The Shuffled Disneyverse: An Alt Disney Timeline

Two questions I have regarding Cinderella:
  1. Are any of the songs different?
  2. What does Cinderella's ball dress look like in this version?
 
Two questions I have regarding Cinderella:
  1. Are any of the songs different?
  2. What does Cinderella's ball dress look like in this version?
1. In this version, only two songs from OTL's version make it into this TL's version: "So This is Love" since the dancing in the clouds sequence is used in Snow White ITTL, and "Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo" since I feel it's too iconic and important to replace. Five new songs are included, all of them considered for our version but didn't make the cut: "Sing a Little, Dream a Little," "The Mouse Song," "Cinderella Work Song," "I Lost My Heart at the Ball," and "The Face That I See In The Night."
2. I'm retaining the color code from OTL's version where the stepsisters wear yellow-green and magenta-red, so Cinderella wears Cyan-Blue. Oh, and I have the stepmother wearing a black dress to the ball.
 
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Cinderella (1940):

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Even before the premiere of Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs on December 21, 1937, Walt Disney was looking for other fairy tales to adapt. This next story was brought to Walt Disney’s attention in September 1937. Cinderella, a tale dating back to Ancient Greece, was something Walt Disney had in his head since 1922 when he produced a Laugh-O-Gram cartoon based on it and was interested in making another version as a Silly Symphony in December 1933. During the production of Snow White, though, Disney realized the story, which he based on Charles Perrault’s version, was too complex to be an animated short and prioritized its creation as a feature-length cartoon. Originally intended to be the third Disney animated film, Cinderella moved up in the pecking order by December so that it would be the second after Snow White. The treatment of this film was based on a 14-page outline by Al Perkins, and a second script written by Dana Cofy and Bianca Majolie. Production began in January 1938 with a preliminary budget of $1 million and increased to $1.7 million by the end. Nevertheless, the production team and directors were stratified with the final result.

The story begins following the untimely death of Cinderella’s father, leaving the young girl to face the wrath of her wicked stepmother Florimel de la Poche and stepsisters Wanda and Javotte. Over time, Cinderella is abused, humiliated, and forced to become a servant in her own house. Her bird friends and mouse friends, including a white mouse named Dusty, a turtle named Clarissa, and her pet dog Bruno help Cinderella stay optimistic and retain hope for a better day. One day, the King’s aid and Grand Duke, Spink, delivers an invitation to the de la Poche household to a royal ball which decrees every eligible maiden must attend. Upon delivering news to her stepfamily during a music lesson, her stepfamily cruelly prevents her from attending. In hopeless despair, the fairy godmother helps her get to the ball and Cinderella soon attracts the attention of Prince Henri who ironically wanted nothing to do with the ball until that point. The clock then strikes midnight and Cinderella flees before she can properly introduce herself to the Prince, leaving behind a glass slipper as the only clue to her identity. The rest of the movie becomes a search for the girl with the slipper.

Cinderella premiered at the Center Theatre in New York City on February 7, 1940, before its general release in the United States on February 23. In its initial run, it earned $1.9 million at the box office. While the film technically earned back its budget, half of the film’s gross went to the movie theaters, in effect costing Disney $750,000. World War II delayed its release in much of Europe and Asia for years. The film was mostly well-received, with critics praising the improvement of the music and animation from Snow White. Though more mixed in the present day, Cinderella’s characterization was praised at the time and she became Walt Disney’s favorite princess. The stepmother was considered an effective villainess, having more interaction with the heroine than in the previous film. The Grand Duke and Prince Henri were considered standout characters due to their unique characterizations and voice performances. The only negative criticism was that of Cinderella’s animal friends taking too much screen time, being seen as an attempt to subvert the focus of the story from Cinderella and her stepfamily. After World War II, the film became profitable in its own right and is now considered a Disney classic.

