Ah, there's nothing like news that's not news-- and six months after it wasn't news the first time. Pardon us while we wander slightly off-topic, here, but as you all know, Steve's other company Pixar, which is currently making Disney a ridiculous amount of money with The Incredibles and will no doubt make Disney another ridiculous amount of money with next year's Cars, is free of its Disney contract at the end of next year, and through third parties Steve has intimated that he would only consider re-upping with The Mouse if The Jerk (otherwise known as Michael Eisner) gets The Boot. Eisner has since announced his intention to "retire"-- in September of 2006, long after Apple will have had to find a new distribution partner. At this point, we don't think it's too likely that Disney will get free money from every new Pixar flick in the post-Cars era.

And so onto the non-news: faithful viewer N Gray forwarded us a CNN article that reveals that Disney is "actively proceeding with a second sequel to Pixar Animation's Toy Story franchise," with zero Pixar involvement. The thing is, everybody knows that Disney's always had the right to do that under the terms of the current contract, and way back in May we mentioned that Eisner had admitted publicly that Disney has "several sequels in the works to the blockbuster films Pixar has created for the company"-- and even then it wasn't really news, since Eisner was just "confirming earlier company statements," so Disney's been pretty open about the plan for ages and ages. Apparently the only change now is that Disney is currently "setting up a digital animation facility" to crank out its inevitably bland butcher-job on the Toy Story characters, so there's basically no turning back.

CNN reports that Disney's active pursuit of this blatant cash-grab "could make it more difficult for the two companies to extend their rocky relationship," but frankly, we don't really see how things could have been made much worse; it's clearly an Eisner move, and Steve already knows that Eisner's a tool. Consider how different Michael Eisner's plane of existence is from our own: faithful viewer Whybird dished us a Reuters article describing his courtroom testimony in a shareholder lawsuit over the $140 million severance package that Michael Ovitz got after fourteen months as Disney president. Now, we're not defending Ovitz or anything, but does anyone else see the irony when Eisner says "he started to rub people the wrong way... he was controversial and it got worse as things went on"?

Not insane enough for you? Okay, then try this one on for size (but prepare yourself, 'cause it's a doozy): "in a series of conversations that Eisner described as 'unimaginable,' he said Ovitz repeatedly refused to acknowledge that it was time to leave. 'If someone ever said to me they didn't want me around, I would be out of there after half of the sentence,' he said."

Wow.

Seriously, that statement betrays an appalling lack of self-awareness. There are entire web sites dedicated to getting Eisner to step down, the most well-known being the one run by Walt Disney's own freakin' nephew. Eisner received a 45 percent vote of no confidence from Disney's shareholders earlier this year-- the largest in history by far, and the clearest mandate a CEO could receive to get out of dodge short of an arrow through the head. Everyone who'd know says that Steve Jobs would consider keeping Pixar at Disney-- a deal that represents billions of dollars of revenue for the Mouse House-- if Eisner would just leave already. And now the guy's claiming that no one ever asked him to go? Yikes. Is there any doubt why Steve Jobs doesn't want to work with him?