All I know is that whatever comes after CottonTale looks like it’ll be a complete steaming dumpster fire.
Last edited:
When you Wish Upon a Frog (Book II of the Jim Henson at Disney saga)
- Thread starter Geekhis Khan
- Start date
- Status
Hoo boy, a bunch of toxic idiots working together? This will surely ensure healthy productions together./s
Then again, the last three years' worth of headlines have been one big cartoon. I say go for it.
It's a good thing 1995 was the year the Calvin and Hobbes strip ended its run, but even if it did continue into 1996 and beyond, being associated with that group certainly wouldn't have done Watterson any favors.
Oh, and if this is what results in the Ice Age sequels getting canned, or Filmation going defunct, or even both, then I'd like to see that.
Oh, and if this is what results in the Ice Age sequels getting canned, or Filmation going defunct, or even both, then I'd like to see that.
If Calvin and Hobbes kept going after, I'm pretty sure Watterson would have sent a cease and desist. That and possibly mock them in the strip if he could think of a way to do so.
Same. Hell…I hit the like button, but...
Brilliant work but..
Agreed.
Am disappointed Lasseter couldn’t be better but then again change is hard. You have to want to and even then it’s easier to fall into habit. Add in that Lasseter resented his loss of power and I can see it ending this way.
It’s a shame; Lasseter was talented and it would be nice if he weren’t a shithead
It’s a shame; Lasseter was talented and it would be nice if he weren’t a shithead
Well, thanks, all, that got ugly and will get more so. Stay tuned.
The language used ("feminazi witch hunts") is right out of late 1990s Talk Radio.
As to whether GROSS is too cartoony, if you read Smolcic's accusations about Pixar in the 2000s or the accusations made by the women who worked for Bakshi (and I recommend that you don't if you want to retain your faith in humanity), you'll see shit that makes what GROSS is doing here seem tame and mundane. In addition to women having to master "The Lasseter" at every conference meeting, he'd allegedly make the new female employees stand up on the stage at the company celebrations, in front of everybody, and talk about their physical elements, essentially grading them like meat. "Welcome to Pixar, let's put you chicks in your place from the beginning." Sexual assault was a daily occurrence at Bakshi's office. A former Bakshi employee noted how she would "think Ralph was mad at me if he didn't slap my ass or grab my tits". In fact, Animation was one of the worst industries for sexual misconduct dating all the way back to the beginning, and Disney was no exception.
I figured GROSS was a likely "name" for their little self-help group turned toxic feedback loop given that they're all animators. I was tempted to say "of course it's cartoony, they're cartoonists", but that seemed flippant, but naturally they would look to cartoons for inspiration. Certainly the fictional GROSS is far less cartoony and absurd than the OTL Proud Boys, who took their name from the dropped Howard Ashman Aladdin song "Proud of your Boy" (an anti-LGBTQ group named after a showtune for a Disney cartoon written by an openly gay man; not sure if they get the irony or not) and they apparently have complex and ironclad rules about when and where and how often you are permitted to masturbate. It's just surreal.
So if the GROSS saga seems unrealistic, count it as a case of Reality is Unrealistic.
I seriously wish I was making all this shit up.
What could go wrong?
I can understand why it might come across that way, Count, but sadly, I do not think I'm going any weirder or wilder than real life. Having lived through some craziness of this sort myself and seen first hand what happens a group of insecure and toxic man-children get together and feel like they can act with impunity, I can attest that the toxic feedback loop only gets weirder the further it goes. I've sadly been a part of the badness, blinded by what was considered "OK" back in the day and unwilling to admit that it wasn't. Nothing nearly to Lasseter's and Pixar's degree, mind you, but I'm no saint and self-improvement is hard. I've had to make the hard choice between the long, hard road and the easy, bad one myself, and on more than one issue. Step one is admitting you're in the wrong, and that's typically the hardest step. Our brains are literally wired against us on self-realization. Backsliding is easy. It's like an addiction.
The language used ("feminazi witch hunts") is right out of late 1990s Talk Radio.
As to whether GROSS is too cartoony, if you read Smolcic's accusations about Pixar in the 2000s or the accusations made by the women who worked for Bakshi (and I recommend that you don't if you want to retain your faith in humanity), you'll see shit that makes what GROSS is doing here seem tame and mundane. In addition to women having to master "The Lasseter" at every conference meeting, he'd allegedly make the new female employees stand up on the stage at the company celebrations, in front of everybody, and talk about their physical elements, essentially grading them like meat. "Welcome to Pixar, let's put you chicks in your place from the beginning." Sexual assault was a daily occurrence at Bakshi's office. A former Bakshi employee noted how she would "think Ralph was mad at me if he didn't slap my ass or grab my tits". In fact, Animation was one of the worst industries for sexual misconduct dating all the way back to the beginning, and Disney was no exception.
I figured GROSS was a likely "name" for their little self-help group turned toxic feedback loop given that they're all animators. I was tempted to say "of course it's cartoony, they're cartoonists", but that seemed flippant, but naturally they would look to cartoons for inspiration. Certainly the fictional GROSS is far less cartoony and absurd than the OTL Proud Boys, who took their name from the dropped Howard Ashman Aladdin song "Proud of your Boy" (an anti-LGBTQ group named after a showtune for a Disney cartoon written by an openly gay man; not sure if they get the irony or not) and they apparently have complex and ironclad rules about when and where and how often you are permitted to masturbate. It's just surreal.
So if the GROSS saga seems unrealistic, count it as a case of Reality is Unrealistic.
I seriously wish I was making all this shit up.
Just to be clear, GROSS was what they secretly called themselves. They didn't go around advertising their little "gropers anonymous" club or make T-Shirts or anything, and it really only came to light much, much later. Watterson, or even Disney or Blue Sky wouldn't have known about it at the time.
I hit the like button, but...
Yeah, I sometimes wonder about when someone Likes or Loves an ugly post. Like, did you like that I just killed a bunch of people in a terror attack, or just like the twist or how it was executed...yeah, sort of odd when you think about it.
I'm presenting two diverging narratives here between TTL Joss and TTL Lasseter, who have both received the same opportunity for a second chance. It's the same diverging path that we all have: the long, difficult road to self improvement that benefits all, yourself included, in the long run, and the short, quick one that only prolongs the suffering all around.
Last edited:
I kind of expected Lasseter and Whedon to go entirely different paths ITTL but it makes sense that they'd turn out this way in hindsight. Anyone hanging around with Bakshi and Kricfalusi is bound to be more toxic.
The End of the World as We Know It (and I still feel fine)
Worlds in Collision
Review by Orrick Jones
Guest Post by @Ogrebear
This summer we were treated with not just one Celestial Object Strikes the Earth film, but two. It’s pretty natural that advances in digital effects would lead to a return to disaster films, given the spectacular visuals that they allow, but how, you might ask, did we get two such similar films at the same time? Well, it all comes down to studio rivalries, in particular one of the most bitter and brutal ones: the rivalry between Universal head Jeffrey Katzenberg and Columbia head Michael Eisner, two former friends turned vicious enemies.
Not really either of these
This movie duel started off when producers Richard Zanuck and David Brown of The Manhattan Project Ltd production house discussed a remake of When Worlds Collide way back in the 70’s. They gelled over love of the old disaster classics such as The Day the Earth Caught Fire, the Godzilla films and their rip offs, Earthquake, Meteor, etc. and tied to pitch the remake multiple times, but each failed. In 1993 they discovered Steven Spielberg had bought the rights to The Hammer of God, a recent sci-fi epic by Arthur C. Clarke set in the far future, and approached him to discuss the idea of merging the projects.
Spielberg was amenable to the idea, and they commissioned a script from Bruce Rubin. However, no one was happy with the script, and a rewrite was commissioned from Michael Tolkin. The movie languished for most of 1993-1995 with no real movement except for script treatments by various, partly because Spielberg himself was busy, and partly because the far future setting of The Hammer of God was causing problems making a script that ‘sold’ the 2109 setting believably. It did not help that Richard Zanuck lost faith in the project, believing it to be ‘unfilmable’, and washed his hands of it.
However, in 1995 Kenneth Branagh was approached by Spielberg while they were working on Star Wars and handed him a copy of the script, asking for Branagh’s option. Despite what they were doing, Branagh brought a document back to Spielberg covered in notes and suggestions. This kickstarted the project and in late 1995 Hammer of God was announced with Branagh as director and Spielberg and Brown as producers, with Universal Pictures agreeing to distribute.
A row between Brown and Zanuck saw them split their partnership. Zanuck would go over to Columbia to help produce the adaption of Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle’s more contemporary Lucifer’s Hammer with Roland Emmerich as director. Eisner had picked up the rights to the Niven novel after hearing about the development of The Hammer of God, and saw an opportunity to undercut his protégé-turned-enemy Katzenberg. The ‘Duel of the Comets’ was on.
As work went on with Hammer of God, problems with the script kept returning even as locations, and casting began. The impact of Lucifer’s Hammer was fairly large; no one wanted to be in a ‘duel’ and few thought the public had the appetite for two ‘comet’ movies. Work slowed through 1996-97 as Branagh, and Brown tried to get a working script within the budget Amblin had given them.
Going into 1998, word reached the Amblin crew of rows on the Lucifer’s Hammer production with Emmerich and Zanuck disagreeing on the direction of the movie. Suggestions were being made by Emmerich about ‘blue collar’ space drillers, huge explosions, and even a rock soundtrack. Rumours were flying about that Niven might even sue for the rights back. The idea that the plot of Lucifer’s Hammer could be discarded so easily got folk thinking about Hammer of God and a flow of new ideas appeared particularly after Branagh brought in Frank Darabont, whom he had worked with before, including on Star Wars. A script appeared that would be very distinct from what Emmerich did, renaming the movie, and while Clarke would get a credit for the story, it was not really the film of the book.
At Columbia, Emmerich won his argument with Zanuck and mollified Niven with talk of a follow-on TV series to examine the post-comet world. The Dean Devlin script for Lucifer’s Hammer would spend much more time on gathering a crew of drillers and the action in getting them to the comet to blow it up than on the people on the ground, unlike the novel it was based on.
Let’s look at both movies’ stories to see who won the slightly misnamed ‘War of the Comets’:
The Rogue Planet
1999, Amblin Pictures
+
Plus a good few more classics dropped in (image sources Ebay and Amazon)
We start in 1997 with a British radio astronomer Angus Millar (Irdris Elba) who discovers odd signals in the outer Solar System. He reports them on the UK JANET educational internet and soon loads of people are looking at the data. After an interview on the Sky at Night with Sir Patrick Moore (playing himself, and one of the chief science advisors on the film) Angus finds himself in America in conference with NASA’s head Administrator Ray Perry (Billy Bob Thornton) wherein it is discovered the object Angus found is in fact a rogue planet, quickly named Nibiru, in reference to an old “ancient aliens” hypothesis, by the media, much to the astronomers’ annoyance. It is believed that the planet will pass Earth a long way off, but as new readings come in it seems Nibiru’s erratic course towards the Sun has changed its trajectory. Nibiru will not crash into Earth but pass close, very close, only about double the distance of the Moon from the planet. It is expected to cause huge gravitational changes on Earth triggering volcanos, earthquakes, blackouts, and possibly worse.
The movie switches track to Ray’s family as the news of Nibiru’s approach sees doomsday cults springing up, spikes in Church attendance, and a government plan to build bunkers for a few chosen by lottery. The world’s space Agencies also get together to come up with a plan to destroy the ‘debris’ orbiting Nibiru which might be the remains of moons. We see Ray and Dr Hammer (Arthur C Clarke himself) from the government discussing the possibility of sending craft to Nibiru as it passes Earth so some of Humanity will survive.
