What a difference four days make.

You may recall that back on Friday, as part of my latest “Why For” column, I reported that Buena Vista Home Entertainment would NOT be producing a 2-disc special collectors edition of the “Lilo & Stitch” DVD.

Several hundred e-mails (and a couple of dozen phone calls) later, I am pleased to report that BVHE appears to have had a change of heart. Disney insiders are now telling me that – if we’re all really patient – there WILL (e-v-en-t-u-a-l-l-y) be a 2-disc special collector’s edition of the “Lilo & Stitch” DVD available for purchase.

Now the bad news: No one that I’ve spoken with since Friday could tell me when exactly this 2-disc DVD might go on sale. Or for that matter, whether or not the special collector’s edition of “Lilo & Stitch” has actually gone into production yet.

Welcome to the Walt Disney Company — circa late 2002, kids. An entertainment conglomerate that has grown so large that no one – not even Disney CEO Michael Eisner himself – seems to really know what’s going on within all of the company’s myriad divisions.

Example: “Treasure Planet.” Even as Walt Disney Company spokesmen are telling the financial press that this film was such an enormous failure that the corporation was forced to take a $74 million pre-tax write-down on this picture, the staff at Walt Disney Television Animation is still hard at work on follow-ups to this alleged flop: a “Treasure Planet II” direct-to-video sequel as well as “Treasure Planet: The Animated Series.”

Or how about this one: In just 16 days, “The Lion King” will be making its triumphant return to the big screen. And I mean the REALLY big screen, kids. This 1994 Academy Award winner (for Best Score) will be popping up on IMAX theaters all over the country starting on December 25th.

To help publicize this momentous event, it would just make sense for Disney’s marketing department to begin trotting out some of the talented people who actually worked on “The Lion King,” right? People like Rogers Allers, the co-director of the film. Surely a few reporters might enjoy talking to Roger about the experiences he’d had while making this movie.

It’s just too bad that Allers’ last day at Walt Disney Feature Animation was this past Friday.

You see what I’m saying, folks? The Walt Disney Company used to be renown for its attention to detail. For making plans months – even years – in advance, just so that things would always go smoothly.

That sort of care and attention to detail used to be possible when Disney was a relatively small entertainment company. But now that the Mouse has become this huge multi-national conglomerate that seems to live or die on how well the corporation’s stock did this quarter, this month, this week, today, this afternoon … Disney’s tradition of advance planning and/or thinking things through seems to have gone right out the window.

This whole “Lilo & Stitch” 2-disc DVD debacle is a perfect example of how the fabled fine tuned machinery at the Walt Disney Company has finally broken down. I mean, here you have two different divisions of the very same corporation (a company renown for its careful orchestration of events) telling the public two very different things about what’s actually going on with the release of a special collector’s edition of this film. This is miscommunication on a grand scale.

Yet no one from Disney management seems willing to step forward to try and sort out this mess out. Why? Out of fear of saying the wrong thing, of making the wrong decision. Doing something that could possibly end their careers. So in order to play it safe, these senior Disney managers just opt to say nothing, do nothing, go with the status quo.

It’s this exact lack of leadership – with Disney’s senior staffers being so obsessed with short term profits that they often forget to plan anything beyond the next quarter – that has allowed the corporation to drift so close to the rocks. I mean, it’s all that Disney Company employees in Burbank and Lake Buena Vista can talk about these days.

Why Lake Buena Vista? Well (in this case, anyway), that’s because this is Walt Disney Feature Animation – Florida is located. This is where the staff of that studio was told earlier this year to pull out the stops. Their mission was to help Buena Vista Home Entertainment make “Lilo & Stitch” the best non-Pixar DVD that the Walt Disney Company has ever released

And the guys down in Orlando really did pull out the stops, people. I mean, they dug through filing cabinets and burrowed through flat files – pulling together huge piles of character sketches, watercolor backgrounds, even early animation tests. The staff at WDFA-F put in hundreds of hours on this project, extending every courtesy to BVHE staffers. All because they thought that they were working on the DVD that would top all of the other 2-disc sets that Disney had released to date.

