The Shuffled Disneyverse: An Alt Disney Timeline

Make Mine Music (1943)
Make Mine Music (1943):

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The financial failure of Frozen: The Story of the Snow Queen meant that Disney had to cut corners and attempt to earn as much money as possible off of low-budget films. Home On The Range was the only film in production by the time the US entered World War II that was neither a military film nor a low-budget film. Make Mine Music would epitomize the latter. This would be the first package feature Disney would make, which is a film consisting of several shorts into a single feature-length compilation. Planning in earnest dated back to early 1941 during the production of Wreck-It-Ralph and Home On The Range. The studio originally considered its two most popular characters at the time, Donald Duck and Goofy, as hosts for the film or even including them in one or more of the package film segments. A classical music segment based on the Russian story Peter and The Wolf was considered as well after Disney heard the piano version in concert in 1938. Both ideas were scrapped in favor of original stories based on contemporary music styles from the 1940s, although Peter and The Wolf was released as a standalone short alongside Make Mine Music.

The film has a total of eight animated segments. Up first is The Martins and the Coys, based on a 1936 folklore about two feuding families in the Appalachian Mountains. The Ken Darby Singers, who had previously been featured in Wreck-It-Ralph and Home On The Range, sing Blue Bayou in the background against a family of alligators in the Louisiana swamps. After that was a Benny Goodman recording of Sing, Sing, Sing (With a Swing) with Goodman on the clarinet alongside his band. The animation here explores the life of a group of teenagers as musicians in the making. Next up is perhaps the most iconic and praised part of the movie, Casey At The Bat, which was based on a poem of the same name. The story is about an arrogant baseball player named Casey whose cockiness costs him his career. Dinah Shore then sings Two Silhouettes featuring a pair of ballet dancers dancing against various animated backgrounds as silhouettes. Benny Goodman’s band then returns with After You've Gone, set to six anthropomorphic musical instruments parading through a musical playground. The penultimate segment is called Johnnie Fedora and Alice Bluebonnet, which is about two hats who fell in love at a New York department store window, with the Andrews Sisters singing the title song. The film concludes with the African-American folk song Shortnin' Bread by sang Nelson Eddy set to a story of a group of slaves in slave the Antebellum South who sing to keep themselves busy to provide hope for a better day.

Production was complete by Christmas 1942. At 65 minutes, it beat out Wreck-It-Ralph as the shortest feature in the Disney animated canon. It premiered on February 6, 1943 in Boston. It was released throughout the entire country on February 19. The music and animation were praised but the film was criticized for lack of overall cohesion. Most viewers at the premiere favored the 15-minute long Peter and The Wolf short to Make Mine Music itself. The Shortin’ Bread segment came under fire during the Civil Rights Movement due to the depiction of many of the slaves with both a stereotypical appearance and attitude. In time for the 25th anniversary of the film’s initial premiere, much of the stereotypical imagery was cropped out and the edit has been in place in all theatrical and home video showings since then. Casey At The Bat was overwhelmingly praised at the time, and today is the most remembered segment of the movie. As for Make Mine Music as a collective entity, it is one of the most forgotten in the Walt Disney animated canon and it is rare to find anyone who either likes it or hates it since it has a small to nonexistent fanbase.

A/N: Since Peter and The Wolf was considered separately as part of a continuation to Fantasia IOTL, it doesn't appear here. Hence one of the reasons why Make Mine Music doesn't have much of a fanbase ITTL is that it lacks a signature sequence that PATW provided OTL. Also, Clair de Lune doesn't appear here since it wasn't initially conceptualized for MMM but rather as part of Fantasia which hasn't happened yet ITTL.
 
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The reason for the Benny Goodman picture is because like OTL's version, this has two Benny Goodman songs in it and he himself is probably the most remembered musician in this version of the film. That and I couldn't find other suitable photos in the public domain. The next film is a plot which is among the least similar to OTL's Disney Canon counterpart, just to give away a hint. Also, I'm considering reviving the idea of an Animation Without WW2 TL, which (like this one) would be a side project made for fun more than anything.
 