This section of the movie is one of its strengths. Ray’s wife Robin (Vanessa Redgrave) is very strong, holding her family together from the apocalypse. The youngest daughter Lottie (Kate Winslet) is pulled and tempted by a doomsday cult by her boyfriend Brain (Matt Damon) while older brother Charlie (Elijah Wood) is also pulled towards the military, who are calling for ‘more hands’ to build the shelters. Angus also turns up to deposit his wife who is going to stay with Ray’s family for the duration and the clash of transatlantic values between Robin and Angus’s wife Lorna (Naomie Harris) adds a strong Human element among the fantastic.
We get a montage of preparations: bunkers across the world being built; USR space craft under construction; riots; headlines about food and power supplies; NASA’s own rocket building; arguing officials with worrying looking trajectory charts behind them; arguing families at Christmas; and a riotous New Year. A year passes and there is a cut to the President of the United States Thomas Beck (Morgan Freeman) who gives a good speech about the launch of the Deliverance mission, a joint mission between the USR, EU, and NASA to prevent the impact of a piece of Nibiru’s debris ring from impacting Earth. We are shown Deliverance, a modified shuttle, taking off. Also taking off from Russia are three huge rockets, each containing we are told the largest nuclear bombs ever made. Deliverance is to guide them to their precise target, relying on Human brains and eyes for final targeting rather than ground based ‘guesswork’.
The mission is led by grizzled astronaut Robert Singh (Ricardo Montalbán) who after NASA went into oil drilling (a subtle dig or nod at Emmerich’s proposed movie). Deliverance heads for the hunk of rock the press is calling the Hammer. Nibiru is now visible in the sky from Earth- a cloudy world that news headlines tell us is becoming ‘Earth like’ as it thaws. A report of a Chinese probe is quoted as saying it is ‘uninhabited’.
Ray and Angus’s families are chosen to go into a shelter, but Lottie refuses to go without her boyfriend, and Charlie has joined up. Naomie Harris shines as she persuades Lottie to ditch the loser boyfriend who is just using her to get a place in the shelters. There is of course many trying to get into the shelters, and near riot conditions outside them- we see Charlie as a guard. Then it all goes quiet at there is a huge flash in the night sky – Deliverance has dropped its payload.
The President returns to the airwaves – Deliverance has managed to shatter the Hammer; however, the debris will pepper the world over the next few days, a deadly prelude to the effects of Nibiru’s passing. Air raid sirens start going off across the world, and we are treated to a montage of destruction- not all monument damage either- we see lots of small pieces shatter windows and homes in lower Manhattan, Sydney Opera House is missed as the Harbour Bridge and docks are peppered, Table Mountain gains some craters. It does not seem too bad, but we cut to a NASA briefing room and Angus is in communication with a chap in Japan who tells him that the ‘volcanoes are waking up’.
(Image source Amazon)
Nibiru’s passing is lovingly played out: we see Charlie shooting rioters trying to break into the shelter as order breaks down. We see Brian on the Battery with his loser friends as the earth begins to shake. The families are safe inside a shelter, but there is rumbling. We cut to a launch site in USR where a sleek looking craft is readying to take off. There is a discussion about weight and a pair of older crew members (Savely Kramarov and Ravil Isyanov ) choose not to go, and just as armed rioters break into the compound the ship lifts away. We see the Pacific Ring of Fire burning from space even as multiple launches lift from America, Australia, USR, and Japan heading for Nibiru.
Emergency lights come on in NASA’s facility and we are looking at a smashed-up control room where screens are out. Ray and Angus are alive, but filthy. An operator (Brian May) reports Nibiru has now passed Earth’s orbital path but is shifting into an orbit of its own. Earth has six months to find out if the planets will collide or if Nibiru’s orbit is stable and away from ours. Earth itself has ‘rolled’ slightly due to the passing; the equator is now at a 15-degree angle to where it was which will change the climate across the globe.
The world is a changed place. We see toppled monuments this time: a broken New York, a flooded London, burned out Moscow, collapsed oilfields. Robin and Lorna are offered the choice to leave the shelter – supplies are high, but the Administrator (Freddie Mercury) is prepared to let them go if they wish to. Trying to stop her family arguing Lottie manages to secure a phone call to Ray who tells them to ‘hang on for six months’. Outside Brian and Charlie have grown breads and are helping in the ruins of New York unlike Brain’s former friends who are playing ‘Mad Max’ trying to extort food and water until Charlie and the locals drive them off.
The movie ends with the President Beck giving a speech in a ruined Washington DC, confirming that Nibiru has moved into a new stable orbit and is no longer a threat to Earth. He confidently predicts Humanity will recover from this disaster, will rebuild stronger and together. Freeman makes you believe it could be true this time.
There is a mid-credits sequence of the Deliverance shuttle, plus that Russian ship, and two more bulky craft having landed on a world clearly not of Earth. Cobb and other crew in spacesuits are moving about the plain looking at the alien flowers and taking photos. Something watches from the trees…
A strong script and performances from the actors lift The Rogue Planet from the mediocre hole it could have fallen into. There are just enough characters and drama to be interesting rather than bogged down in their stories. There is also enough action and disaster to be interesting and not totally dominating the film, and it is not ‘disaster porn’ considering its subject matter, often prepared to ‘tell not show’. The science is plausible if only slightly bent for drama. All the special effects by ILM hold up well, there are no failed shots that jumped out at this reviewer.
The Rogue Planet is a good, intelligent movie, and certainly one that taps a little into the fears of the Millennium and how things can change after a disaster without being particularly preachy or too damn loud – though I do like that Queen title track.
Lucifer’s Hammer
1999, Columbia Pictures
Based, very loosely on this (Image source Abe Books)
The movie starts at an old NATO facility where an ancient reel-to-reel computer suddenly wakes up and the attached dot matrix machine starts sending out print out. A day later an intern (Tom Hardy) goes into the corner of a data centre where this machine is, muttering about his stupid boss sending him to shut up an alarm that’s probably just a dying machine… only to stop mid-rant as he starts looking at the data being printed, before ripping off the printout and running out of the room like the wind.
Cut to a NASA/NATO meeting room full of generals, suits, and hassled looking scientists. NASA administrator Dan Forrester (Rand Quaid) stands up and thanks NATO for ‘spotting the object’ and ‘it’s a shame we don’t have our own satellites watching’ he says icily to the suits. The Object is a huge asteroid 16km wide, bigger than the one that wiped out the dinosaurs, and it’s on a collision course. Lucifer, as it has been named at NASA, is a few months away, barely time to plan how to do something about it. Suggestions are put forward from space lasers, to using a ship to push it off course, to simply blowing it up with a ‘really large nuke’ – of course they pick the latter course.
Now comes the hard part of how to deliver said nuke and, as explained thanks to some dodgy graphics, deep enough into Lucifer to split it into enough pieces. General Collins (Richard Gant) says he knows some reliable drillers ‘who had done some work for the army’. The General agrees to get them in to train the astronauts.
Wipe to an oil rig somewhere, over a Traveling Wilburys rock track a disputable crew are celebrating at oil spurts up and covers them, as Tim Hamner (Arnold Schwarzenegger) orders them around and soon the cap is in place and pumps start getting rigged up as Hamner’s wife Joan (Pamela Reed) tells him there is a General incoming. As Collins steps off the helicopter he is greeted by Hamner and his motley crew- right hand man Oscar (Bill Paxton), geologists Dot (Matthew Broderick) and Rockhunter (Brent Spiner), plus the drillers Bear (Steve Buscemi), Turner (Chris Ellis), John Brown (Keith David), and Max (Clyde Kusatsu) who all ask excitedly if they are ‘burying more secrets this time’. The General brushes them off and talks to Hamner in private. He explains about Lucifer and asks Hamner to come and train the astronauts. Hamner agrees, but it will cost. The General nods.
We go back to NASA HQ as Hamner and his people arrive and stand out like parade. They greet the astronauts, led by Col. Rick Delanty (Jean Reno) but the initial training goes badly. While they are doing that, we get news that Lucifer is not alone and there is a significant ‘cloud’ of debris with it, some if it will hit Earth. It is time to reveal Lucifer to the public. The US President (Alec Baldwin) stands at the podium in the UN as he announces the existence of Object LHX31. The President tells the world that the USA, USR, Europeans, and Japanese space agencies were working together to prevent impact, but that smaller debris will hit Earth soon. All Agencies will provide tracking data as soon as they could. It is a good speech.
Over another rock song, this time Def Leppard, there is a montage of historical treasures being taken off walls; headlines proclaiming the comet’s new name of Lucifer’s Hammer coming to destroy Earth; people moving from the coast; rioting globally; and shots of arguing drillers and astronauts, before we cut to the NASA Mission Control where a controller (Téa Leoni) reports the first meteor shower is about to enter the atmosphere – it will impact over Rome. We get a very nicely done sequence of Rome landmarks and the city getting peppered with space rocks, including an cliché shot of the Adam-God hands in the Sistine Chapel being destroyed, and Vittorio Emanuele II Monument imploded.
Hamner orders his men to take the night off and confronts Forrester, He tells him that simply he cannot train the astronauts to use his equipment properly in the time they have. He drops the bombshell: he and his men will need to go. Forrester agrees, but only if they all sign on for what might be a suicide mission. There is an amusing sequence of Hamner’s men being rounded up and Hanmer presenting their demands for the mission the next day.
There is another montage of Rio being slammed with meteors and Hamner’s crew undergoing psychological testing for space flight and doing training to work in space suits. Multiple failures are shown as Aerosmith rock out an old hit. The movie shows us the Russians preparing the huge bomb and it being transferred to their Mir space station via a huge rocket. We see Alexander Baluev’s slightly crazy cosmonaut Michail Tulchsky bolt it to his station.
It is launch day. Lucifer is visible from Earth now. There is an emotional goodbye between Hamner and Joan. As they take off in the specially prepared Shuttles Freedom, and Liberty, news comes in of a half mile section of Lucifer is heading for the Atlantic coast not far from New York. Reaching the USR space station, the nukes are transferred to the shuttles – carefully. Tulchsky is ordered to go with them as the incoming asteroid will impact his station. As the Shuttles leave ICBM nukes are seen flying towards the fragment.
We get a slow-mo nuclear explosion as the nukes impact, to little effect, but to split more fragments off the half-mile chunk. Sirens wail in New York. We see people running for skyscrapers or stuck in jams etc. There is a nod to the book with ‘Lucifer’s Hammer’ merch stands seen. Even as the shuttles fly away, we follow the rock in as it impacts in the Atlantic creating a 60m/200ft wave heading for the East Coast (‘and Europe’- though we never hear anything more about that) for a change the score changes to Epic Music (made by David Arnold) instead of rock as a huge wave inundates New York and we see skyscrapers topple, and Lady Liberty’s head bounce down a flooded Broadway.
(Image source VFX Blog)
This is a spectacular disaster sequence; Digital Domain really pushed their technology to get the water in this sequence moving correctly. They deserved the Oscar nomination for Best Visual Effects, and for all this movie’s other flaws SFX was not one of them.
After a touch and go ride, both shuttles reach Lucifer, and we get some decent work on simulating differing gravities and conditions as the shuttles separate to reach their drilling sites. Both make it and deploy the adapted drilling kit from the shuttles bay. Freedom team under Hamner have the easier time, while Liberty’s team under Oscar struggle. Time pushes on as Lucifer draws near the line where it will be too late to split the comet without Earth being destroyed by the fragments. There is argument on the ground about detonating the nukes early with the USR Security Agent Frolov (Claudia Christian) in charge of them leading Forrester and the others against Grant and other military types.
