Disney World

The Anaheim GardenWalk — a unique outdoor shopping, dining and entertainment center — is now open just steps from the Anaheim Convention Center and the Disneyland Resort.

This entertainment and lifestyle development encompasses approximately 440,000 square feet of retail, dining and entertainment areas amidst an environment of beautifully manicured and unique gardens. The gardens within this complex range from a peaceful Zen-style garden to colorful entertainment pavilions incorporating waterfalls, as well as distinctive landscaping features.

The first phase opened with six nationally known restaurants including such favorites as Bubba Gump Shrimp Co., California Pizza Kitchen, Cheesecake Factory, McCormick & Schmick’s Grille, P.F. Chang’s and Roy’s. Each restaurant includes spacious patio seating ideal for Southern California’s year-round sunny weather. The second phase of this innovative retail, dining and entertainment venue opened June 14. One of the Anaheim GardenWalk’s main features is “300 Anaheim Bowling & Entertainment Center” — an upscale bowling lounge complete with a concierge who, upon proper fitting, delivers guests’ bowling balls to their lanes. In addition, guests can enjoy personal lane-side service while dining on menu items created by the executive chef. Another highlight of the center includes “The Movie Experience 14″ — a 14-screen movie complex, including IMAX that features first-run, as well as vintage classic movies.

New to the OC scene is “Heat Ultra Lounge” — a 10,000-square-foot nightclub and special event venue complete with two distinctively different and luxurious areas for entertaining and exclusive VIP sections. The Anaheim GardenWalk also offers a wide selection of restaurants and retail stores including a few OC originals. Some of the eclectic offerings include: Bar Louie, Chico’s, Harley-Davidson of Anaheim, Hollister, O’Neill, Pop the Cork wine bar and Tommy Bahama.

“GardenWalk gives Anaheim’s visitors and locals alike a place to dine, shop and explore like no other in Orange County,” said Bill Stone, principal of Excel Realty Holdings, LLC.

Upon opening 300 Anaheim Bowling & Entertainment Center, Tristan Stone, general manager for 300 Anaheim said, “With the center’s private lanes — Club 300 — and its sophisticated dining capabilities, 300 Anaheim is sure to bring new meaning to bowling in Orange County and plenty of fun for GardenWalk visitors!”

“We are very excited to open the newest Tommy Bahama retail store at Anaheim GardenWalk,” says Doug Wood, President & COO, Tommy Bahama Group. “This center has generated a lot of excitement & we feel that it perfectly conveys the brand’s ‘life is one long weekend’ philosophy.”

The final phase of this project will include two hotels with a combined total of 866 hotel guestrooms, and a 400-unit timeshare property scheduled to open end of 2010. The hotel meeting and event space will include 36,000 square feet in one hotel and 14,000 square feet in the other hotel.

The Cheetah Girls will launch a 50-date North American tour, according to reports on Monday.

The Disney Channel stars will begin the tour on Oct. 8 at the Frank Erwin Center in Austin, Texas, and end it on Dec. 21 at the San Diego Sports Arena in San Diego.

Tickets for The Cheetah Girls tour go on sale Aug. 23 via Ticketmaster and AEGLive.com.

The tour is to promote the “The Cheetah Girls One World” soundtrack for the group’s third movie on the Disney Channel. The soundtrack will be released Aug. 19 via Walt Disney Records. The soundtrack to their last movie has sold 1.4 million units, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

“The Cheetah Girls One World”, also known to fans as “Cheetah Girls 3″, will be air on the Disney Channel on August 22.

The Cheetah Girls, which consist of Adrienne Bailon, Sabrina Bryan and Kiely Williams, was a quartet until Raven-Symone left the group in 2006.

Charter Communications, Inc. announced today that it has entered into an agreement with Disney-ABC Domestic Television to launch a subscription video on demand (SVOD) entertainment service featuring classic and contemporary movies and animated shorts from The Walt Disney Studios.

