Archive for August, 2007

Disney Publishing Worldwide has cancelled Disney Adventures, a monthly digest-sized magazine with comics and articles for tweens.

The series was launched in the United States in 1990. The November issue will be the publication’s final issue. The company said that the decision was made to better focus resources and maximize long-term growth potential through new magazine and book initiatives.

Anyone familiar with Carl Barks’ classic 1953 The Master Rainmaker will remember how Donald Duck skillfully shaped clouds and sprinkled them with rain seed to provide farmers with just the right amount of rain in the right place. In 1983, Barks commented that the inspiration for his story “grew out of the news events of the period. Rainmaking by seeding clouds was getting a lot of publicity, and who could perfect the technique better than Donald Duck – and overdo it more disastrously?”

Cloud seeding was actually invented by atmospheric scientist Bernard Vonnegut, who in 1946 discovered the potential of silver iodide for the process. The first attempt at cloud seeding was in upstate New York during 1946 when a chemist caused snow to fall after he dumped six pounds of dry ice into a cloud from a plane.

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The Walt Disney Company today announced that it will buy Club Penguin for a cool $350 million. Club Penguin is by far the most popular social networking and gaming site for tweens aged 8 to 14-years-old. Disney has already redesigned Disney.com earlier this year, adding social networking, games and video. It has also been developing standalone gaming sites based on franchises like “Pirates of the Caribbean”. Bob Iger, President of the Walt Disney Company, said that Disney could “succeed online by growing organically” but that it considered Club Penguin “too good of a strategic fit” to pass up.