Tezuka also took inspiration from Carl Barks' various duck comics (most famously Uncle Scrooge, which would go on to inspire Don Rosa's Life & Times of Scrooge McDuck and later DuckTales, as well as Messers Lucas & Spielburg), which were also popular in Latin America too.
A Hippie in the House of Mouse (Jim Henson at Disney, 1980)
- Thread starter Geekhis Khan
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I know this has nothing to do with this timeline, but did you know that those guys, the Vapors, released a new album in May, their first in 39 years? It's called Together, and it's really good.
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We've had a wave of speculation on Disney/Henson getting into SF movies and perhaps series in the mid-80s, and so it might seem repetitious but in view of some of the suggestions in the past week, I am going to put in a repeated plea for the empire considering doing something effective with more or less classic American science fiction. I still think Robert Heinlein is an untapped vein. We have had Philip K Dick come up in this thread and I certainly think he has potential if we set the clock back to 1983--the thing is, quite a few Dick stories have been handled in diverse ways, and at least some of the time quite well, OTL. By no means would I want any of these to be butterflied away! But we don't need an ATL for that either.
Heinlein on the other hand is pretty much untouched--Starship Troopers OTL was filmed as a parody. Otherwise it is just Heinlein's own Destination Moon.
The thing about Heinlein working with Disney is, there is a lot more resonance between them; both Walt Disney and Heinlein have this classic American vibe to them.
Now the question is, can they jibe at all with the new energy Henson brings in?
What we have to remember is, Heinlein was a lot more than the stereotype of crusty old reactionary he had somewhat acquired by the Vietnam era and after. He was, as a younger person, quite a progressive, albeit in a pretty narrowly American way. So the 1950s Heinlein juveniles might be an excellent base for some SF movies upgrading the "wholesome kid friendly" classic Disney image while keeping it a bit edgy in '80s terms. I believe I have pointed to Citizen of the Galaxy as such a yarn...the problem I see with that is that exploring the richness of its successive settings might tempt showrunners to do a stretched out multi-movie series of it. And I've had thoughts how that might work, perhaps with some clever marketing--start with a relatively low budget made for cable first part mostly set in Thorby's childhood in Jubblepore, which is shot and marketed so as to promote a theater film second part covering his adventures on the Free Trader Sisu, ending this with him entering the Hegemonic Guard service on the Hydra setting up the final movie wherein he discovers his fortune and his destiny on Earth. If it works, the first part draws customers in to Disney Channel; the Disney Channel fans of part one all go to see part two in the movie theater, then Disney Channel reruns part one and follows with part two there to set up audiences for the culminating final act movie. But of course it could also backfire spectacularly, as the tones of the three segments would all be different.
So it might be best to stick to one fairly longish but fast paced movie, just throwing a kaleidoscopic shift in scenes at the audience real fast, allowing the excellent synergy of Disney and Henson visual backgrounds to do a lot of heavy lifting with minimal pausing for exposition (very much Heinlein's own style; Citizen of the Galaxy is not a thick book!)
The Star Beast is another work that resonates very strongly with Classic Disney sensibilities yet has plenty of scope for Henson's as well. As a story where a major protagonist is a career bureaucrat, in the diplomatic service in fact, it also subverts the crankier stereotypes of Heinlein as some sort of Randroid Bircher. I think in the right hands--and Disney-Henson seems perfect--it is almost ideal.
Have Space Suit Will Travel will definitely need a title change, but given that the early '80s were the era when the Space Shuttle marked the return of US astronauts to space and the Shuttle was sold as a vehicle that would lower the cost of getting to orbit drastically thus opening up a space age renaissance of space station construction, lunar colonization and deeper space exploration, updating the general setting (one infers, reading the novel, that this stuff is happening about when I was reading it, in the 1970s or so, and so pushing the story line into the near future for the movie audience should work reasonably well, assuming the writers could make a version of Kip Russell the teens of the mid-80s could relate to. Taking it for granted a Moonbase and space tourism to it is plausible before say 2000 the way things seemed to be going in the early '80s, the story works. Henson could work in some serious multiculturalism, by say making Kip African-American (might or might not work) or Peewee say Asian-African (I think we could have a supergenius scientist like Peewee's father be from an African-American background, serve a stint in the military where he marries an Asian woman, then wind up a big shot professor at Princeton. Some might assume Heinlein would bridle at that but such people are not consistent readers of his stuff; as for whether Disney would--they'd better not, in 1984 or so! Certainly not with Jim Henson involved.
