Disney fans who grew up in the eighties and nineties were living through one of the best times to be a Disney fan. Some of their greatest movies to this day were released during the Disney Renaissance period that began after Michael Eisner took over the company in 1984. But did you ever notice something that many of the Disney films from the late eighties and the early nineties had in common during their opening credits?

I admit I would have never given any thought to this if I saw it once or twice, but it became so common to see that production company’s name that I did eventually become curious about what Silver Screen Partners was, and why it was sometimes called “Silver Screen Partners III” and other times “Silver Screen Partners IV.” What was the meaning behind its ever changing moniker? And did Michael Eisner have something to do with its sudden association with all things Disney during the period of his reign? Most simply, where did that company come from and what was the origin of its association with Disney and its eventual disappearance in the early nineties?

The answers to all these questions are actually pretty simple. A New York investor named Roland W. Betts founded a company called Silver Screen Partners in 1983 as a way of helping invest in films and produce them for profit. It was originally organized to fund movies for a fairly new little cable television network called HBO, although the first movie Silver Screen managed to produce was the 1984 musical drama Footloose, which was a major hit for Paramount. While helping fund movies for HBO, Silver Screen mostly worked with TriStar, and Silver Screen and TriStar truly were “partners” in things like selecting film pitches and negotiating release dates.

But Silver Screen soon entered into a long and fruitful partnership with Disney beginning in 1985, a year after former Paramount president Michael Eisner (the man who greenlit Footloose) became Disney’s new CEO. And since the way Silver Screen was set up meant they were only allowed to partner with film studios for a limited time, the company changed its name to “Silver Screen Partners II” once it began its partnership with Disney, later changing to “Silver Screen Partners III” in 1987 and “Silver Screen Partners IV” in 1988. They still funded a number of HBO films in the eighties but they mostly worked with the bigger and more profitable Disney, collaborating with them exclusively starting in 1990.

Some of the Disney movies Silver Screen helped produce include Return to Oz (1985), The Black Cauldron (1985), The Great Mouse Detective (1986), The Color of Money (1986), Adventures in Babysitting (1987), Three Men and a Baby (1987), Good Morning, Vietnam (1987), Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (1989), The Little Mermaid (1989), Pretty Woman (1990), Dick Tracy (1990), The Rocketeer (1991), Beauty and the Beast (1991) and Newsies (1992).

Silver Screen would dissolve in 1992, but in 1990, Disney formed Touchwood Pacific Partners as a successor to Silver Screen, becoming Disney’s exclusive funding partner. Touchwood Pacific worked with Walt Disney Pictures, Touchstone Pictures and Hollywood Pictures well into the decade, this time working exclusively in the production of live-action films. And in case you are wondering why Disney replaced Silver Screen with Touchwood Pacific, the company was owned and operated in Japan, where the interest rates were lower than those in the U.S., so from a business point of view, the Touchwood deal benefited Disney much more. The partnership with Touchwood Pacific led to such films as Sister Act (1992), Honey, I Blew Up the Kid (1992), The Mighty Ducks (1992), Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey (1993), A Far Off Place (1993) and the cult oddball video game adaptation Super Mario Bros. (1993).

In the beginning, Disney was its own independent Hollywood studio, only working with others like Columbia and RKO when they needed a distributor. Once they became rich enough to do so, they created their own distributor, known as Buena Vista. But Silver Screen and Touchwood were far from their only partners. Disney frequently partners with other studios, including Paramount Pictures on Popeye, Dragonslayer and most recently Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. Plus they created their own film producing subsidiary in 1992 called Caravan Pictures, which helped produce The Three Musketeers, Angels in the Outfield and Heavyweights before morphing into Spyglass Entertainment in 1998 and producing The Sixth Sense and non-Disney films like Bruce Almighty and Star Trek. Other companies Disney has frequently teamed up with as film producing partners over the years include Amblin, The Jim Henson Company, Mandeville Films, Avnet-Kerner, Pixar, Happy Madison, Jerry Bruckheimer Films (Remember the Titans, Pirates of the Caribbean, National Treasure), Gunn Films, Walden Media, The Kennedy/Marshall Company and DreamWorks Pictures.