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Hendrixland if you'd prefer - it's a hypothetical district like Tomorrowland or Frontierland.

They kinda-sorta brushed on it with Brother Bear (though it was more Inuit, if anything). Wouldn't mind if TTL goes for a deeper dive.
1. Still no. That's still too tacky for Disney, imo. Tomorrowland would actually be a decent alternative with the Space Needle and all, but eh, I like the Adventureland idea better.

2. Yes, I wouldn't be surprised if Disney is more confident with representing Native American culture under Henson, and with greater finesse than with OTL.
 
Neither am I, but I'm not sure how willing the Cree or Huron or Haudenosaunee would be to play dress up and run a Tiki Room (or worse, have white actors do it for them) for idiot tourists. Or if even Henson!Disney is willing to talk with them and do it respectfully.

Cherokee, NC/Eastern Band of the Cherokee might offer a great model. The Museum of the Cherokee Indian, the outdoor play Unto These Hills, great hiking and fly-fishing, local tours and craft vendors. Beautiful place.
 
Marty Sklar V: Let's Get Digital
Chapter 28: A Digital Revolution!
Excerpt from: From a Figment to a Reality: The Imagineering Method! by Marty Sklar


The Digital Entertainment Revolution was emerging in 1990, and I’m proud to say that Walt Disney Entertainment was the industry leader. When I first joined Disney back in the 1950s a “computer” was a giant, buzzing thing that ran on punch cards and vacuum tubes and which required a building the size of a gymnasium just to house it. By 1990 a computer that could sit on your desk, running on a chip the size of a postage stamp, could do things that those early computer programmers couldn’t even conceive of a computer ever doing. And the folks at the Softworks were certainly doing things with computers that we couldn’t have conceived of in 1964 when Mr. Lincoln debuted at the World’s Fair. The controls for Mr. Lincoln required a bank of relays that took up a whole wall just so that he could stand up, sit down, gesture broadly, and talk. By 1990 a small black box could run an advanced Audio-Animatronic through a complex series of fine motor motions without any shake or a millisecond’s gap with the audio.

Even beyond animatronics, the folks over at the Disney Digital Division or 3D were creating fully computer-generated animation where not a single cel was ever inked or painted and not a single still frame of celluloid ever taken. Lasseter and Keane had produced their first all-digital animation sequence in 1983 with the original Where the Wild Things Are test footage. Not only was it blocked and composited digitally, but it was “inked and painted” digitally. They wanted to continue the all-digital approach on the 1986 film, but back then, even with a CHERNABOG, it was prohibitively expensive, so Where the Wild Things Are was a composite of digital and hand-drawn, the digital mostly for backgrounds, framing, and compositing to reduce the number of hand-drawn cels required. By 1988 the technology was mature enough that entire animated sequences were being done entirely digitally, such as the journey into the Lilliputian city in A Small World or the turtle-borne Discworld sequences for Mort. They could have made A Small World or Mort entirely digital if they’d been willing to spend an extra $5-10 million[1], but by 1990 computer technology had reached a point where a single experimental “Baby BOG” double-tower could do what four of the old Cray 2 based CHERNABOGs could do. And you could link multiple Baby BOGs together as a single render farm network! More on them later.

Suddenly digitally inked and painted animation was cost competitive with hand-drawn or hybrid animation. Thus, the first all-digitally inked and painted film would be 1991’s Aladdin whereas 1990’s Mort would be a hybrid of computer and cel. Aladdin would be created entirely by 3D using the DATA machines, Pixar engines, Disney Imagination Stations, and Baby BOG compilers. Not a single hand-painted cel was made, much to the chagrin of later collectors and archivists (only the original pencil tests!). This digital technology allowed for all kinds of new possibilities. Flying carpets that soared through the air and between towers and minarets. A man magically transforming into a monkey. Genies that could change shape and form in new and fluid ways. Frankly, the programmers were the real Genies. I personally couldn’t make heads nor tails of it all. They typed some gibberish into a computer window and suddenly a lifelike drawing emerged. It was the computer equivalent of waving a wand and singing “bippity, boppity, boo!”

