I think most radio shows had studio audiences so they would expect to see Charlie. I remember hearing a story once about the radio show was having trouble with the sound dropping out. It turned out that the sound engineer was switching between Bergen’s and McCarthy’s microphones.
A Hippie in the House of Mouse (Jim Henson at Disney, 1980)
- Thread starter Geekhis Khan
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Nice 1986 round up there @Geekhis Khan.
Hopefully Freddie Mercury has a heath scare (or something) and gets himself cleaned up before he gets HIV ITTL..
What sort of line up does the Paramount-Fox Network launch with please?
Hopefully Freddie Mercury has a heath scare (or something) and gets himself cleaned up before he gets HIV ITTL..
What sort of line up does the Paramount-Fox Network launch with please?
It's only actually $10-20 000 (with the Shuttle). Still a lot, not a million bucks.
If they start like fox than the only show they'll have in 1986 is The Late Show with Joan Rivers.
Well, keep in mind the whole "Paramount" thing about the launch.
I know, the question is what first-run syndication shows were both Paramount and 20th Century Fox producing at the time and did they have enough of them to have a Prime Time line up even for the weekends much less the weekdays.
That would be interesting. This remind me though, but I’m curious how future James Cameron films will be effected ITTL. I think Terminator 1 probably is unchanged ITTL as it was both a relatively low budget movie and none of the timeline changes I think would have altered that. I do wonder how Terminator 2 will be effected though.
It would be interesting to see more David Fincher-ist things in Alien 3.
The Spirit of '86
The Spirit of ‘86
From Animation Magazine, November 1989
In 1979 Brad Bird was fired from Walt Disney Animation. He returned four years ago, launching the successful afternoon animated superhero adventure series The Spirit, based on the Golden Age Comic of the same name, which aired in February of 1986. It is about to enter its third season this spring. Why? How? We sat down with Brad and asked him.
Gary Kurtz, Will Eisner, and Brad Bird c. 1980 (Image source “cartoonresearch.com”)
AM: Mr. Bird, in 1975 you did an internship with Walt Disney Animation while still a teenager.
BB: Yes, under the legendary Milt Kahl, one of Walt’s “Nine Old Men”. From there they sent me to CalArts and hired me full time in the late ‘70s when I graduated.
AM: And you had some pretty now-famous classmates.
BB: Yes, Tim Burton, John Lasseter, Andreas Deja…I mean, dream team stuff. Don Bluth called us the “Rat’s Nest”.
AM: So we hear. And you left around the same time that he did.
BB: (laughs) Yea, but under different circumstances. Bluth, shall we say, left voluntarily. Me, I was summarily run out of town on a rail for pointing out that the emperor was naked.
AM: Do tell.
BB: You see, basically, you had the great old guys and the great young guys, and there were mediocre guys in between who were never good enough to rise to the top when the old guys were there. So, when the old guys left, they elevated the mediocre guys, and the first thing the middle guys did was hold down all the young guys. I mean, if you look at the bear fight in The Fox and the Hound, which was done by the young guys, it doesn't look like anything else in the movie, and that's because Disney ran out of time and couldn't interfere and mess it up. It's during that fight that the film suddenly gets cinematic, it has teeth to it, and the animation is vigorous and energetic. I was fired around halfway through The Fox and the Hound, because I was very vocal about the lack of quality. In code, they sort of said to me "you either shut up or you leave," and I said "OK, I'm going, because I'm NOT going to shut up about the fact that the very stuff that YOUR GUYS trained me to look for is completely missing from these films[1].”
AM: So, after all of that, why did you return?
BB: You can blame Steven Spielberg. After leaving the Mouse House I took a job with Lisberger and worked on Animalympics and then worked briefly with Yutaka Fujioka on Little Nemo like everyone else in animation history (laughs), but then a few friends and I pursued The Spirit. I loved the old film noir angles and two-fisted action stuff of the comic and thought that it’d be a great feature. We put together a test sequence and some storyboards in 1980 and I sold Steve and Gary Kurtz on the idea. However, funding was hard to come by for animated features in the early ‘80s, so the project kind of languished for a few years. And then Steve joined the White Knight crusade to save Disney and ended up on the Advisory Board. He suggested that he could set us up with Disney.
AM: And you naturally jumped at the opportunity, I’m sure.
BB: (laughs) I told him to “stuff it.” He had to physically drag me there to meet Jim Henson, explaining that this was a “New Disney”. I was doubtful, but I was in no position to bite two hands that fed me in a row. Sure enough, Jim is good people. He had joined the board just a few months after I left and then joined the company in ’82. Apparently, he and Frank Wells had turned around a lot of the very issues that I was rebelling against. I signed on immediately, even if they only had the resources to support a TV series and not the full-blown feature I’d hoped to pursue at the time.