Thanks. I suggest doing it in a style similar to Megafighter3’s collaborative timeline Mario Takes Hollywood and King Krazy’s Pop Culture Timeline, which although isn’t a collaborative timeline does has a lot of collaboration involved in making it.
I've actually looked at the King Krazy TL and I have to say I really like it and that it probably will be the base for it (except no WW2 of course so there may be two PODs for this to work).
 
Meet The Robinsons (1945)
Meet The Robinsons (1945):

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Unlike the last film, this next package film would have only two segments. However, they would both share a similar theme and a similar name and be much more fleshed out than in the previous film. Both stories involve disasters at sea, shipwrecks, and fighting for survival, but each had its own twist. The two stories were none other than Robinson Crusoe and Swiss Family Robinson, hence the title Meet the Robinsons. It would be Disney’s darkest movie yet, enhanced by the fact that World War II was raging while this was in production. The project was conceived during the planning stages of Make Mine Music. The large-scale flopping of Frozen at the box office meant it would take some time and some cheap movies that would serve to make Disney a quick buck for the financial situation to improve if it didn’t collapse first. Production for Meet The Robinsons took place during the time when most of the Walt Disney Studio’s resources were diverted away from regular films by the military for war-related projects. The only reason this was even greenlit in the first place was that Disney himself convinced the military he would create a war-like atmosphere that was all too familiar to many sailors fighting in the Pacific Ocean at the time.

As the film's animated segments are both based on literary works, they are introduced in a live-action library scene. The first segment, Robinson Crusoe, was based on a 1719 novel written by Daniel Defoe. Much like the book, the segment tells of the title character's voyage at sea as he endures a shipwreck and ultimately finds himself stranded on a deserted Caribbean island off the South American coast. Once on the island, he fights off cannibalistic islanders and learns to navigate the ropes of the island in order to survive until his rescue. The second segment, Swiss Family Robinson, follows a similar premise but with various twists and turns that set it apart from its predecessor. Based on its namesake novel from 1812 by Johann David Wyss, a Swiss family named the Robinsons comprising of two parents and four sons ranging in age from 15 to 7 years old find themselves shipwrecked en route to the New South Wales colony in Australia. Unlike in the first story, the ship carried supplies to found a new settlement, with the island itself complete with a wide array of flora and fauna. Also unlike the race for survival and straightforward drama of the first segment, the father utilizes this as an opportunity to teach his four child sons about nature, resourcefulness, and responsibility.

The production of Meet the Robinsons was completed on December 21, 1944, just over six weeks before its premiere in New York City premiere on February 3, 1945. At the time, it received mixed to positive reviews overall. The Robinson Crusoe segment had a generally mixed reception, being praised for its animation and voice acting while receiving criticism for being overly dark in tone, lacking charm, and not doing anything new from an art or narrative standpoint. On the other hand, Swiss Family Robinson garnered much more praise for its balance of excitement, danger, and light-heartedness, and for its writing of the Robinson family while having strong animation for its budget. The film broke even upon its initial release but did not become popular as its own film until the 1960s, well past the dangers of World War II. In the 1980s, the film premiered on home video as a full-length feature and in individual segments as part of the Walt Disney Mini-Classics Collection. Swiss Family Robinson became one of the highest-selling titles in this collection and is nowadays regarded as the best overall segment from a Walt Disney package film.

A/N: Since the original novel that Meet The Robinsons was based on IOTL was only published in 1990, I had to get creative with this film and the first thing that popped into mind when it came to pop culture and literature to base this film on ITTL is Swiss Family Robinson and Robinson Crusoe.
 
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Wow, that's a really clever twist on it! Definitely interesting to see SFR as animated rather than live action!
 
Wow, that's a really clever twist on it! Definitely interesting to see SFR as animated rather than live action!
A Day With Wilbur Robinson (which was what OTL Meet The Robinsons was based on) was 45 years off from this movie and there to date there is no fully original Disney film yet TTL as Wreck-It-Ralph had borrowed from several different stories and Home On The Range was based on its namesake poem. So when life gives you lemons…
 
A Day With Wilbur Robinson (which was what OTL Meet The Robinsons was based on) was 45 years off from this movie and there to date there is no fully original Disney film yet TTL as Wreck-It-Ralph had borrowed from several different stories and Home On The Range was based on its namesake poem. So when life gives you lemons…

....You made lemonade.