Hamner’s hole gets to the right depth, but the nukes trigger mechanism is damaged. Oscar’s hole is too shallow, and they lose Dot and Turner when the drill explodes. With no choice they lower their nuke and hightail it. At Hamner’s site, straws are drawn to stay and detonate the nuke, with Hanmer rigging it so he gets it, and has an emotional farewell with Joan before he goes, but at the last minute a slightly unhinged Bear sabotages his air tank and takes his place in the airlock telling him to ‘go home to your wife’ – it’s a nice subversion of the usual ‘hero sacrifice’ to be sure. With Freedom and Liberty clear, the nukes are detonated- Bear getting one last mad rant about there not being a coffee stop on his trip.
There is a swelling of guitar chords as we jump around the world to shots of people celebrating. We cut to the NASA control room and a graphic showing Lucifer shattering. Forrester mentions pieces will rain down on Earth for a while, setting up the rumoured TV show dealing with the aftermath, but the threat for now is dealt with. We get the shuttles landing and reunions for Joan and Hanmer, plus the other crew- but as the credits roll, we see Earth from space and numerous rocks falling into the atmosphere for a slightly more ominous ending than you might expect from a triumphal feeling movie like this one.
Conclusion
Comparing the two movies, Rogue Planet has much, much more depth than Lucifer’s Hammer. The characters are more realized in Branagh’s film, much less ‘comic book’ that Emmerich’s. Yes, Rogue Planet has less action and more ‘tell not show’, but that works in making the drama stronger. Lucifer’s Hammer is way more brazen, loud, and frankly stupid than the other film. I certainly came out of one thinking more about what I might do in an Earth-collision situation than the other, where, honestly, I came out needing a headache tablet.[1]
If you must see one Earth collision movie, see Rogue Planet.
Rogue Planet, 4/5 ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ Recommended.
Lucifer’s Hammer, 2/5 ⭐⭐ Not worth it, even with good SFX.
[1] Facing stiff competition from three Marvel films, Rogue Planet will make $327 million against an $82 million budget while the more action-centric Lucifer’s Hammer will make $412 million against a $136 million budget.
Review by Orrick Jones
Guest Post by @Ogrebear
This summer we were treated with not just one Celestial Object Strikes the Earth film, but two. It’s pretty natural that advances in digital effects would lead to a return to disaster films, given the spectacular visuals that they allow, but how, you might ask, did we get two such similar films at the same time? Well, it all comes down to studio rivalries, in particular one of the most bitter and brutal ones: the rivalry between Universal head Jeffrey Katzenberg and Columbia head Michael Eisner, two former friends turned vicious enemies.
Not really either of these
This movie duel started off when producers Richard Zanuck and David Brown of The Manhattan Project Ltd production house discussed a remake of When Worlds Collide way back in the 70’s. They gelled over love of the old disaster classics such as The Day the Earth Caught Fire, the Godzilla films and their rip offs, Earthquake, Meteor, etc. and tied to pitch the remake multiple times, but each failed. In 1993 they discovered Steven Spielberg had bought the rights to The Hammer of God, a recent sci-fi epic by Arthur C. Clarke set in the far future, and approached him to discuss the idea of merging the projects.
Spielberg was amenable to the idea, and they commissioned a script from Bruce Rubin. However, no one was happy with the script, and a rewrite was commissioned from Michael Tolkin. The movie languished for most of 1993-1995 with no real movement except for script treatments by various, partly because Spielberg himself was busy, and partly because the far future setting of The Hammer of God was causing problems making a script that ‘sold’ the 2109 setting believably. It did not help that Richard Zanuck lost faith in the project, believing it to be ‘unfilmable’, and washed his hands of it.
However, in 1995 Kenneth Branagh was approached by Spielberg while they were working on Star Wars and handed him a copy of the script, asking for Branagh’s option. Despite what they were doing, Branagh brought a document back to Spielberg covered in notes and suggestions. This kickstarted the project and in late 1995 Hammer of God was announced with Branagh as director and Spielberg and Brown as producers, with Universal Pictures agreeing to distribute.
A row between Brown and Zanuck saw them split their partnership. Zanuck would go over to Columbia to help produce the adaption of Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle’s more contemporary Lucifer’s Hammer with Roland Emmerich as director. Eisner had picked up the rights to the Niven novel after hearing about the development of The Hammer of God, and saw an opportunity to undercut his protégé-turned-enemy Katzenberg. The ‘Duel of the Comets’ was on.
As work went on with Hammer of God, problems with the script kept returning even as locations, and casting began. The impact of Lucifer’s Hammer was fairly large; no one wanted to be in a ‘duel’ and few thought the public had the appetite for two ‘comet’ movies. Work slowed through 1996-97 as Branagh, and Brown tried to get a working script within the budget Amblin had given them.
Going into 1998, word reached the Amblin crew of rows on the Lucifer’s Hammer production with Emmerich and Zanuck disagreeing on the direction of the movie. Suggestions were being made by Emmerich about ‘blue collar’ space drillers, huge explosions, and even a rock soundtrack. Rumours were flying about that Niven might even sue for the rights back. The idea that the plot of Lucifer’s Hammer could be discarded so easily got folk thinking about Hammer of God and a flow of new ideas appeared particularly after Branagh brought in Frank Darabont, whom he had worked with before, including on Star Wars. A script appeared that would be very distinct from what Emmerich did, renaming the movie, and while Clarke would get a credit for the story, it was not really the film of the book.
At Columbia, Emmerich won his argument with Zanuck and mollified Niven with talk of a follow-on TV series to examine the post-comet world. The Dean Devlin script for Lucifer’s Hammer would spend much more time on gathering a crew of drillers and the action in getting them to the comet to blow it up than on the people on the ground, unlike the novel it was based on.
Let’s look at both movies’ stories to see who won the slightly misnamed ‘War of the Comets’:
The Rogue Planet
1999, Amblin Pictures
Plus a good few more classics dropped in (image sources Ebay and Amazon)
We start in 1997 with a British radio astronomer Angus Millar (Irdris Elba) who discovers odd signals in the outer Solar System. He reports them on the UK JANET educational internet and soon loads of people are looking at the data. After an interview on the Sky at Night with Sir Patrick Moore (playing himself, and one of the chief science advisors on the film) Angus finds himself in America in conference with NASA’s head Administrator Ray Perry (Billy Bob Thornton) wherein it is discovered the object Angus found is in fact a rogue planet, quickly named Nibiru, in reference to an old “ancient aliens” hypothesis, by the media, much to the astronomers’ annoyance. It is believed that the planet will pass Earth a long way off, but as new readings come in it seems Nibiru’s erratic course towards the Sun has changed its trajectory. Nibiru will not crash into Earth but pass close, very close, only about double the distance of the Moon from the planet. It is expected to cause huge gravitational changes on Earth triggering volcanos, earthquakes, blackouts, and possibly worse.
The movie switches track to Ray’s family as the news of Nibiru’s approach sees doomsday cults springing up, spikes in Church attendance, and a government plan to build bunkers for a few chosen by lottery. The world’s space Agencies also get together to come up with a plan to destroy the ‘debris’ orbiting Nibiru which might be the remains of moons. We see Ray and Dr Hammer (Arthur C Clarke himself) from the government discussing the possibility of sending craft to Nibiru as it passes Earth so some of Humanity will survive.
This section of the movie is one of its strengths. Ray’s wife Robin (Vanessa Redgrave) is very strong, holding her family together from the apocalypse. The youngest daughter Lottie (Kate Winslet) is pulled and tempted by a doomsday cult by her boyfriend Brain (Matt Damon) while older brother Charlie (Elijah Wood) is also pulled towards the military, who are calling for ‘more hands’ to build the shelters. Angus also turns up to deposit his wife who is going to stay with Ray’s family for the duration and the clash of transatlantic values between Robin and Angus’s wife Lorna (Naomie Harris) adds a strong Human element among the fantastic.
We get a montage of preparations: bunkers across the world being built; USR space craft under construction; riots; headlines about food and power supplies; NASA’s own rocket building; arguing officials with worrying looking trajectory charts behind them; arguing families at Christmas; and a riotous New Year. A year passes and there is a cut to the President of the United States Thomas Beck (Morgan Freeman) who gives a good speech about the launch of the Deliverance mission, a joint mission between the USR, EU, and NASA to prevent the impact of a piece of Nibiru’s debris ring from impacting Earth. We are shown Deliverance, a modified shuttle, taking off. Also taking off from Russia are three huge rockets, each containing we are told the largest nuclear bombs ever made. Deliverance is to guide them to their precise target, relying on Human brains and eyes for final targeting rather than ground based ‘guesswork’.
The mission is led by grizzled astronaut Robert Singh (Ricardo Montalbán) who after NASA went into oil drilling (a subtle dig or nod at Emmerich’s proposed movie). Deliverance heads for the hunk of rock the press is calling the Hammer. Nibiru is now visible in the sky from Earth- a cloudy world that news headlines tell us is becoming ‘Earth like’ as it thaws. A report of a Chinese probe is quoted as saying it is ‘uninhabited’.
Ray and Angus’s families are chosen to go into a shelter, but Lottie refuses to go without her boyfriend, and Charlie has joined up. Naomie Harris shines as she persuades Lottie to ditch the loser boyfriend who is just using her to get a place in the shelters. There is of course many trying to get into the shelters, and near riot conditions outside them- we see Charlie as a guard. Then it all goes quiet at there is a huge flash in the night sky – Deliverance has dropped its payload.
The President returns to the airwaves – Deliverance has managed to shatter the Hammer; however, the debris will pepper the world over the next few days, a deadly prelude to the effects of Nibiru’s passing. Air raid sirens start going off across the world, and we are treated to a montage of destruction- not all monument damage either- we see lots of small pieces shatter windows and homes in lower Manhattan, Sydney Opera House is missed as the Harbour Bridge and docks are peppered, Table Mountain gains some craters. It does not seem too bad, but we cut to a NASA briefing room and Angus is in communication with a chap in Japan who tells him that the ‘volcanoes are waking up’.
(Image source Amazon)
Nibiru’s passing is lovingly played out: we see Charlie shooting rioters trying to break into the shelter as order breaks down. We see Brian on the Battery with his loser friends as the earth begins to shake. The families are safe inside a shelter, but there is rumbling. We cut to a launch site in USR where a sleek looking craft is readying to take off. There is a discussion about weight and a pair of older crew members (Savely Kramarov and Ravil Isyanov ) choose not to go, and just as armed rioters break into the compound the ship lifts away. We see the Pacific Ring of Fire burning from space even as multiple launches lift from America, Australia, USR, and Japan heading for Nibiru.
Emergency lights come on in NASA’s facility and we are looking at a smashed-up control room where screens are out. Ray and Angus are alive, but filthy. An operator (Brian May) reports Nibiru has now passed Earth’s orbital path but is shifting into an orbit of its own. Earth has six months to find out if the planets will collide or if Nibiru’s orbit is stable and away from ours. Earth itself has ‘rolled’ slightly due to the passing; the equator is now at a 15-degree angle to where it was which will change the climate across the globe.
The world is a changed place. We see toppled monuments this time: a broken New York, a flooded London, burned out Moscow, collapsed oilfields. Robin and Lorna are offered the choice to leave the shelter – supplies are high, but the Administrator (Freddie Mercury) is prepared to let them go if they wish to. Trying to stop her family arguing Lottie manages to secure a phone call to Ray who tells them to ‘hang on for six months’. Outside Brian and Charlie have grown breads and are helping in the ruins of New York unlike Brain’s former friends who are playing ‘Mad Max’ trying to extort food and water until Charlie and the locals drive them off.