Meanwhile, back in Burbank, Disney’s market research staff was briefing Michael Eisner about what the public really thought about Disney’s DVDs. As it turns out, there really are a hardcore group of film fans and Disneyana fans who love all the extra features that BVHE adds to their discs. But these folks are only 8% of the market. The other 92% are parents who buy Disney’s DVDs just to entertain their children. So all these additional features that Disney piles on its discs aren’t really that big a selling point to the people who actually buy most of the DVDs.

If anything, most of the parents surveyed seemed to actively dislike Disney’s 2-disc sets. Why for? Well, the adults expressed concern that – should their children try (on their own) to swap disc 1 for disc 2 (in order to see the additional features) – they might accidentally end up breaking the family’s DVD player. Which is why these parents told Disney that they’d honestly prefer it if BVHE went back to the single disc format. To these folks, anyway, ease of use and convenience is infinitely more preferable to any additional features.

Based on this info, Eisner supposedly made a decree: From that point forward (this was approximately May of this year), the Walt Disney Company would begin scaling back production of Buena Vista Home Entertainment’s 2-disc DVD sets. Oh, sure. Disney would continue to support the 2-disc series that BVHE had already started — like its much praised (and highly profitable) “Platinum Edition” collection. But beyond that …

Well, the new thinking was that these 2-disc DVD sets are mostly favored by serious film fans as well as hardcore Disney dweebs. Which is a much smaller share of the marketplace than had been previously thought. Which is why – from this point forward – BVHE would be issuing these special edition collector’s sets in significantly lower numbers then they had in the past.

Case in point: The second installment of the “Walt Disney Treasures” series. You know, those three 2-disc DVD sets — the ones in the attractive tins — that are out in stores right now? Last year, Buena Vista Home Entertainment put 150,000 copies of “Mickey Mouse in Color,” “Silly Symphonies” and “Disneyland U.S.A.” up for sale. This time around, BVHE only put 125,000 copies of the newer titles in the “Walt Disney Treasures” series (“Mickey Mouse in Black & White,” “The Complete Goofy” and “Behind the Scenes at Disney Studios”) out on sale. Shaving a full 25,000 copies of each title off of its production run. All in an effort to economize. Keep profits high and production costs low.

This same “What-can-we-do-to-save-a-few-bucks?” philosophy was then extended by Buena Vista Home Entertainment to the “Lilo & Stitch” DVD project. Given how few copies of the special collector’s edition of “The Emperor’s New Groove” and “Dinosaur” had actually sold (which might explain why earlier this year Best Buy began offering a “Disney’s Ultimate Collector’s Edition DVDs” boxed set. Where that store created a special boxed set that bundled the special collector’s edition of “Groove” and “Dinosaur” in with “The Ultimate Toy Box,” “The Fantasia Anthology” and the collector’s editions of “Tarzan” and “a bug’s life” at a deep discount. All in an effort to finally get these very slow moving titles off the shelves), Disney didn’t want to get stuck with a large pile of 2-disc special collector’s editions of the “Lilo & Stitch” DVD that they’d have trouble moving. Which is why all talk of doing a deluxe collector’s edition of this film were quietly tabled by mid-June.

The only problem is … someone forget to tell the folks down at Walt Disney Feature Animation – Florida about this decision. The very folks who had busted their butts for Buena Vista Home Entertainment back in May, assembling those master tapes that were chock full of cool extra features for the deluxe 2-disc collector’s edition of the “Lilo & Stitch” DVD. So these guys were still assuming that the DVD to top all other Disney DVDs — the project that they had worked so hard on — would still be hitting store shelves come January 28, 2003.

This is why “Lilo & Stitch” co-director Dean Deblois — when he was being interviewed last summer about the film that he’d just finished working on — kept talking up the deluxe 2-disc DVD of this movie. Whenever a reporter would bring up the movie’s infamous 747 rescue scene (the one that had been cut from the film immediately after 9/11), Dean would say “I’m hoping that we’ll be able to include that scene as one of the extra features to be found on the 2-disc version of the ‘Lilo & Stitch’ DVD.”

Deblois and his co-director Chris Sander only learned that the deluxe 2-disc edition of version of the “Lilo & Stitch” DVD had been cancelled and/or postponed when they got the news (second hand, mind you) that Buena Vista Home Entertainment was planning on releasing a single disc version of the film on December 3rd (a full eight weeks ahead of when BVHE had originally announced that it would be putting home video and DVD version of “Lilo & Stitch” out on store shelves). When Dean and Chris asked if this meant that the deluxe 2-disc collector’s edition of “Lilo & Stitch” would still be released on January 28th, the answer they got from Buena Vista Home Entertainment went something like this: “Er … Um … We’re going to have to get to you on that.”