AM: And this was late ’84?
BB: Yes. And suddenly I’m back at Disney.
AM: And how was that?
BB: Strange at first. Ed Hansen, the guy who’d fired me – no hard feelings, by the way, he was doing his job – Ed had recently retired so that particular awkwardness was avoided, but there were plenty of remaining animators in that “mediocre middle” that were none too happy to see me. They were also annoyed that some of my CalArts classmates like Tim and John [Lasseter] were skyrocketing to positions of influence and opportunity while they stayed stuck in the middle. Many quit to pursue other jobs over those years while some just stayed silently resentful. A surprising lot of them actually came up to thank me for my earlier rebellion, though. They’d silently agreed with me at the time, even if they didn’t dare say anything. Even if they were getting left behind by the Rat’s Nest, they still were making a good living and enjoying working for Jim and Roy, who both treated all of the animators well.
AM: So, truly a New Disney?
BB: Mostly yes. And yet still, oddly, the same place I left in ’79. The old animation building even still smelled the same. Paper, paint, solvent, cellulose, old building, and decades of cigarette smoke soaked into everything.
AM: That was before the big building renovation.
BB: Yes. The big difference was that things were, how can I describe it, brighter. People seemed happy to be there. There were opportunities through the Soft Pitch/Hard Pitch process. I’d been watching the results of it all on [Disney’s] World of Magic and had been impressed. If I’d been less stubborn, cynical, and bitter then maybe I’d have gone to Jim earlier.
The Spirit concept art (Image source “cartoonbrew.com”)
AM: So, your Visions Animation studio, which you’ve recently renamed Bird Brain Studios, subcontracted with Disney, who has the most exacting standards in the industry they say.
BB: Oh, I wasn’t worried about meeting the quality standards. By this point I’d recruited Bruce Timm and Paul Dini, who’d been doing a lot of low-level stuff for Filmation; He Man and the like. They’d answered an advert I put out. You can blame them for “Bird Brain”. They said it as a joke and it stuck. Bruce and Paul were unhappy at Filmation and loved superheroes, so they jumped at the opportunity to work with us on The Spirit and loved the idea that by working at Disney we’d be able to push the limits of TV animation beyond the usual cheap toy-driven crap from Filmation or DIC. And to be clear we still officially work for Amblin, but on loan to Disney. My team and I got an office and were assigned a few animators from the pool led by Jerry Rees, who’d been in discussions to join us at Bird Brain so it kind of worked out.
AM: And how did that work out, Bird Brain subcontracting to Amblin in turn subcontracting to Disney? It seems like a complex arrangement.
BB: Well, it let Steve and Ron split the costs and the rewards. Lisa Henson did production for us along with Roy Disney. Animating for TV meant that we could take some shortcuts for the small screen that we’d never take on the big screen, where you can see everything, so things went quicker and cheaper than they would for a feature. Still, though, I insisted that we push for fluidity in motion and “camera” pans and zooms, so we took our “short cuts” by falling back on the chiaroscuro of the 1930s, so lots of black and white and gray space, which both set the Film Noir quality we wanted and made the ink-and-paint that much faster. Sometimes the only color in a scene was The Spirit’s red tie, Also, the DATA machines helped create some fluid but reusable and soft-editable backgrounds. I’d love to do something more with the boys in 3D. Those DIS stations are something else. Even so, it took several months for the team to build up that first 32-episode half-season.
AM: The Spirit aired on the Disney Channel in February of 1986, immediately after Dreamfinders, where it earned a good viewing percentage. It has been praised for its cinema-like motion and framing. It was successful enough that you moved to the ABC after school lineup. It has performed well since. To what do you attribute its success?
BB: It’s a great show. The characters are fun and classic, it piggybacked off of the 1930’s nostalgia that has been big of late, and the moral lessons are good without being saccharine or preachy. It’s Noir Lite, I guess. I also like to think our animation had something to do with it. (laughs)
AM: Is there any hope of ever seeing The Spirit on the big screen like you’d imagined it?
BB: Well, I’m not able to comment on that right now (laughs).
AM: Understood, thank you. Whatever you have coming up next, Mr. Bird, we hope to talk to you about it then.
BB: Thank you, and sure thing!
[1] Most of this is lifted verbatim from an interview with the Chicago Tribune here.
From Animation Magazine, November 1989
In 1979 Brad Bird was fired from Walt Disney Animation. He returned four years ago, launching the successful afternoon animated superhero adventure series The Spirit, based on the Golden Age Comic of the same name, which aired in February of 1986. It is about to enter its third season this spring. Why? How? We sat down with Brad and asked him.
