Company Town: Disney’s Mega-Merger : BURBANK : For the Butt of All Those ‘Tonight Show’ Jokes, the Last Laugh?
“Hello, you’ve reached the City of Burbank, home of Disney and Capital Cities/ABC.”
That’s how some Burbank city officials were gleefully answering their phones Monday after Walt Disney Co. announced its blockbuster $19-billion merger with Capital Cities/ABC Inc.
Burbank’s dowdy image has long been the butt of jokes on NBC’s “Tonight Show,” but city officials hope that Disney’s proposed absorption of the top-rated ABC television network will help draw more attention to Burbank as an entertainment industry center.
Walt Disney Co. is based in Burbank, of course, but now the city will enjoy the prestige of being the first West Coast city to serve as the headquarters for a parent company of one of the Big Three television networks.
Disney, which now employs about 7,000 at its facilities in the Burbank-Glendale area, said that moving Capital Cities/ABC workers there is not part of the company’s plan.
Under terms of the deal, Capital Cities/ABC will operate as a wholly owned Disney subsidiary that will continue to be based at its Manhattan headquarters.
Still, economists point out that when one giant corporation swallows another, economic spillover is inevitable.
“Over the near term, it’s going to be more symbolic than dollars and cents,” said Jack Kyser, chief economist for the Economic Development Corp. of Los Angeles County. “You aren’t going to see a line of trucks with ‘ABC’ on the side coming into town. But this is now a much larger corporation, and all its needs, from accounting to legal to public relations, get much bigger.”
Since the late 1980s, Burbank has aggressively recruited entertainment and media companies for its Media District, a 340-acre commercial zone that straddles the 134 Freeway in the southwest corner of the city.
With Disney, Warner Bros. Studios and NBC TV’s West Coast operations as anchors, the Media District accounts for more than half of the 90,000 jobs within the city’s boundaries.
However, the idea of Burbank as a world media capital was not exactly resounding through the hot, smoggy streets of the city on Monday.
Tomasina Delaney, 16, of Brooklyn was waiting in line for tickets to the “Tonight Show” at NBC studios. She surveyed the traffic whizzing by, then remarked that the place actually seems pretty quiet.
“It’s nothing like New York City,” she said. “There’s not the shops, the people . . . no pay phones on the corners. It’s kind of scary.”
Another “Tonight Show” fan, Henry Charrabe, 19, is from Berlin. He said he watches Jay Leno in Germany and knows all about Disney. But, he said, “if you asked people in Europe where Burbank is, they wouldn’t know.”