Now keep in mind that all of this is going down while Walt Disney Studios was in the middle of trying to negotiate a new production deal with Deblois and Sanders. Given that “Lilo & Stitch” is Feature Animation’s first real hit since 1999’s “Tarzan,” Mouse House executives weren’t all that eager to have Dean, Chris and their new Stormcoast Pictures production company walk off the Disney lot and go set up shop elsewhere. Like at – say – Dreamworks. Which is why the Mouse was doing everything within its power to try and make these guys happy.

And — since these guys were absolutely furious that the deluxe 2-disc collector’s edition of “Lilo & Stitch” had been cancelled / postponed / whatever — Disney was bending over backwards to try and placate Deblois and Sanders. Which is why BVHE allowed Dean and Chris to personally edit the original 45 minute version of the “On Location with the Directors” featurette (which has been created expressly for the 2-disc deluxe DVD) down to 18 minutes (so that the featurette might now fit on the single disc version of the DVD). Just so at least some of the extras that the “Lilo & Stitch” production team had worked so hard to create might actually get seen by the public.

This gesture may have placated Deblois and Sanders (who finally did get around to signing a new production deal with Disney back on November 19th). But not the rest of the staff down at Walt Disney Feature Animation – Florida. You see, the folks down in Lake Buena Vista were reportedly furious that the 2-disc deluxe collector’s edition of “Lilo & Stitch” has been cancelled / postponed / whatever … which is why they began complaining to anyone who’d listen.

Now you have to understand that a large number of staffers who work at Disney’s Lake Buena Vista animation facility already have a bit of a Rodney Dangerfield complex. AKA: They feel that they “don’t get no respect” from the Mouse. EX: Just because they live and work in Florida (a right-to-work state with a lower cost of living), staffers here are paid considerably less than their California counterparts.

Then there’s the whole “How come our movies don’t get treated with the same care and consideration that the ones that are made in Burbank are given?” issue. Which – to be honest – dates back to the short shrift that WDFA-F staffers supposedly feel that “Mulan” (the feature length cartoon that was primarily produced at Disney’s Florida facility) was given during its June 1998 world premiere.

To explain: Some of you may recall that “Pocahontas” was given this huge send-off back in the summer of 1995, with its world premiere actually being held on the Great Lawn in NYC’s Central Park. And that – in June of 1996 — Disney’s marketing department actually tried to top “Pocahontas”‘s premiere by staging a “Hunchback of Notre Dame” event in New Orleans. That film’s world premiere featured a special Disney-themed parade through the city as well as a screening that held inside the Super Dome.

And “Hercules” … well, in June of 1997, “Hercules” had the biggest world premiere of them all. It featured Disneyland’s Main Street Electrical Parade being rolled up Fifth Avenue in NYC as well as a star studded screening at the New Amsterdam Theatre.

The only problem is … there seems to have been this weird correlation between how much promotion Disney’s marketing department put behind these pictures and how poorly they performed at the box office. EX: “Pocahontas” – with a fairly large amount of hype – grossed $142 million during its initial domestic run. “Hunchback” – with an even larger amount of hype – only grossed $121 million. “Hercules” – with the largest amount of hype of all – only managed to pull in $99 million at the domestic box office.

You see what I’m saying? Since Mouse House executives eventually came to think that the main reason that “Hercules” had under-performed at the box office because there had been far too much hype and hoopla associated with the launch of that film, Disney’s marketing department decided to take a “less is more” approach with “Mulan.” Which meant soft peddling the promotion of that picture. Staging a much smaller, far more modest world premiere for “Mulan.” Which is why this film got just a quickie, low budget event that was staged at the Hollywood Bowl.

Now you have to understand that after they’d spent five years busting their butts to make “Mulan,” the staff of Walt Disney Feature Animation – Florida were really looking forward to the elaborate world premiere that the Mouse’s PR staff would be staging for their picture. (Which — had Disney’s marketing department stuck with its original plan — the “Mulan” event would have probably been held in a major West Coast city with a large Asian population [San Francisco and Los Angeles were reportedly discussed as possible sites]. The world premiere was also supposed to have featured yet another appearance by Disneyland’s then-still-retired Main Street Electrical Parade.) But now — because management had become concerned with over-selling their picture — “Mulan”‘s world class world premiere suddenly got scaled back to barely a blip.