But the real challenge was selling the effects on a screen and making the motion look real and fluid, not like a cheap videogame. Brian [Henson] of course was all over it. He’d learned some coding in college and had picked up much more since returning to Imagineering. Now he, John Lasseter, Ed Catmull, Leo Tramiel, and Steve Jobs brainstormed to come up with ways to turn physical motion into digital imagery and vice versa. Waldo C. Graphic had been an interesting proof of concept, but now Steve, Leo, and Brian worked to turn it into a revolution. They could use a waldo input as a shortcut on coding, just like they’d started using them to pre-program audio-animatronics for the parks. Interestingly, we’d experimented with just such a concept in the 1960s for Mr. Lincoln. An Imagineer sat with this robot-like rig, a sort of full-body waldo, and made motions to program the Audio-Animatronics for Mr. Lincoln. We called it an “Animating Apparatus”. It lacked the precision and elegance of the modern electronics, being a crude relay-based analog system, so it was largely a clever dead end at the time, but it still made me happy to see an old Walt-era idea resurrected.

Disney-waldo-x640.jpg

Early Disney “Animating Apparatus” Waldo technology for programming audio-animatronics c1963 (Image source “cyberneticzoo.com”)

The advanced real-time Fazakas waldo-input was a game changer in this regard. Now Brian or another experienced Muppet performer could guide the flight of a magic carpet or dastardly parrot, or steer the actions of Omar, Aladdin’s best friend turned into a monkey by Jaffir the evil Wazir, all using a waldo for the input rather than have a coder at a keyboard spend hours trying to set and reset the parameters in a few lines of code one number at a time while a director patiently sat over their shoulder. Hours and thus dollars were saved simply by having the waldo-performer guide a wireframe object through a wireframe world, the computer simply recording and optimizing the parameters automatically. These could then be automatically loaded into the preset digital “objects” such that the digital creature now reproduced the performer’s motions with just a bit of post-processing cleanup to eliminate any blur, distortions, or goofs.

But the Holy Grail as it were was using digital effects in a live action film, and the first live-action movie to make use of the 3D Computer Effects in this way would be Spiderman. The webslinger would need some “help” to swing through the streets of New York City since on-location shots would be a costly challenge and simply swinging back and forth on a rope in front of a green screen would work for a ‘70s TV show, but not a major motion picture in 1991. We needed to develop new technology and new techniques simply to capture the dynamic, rotating, three-dimensional “comic book” action in a realistic and engaging manner. Imagineering was brought in to work directly with the studio editing and effects people to come up with them. It was my first time working directly on movie effects, so I brought in Brian Henson to be the Imagineering lead since he’d come up through film and TV.

And yet we were amazed at what was possible even without special photographic and computer effects. Camera work, specifically zooms, dollies, pans, tilts, lifts, and forced perspective, could achieve a surprising amount of what we needed, and at the recommendation of George Lucas we brought in cinematographer Peter Suschitzky of Empire Strikes Back fame to help us make things happen. He even consulted with Bill Pope, who’d done cinematography for Raimi on Batman, figuring that even if we didn’t directly copy the tone of the Raimi film, we could quote some of the photography to subconsciously tie viewers to Batman and thus increase viewer acceptance.

Tom and Jim were taking a chance on the script, handing it to a young writer named Joss Whedon who’d been chomping at the bit for a chance to write the screenplay for Spiderman. He’d already made a name for himself in the company writing for the X-Men and Spiderman cartoon series, even winning an Emmy for the writing on the “Dark Phoenix” crossover saga, and even penned the popular and subversive “reverse slasher” Final Girl. On Spielberg’s suggestion we also brought in Bob Gale to assist with the pacing[2]. Together the two of them put out an amazing script. Jim insisted that, in stark contrast to the dark and brooding vision of Sam Raimi’s Batman and all of the inevitable upcoming “dark and brooding” superhero flicks mimicking it, we needed Spiderman to stand out by being lighter and, in a word, “fun”. With perhaps just a touch of semi-self-aware camp, as Jim put it, but nothing even approaching Adam West territory. Joss came from a scriptwriting dynasty and had a real talent for fun and quirky dialog. His first run with the script had so much over-the-top action, though, that we needed to tone it down just to prevent this from ballooning into a $50 million picture. The dialog, though, was fun, snarky, and borderline self-aware, perfect for the smart-mouthed, quippy Peter Parker.

