A little history that I was able to cobble together from wiki sources:Topps itself was founded in 1938, but the company can trace its roots back to an earlier firm, American Leaf Tobacco. Founded in 1890 by Morris Shorin, the American Leaf Tobacco Co. imported tobacco to the United States and sold it to other tobacco companies.
Shorin's sons, Abram, Ira, Philip, and Joseph, decided to focus on a new product but take advantage of the company's existing distribution channels. To do this, they relaunched the company as Topps, with the name meant to indicate that it would be "tops" in its field. The chosen field was the manufacture of chewing gum - still a relative novelty sold in individual pieces at the time. Topps's most successful early product was Bazooka bubblegum, which was packaged with a small comic on the wrapper. Starting in 1950, the company decided to try increasing gum sales by packaging them together with trading cards featuring Western character Hopalong Cassidy, one of the biggest stars of early television and featured in newspaper articles and on magazine covers, not to mention merchandising. When Topps next introduced baseball cards as a product, the cards immediately became its primary emphasis.
After being privately held for several decades, Topps offered stock to the public for the first time in 1972 with the assistance of investment banking firm White, Weld & Co. This led to the first of two periods of serious financial difficulty, when a "Wall-Street crowd" of executives steered it "down the chewing gum route instead of the kids entertainment route," said Alan Shorin (son of Joseph, one of the four founding brothers). The company returned to private ownership when it was acquired in a leveraged buyout led by Forstmann Little & Company in 1984.
Meanwhile, at Disney...Walt Disney Productions had been struggling since its founder's death in 1966 and had narrowly survived takeover attempts by corporate raiders when its shareholders Sid Bass and Roy E. Disney brought on former Paramount president and CEO Michael Eisner and former Warner Brothers chief Frank Wells in 1984 to turn the company around.
Back to Topps...The new ownership group again made Topps into a publicly traded company in 1987, now renamed to The Topps Company, Inc., all the while, the Shorin family retained management throughout all of these maneuverings. Then, in the mid-1990s, in the aftermath of the baseball strike and labor troubles in hockey and basketball, the company hit the second period of economic struggle.
In imitation of Bowman and other competitors, Topps eventually also began producing trading cards and other collectibles for a variety of topics unrelated to sports. Pokemon trading cards (not the game - WotC, a division of Hasbro, produces that) was, and still is, a major success for the Topps company. More recently, the company has tried its hand at developing comic books and games. The company's involvement with
WizKids began in 2003, when
WizKids was purchased by Topps for $28.4 million in cash.
Meanwhile...In 2003, Roy E. Disney, the son of Disney co-founder Roy O. Disney, resigned from his positions as Disney vice chairman and chairman of Walt Disney Feature Animation, accusing Michael Eisner (then CEO of Disney) of micromanagement, flops with the ABC television network, timidity in the theme park business, turning the Walt Disney Company into a "rapacious, soul-less" company, and refusing to establish a clear succession plan, as well as a string of box-office movie flops starting in the year 2000.
On March 3, 2004, at Disney's annual shareholders' meeting, a surprising and unprecedented 43% of Disney's shareholders, predominantly rallied by former board members Roy Disney and Stanley Gold, withheld their proxies to re-elect Eisner to the board.
Michael Eisner resigned both as an executive and as a member of the board of directors one year before his contract expired, severing all formal ties with the company. He then founded The Tornante Company ("tornante" means 'hairpin turn' in Italian), a privately held investment firm, in 2005. Tornante invests in and creates media and entertainment. CNBC President Mark Hoffman hired Eisner in early 2006 to host his own talk show, "Conversations with Michael Eisner".
Going back to Topps...Criticism of Topps' financial performance and flat stock price led two 'hedge funds' holding 7.4% of the stock to launch a proxy fight in July 2006. The battle extended into 2007.
Meanwhile, at Tornante...In March 2007, Eisner's investment firm, The Tornante Company, launched a studio, Vuguru, that produces and distributes videos for the Internet, portable media devices and cell phones. Through these companies Eisner has acquired the rights to the internet series SamHas7Friends, an internet-based serial drama.
Now, things get really interesting...With a $385 million buyout offer led by the firms Madison Dearborn and Tornante (an investment company started by former longtime Disney CEO Michael Eisner), the price of $9.75 per share was endorsed by Topps executives. However, the dissident board members felt it undervalued the company and they pushed to shop for other bidders, which led to discussions of a potential merger with a rival company. The merger with the rival was rejected by management due to legal and anti-trust concerns. The rival continued to pursue a hostile takeover bid, but they eventually withdrew their offer.
The buyout by Dearborn and Tornante was eventually approved in a special shareholders meeting by nearly two-thirds of the shares voting. The result was close, however, as the bloc voting for the deal was only a narrow majority of total shares outstanding, including those not voted. Eisner, through Tornante, took over the firm in October 2007, and is now filming a mock-documentary style show about his takeover of the Topps company, called "Back on Topps."
And now, the present...Topps closed down all WizKids operations and product lines on November 10, 2008.