Gary Kurtz, Will Eisner, and Brad Bird c. 1980 (Image source “cartoonresearch.com”)
AM: Mr. Bird, in 1975 you did an internship with Walt Disney Animation while still a teenager.
BB: Yes, under the legendary Milt Kahl, one of Walt’s “Nine Old Men”. From there they sent me to CalArts and hired me full time in the late ‘70s when I graduated.
AM: And you had some pretty now-famous classmates.
BB: Yes, Tim Burton, John Lasseter, Andreas Deja…I mean, dream team stuff. Don Bluth called us the “Rat’s Nest”.
AM: So we hear. And you left around the same time that he did.
BB: (laughs) Yea, but under different circumstances. Bluth, shall we say, left voluntarily. Me, I was summarily run out of town on a rail for pointing out that the emperor was naked.
AM: Do tell.
BB: You see, basically, you had the great old guys and the great young guys, and there were mediocre guys in between who were never good enough to rise to the top when the old guys were there. So, when the old guys left, they elevated the mediocre guys, and the first thing the middle guys did was hold down all the young guys. I mean, if you look at the bear fight in The Fox and the Hound, which was done by the young guys, it doesn't look like anything else in the movie, and that's because Disney ran out of time and couldn't interfere and mess it up. It's during that fight that the film suddenly gets cinematic, it has teeth to it, and the animation is vigorous and energetic. I was fired around halfway through The Fox and the Hound, because I was very vocal about the lack of quality. In code, they sort of said to me "you either shut up or you leave," and I said "OK, I'm going, because I'm NOT going to shut up about the fact that the very stuff that YOUR GUYS trained me to look for is completely missing from these films[1].”
AM: So, after all of that, why did you return?
BB: You can blame Steven Spielberg. After leaving the Mouse House I took a job with Lisberger and worked on Animalympics and then worked briefly with Yutaka Fujioka on Little Nemo like everyone else in animation history (laughs), but then a few friends and I pursued The Spirit. I loved the old film noir angles and two-fisted action stuff of the comic and thought that it’d be a great feature. We put together a test sequence and some storyboards in 1980 and I sold Steve and Gary Kurtz on the idea. However, funding was hard to come by for animated features in the early ‘80s, so the project kind of languished for a few years. And then Steve joined the White Knight crusade to save Disney and ended up on the Advisory Board. He suggested that he could set us up with Disney.
AM: And you naturally jumped at the opportunity, I’m sure.
BB: (laughs) I told him to “stuff it.” He had to physically drag me there to meet Jim Henson, explaining that this was a “New Disney”. I was doubtful, but I was in no position to bite two hands that fed me in a row. Sure enough, Jim is good people. He had joined the board just a few months after I left and then joined the company in ’82. Apparently, he and Frank Wells had turned around a lot of the very issues that I was rebelling against. I signed on immediately, even if they only had the resources to support a TV series and not the full-blown feature I’d hoped to pursue at the time.
AM: And this was late ’84?
BB: Yes. And suddenly I’m back at Disney.
AM: And how was that?
BB: Strange at first. Ed Hansen, the guy who’d fired me – no hard feelings, by the way, he was doing his job – Ed had recently retired so that particular awkwardness was avoided, but there were plenty of remaining animators in that “mediocre middle” that were none too happy to see me. They were also annoyed that some of my CalArts classmates like Tim and John [Lasseter] were skyrocketing to positions of influence and opportunity while they stayed stuck in the middle. Many quit to pursue other jobs over those years while some just stayed silently resentful. A surprising lot of them actually came up to thank me for my earlier rebellion, though. They’d silently agreed with me at the time, even if they didn’t dare say anything. Even if they were getting left behind by the Rat’s Nest, they still were making a good living and enjoying working for Jim and Roy, who both treated all of the animators well.
AM: So, truly a New Disney?
BB: Mostly yes. And yet still, oddly, the same place I left in ’79. The old animation building even still smelled the same. Paper, paint, solvent, cellulose, old building, and decades of cigarette smoke soaked into everything.
AM: That was before the big building renovation.
BB: Yes. The big difference was that things were, how can I describe it, brighter. People seemed happy to be there. There were opportunities through the Soft Pitch/Hard Pitch process. I’d been watching the results of it all on [Disney’s] World of Magic and had been impressed. If I’d been less stubborn, cynical, and bitter then maybe I’d have gone to Jim earlier.
The Spirit concept art (Image source “cartoonbrew.com”)
AM: So, your Visions Animation studio, which you’ve recently renamed Bird Brain Studios, subcontracted with Disney, who has the most exacting standards in the industry they say.