A/N: This version of Cinderella is a combination of OTL's version plus the suggestions for gags for a potential Silly Symphony of the story, an actual fourteen-page outline that was published in 1938, and a script that Cofy and Majolie developed in real life that was one of the earliest if not the earliest treatments of Cinderella in script form.
Sorry
 
Frozen: The Story of the Snow Queen (1940)
Frozen: The Story of the Snow Queen (1940):

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Walt Disney wanted his third project to be ambitious. Not only did he want to tell a story, but he wanted to tell it using the most advanced animation techniques and pristine sound. He found that project in 1936 while still working on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. That project would be based on the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale The Snow Queen. Disney ultimately fave this film the title Frozen along with the subtitle The Story of the Snow Queen. He gained the rights to the story in July 1937 and production began six months later. Of course, production was not without its troubles. There was trouble developing the character of the Snow Queen herself. In the original tale, she was a morally ambiguous figure. Her relationship with the boy, Kai, was unclear, and it was unknown why she took him and why he was willing to go with her. Perhaps most important of all, the readers never got to see the Snow Queen reacting to Gerda (the protagonist of the story) trying to get her friend back. Disney vowed to remove the ambiguity. The story was finalized in September 1938 and production was in full swing in early 1939. The final budget was close to $2.2 million.

The villainous Snow Queen orders a troll to create a magic mirror with the purpose to magnify all the negative aspects of its reflection. She then shatters the mirror into over a billion pieces and plans to use them against her otherwise unwilling victims. Several years pass and two teenage children, a peasant boy named Kai and the daughter of a nobleman named Gerda, listen to Kai’s grandmother telling a story about the Snow Queen. All of a sudden, the Snow Queen herself appears to have believed she had been mocked. In response, the Queen takes a pair of magical shards and strikes Kai with one each to the eye and heart, causing him to act coldly towards Gerda and threaten their relationship. The next winter, the Snow Queen arrives at the village square on her silver sled and forcibly abducts Kai, carrying him back to her castle at the North Pole and causing him to not only forget about his home but Gerda. This leaves Gerda to race to the North Pole to both set Kai free and restore his memories before his heart can become literally frozen and the village can be plagued by a state of permanent winter.

Frozen: The Story of the Snow Queen opened at the Broadway Theatre in New York City on November 13, 1940, following the release of the musical short The Sorcerer’s Apprentice starring Mickey Mouse. With much of Europe and Asia cut off from the market, it was decided that Frozen should run on Broadway for a over year. Before its general release in January 1942, there was a West Coast premiere in Los Angeles, attracting many notable celebrities like Shirley Temple and Edgar Bergen. There were also showings in cities like Baltimore, Boston, Buffalo, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, San Francisco, and Washington. Critical reception, while mostly positive, was at the cooler end of favorability. Most were appreciative of having a female lead character that was more proactive than her predecessors, an important male character that wasn’t a prince, and the villain being a greater threat and having a larger presence than before. Others disliked the icier and darker tone than seen in Snow White and Cinderella, reminiscent of the world at war, or thought Disney was becoming formulaic. By April 1941, The Sorcerer's Apprentice earned back its budget but the feature film itself it only made $1.3 million at the box office, merely 60% of its budget. It would be successful upon post-war releases and would later warrant a sequel. In the meantime, Disney struggled to keep afloat financially.

A/N: This is possibly what Frozen could have looked like had Walt Disney’s collaboration with other studios for the Hans Christian Andersen projects dating back to 1943 not been canceled. I figured that if it did go through it probably would have been more faithful to the original Snow Queen tale than what we got in real-time.
 
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It's more akin to The Snow Queen, but would there be some similarities (especially design-wise) with the 2013 Frozen?

Design-wise, here’s what it would probably look like since this was an actual sketch for the attempted biopic of Hans Christian Andersen that was abandoned IOTL due to WW2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Disney's_"The_Snow_Queen".jpg

Story-wise: Anna and Kristoff are basically aged-up versions of Gerda and Kai and still become each other’s love interests albeit taking a different path to get there. The Snow Queen is pretty much Elsa pre-Let It Go from a production perspective. There’s also a snowman sidekick except he doesn’t come across as child-like or a cinnamon roll. With regard to the plot, the primary similarities involve Gerda going to find someone on a mountain and end up at the Ice Palace, and The Snow Queen freezing someone’s heart and casting eternal winter over the village.
 