Disney Family Movies features a dozen Disney movies and animated shorts. Titles will remain in rotation for about a month, with new titles added weekly. The rotating titles will have broad appeal, targeting children, teens, adults, and families. Initially, Disney Family Movies includes Honey, I Shrunk the Kids; Air Buddies; Disney Princess Enchanted Tales: Follow Your Dreams; Tarzan & Jane; Geppetto and others.

“Charter is pleased to have developed this service with Disney-ABC Domestic Television and serve as their launch partner on this exciting new venture,” said Maria Rothschild, Senior Director of Video Product Management for Charter. “Disney Family Movies is entertainment the whole family can enjoy together and a great value for our customers. With Disney Family Movies, in addition to our VOD movie line up of new releases, blockbusters, free movies, and high definition selections, Charter is the place for movies on television.”

“We are delighted to be offering a family-friendly entertainment service featuring universally treasured Disney titles to Charter’s customers,” added Dan Cohen, executive vice president, pay television and interactive media, Disney-ABC Domestic Television. “This unique Disney offering is the first of its kind, generating an innovative use of the SVOD technology.”

From “Lizzie McGuire” to “Hannah Montana,” Disney Channel has long been the top network for girls. Now, Disney is rebranding Toon Disney in hopes that it will become the premiere network for boys.

In February, Toon Disney, the ad-supported cable network available in 70 million households, will morph into Disney XD, a channel targeting boys ages 6-14.

Programming will consist of a mix of live-action and cartoons, including shows about video games and skateboarding, aimed at drawing viewers away from the traditional heavyweights in the demo, Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network.

The reason for the switch isn’t difficult to understand. Disney Channel has made periodic efforts to target boys through series like “The Suite Life of Zack and Cody” and “Cody in the House,” but its audience remains 65 percent female in the 6-11 demo.

By targeting boys 6-14, Disney XD has a chance to tap into a tween market with an estimated $25 billion in buying power, according to reports. There are some 15 million boys in this group, and they are heavy consumers of video games, with boys 9-12 spending roughly six hours a week gaming, according to NPD Group.That demo has already driven some gains for Toon Disney, which programs an animated programming block aimed at boys in the morning.

During this year’s kids’ upfront, Toon Disney saw an increase in ad spending, which a Disney spokesperson attributed to stronger ratings among kids 6-11 last year. Entertainment and video games saw the greatest ad spending increases.

This year, Toon Disney’s ratings growth has cooled off a bit. The network was down during second quarter among kids 2-11 and 6-11, and in July total-day viewership slipped 7 percent among 9-14s, from 55,000 to 51,000, according to Nielsen.

Still, it remains a top-five network across virtually every kids’ demo. Its current lineup consists mostly of older cartoons built on proven franchises, like “Kim Possible,”  “Batman: The Animated Series” and “Power Rangers Jungle Fury.”

The new programming will better reflect tweens’ interests today, and some play off earlier Disney successes. The live-action “Aaron Stone” is a secret identity series like “Hannah Montana,” in which an unassuming teen becomes the real-life version of a popular video game character.

“Mongoose & Luther” follows two best friends who attempt to become world-famous skateboarders, and “Hero and Not” is an animated comic book-style show.

Toon Disney launched in April 1998 as an ad-supported network. It was an offshoot of Disney Channel, which originally began as a premium channel and later switched to a non-commercial basic cable network.

Disney, experiencing one of the worst slumps at the box office in years, is counting on talking dogs and singing teens to turn things around.

When the Walt Disney Co. reported earnings recently, the one glaring weak spot in an otherwise strong quarter was in the company’s Studio Entertainment division, which encompasses the movie studio. Operating income plunged 49 percent and revenue was off 19 percent from a year ago, mostly due to Disney’s pictures performing below expectations.

With its newest release, Swing Vote, succumbing last weekend to a landslide and ticket sales for the studio down nearly 30 percent this year, Disney is now in last place in box office market share — an unusual place for the company that is usually ranked at or near the top.

