Business Wars

It's the early 1990s and the diet boom is over. Weight Watchers is now a millstone around Heinz's neck, Jenny Craig's advance has stalled, and Nutri/System's bankrupt and broken.

Faced with tanking sales, the diet giants home need new tricks to get people back on their weight-loss plans. And soon all three are homing in on the same answer – paying celebrities big bucks to convince the public that they're just a diet away from happiness.

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It's 1983 and civil war's broken out within Nutri/System. But while CEO Harold Katz fights his franchisees, his former colleague Jenny Craig has grand designs on Australia.

Craig wants to use Australia as a staging post on the way to becoming a U.S. heavyweight, but first she's got to convince women Down Under to diet like Americans. And that's going to be anything but easy.

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It's 1961 and in a supermarket, housewife Jean Nidetch is about to get a shock that will send her on desperate quest to get thin.

But when her new diet gets tough, she turns to friends for help and inadvertently starts what will become Weight Watchers. And as Weight Watchers rakes in big bucks from weight-loss, a street-tough Philadelphia businessman grabs his chance to become a millionaire.

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We're celebrating the five-year anniversary of Business Wars with a special episode that takes you behind the scenes. We'll delve into how we chose our host and how the first season got off the ground (time code: 1:19). Then we'll explore how we bring the story to life with sound (time code: 17:26). And comedian Josh Gondelman will give David Brown a bit of a grilling (time code: 32:45).

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We’re going behind the scenes of your favorite Disney animated movies with Andrew Millstein, former president of Disney Animation. He helped lead the company’s transition to 3D computer animation, working on some of Disney’s biggest hits of the 2010s — Frozen, Tangled, and Zootopia, to name a few. Later, Polygon reporter Petrana Radulovic dissects DreamWorks, whose edgy animated films have become cult classics. Petrana also shares what’s new in animation online and around the world.

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It’s 2006 and with Pixar part of Disney, Ed Catmull and John Lasseter now face the task of fixing Disney Animation Studios. And they need to fix it fast, because DreamWorks is winning at the box office.

But while they strive to turn Disney Animation from has-been to hero, Hollywood’s other big studios are gearing up to take a bite out of the animated movie pie and that’s only going to dial up the competitive pressure on DreamWorks and Disney-Pixar.

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It’s the 2000s and Disney and Pixar are locked in a high-stakes game of chicken. Disney’s deal with Pixar is about to end and renewal talks are snarled up. The dream team that introduced the world to computer animated movies is careening towards divorce.

And with neither Disney CEO Michael Eisner nor Pixar boss Steve Jobs willing to cede ground, DreamWorks boss Jeffrey Katzenberg is about to forget tradition and go all out to become Hollywood’s new animation champ.

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It’s 1995 and Pixar’s Toy Story is just months away from release. But as the premiere of the first computer-animated feature nears, all-out war breaks out between Disney and DreamWorks.

Jeffrey Katzenberg raids Disney’s talent to build DreamWorks’ animation studio. Disney rearranges its releases schedules to undermine DreamWorks’ movies.

And as Disney and DreamWorks’ tit-for-tat battle intensifies, Pixar will get caught in the crossfire.

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It’s 1985 and Steve Jobs is fuming after being fired from Apple. He wants a second act, and he thinks he’s found one in Lucasfilm’s unwanted computer division.

But when Jobs buys it and founds Pixar, it soon becomes clear that visions aren't aligned. Jobs wants to create the next-generation of personal computers. But Pixar’s leaders Ed Catmull and John Lasseter have different plans. They want Pixar to make animated movies using computers.

But to make that happen, they need to persuade Jobs to burn through his fortune, and convince Hollywood that a computer animated film can hold its own against the hand-drawn creations of Disney.

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We're talking about Disney's pivot to streaming and the hurdles ahead for the legacy media company as new rivals emerge. We're joined by Parrot Analytics strategist Julia Alexander and comedian Chase O'Donnell.

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