The movie ends with the President Beck giving a speech in a ruined Washington DC, confirming that Nibiru has moved into a new stable orbit and is no longer a threat to Earth. He confidently predicts Humanity will recover from this disaster, will rebuild stronger and together. Freeman makes you believe it could be true this time.
There is a mid-credits sequence of the Deliverance shuttle, plus that Russian ship, and two more bulky craft having landed on a world clearly not of Earth. Cobb and other crew in spacesuits are moving about the plain looking at the alien flowers and taking photos. Something watches from the trees…
A strong script and performances from the actors lift The Rogue Planet from the mediocre hole it could have fallen into. There are just enough characters and drama to be interesting rather than bogged down in their stories. There is also enough action and disaster to be interesting and not totally dominating the film, and it is not ‘disaster porn’ considering its subject matter, often prepared to ‘tell not show’. The science is plausible if only slightly bent for drama. All the special effects by ILM hold up well, there are no failed shots that jumped out at this reviewer.
The Rogue Planet is a good, intelligent movie, and certainly one that taps a little into the fears of the Millennium and how things can change after a disaster without being particularly preachy or too damn loud – though I do like that Queen title track.
Lucifer’s Hammer
1999, Columbia Pictures
Based, very loosely on this (Image source Abe Books)
The movie starts at an old NATO facility where an ancient reel-to-reel computer suddenly wakes up and the attached dot matrix machine starts sending out print out. A day later an intern (Tom Hardy) goes into the corner of a data centre where this machine is, muttering about his stupid boss sending him to shut up an alarm that’s probably just a dying machine… only to stop mid-rant as he starts looking at the data being printed, before ripping off the printout and running out of the room like the wind.
Cut to a NASA/NATO meeting room full of generals, suits, and hassled looking scientists. NASA administrator Dan Forrester (Rand Quaid) stands up and thanks NATO for ‘spotting the object’ and ‘it’s a shame we don’t have our own satellites watching’ he says icily to the suits. The Object is a huge asteroid 16km wide, bigger than the one that wiped out the dinosaurs, and it’s on a collision course. Lucifer, as it has been named at NASA, is a few months away, barely time to plan how to do something about it. Suggestions are put forward from space lasers, to using a ship to push it off course, to simply blowing it up with a ‘really large nuke’ – of course they pick the latter course.
Now comes the hard part of how to deliver said nuke and, as explained thanks to some dodgy graphics, deep enough into Lucifer to split it into enough pieces. General Collins (Richard Gant) says he knows some reliable drillers ‘who had done some work for the army’. The General agrees to get them in to train the astronauts.
Wipe to an oil rig somewhere, over a Traveling Wilburys rock track a disputable crew are celebrating at oil spurts up and covers them, as Tim Hamner (Arnold Schwarzenegger) orders them around and soon the cap is in place and pumps start getting rigged up as Hamner’s wife Joan (Pamela Reed) tells him there is a General incoming. As Collins steps off the helicopter he is greeted by Hamner and his motley crew- right hand man Oscar (Bill Paxton), geologists Dot (Matthew Broderick) and Rockhunter (Brent Spiner), plus the drillers Bear (Steve Buscemi), Turner (Chris Ellis), John Brown (Keith David), and Max (Clyde Kusatsu) who all ask excitedly if they are ‘burying more secrets this time’. The General brushes them off and talks to Hamner in private. He explains about Lucifer and asks Hamner to come and train the astronauts. Hamner agrees, but it will cost. The General nods.
We go back to NASA HQ as Hamner and his people arrive and stand out like parade. They greet the astronauts, led by Col. Rick Delanty (Jean Reno) but the initial training goes badly. While they are doing that, we get news that Lucifer is not alone and there is a significant ‘cloud’ of debris with it, some if it will hit Earth. It is time to reveal Lucifer to the public. The US President (Alec Baldwin) stands at the podium in the UN as he announces the existence of Object LHX31. The President tells the world that the USA, USR, Europeans, and Japanese space agencies were working together to prevent impact, but that smaller debris will hit Earth soon. All Agencies will provide tracking data as soon as they could. It is a good speech.
Over another rock song, this time Def Leppard, there is a montage of historical treasures being taken off walls; headlines proclaiming the comet’s new name of Lucifer’s Hammer coming to destroy Earth; people moving from the coast; rioting globally; and shots of arguing drillers and astronauts, before we cut to the NASA Mission Control where a controller (Téa Leoni) reports the first meteor shower is about to enter the atmosphere – it will impact over Rome. We get a very nicely done sequence of Rome landmarks and the city getting peppered with space rocks, including an cliché shot of the Adam-God hands in the Sistine Chapel being destroyed, and Vittorio Emanuele II Monument imploded.
Hamner orders his men to take the night off and confronts Forrester, He tells him that simply he cannot train the astronauts to use his equipment properly in the time they have. He drops the bombshell: he and his men will need to go. Forrester agrees, but only if they all sign on for what might be a suicide mission. There is an amusing sequence of Hamner’s men being rounded up and Hanmer presenting their demands for the mission the next day.
There is another montage of Rio being slammed with meteors and Hamner’s crew undergoing psychological testing for space flight and doing training to work in space suits. Multiple failures are shown as Aerosmith rock out an old hit. The movie shows us the Russians preparing the huge bomb and it being transferred to their Mir space station via a huge rocket. We see Alexander Baluev’s slightly crazy cosmonaut Michail Tulchsky bolt it to his station.
It is launch day. Lucifer is visible from Earth now. There is an emotional goodbye between Hamner and Joan. As they take off in the specially prepared Shuttles Freedom, and Liberty, news comes in of a half mile section of Lucifer is heading for the Atlantic coast not far from New York. Reaching the USR space station, the nukes are transferred to the shuttles – carefully. Tulchsky is ordered to go with them as the incoming asteroid will impact his station. As the Shuttles leave ICBM nukes are seen flying towards the fragment.
We get a slow-mo nuclear explosion as the nukes impact, to little effect, but to split more fragments off the half-mile chunk. Sirens wail in New York. We see people running for skyscrapers or stuck in jams etc. There is a nod to the book with ‘Lucifer’s Hammer’ merch stands seen. Even as the shuttles fly away, we follow the rock in as it impacts in the Atlantic creating a 60m/200ft wave heading for the East Coast (‘and Europe’- though we never hear anything more about that) for a change the score changes to Epic Music (made by David Arnold) instead of rock as a huge wave inundates New York and we see skyscrapers topple, and Lady Liberty’s head bounce down a flooded Broadway.
(Image source VFX Blog)
This is a spectacular disaster sequence; Digital Domain really pushed their technology to get the water in this sequence moving correctly. They deserved the Oscar nomination for Best Visual Effects, and for all this movie’s other flaws SFX was not one of them.
After a touch and go ride, both shuttles reach Lucifer, and we get some decent work on simulating differing gravities and conditions as the shuttles separate to reach their drilling sites. Both make it and deploy the adapted drilling kit from the shuttles bay. Freedom team under Hamner have the easier time, while Liberty’s team under Oscar struggle. Time pushes on as Lucifer draws near the line where it will be too late to split the comet without Earth being destroyed by the fragments. There is argument on the ground about detonating the nukes early with the USR Security Agent Frolov (Claudia Christian) in charge of them leading Forrester and the others against Grant and other military types.
Hamner’s hole gets to the right depth, but the nukes trigger mechanism is damaged. Oscar’s hole is too shallow, and they lose Dot and Turner when the drill explodes. With no choice they lower their nuke and hightail it. At Hamner’s site, straws are drawn to stay and detonate the nuke, with Hanmer rigging it so he gets it, and has an emotional farewell with Joan before he goes, but at the last minute a slightly unhinged Bear sabotages his air tank and takes his place in the airlock telling him to ‘go home to your wife’ – it’s a nice subversion of the usual ‘hero sacrifice’ to be sure. With Freedom and Liberty clear, the nukes are detonated- Bear getting one last mad rant about there not being a coffee stop on his trip.
There is a swelling of guitar chords as we jump around the world to shots of people celebrating. We cut to the NASA control room and a graphic showing Lucifer shattering. Forrester mentions pieces will rain down on Earth for a while, setting up the rumoured TV show dealing with the aftermath, but the threat for now is dealt with. We get the shuttles landing and reunions for Joan and Hanmer, plus the other crew- but as the credits roll, we see Earth from space and numerous rocks falling into the atmosphere for a slightly more ominous ending than you might expect from a triumphal feeling movie like this one.
Conclusion
Comparing the two movies, Rogue Planet has much, much more depth than Lucifer’s Hammer. The characters are more realized in Branagh’s film, much less ‘comic book’ that Emmerich’s. Yes, Rogue Planet has less action and more ‘tell not show’, but that works in making the drama stronger. Lucifer’s Hammer is way more brazen, loud, and frankly stupid than the other film. I certainly came out of one thinking more about what I might do in an Earth-collision situation than the other, where, honestly, I came out needing a headache tablet.[1]
If you must see one Earth collision movie, see Rogue Planet.
Rogue Planet, 4/5 ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ Recommended.
Lucifer’s Hammer, 2/5 ⭐⭐ Not worth it, even with good SFX.
[1] Facing stiff competition from three Marvel films, Rogue Planet will make $327 million against an $82 million budget while the more action-centric Lucifer’s Hammer will make $412 million against a $136 million budget.
So Deep Impact is even deeper… while Armageddon doubles down on the suck and Emmerich continues to be a discount Michael Bay. Oh well, I guess there had to be a trade off.
Hoping for a spin-off about Deliverance exploring Nibiru (and its possible aliens)… James Cameron, you listening?
Hoping for a spin-off about Deliverance exploring Nibiru (and its possible aliens)… James Cameron, you listening?
Yikes.
I mean, with Bakshi I didn't know since I didn't find much in my admittingly little overview. And yikes, the whole thing sounds freakin bonkers. But this is not gonna end well for them.
mortonofski
Donor
The last time Montalbán played a spacefarer named Singh, it turned out alright. Much as I enjoyed Deep Impact OTL, I think I'd prefer Rogue Planet much more. Another fine chapter!
L-O-L-A, LOLA...LO-LO-LO-LO-LOLA....
Freeing the Mouse: How Disney Flipped the Script on Copyright
Bloomberg, July 2008 Edition
In 1998 the 105th Congress, spurred in large part by the recent passage of the EU’s Copyright Duration Directive and intense industry lobbying, passed the Copyright Term Extension Act, a.k.a. “The Sonny Bono Act” after its sponsor, a.k.a. “The Porky Protection Act”. It might have been called “The Mickey Mouse Protection Act” save for one major factor: Walt Disney Entertainment was not advocating for the bill.
For those who see Disney as a “friendly family company” overseen by the smiling faces of Walt Disney and Jim Henson, it might seem the anathema of the “House of the Mouse” to support such “greed-driven corporate welfare”. But the fact remains that the Walt Disney Entertainment Company, Federal Stock Listing “DIS”, is a major international Fortune 100 corporation and one of the Dow Jones 40 that benefitted greatly from the Act’s passage. And in the past, they openly supported and even actively lobbied for similar legislation, being a prime driver in the similar 1976 Copyright Act.
The Bill’s Sponsor, Representative Sonny Bono, 1998[1]
And unlike Porky, who had until 2010 before Copyright expired on his first appearance, 1935’s “I Haven’t Got a Hat”, Disney’s most iconic character, indeed their central Trademark image, Mickey Mouse, was set to enter the Public Domain in 2003 when “Steamboat Willie” reached the 75-year mark.