Disney is betting that won’t last for long, however. Among the movies it believes will put it back on top this fall are Beverly Hills Chihuahua, about a pampered pooch from the 90210 zip code lost in Mexico, and Bolt, an animated film about a showbiz dog that was overseen by Pixar Animation Studios guru John Lasseter. Disney is also releasing High School Musical 3: Senior Year, the third movie in the pubescent franchise and the first debuting on the big screen.

The studio says one of the reasons for its weaker performance at the box office in the third quarter is that results in the year-ago quarter were extraordinarily high due to gains by last summer’s blockbuster Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, which generated $961 million in worldwide ticket sales. In addition, Disney made a strategic shift a couple years ago to release fewer movies annually, which potentially reduces its box office total.

Still, other than its current Pixar feature Wall-E, which has grossed more than $200 million in the United States, Disney hasn’t hit one out of the park in seven months. It’s biggest live-action bet, The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, the second film in the franchise co-owned by Phil Anschutz’ Walden Media, performed below expectations at $140 million domestically — less than half of what its 2005 predecessor, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, Witch and Wardrobe, did and less than half the U.S. total that Pirates achieved.

And, while the studio made some money on modest budget pictures such as College Road Trip and Step Up 2: The Streets, and its Miley Cyrus’ Hannah Montana concert movie beat expectations, those films’ grosses paled next to those collected last year by the comedy Wild Hogs, the action sequel National Treasure: Book of Secrets, and Enchanted.

“What we’re seeing is increased quarterly volatility from fewer film releases,” said Laura Martin, a senior media analyst with Soleil Securities. She said that Disney’s off-quarter was “widely expected” given the comparison to last year’s Pirates sequel. Because Disney has a strong track record delivering franchise hits, the market does not penalize the studio when its movies hit a dry patch at the box office.

Disney Studios chairman Dick Cook said that although box office races “have their place,” public companies such as Disney are “judged on having a great return on capital.” On that account, he said that the Studio Entertainment group — which includes worldwide theatrical, DVD, television sales of movies, stage plays and music earnings — is doing well.

“We’re having the second biggest year in the history of the studio,” said Cook. He noted that last year the division generated operating profit of more than $1 billion, and in the nine fiscal months of this year has earned $988 million.

Of course, much will depend on Disney’s fourth quarter, which will include the lion’s share of earnings from Wall-E, which was released one day before the end of the third fiscal quarter. Cook and his team are bullish about the films they have lined up between now and the end of the year, which also includes an Adam Sandler family comedy at Christmas, titled Bedtime Stories.

The studio could have a much tougher time selling tickets to its upcoming fall release Miracle at St. Anna, a World War II drama directed by Spike Lee.Cook said that quarterly results are heavily dependent on when and which films are released in theaters and on DVD. Dates are selected for how movies will maximize audience, Cook said, and are not tied to the fiscal calendar.

But these days, Disney has fewer swings at bat than its competitors.“When you make fewer movies, each one is going to count more,” Cook acknowledges.

Martin said that’s a strategy that investors support. “The live-action film business is a very low return-on-capital business and Wall Street likes the fact that Disney is making fewer films because there’s less opportunity to destroy value,” she said.

Disney has been a part of my life since I was a child.  I remember watching Jungle Book, Bambi, Snow White and the list goes on and on and on.

With Disney animated movies I pretty much never have to worry about there being inappropriate content.  Come to think of it, there isn’t one Disney animated movie that would cause me concern to have my child view it.  So with all these positives, what could possibly be wrong with a Disney movie you say?

You don’t have to be a parent to see or understand this, but being one does help.  Follow me along here for a moment…A two year old child who can repeat the word “feeesh” what seems like 400 times in one minute without taking a breath.

