I hope so but not by that name.Question, @Geekhis Khan : will we have to stay tuned for Fox Kids?
Fox Kids
Fox Kids was an American children's programming block that aired on Fox from September 8, 1990 to September 7, 2002, as well as the former branding for a slate of international children's television channels. The programming block aired on Saturday mornings throughout its existence; an...90scartoons.fandom.com
A Hippie in the House of Mouse (Jim Henson at Disney, 1980)
- Thread starter Geekhis Khan
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Maybe we can call it by the name of "Triad Toons", given how both entities of Fox have merged with Paramount?
I can see this being a thing in a TV interview during the 90s, especially after Hunt and Ashman's deaths to AIDS.
But you know what would be a huge bombshell? Disney officially endorsing Gay Days/Pride during the late 90s or early 2000s, merch and all.
Gay Days at Walt Disney World - Wikipedia
What about Disney's Not-So-Scary Week? It's even more blatant in its message of being a fun and less scary Halloween Event than other theme parks.
But as of Halloweentown? That's essentially what the parks would become during the week since it's a week-long event and they can afford to invest in more decorations.
With the 1998 film as the inspiration the daytime and The Nightmare Before Christmas at night.
I don't know if they would be able to do two sets of decorations every single day. More likely that they will decorate the parks shortly before the event (either as standard Halloween fare or ones based on Disney IPs) and then slowly take them down to make way for The Nightmare Before Christmas / Christmas decor for the holiday season.
Although I'd love to see the film either take inspiration from Not-So-Scary Week or become associated with it so it becomes more popular than OTL.
I wasn't think complete decoration change, just a change in lighting and walk arounds.
That's probably more realistic. In fact, maybe a Jack Skellington walkaround is exclusive to the event since he moves to the Haunted Mansion during the holidays.
The Song of Susan
Chapter 15; The Song of Susan
Excerpt from Renegade Suit, the autobiography of David Lazer (with Jay O’Brian)
Jim was devastated to learn about Richard Hunt’s and Howard Ashman’s illness, though at the time I only knew about Richard, who told me himself. Howard’s illness was a secret even to his musical partner Alan Menken at the time. AIDS was very poorly understood back then. Scientists had only recently discovered the HIV virus and the anti-retroviral drugs hadn’t yet seen wide distribution. To have AIDS was a slow but inevitable death sentence. And to make matters worse, it wasn’t getting the attention that it needed. The government was blasé about it all and many of the self-proclaimed moral authorities were blaming the victims, suggesting that it was “God’s justice” in action because the disease was primarily affecting homosexual men in the US.
Jim wasn’t having it. He made sure that Richard and Howard both got every medical advantage they could, which wasn’t much back then. He was also bound and determined to raise awareness. The disease had been something abstract for him (and me) prior to that moment. We were all scared and horrified at the devastation of the disease, but much in the same way we were horrified and scared about the famine in Ethiopia. It was horrible, but it was somewhere else.
Now AIDS wasn’t “somewhere else”. It was killing the men we loved.
Jim, Bernie, Diana, and I decided that we would do something about it. We would use the resources we had to make a difference. Not only was the Walt Disney Entertainment Company going to donate to AIDS research and treatment, but MGM was going to produce a new movie specifically about the AIDS crisis. And we were going to make sure that Middle America knew it was their problem too. The Song of Susan was thus born.
To our happy surprise Ron Miller, Frank Wells, and the board didn’t resist. Frank, in fact, let us know that money was no obstacle. Tom Wilhite, the president of MGM, was happy to support us. Because for all the homophobic victim blaming, the truth was that the disease did not discriminate. Disease, unlike man, never does. We heard more than one story about unambiguously innocent people like children getting AIDS due to blood transfusions, or in some cases simply being born to an infected mother. The disease was guaranteed to spread further. It would not stay in one population no matter how much some people assumed it would. We were going to make it clear to all of America that this wasn’t a “gay man’s problem”, it was everyone’s problem.
Our heroine would be Susan, a young, suburban middle-class girl of 17 whose bike is hit by a drunk driver and who contracts HIV through a blood transfusion. We cast Molly Ringwald to drive home the “girl next door” aspect. Though by all accounts a “good girl” who participates in her church and school, Susan suddenly becomes a pariah in her community as salacious and malicious rumors spread. Suddenly she’s forced to confront the very bigotry and judgement that less privileged people have to go through every day. She befriends Benny, played by Richard Hunt, an HIV-positive gay man, and through their experiences we learn the horrors of disease and prejudice.
