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The history of Disney in the Post-Walt Era really fascinates me. It was obvious that they were doing worse and worse after Walt's death, but even 30 years after the takeover by Saul Steinberg and proceeding break-up of the company*, no real consensus on exactly what caused Disney to fail and what it needed to do to survive has yet formed. Many blame the worsening quality of the films they were putting out, yet others counter how many of those films found their way to VHS and DVD to discover a much warmer reception (I still don't think many will argue that it was worth their time to finish The Black Cauldron). A smaller crowd argues that big-studio feature animation became impossibly expensive without computer assistance, although personally I think the success of traditionalists like Don Bluth and Studio Ghibli in the '80s and early '90s refutes that. Those who may be more cynical of Disney may believe that it was the simple growth of honest competition in their home turf, feature animation, which saw them off, and that they would've broken apart even earlier had Warner Bros. stopped messing around with shorts and made features of their own. Again, specifically what competition had came around is not often specified (NIMH was hardly a blockbuster, a taste of things to come though it was).

How would a move to avoid the buying out of Disney be avoided, and more crucially, how would Disney recover from the slump that IOTL proved fatal (if The Black Cauldron was the best they could do with $40 million, then we may have a problem)? What would a 'revived' Disney look like, what kind of films would they make,? Would they continue the trend to move farther away from the traditional fairy tale and maybe even become more mature, or would a 'return to roots' strategy be better? And what of their competition?

*: The PoD is that Roy Disney Jr., organiser of the 'Save Disney' campaign which headed off Steinbergs takeover attempt and put the Eisner/Katzenberg/Wells trio in charge, has died in a car crash in 1980. No Roy, no push to save the company.
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