I believe I mentioned CJ Cherryh too. She was just hitting her stride in the early '80s (in my opinion, some might prefer her earlier style in the later '70s) and the Chanur novels began shortly before our current moment in the TL. It might be too much of a stretch for her to get noticed and it might break her to get seduced into the Chanur sequels being a Disney SF series. I certainly think she'd have to change some of the ultimate drift and conclusion of the series, since the whole point of the trilogy following Pride of Chanur (Chanur's Venture, The Kif Strike Back, Chanur's Homecoming--the middle one definitely requires a title change!) is that humans, as the alien Compact species encounter them, do not belong in contact with the Compact and must be shut out. But the tone at the end of the initial novel, which I suppose was meant to be a one-shot or perhaps integrated into her evolving Merchanter/Company Wars series, certainly did not forecast that outcome; it relates more to the backstory of the nature of Earth/Sol/Earth Company misgovernance, and by shifting that and making Earth less of a Shemp in her larger canon, a more positive multicultural contact message could emerge. Perhaps; I am not sure how much Cherryh herself was actually hostile to that in the mid-80s, but perhaps working with Jim Henson could find some middle ground--particularly as her later work seems to sort of feel its way back to the idea of cautious but positive contact.
Meanwhile her Faded Sun series was already complete; as is it does not seem very Disneyesque to me, but it might be suitable for Touchstone.
I dwelt on the Chanur stories though because of the great scope it offered Disney/Henson artists for more or less live action aliens; Compact Space involves the lionlike Hani point of view characters, the somewhat amphibian or birdlike sthsho, the ape-like mahendo'sat and the terrifying, rat/vulture like kif--and those are just the oxygen breathers! The Methane Folk include several other weirder species; they can't be face to face with oxygen breathers so that gives scope to various methods of representing them--all Muppet/Animatronic creatures seen in brief POV on their own "decks" and spaces on the various star stations, interactions with their vehicles by the oxy-breathers in their station spaces, external starship shots, especially for ultra mysterious and highly advanced knnn.
I suspect a way to modify the Chanur series to be more audience friendly to human-chauvinist audiences and be something of a vehicle for Hensonesque cultural unitarianism is to mix in elements of the Faded Sun series plot---in OTL Cherryh canon, the Earth expeditionary force is very much a military force, and quite ominous; the long range expedition sent out by the Alliance forces in the Faded Sun series is more diverse, with anthropologists and diplomats hosted by a small task force--something more like that, with the movies giving us some POV of debates and dissensions among the Sol system factions and resolving it a bit like Cherryh did in the final Faded Sun book, could lead to a more satisfactory outcome for both the audiences and the in-story Sol mission--albeit not at all what the gung-ho militarist faction wants.
Another possible approach would be to film such a story by Roger Zelazny as Eye of Cat--cinematically more like The Star Beast in that it is set mainly on Earth of the future, with a lot of Navajo mythos (the protagonist being a Navajo).
Yet another direction to go--take up a suggestion by Harlan Ellison OTL--he was approached by some Hollywood types for a remake of Forbidden Planet, and his response was "you know, they did Forbidden Planet right the first time. Don't remake it--write a sequel!" Disney had some involvement in Forbidden Planet's production, it was a huge budget project for an SF film of its day, and Disney did a lot of the special effects apparently. So--imagine a sequel, and film that. FP had a huge influence on the general sensibilities of US SF cinematic norms; they are plain to see in both Star Trek (especially the original pilot) and Lost In Space.
My overarching interest here is that I think by and large the entire field of classic 1930s-contemporary (1980s) written science fiction has been very largely overlooked. There might be deep reasons for this, relating to what works in text not working on the screen, and so cinematic SF is a different canon entirely. I still think though that especially for a house like Disney, something really vibrant and exciting can be made of all this stuff. Quite a lot of it would not work well with Disney (though perhaps, just maybe, Henson and his legacy might enable Disney to offer Ursula LeGuin a better realization of her vision of Earthsea, if not in the 1980s than perhaps in the '90s). But we might hope that if Disney can have some successes with working with some of this material (in addition to Heinlein I suspect a lot of stuff by Poul Anderson might fit the Classic Disney mentality) then Touchstone can work with other materials, and houses unrelated to Disney can get funding for yet others.
My general interest here is that I feel damn little has generally been done with
Heinlein on the other hand is pretty much untouched--Starship Troopers OTL was filmed as a parody. Otherwise it is just Heinlein's own Destination Moon.
The thing about Heinlein working with Disney is, there is a lot more resonance between them; both Walt Disney and Heinlein have this classic American vibe to them.
Now the question is, can they jibe at all with the new energy Henson brings in?