BB: Oh, I wasn’t worried about meeting the quality standards. By this point I’d recruited Bruce Timm and Paul Dini, who’d been doing a lot of low-level stuff for Filmation; He Man and the like. They’d answered an advert I put out. You can blame them for “Bird Brain”. They said it as a joke and it stuck. Bruce and Paul were unhappy at Filmation and loved superheroes, so they jumped at the opportunity to work with us on The Spirit and loved the idea that by working at Disney we’d be able to push the limits of TV animation beyond the usual cheap toy-driven crap from Filmation or DIC. And to be clear we still officially work for Amblin, but on loan to Disney. My team and I got an office and were assigned a few animators from the pool led by Jerry Rees, who’d been in discussions to join us at Bird Brain so it kind of worked out.
AM: And how did that work out, Bird Brain subcontracting to Amblin in turn subcontracting to Disney? It seems like a complex arrangement.
BB: Well, it let Steve and Ron split the costs and the rewards. Lisa Henson did production for us along with Roy Disney. Animating for TV meant that we could take some shortcuts for the small screen that we’d never take on the big screen, where you can see everything, so things went quicker and cheaper than they would for a feature. Still, though, I insisted that we push for fluidity in motion and “camera” pans and zooms, so we took our “short cuts” by falling back on the chiaroscuro of the 1930s, so lots of black and white and gray space, which both set the Film Noir quality we wanted and made the ink-and-paint that much faster. Sometimes the only color in a scene was The Spirit’s red tie, Also, the DATA machines helped create some fluid but reusable and soft-editable backgrounds. I’d love to do something more with the boys in 3D. Those DIS stations are something else. Even so, it took several months for the team to build up that first 32-episode half-season.
AM: The Spirit aired on the Disney Channel in February of 1986, immediately after Dreamfinders, where it earned a good viewing percentage. It has been praised for its cinema-like motion and framing. It was successful enough that you moved to the ABC after school lineup. It has performed well since. To what do you attribute its success?
BB: It’s a great show. The characters are fun and classic, it piggybacked off of the 1930’s nostalgia that has been big of late, and the moral lessons are good without being saccharine or preachy. It’s Noir Lite, I guess. I also like to think our animation had something to do with it. (laughs)
AM: Is there any hope of ever seeing The Spirit on the big screen like you’d imagined it?
BB: Well, I’m not able to comment on that right now (laughs).
AM: Understood, thank you. Whatever you have coming up next, Mr. Bird, we hope to talk to you about it then.
BB: Thank you, and sure thing!
[1] Most of this is lifted verbatim from an interview with the Chicago Tribune here.
So we can consider The Spirit TTL's equivalent to Batman: The Animated Series? Because that's the vibe I get.
Oh please yes...
Maybe they use William Gibson’s script (though with both Ripley and Hicks on-screen).
This is another great update, and makes me jealous of the Disney Channel content we have in this timeline.
However, if I may ask, what's the deal with the term "after school lineup"? Is it basically a broadcast network's equivalent to syndication, what with Bio-Man and now The Spirit appearing in the afternoon timeslots? Is it an extension of their Saturday Morning content? Is it both? I just have to know!
However, if I may ask, what's the deal with the term "after school lineup"? Is it basically a broadcast network's equivalent to syndication, what with Bio-Man and now The Spirit appearing in the afternoon timeslots? Is it an extension of their Saturday Morning content? Is it both? I just have to know!
I think it's an American thing, a block of cartoons played in the afternoon after school ended (round about 3 pm) and before the news (at 5 or 5:30).
Weekday cartoon - Wikipedia
Both the Phantom and Flash Gordon had a cartoon series in the form of The Defenders of the Earth:
Defenders of the Earth - Wikipedia
List of unmade Brad Bird projects:
Brad Bird - Wikipedia
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Hmmmm. Methinks this 'Bird Brain' group deserves attention for future projects...
I love stylistic scenes like these that animation does so well.
Certainly a predecessor and style-setter. Batman:TAS might actually be butterflied if it comes up from being too similar!
The Rocketeer film doesn't come out until 1991 but the comic book it's based on came out in '85 so there's a good chance Bird & Co. are aware of it. One of the little wish-list items I've had for this timeline is for a Rocketeer animated series and I can't think of a better team to do it than post-Spirit Bird Brain. You could even have a cross-over episode since the characters are contemporaneous.
Oh. I didn't know that Geekhis was referring to that, but under a different name. Thanks!I think it's an American thing, a block of cartoons played in the afternoon after school ended (round about 3 pm) and before the news (at 5 or 5:30).
Weekday cartoon - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
Possible, but I like the idea of the Rocketeer being on the trail of some smugglers and getting caught by The Spirit, who's after the same guys. The idea being that the Spirit showing up is a total surprise to everyone, including the audience.
"Might want to do something about that helmet, kid. I could see the shine from the road."
"You! You... You're a legend!"
"Not yet, I'm still waiting for the Happily Ever After."
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