Disasters in business history

[Uranus Pink]

I would hope they are rethinking their position after BLM attacked their Ronald McDonald House and terrorize the people who were staying there.

 

[TurdFondler]

The big issue in Takata's airbags was that they were assembled in Mexico. The explosive is typically packed in tiny pellets covered in wax, which slows down the combustion. Mexico QC is garbage so they were stored in moist, hot conditions and the wax does what wax does best and instead of a bunch of loosely packed pellets the airbags shipped with a brick of explosive.

 

[Cedric_Eff]

If we're speaking about car industries, then the crash of the USA and UK cars is a pretty huge disaster. James May had an episode about it in one of his shows:

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3oe1yo

tl;dw The Americans didn't care for efficency and got fucked hard when gas prices increased and people went over for Japanese cars that don't guzzle fuel. The Brits were modern Brits and had a commitee design shitty cars nobody want.

Another thing about American cars is that they initially passed up robot welding and assembly. American engineers used to mock the japs for their cars claiming it’s “shitty” and even worse, a lot of American mechanics refused to touch the Mitsubishi GTO, which led to the creation of the Dodge Viper.

Dodge Viper was supposed to be the Mitsubishi GTO killer. They missed the Mark completely and built a car that no Mitsubishi owners would be interested in.

The big issue in Takata's airbags was that they were assembled in Mexico. The explosive is typically packed in tiny pellets covered in wax, which slows down the combustion. Mexico QC is garbage so they were stored in moist, hot conditions and the wax does what wax does best and instead of a bunch of loosely packed pellets the airbags shipped with a brick of explosive.

That’s what they get for stopping airbag manufacturing in Japan.

 

[mindlessobserver]

McDonalds going full woke after the martyrization of St. Floyd ruined their image for me, which was actually on the upswing before all that. Earlier I went there for the first time in a long while and was pretty impressed at the quality. But now, maybe I'll go there if I'm on a road trip in the middle of nowhere and the only alternatives look like they might give me food poisoning. But they are a well-managed company so maybe they know something I don't. This is the same country that would rather be locked down for 2 years than have someone say mean things on Twitter, after all.

They do alot of business in the inner city. They had to pay lip service to The Martyred Floyd. Unlike Starbucks though, you dont get to use the bathroom unless you buy something. McDonalds also knows how to play the game in the Urban market. Rather then let hobos use the bathrooms to do drugs, they let an NBA player design a "special menu" that is only available for online orders. So they get "street cred" and simultaneously dont inconvenience their employees with having to fulfill custom order quarter pounders and needing to clean up after vagrants shitting on the bathroom walls.

 

[Spasticus Autisticus]

They do alot of business in the inner city. They had to pay lip service to The Martyred Floyd. Unlike Starbucks though, you dont get to use the bathroom unless you buy something. McDonalds also knows how to play the game in the Urban market. Rather then let hobos use the bathrooms to do drugs, they let an NBA player design a "special menu" that is only available for online orders. So they get "street cred" and simultaneously dont inconvenience their employees with having to fulfill custom order quarter pounders and needing to clean up after vagrants shitting on the bathroom walls.

They went way beyond simple lip service. It was a full month of nothing but woke propaganda that had zero to do with their business. Pushing the loathsome grifter Ibram X. Kendi, the hoaxer Bubba Wallace, splashing some hideous tranny on their feed, etc. They also shifted their tone afterwards to ironic casual lowercase posting, real "How do you do fellow kids?" stuff, a big change from before. That and all these collaborations with rappers make it clear that I'm not their target demographic. Maybe they know more than I do and catering to low-income urban dwellers really is the way to grow their business. It seems like an area with a lot of competition to me, but if anyone's poised to push the competition out, I guess it's McDonalds.

 

[mindlessobserver]

They went way beyond simple lip service. It was a full month of nothing but woke propaganda that had zero to do with their business. Pushing the loathsome grifter Ibram X. Kendi, the hoaxer Bubba Wallace, splashing some hideous tranny on their feed, etc. They also shifted their tone afterwards to ironic casual lowercase posting, real "How do you do fellow kids?" stuff, a big change from before. That and all these collaborations with rappers make it clear that I'm not their target demographic. Maybe they know more than I do and catering to low-income urban dwellers really is the way to grow their business. It seems like an area with a lot of competition to me, but if anyone's poised to push the competition out, I guess it's McDonalds.

