• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, April 1, 2024

The TV Blog hereby throws its support behind the Disney Board ahead of this week’s proxy vote on Wednesday.

The reasons are basically this: As far as I can learn, the financial firm of Trian Partners has no department of imagineering in its corporate structure. Moreover, Trian has never made a cartoon.

The same goes for the other entities seeking to elbow their way onto the Disney Board to bring their influence to bear on the company’s top management.

Their goals, as I understand them: (1) To rein in compensation for Disney’s top brass, (2) curb spending on production to fill the Disney+ pipeline and (3) make more money for shareholders, including themselves.

There is nothing wrong with wanting to make money in America.

But how can they put a price on dreams? Dreams are expensive!

Really, Nelson Peltz? Where is your Mickey Mouse? Where is your Magic Kingdom? Where is your “Darby O’Gill And the Little People”?

Disney has been hard at work since at least February contacting little people -- i.e., individual investors in its empire -- by mail and by phone to support the Disney board with their proxy votes in advance of the company’s annual shareholders meeting in two days.

Trian has adopted similar tactics to sway shareholders to vote to elect Peltz, 81, a founding partner of Trian, and Jay Rasulo, a former Disney executive, to the Disney board.

They haven’t forgotten the little people either. “We want to make sure that all the shareholders -- not just guys like us -- but guys who got 50 shares for a gift, a kid who got 10 shares and has it on his wall as his 10th birthday gift, those are the people we wanna help,” says Peltz in a video clip on Trian’s “Restore the Magic” web site.

Kid investors with shares of Disney are one thing. But what about the millions of other kids who are emotionally invested in Disney?

Who can they trust to keep the characters they love -- Mickey, Woody, Buzz Lightyear, Nemo and thousands of others -- alive and well?

Not the Trian gang. They aim to curtail Disney productions, which could include animation (although they have said no such thing).

What’s next? “Star Wars”?

Disney, on the other hand, has a history of never jettisoning or otherwise sidelining or mothballing any of its intellectual property, no matter how long in the tooth it might be, except maybe for “Song of the South.”

In some ways, the proxy vote boils down to a choice between these Trian guys and Bob Iger, now in his second term as Disney CEO.

The Trian activists have openly complained about the size of Iger’s compensation package. 

In addition, they are dissatisfied with the pace of Disney’s efforts to form a succession plan to replace Iger, who is 73, in the event he leaves -- which is also something they wouldn’t exactly mourn. 

But Iger seems like a better hope for the preservation of the Disney characters, the Magic Kingdoms and the Department of Imagineering than Peltz, despite his evident concern for kids with Disney stock certificates thumbtacked to their bedroom walls. 

Although his last name is not Disney, Iger feels like a part of the family.

The TV Blog believes that if Walt Disney were alive today, he would regard Bob Iger as the son he never had (Disney had two daughters).

In endorsing the Disney Board over the activist investors, the TV Blog exhorts those who have not yet done so to vote to Make Disney Great Again -- MDGA!