We set the film in New York, with Susan a Long Island girl. To write and direct we found Ron Nyswaner, who turned Jim Henson’s film treatment into a deeply moving screenplay. We made it an MGM film to further add gravitas to the production. Diana and I would share the producer credit while Jim and Bernie would claim the executive producer billet. Howard, who was working near non-stop already on Mort and developing songs and a treatment on his own for an animated Aladdin[1], wrote a single, beautiful original song to go with the soundtrack, “The Song of Susan”, performed by Freddy Mercury, who wrote the rest of the beautiful and poignant sound track.
Freddy was an early add, having approached us to work on it, and working for scale at that. He’d lost many friends and loved ones to the disease already. He was honestly irate to hear about Howard. “It’s all bloody bullshit, you know?” Freddy told me years later. “For most of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s I’d slept around and did drugs and basically lived like a stupid rock star with a death wish. Meanwhile, old Howard was faithful and true to every man that he loved, which wasn’t many. And his strongest drug was dry sherry. Unfortunately, one of the men that he loved lived more like I used to. And yet Howard dies and I somehow dodge the bullet[2]. I guess the universe has a fucked sense of irony, you know?”
By this point Howard was losing his once-incredible stamina and we were flying animators and directors and producers out to Fishkill, NY, to work with him. In addition to Richard, Jim secretly had Howard, who was very sick at the time but doing an incredible job of hiding it, make a cameo. Most of us didn’t know about it until the film debuted. It was how most of us learned about Howard being sick.
Howard and Freddy won the Oscar for the song, along with a Grammy for both song and soundtrack. Richard won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for the film. We lost Howard just a year later and Richard a year or so after that.
The Song of Susan received near universal praise at the time of its release. It’s gotten some pushback in recent years, but we remain proud of it and of the awareness we brought to what was an issue that nobody wanted to talk about in 1989.
For me, it will always be my greatest and most important production, not for what it did for my reputation, but what it did for Richard and Howard.
Requiescat in pace, Richard and Howard, and thank you both for the gifts that you gave to us all
[1] Aladdin was Howard Ashman’s idea, not a project envisioned in-house. He’d once played the character in Children’s Theater and loved the story and character. In our timeline Katzenberg didn’t like what they’d done with it and pushed it off, recruiting a reluctant Ashman to instead work on Beauty and the Beast, a film originally envisioned by Disney for Richard Williams’ team after Roger Rabbit. With Roger Rabbit animated in house in this world and Williams largely retired now that The Thief and the Cobbler has seen the light of day (much of his former staff went to Bluth), Beauty and the Beast as we know it has been butterflied.
[2] All of these were hard decisions to make, to say the least. Needless to say, determining when and how someone contracts a horrible disease, especially one that can show no symptoms for years, is a serious challenge. Freddy Mercury reportedly had a negative HIV test result in 1982 and hypothetically could have taken steps to protect himself. In this timeline it was a false positive that scared him into playing things more carefully, a small spot of hope and happiness in a sad part of the timeline. By contrast, Howard Ashman reportedly lived a monogamous life the whole time. Alas, his first long-term lover did not, and was dying of AIDS by 1982, so Howard was probably HIV positive already at this point. Hunt’s point of infection I can’t figure out, though according to Jim Henson: A Biography he was living with someone HIV positive by 1986, but was likely positive himself already at that point. Likely he'd been positive since the early 1980s. And this timeline has taken him to some of the early outbreak sites even before HIV had a name. There’s so much indiscriminate randomness to it all, that the end, I had to follow where the narrative took me, which was to accept the randomness and indiscriminate nature of it all, and simply attempt to honor those we lost and celebrate those we didn't in both timelines.
Excerpt from Renegade Suit, the autobiography of David Lazer (with Jay O’Brian)
Jim was devastated to learn about Richard Hunt’s and Howard Ashman’s illness, though at the time I only knew about Richard, who told me himself. Howard’s illness was a secret even to his musical partner Alan Menken at the time. AIDS was very poorly understood back then. Scientists had only recently discovered the HIV virus and the anti-retroviral drugs hadn’t yet seen wide distribution. To have AIDS was a slow but inevitable death sentence. And to make matters worse, it wasn’t getting the attention that it needed. The government was blasé about it all and many of the self-proclaimed moral authorities were blaming the victims, suggesting that it was “God’s justice” in action because the disease was primarily affecting homosexual men in the US.
Jim wasn’t having it. He made sure that Richard and Howard both got every medical advantage they could, which wasn’t much back then. He was also bound and determined to raise awareness. The disease had been something abstract for him (and me) prior to that moment. We were all scared and horrified at the devastation of the disease, but much in the same way we were horrified and scared about the famine in Ethiopia. It was horrible, but it was somewhere else.