The first rule of Business when selling to city dwellers is to tell them what they want to know, even if you are lying to their faces. Having lived in both a rural and urban environment myself, I can say with certainty there is a huge split between marketing to the two regions. Rural consumers put a huge value on honesty, and will punish a company severely if what is promised is very different from what is offered. Urban consumers by contrast will buy what is promised and if it is not as advertised will shrug their shoulders at being duped. Because they think they are super smart and they don't want to admit to anyone, even themselves, that they got suckered. From a sociological stand point its fascinating. Its why every business in Urban America put the lying poster "black lives matter" in their windows. They know that the customers in Americas cities wish to live in their delusional state, and will happily encourge their delusions in order to get them to part with their cash.

The unfortunate side effect of this is companies that end up using their own product and assuming the rest of the country wants to take a sniff too. It makes the divide far more severe politically.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

I somehow forget to write about the most famous disaster in Israeli companies - Teva. It is a generic pharmaceutical company (basically copying medicine after its patent term is up and selling it for a fraction of the price) that was hailed as "Israel's home company".
The company had a massive success with its own patents and ballooned up, never really cutting the fat. When it became one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world it started buying a lot of smaller companies aiming for dat infinite growth and foreign markets, not really taking time to actually look at what it bought. This culminated in buying poisonous assets for WAY beyond their actual worth. As expected, in 2017 the bubble burst once people actually understood how big the error was, and Teva's share price tanked hard. This was a problem because a lot of Israelis were heavily invested in it. Any attempts to fire employees failed because the government didn't want a massive amount of unemployment but in the end agreed to partial firing. The company still exists as a shadow of its former self.

Moral of the story: Infinite growth might not be literal cancer, but it will inevitably lead to one.

 

[Vyse Inglebard]

I would hope they are rethinking their position after BLM attacked their Ronald McDonald House and terrorize the people who were staying there.

Wait, WHAT?!

*looks it up*

OH HELL NO!

Spoiler: Bit of a personal reason for why this pisses me off so much

I suffered from retinoblastoma when I wasn't even a year old, and my parents and I stayed at the local Ronald McDonald House while I was going through surgery to remove the tumor in my left eye. The fact that these motherfuckers attacked one of these safe places for families who are going through similar (if not even worse) situations - some of them undoubtedly black themselves - and have the outright BALLS to claim that it's "reparations".....and the media still goes to bat for these monsters.......I just....I have no words. BLM were already on my shitlist before, but this.....this fucking pisses me off. These mongoloids are pure pond scum at this point, and no MSM lapdog is gonna convince me otherwise.

 

[Prehistoric Jazz]

*looks it up*

Well, if I'd wanted to be sick with anger, that's gonna do it. You'd at least hope someone slapped that spokesperson and explained there were black women and children inside too.

 

[Uranus Pink]

Well, if I'd wanted to be sick with anger, that's gonna do it. You'd at least hope someone slapped that spokesperson and explained there were black women and children inside too.

Acceptable losses in the pursuit of killing whitey.

 

[TowinKarz]

Someone's already mentioned NASCAR as having fallen greatly from it's late 90's perch. But the whole reason it got so big in the first place was due to the concurrent total meltdown of the then-premier racing series in the nation, "Indycar".

Up until then, your average racing fan in the US followed open-wheel racing, not stock car racing, and the man on the street selected at random was more likely to know who Bobby Rahal, Michael Andretti or Rick Mears was than Dale Earnhardt, Darrel Waltrip or Davy Allison. And more people tuned in to watch the Indianapolis 500 than the Daytona 500. Hell, Indy sold thousands of tickets to fans who just wanted to watch qualifying.

Then, in 1996, came "The Split" when the owner of the Indianapolis Speedway, Tony George, took his ball and went home, essentially. He announced he was starting his own racing series, the Indy Racing League (IRL) and that the series that raced at Indy up until then, Championship Auto Racing Teams (CART), was no longer welcome at "his" track. Why was this so disastrous?