But the effects were going to be difficult in 1990. Batman could just swing from one building to another on a grappling hook in the dark, but Spiderman had to shoot webs from his wrists and dynamically swing through the city again and again, and in the daytime! We could do a lot of this with practical effects, sets, camera angles, and matte paintings, but the digital effects potential of the 3D machines led us to believe that we could do much better than that. However, processing speeds at the time were limited, so the complex vector graphics you’d need to make a realistic digital effect of a human would be an extreme challenge. CHERNABOGs could help with the vector data number crunching, but there were only a few of them and their time was hard to schedule.

Thankfully, Steve Jobs and his team at Imagine, Inc., had developed a new piece of hardware. Using the recent advances in computer processor speeds, they took the basic functionality of a CHERNABOG and implemented it in miniature with a twin-tower system that could fit on or under a desk. It was four times faster and more capable than CHERNABOG, which was the size of a dining table. They called it “Baby BOG” as a working title (they'd come up with a permanent name later), which caused some of the formerly British staff to laugh. Imagine, Inc., then went and built several Baby BOGs, and then connected them all together into a single, mutually-supporting rendering network! Even the computer nerds were amazed at what the networked Baby BOGs could do when it came to raw number-crunching for vector graphics.

Of course, what works with animation doesn’t always work in live action. Animation is unreal enough that it ironically allows you to veer into the totally unreal, like pets that are far too intelligent or humans whose smiles take up half of their faces, but the seeming reality of live action risks losing the audience’s willing suspension of disbelief if you push the law of physics too far, even in a film about a teenager bitten by a radioactive spider and thus suddenly able to walk on walls. And an all-digital person, even in a blue and red spider suit, would stand out as an artificial creation back then.

We also needed to combine a live actor or stuntman with a composite background and make it fluid and realistic. And in 1990 you just didn’t do that…yet. Motion capture technology wasn’t quite up to the task at the time and, as mentioned, digital effects weren’t up to snuff yet. This is where Imagineering and 3D earned their salt. Brian and Steve came up with the “Body Waldo”, or “Baldo”, a lightweight plastic-and-aluminum green-screen-cloth-covered exoskeleton much like a miniaturized version of the old animating apparatus we developed for the ’64 World’s Fair Mr. Lincoln audio-animatronic, but which could be to some degree hidden behind the actor’s limbs or torso[3]. Building off of the techniques that we’d developed for pre-programming the movements of an audio-animatronic for the parks using a Waldo and other controls in the hands of a skilled Muppet Performer, the accelerometers and position indicators built into the Baldo could record the body movements of an actor as vector data for computer input, like digital puppetry on a full body scale.

The Baldo was combined with a giant, swiveling double C-rig like a huge gyroscope open on one end that everyone called the “Christmas Ornament Rig” or COR. It was made of lightweight plastic and aluminum tubing covered in green screen material and allowed a trained stunt performer to strap in and perform 360° spins in three axes. Multiple cameras could be used to more easily edit around the Baldo and COR. Accelerometers and position meters placed on each axis of the COR converted the motions into simple position/angle/velocity vectors that could be used as input to a computer. Then the “rendering farm” of Baby BOGs could crunch and reduce the massive data into a wireframe representation of the actor’s movements for insert over any background image.

Now a moving performer’s complex actions could be converted into a wireframe input to drive effects, and then if even more realism was desired, the same performer could look at a screen projection of their earlier actions and actively recreate the motion without the rig in a green room and then the engineers could composite all of that with camera background footage in post. But Brian and the team weren’t finished: they built a smaller “reverse-Baldo” animating endoskeleton they called an “Odlab” (naturally) that could be used to take the original recorded vector frames and use them as command inputs to run the small servos on an internal animatronic skeleton to move an articulated humanoid scale model in a tiny spider suit for distance shots!

These could all be smoothed using a simple waldo input to “fine tune”.

