Bob Schooley just told me about an upcoming sneak peak of Mark and his new show on Nick, The Penguins of Madagascar.

Programming dates are always tentative and change at the drop of a hat, but at the moment, the sneak peak of “Gone in a Flash” (a single 11 minute episode) premieres:
Friday, 11/28, at 8:30PM
And repeats:
Saturday, 11/29, at 10AM and 9:45PM
Sunday, 11/30, at 12:45AM and 7:45PM

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

Halloween is by far the best recruiting day of the year. All year long we spend a lot of time encouraging everyone to get out there and find more people who don’t yet know about our movements. This might be by posting flyers around town, wearing SDS merchandise, and/or by posting about us online. But on Halloween, kids and their parents come right to your door. What could be easier?

But we need you all to help!

Download and print out the new flyer and post one one your front door, gate, where ever people can read it. If you’re trick-or-treating leave a few flyers with you parents and take a few with you. Give them to anyone who seems interested. If you’re too old for trick-or-treating, you can still give flyers to anyone interested who comes begging for candy.

Download the new flyer here

You can also find many more flyers and handouts here. Or feel free to make your own!

And if you happen to dress up like a DC star or chracter this year, we’d love to see it! And we’d love to see how you make use of our flyers. Send us any photos you’d like to share at webmaster@savedisneyshows.org.

“Rita Rocks” is a show about mom and wife Rita (Nicole Sullivan, Kim Possible) who gets passed up for a promotion and realizes that everyone around her has a life and is out doing things with their lives. When she was younger she was in a band and now to capture the spirit of her younger days she starts a garage band with her mail lady Patty as the keyboardist, unemployed neighbor Owen as the bass player, and her oldest daughter Hallie’s boyfriend Kip (Raviv Ullman, Phil of the Future)  plays the drums.

Characters

Rita: Wife to Jay, and mother to Hallie and Shannon, forms a garage band to have time for herself.

Jay: Husband to Rita who supports her garage band.

Hallie: Rita’s oldest daughter at the age of 16.

Shannon: Youngest daughter. She loves karate.

Kip: Hallie’s goofy boyfriend for over a year who spends most of his time at Rita’s because he doesn’t like his parents.

Patty: Rita’s mail lady who is the keyboardist in her band.

Owen: Rita’s unemployed neighbor who can’t find a job anywhere after being in the auto business for 20 years. He invited himself to play with the band.

Yoda: Family dog who is a golden retriever.

The show will premiere on October 20th at 8:30pm et/pt after Reba on Lifetime (channel 73 for Time Warner). There will then be a new episode everyday that week at 8:30pm et/pt.

October 20th
The first episode is the pilot where it will deal with Rita having sort of a midlife crisis and forming a band.

October 21st
Rita misses Shannon’s karate class because she was having band practice. Meanwhile Kip is playing the drums in Rita’s band even though Hallie has forbid him not to.

October 22nd
Patty has started going out with a UPS guy and Rita tries to help move it along and ends up complicating things. Meanwhile Kip and Hallie plan to get tattoos but the plan doesn’t go over well with Rita and Jay.

October 23rd
Rita and Patty go to a guitar shop when one of the strings on her guitar break and they meet two young guy musicians. They all go out to a concert together and Jay is not too happy about it.

October 24th
Rita and Jay decide to go away for the weekend but their plans are almost ruined when Rita’s mom has to back out of babysitting Hallie and Shannon. Hallie thinks she is old enough to watch Shannon for the weekend but Rita and Jay don’t think do.

Starting the week after on October 28th “Rita Rocks” will be on it’s normal time at 8:30pm.

October 28th
Hallie wants to go to Canada with Kip for a concert and Shannon wants to have a sleepover with friends at the house. Rita says no to both requests and as a result she thinks Hallie and Shannon are sucking up to Jay to get him to say yes.

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

Webmaster Greg recently re-did the How to Help section of SDS to hopefully make it much more user friendly.

http://help.savedisneyshows.org/

Please give it a look and let us know what you think.

Please be critical - we can only make improvements when we know what users find good and bad.

For the first time in ages, Disney Channel suffered a ratings decrease.