Imagine the NFL suddenly splitting into it's precursor leagues, with the AFL getting the rights to all the players, but the NFL getting the rights to all the stadiums and the "Super Bowl" name. Who would you follow? Who'd be considered the 'real' pro football league at that point? Neither side would have the "best" of everything. Sure, one side had the Super Bowl and the historical million dollar venues, but , with scraped up XFL/AAF talent and practice team dregs, would the play on-field justify the thousand-dollar tickets? On the other side, even if you had Tom Brady, would you pay a thousand bucks to watch him throw passes in run-down municipal stadiums and high school fields? And at the end of the day, there's no Super Bowl rings? No Lombardi Trophy? Even if your team wins? And forget fans, how would sponsors react? And what if this happened literally overnight? Fans would be confused, angered, disinterested. Ratings would plummet. Merchandise wouldn't sell. Contracts would shrink. Players would risk the ire of teammates and fans alike by crossing the picket lines... if they didn't just fuck off to the CFL for some peace and quiet.

Same thing now happened to racing. In 1996, you'd have to decide if you'd rather watch no-names race at Indy, or , the stars racing at county-fair tier events? What was more important to you? The history? or the Drivers? The answer came back swiftly, neither. Fans tuned out or deserted to NASCAR as the two rival series sniped at each other in the papers.

George usually gets played as the villain in this, but he arguably had some reasons behind the decision. For years, he'd been advocating for CART to do something about the rising costs to compete which meant only a handful of the best-funded teams truly had a shot at the 500, let alone the championship of which Indy was just one round. This pay-to-win reality was probably best demonstrated when Roger Penske's team dominated the 1994 Indy 500 with an in-house specially-built V8 that exploited a few gaps in the rulebook for just the 500 and wouldn't be legal for any other race on the schedule. It's development alone was probably more than some teams could spend for an entire competition season, and guys racing Indy Lights, one rank down the ladder from CART itself, reportedly needed a budget of a million dollars a year to win. This priced out the owner-operator teams of the old days who could literally trailer a car they built themselves in their own garage to the track and at least have a chance to qualify for the race.

But that wasn't all. George was also dissatisfied that CART was increasingly becoming a series where cars raced on road courses or city street courses. He felt Indianapolis, as an oval track, should be for oval racers. That is, any 18 - 20 year old rookie just starting out racing USAC midgets or sprint cars on a dirt track somewhere in Iowa should not just dream to one day race at Indy, but that it should be possible and financially feasible. With CART drivers increasingly coming from different feeder leagues, including even Formula One, it seemed to him like the common small-town racer was being squeezed out from yet another angle. Indeed, some CART teams openly questioned if a guy who learned to race making left handers on clay even had the ability to handle right turns on pavement.

The increasing internationality of the sport also rubbed George the wrong way. Indy, in his eyes, was the crown jewel of American racing, but it looked to him to be ever more out-of-place in a series that had stops in Australia and Canada. These were things he felt were better suited for the glitz and glamour of F1 and not blue-collar folk. Possibly the final straw for George's decision to pull the nuclear option and go rogue was when Jeff Gordon, a kid from Indiana who'd said he one day wanted to race at Indianapolis shunned CART and instead opted to go to NASCAR where he became a star. That encapsulated everything he felt was "wrong" with the sport, and proof it was running off its natural home-grown talent by ignoring it in favor of more "pedigreed" globe-trotting options. As if to prove the point, Nigel Mansell, the former F1 world champion, entered CART almost on a lark in 1993 after a falling-out with Williams left him without a seat and promptly won the CART championship in what was technically his rookie year.

On the flip side, CART undoubtedly had it's eyes set on international appeal. Since it's formation in the late 70's it had seen the aforementioned growth beyond the US borders and wasn't interested in stopping. To them, George seemed like a naive relic, arguing for the return of "good ol' days" that had never really existed. George was upset they didn't invite dirt track racers? Why? There hadn't been a points-paying Indycar race on dirt since 1972. They also didn't see why the owner of a track, even a venerated one, should hold sway over the governing body of an entire series and dictate to them what kind of cars to use. There was more than a little bit of irony here as CART itself had split from it's parent organization, USAC, over the very same things George was grumbling about now: high costs and failing to address driver concerns. To now think themselves too big to fail was the height of hubris, exemplified by the fact that while George had a seat on the CART board of directors, he wasn't a voting member. This made it easy for the CART bigwigs to technically listen to but constantly pooh-pooh his complaints, never dreaming he'd kill the Golden Goose by throwing them out of the 500.