Now AIDS wasn’t “somewhere else”. It was killing the men we loved.
Jim, Bernie, Diana, and I decided that we would do something about it. We would use the resources we had to make a difference. Not only was the Walt Disney Entertainment Company going to donate to AIDS research and treatment, but MGM was going to produce a new movie specifically about the AIDS crisis. And we were going to make sure that Middle America knew it was their problem too. The Song of Susan was thus born.
To our happy surprise Ron Miller, Frank Wells, and the board didn’t resist. Frank, in fact, let us know that money was no obstacle. Tom Wilhite, the president of MGM, was happy to support us. Because for all the homophobic victim blaming, the truth was that the disease did not discriminate. Disease, unlike man, never does. We heard more than one story about unambiguously innocent people like children getting AIDS due to blood transfusions, or in some cases simply being born to an infected mother. The disease was guaranteed to spread further. It would not stay in one population no matter how much some people assumed it would. We were going to make it clear to all of America that this wasn’t a “gay man’s problem”, it was everyone’s problem.
Our heroine would be Susan, a young, suburban middle-class girl of 17 whose bike is hit by a drunk driver and who contracts HIV through a blood transfusion. We cast Molly Ringwald to drive home the “girl next door” aspect. Though by all accounts a “good girl” who participates in her church and school, Susan suddenly becomes a pariah in her community as salacious and malicious rumors spread. Suddenly she’s forced to confront the very bigotry and judgement that less privileged people have to go through every day. She befriends Benny, played by Richard Hunt, an HIV-positive gay man, and through their experiences we learn the horrors of disease and prejudice.
We set the film in New York, with Susan a Long Island girl. To write and direct we found Ron Nyswaner, who turned Jim Henson’s film treatment into a deeply moving screenplay. We made it an MGM film to further add gravitas to the production. Diana and I would share the producer credit while Jim and Bernie would claim the executive producer billet. Howard, who was working near non-stop already on Mort and developing songs and a treatment on his own for an animated Aladdin[1], wrote a single, beautiful original song to go with the soundtrack, “The Song of Susan”, performed by Freddy Mercury, who wrote the rest of the beautiful and poignant sound track.
Freddy was an early add, having approached us to work on it, and working for scale at that. He’d lost many friends and loved ones to the disease already. He was honestly irate to hear about Howard. “It’s all bloody bullshit, you know?” Freddy told me years later. “For most of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s I’d slept around and did drugs and basically lived like a stupid rock star with a death wish. Meanwhile, old Howard was faithful and true to every man that he loved, which wasn’t many. And his strongest drug was dry sherry. Unfortunately, one of the men that he loved lived more like I used to. And yet Howard dies and I somehow dodge the bullet[2]. I guess the universe has a fucked sense of irony, you know?”
By this point Howard was losing his once-incredible stamina and we were flying animators and directors and producers out to Fishkill, NY, to work with him. In addition to Richard, Jim secretly had Howard, who was very sick at the time but doing an incredible job of hiding it, make a cameo. Most of us didn’t know about it until the film debuted. It was how most of us learned about Howard being sick.
Howard and Freddy won the Oscar for the song, along with a Grammy for both song and soundtrack. Richard won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for the film. We lost Howard just a year later and Richard a year or so after that.
The Song of Susan received near universal praise at the time of its release. It’s gotten some pushback in recent years, but we remain proud of it and of the awareness we brought to what was an issue that nobody wanted to talk about in 1989.
For me, it will always be my greatest and most important production, not for what it did for my reputation, but what it did for Richard and Howard.
Requiescat in pace, Richard and Howard, and thank you both for the gifts that you gave to us all
[1] Aladdin was Howard Ashman’s idea, not a project envisioned in-house. He’d once played the character in Children’s Theater and loved the story and character. In our timeline Katzenberg didn’t like what they’d done with it and pushed it off, recruiting a reluctant Ashman to instead work on Beauty and the Beast, a film originally envisioned by Disney for Richard Williams’ team after Roger Rabbit. With Roger Rabbit animated in house in this world and Williams largely retired now that The Thief and the Cobbler has seen the light of day (much of his former staff went to Bluth), Beauty and the Beast as we know it has been butterflied.
