Great jumpin' girls named Maude, our brains are all a-tangle with this latest plot twist in the ongoing Disney melodrama. Unless you've spent the day with your head stuck inside a large media-shielding ham and you didn't have anyone around like faithful viewer Jonas Rabbe to tap you the news in Braille, you're all too aware that the cable borg known as Comcast (well, there are usually a handful of creative adjectives preceding that name, too, but we've got a PG rating to preserve) just made a gloriously public $66 billion bid to assimilate Disney. Needless to say, this throws at least nine kinds of havoc at the story so far, because all the Eisner-Jobs sniping and intrigue in the world isn't going to pull anyone's attention away from that kind of moolah.

Just how big a merger would this be, you ask? Well, according to CNET, "the deal could create a media and distribution empire rivaling the size and influence of the post-America Online Time Warner." But, of course, all we really care about is the Jobs-Gold-Disney conspiracy and what the merger likely means to Disney CEO Michael Eisner: a one-way ticket to a small town called Oustville, where Gil Amelio spends his evenings out on the porch, whittling and playing the banjo. (Yes, both at the same time. He's actually quite talented.) See, apparently Comcast CEO Brian Roberts first went to Eisner with his offer of a Disney buyout, and Eisner told him to shove it right up his broadband. So Roberts drafted a letter to Eisner outlining the proposal-- and sent it to everyone else, instead. Media frenzy, anyone?

The upshot, of course, is that now Disney's board of directors knows about the offer, and knows that Eisner tried to kill it outright. What's more, the shareholders know it, too, and given that a Comcast buyout might get investors back some of the money they've lost over the past four or five years (Roberts notes that his offer "represents a premium of over $5 billion for your shareholders, based on yesterday's closing prices"), they might consider Eisner's attempt to sweep the deal under the rug to be yet another example of poor judgment, CEO-wise. Regardless of how Roy Disney and Stan Gold may feel about the prospect of a Comcast-owned Disney, they must at least appreciate how the news of Eisner's initial rejection of the offer helps them in their push to get Eisner voted off the Disney board and eventually yoinked from the CEO spot as well. (Disney's stock jumped almost 15% today; clearly investors aren't as dismissive of the buyout as Eisner was.)

So where's this leave Steve and Pixar? Well, if his plan was to kill contract negotiations with Disney in order to get Eisner fired and then come back and sign a new deal in a post-Eisner Disney wonderland, a Comcast buyout might actually help the process along-- and from a distribution perspective, a Disney with Comcast's bulk behind it could well push Pixar's flicks into hitherto unimagined corners of the planet. On the other hand, if Steve's goal was to get Eisner booted and then become CEO of Disney himself while officially folding Pixar into Disney as a wholly-owned subsidiary, well, this whole Comcast thing might put just a little dent in his plans. Then again, when life hands you lemons, grind them against the bloody bones of your enemies to make lemonade; after all, what's one more parent company to seize from within? You just know he's got to be seeing how the phrase "Comcast CEO Steve Jobs" rolls off the tongue.

Oh, and of course, Disney's going to buy Apple any day now. But you knew that.