Washington Redskins owner Dan Snyder also owns 12% of Six Flags, the money-losing theme park company, and after a proxy fight, he finally gave management the boot and installed his boy Mark Shapiro, who'd previously been in charge of programming at ESPN, as President and CEO.
Now Shapiro's gettin' the ESPN band back together, trying to inject some entertaining pizazz into the whole "spend $200 to stand in line all day and get sunburned with your family" experience. His recently announced executive team includes one of his own boys from EPSN Original Entertainment and Angelina Vieira, who oversaw the network's best programming EVER, the "This is SportsCenter" ad campaign, while at Wieden+Kennedy. Why do I mention this here? Because Angie was most recently the president of Bugaboo North America.
So watch for exciting licensing announcements, like Warner Bros.' Firewall: The Ride, where your family is held hostage in line until you empty your ATM account [wait, don't they already have this one?]; a franchising deal with the Branson, MO-based Rich Eisen & Stuart Scott Musical Theater & Buffet; and, of course, the Batman strollers will be bigger, more like an SUV.
Six Flags Announces New Entertainment and Marketing Department [prnewswire/yahoo via dt reader buck]
With any luck Mark Shapiro will do for Six Flags what he did for ESPN. Completely alienate their core group of fans and then run the network into the ground while trying to promote entertainment over content. The Houston Six Flags was deemed too valuabele to keep and sold for the real estate so here's to a few less crappy, overpriced theme parks.