LISTEN: ESPY Awards Score Despite Host Shane Gillis; Happy 70th Birthday to Disneyland

The ESPY Awards showered kudos on female athletes during Wednesday’s glitzy ceremony at the Dolby Theater in Hollywood.

Fortunately, the honorees delivered enough inspiration and muscular prowess — see: rugby star Ilona Maher, who was honored as breakthrough athlete of the year — to offset the edgy jabs aimed at women in the monologue from ESPYs host Shane Gillis.

A rundown of highlights from the ESPY Awards and a salute to Disneyland on its 70th birthday are the stories are included in today’s installment of “Daily Variety,” a new podcast that features conversations with Variety journalists about news, trends and personalities making waves in media and entertainment.

I ran into ESPN chief Jimmy Pitaro in the Dolby lobby after the ESPYs were over. We talked about the very big, somewhat complicated sales pitch that the Worldwide Leader is preparing to lob at consumers as it launches its standalone ESPN streaming app later this fall. The EPSYs telecast included a 60-second spot that presented the streaming app launch as a great leap forward for sports fans, much as the dawn of the original ESPN cable channel was back in 1979.

“There are two things that are happening this fall. The first is, we’re going direct to consumer. The second is, we’re enhancing the app,” Pitaro tells me. “So in that spot, we’re basically telling you that there is a new day for ESPN. Come this fall, you’ll be able to access all of our content, all of ESPN, all in one place, and that is the ESPN app. And so whether you’re on a smart television or you’re on your phone or your tablet, we want you to fire up the ESPN app to get the best sports experience.”

From the ESPYs, we turn to a look at Disneyland on the occasion of its 70th birthday. My Variety colleagues Jazz Tangcay, senior artisans editor, and Carole Horst, deputy editor for features, assembled a package of stories that look at the art and science behind the park. Specifically, they went to Walt Disney Imagineering in Glendale to get a hands-on look at how their cutting-edge work is expressed at Disneyland and other Disney parks.

The sheer scope of the creative and technical activity overseen by Imagineers is impressive, Horst says.

“When we had our tour, we saw all the aspects of Imagineering. We saw how they developed the Spider-Man show that’s on the Avengers campus with the robot that flies through the air, to the sculpture room where they create models and sculptures. This is something that I think is unique to Disney,” Horst says.

Tangcay says she was struck by how spirit of Walt Disney himself still guides the commitment to R&D and investment in cutting-edge technology.

“We really got an insight into their thinking and it’s very much in tune with Walt Disney — just staying in touch with the inner child,” Tangcay says. “It’s those tiny details that you never really pay attention to. Even the smell — they talk about the water smell that you have on Pirates of the Caribbean and It’s a Small World.”

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(Pictured: Rugby star Ilona Maher at the ESPY Awards)