Leonard Goldenson
Goldenson orchestrated the merger of United Paramount Theatres with ABC in 1953 (after Paramount was ordered to spin it off in the wake of "United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc.", a 1948 decree of the U.S. Supreme Court). ABC was originally formed in 1943 in the wake of an earlier Supreme Court decree effectively ordering the spinoff of the largely secondary-status "Blue Network" from its then-parent, NBC; its buyer, industrialist Edward J. Noble, tried to build ABC into a competitive Broadcasting company, but by 1951 was rumored to be on the verge of selling the nearly bankrupt operation to CBS, whose management apparently wanted ABC's critically important owned-and-operated television stations.
Children's programming on the American Broadcasting Company
The merger of Capital Cities Communications (which purchased ABC in 1986) into The Walt Disney Company in 1996 marked a shift in the network's Saturday morning cartoon output. The merger resulted in Disney increasing the amount of programming content it produced for the network, including in regards to children's programming (prior to this, most of Disney's animated programming originated on either CBS, with which the studio had a working relationship prior to its purchase of ABC, or Disney's syndicated block, "The Disney Afternoon"). After Disney formally took over ABC's operations, the company's president and CEO Michael Eisner sought to create a Saturday morning block that was different from those carried by its competitors at the time, recruiting Peter Hastings (who had left Warner Bros. Animation in a dispute over the creative direction of "Animaniacs" and "Pinky and the Brain", which he had both written for) to help overhaul ABC's Saturday morning lineup. The concept that was developed revolved around the idea that Saturday is different from every other day of the week; Hastings also came up with the idea of utilizing virtual set technology for the hosted interstitial segments.