Hannah Montana’s ratings are down ever sense Miley’s Vanity Fair photos. The original Suite Life series is ending. KP and ADJL are over. And the only new show getting any decent promotion is Phineas and Ferb. And I doubt few would disagree with the statement that Camp Rock was no High School Musical.

My hope is that now Disney realizes that they cannot endlessly manufacture hits. At some point the fans really will begin to walk away in noticeable amounts.

Article Source: Animation Insider

Disney Channel lacked stability in Second Quarter of this year, with an uneven stream of weekly performances throughout much of the Quarter. Although select growth could be found following the launch of key episode premieres or following various television specials, Disney Channel saw a plethora of audience losses, with demographic losses in each month of analysis. April saw a decline with Kids 6-11 of roughly -08%, recorded through the Total Program Day, which although much, was the children’s channel’s smallest decline of the Quarter.

The Tweens 9-14 audience showed a consistent decline (Total Program Day), throughout April 2008 for the Disney Channel. Although the cartoon and live-action kid sitcom network has previously helped guide the tween audience, in a year-to-year comparison, the Tweens 9-14 demographic dropped -11% (down to 375,000) on average for this month.

Moving on to the month of May, Disney Channel, with Kids 6-11, similarly declined another -08% (Total Program Day). May 2008 was a difficult month on some level for almost all kids cable networks, but Disney Channel, for its loss, showed modest growth in Total Program Day with Kids 2-11 as the weeks continued; and likewise, in Primetime, Kids 6-11 viewers grew from week to week, if not every so slightly, while other kid networks showed a decline viewers at least one week in said month.

Disney Channel’s June saw double-digit declines in every notable kids demographic. The network saw a decline with the Kids 2-11 audience, when compared to the previous year, of -10% (TPD) and -14% (Primetime), and a similar drop in viewer delivery of -11% (TPD) and -15% (Primetime) with Kids 6-11. From a larger perspective, Disney Channel lost more viewers in Primetime than throughout the entire day of programming, in each demographic. The largest of such losses, in June 2008, were with Tweens. Tweens 9-14 viewership decreased -16% (TPD) and down another -21% (Primetime).

Regardless of Disney Channel’s multi-media dominance among all kid’s entertainment channels due to household reach — Disney Channel averaged a 1.55 Primetime rating in June as based on total U.S. household projection — Second Quarter 2008 saw a decrease of -09% (K6-11, TPD) overall. One key highlight though, specific to the network’s animated programming, was an episode of Phineas and Ferb in Q2 2008, which pulled in a commendable 1.29 million Kids 6-11.

The new KP atraction is actually getting some local press!

Source: The Orlando Sentinel

Erupt the volcano in the Mexico pavilion, blow a puff of smoke from a chimney in Norway, make a jade monkey appear in China.

Those are among the 50 special effects created for Epcot’s Kim Possible World Showcase Adventure, a high-tech scavenger hunt that will debut in “late fall,” according to Disney officials. The animated Disney Channel heroine will guide participants through world-saving missions via a “Kimmunicator,” a hand-set that could pass as a cell phone in the real world.

“You hit the OK button, and something happens for you,” said Jeannette Lomboy-Russo, an Imagineer who previewed elements of the attraction during a behind-the-scenes tour. Each of seven countries presents a different adventure, storyline and villain. Each mission will take 45 minutes to an hour to complete, and will be contained within a single pavilion. Players won’t be scurrying all over World Showcase to save the world.

“It brings technology — without being invasive — from the Future World environment into World Showcase,” said Jim MacPhee, Walt Disney World’s vice president for Epcot.

It will add a youth-driven activity to the World Showcase, which features many shopping and dining opportunities. Participating pavilions will be Mexico, Norway, China, France, United Kingdom, Germany and Japan.

“Particularly for children, it’s very empowering,” Imagineer Jonathan Ackley said. “The kid is essentially controlling the theme-park environment.”

The activity is included in regular theme-park admission. A similar Kim Possible attraction had a smaller test run at Epcot in 2006.

Popular characters from the TV series are included in the Kimmunicator’s videos, but some original characters were created for the attraction.