[2] All of these were hard decisions to make, to say the least. Needless to say, determining when and how someone contracts a horrible disease, especially one that can show no symptoms for years, is a serious challenge. Freddy Mercury reportedly had a negative HIV test result in 1982 and hypothetically could have taken steps to protect himself. In this timeline it was a false positive that scared him into playing things more carefully, a small spot of hope and happiness in a sad part of the timeline. By contrast, Howard Ashman reportedly lived a monogamous life the whole time. Alas, his first long-term lover did not, and was dying of AIDS by 1982, so Howard was probably HIV positive already at this point. Hunt’s point of infection I can’t figure out, though according to Jim Henson: A Biography he was living with someone HIV positive by 1986, but was likely positive himself already at that point. Likely he'd been positive since the early 1980s. And this timeline has taken him to some of the early outbreak sites even before HIV had a name. There’s so much indiscriminate randomness to it all, that the end, I had to follow where the narrative took me, which was to accept the randomness and indiscriminate nature of it all, and simply attempt to honor those we lost and celebrate those we didn't in both timelines.
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"Death does not discriminate between the sinners and the saints, it takes and it takes and it takes..."
- Lin-Manuel Miranda, 2016
- Lin-Manuel Miranda, 2016
"The Song of Susan, performed by Freddy Mercury, who wrote the rest of the beautiful and poignant sound track."
I am sure it is a beautiful song written by a incredible writer, and sung by that incredible voice.
Molly Ringwald seems perfectly cast here.
Thank you for having Disney ITTL highlight this disease and start to help fight against it. Hopefully other Corps and rich folk will chip in along with all the other people and it will make a real difference to combatting the spread, and helping those with it.
Is this HIV butterfly enough to effect national politics ITTL?
Very ponient chapter @Geekhis Khan
I am sure it is a beautiful song written by a incredible writer, and sung by that incredible voice.
Molly Ringwald seems perfectly cast here.
Thank you for having Disney ITTL highlight this disease and start to help fight against it. Hopefully other Corps and rich folk will chip in along with all the other people and it will make a real difference to combatting the spread, and helping those with it.
Is this HIV butterfly enough to effect national politics ITTL?
Very ponient chapter @Geekhis Khan
I had this idea in my head that John Lasseter would take over at least Scooter from Rich when the time is drawing near and it wouldn't stop bugging me unless I shared it with anyone. Mainly I saw in my head John L. Puppeteering Scooter at that ever-so-inevitable memorial service.
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So, does this mean that Freddie Mercury is still alive and kicking as of now?
Fantastic post Geekhis. It really shed a tear in my eye to see them being honored so much for their previous works and now for the Song of Susan.
With this film and the lack of push back from Wells, Miller, and the rest of the Disney execs, I'm pretty confident that Disney will be significantly more LGBT-friendly than OTL since they're now actively pursuing LGBT causes while also donating to worthy organizations for the community. In a decade where virulent opposition is mostly domestic and Disney is less dependent on foreign markets, it may be possible that Disney could do major milestones like openly endorse Gay Pride early on as a show of solidarity (instead of unofficial Gay Days). Maybe they'll even make a theatrical movie involving a LGBT character someday, but that's wishful thinking.
At least Freddie Mercury still lives in this timeline. That was an unexpected but a welcome butterfly.
I'm very glad that Ashman's Aladdin is going to survive, even if we have to sacrifice Beauty and the Beast to get it. As long as we get The Little Mermaid, then we have a trinity of strongly written and critically acclaimed films for the early 90s.
I thought about how Ashman could advance his initial drafts for Aladdin after reading his actual take on the story. If America is slightly more accepting of LGBT people thanks to the Song of Susan, then I think he could take Aladdin a step further and unofficially make him a bisexual character. Hear me out:
In his draft, Abbi is his love interest, yet she acts like a tomboy and in fact disguises herself as a guy for the majority of the film, to the point where he doesn't even recognize her as a girl. What if he slowly experiences a higher level of friendship and care for her over his other friends (Babkak, Omar, and Kasim) as a result of Abbi's advances towards him throughout the course of the film (lots of Ho Yay moments between them)? Of course Abbi reveals herself as a girl shortly before the finale and he openly professes his love for her by the end of the story, but make it so that her reveal wasn't what causes Aladdin to fall in love with her but instead her confession. While the general public wouldn't really catch onto this kind of hint, LGBT people would immediately get this as a sign that he could've fallen for Abbi if she was a guy. Boom. A queercoded bisexual protagonist.
Reminds me of Li Shang, actually.
Also, I am pleased that we won't get Agrabah and instead we are whisked away to an elaborate fantastical version of Baghdad. There could be concerns of presenting it at the highlight of the Gulf War, but since it's a magical Medieval Baghdad maybe it won't be regarded as negatively as people might think.
3D Image of the Round City of Baghdad from Reddit
As much as I love Ashman's Aladdin though, I wonder how Jim Henson would've reacted to the overall concept art of the film along with the lyrics, because Aladdin has gotten some heat by Arabs and other Muslims before for being very orientalist in nature, perpetuating negative stereotypes about Islamic/Arab culture in the process. Would he be offended and order changes to the film to present a more positive image or ignore it? Should be interested to see his response to the subject matter.