What we have to remember is, Heinlein was a lot more than the stereotype of crusty old reactionary he had somewhat acquired by the Vietnam era and after. He was, as a younger person, quite a progressive, albeit in a pretty narrowly American way. So the 1950s Heinlein juveniles might be an excellent base for some SF movies upgrading the "wholesome kid friendly" classic Disney image while keeping it a bit edgy in '80s terms. I believe I have pointed to Citizen of the Galaxy as such a yarn...the problem I see with that is that exploring the richness of its successive settings might tempt showrunners to do a stretched out multi-movie series of it. And I've had thoughts how that might work, perhaps with some clever marketing--start with a relatively low budget made for cable first part mostly set in Thorby's childhood in Jubblepore, which is shot and marketed so as to promote a theater film second part covering his adventures on the Free Trader Sisu, ending this with him entering the Hegemonic Guard service on the Hydra setting up the final movie wherein he discovers his fortune and his destiny on Earth. If it works, the first part draws customers in to Disney Channel; the Disney Channel fans of part one all go to see part two in the movie theater, then Disney Channel reruns part one and follows with part two there to set up audiences for the culminating final act movie. But of course it could also backfire spectacularly, as the tones of the three segments would all be different.
So it might be best to stick to one fairly longish but fast paced movie, just throwing a kaleidoscopic shift in scenes at the audience real fast, allowing the excellent synergy of Disney and Henson visual backgrounds to do a lot of heavy lifting with minimal pausing for exposition (very much Heinlein's own style; Citizen of the Galaxy is not a thick book!)
The Star Beast is another work that resonates very strongly with Classic Disney sensibilities yet has plenty of scope for Henson's as well. As a story where a major protagonist is a career bureaucrat, in the diplomatic service in fact, it also subverts the crankier stereotypes of Heinlein as some sort of Randroid Bircher. I think in the right hands--and Disney-Henson seems perfect--it is almost ideal.
Have Space Suit Will Travel will definitely need a title change, but given that the early '80s were the era when the Space Shuttle marked the return of US astronauts to space and the Shuttle was sold as a vehicle that would lower the cost of getting to orbit drastically thus opening up a space age renaissance of space station construction, lunar colonization and deeper space exploration, updating the general setting (one infers, reading the novel, that this stuff is happening about when I was reading it, in the 1970s or so, and so pushing the story line into the near future for the movie audience should work reasonably well, assuming the writers could make a version of Kip Russell the teens of the mid-80s could relate to. Taking it for granted a Moonbase and space tourism to it is plausible before say 2000 the way things seemed to be going in the early '80s, the story works. Henson could work in some serious multiculturalism, by say making Kip African-American (might or might not work) or Peewee say Asian-African (I think we could have a supergenius scientist like Peewee's father be from an African-American background, serve a stint in the military where he marries an Asian woman, then wind up a big shot professor at Princeton. Some might assume Heinlein would bridle at that but such people are not consistent readers of his stuff; as for whether Disney would--they'd better not, in 1984 or so! Certainly not with Jim Henson involved.
I believe I mentioned CJ Cherryh too. She was just hitting her stride in the early '80s (in my opinion, some might prefer her earlier style in the later '70s) and the Chanur novels began shortly before our current moment in the TL. It might be too much of a stretch for her to get noticed and it might break her to get seduced into the Chanur sequels being a Disney SF series. I certainly think she'd have to change some of the ultimate drift and conclusion of the series, since the whole point of the trilogy following Pride of Chanur (Chanur's Venture, The Kif Strike Back, Chanur's Homecoming--the middle one definitely requires a title change!) is that humans, as the alien Compact species encounter them, do not belong in contact with the Compact and must be shut out. But the tone at the end of the initial novel, which I suppose was meant to be a one-shot or perhaps integrated into her evolving Merchanter/Company Wars series, certainly did not forecast that outcome; it relates more to the backstory of the nature of Earth/Sol/Earth Company misgovernance, and by shifting that and making Earth less of a Shemp in her larger canon, a more positive multicultural contact message could emerge. Perhaps; I am not sure how much Cherryh herself was actually hostile to that in the mid-80s, but perhaps working with Jim Henson could find some middle ground--particularly as her later work seems to sort of feel its way back to the idea of cautious but positive contact.
Meanwhile her Faded Sun series was already complete; as is it does not seem very Disneyesque to me, but it might be suitable for Touchstone.
I dwelt on the Chanur stories though because of the great scope it offered Disney/Henson artists for more or less live action aliens; Compact Space involves the lionlike Hani point of view characters, the somewhat amphibian or birdlike sthsho, the ape-like mahendo'sat and the terrifying, rat/vulture like kif--and those are just the oxygen breathers! The Methane Folk include several other weirder species; they can't be face to face with oxygen breathers so that gives scope to various methods of representing them--all Muppet/Animatronic creatures seen in brief POV on their own "decks" and spaces on the various star stations, interactions with their vehicles by the oxy-breathers in their station spaces, external starship shots, especially for ultra mysterious and highly advanced knnn.