Even as the warning signs continued to mount, such as George pledging his loyalty to oval racing very publically by inviting NASCAR to hold the Brickyard 400 at Indy in 1994 (and continuing since) , they still seemed content that they had too much fame and pull to ever be cast out. Until they were. And it really was a shock, nobody had prepared for this, especially not casual fans, who had been in the dark about the gathering storm clouds in paddocks and board rooms since there was no social media eavesdropping like there would be today.

It was a battle of entrenched egos and by 1996, the battle lines were drawn: George felt CART was a bunch of millionaires out of touch with fans, CART felt George was a small-town businessman out-of-touch with the corporate reality of modern racing.

The Split officially ran from 1996 to 2003 when CART "lost" by going bankrupt after six major teams (including the aforementioned Penske) had bowed to sponsor pressure and switched over to the IRL, in addition to a series of disastrous mishaps on its side over the years. These included a first-lap wipeout of the field at the inaugural 96' US 500 after having shit-talked the IRL Indy 500 as a race full of no-talent rookies all week, a series of tragic driver, track marshal and fan fatalities in the late 90's that claimed, among others, up and coming superstar Greg Moore, 9-11 leaving a race in Germany in limbo, and when run, a freak accident resulted in Alex Zanardi losing his legs, and finally, a headlining 600-mile race at Texas Motor Speedway being canceled at the last second due to safety issues and sparking a lawsuit. Negotiations began to re-fold CART back into the IRL and recreate a solidified Indycar, but it wouldn't happen until 2008 as a few die-hards who still harbored animosity over the Split continued to try and keep the dead series viable just to deny George his "win".

But the damage had already been done. And not just to CART.

General fan disinterest had struck the IRL as well, ticket revenues for the Indy 500 had plummeted, as did TV viewership. They too had seen driver fatalities, and fans killed by flying debris at events. They'd also had a couple embarrassing races where scorekeeping errors had given wins to drivers who hadn't actually been leading. Ultimately, however, the pull of racing at Indianapolis was too strong, and the IRL eventually became the more popular league, if only barely.

Not that it mattered.

A clash of inflexible corporate ideologies and arrogance had torpedoed a successful sport, and even after reunification, modern Indycar has yet to return to it's former place of glory. By the time of the reformation, George himself had become a casualty, ousted from ownership of Indianapolis by his own family in 2009 over his lavish spending on not just the IRL but addition of a road course to Indianapolis that would allow it to host the United States Grand Prix for Formula One, an event that itself had a farcical and damaging controversy behind it when the 2005 edition saw only six cars start the race due to the remainder of the field withdrawing when the Michelin tires provided couldn't hold up at track speed, and hasn't been held there since 2007.

And in the end, one wonders if any of his goals had even been met. Costs to run an IRL team weren't appreciably lowered, the starting grid continued to be populated by established and foreign drivers, and some of IRLs best/most marketable talent such as Tony Stewart and Danica Patrick jumped ship to NASCAR anyway.

Like most wars, there weren't many winners, and many degrees of loser.

 

[Super-Chevy454]

Harley Davidson aka 100 years tradition and 10 years innovation.
But seriously those comments in that comment section, even if only half of that is true, holy shit.

Sorry for the very late reply and bringing back that one from the dead but there's a good rant about Harley Davidson to read.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/08/harley_davidson_goes_woke.html

https://ghostarchive.org/archive/oOp1o

https://archive.is/q6xaA

August 18, 2024

Harley Davidson goes woke?!​

By Mike McDaniel


There are some brands strongly identified with America, with American values and ideals and with American design and quality. They’re known and coveted around the world, prestige symbols here and abroad. That’s why it’s so dumbfounding when the makers of those profitable, iconic, products do incredibly stupid things to fix what isn’t broken.

