennedy, NFWV’s executive director. “It’s a form of visual innuendo, a kind of virtual nudity and it’s just as offensive to any thoughtful person as a more real form of nudity.”
Although Disney executives had several meetings with NFWV staff members in the last six months and some company insiders said a compromise acceptable to both sides seemed within reach, in recent weeks Disney insiders had begun to say that Eisner had been persuaded that NFWV was correct with its virtual nudity argument and that Disney should begin working on contingency plans to clothe most, if not all, of its characters who wear no pants.
“I hope we are now entering a new era at Disney in which sanity will return and management will return to its core values,” said Bayou Water’s Abraham. “People want their cartoon characters without pants and so does Wall Street.”