Can't wait to see the next one. Kept up the good work.

Logging off,
MadWritter
 
  1. Does The Reluctant Dragon still exist in TTL?
  2. Will there be any butterfly effects on the other animation studios?
1. The Reluctant Dragon still exists ITTL as the animator’s strike is still taking place.

2. Now that I think about it, with the first three Disney films ITTL being princess-esque and having a more “girly” appeal than OTL, other animation studios will try to capture the more “boyish” demographic. So The Gulliver’s Travels will be staying the same since it was emulating Snow White, but I can imagine Mr. Bug Goes To Town being affected (even though I said otherwise previously) as a potential Superman movie and Aladdin and the Magic Lamp. These efforts will be more or less abandoned after 1945 with the success and acclaim of Wreck-It-Ralph, Home On The Range, and Swiss Family Robinson, as Disney now proved it can be successful with audiences of both genders. After the late 1950s, other animation studios could get their time to shine as well.
 
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The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh (1946)
The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh (1946):

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Walt Disney first learned about the Winnie the Pooh books by A. A. Milne from his daughter, Diane, who avidly read them during her childhood. In 1938, Disney initially expressed interest in obtaining the film rights to the Winnie The Pooh books and ultimately acquired them in June 1941. By 1944, Disney confirmed to his animation team that he was planning on making a full-length Winnie The Pooh animated feature film. With the war still going on, it was decided in a meeting with senior staff members to make it into a package film with three loosely interconnected connected segments. It also made sense since the books were all comprised of chapters made of very loosely connected stories that could be read independently. The original 1926 book would be the basis of this movie, from which a number of smaller stories would be combined into three, with the last chapter serving as an epilogue that would connect all three segments. An original all-American character who was planned but not a part of the British-based books, Gopher was introduced as a surrogate for American audiences.

The first segment of the film introduces audiences to Winnie the Pooh himself as he notices one morning he is out of honey. When he climbs a tree to get some, he falls and almost gets badly hurt. His human friend, Christopher Robin, helps him up with Balloon and finds the honey, only to eat too much and is stuck in his neighbor Rabbit’s door. It’s up to Christopher Robin, Tigger, and Winnie The Pooh’s other friends to get him out. The next segment has Pooh feeling bad for Eeyore given that everyone has forgotten his birthday and his tail is missing. Pooh insists it was stolen and he, Piglet, and Christopher Robin track down increasing numbers of footsteps, thinking they are from woozles and Heffalumps (using honey as bait) only for Pooh to get stuck in a hole and covered in honey, leaving Piglet to think he is an actual Heffalump. The third and final segment features Christopher Robin and all of the animals in the Hundred Acre Wood (real or stuffed) going on a “quest” to find the North Pole, including newcomers Kanga and Roo. When it starts to rain, the river floods and Roo falls in by accident., Roo and Piglet are switched by accident when everyone goes home and the flood follows them all the way to Piglet’s house where Roo is, so the young kangaroo sends a message in a bottle for help. After his rescue by Pooh and Piglet (after the mistake is discovered), the entire gang celebrates their bravery.

The Many Adventures of Winnie The Pooh initially premiered in New York City on April 20, 1946, almost four months before its wide release in August. It had a generally positive reception from both critics and audiences at the time and has since been regarded as the strongest overall feature from the Package Film Era. Despite its lackluster animation style, The Many Adventures of Winnie The Pooh was praised as being the most faithful literary adaptation of a film Disney had produced up to this point as well as being the most charming film from Walt Disney to date. However, this film was not financially profitable, barely breaking even upon its release despite high box-office rentals. It was only upon future re-releases that it became profitable. Nevertheless, this very film would be the foundation of the successful Winnie The Pooh franchise that took off with two television series inspired by the characters in 1966 and 1977. The success of these two programs caused a demand for a home video release for this particular film in the early 1980s, making it one of the first to be released by Disney and one of the highest selling during this time.

A/N: The plots are all derived from the original Winnie The Pooh books so it makes for a more faithful retelling.
 
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