It was a long and labor-intensive process, and it took about 3-5 months of work for one minute of quality final film effects work. As such, we limited the number of big, thrilling “swing through the city” effects to a handful of exciting set pieces where they’d have the most effect. In fact, there are only about three minutes of swinging effects total in the whole movie![4] Today with modern computer effects, of course, you can have half the film be such wild effects, but back then you had to be picky.

And ironically, the effects scene that people remember the best, where Spidey leaps and flips up the wall and onto the ceiling, was accomplished with a simple “rotating room” set, the exact same trick used in 1951’s The Royal Wedding to let Fred Astaire dance on the ceiling. Sometimes it’s the oldest tricks that are the best!


Eventually, motion capture technology reached a level of accuracy that rendered the Baldo/COR/Odlab largely obsolete, but for about 5 to 10 years no one but Disney (and soon enough ILM, naturally) could digitally produce this level of accuracy and resolution in motion. Modern motion tracking suit technology makes it all look quaint and old fashioned today, but in 1990 we were blowing everyone’s mind.

I even brought in effects-legend Ray Harryhausen back in 1993 and showed him the Odlab rig, which we used to animate a small skeleton warrior, and I swear that he cried tears of joy!



[1] The first all-digital CAPS-based animation in our timeline was The Rescuers Down Under, produced by an independent Pixar as an experimental side project, which cost $35 million compared to the hybrid Aladdin’s $28 million two years later. Digital animation technology is a little bit ahead of this in this timeline, but the “hybrid” approach is yielding such good and cost-effective results that Disney has delayed their first all-digital movie longer than they needed to. Plus, the “Pixar” folks are part of Disney and employed full-time on Disney TV and feature productions.

[2] Hat tip to @Pyro.

[3] Inspired in part by Figment, Waldo C. Graphic, and some ideas that @Shevek23 came up with. Hat-tip!

[4] Our timeline’s Jurassic Park 1993, by comparison, had only 4 minutes of CGI and an additional 10 minutes of practical effects.
 
Baby BOG is such a nerdy computer name.

So Brain, Steve et all have invented motion capture? Awesome.

Spiderman is sounds fantasic. Joss at his snarky height, plus people to contain and guide him, plus some serious top of the line SFX.

"a simple “rotating room” set" - indeed, sometimes keep it simple!

I bet this SFX blew audiences (inc ITTL me) away in the same way Terminator 2 or Jurrassic Park did.

I hope that Ray Harryhausen visit was filmed!

Lovely chapter @Geekhis Khan
 
Can't wait for the Spider-Man movie and see its impact.

Meanwhile, it was a few days ago I learnt about Meteor Man, a 1993 film released by MGM and even had a comic line published by Marvel, even crossing over with Spider-Man. You can see why I'm asking if we may see it in TTL.
 
D’oh… I really feel I should have seen this coming. Well, maybe not the release date, I was expecting it to come out in 1992-4 based on the specs. (in fairness it was clearly in development for several years now ITTL and we just weren’t explicitly aware of that), but the other stuff just… makes sense. Especially not surprised that a fresh-off-Final Girl Joss Whedon is the scribe, nor that he needed to be scaled back so to not balloon the budget (this not being the MCU money printing machine, which of course ain’t happening - least of all as a concise plan - for at minimum another decade). Intrigued to see what the film lools like, what ideas made it through and what didn’t… and given that this isn’t the Cameron film people thought was coming up (which… come on, look at how much before it stuff was shifting guys) we’re in pretty undefined territory: Gwen Stacy or Mary Jane? Or will both feature, if not a different love interest like Betty Brant or Liz Allen? We could get the expected Green Goblin, Doctor Octopus, or hell even the Kingpin - or a combination therein, maybe with another villain or two? It’s not going to be TOO crazy though, with good reason mind.