And make no bones about it, many at Disney were pushing for full support of the bill, Vice Chairman Roy Disney chief among them.
But, interestingly enough, Disney had already slightly loosened its copyright protections on certain derivative works under certain terms and conditions. And it all started with Dungeons & Dragons.
We’ll get to that later.
By staying out of the fight, Disney avoided a torrent of bad publicity. Bono, of course, whose own musical IP gave him what was seen by many as a conflict of interest, became the butt of several jokes, with David Letterman suggesting that “Sonny never was one much to share/Cher”. And while numerous studios and the families of dead artists were supporting the bill, including Columbia, Universal, and United Artists, Warner Brothers became the poster corporation and their President and COO John Peters the “face of corporate greed”. Porky Pig, their most endangered asset, became irrevocably associated with the bill when Peters specifically called out the stuttering porker in a news conference supporting the legislation. The clear connection between “Porky” and “Pork”, or legislation that serves special rather than national interests, was unavoidable.
By staying out of the fray, Disney Chairman Jim Henson could, without deception, hypocrisy, or irony, declare his utter befuddlement about the whole deal, and even speak about how Disney was fully supportive of its fans and followers. Henson could, without irony, note how much Disney had benefited from Public Domain works, with a majority of Disney Princesses being derivative of classic Public Domain IP, like Cinderella and Snow White. Henson also saw little to fear with Mickey Mouse entering Public Domain. After all, almost anyone could use Mickey or other Disney Copyrighted material or even Trademarks within certain limited terms and conditions, and even make a small profit from them. Only the Steamboat Willie versions of Mickey and Minnie were to be “up for grabs” in 2003. And Disney still retained full Trademark protections in perpetuity under existing law.
The whole arrangement actually began very small, initiated by Tactical Systems Rules, or TSR, a division of Marvel Entertainment, itself a division of Disney. TSR, the company behind the iconic Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying game and similar products, had long had a very open and permissive relationship with its fans, going back to its early days in the late 1970s. “Homebrew” adventures, rules, characters, and monsters were de rigueur, and even occasionally got adopted by TSR as Canon. In fact, the Thief Character Class, one of the four cornerstone classes alongside Fighter, Mage, and Cleric, began as a Homebrew creation that Gary Gygax found fascinating and even helped shape when its fan-creators cold-called him.
When Marvel ultimately acquired TSR after being itself acquired by Disney, they acted in much the same way. And being such a relatively small cog in the giant machine of Disney, their laisses faire approach to copyright and trademark largely flew under the radar.
But this all changed when Mickeyquest was born in the late 1980s. A simplified game based on the classic Disney and Muppets characters and meant to “help children expand their imagination while learning valuable social and math skills”, Mickeyquest soon spawned its own Homebrew, this time using Trademarked Disney characters like Mickey and Donald! Disney’s legal team, the so-called “Legal Weasels”, cried fowl…err…foul, but TSR Chairman Gary Gygax pushed back, citing Homebrew as not just an indelible part of the gaming culture, but a rather lucrative source of great ideas and fan loyalty.
“I just made three million in profit selling a fan-written adventure module,” he told the board.
The issue of Disney Copyright and Trademark protections was a source of great consternation at the time. As Calvin & Hobbes creator Bill Waterston discovered to his chagrin, failure to enforce or take advantage of one’s Trademarks and Copyrights could, perversely, endanger them. One overenthusiastic Legal Weasel had, following this line of thought, sent a Strongly Worded Letter to the owners of a small private daycare who’d painted Snow White on one of their internal walls. Chairman Henson, mortified when the story reached him, openly apologized to the center and even sent them a donation and granted them a limited one-time allowance for use of the Trademarked image.
The possible price of not protecting your Copyright (Image source Etsy)
These two moments soon collided in the Weasel’s Den, and after long and reportedly “lively” discussions, a new ruleset was worked out: a Limited Open License Agreement (LOLA) that allowed for private individuals and certain child-associated small businesses and charities under a certain size and value threshold (such as day care centers) to “limited use” of certain Disney Trademarked images and Copywrite within a specified (and renewable) time frame, subject to certain restrictions, such as open acknowledgement of Disney Trademark and Copyright, where applicable. Also, certain “inappropriate representations” of the Disney trademarks would be absolutely forbidden (the “Disney-Pricesses.net” adult website stuck in their memory here), as would “anything used in the advocacy of hate, violence, or other things deemed at odds with Disney’s Company Values, as defined wholly by Disney”. Partisan political causes were wholly banned, though certain apolitical charitable and non-profit uses were allowable. Few restrictions were put upon derivative “Fan Works” done for no profit (though such works are generally considered allowable under “Fair Use” statutes anyway).
And most interestingly, in something that evolved directly out of TSR, some limited Derivative Works that met the Terms, Conditions, and Restrictions, could actually be used in a limited commercial fashion if used by narrowly defined “Independent Individuals” and “charitable organizations” who a) got advanced permission from Disney, b) gave Disney full rights to claim full ownership after reasonable compensation to the “Freelance Content Creator”, and c) if the Creator agreed to give Disney a percentage of all profits made once a certain minimum revenue threshold (originally $10,000, currently up to $55,000)[2] was reached. Disney profit share began at 5% and scaled up to 75% as revenues increased beyond the minimum threshold. To keep LOLA licensees small and thus limit their potential for becoming serious competition to official merch, a maximum revenue threshold was also established, originally $100,000, now $500,000, beyond which the LOLA licensee was given the choice of scaling back, ceasing sales of derivative works and ending the LOLA, or forging a formal licensing agreement with Disney.
This last aspect, it was hoped, would help limit the damage potential from “bad actors” trying to game the system by simply, for example, reinvesting all revenues into employee salaries or facilities, and thus having no real “profit”. A small measure of loss to such “profit hiding” was expected, with Disney figuring a little bit of “scam loss” was worth the good PR, comparing it to advertising expenses, but they clearly wanted to avoid massive abuses ran into six figures or more. An alternative option involving claiming a share of gross revenues was rejected since this led to the real possibility that the LOLA licensee might actually lose money while Disney made money, creating bad press.
Also, as an “emergency stop”, Disney retained the right to unilaterally revoke any and all LOLA permissions as they saw fit. Though as we shall see, this didn’t always work as planned.
It’s worth noting that there may be a less-than-charitable reason behind the minimum threshold as well, as the legal and overhead costs of claiming their share would have likely exceeded any revenues Disney made below the lowest total revenue threshold. It’s also notable that Disney individual and family vacation packages for their parks and cruises are typically in the $5,000-25,000 range, with some Premium Packages going for $50,000 or more, meaning that successful LOLA Creators are primed with just the right amount of cash for a Disney vacation, leading to speculation that Disney is effectively giving its fans a tool to fund their Disney Vacation in a self-serving circle. Special deals for LOLA Participants would seem to confirm this hypothesis.
Even with these protections in place, Disney, with the potential of losing billions of dollars in IP should the plan backfire and nullify their copyright and trademark protections, started small. They began with the old black & white versions of Mickey and Minnie and Oswald and Ortensia, which were already endangered, as well as Snow White, which would be the first Disney Princess at risk of going into the Public Domain should the Bono Act fail. When Universal tried to reclaim the rights to Oswald claiming that the LOLA showed that Disney was no longer enforcing Copyright, the Legal Weasels managed to point to rock solid language in the LOLA and cite pertinent precedent on other Copyright claims to fend off the challenge. With precedent thus established that the LOLA’s very limited and revokable nature did not indicate a lack of intent for Copyright enforcement by Disney (as demonstrated by a quick quashing of an offensive use of Snow White), Disney began to periodically increase the list of LOLA-permitted characters, which were released in a phased approach that built anticipation, and thus interest.
This deal, which caused an uproar, with many predicting a disastrous spiral of lost IP rights and revenues, shocked everyone by actually making a small revenue stream for Disney and not cutting appreciably into official merchandise sales. While revenues from the sharing arrangement and any “claimed with compensation” spec works are rarely more than a drop in the bucket for a company with a Market Capitalization of over $65 billion, it’s usually been more than enough to cover any litigation needed when people break the rules or abuse the LOLA. And the Disney fandom has been, on the whole, more than happy to report any abuses they see to Disney due to a combination of loyalty and fear that Disney, if they suffer enough loss from LOLA abuses, will restrict or revoke the LOLA entirely.
Still, abuses do happen and the Legal Weasels have to occasionally take legal action to quash LOLA rules breakers or those who “hide revenues”. To date, the largest LOLA-related case came down to battling an online “consortium” of merch creators working in collaboration, each individually making below the then-$35,000 threshold, but making over $2 million in aggregate revenues. The Legal Weasels managed to demonstrate that the consortium was working “in open collaboration” via public posts and subpoenaed emails and online money exchanges and was thus in open violation of the LOLA. Disney ultimately claimed their 75% plus interest and damages and revoked the LOLA rights for all involved.
A similar issue affected a single producer who would sell right up to the threshold, then close his business, and then restart sales under a different name. Eventually, his use of the same IP Address for his server left a clear indication that it was one person. The Legal Weasels managed to demonstrate that he’d been knowingly violating the spirit of the LOLA, and claimed considerable back-earnings, interest, and damages before revoking LOLA for him. They caught him trying it again under a different name, and drove him into bankruptcy.
But other times the Legal Weasels have had less luck. In one case a pair of collaborators set up a scheme where the first person set up a LOLA agreement for some Mickey figurines, then sold them in bulk to his friend at a loss, who in turn then resold them “second hand” for a profit, that they then did not share with Disney. Disney had a hard time proving collusion and profit-hiding since they left no clear paper trail, and local law enforcement was uninterested in investigating a possible scam netting only a few thousand dollars in total profit when much bigger issues were plaguing the district. It was also a considerable amount of work for the two alleged conspirators, who likely didn’t make much more than they would have by playing fair. Disney simply did not renew the LOLA at the end of the specified term. And Henson, upon noting the similarities of their scheme to many of the “Hollywood accounting” practices that Disney-MGM still used despite his best efforts to clamp down on them, reportedly joked to Tom Wilhite “maybe we should hire these guys to do accounting for MGM.”
Also, in one case Disney’s own legal precedent came back to bite them. Much discussion had occurred back when first drafting the LOLA about how strictly to enforce the letter of the LOLA, as a strict interpretation could lead to open loophole abuse while a “spirit of the agreement” strategy could make it hard to enforce certain clauses. Jim Henson pushed for a more “spirit of the rules” interpretation in order to “best stimulate creative opportunity”. This approach helped Disney in their case against the above loophole abusers, but bit them in the behind later in the case of the Imagine a Green Future Society, a small trade society of various scientists, engineers, and technicians working in the renewable energy industry. Disney was at first more than happy to approve a LOLA agreement for them, given Chairman Jim’s values. And indeed, their first LOLA product, a fundraising T-shirt involving Pluto the Dog and a “Pluto Reactor”, was found to be a “good fit”. The second year’s shirt, Don Quixote and a Wind Turbine, likewise raised no issues.
However, Year Three’s shirt featured Mickey and Walt Disney’s jovial, smiling frozen head and celebrated the “WALTS HEAD” cryogenic energy storage technology, which caused outrage with the Disney family. Despite Henson trying to talk them out of it (he reportedly snorted with amusement upon seeing the shirt; “Walt just looked so happy to be there!”) the Legal Weasels tried to revoke the LOLA, citing the “poor taste” shirt to be “at odds with Disney’s Company Values”. However, the Society pushed back, claiming that the attempted invocation of the emergency stop was contrary to the spirit of the contract. They’d paid their fees to Disney, followed the rules, worked in good faith, and argued that the T-shirt, which had been their most popular to date, was doing no harm to the value of the characters or IP, and that Disney was not suffering a loss or any harm (it might mock Walt a bit, but his likeness as a public figure was not covered by LOLA and ultimately protected satirical free speech). And ultimately, a judge agreed. This resulted in Disney revising the LOLA to include limitations on the use of Walt and other Disney employees, and ultimately buying up the rights to (and all remaining items featuring) the WALTS HEAD design.
