WE'RE WITH ROY:

Reanimated (DEBORAH SOLOMON, 2/22/04, NY Times Magazine)

Roy E. Disney, who has long been derided as ''Walt's idiot nephew,'' as he puts it, is actually an eloquent, thoughtful man who completes the daily crossword in ink. Yet he does have a quirky sense of humor that he tends to unleash at his own expense. One recent afternoon, while we were sitting in his living room with his wife and his oldest son, I looked up from my notepad and was astonished to see him tugging on both ears, dangling his tongue from his mouth and panting like an exhausted dog. ''Did you know,'' he asked me, ''that I was the model for Goofy?''

At 74, Disney is an affable, gray-haired man whose long face and squinty eyes lend him an uncanny likeness not to old Goofy -- for whom he did not actually pose -- so much as to their mutual forebear Walt. His temperament, though, is closer to that of his father, Roy O. Disney, the kinder, gentler and lesser-known of the entertainment empire's founders. Within the company, the younger Roy has always been viewed as an oddly nonchalant heir, indifferent to the seductions of power, content to spend his days tinkering with films and keeping court with the old-time animators whom he had watched, in his privileged boyhood, sketching scenes for ''Pinocchio'' and ''Fantasia'' on their storyboards.

''When you grow up around a company in which the power is already yours,'' he explained that day at his home in Toluca Lake, a suburban section of Los Angeles, ''you look at power in a different way. I believed that the work was the important thing. I wasn't political. I wasn't trying to nudge some guy out of the way.''

These days, however, Roy Disney is very intent on nudging a guy out of the way. He is trying, by his own admission, to destroy Michael D. Eisner, the chairman and chief executive of the company and a man Disney himself helped hire in 1984.

Mr. Disney may not be the man to run Disney, but his vision should prevail.

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 22, 2004 9:28 AM