With this film and the lack of push back from Wells, Miller, and the rest of the Disney execs, I'm pretty confident that Disney will be significantly more LGBT-friendly than OTL since they're now actively pursuing LGBT causes while also donating to worthy organizations for the community. In a decade where virulent opposition is mostly domestic and Disney is less dependent on foreign markets, it may be possible that Disney could do major milestones like openly endorse Gay Pride early on as a show of solidarity (instead of unofficial Gay Days). Maybe they'll even make a theatrical movie involving a LGBT character someday, but that's wishful thinking.
At least Freddie Mercury still lives in this timeline. That was an unexpected but a welcome butterfly.
I'm very glad that Ashman's Aladdin is going to survive, even if we have to sacrifice Beauty and the Beast to get it. As long as we get The Little Mermaid, then we have a trinity of strongly written and critically acclaimed films for the early 90s.
I thought about how Ashman could advance his initial drafts for Aladdin after reading his actual take on the story. If America is slightly more accepting of LGBT people thanks to the Song of Susan, then I think he could take Aladdin a step further and unofficially make him a bisexual character. Hear me out:
In his draft, Abbi is his love interest, yet she acts like a tomboy and in fact disguises herself as a guy for the majority of the film, to the point where he doesn't even recognize her as a girl. What if he slowly experiences a higher level of friendship and care for her over his other friends (Babkak, Omar, and Kasim) as a result of Abbi's advances towards him throughout the course of the film (lots of Ho Yay moments between them)? Of course Abbi reveals herself as a girl shortly before the finale and he openly professes his love for her by the end of the story, but make it so that her reveal wasn't what causes Aladdin to fall in love with her but instead her confession. While the general public wouldn't really catch onto this kind of hint, LGBT people would immediately get this as a sign that he could've fallen for Abbi if she was a guy. Boom. A queercoded bisexual protagonist.
Reminds me of Li Shang, actually.
Also, I am pleased that we won't get Agrabah and instead we are whisked away to an elaborate fantastical version of Baghdad. There could be concerns of presenting it at the highlight of the Gulf War, but since it's a magical Medieval Baghdad maybe it won't be regarded as negatively as people might think.
3D Image of the Round City of Baghdad from Reddit
As much as I love Ashman's Aladdin though, I wonder how Jim Henson would've reacted to the overall concept art of the film along with the lyrics, because Aladdin has gotten some heat by Arabs and other Muslims before for being very orientalist in nature, perpetuating negative stereotypes about Islamic/Arab culture in the process. Would he be offended and order changes to the film to present a more positive image or ignore it? Should be interested to see his response to the subject matter.
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I wonder if this butterflies away Molly Ringwald's role in the teen pregnancy movie For Keeps--according to Ringwald and the screenwriters of the movie (this is from the tvtropes.org page on For Keeps, located here: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Trivia/ForKeeps) , it was supposed to be a cautionary, yet funny tale about teen pregnancy, but they picked the wrong person to direct--John G. Avilsden, who directed Rocky and The Karate Kid. Avilsden disliked the original script, and envisioned it as an uplifting love story, filming it as such, which pissed off Ringwald and the screenwriters, who clashed with him--he accused Ringwald of wanting to film a "condom commercial." The film was savaged at the box office and wrecked the careers of Ringwald and Avilsden...
Really, butterflying that film away would help Ringwald's career...
Also worth consideration is something closer to the original script where the Genie of the Lamp and the Genie of the Ring are constantly trying to outdo each other to be Aladdin's best friend.
Ironically, the lyrics are already a step down from the original racism:
Oh, I come from a land, from a faraway place
Where the caravan camels roam
Where they cut off your ear
If they don't like your face
It's barbaric, but hey, it's home
Oh, I come from a land, from a faraway place
Where the caravan camels roam
Where they cut off your ear
If they don't like your face
It's barbaric, but hey, it's home
The closest we have right now:
While it is wonderful to see Freddie Mercury survive, as you say a bright spot amongst the dark, there is a part of me that feels a more careful Freddie is somehow a lesser Freddie. There was always a sense of "Better to burn out than to fade away" about his life, without it he is a different person. Longer lived, maybe happier, maybe less, but certainly different.
Speaking of Freddie, perhaps he makes a cameo in Wayne's World?
Just a thought.
...OOH, or maybe an animated musical focused around Zoroastrian mythology, with music by Freddie!
The ‘as we know it’ line makes me wonder if we might still get a very different version of Beauty and the Beast.
Anyways RIP Ashman and Hunt.
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