(It should be noted here that there may have been – in fact – some method to Mickey’s marketing madness. Whether it was because Disney’s PR department deliberately took a low key approach with the promotion of this picture or maybe it was just because “Mulan” was just a better movie than the Mouse’s last few films, who can say. But this made-mostly-in-Florida picture did gross $121 million during its initial domestic run in the summer of 1998. Which was least a 20% improvement over the business that “Hercules” had done at the box office a year earlier. Anyway… )

So the staff of Walt Disney Feature Animation – Florida had been nursing this grudge over how badly “Mulan” was supposedly treated during its initial release for over four years now. But now here comes another chance for this somewhat neglected division of the Walt Disney Company to shine once more. By helping Buena Vista Home Entertainment turn the collector’s edition of the “Lilo & Stitch” DVD into the best 2-disc set that the company has ever produced by really loading this DVD up with extras.

But once again. due to circumstances that are beyond their control (I.E. Disney CEO Michael Eisner — because he’s concerned that his cushy position at the top of the Mouse House may be riding on whether or not he can radically improve his corporation’s performance over the next few months — is ordering every division of the Walt Disney Company to make extreme cuts in order to maximize profitability) have conspired against the crew at WDFA-F. So these guys feel like they’re getting the shaft. Again.

So is it any wonder that the folks at Walt Disney Feature Animation – Florida have been aggressively putting the word out about what consumers are actually missing out on because Buena Vista Home Entertainment opted to quietly cancel / postpone / whatever the 2-disc special collector’s edition of “Lilo & Stitch”? All of the cool extras and additional features that that the crew at WDFA-F worked so hard to pull together. These extra features are already properly formatted on those master tapes, just waiting to be used … if only BVHE would actually get off its ass and produce a deluxe 2-disc collector’s edition of the “Lilo & Stitch” DVD.

Which bring us back to our main question. Which is: when WILL Buena Vista Home Entertainment actually get around to producing a 2-disc special collector’s edition of “Lilo & Stitch?” As I mentioned at the very start of this article, all the reps at BVHE that I’ve spoken with over the past few days now say that a deluxe version of this film’s DVD IS actually in the works. But when pressed about when this 2-disc set might be released (or – for that matter – when actual production on the collector’s edition of “Lilo & Stitch” might begin), everyone suddenly clammed up.

It should be noted here that some of the suggestions that I made during last Friday’s “Why For” column (I.E. Releasing a deluxe 2-disc collector’s edition of the “Lilo & Stitch” DVD day and date with the film’s direct-to-home-video sequel and/or around the same time that “Stitch! The Animated Series” begins airing in late 2003) are supposedly already being discussed by BVHE staffers. Though – to be honest (based on conversations that I’ve had over the last couple of days with Buena Vista Home Entertainment insiders) – I’m fairly certain now that these possible release dates for the 2-disc “Lilo & Stitch” were already on the table PRIOR to my suggesting them in Friday’s JHM column. So it would appear that semi-great minds DO actually think alike.

Which brings us back to those poor slobs who work down at Walt Disney Feature Animation in Florida. Can’t anyone in Mouse House management cut these guys a break? I mean, first the deluxe 2-disc collector’s edition of “Lilo & Stitch” gets cancelled / postponed / whatever. Then – just last week – they learn that their next film, “Bears,” is swapping release dates with “Home on The Range.” Which means that this movie now has to be ready for release by November 2003. A full year ahead of when the picture was originally supposed to roll into theaters.

This, of course, adds tremendously to the pressure that this division of Walt Disney Feature Animation has been feeling lately. Not to mention the very persistent rumor that WDFA-F will soon undergo a significant layoff of staff.

I mean, haven’t the guys in Florida suffered enough? Please, Buena Vista Home Entertainment – cut the crew at WDFA-F a little bit of slack and release that 2-disc collector’s edition of the “Lilo & Stitch” DVD sooner rather than later.

That way, the dedicated employees down there will at least have a lovely parting gift as they’re booted out the door.