To help promote the 50th anniversary of Disneyland, Disney launched a free "Virtual Magic Kingdom" website, where fans could make little avatars and walk around the virtual theme park doing little virtual activities. The VMK was originally scheduled to run for 18 months. But now, three years after it launched, the site is still going. Why? Because creepy Disney-obsessed adults who scare everyone have staked their claim to the site, and they're not about to let the company shut down this free temporary children's amusement. Their very identities depend upon it! The company says it makes no money on the site, and it needs to shutter it and move on. The fans say: we are creepy obsessed adults, and we are picketing your theme parks. As well as making slick protest websites, which showcase their virtual "Save VMK" protest videos. Like this one, in which a virtual boy in a feathered head dress persuades the multibillion-dollar corporation to listen to reason:

Hannah Montana, the kids' show starring exploited teenager (or, alternately, picture-posing strumpet) Miley Cyrus, ran its first new episode in two months last Sunday. And the ratings were down 24%! Could this be the end for our hero—done in by Annie Leibovitz, Vanity Fair, and a child-unfriendly wave of bad publicity?

WHEREAS, Walt Disney Pictures has made available online this week its trailer for the animated/live-action film Beverly Hills Chihuahua, and

· Baby-faced Freaks and Geeks (and Bones) star John Francis Daley and writing partner Jonathan Goldstein will rewrite Hours of Fun for Disney, a great premise about what happens when all those back-of-the-comic-book novelty items actually live up to their promises. Oh man, Sea-Monkeys: The Movie! We're so there. [THR]
· So beyond four more years of Family Guy and its offspring, what else does Seth MacFarlane's $100 million deal mean for you? How about a Family Guy movie?! Don't say you came out of this empty handed. [TV Week]
· Jennifer Love Hewitt's legendary, spirit-channeling rack will live on the syndicated afterlife, as Sci Fi Channel and WE have jointly acquired rerun rights to the CBS drama. [Variety]
· Worried that a PG-13 rating will water down Terminator Salvation: The Future Begins, the next installment of the cyborg-killing-machine franchise? Says Salvation-producer Victor Kubicek, "The PG-13 has increased in intensity." [Variety]
· This is great: An FCC ruling has deemed TMZ and The 700 Club "bona fide newscasts," making them exempt from political equal-time requirement laws. We guess that makes Harvey Levin the Walter Cronkite of the exposed ladyparts generation? "And that's the way it's shaved." *Long sip from sippy cup.* [Variety]

For those of you who get your McDreamy fix by watching Gray's Anatomy at ABC.com, you'll soon have to start putting up with more advertisements. Now viewers will simply switch browser tabs instead of changing the channel. [Hollywood Reporter]

It's been nearly two years since we last detected the whimperings of M. Night Shyamalan, who followed Lady in the Water (and the pouty studio exile that preceded it) with a quiet retreat to his shrouded, moated enclave in the Pennsylvania wilderness. But the LA Times's Susan King smoked him out in advance of his return to theaters this summer, reviving the classic Manoj Twist for a readership craving every word:

The inevitable grouping of the major studios under the iTunes roof finally occurred today, when Apple officially announced it had reached agreements with Universal, Paramount, Fox, Warner Bros., Sony and Lionsgate (along with previous bedfellow Disney) on day-and-date downloads of their new DVD titles. The studios had made most releases available for rental since earlier this year (with catalog titles for sale before that), but this marks the first time users can buy and download new releases on their DVD street dates.

The Walt Disney Corporation was nothing short of outraged when its billion-dollar-a-year child star Miley Cyrus appeared in Vanity Fair wearing only a bedsheet, as shown in the rightmost image above. Said a spokeswoman at the time: "A situation was created to deliberately manipulate a 15-year-old in order to sell magazines." But check out the Disney billboard pictured on the left, snapped by Slate's Daniel Brook in Beijing, China. The model, who looks barely pubescent, is being used to sell a matching bra-and-panties set. Brook said the billboard made "the controversial 1990s Calvin Klein underwear ads look artistic by comparison." And it's not the work of Chinese intellectual property pirates; it comes from a legitimate Disney licensee pledged to clear all ads with Disney corporate. What does Disney say? Controlling child exploitation is hard! Also, Chinese people have certain... tastes:

We're so confused. An extra day's digestion of the Miley Cyrus/Vanity Fair photo "scandal" hasn't cleared much up for us in the way of morals, betrayals, exploitations and career management of the young Hannah Montana star, but the public meltdown has alerted us to a more basic truth that is helping guide us through the fog of outrage. This isn't about Miley Cyrus without a shirt on or if she's been seen somewhere in her lingerie, or if her father dropped the ball.

The stock-options backdating scandal, which bored Silicon Valley the day the SEC first announced its investigations, continues. The latest to disclose a brush with the law: Google. Google has not been accused of misleading investors by moving up the grant date of stock options, making them more profitable for the executives who received them. But Google board member Ann Mather, the former CFO of animation studio Pixar, has, and the SEC is now initiating legal proceedings against her.

Vanity Fair has done it again. In their upcoming issue, famed photographer Annie Leibovitz shot a controversial photo spread featuring Billion Dollar Girl Miley Cyrus, prompting public outrage from the Christian Coalition, Disney and, naturally, the ladies of The View. Leibovitz and VF are being accused of crossing the line between art and pedophilia by shooting Cyrus in what some are calling "topless" photos (shown after the jump). Before the issue has even hit newsstands, Miley has apologized to her fans and Disney, concerned that the spread could affect the Hannah Montana cash cow. But this isn't the first time VF has hired one of their star photographers to use her lens in an effort to reinvent the images of underage starlets by featuring them in a slightly more provocative and mature light...

