Son of Linkorama

Still early in the week, but let's redirect some traffic to subjects we've been dealing with around here.

Walt Disney Productions from a while ago: Disney veteran Floyd Norman talks about when The Rescuers was going to be a nice, simple, inexpensive movie. This wasn't in the seventies, but the early sixties ...

The first "B" [animated feature] was underway. Writer/artist Bill Berg began developing "The Rescuers" as a feature film ... Bill quickly had his boards completed, and ready to show to Walt Disney ...

I was close enough to hear the pitch through the closed story room door. Over an hour had passed and all appeared to be going well until the door opened, and the old guys walked out into the hallway. I moved toward the story room just in time to see the Old Maestro himself walk past me and down the hallway. The look on Walt's face, and his overall attitude told me all I needed to know ...

When I got to Disney's in 1976, a different version of The Rescuers was being completed. Artists who were working on it told me this second version had also been considered a "B" movie (originally boarded by story artist Fred Lucky) but then turned into an "A" production ...

The Writers Guild Strike: Patrick Goldstein at the L.A. Times has a nice compendium of Winners and Losers:

Winners

* The WGA leadership: Whenever I spoke to studio chiefs, they heaped abuse on Patric Verrone and David Young, dismissing them as naive, hapless militants with no clue about how to negotiate a showbiz contract. All wrong. Despite some missteps along the way, the WGA leaders kept their fractious membership together, courted the powerful TV show runners, thrashed the studios in the PR wars and stayed cool under fire. For all the concessions they had to make, they got the guild perhaps the best deal it's had in decades. If that's not saying much, that's more a reflection on the perilous state of unions and Hollywood than on the WGA ...

* Nikki Finke: As much as I hate complimenting someone who has consistently belittled my newspaper's coverage of the strike, not to mention trashed my own work, it's impossible to ignore the fact that Finke turned her Deadline Hollywood Daily blog into a must-read for timely strike coverage. While many of my writer pals scoffed at the accuracy of some of her "scoops," she racked up an eye-popping amount of traffic, proving again that the Web is a great leveler, allowing one dogged reporter to successfully compete with far bigger news organizations ....

Lastly. Toon Zone interviews Nickelodeon Veep Teri Weiss about Nick's debuting cartoon series Ni Hao Kai-Lan:

[NHKL] began as a series of shorts that we did ... [O]nce those shorts were complete and we saw this little girl come to life, we just thought there was something there that we wanted to explore in a much deeper way. We just felt like the designs were so beautiful and unique, we thought that the spirit of the character was infectious, and we wanted to see what else we could do with it ...

And so on and so forth.