Remember “New Coke?” “Crystal Pepsi?” Those dimwitted marketing stunts were pre-woke, pushed by people who thought they knew better than Americans what Americans wanted.
In the woke era in which we currently suffer, the most notorious example of marketing dimwittery is Budweiser’s abortive association with trans Tinkerbell Dylan Mulvaney. Not only did a newly minted marketing executive think that a good idea, she also insulted Bud’s customer base, telling them, in essence, they‘d better get with the woke program or be left behind. That bit of legendary marketing brilliance cost Anheuser-Busch nearly $7 billion in market capitalization virtually overnight, and knocked Bud Lite out of its top spot, a blow from which it has never recovered.

Bud struggled mightily to recover, firing the hapless customer insulter, and trotting out a variety of weak apologies. They tried to distance themselves from Mulvaney by teaming up with Harley Davidson:

 

[The Grognard]

And in the end, one wonders if any of his goals had even been met. Costs to run an IRL team weren't appreciably lowered, the starting grid continued to be populated by established and foreign drivers, and some of IRLs best/most marketable talent such as Tony Stewart and Danica Patrick jumped ship to NASCAR anyway.

Like most wars, there weren't many winners, and many degrees of loser.

The ones who won in this war were Bernie Ecclestone and the France family. NASCAR got all the domestic sponsors/media attention and that's now where the vast majority of American talent aims at. F1 got to rest easy knowing that their American competition destroyed itself, handing them back markets where CART was a genuine threat to F1's hegemony like Japan, Brazil, and Australia. Even in terms of payouts to the drivers, they used to be able to compete with F1 on the driver market. Now they are seen as just the second best place to keep promising junior drivers on holding pattern until they get that phone call to F1 and it's now unassailable position as the one series still awash with money.

 

[John.Doe]

I know there's a thread on this, but the non-canonization of the Star Wars Expanded Universe or "Star Wars Legends" was the literal act of killing the golden goose. More fans were way much more familiar to these stories because George Lucas gave the greenlight for other authors and artists to commission work to expand the world of Star Wars, and did so after The Return of the Jedi, which meant these works were kept going for years.

Every time I am reminded of the current state of Disney-led Star Wars I am just outright baffled.

Kennedy had, on paper, every advantage going into this;
Years of experience with Lucas.
Tons of pull with top-shelf directors.
Nearly endless money and resources.
Decades of EU content that basically focus-tested all sorts of ideas.
A rabidly devoted fanbase ready to eat their own faces for more Star Wars.

The new trilogy was basically starting a few feet from the finish line in the great race to make more money. They didn't have to make amazing films, hell, even making good films wouldn't be necessary. The prequels turned a profit, for fuck's sake. A bare-minimum by-the numbers competent trilogy would have doubled the investment by now. I mean some real lazy shit would have worked just fine.

As for ditching the Extended Universe, I checked and I have made a dozen posts in the SW thread about the huge mistake that was ditching the EU, including Thrawn. At the very least, the EU represented a treasure trove of sequel plotlines, side stories, prequel ideas, and characters that had all been market tested. That is extremely valuable in media because you're not blindly shooting in the dark in regards to any new movie properties, you have sales data and fan feedback that you can use to shape your path.

"Should we have a gold plated monster that eats Jedi?"
"What, like some kind of...Force Eater?"
"Yeah yeah, around a dying dwarf sun!"
"Fuck no, you moron, The Crystal Star was a stupid book and a terrible idea! No Force Eaters!"

The EU gives you fan favorite characters like Mara Jade and plotlines like Luke building a new Academy - how cool would it be to have some part of the sequels take place at his Academy with Mara Jade as his wife? An easy set-up for a prequel movie about Mara Jade during the time of the Empire, or a new trilogy about some Jedi students. Plus fans would have loved it!

As I've said time and time again, the EU represented literally decades of market research. There is enough tested IP in the EU to support just about anything you want, for dozens of movies. Even after you ditch all the Baraka stuff, Sun Crusher, and Crystal Star-level cringe in favor of all the good things that have held up, you've got a ton of fertile ground. Do a Mara Jade spinoff in the Galactic Empire Era, adapt the Thrawn trilogy, do some Rouge Squadron, fuck it, some of the Young Jedi Academy series is worth re-tooling! They would have printed money from the loyal fanbase and even normies would have enjoyed such solid stories across different sub-genres.

