A Tale of a Bunny and a Mouse

By Richard Stengel

Playboy and Disney have fast-growing cable services in common

That's it. It's the ears. They both have big ears. In the iconography of American entertainment, there are two symbols that instantly conjure up one-word responses: Playboy's stylized bunny connotes "sex" and Disney's geometric logo type mouse suggests "family." But the bunny and the mouse have more than just prominent ears in common. Playboy equals naughty adult fun; Disney, whole some kid fun. Disney and Playboy are both purveyors of fantasy: Playboy makes real women seem unreal; Disney makes unreal adventures seem real. The Playboy mansion is a sort of Disneyland for adults; Disneyland is the Playboy mansion for kids.

The symbols identify two of the nation's newest, fastest-growing pay cable services, both of which are aggressively capitalizing on their noted (and notorious) images. Since its start in November, the Playboy Channel has been adding subscribers at an average rate of 25,000 a month, yielding a current total of more than half a million. The Disney Channel, whose launching last April was the most loudly trumpeted in cable history, now has nearly 350,000 subscribers, or 75,000 more than the company projected for this point.

What Disney and Playboy offer, notes Paul Kagan, publisher of Pay TV New-letter and a respected analyst of the industry, is "a departure from the essentially movie based programming of HBO. Showtime, Cinemax and The Movie Channel. They are not trying to be all things to all people." As exponents of the technique of "narrowcasting" (aiming at a relatively small and well-defined audience), the two channels add what cable pros call "complementary tiers" to the mix of available programming.

The Playboy Channel, which airs daily from 8 p.m. to 6 a.m., E.S.T., is an expanded video version of Publisher Hugh Hefner's glossy magazine, minus the good writing. Ribald Classics presents softcore, soft-minded dramatizations of often less than classic tales in a visual style somewhat reminiscent of gauzy old Clairol commercials. Playboy on the Scene brings the monthly centerfolds to life, though not intelligent life, in filmed segments showing their phantasmagoric photo sessions (as Miss December dutifully undrapes for the 9th time, she purrs: "I'm a very touchy-feely person"). The two smirky anchors of Sexcetera . . . The News According to Playboy purport to examine sexual mores. One typically feeble attempt at jocularity: in profiling the teacher of an acting school for X-rated movies, the woman anchor remarks that the instructor "helps the actors stay on top of things."

The Great American Strip-Off is a continuing series of competitions across the country in which overzealous but ever smiling amateurs take it all off (except for a G string) in hopes of winning a crisp $1,000 bill. Marginally less revealing, but equally energetic, is Shake It Sexy, an intermittently topless American Bandstand for grownups. No matter how crude the content, the channel's packaging is often stylish, and its standard never exceeds medium-core (full frontal nudity for women only). It is suffused with blow-dried sensuality and is innocently convinced that S-E-X is the single most important thing in the universe, period.

The Disney Channel features hardcore wholesomeness for 16 hours every day. On Mousercise, mini-Jane Fondas are instructed to bend and stretch while imagining that they are puppets pulled by strings. The Edison Twins is a kind of scientific Hardy Boys in which 16-year-old twins discover the meaning of life and thermodynamic entropy. You and Me, Kid features a Pied Piper-like host who leads children through such activities as storytelling and "let's pretend" fantasies.

The channel's masterstroke is Mouseterpiece Theater, in which George Plimpton, doing a droll parody of Alistair Cooke, introduces classic cartoons from an overstuffed leather chair: he annotates a Donald Duck short called Straight Shooters by reciting a Baudelaire poem in French to explicate Donald's existential behavior. About 40% of the channel's programming is mined from the Disney library, a Golconda of 60 years of treasures that include 450 cartoon shorts, 561 episodes of The Mickey Mouse Club, 75 episodes of Zorro ("He makes the sign of the Zeee!") and 200 never-before-syndicated hours of Disney's long-running Sunday night series. (Not to be shown are 16 classic Disney films, including Snow White and Fantasia, which the company reserves for periodic theatrical releases.)

Filling the endless hours of their schedules without too much duplication is an expensive proposition for both channels. Paul Klein, the outspoken former NBC executive who heads the Playboy Channel, estimates that he needs at least 100 films annually to satisfy his audience. In the next year, 36 of those will be made-for-Playboy movies, with budgets of up to $1 million each and titles like Black Venus. The Disney Channel will spend at least $100 million on new programming during its first lg three years. President James Jimirro, a ten-year Disney veteran, has nearly 20 shows in development. One that will appear this fall is Five Mile Creek, a dramatic series set in Australia in the 1860s. Jimirro also plans to make six to eight movies a year. The first, Tiger Town, stars Roy Scheider as a fading phenom for the Detroit Tigers. It will air in October.

Some Disney viewers have complained that the service is too "adult," that its programming is oriented not to children but to nostalgic older viewers for whom the shows are a kind of video dej`a vu. Jimirro acknowledges that 20% of Disney subscribers do not have children under 13. But he prefers to see this as a sign that the service offers "something universal."

The Playboy Channel, meanwhile, has a dual problem. Some of its viewers have complained that the channel is not hard-core enough, that it cannot compete with the X-rated fare that is readily available on video cassettes. Many local cable companies, however, resist carrying the service for fear of offending subscribers. Media Analyst Tony Hoffman, a vice president of Cralin & Co., notes that the companies "have a knee-jerk reaction: 'Oh, it's porn, I don't want it.' " Hoffman adds that "the operators who are trying to shun it don't recognize how harmless most of it is." Even when the cable operator does not object, the community might. Earlier this year, a grand jury in Cincinnati indicted the local cable company, which carries the Playboy Channel, for "pandering to obscenity." The charges were later dropped.

Klein maintains that the Playboy audience confounds these stereotyped attitudes. About 40% of Playboy's viewers are young singles, men and women; 40% are older married couples with grown children; and 20% are female heads of households, either divorcees or widows with young children. Overall, about half the viewers are women, says Klein. Such statistics are vital to pay cable's boutique services, since the focus needs to remain narrow but not too narrow. They need to appeal to new audiences without alienating their traditional constituencies. "The interesting question," muses Analyst John Reidy of Drexel Burnham Lambert, "is whether both Playboy and Disney have lost their historic grip on their clearly defined audiences."

At its current growth rate, Disney will probably break even in spring 1985, when it reaches 2 million subscribers. Playboy is almost profitable now, according to Klein, and will probably be in the black when it reaches 1 million viewers, which Klein expects will happen in 18 months or so. Indeed, the bunny and the mouse may one day make not-so-strange bedfellows in homes across America. Already some cable operators are offsetting anticipated community objections to Playboy by offering Disney as well. Ultimately, predicts Reidy, 15% of all cable homes will subscribe to both. --By Richard Stengel.

Reported by Peter Ainslie/New York and Denise Worrell/Los Angeles

With reporting by Peter Ainslie, Denise Worrell This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.