I have to say this is a really fun idea here! Definitely got a lot of thought going into it, consider me curious to see where it goes!
 
I have to say this is a really fun idea here! Definitely got a lot of thought going into it, consider me curious to see where it goes!
Thank you! Considering I’m still developing the plot for the next film in the shuffled canon, I’m still somewhat curious myself as to where this goes. And while I agree it is a fun idea, it’s not fully my own. That goes to King of the Uzbeks of course.
 
Wreck-It-Ralph (1941)
Wreck-It-Ralph (1941):​

What turned out to be Wreck-it-Ralph was the first Disney feature animated film not to be based on a fairy tale. Rather, it was something new, inspired by the Popeye theatrical shorts, the 1933 film King Kong, and the fairy tale Beauty and the Beast. Walt Disney himself tried developing Beauty and the Beast as its own film in the 1930s but could not figure out how the heroine’s stay in the Beast’s castle would work. Meanwhile, Disney had taken note of how his beloved star Mickey Mouse had fallen in popularity behind Popeye the Sailor, as well as the ascending popularity of the King Kong film. This story first gained attention in late 1939 with story sketches and script completed by March 1940. Originally intended to be the fifth or sixth film in the Disney lineup, it became the fourth due to the underperformance of Cinderella and the outright flopping of Frozen at the box office and moved into production in early 1941. This was made possible through simpler character designs than in previous works, background paintings done in watercolor with less detail, and frames being used in character animation.

Wreck-it-Ralph is about a man named Ralph who is a construction worker for the Niceland Construction company. He is ostracized and seen as villainous to his big hands causing him to mess up one too many projects he is supposed to be working on and his occasionally volatile temper, earning him the nickname Wreck-It-Ralph. He reveals himself to be a misunderstood hard-working gentle giant but no one gives him the chance. The only person who fully trusts him is the company owner’s son Felix, whom Ralph playful calls Fix-it-Felix. As he is about to be fired from Niceland Construction, Ralph takes Felix with him and the pair take a train ride across the country in order to start anew. Ralph inadvertently catches the attention of a wealthy heiress who despite her wealth and appearance appreciates him for being kind and different. These advances anger a powerful businessman named Gene (nicknamed Turbo) who becomes resentful and hostile towards Ralph. The two men then engage in an intense rivalry while Ralph vows his best not to sink to the level of the enemy and shows his courageous, valiant, and honorable side in the process.

Production on the film was interrupted in late May 1941 when the Disney animator’s strike broke out, and the film almost did not meet its deadline. Disney rushed to get the film completed and finally sent it to RKO Radio Pictures on September 11, 1941. Initially considered to be released as a B movie, Walt was able to persuade them to release it as an A feature. Wreck-It-Ralph premiered in New York City on October 23, 1941. Financially, it proved itself to be a hit in the United States and other places not directly impacted by World War II. Costing under $700,000 to produce, the film profited by a $1.28 million margin by the end of its initial run. Critically, the film was praised for being endearing and having a stronger feel-good vibe than its predecessors. The greater presence of action was also praised, combined with its simple story, humor, and unique characters. While it was more of a straightforward cartoon than the first three Disney films, many celebrated this as a welcomed change reminiscent of older cartoons. Nowadays, Wreck-it-Ralph is considered the fourth and final film of the iconic Disney Golden Age.

A/N: Honestly I wasn’t sure what to do when I saw Wreck-It-Ralph’s placement here via the randomizer. With the actual and the sequel version from our timeline being based in arcade games and computers respectively, this was going to be the hardest (or one of them) to create. It was only thanks to a fanfiction plus looking at what inspired the character of Ralph himself in the first place and in turn what inspired that where I decided not to cancel this TL.
 
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