Instead we get Rey 'Troutmouth' Sue and Kylo 'Hot Topic is my LIFE' Ren in the kind of mishmash I experience coming down off a ketamine high in a gay bathhouse designed by Salvador Dali.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

Instead we get Rey 'Troutmouth' Sue and Kylo 'Hot Topic is my LIFE' Ren in the kind of mishmash I experience coming down off a ketamine high in a gay bathhouse designed by Salvador Dali.

Wouldn't they need to pay royalties for some of the books? Plus TFA was just slightly different episode 4 only with more appeal to Mystery Box audience and female oriented romance. You can say TLJ broke the mold in being subversive, but you already had the cracks in how boring and repetitive it all was.

 

[John.Doe]

Wouldn't they need to pay royalties for some of the books?

Probably so, but those books were wrapped up in old Lucas Arts agreements for use in all media anyway - it isn't as if any of the authors could throw a curve ball at some later date and take the lion's share of profits or anything. The overall financial exposure is very minimal - and likely very worth the cost when you consider the benefit.

Cost: You write a check to some author from the 90's, an author who will likely be very glad to show up for more work, conventions, and do all kinds of helpful things, motivated with the carrot of more money and more projects. As for the stick, you have them locked in an iron-clad agreement enforced by an army of your lawyers and the threat of no more cash.

Benefit: You have an IP that has already been proven popular in the moment and over time, with a built in fanbase of motivated ambassadors that will do a lot of work for you. There are essentially years of pre-production in the form of concept art, audio-book and likely comic or video game versions of the story. There may be existing toy designs blueprinted somewhere. You already have a massive foundation of work done for you, and the confidence of the IP's established success.

The calculus is very similar to the math that keeps producing adaptations and remakes - you already know the idea works (or at least it did in another time period or format), all that must be done is executing it successfully in movie format.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

Probably so, but those books were wrapped up in old Lucas Arts agreements for use in all media anyway - it isn't as if any of the authors could throw a curve ball at some later date and take the lion's share of profits or anything. The overall financial exposure is very minimal - and likely very worth the cost when you consider the benefit.

Cost: You write a check to some author from the 90's, an author who will likely be very glad to show up for more work, conventions, and do all kinds of helpful things, motivated with the carrot of more money and more projects. As for the stick, you have them locked in an iron-clad agreement enforced by an army of your lawyers and the threat of no more cash.

Benefit: You have an IP that has already been proven popular in the moment and over time, with a built in fanbase of motivated ambassadors that will do a lot of work for you. There are essentially years of pre-production in the form of concept art, audio-book and likely comic or video game versions of the story. There may be existing toy designs blueprinted somewhere. You already have a massive foundation of work done for you, and the confidence of the IP's established success.

The calculus is very similar to the math that keeps producing adaptations and remakes - you already know the idea works (or at least it did in another time period or format), all that must be done is executing it successfully in movie format.

Remember that modern Disney execs would rather burn the entire company down than pay royalties for anyone. Plus if something is popular for SW fans it wouldn't mean it would be popular for Women and Chinks, which are the primary audience they sell to while knowing the fans will continue buying their shit no matter what

 

[John.Doe]

Remember that modern Disney execs would rather burn the entire company down than pay royalties for anyone. Plus if something is popular for SW fans it wouldn't mean it would be popular for Women and Chinks, which are the primary audience they sell to while knowing the fans will continue buying their shit no matter what

This is why its a business disaster. They would rather take 100% of No Fucking Money than 90% of Billions, because they are stupid, short sighted and greedy. They thought they could conjure an audience of fat-wallet DEI faggot nigger whales that don't exist, to invest in a property that catered solely to to them. They purchased a massive property with tons of potential to make so much fucking money and they have bungled it at every step.

Start with the movies (which you'll notice they aren't making anymore) which did make money, but not as much as the box office numbers would indicate. Studios only get a portion of ticket sales, usually a deceasing amount as time goes on. For foreign markets, it varies with the rates and arrangements, but it is typically even less.

Now this isn't chump change, but these movies weren't free to make or market. Calculating out the costs from production to marketing is another affair, and those have to be subtracted out, and if the Entertainment magazines/news are to be believed, each had a of 200-300 million, with at least the same in marketing costs. So for all three you're looking at more than a billion dollars spent in production costs on the movies alone.