Unfortunately for Disney, and as Henson may have predicted, the story went viral on the Net, and the ensuing publicity resulted in the shirts and image, which previously had only seen a very small distribution among tech sector employees, becoming world famous, the offensive image plastered across the Net, and the few remaining shirts in circulation becoming valuable collectors’ items. Furthermore, this type of effect, where attempts to cover something up only speeds its mass discovery, has since been dubbed “The Walt’s Head Effect”[3] by the press.
The Legal Weasels have also had harder times battling Chinese and other foreign-located entities selling unlicensed and counterfeit merch irrespective of the LOLA, but Warner and others are having the same issues, LOLA or no LOLA. That’s just increasingly the price of doing business in the modern economy when a growing economic power fails to respect international IP law!
And yet despite these setbacks, the LOLA has in general had the effect of greatly improving public perceptions of Disney, gained them an almost obnoxiously loyal and vocal fanbase (who gladly rat out abusers), and even led to the occasional “big deal”, such as Jeff Marx and Robert Lopez’s 2001 minor hit Kermit, The Prince of Denmark, which made noteworthy profits on Broadway, the Big Screen, and home media alike, and led directly to follow-up deals with the two up-and-coming playwrights.
Coming soon… (Image source Goodreads)
Similarly, a recent animated short featuring Marvel’s Blade, done “spec” under LOLA by a CalArts student as his final project (and who subsequently went to work for Whoopass Studios), caught the attention of Marvel Chairman Stan Lee and CEO Jim Shooter, which led to an upcoming animated feature length movie from Whoopass Studios, set to enter production in 2010.
While it remains to be seen what the long-term effects of the LOLA will be, in the past decade it has been a public relations coup and a small new revenue stream and freelance content creation pipeline. No one has tried to challenge the legality of LOLA in court as of yet (though Warner reportedly threatened to), and had the Bono Act failed, Disney would have gotten out ahead of the deal, and positioned themselves to retain some limited control over post-2003 content.
Either way, the growing Internet is already becoming a haven for Fan Works and Homebrew, with LOLA-derived Disney/Muppets/Marvel IP leading the pack. And numerous smaller companies, such as Whoopass and Bird Brain, have set up similar LOLA-type systems. Paramount has begun experimenting with a LOLA exclusive to Star Trek, given the already rabid fandom. And Lucasfilm is reportedly “in serious debate” about following suit.
“If properly enforced, monitored, and managed, a LOLA-type arrangement can make a notable profit,” said one Harvard Law School professor. “In Disney’s case, it has actually reduced counterfeit merch since it’s generally cheaper to give Disney their due percentage than it is to fight them in court, and a single letter in the mail usually leads to a fast out of court settlement. A few people have gotten away with flying under the radar for a while or abusing loopholes, but Disney’s engagement and enforcement of the LOLA rules has made clear to patent lawyers that they have no intention to relinquish their IP copyright or trademark in any fundamental way.”
And while Disney openly engages with the LOLA content creators and only occasionally has to stamp down on “Trolls” creating inappropriate work that violates the LOLA, WB has had the opposite reaction, increasingly gaining a reputation as a “bully” that quashes Fan Works featuring Batman or Bugs Bunny. And visit any internet message board or social media site, and you’ll see plenty of love for Disney, and plenty of hate for WB, leading the latter to start rethinking their policy on outside content creators.
“Should I be worried that some kid in Canada is making a few thousand dollars selling Kermit shirts on the net?” asked Jim Henson when asked about the LOLA in 2001, speaking hypothetically at the time. “Absolutely not! Particularly if he uses some of that money to go see Kermit, The Prince of Denmark or fund a trip to Muppetland. Magic, like love, only becomes more magical the more you share it.”[4]
President Dick Nunis Retires, Replaced by Tom Wilhite
Disney Magazine, April 1999 Edition
(Image source I Know What Happened Today)
Anaheim – Being Disney’s President is a hard but important job! Richard “Dick” Nunis sure knows! And soon, current Disney-MGM Studios Chairman Thomas “Tom” Wilhite will be finding out for himself! Tom will soon take over from Dick as both Disney President and Chief Operations Officer, another important job keeping the company running! Tom and Dick have worked together well, without things getting too “hairy” as Chairman Jim Henson likes to say. Tom, on the other hand, will be replaced as Disney-MGM Studios Chairman by Michael Lynton, a former Disney Publishing VP who for the last few years has worked for Penguin Pictures as their Studio President. Welcome back, Michael!
Dick retired after over forty-four years working at the Happiest Place on Earth, having been originally hired by Walt Disney himself in 1955 to work at Disneyland. Dick thought at the time that it would just be a “summer job”. Little did he know! But before we “wave” goodbye to him (we’ll explain that reference soon!), just who is Dick Nunis? And who is Tom Wilhite? And for that matter, who is Michael Lynton? Let’s find out!
Dick Nunis’ Window on Main Street (Image source Flickr)
[Continues]
Jane Henson’s Nativity Coming to Immaculate Conception
Advertisement in the San Diego Union-Tribune, December 12, 1999
(Image source IndieGoGo)
Jane Nebel Henson, wife of Disney Chairman Jim Henson and co-founder of The Muppets, will be bringing a live performance of her Nativity, a Bunraku-inspired puppetry recreation of the Christmas Story, to Immaculate Conception Church in San Diego on Sunday the 19th of December. Executive produced by MLB Commissioner George W. Bush and funded by the Walt Disney Company, Nativity is a stylistic and elegant retelling of what Christians consider Chapter 1 of the “Greatest Story Ever Told”. With brilliant and intimate puppetry choreographed by Jane Henson and Bruce Schwartz, the events recounted in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke come alive like never before. Beautiful and modern, the grace and magic of the performance is so real and so true that even the physical presence of the puppetry performers themselves cannot break the magic spell.
Perfect for all ages and open to all faiths, Nativity is a performance that celebrates beauty, divinity, and grace. Performances happen every hour on the hour from 10 AM to 7 PM on the 19th. Performances are free. Donations of food, toys, or money are encouraged with all proceeds to support the San Diego Food Bank and Toys for Tots.
www.facebook.com
[1] The sheer randomness of Bono’s 1998 death in our timeline, asymptomatic intercranial hematoma following a skiing accident, is butterfly fodder to say the least.
[2] And if all of this sounds incredibly generous for a major corporation, it’s ironically based on the controversial, utterly despised Open Gaming License (OGL) 2.0 recently proposed by current D&D owner Wizards of the Coast. This proposed change to the OGL, which WotC abandoned after the ensuing outrage, claiming that they “rolled a 1” on that deal, would have been a drastic reduction in rights for the fans compared to the OGL 1.0, which is pretty much a free license to do what you want with WotC Trademarks and Copyrighted material with a few restrictions. The Disney LOLA is far less generous than even the hated OGL 2.0, but ironically, this same idea, when proposed from the opposite direction (i.e. a company giving fans more rights rather than less) would be seen as exceptionally generous rather than a greedy stab in the back.
And as to how this would affect Disney’s sales, just doing the basic math, if 1,000 people succeed in selling just under the $55,000 threshold, that’s hypothetically $5.5 million in revenue not made by Disney (assuming that every person who bought these LOLA products would have bought an equivalent official Disney product instead, which you can’t since some of it will be charitable or unique). However, it’s unlikely for that many people to make that much money given they’d be in competition with each other (much like how very few people make a living on Etsy, but plenty of people make some “side cash”), and producing in sufficient bulk to reduce costs and increase profit margins would quickly push you above the $55,000 mark and result in you owing a percentage to Disney. And since Disney can sell in super-bulk and manage premium contracts with suppliers and official licensees, even with a noteworthy markup for “Official” Disney merch, they remain highly competitive since the small-fry would have higher per-item costs or have to reduced quality to stay competitive.
And even if Disney loses a few million in merch revenues on the deal on a given year, it’s still orders of magnitude less than they will have spent that year on advertising, and end up doing far more to boost Disney’s brand awareness and perception than a thousand commercial campaigns. Or so its continued proponents maintain.
[3] We’d call it The Streisand Effect, based on Barbara Streisand’s 2003 legal attempts to quash a shoreline erosion scientist’s website that inadvertently featured an image of her California mansion. The lawsuit caught the attention of the web, causing the issue to go viral, resulting in tens of millions seeing an image that, prior to her legal attempts to quash it, had only been seen by a few hundred, mostly scientists with no knowledge or care about whose mansion that was. And a huge Hat Tip to @El Pip for helping me “game” the LOLA system and coming up with the WALTS HEAD shirt saga!
[4] So, the obvious question becomes, “would this actually work? Or would Disney be opening up the floodgates to massive copyright infringement?” The short answer is “the significantly more generous OGL 1.0 worked for WotC”, though, while a very large publisher with over a billion dollars in revenue, they are far, far smaller than Disney even 20 years ago. And their recent attempt to change and restrict the OGL makes clear to me that they believed that they were losing revenue, while their willingness to quickly backtrack on that conversely indicates that their Public Image is more important to them than the “lost revenue”, suggesting that “boycott losses” from pissing off the fans would have significantly exceeded any revenues gained by implementing OGL 2.0 (I seriously doubt that Hasbro, WotC’s owners, really place their fans’ happiness over raw profits). The controversy of even proposing the tightening of restrictions has apparently already caused a major hit in revenue. Business Lesson #1: don’t piss off your main customers (Elon take note).
The longer answer would be “a lot will depend on how well Disney writes and enforces the terms of the LOLA, how clever the violators are, and what precedent is set by the initial judgements in the early enforcement cases and any subsequent appeals.” Though I’m no IP lawyer, I do deal with technical IP and Data Rights as part of my job and provide technical advice to the Patent Attorney on specific IP and rights issues, so I’m not wholly ignorant here. And I have tried, along with @El Pip (as you can fully see in the writeup), to “game” the system and figure out a) how to abuse the LOLA and b) how the Legal Weasels could fight back. My numbers and conclusions speak to my assumptions, though much is speculative here, so before you go trying such a thing with your own IP, remember to “CYA”: “Consult Your Attorney”. #NotLegalAdvice
So, in short, the answer to whether this would work is “maybe”. I believe it could work and work well if done right, but I may be missing something that will be obvious to someone else, so let me know if I left in any “wide open back doors” that would prove disastrous and I will retcon.
Bloomberg, July 2008 Edition
In 1998 the 105th Congress, spurred in large part by the recent passage of the EU’s Copyright Duration Directive and intense industry lobbying, passed the Copyright Term Extension Act, a.k.a. “The Sonny Bono Act” after its sponsor, a.k.a. “The Porky Protection Act”. It might have been called “The Mickey Mouse Protection Act” save for one major factor: Walt Disney Entertainment was not advocating for the bill.
For those who see Disney as a “friendly family company” overseen by the smiling faces of Walt Disney and Jim Henson, it might seem the anathema of the “House of the Mouse” to support such “greed-driven corporate welfare”. But the fact remains that the Walt Disney Entertainment Company, Federal Stock Listing “DIS”, is a major international Fortune 100 corporation and one of the Dow Jones 40 that benefitted greatly from the Act’s passage. And in the past, they openly supported and even actively lobbied for similar legislation, being a prime driver in the similar 1976 Copyright Act.
