I had this story yesterday, but didn’t have a chance to post it and now Jim Hill Media has beaten me to it. The basics are that Sharon Morrill, President of Disney Toon Studios, makers of direct-to-DVD “product”, has been asked to step down. Ding dong, the Wicked Witch is dead!

I’m not going to discuss the merits of the sequels, pre-quels or mid-quels, there are plenty of comments over at Jim Hill. What I want to say is that while the DVD releases made a lot of money, they cost way more than they needed to. Virtually every one of them went through a multitude of writers and directors, fired on a whim by Sharon. If they followed her directives and she hated it, they got fired. If they didn’t follow her directives, they got fired even faster. All this shutting down productions in the middle because there wasn’t a good script to begin with cost the company millions of dollars more than necessary. If anyone before Lasseter and Catmull had really known how she ran that division, she would have been out years ago. But I suppose to the accountants, the bottom line was all that mattered.

However, beyond dollars, Sharon Morrill is not a nice person. And it has nothing to do with being a tough boss or the President of a company. Whatever you thought about Eisner creatively, I’ve heard from insiders that he was easy to work for. Sharon was not.

But Karma gets us all in the end and she’ll serve out her contract in what the employees refer to as “The Dead President’s Office”. Rather than pay her off and kick her out, they’ll make her stick around “taking on new duties”, which has about the same amount of truth to it as when a disgraced government official says they’re leaving office to spend more time with their family.

All good things come to an end and fortunately, sometimes bad things end, too.