Disney TVA's New Mojo

Disney TVA is now off the Disney lot and reconfigured near the Bob Hope Airport (Burbank, CA.) and what was once the Grand Central Airport (Glendale, CA.) And where once the series were home-grown, Disney TVA -- under the wing of the Disney Channel -- now welcomes cartoon creators from other distributors of television cartoons ...

Producer Craig McCracken ... has taken his latest project to Disney. His new TV series is "Wander Over Yonder," a comedy about an intergalactic traveler named Wander and his steed, Sylvia ...

... artist and director Paul Rudish ... has a deal with Disney Television Animation. Charlie Bean, former creative director of the Cartoon Network's U.K. studio, is executive producer of the Disney XD series, "Tron: Uprising," based on the 2010 Walt Disney Studios' sci-fi film, "Tron: Legacy." Mike and Matt Chapman, creators of the popular Internet cartoon "Homestar Runner," also have a development deal with Disney. ...

For more than half a century, the fortunes of television animation studios have ebbed and flowed. Eleven years ago, one of the biggest and busiest tv cartoon facilities was Sony Adelaide, then employing three hundred artists.

Adelaide is now pretty much gone.

And three years ago, Warner Bros. Animation had withered away to a few dozen employees. Now it spills through four buildings on the Warner Ranch and a fifth building a couple miles away.

Nickelodeon cartoons were part of the robust Nick franchise for a decade and a half. But recently, Nickelodeon's grip on ratings has slipped a bit, and the studio's working to develop new properties and talent.

All of the above is another way of saying: Studios go up, and studios go down. No entity stays on top forever. (In the middle nineties, Disney Feature was the biggest and mightiest. In the mid eighties, Filmation was the biggest employer of animation artists in Los Angeles. Filmation ceased to exist in 1989.)

But the Times gets part of its analysis wrong. When it says: Disney television animation struggled for years to find success, despite founder Walt Disney's place in the cartoon pantheon, it ignores what a roaring money-maker the division was right out of the box ... and well into the nineties. It spawned "The Disney Afternoon" and created the hugely successful direct-to-video feature franchises.

So hear us, Los Angeles Times. Diz TVA didn't "struggle" for success. It found it and lost it several times over. And right now the place is on an uptick yet again.