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Now, with a tear in my eye, I wanna know about Tom. I hope this post gets to him somehow.
https://disney.fandom.com/wiki/Tom_Fitzgerald He had just joined WED the same year he sent that reply (1979). Worked there until 2020 in various leadership roles. Seems to have been particularly involved in the making of EPCOT. A web search shows all kinds of interesting interviews etc.
At age 13 I pitched a candy idea to Mars Bars as part of a school project to write business letters. I loved Snickers at the time but was tired of unwrapping so many fun-size ones from Halloween. I told them something like - “you should just put the fun-size candies in a big resealable bag, so people can eat as much as they want without dealing with the wrappers. You can call them unwrapped minis. All you have to do…
8 months later sounds too short to have taken your idea, I'm guessing launching a product at Mars scale takes like 2 years. This is probably why the always say they cannot take ideas sent by external people... but on the other hand if this came from the CEO, probably could be fast tracked. So 80/20. Do you remember who was the CEO?
These letters matter a lot to kids. I sent my video game idea to Nintendo as a little kid and I had the same reaction seeing that envelope from Nintendo in the mailbox addressed to me. I think it was also a bit more special pre-internet as these companies felt a bit more magical and mysterious. You can only read about them through video game magazines and see their names in the credit scenes at the end of the games.…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://disney.fandom.com/wiki/Tom_Fitzgerald He had just joined WED the same year he sent that reply (1979). Worked there until 2020 in various leadership roles. Seems to have been particularly involved in the making of EPCOT. A web search shows all kinds of interesting interviews etc.
He sent the letter in April 1979! He was only 3 months into the job.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What was the reason? Anything beyond concerns over ownership of the ideas, characters, etc. (which I presume is the boilerplate legalese)? Did they even admit to reading your letter?
When I visited the Warner Bros studios, they had a huge pile of paper in a corner, representing all the unsolicited ideas they receive. They told us they took care to not even read the manuscripts. I don't remember if they return them unopened or destroy them, but otherwise if the ideas from the manuscript end up in one of their productions, they open themselves to legal trouble. It may happen even if it is a coincid…
These letters matter a lot to kids. I sent my video game idea to Nintendo as a little kid and I had the same reaction seeing that envelope from Nintendo in the mailbox addressed to me. I think it was also a bit more special pre-internet as these companies felt a bit more magical and mysterious. You can only read about them through video game magazines and see their names in the credit scenes at the end of the games.…
I so much wish we could all get together as engineers and make a site where kids can write to and send videos etc on and we just praise them and tell them their ideas are good as a community.
I remember sending a letter to Google in 2003? 2004? (I was 13 years old) with my idea. It explained that my mom asks questions to Google instead of using keywords (remember how using the right keywrods was a skill and could affect the results a lot?), and they should fix that. I event included some PHP code to explain how they could parse the input in question format and convert it to keywords, using regular express…
These letters matter a lot to kids. I sent my video game idea to Nintendo as a little kid and I had the same reaction seeing that envelope from Nintendo in the mailbox addressed to me. I think it was also a bit more special pre-internet as these companies felt a bit more magical and mysterious. You can only read about them through video game magazines and see their names in the credit scenes at the end of the games.…
At age ~11, I sent a MSPaint design of a phone with two SIM cards that you could switch between physically on a phone. I sent it to Nokia over email :-D. They didn't respond. Dual SIM phones apparently became a thing that same year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_SIM#:~:text=The%20first%2... Not originally by Nokia, though.
The first was essentially the iPhone but with a palm pilot type touch screen, the other was a PCMCIA card (which were also much larger back then) that you could put your SIM card into and plug into your laptop to be able to make calls or send/receive faxes on the computer.