The Bill’s Sponsor, Representative Sonny Bono, 1998[1]
And unlike Porky, who had until 2010 before Copyright expired on his first appearance, 1935’s “I Haven’t Got a Hat”, Disney’s most iconic character, indeed their central Trademark image, Mickey Mouse, was set to enter the Public Domain in 2003 when “Steamboat Willie” reached the 75-year mark.
And make no bones about it, many at Disney were pushing for full support of the bill, Vice Chairman Roy Disney chief among them.
But, interestingly enough, Disney had already slightly loosened its copyright protections on certain derivative works under certain terms and conditions. And it all started with Dungeons & Dragons.
We’ll get to that later.
By staying out of the fight, Disney avoided a torrent of bad publicity. Bono, of course, whose own musical IP gave him what was seen by many as a conflict of interest, became the butt of several jokes, with David Letterman suggesting that “Sonny never was one much to share/Cher”. And while numerous studios and the families of dead artists were supporting the bill, including Columbia, Universal, and United Artists, Warner Brothers became the poster corporation and their President and COO John Peters the “face of corporate greed”. Porky Pig, their most endangered asset, became irrevocably associated with the bill when Peters specifically called out the stuttering porker in a news conference supporting the legislation. The clear connection between “Porky” and “Pork”, or legislation that serves special rather than national interests, was unavoidable.
By staying out of the fray, Disney Chairman Jim Henson could, without deception, hypocrisy, or irony, declare his utter befuddlement about the whole deal, and even speak about how Disney was fully supportive of its fans and followers. Henson could, without irony, note how much Disney had benefited from Public Domain works, with a majority of Disney Princesses being derivative of classic Public Domain IP, like Cinderella and Snow White. Henson also saw little to fear with Mickey Mouse entering Public Domain. After all, almost anyone could use Mickey or other Disney Copyrighted material or even Trademarks within certain limited terms and conditions, and even make a small profit from them. Only the Steamboat Willie versions of Mickey and Minnie were to be “up for grabs” in 2003. And Disney still retained full Trademark protections in perpetuity under existing law.
The whole arrangement actually began very small, initiated by Tactical Systems Rules, or TSR, a division of Marvel Entertainment, itself a division of Disney. TSR, the company behind the iconic Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying game and similar products, had long had a very open and permissive relationship with its fans, going back to its early days in the late 1970s. “Homebrew” adventures, rules, characters, and monsters were de rigueur, and even occasionally got adopted by TSR as Canon. In fact, the Thief Character Class, one of the four cornerstone classes alongside Fighter, Mage, and Cleric, began as a Homebrew creation that Gary Gygax found fascinating and even helped shape when its fan-creators cold-called him.
When Marvel ultimately acquired TSR after being itself acquired by Disney, they acted in much the same way. And being such a relatively small cog in the giant machine of Disney, their laisses faire approach to copyright and trademark largely flew under the radar.
But this all changed when Mickeyquest was born in the late 1980s. A simplified game based on the classic Disney and Muppets characters and meant to “help children expand their imagination while learning valuable social and math skills”, Mickeyquest soon spawned its own Homebrew, this time using Trademarked Disney characters like Mickey and Donald! Disney’s legal team, the so-called “Legal Weasels”, cried fowl…err…foul, but TSR Chairman Gary Gygax pushed back, citing Homebrew as not just an indelible part of the gaming culture, but a rather lucrative source of great ideas and fan loyalty.
“I just made three million in profit selling a fan-written adventure module,” he told the board.
The issue of Disney Copyright and Trademark protections was a source of great consternation at the time. As Calvin & Hobbes creator Bill Waterston discovered to his chagrin, failure to enforce or take advantage of one’s Trademarks and Copyrights could, perversely, endanger them. One overenthusiastic Legal Weasel had, following this line of thought, sent a Strongly Worded Letter to the owners of a small private daycare who’d painted Snow White on one of their internal walls. Chairman Henson, mortified when the story reached him, openly apologized to the center and even sent them a donation and granted them a limited one-time allowance for use of the Trademarked image.
The possible price of not protecting your Copyright (Image source Etsy)
These two moments soon collided in the Weasel’s Den, and after long and reportedly “lively” discussions, a new ruleset was worked out: a Limited Open License Agreement (LOLA) that allowed for private individuals and certain child-associated small businesses and charities under a certain size and value threshold (such as day care centers) to “limited use” of certain Disney Trademarked images and Copywrite within a specified (and renewable) time frame, subject to certain restrictions, such as open acknowledgement of Disney Trademark and Copyright, where applicable. Also, certain “inappropriate representations” of the Disney trademarks would be absolutely forbidden (the “Disney-Pricesses.net” adult website stuck in their memory here), as would “anything used in the advocacy of hate, violence, or other things deemed at odds with Disney’s Company Values, as defined wholly by Disney”. Partisan political causes were wholly banned, though certain apolitical charitable and non-profit uses were allowable. Few restrictions were put upon derivative “Fan Works” done for no profit (though such works are generally considered allowable under “Fair Use” statutes anyway).
And most interestingly, in something that evolved directly out of TSR, some limited Derivative Works that met the Terms, Conditions, and Restrictions, could actually be used in a limited commercial fashion if used by narrowly defined “Independent Individuals” and “charitable organizations” who a) got advanced permission from Disney, b) gave Disney full rights to claim full ownership after reasonable compensation to the “Freelance Content Creator”, and c) if the Creator agreed to give Disney a percentage of all profits made once a certain minimum revenue threshold (originally $10,000, currently up to $55,000)[2] was reached. Disney profit share began at 5% and scaled up to 75% as revenues increased beyond the minimum threshold. To keep LOLA licensees small and thus limit their potential for becoming serious competition to official merch, a maximum revenue threshold was also established, originally $100,000, now $500,000, beyond which the LOLA licensee was given the choice of scaling back, ceasing sales of derivative works and ending the LOLA, or forging a formal licensing agreement with Disney.
This last aspect, it was hoped, would help limit the damage potential from “bad actors” trying to game the system by simply, for example, reinvesting all revenues into employee salaries or facilities, and thus having no real “profit”. A small measure of loss to such “profit hiding” was expected, with Disney figuring a little bit of “scam loss” was worth the good PR, comparing it to advertising expenses, but they clearly wanted to avoid massive abuses ran into six figures or more. An alternative option involving claiming a share of gross revenues was rejected since this led to the real possibility that the LOLA licensee might actually lose money while Disney made money, creating bad press.
Also, as an “emergency stop”, Disney retained the right to unilaterally revoke any and all LOLA permissions as they saw fit. Though as we shall see, this didn’t always work as planned.
It’s worth noting that there may be a less-than-charitable reason behind the minimum threshold as well, as the legal and overhead costs of claiming their share would have likely exceeded any revenues Disney made below the lowest total revenue threshold. It’s also notable that Disney individual and family vacation packages for their parks and cruises are typically in the $5,000-25,000 range, with some Premium Packages going for $50,000 or more, meaning that successful LOLA Creators are primed with just the right amount of cash for a Disney vacation, leading to speculation that Disney is effectively giving its fans a tool to fund their Disney Vacation in a self-serving circle. Special deals for LOLA Participants would seem to confirm this hypothesis.
Even with these protections in place, Disney, with the potential of losing billions of dollars in IP should the plan backfire and nullify their copyright and trademark protections, started small. They began with the old black & white versions of Mickey and Minnie and Oswald and Ortensia, which were already endangered, as well as Snow White, which would be the first Disney Princess at risk of going into the Public Domain should the Bono Act fail. When Universal tried to reclaim the rights to Oswald claiming that the LOLA showed that Disney was no longer enforcing Copyright, the Legal Weasels managed to point to rock solid language in the LOLA and cite pertinent precedent on other Copyright claims to fend off the challenge. With precedent thus established that the LOLA’s very limited and revokable nature did not indicate a lack of intent for Copyright enforcement by Disney (as demonstrated by a quick quashing of an offensive use of Snow White), Disney began to periodically increase the list of LOLA-permitted characters, which were released in a phased approach that built anticipation, and thus interest.
This deal, which caused an uproar, with many predicting a disastrous spiral of lost IP rights and revenues, shocked everyone by actually making a small revenue stream for Disney and not cutting appreciably into official merchandise sales. While revenues from the sharing arrangement and any “claimed with compensation” spec works are rarely more than a drop in the bucket for a company with a Market Capitalization of over $65 billion, it’s usually been more than enough to cover any litigation needed when people break the rules or abuse the LOLA. And the Disney fandom has been, on the whole, more than happy to report any abuses they see to Disney due to a combination of loyalty and fear that Disney, if they suffer enough loss from LOLA abuses, will restrict or revoke the LOLA entirely.
Still, abuses do happen and the Legal Weasels have to occasionally take legal action to quash LOLA rules breakers or those who “hide revenues”. To date, the largest LOLA-related case came down to battling an online “consortium” of merch creators working in collaboration, each individually making below the then-$35,000 threshold, but making over $2 million in aggregate revenues. The Legal Weasels managed to demonstrate that the consortium was working “in open collaboration” via public posts and subpoenaed emails and online money exchanges and was thus in open violation of the LOLA. Disney ultimately claimed their 75% plus interest and damages and revoked the LOLA rights for all involved.
A similar issue affected a single producer who would sell right up to the threshold, then close his business, and then restart sales under a different name. Eventually, his use of the same IP Address for his server left a clear indication that it was one person. The Legal Weasels managed to demonstrate that he’d been knowingly violating the spirit of the LOLA, and claimed considerable back-earnings, interest, and damages before revoking LOLA for him. They caught him trying it again under a different name, and drove him into bankruptcy.
But other times the Legal Weasels have had less luck. In one case a pair of collaborators set up a scheme where the first person set up a LOLA agreement for some Mickey figurines, then sold them in bulk to his friend at a loss, who in turn then resold them “second hand” for a profit, that they then did not share with Disney. Disney had a hard time proving collusion and profit-hiding since they left no clear paper trail, and local law enforcement was uninterested in investigating a possible scam netting only a few thousand dollars in total profit when much bigger issues were plaguing the district. It was also a considerable amount of work for the two alleged conspirators, who likely didn’t make much more than they would have by playing fair. Disney simply did not renew the LOLA at the end of the specified term. And Henson, upon noting the similarities of their scheme to many of the “Hollywood accounting” practices that Disney-MGM still used despite his best efforts to clamp down on them, reportedly joked to Tom Wilhite “maybe we should hire these guys to do accounting for MGM.”
Also, in one case Disney’s own legal precedent came back to bite them. Much discussion had occurred back when first drafting the LOLA about how strictly to enforce the letter of the LOLA, as a strict interpretation could lead to open loophole abuse while a “spirit of the agreement” strategy could make it hard to enforce certain clauses. Jim Henson pushed for a more “spirit of the rules” interpretation in order to “best stimulate creative opportunity”. This approach helped Disney in their case against the above loophole abusers, but bit them in the behind later in the case of the Imagine a Green Future Society, a small trade society of various scientists, engineers, and technicians working in the renewable energy industry. Disney was at first more than happy to approve a LOLA agreement for them, given Chairman Jim’s values. And indeed, their first LOLA product, a fundraising T-shirt involving Pluto the Dog and a “Pluto Reactor”, was found to be a “good fit”. The second year’s shirt, Don Quixote and a Wind Turbine, likewise raised no issues.
