You know how coaches are sometimes allowed to switch teams in exchange for fourth-round draft picks? Something like that just went down in the world of broadcasting. According to a deal announced Thursday, Al Michaels will be able to leave ABC to go to NBC and call the plays on "Sunday Night Football" next season. In exchange, NBC will loosen up its restrictions on ESPN (which would have had Michaels' services had he stayed at ABC) regarding the embargo of Olympics footage. It will sell the rights to the Ryder Cup to ABC, which NBC had sealed up through 2014 when it thought it wasn't going to be in the football business any longer. And ...
Well, here's the bizarro part.
Does anyone remember who Oswald the Lucky Rabbit was? He was a character created for Universal Pictures by Walt Disney. He starred in 26 shorts. Then Disney struck out on his own ... and as the story goes, was crestfallen later to learn that Universal owned the rights to Oswald. He tried buying back his character, but to no avail. So instead, he and his chief animator, Ub Iwerks, designed a replacement character. Mickey Mouse.
Fast forward eight decades. NBC buys Universal ... and takes ownership of Oswald. You are intelligent readers, and you've already skipped to the end.
All I can say is, that is some golden throat Al Michaels has.
Interestingly, NBC Universal only gave to Disney the Oswald character and the 26 Oswald shorts Disney made--the 163 other shorts, produced by Margaret Winkler and then by Walter Lantz (before Lantz hit real paydirt with Woody Woodpecker), including the only color Oswald shorts (the character had been re-designed to, oddly enough, not look like Mickey Mouse), are still owned by NBCU. As if they have the slightest idea of what to do with them, unless they plan to have someone in a redesigned Oswald costume walk around at the Universal theme parks while an original Oswald costume is doing the same at Disneyland and Disney World.
Posted by: Mark Jeffries | February 10, 2006 at 10:17 AM