As I hurry to turn on the DVD player, the power comes on and as I anxiously wait the tray to open, I quickly sort through the Disney DVD’s to find Finding Nemo. Alas, I found the movie and the tray is open.  Close and the DVD slides in and I’m one step closer to salvation…for the both of us.  “Feeesh” continues to ring in my ears, almost like a hungry bird waiting anxiously as the parent holds a wriggling worm over its open mouth.

Finally…the DVD starts to read.  FBI warning…neither of us care about it at this point.  Of course you can’t fast forward, skip past it or hit the menu button.  Ah, a little closer now…a Disney splash screen. Yes, I know it’s a Disney movie or I wouldn’t be playing it.

The menu appears and I hit ‘play’.  Another Disney splash screen.  I know I have a short memory/attention span but I still remember ten seconds ago when I was first reminded it was a Disney DVD I was playing.  Oh look, they have more titles available for me.  Listen, I could really give a damn at this point.  Just play the friggin’ movie I think to myself as I feel my blood pressure rise as I’m still unable to satisfy my hungry chick’s craving.  I hit skip, think foolishly this MUST be it.  Nope….

Throw on your sneakers and get ready to play chase with Handy Manny and his tools in Handy Manny: Manny’s Pet Roundup, new on Disney DVD on August 05, 2008.

The pets of Sheetrock Hills are on the loose – and it’s up to Manny and the gang to save the day! From the popular Playhouse Disney series, Manny’s Pet Roundup features adventures and excitement from Manny and his gang of talking tools, including a never-before-seen episode along with an “a-mazing” game!

In their latest series of adventures, Manny and his gang face pet problems and creature challenges galore, solving each one with fun and teamwork. In Pet Problem, Manny and the tools are called to help with a group of playful bunnies on the run. In Kitty Sitting, the gang adopts a kitty, but in the process realizes that giving up something you want to help someone else can be a good thing. In Gopher Help, Manny and the tools take on a group of mischievous gophers, while in Renaldo’s Pretzel Castle, the group helps defend the famous local pretzel store from attack by hungry birds. With a little teamwork and yummy treats, Manny and his lively bunch of tools might just be able to round the pets up and bring them home safely!

Wilmer Valderrama of “That ’70s Show” is the voice of the main character, Manny Garcia, who is the best handyman in the town of Sheetrock Hills and uses his box of mismatched tools to help him make repairs all over town. Each episode focuses on teamwork, friendship and the value of community, as well as teaching basic Spanish language skills. In 2007, Handy Manny was a top rated program on Playhouse Disney with preschoolers aged 2-5 (Source: Quarterly Sales Highlights – U.S.Performance: April-June 2007).

Manny and his tools live by the motto “You break it, we fix it!” Among his tools are Pat, the bumbling hammer; Felipe, the ambitious screwdriver; Turner, the grumpy screwdriver; Stretch, the nearly perfect tape measure; Rusty, the fearful monkey wrench; Squeeze, the curious pliers; and Dusty, the not-so-dainty handsaw.

Handy Manny: Manny’s Pet Roundup is available in the U.S. for $19.99 (SRP) and in Canada for $24.99 (SRP) from Walt Disney Home Entertainment.

Join the Little Einsteins for a brand new musical mission as they travel to the arctic Northern Lights in Little Einsteins: Flight of the Instrument Fairies premiering on Disney DVD August 5, 2008.

In this latest DVD from the popular Playhouse Disney series, the Little Einsteins star in four adventure-filled stories including a special never-before-seen episode – a must-see for Little Einsteins everywhere. With a little music, singing and dancing YOU can help the gang on their quests – so come along on their latest mission of discovery!

In the never-before-seen episode, Flight of the Instrument Fairies, the Little Einsteins face their most magical mission yet, setting off on an arctic adventure to help a musical band of sprites in far-off Alaska. When summoned by the tiny Violin Sprites to rescue their friends, the instrument fairies, the Little Einsteins forge full speed ahead, battling everything from a caving iceberg to a ferocious polar bear, solving problems with teamwork and friendship and learning lessons about music and the stunning night sky along the way.