Normally this is the part where we bring up the toys, video games and merchandising numbers - after all, that is how George made his money back in the day, right? Well, I would, except Disney can't sell a fucking thing when it comes to toys and merch. The only trickles of sales are tiny amounts from truly brainwashed 'Modern audiences' buying a token Rose Tico to 'own the chuds' and a few old boomers blinded by nostalgia buying the paltry few legacy characters/throwback figures. Star Wars toys rot on shelves, with pallets of them marked at bottom dollar discount at trashy outlet stores one step from the dump. They can't move shirts, kids toys, adult merch, or anything. The licences are worthless.

Add on top of that the boondoggle that is the theme park expansion, Galaxy's Edge, that is failing. That slice of heaven cost over a billion dollars as well just to build and continues to hemorrhage money. They built an entire Star Wars themed hotel that cost several hundred million to build, then shut it down within a year - a loss of a billion dollars when all done and said, I'm sure.

So where are they now? They've spent about 6 billion dollars, to maybe bring in 3 billion, which is a 50% loss on investment. An investment which is unlikely to ever regain its former value.

 

[stares at error messages]

Big Idea Productions could've potentially still remained in Phil Vischer's hands a little bit longer had he and Dick Leach, the owner of Lyrick Studios, actually signed a contract for the distribution instead of just having a verbal agreement. Because when Dick sold his company to Hit Entertainment and then suddenly died, and Phil struck a deal with Warner Bros. to fund Jonah, Hit slapped them with a lawsuit, which could've gone a bit smoother for Phil with a physical contract. Also, the money of the merchandise and home video sales went to the distributors.

But everything about Big Idea Productions was a disaster due to overspending to get big as a company fast and not turning a profit fast enough, and the staff (the animators, mostly) clashed quite a lot--all before they started making the Jonah movie. It's also quite possible that Phil may have been laundered from the start by some executives and lawyers taking advantage of a Christian man with no prior business experience. But ultimately, his pride got a hold of him.

Saberspark did an in-depth video on Big Idea's history. It's long (has some meme fluff that adds to the duration), but it's a tragic story and a cautionary tale.

A lot of "Christian" media is really poorly made. That is why people who aren't just showing up for Jesus and to be nice and Christian don't watch that crap. Not that it's relevant anymore and the two men running it are groce leftists who trooned out, but The Bible Re-Loaded used to do these reviewed of Christian media and universally each one was worse than stuff kids make in highschool. It all looked like Chris Chan made it. The production quality was nothing like Veggie Tales. It'd either be a movie with a few seances with inspirational framing but no real plot, a bunch of dogwhistles to secular people that not even most Christians use or think in real life, and bunch of poorly made movies with bad stories which clearly only sold because the people buying them didn't bother returning them. A lot of the latter weren't stickily Christian themed, and only brought up God a lot for why one character was right to do something even other real Christians would say is stupid. Turns out Bible Re-Loaded isn't the channel name anymore and they don't release content for that channel anymore either, so it counts as a disaster too.

 

[Xarpho's Return]

But everything about Big Idea Productions was a disaster due to overspending to get big as a company fast and not turning a profit fast enough, and the staff (the animators, mostly) clashed quite a lot--all before they started making the Jonah movie. It's also quite possible that Phil may have been laundered from the start by some executives and lawyers taking advantage of a Christian man with no prior business experience. But ultimately, his pride got a hold of him.

Years ago I found a series of blog posts by Vischer explaining how the whole thing went down. He specifically mentioned that he had read Built to Last and his company needed a BHAG, a "big hairy audacious goal" and that was Christian Walt Disney. I can't find these posts anymore, disappeared into the ether (probably on archive.org somewhere) but I did find an interview he gave (a) from 2011 that mentions that.

I haven't watched that video yet but I do remember what a bit of a let-down Jonah was. It was basically a two-hour VeggieTales special, not really a big epic movie like they wanted it to be.

I guess in business, there's also Sears/Kmart, not because it was a bad idea to begin with but the fact that in a little over a decade you went from having a cash-rich, asset-rich company with $8B in revenue to bankruptcy in one of the most despicable cases of hedge fund dismantling.