Return of the devices was scripted into the stories’ finale. Lomboy-Russo compared it to the 18th hole of miniature golf, which typically conspires to keep the ball at the end of the round.

Epcot purists might be alarmed by the cultural contrast of World Showcase and a scrappy animated crime fighter. The Imagineers said their plans were designed to blend with the pavilions’ atmospheres and not alarm nonplayers. Ackley called it “an invisible Get Smart overlay.”

The theming and structures of the pavilions served as a base for the attraction.

“We didn’t want it to detract,” said Lomboy-Russo. “I think the two fit seamlessly together. I’m proud of the fact that people don’t notice.”

First, read this article from the LA Times:

Disney to target boys with rebranded cable channel

The entertainment giant plans to relaunch Toon Disney as Disney XD, which will be aimed at boys ages 6 to 14.

Someday, Disney hopes its princes will come.

The entertainment giant, which has made billions catering to the princess fantasies of young girls, plans to relaunch Toon Disney as Disney XD, a cable channel that will target boys. The move, under wraps for more than a year, is an attempt by the company to capture a market that has long eluded it.

Starting in February, Disney XD will seek to become to young dudes what Disney Channel, with its lineup of tweeny bopper programs such as “High School Musical,” “Hannah Montana” and “Camp Rock” is to girls. Disney XD, aiming at boys ages 6 to 14, will offer original action-adventure and comedy series, movies, animation and sports-themed shows developed with Walt Disney Co.-owned ESPN.

“What was clear to me, and clear to us, is we had a huge opportunity to create content that were boys’ favorites,” said Rich Ross, president of Disney Channels Worldwide.

Tween boys, ages 9 to 14, account for about $50 billion in spending worldwide, said Greg Kahn, senior vice president of strategic insights for media buying firm Optimedia International USA Inc. Advertisers are eager to reach these young consumers, not just snag a portion of their disposable income, but to build a loyalty they hope will extend into even more free-spending teen years, he said.

But the Disney Channel has struggled for years to find the right programming formula to lure boys, who tend to gravitate to Viacom’s Nickelodeon and Time Warner’s Cartoon Network — that is, when they’re not spending time playing video games. Disney Channel’s popular live-action shows, from its early tween phenomenon, “Lizzie McGuire,” through its current pop-culture sensation, “Hannah Montana,” mainly attract girls.

Efforts to bring in more boys, through male-led series such as “Even Stevens” or “The Suite Life of Zack and Cody,” still haven’t succeeded enough to close the gender gap between female and male viewers.

Animation, traditionally a draw for boys, has been a struggle for Disney Channel, although its newest series, “Phineas and Ferb,” appears to be building a strong male following.

But so far, the network has failed to produce a blockbuster to compete with Nickelodeon’s “SpongeBob SquarePants;” or match the guy-centric focus of Cartoon Network, which one ad buyer described as the ESPN of animation.

“You’re fighting the brand perception, the very, very strong brand equity that’s been in the marketplace for many, many years,” Kahn said of Disney Channel. “It would almost require a completely separate effort to reach tween boys, with a completely different name somehow associated with the Disney property, to reach these tween males.”

None of this is news to Ross, who, with his executive team, spent more than a year with focus groups pondering the eternal verities: “What do boys want?”

The answer, perhaps not surprisingly, is that boys want it all. “What we heard, loud and clear, is they expect from Disney this broad array,” Ross said, with programs running the gamut from animation to action-adventure to comedy. “They expect from Disney the whole thing, including movies.” In short, tween boys are looking for more than a show or two wedged in the midst of the musical theater-inspired programs that have come to define Disney Channel. They want, Disney says, a channel they can call their own.

“They want a place, essentially a headquarters for them where their favorite content exists, that has this broad array of shapes and sizes and tenors and complexities, and treats them with the respect that Disney Channel treats all kids, and the girls are fanatical about,” Ross said.

Instead of tinkering with what works — Disney Channel, which has spawned two billion-dollar creative franchises in High School Musical and Hannah — Ross relaunched a struggling cable asset, Toon Disney, into this destination for boys.