In well-loved episode The Puppet Princess, the Little Einsteins travel to Prague to help three silly puppets get to the theater on time – and to help them celebrate the show! Next, it’s off to Vienna for The Glass Slipper Ball. June’s biggest wish is to dance at the Glass Slipper Ball, but will she make it on time…and will her slipper fit? In Little Red Rockethood there’s a twist on an old favorite tale. Rocket’s grandma is sick and looking forward to some special Rocket Soup, but along the way meddling Big Jet creates some mischief, and grandma may not be all she seems!

Disney has picked up the rights to “Monster Attack Network,” a graphic novel published by AIT/Planet Lar. Jason Netter is producing via his Kickstart Entertainment banner.

The adventure tale, written by Marc Bernardin and Adam Freeman with art by Nima Sorat, is set on the picture-perfect Pacific island of Lapuatu, which is populated by giant monsters. There, a team of adventurers deal with rampages and related crises and clean up messes afterwards. The team faces its biggest challenge when a shady industrialist shows up.

The book was published in May 2007.

Disney’s Shane Snoke brought the book to Brigham Taylor. The company is eyeing the project, described as having a “Men in Black” tone, as a tentpole with franchise potential.

Netter, whose Kickstart focuses on comic IP, was a producer on Universal’s “Wanted.” Among his projects are AIT’s “Couriers,” set up at Rogue, and the Garth Ennis comic “The Boys,” which he is producing with Original Films, at Columbia. He also executive produced the ABC Family pilot “Nobody,” also based on an AIT comic.

The de facto strike in Hollywood may be slowly coming to an end, with several big-ticket studio projects starting production despite the stalemate in the Screen Actors Guild’s contract talks.

Director Roland Emmerich began filming his latest disaster picture “2012″ in Vancouver this week. The Sony project, which will feature heavy special effects, comes with a contingency plan in case of an actors walkout or strike.

On Wednesday, Walt Disney Co. CEO Robert Iger told investors, “We have decided to move forward with a number of our productions and address any issues later as they arise.” Disney’s “Persia,” which has begun filming, also has some wiggle room since the studio has shifted the film’s planned release date by a year to May 2010.

A Universal executive said the studio has the Judd Apatow project “Funny People” and “Lost for Words” scheduled to shoot in September.

The studios, fearful of industrial action, had wound down production ahead of the June 30 expiration of SAG’s contract with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP). On that date, the AMPTP presented its final offer to SAG, and some impatient members are now demanding that SAG put that offer up for ratification.

But there is a growing sense that the stalemate will extend through September, when the guild’s leadership will be up for re-election. The election is likely to become a referendum on the bargaining committee’s efforts to achieve a contract.

“Everyone is working under the assumption that nothing will happen until there is an election and the results are known,” said a source close to the AMPTP. “I think SAG thought, ‘Let’s drag this into July and August; let’s force the studios to make a mistake. Maybe they’ll impose, maybe they’ll lock us out, and that will galvanize the members and then we’ll get a strike vote.’ That didn’t happen.”

While it’s possible there are behind-the-scenes outreach efforts under way, there has been virtually no formal contact between SAG and the studios for nearly two weeks. The AMPTP has not received any phone calls, e-mails or other forms of communication from SAG. But as one Los Angeles SAG board member put it, “It’s a two-way street. The AMPTP knows where to find us.”

Even if current SAG leadership wins the election by a comfortable margin, officials would likely not be able to muster the 75% vote necessary to authorize a strike barring any inflammatory actions — such as a lockout — by the studios.

And despite last week’s show of unity by SAG’s board, which unanimously passed a resolution reaffirming the guild’s determination to bring all new-media work under its jurisdiction, there are clear signs that many within the union would like to see the contract offer brought to a vote.

Several Emmy nominees recently used that platform to urge a vote on the offer, and several New York board members say off the record that their patience is wearing thin.