Walt Disney (DIS) won’t make Shanghai the happiest place in the world.

That’s the early reaction from a surprising number of netizens, or Chinese Internet users, to confirmation early Wednesday that plans for Shanghai Disneyland have the green light to proceed. Of the posts streaming into tianya.cn, a major portal, early Wednesday, the negative views were solidly outweighing positive views. A survey on eastday.com suggests a lack of enthusiasm too.

The Burbank, Calif., entertainment giant and the Shanghai government announced that they have central-government approval to build mainland China’s first Disney theme park and resort, which means contracts to build can now be hashed out.

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Via Copycense, we learn that the students who formed the Disney Movie Appreciation Club at Washington University in St. Louis recently had to shut down the club due to threats of IP infringement, because the students were gathering together to watch the legally obtained movies, without getting a proper license for showing it to a larger group of people (rather than just a few people).

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Can Hollywood improve on a Beatles classic? Director Robert Zemeckis and Disney evidently hope to do just that with a 3-D remake of Yellow Submarine. The 1968 cartoon featured McCartney-Lennon gems including “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds,” “Eleanor Rigby,” “When I’m Sixty-Four” and “With a Little Help From My Friends” in a fantasy involving grumpy grownup types called Blue Meanies.

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Last November, the Wall Street Journal ran a Heard on the Street column that proposed that Disney (DIS) ought to buy Electronic Arts (ERTS). The following month, they revisited the idea.

This morning, Janney Montgomery Scott analyst Tony Wible dusted off the concept in a report in which he launched coverage of Disney with a Buy rating. The logic isn’t that hard to figure out. Disney owns ESPN, the television, radio and Web sports programming juggernaut. Electronic Arts is a huge player in sports video games with its EA Sports line, including the Madden football franchise, Tiger Woods golf games and FIFA soccer games, among many others.

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Will Comcast (CMSCA) use its rising cash pile to make a large acquisition in the content business?

Reuters raised that question in a lengthy news analysis yesterday which wondered if the company is plotting a giant deal along the lines of its failed $54 billion bid for Disney (DIS) in 2004. The story says speculation on the Street has the company potentially targeting Viacom (VIA), or even Time Warner (TWX). (A combination with Time Warner–which would give the company control of key cable properties like HBO and CNN – would be truly weird, given that Time Warner only months ago spun off Time Warner Cable as an independent company.)

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The U.S. Supreme Court today cleared the way for Cablevision (CVC) to offer a network DVR service, allowing consumers to record copies of television programming “in the cloud,” rather than on set-top boxes.

Without comment, the court refused to review a Court of Appeals ruling that rejected claims by film studios and television networks that the network DVR approach would infringe copyrights.

Cablevision first announced plans for the service in 2006, but it has been tied up in litigation–until now. Among the companies opposed to the concept were Time Warner (TWX), CBS (CBS) and Disney (DIS).

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Hulu, the online TV service launched two years ago by Fox and NBC, has enjoyed incredible success with viewers–too much, it may turn out.

Two weeks ago, comScore’s report that Hulu had pulled into the top three streaming video sites was quickly followed by news that Disney (DIS)–the corporate parent of ABC and ESPN–was taking a stake in the venture.

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High-end filmmakers aren’t just making movies these days. They’re building virtual worlds before shooting a single frame of film, using digital tools that blur the lines between animation and live-action, virtual sets and physical soundstage, photorealistic cartoon characters and motion-captured human beings.

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One of the remarkable things about Pixar is that the Disney (DIS) unit has never produced a flop.

It’s an amazing list: “Toy Story,” “A Bug’s Life,” “Toy Story 2,” “Monsters Inc.,” “Finding Nemo,” “The Incredibles,” “Cars,” “Ratatouille” and “Wall-E.”

Nine movies, nine success stories.

Can they make it 10 for 10? The next big release for Pixar, which is coming up in late May, is a movie called “Up.” If you have kids, you’ve likely seen the trailer by now. At the heart of the movie is an old geezer named Carl, who is voiced by Ed Asner; he’s accompanied on some adventures by a 9-year-old Boy Scout sidekick named Russell.

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It’s shaping up to be the hottest race on the Web. Much as they do on TV, Disney and Viacom’s Nickelodeon are duking it out online. And if the most recent numbers from Web-traffic researcher comScore are any indication, Disney is pulling into the lead.

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If you read this blog, you might think that Kara Swisher isn’t a big fan of fun. Or at least of silly, fun apps like SuperPoke! and what we call “social entertainment.” Call me silly, but I’d take entertainment over utility any time, and you know what? I bet you would too.

Case in point: the week of April 21 and the Pennsylvania Democratic Primary. That Tuesday marked a very important day for our country. A major competition between visible and opposing candidates was decided. It was a vote that is sure to generate publicity and campaigning over the coming months, and it will no doubt continue to occupy center stage of our national attention. Of course, I’m talking about “American Idol.”

That week, the two most popular television broadcasts were “American Idol” and “American Idol” (Tuesday and Wednesday, respectively). The third and fourth were both “Dancing with the Stars.” Check out the table below (from Nielsen Media Research; click on all tables and charts to make them bigger) and perhaps you’ll arrive at the same conclusion I did: When it comes to consumption, we prefer entertaining fare.

Likewise on the Web, Google News’s (GOOG) most popular searches in 2007 are by and large entertainment related (from Google Zeitgeist 2007):

Here’s a graph from Alexa.com of traffic to the three most popular non-search-engine Web sites and the most popular news Web site.

And here’s a graph from a Morgan Stanley (MS) “Internet Trends” report from 2008 of two of those same Web sites and the two most popular search-engines:

That last graph made a pretty big splash when it debuted at the Web 2.0 Expo conference; its title was “YouTube + Facebook Views > Yahoo! or Google…” Or to put it another way: today, fun is more powerful than utility.

Consider the value of other companies that deliver entertainment: Disney (DIS), Time Warner (TWX) and Sony (SNE) have a combined market cap of over $168 billion. Gross revenue for the NFL and MLB last year exceeded $12 billion. Apple (AAPL) made nearly $2 billion through iTunes music sales alone. Social networks benefit from increased activity, advertisers benefit from an exuberant audience, and widget users can, well, share favorite “American Idol” moments, send virtual margaritas or trout slap each other.

So seriously Kara, you have to try throwing a sheep or two. As Dr. Seuss said: “If you never have, you should. These things are fun and fun is good.”

Keith Rabois is vice president of strategy and business development at Slide, which makes widgets and applications such as SuperPoke!

In Pixar Films’ upcoming animation epic, “Wall-E,” the title character is a cute but clunky robot whose centuries of solitude on an abandoned Earth is broken by the arrival of a svelte, futuristic robot named Eve–who is so white, gleaming and well, pod-like, that she looks like she was born in Apple’s design room. It turns out that she was–sort of: Eve marks the first design collaboration within Steve Jobs’s culture-shaping Apple-Pixar-Disney axis.

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