After an internet-wide tweenhunt for missing That's So Raven star Orlando Brown turned up virtually every known Orlando in existence (including former Baltimore Ravens offensive tackle Orlando Brown) save the Disney Channel star in question, people began to fear the worst. We're thrilled to report, however, that the young actor has resurfaced, and is doing just fine:

Disney Channel star Orlando Brown has been missing since Tuesday morning, People.com reports: "The 20-year-old reportedly left his manager's house around 10:20 a.m. to make a quick trip to 7-Eleven and has not been seen since...According to Brown's publicist, Elayne Rivers, he had a full day of meetings and appointments in preparation for a photo shoot Wednesday." Based on what we know about missing persons cases from Without A Trace, the first 24 hours are the most crucial. But we've now exceeded those. So where the hell is he? Has anyone seen Orlando Brown? You have? No, not him! Not him, either! Oh, never mind—you're no help at all. Orlando, come home!

No, your eyes weren't deceiving you as you scanned the LA Weekly escort ads while waiting on some Alegria take-out—that was none other than Suite Life of Zack & Cody star Brenda Song, rebranded as a "Hawaiin beauty. Come get lei'd." Despite possessing a well-documented stable of oft nude and knocked-up rising talent, however, Song's moonlighting efforts appear to be a complete fabrication, as Disney lawyers tell TMZ the ad constitutes "an unauthorized use of Brenda Song's image and her personal attorney has issued a cease and desist to the advertiser." As was the case with Elisha Cuthbert fans hoping for that $47 special in Las Vegas, when your celebrity escort deal seems almost too good to be true, it frequently is.

If any media concern seemed destined to prosper in the business of virtual worlds, it was surely Disney. Its Virtual Magic Kingdom, created as a one-off to promote Disneyland's 50th anniversary, proved popular enough that Disney kept it open. Now, however, it's closing, with the nonsensical explanation that it was meant to close all along. An online petition predictably failed to sway Disney managers, and the site is closing on April 21. The number of players has dropped from 1 million after launch to roughly 250,000 today, and Disney would just as soon have them join its more successful Toontown. A virtual Magic Kingdom, after all, might substitute for a trip to the actual theme park. A fake real thing threatening a real fake thing? Only on the Internet, folks, only on the Internet.

Everyone's favorite over-allusive Indiewood hit Juno is now available for download at the iTunes Music Store for $14.99. The move marks Fox's first foray into offering new DVD releases as paid downloads through Apple's popular service, with the studio joining Paramount and Disney. Amazon's Unbox already carried the title, where it's also available to rent. Apple TV owners won't be able to rent Juno until May 14.

Rising star Shia LaBeouf gave one of his younger fans the cold shoulder at the LAX baggage claim over the weekend. The young fan asked LaBeouf if he was going to do another Even Stevens movie, which got no response from LaBeouf. Then the fan began to shout "Hello?" over and over again until LaBeouf picked up the wrong piece of luggage and ran out of the terminal.

Boy, ABC News president David Westin must have really been moved by the story of Randy Pausch, a 47 year-old professor and father who has terminal cancer. It's not every day an exec as high up as Westin takes the time to email the entire ABCTV staff just to talk about an uplifting story! Westin is truly touched by how Pausch has altered our lives. That's one interpretation. Another, more accurate interpretation, which is completely validated by the contents of Westin's email [via Jossip], is that the exec saw a good chance to use this ill man's story as an example of the badass corporate interactivity going on under the Disney umbrella. Westin's totally excited about Pausch's TV segment, sister company Hyperion is publishing the book, and the guy once wanted to be an "Imagineer" for another Disney unit... When he still had his life before him, of course. The full email, after the jump.

First "Mr. Toad's Wild Ride" and now "It's a Small World." The beloved and hysterically dated Disney ride, featured at both the charming old Disneyland and the horrifying specter of American doom that is Disney World, that takes you on a wee boat trip through the countries of the world, from darkest Africa through ching-chongiest Asia, isn't disappearing like "Wild Ride," but it's gonna change. Plans are afoot for an update, to both include well-known Disney characters and to accommodate the increasing waistlines of parkgoers. The family of Mary Blair, the ride's designer, along with the many people who are strangely devoted to the automated wonder, is up in arms, claiming that the inclusion of popular Disney folk will cheapen the ride's twee spirit of separate-but-equal internationalism. Atlantic blogger Virginia Postrel, while not mentioning the weight issue, believes that the ride is due for a makeover, because in this increasingly globalized society, the isolationism of its message is, at best, irrelevant.

· The 2008 box office year has been "solid rather than spectacular," failing to yet produce the kind of runaway, $200 million-earning blockbuster that 300 did for the first quarter of 2007. You want a hit? Turn South Heavy Metal Park into a feature. [Variety]
· Dennis Quaid and approximately two dozen other stars sign up for Legion: On the eve of Apocalypse, a "group of strangers...must deliver a baby they realize is Christ in his second coming." Or as it was pitched in the room, "It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World meets Children of Men!" [Variety]
· Superproducer Jerry Bruckheimer has reteamed with his Pirates of the Caribbean writers Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio for a take on The Lone Ranger for Disney that promises to be as overbloated, over-CGId, and overly fucking confusing as their last outings. (Tonto's half-squid.) [THR]