Toon Disney pulls only 10% to 15% of the viewers of Disney Channel, despite the cable network’s reach into nearly 70 million U.S. households. The Nielsen ratings reflect its hodgepodge lineup of geriatric kids shows, such as as “Power Rangers Jungle Fury” and recycled animated offerings such as “Batman: The Animated Series,” and “Jackie Chan Adventures,” and movies.

As the rebranded Disney XD, the ad-supported cable network will boast original series, such as “Aaron Stone,” a live-action show about a video game virtuoso who leads a secret double life as a crime fighter. The show boils down to a male fantasy version of “Hannah Montana,” in which an ordinary teen leads a double life as a rock star.

Former “The Wonder Years” child star Fred Savage directed the pilot for “Mongoose & Luther,” a mock documentary series about two best friends who set out to become the world’s greatest skateboarders.

The project was created by Matt Dearborn and Tom Burkhard, who worked on Disney Channel’s “Even Stevens.”

Established animated series, from “Phineas and Ferb,” to “Batman: The Animated Series,” will air on Disney XD alongside new offerings, such as RoboDz, a short-form series developed in partnership with Toei Animation Co. of Japan, in which robotic life forms defend Earth from space invaders. Plans for an online presence and mobile offerings are also in the works.

“We know we have a huge opportunity to take that asset and make it every bit as powerful as Disney Channel or Playhouse Disney,” Ross said.

dawn.chmielewski @latimes.com

Now, In one aspect, this is brilliant. DC does have a predominately female audience, and to relaunch TD as this new channel could be a brilliant business decision. So as a shareholder, I must salute Rich Ross.

On the other hand, my initial reaction would be to hit Ross with a 2 by 4. I don’t watch Toon Disney for three reasons. 1) It requires using the digital cable box, and that only works with one TV in the house and not with my TiVo. 2) I cannot obtain a reliable schedule guide for that channel, so I never know what’s on. 3) Most of what I would want to watch (KP & ADJL) I can just watch on DC.

Honestly, I think what they should have done is not turn DC so blatantly female biased. In the article they make the point:”Animation, traditionally a draw for boys, has been a struggle for Disney Channel,” And I was freakin’ screaming “KIM POSSIBLE. IDIOTS.”

They had a chance with KP to court the male fans and the female fans. They chose to make everything pink and marginalize the male fans. They had a chance, and they lost it. And now, they’re taking out KP’s future with the end of Toon Disney.

And even worse, by making a new “DC for Boys” they’re gonna be intentionally writing off all males from DC and all females from the new channel. Further narrowing the audience for both channels.

Disney is supposed to be family entertainment - programing for EVERYONE. And further narrowing the demographic targets is not the Disney way.

Walt Disney Co.’s (DIS) fiscal third-quarter net income 9% as growth in its media networks and theme-park operations more than offset a decline in studio entertainment.

In the quarter ended June 28, the media and entertainment giant reported net income of $1.28 billion, or 66 cents a share, compared with $1.18 billion, or 57 cents a share, a year earlier. Unusual items added 4 cents a share to the latest quarter’s earnings.

Revenue climbed 2% to $9.24 billion.

The breakdown per division was:

Media Networks Oper Rev $4.12B Vs $3.83B
Media Networks Oper Net $1.47B Vs $1.36B
Parks And Resorts Oper Rev $3.04B Vs $2.90B
Parks And Resorts Oper Net $641M Vs $621M
Studio Entertainment Oper Rev $1.43B Vs $1.78B
Studio Entertainment Oper Net $97M Vs $190M
Consumer Pdts Oper Rev $642M Vs $537M
Consumer Pdts Oper Net $113M Vs $118M

Joshua Kreitzer of the MKP group thinks all KP fans should know about the RATTY awards:

…the Ratty Awards, which are voted by the
readers of the rec.arts.tv newsgroup each year. Well, the nominations
are out now, and Kim Possible has once again been nominated for Best
Animated Program.

The full ballot and rules can be found at:
http://groups.google.com/group/rec.arts.tv/msg/18968a36b16061e0

If you happen to vote in the Rattys, please try to vote in as many
categories as you can. Thanks!