I suspect a way to modify the Chanur series to be more audience friendly to human-chauvinist audiences and be something of a vehicle for Hensonesque cultural unitarianism is to mix in elements of the Faded Sun series plot---in OTL Cherryh canon, the Earth expeditionary force is very much a military force, and quite ominous; the long range expedition sent out by the Alliance forces in the Faded Sun series is more diverse, with anthropologists and diplomats hosted by a small task force--something more like that, with the movies giving us some POV of debates and dissensions among the Sol system factions and resolving it a bit like Cherryh did in the final Faded Sun book, could lead to a more satisfactory outcome for both the audiences and the in-story Sol mission--albeit not at all what the gung-ho militarist faction wants.
Another possible approach would be to film such a story by Roger Zelazny as Eye of Cat--cinematically more like The Star Beast in that it is set mainly on Earth of the future, with a lot of Navajo mythos (the protagonist being a Navajo).
Yet another direction to go--take up a suggestion by Harlan Ellison OTL--he was approached by some Hollywood types for a remake of Forbidden Planet, and his response was "you know, they did Forbidden Planet right the first time. Don't remake it--write a sequel!" Disney had some involvement in Forbidden Planet's production, it was a huge budget project for an SF film of its day, and Disney did a lot of the special effects apparently. So--imagine a sequel, and film that. FP had a huge influence on the general sensibilities of US SF cinematic norms; they are plain to see in both Star Trek (especially the original pilot) and Lost In Space.
My overarching interest here is that I think by and large the entire field of classic 1930s-contemporary (1980s) written science fiction has been very largely overlooked. There might be deep reasons for this, relating to what works in text not working on the screen, and so cinematic SF is a different canon entirely. I still think though that especially for a house like Disney, something really vibrant and exciting can be made of all this stuff. Quite a lot of it would not work well with Disney (though perhaps, just maybe, Henson and his legacy might enable Disney to offer Ursula LeGuin a better realization of her vision of Earthsea, if not in the 1980s than perhaps in the '90s). But we might hope that if Disney can have some successes with working with some of this material (in addition to Heinlein I suspect a lot of stuff by Poul Anderson might fit the Classic Disney mentality) then Touchstone can work with other materials, and houses unrelated to Disney can get funding for yet others.
My general interest here is that I feel damn little has generally been done with
What about The Rolling Stones? I think that would be perfect Disney material...just a fun romp through the Solar System...
Thought you meant those kinds of Rolling Stones and was like "That is not disney material!"
that is if he and other can push it, a little secret, Saban tried per years but was rejected per years as tv executives rejected the concept, i think otl 1993 was the best year for PR, specially as the original cast is the main reason why we even got sequels to begin with, without them,...it could bomb, plus the ninja boom come later on 85 onward
Jokes on you, its gotta fight every other earworm stuck in my head.
Not the Rolling Stones of Mick Jagger, but the Stone family from Luna City...just a fun book to read, and I think the flat cat was the inspiration for the Star Trek tribble!!!!
So, long as this version of Jungle Emperor Leo/Kimba The White Lion manages to give proper credit to Dame Astentudo and her short stories in Jomo Kenyatta's literary magazine, I'll have no problems.
Hmm, if the '80s version of Astro Boy is on the Disney Channel, My Life as a Teenage Robot will feel far less fresh in the US than it did OTL. Plus, it's an even more iconic and better fit than Giant Gorg! Oh, and Geekis Khan, if you're thinking what I think you're thinking, it looks like I have some ideas to work on.
Hmm, if the '80s version of Astro Boy is on the Disney Channel, My Life as a Teenage Robot will feel far less fresh in the US than it did OTL. Plus, it's an even more iconic and better fit than Giant Gorg! Oh, and Geekis Khan, if you're thinking what I think you're thinking, it looks like I have some ideas to work on.
Heinlein's 'juvenile' books (that is, meant for younger readers), would work as short movies or mini series on Disney Channel. I think you're just right on how the (unrealized) promise of the Shuttle would be the right time for stories about 'cheap' trips into space.
I counter your insinuation with a glorious rebuttal from someone who put in far more time into this than they had to (warning! the following video is very long and will make you question everything you ever thought you knew about lion-related media):
Jenny/XJLR-9 feel and thought was original, Robot boy was so blatant plagiarism was a mistake for CN, as they showed astroboy before in latin america
Seeing how Disney has their own channel at this time at would be hard for them to produce and show their own version. Also they could pick up Haim Saban's Bio-Man in 1986.
You know, they could lanuch it..but what if failed? might kill PR in the west...as the old say: Butterflies giveth, butterflies taketh away too
Was this the same (rather lackluster) dub as OTL or did they use different voice actors?
Well if this happens ITTL we had better hope @Geekhis Khan like Power Rangers and doesn't kill Bio-Man.
I was saying Disney could commission the series, there not guarantees his sucess, if the show bomb, PR is done ITTL, dunno just got the idea, again things like that happen, give the TL more realism, bomb and misfire happens OTL so should ITTL
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