However, Year Three’s shirt featured Mickey and Walt Disney’s jovial, smiling frozen head and celebrated the “WALTS HEAD” cryogenic energy storage technology, which caused outrage with the Disney family. Despite Henson trying to talk them out of it (he reportedly snorted with amusement upon seeing the shirt; “Walt just looked so happy to be there!”) the Legal Weasels tried to revoke the LOLA, citing the “poor taste” shirt to be “at odds with Disney’s Company Values”. However, the Society pushed back, claiming that the attempted invocation of the emergency stop was contrary to the spirit of the contract. They’d paid their fees to Disney, followed the rules, worked in good faith, and argued that the T-shirt, which had been their most popular to date, was doing no harm to the value of the characters or IP, and that Disney was not suffering a loss or any harm (it might mock Walt a bit, but his likeness as a public figure was not covered by LOLA and ultimately protected satirical free speech). And ultimately, a judge agreed. This resulted in Disney revising the LOLA to include limitations on the use of Walt and other Disney employees, and ultimately buying up the rights to (and all remaining items featuring) the WALTS HEAD design.
Unfortunately for Disney, and as Henson may have predicted, the story went viral on the Net, and the ensuing publicity resulted in the shirts and image, which previously had only seen a very small distribution among tech sector employees, becoming world famous, the offensive image plastered across the Net, and the few remaining shirts in circulation becoming valuable collectors’ items. Furthermore, this type of effect, where attempts to cover something up only speeds its mass discovery, has since been dubbed “The Walt’s Head Effect”[3] by the press.
The Legal Weasels have also had harder times battling Chinese and other foreign-located entities selling unlicensed and counterfeit merch irrespective of the LOLA, but Warner and others are having the same issues, LOLA or no LOLA. That’s just increasingly the price of doing business in the modern economy when a growing economic power fails to respect international IP law!
And yet despite these setbacks, the LOLA has in general had the effect of greatly improving public perceptions of Disney, gained them an almost obnoxiously loyal and vocal fanbase (who gladly rat out abusers), and even led to the occasional “big deal”, such as Jeff Marx and Robert Lopez’s 2001 minor hit Kermit, The Prince of Denmark, which made noteworthy profits on Broadway, the Big Screen, and home media alike, and led directly to follow-up deals with the two up-and-coming playwrights.
Coming soon… (Image source Goodreads)
Similarly, a recent animated short featuring Marvel’s Blade, done “spec” under LOLA by a CalArts student as his final project (and who subsequently went to work for Whoopass Studios), caught the attention of Marvel Chairman Stan Lee and CEO Jim Shooter, which led to an upcoming animated feature length movie from Whoopass Studios, set to enter production in 2010.
While it remains to be seen what the long-term effects of the LOLA will be, in the past decade it has been a public relations coup and a small new revenue stream and freelance content creation pipeline. No one has tried to challenge the legality of LOLA in court as of yet (though Warner reportedly threatened to), and had the Bono Act failed, Disney would have gotten out ahead of the deal, and positioned themselves to retain some limited control over post-2003 content.
Either way, the growing Internet is already becoming a haven for Fan Works and Homebrew, with LOLA-derived Disney/Muppets/Marvel IP leading the pack. And numerous smaller companies, such as Whoopass and Bird Brain, have set up similar LOLA-type systems. Paramount has begun experimenting with a LOLA exclusive to Star Trek, given the already rabid fandom. And Lucasfilm is reportedly “in serious debate” about following suit.
“If properly enforced, monitored, and managed, a LOLA-type arrangement can make a notable profit,” said one Harvard Law School professor. “In Disney’s case, it has actually reduced counterfeit merch since it’s generally cheaper to give Disney their due percentage than it is to fight them in court, and a single letter in the mail usually leads to a fast out of court settlement. A few people have gotten away with flying under the radar for a while or abusing loopholes, but Disney’s engagement and enforcement of the LOLA rules has made clear to patent lawyers that they have no intention to relinquish their IP copyright or trademark in any fundamental way.”
And while Disney openly engages with the LOLA content creators and only occasionally has to stamp down on “Trolls” creating inappropriate work that violates the LOLA, WB has had the opposite reaction, increasingly gaining a reputation as a “bully” that quashes Fan Works featuring Batman or Bugs Bunny. And visit any internet message board or social media site, and you’ll see plenty of love for Disney, and plenty of hate for WB, leading the latter to start rethinking their policy on outside content creators.
“Should I be worried that some kid in Canada is making a few thousand dollars selling Kermit shirts on the net?” asked Jim Henson when asked about the LOLA in 2001, speaking hypothetically at the time. “Absolutely not! Particularly if he uses some of that money to go see Kermit, The Prince of Denmark or fund a trip to Muppetland. Magic, like love, only becomes more magical the more you share it.”[4]
President Dick Nunis Retires, Replaced by Tom Wilhite
Disney Magazine, April 1999 Edition
(Image source I Know What Happened Today)
Anaheim – Being Disney’s President is a hard but important job! Richard “Dick” Nunis sure knows! And soon, current Disney-MGM Studios Chairman Thomas “Tom” Wilhite will be finding out for himself! Tom will soon take over from Dick as both Disney President and Chief Operations Officer, another important job keeping the company running! Tom and Dick have worked together well, without things getting too “hairy” as Chairman Jim Henson likes to say. Tom, on the other hand, will be replaced as Disney-MGM Studios Chairman by Michael Lynton, a former Disney Publishing VP who for the last few years has worked for Penguin Pictures as their Studio President. Welcome back, Michael!
Dick retired after over forty-four years working at the Happiest Place on Earth, having been originally hired by Walt Disney himself in 1955 to work at Disneyland. Dick thought at the time that it would just be a “summer job”. Little did he know! But before we “wave” goodbye to him (we’ll explain that reference soon!), just who is Dick Nunis? And who is Tom Wilhite? And for that matter, who is Michael Lynton? Let’s find out!
Dick Nunis’ Window on Main Street (Image source Flickr)
[Continues]
Jane Henson’s Nativity Coming to Immaculate Conception
Advertisement in the San Diego Union-Tribune, December 12, 1999
(Image source IndieGoGo)
Jane Nebel Henson, wife of Disney Chairman Jim Henson and co-founder of The Muppets, will be bringing a live performance of her Nativity, a Bunraku-inspired puppetry recreation of the Christmas Story, to Immaculate Conception Church in San Diego on Sunday the 19th of December. Executive produced by MLB Commissioner George W. Bush and funded by the Walt Disney Company, Nativity is a stylistic and elegant retelling of what Christians consider Chapter 1 of the “Greatest Story Ever Told”. With brilliant and intimate puppetry choreographed by Jane Henson and Bruce Schwartz, the events recounted in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke come alive like never before. Beautiful and modern, the grace and magic of the performance is so real and so true that even the physical presence of the puppetry performers themselves cannot break the magic spell.
Perfect for all ages and open to all faiths, Nativity is a performance that celebrates beauty, divinity, and grace. Performances happen every hour on the hour from 10 AM to 7 PM on the 19th. Performances are free. Donations of food, toys, or money are encouraged with all proceeds to support the San Diego Food Bank and Toys for Tots.
A New York Christmas to Remember: The Nativity | Watch the beautiful puppetry of Jane Henson's Nativity Story Live Stage Tour. Remember that Christ is the #ReasonForTheSeason. 🎵 Listen:... | By Muppet CentralFacebook
Watch the beautiful puppetry of Jane Henson's Nativity Story Live Stage Tour. Remember that Christ is the #ReasonForTheSeason. 🎵 Listen:...
www.facebook.com
[1] The sheer randomness of Bono’s 1998 death in our timeline, asymptomatic intercranial hematoma following a skiing accident, is butterfly fodder to say the least.
[2] And if all of this sounds incredibly generous for a major corporation, it’s ironically based on the controversial, utterly despised Open Gaming License (OGL) 2.0 recently proposed by current D&D owner Wizards of the Coast. This proposed change to the OGL, which WotC abandoned after the ensuing outrage, claiming that they “rolled a 1” on that deal, would have been a drastic reduction in rights for the fans compared to the OGL 1.0, which is pretty much a free license to do what you want with WotC Trademarks and Copyrighted material with a few restrictions. The Disney LOLA is far less generous than even the hated OGL 2.0, but ironically, this same idea, when proposed from the opposite direction (i.e. a company giving fans more rights rather than less) would be seen as exceptionally generous rather than a greedy stab in the back.
And as to how this would affect Disney’s sales, just doing the basic math, if 1,000 people succeed in selling just under the $55,000 threshold, that’s hypothetically $5.5 million in revenue not made by Disney (assuming that every person who bought these LOLA products would have bought an equivalent official Disney product instead, which you can’t since some of it will be charitable or unique). However, it’s unlikely for that many people to make that much money given they’d be in competition with each other (much like how very few people make a living on Etsy, but plenty of people make some “side cash”), and producing in sufficient bulk to reduce costs and increase profit margins would quickly push you above the $55,000 mark and result in you owing a percentage to Disney. And since Disney can sell in super-bulk and manage premium contracts with suppliers and official licensees, even with a noteworthy markup for “Official” Disney merch, they remain highly competitive since the small-fry would have higher per-item costs or have to reduced quality to stay competitive.
And even if Disney loses a few million in merch revenues on the deal on a given year, it’s still orders of magnitude less than they will have spent that year on advertising, and end up doing far more to boost Disney’s brand awareness and perception than a thousand commercial campaigns. Or so its continued proponents maintain.
[3] We’d call it The Streisand Effect, based on Barbara Streisand’s 2003 legal attempts to quash a shoreline erosion scientist’s website that inadvertently featured an image of her California mansion. The lawsuit caught the attention of the web, causing the issue to go viral, resulting in tens of millions seeing an image that, prior to her legal attempts to quash it, had only been seen by a few hundred, mostly scientists with no knowledge or care about whose mansion that was. And a huge Hat Tip to @El Pip for helping me “game” the LOLA system and coming up with the WALTS HEAD shirt saga!
[4] So, the obvious question becomes, “would this actually work? Or would Disney be opening up the floodgates to massive copyright infringement?” The short answer is “the significantly more generous OGL 1.0 worked for WotC”, though, while a very large publisher with over a billion dollars in revenue, they are far, far smaller than Disney even 20 years ago. And their recent attempt to change and restrict the OGL makes clear to me that they believed that they were losing revenue, while their willingness to quickly backtrack on that conversely indicates that their Public Image is more important to them than the “lost revenue”, suggesting that “boycott losses” from pissing off the fans would have significantly exceeded any revenues gained by implementing OGL 2.0 (I seriously doubt that Hasbro, WotC’s owners, really place their fans’ happiness over raw profits). The controversy of even proposing the tightening of restrictions has apparently already caused a major hit in revenue. Business Lesson #1: don’t piss off your main customers (Elon take note).
The longer answer would be “a lot will depend on how well Disney writes and enforces the terms of the LOLA, how clever the violators are, and what precedent is set by the initial judgements in the early enforcement cases and any subsequent appeals.” Though I’m no IP lawyer, I do deal with technical IP and Data Rights as part of my job and provide technical advice to the Patent Attorney on specific IP and rights issues, so I’m not wholly ignorant here. And I have tried, along with @El Pip (as you can fully see in the writeup), to “game” the system and figure out a) how to abuse the LOLA and b) how the Legal Weasels could fight back. My numbers and conclusions speak to my assumptions, though much is speculative here, so before you go trying such a thing with your own IP, remember to “CYA”: “Consult Your Attorney”. #NotLegalAdvice
So, in short, the answer to whether this would work is “maybe”. I believe it could work and work well if done right, but I may be missing something that will be obvious to someone else, so let me know if I left in any “wide open back doors” that would prove disastrous and I will retcon.
Sonny lives, I hopefully look forward to his next political campaign with the slogan "I've Got You, America!"
Just when you think it can’t get any better, Disney avoids joining the Dark Side.
- Status