Additionally, it seems it’ll release not ling after(?) Batman 2, which is probably ideal as it’ll let the two studios offer contrasting fare which can whet different appetites (hopefully better than how the 2010s IOTL went for one side); whether this means Spiderman 2 (and YIKES is that spelling going to set off the millennials who insist that Spider-MAN is the only correct spelling; as Friends put IOTL, it’s not a surname pronounced “Spider-mun”) releases before Batman 3 or after is another matter, although outright Duelling Movies is a self-sabotage that will hopefully be avoided by the studios (Disney at least should have learned their lesson after the 80s demolished them in most such cases, not to mention Return of the Littles being the disastrous mess it was from Katzenberg’s ego actively trying to one-up them…)

Also, apparently the X-Men series has been quite a success; definitely not the show we know, so we shouldn’t necessarily expect original stories like “One Man’s Worth” (the story which retroactively led to the comics’ own “Age of Apocalypse” timeline) or even the exact same lineup of characters… And that’s assuming that Chris Claremont was still disallowed to implement all his crazier ideas (like Gambit bring a created avatar of Mr. Sinister rather than his own person, Sinister himself being a childhood acquaintance of Scott’s, Apocalypse being the third Summer’s brother sent back in time thousands of years, Mystique being Nightcrawler’s fath— actually, that last one IS the one that I wish we’d actually get in the comics even now; the rest, I dunno…) Will we get any posts dedicated to the “MAU” shows of this timeline; is there even one here, similar to the one attempted in the 90s? Same for Bruce Timm, Brad Bird and Co. over at DC; I don’t expect The Spirit to be in continuity with BTAS (1989-199?), but the latter will hopefully spin-off at least a Superman series, and a Justice League (maybe even Batman Beyond, give that was meant to be them being told “do teenage Batman” and technically giving them what was asked for… even if the suits expected “teen Bruce Wayne” when they said this).

I have to admit, a lot of the intricacies of the developing tech are flying over my head, though I am getting that it’s progressing more efficiently than 1990 IOTL had (if in a more lateral, parallel way). I know that getting even a clean three minutes of web-slinging that ages well would be impossible for us at the same time, but luckily the minds of Brian Henson, Steve Jobs, Leo Tramiel et. al seem very much up to the task… And yeah, it was also nice to get some idea of how Aladdin will turn out even if it got a bit overshadowed (even I almost forgot about it); two genies like the original 1000 nights story? Jaffir the evil Wazir turning Al’s BFF Omar into a monkey for a significant point in the movie? I’m not sure how much this is closer to Ashman’s original vision vs. different kinds of shifts from what OTL gave us, but I’m guessing it’ll be clearer with the “release”? Either way, I’m all in!)
 
A "Digital Entertainment Revolution"? I guess with computers and CGI advancing at a faster rate thanks to butterflies and the efforts of the Softworks/Disney Digital Division, we get to see some crazy things happen that wouldn't be possible ITTL. Aladdin sounds absolutely amazing, given the technical wizardry Disney has done with fully digital animation. Abandoning cels is a shame (since I love cel animation to the core, due to how Japan made use of it in the 80s and 90s), but there's no doubt that the cheaper and more economical digital method is the future. Makes me think that Japan will also follow America in an early adoption for digital animation, so that's some huge butterflies for studios like Ghibli who might have films like Mononoke be entirely digital.

Steer the actions of Omar, Aladdin’s best friend turned into a monkey by Jaffir the evil Wazir...
Guess we gotta have a monkey somewhere in this Aladdin lol :openedeyewink:

Spiderman is simply a miracle of the timeline. I don't know how they're going to do the webslinging literally a decade before the OTL Sam Raimi films, but holy crap they're actually going to do it! Now I want a comparison of the effects when the Spiderman film drops on the TL. If it's better than the Raimi films, then I'd probably die from the hype!

Thankfully, Steve Jobs and his team at Imagine, Inc., had developed a new piece of hardware. Using the recent advances in computer processor speeds, they took the basic functionality of a CHERNABOG and implemented it in miniature with a twin-tower system that could fit on or under a desk. It was four times faster and more capable than CHERNABOG, which was the size of a dining table. They called it “Baby BOG” as a working title (they'd come up with a permanent name later), which caused some of the formerly British staff to laugh. Imagine, Inc., then went and built several Baby BOGs, and then connected them all together into a single, mutually-supporting rendering network! Even the computer nerds were amazed at what the networked Baby BOGs could do when it came to raw number-crunching for vector graphics.
I guess they could name the graphical computers after Slavic/Russian gods and other mythological figures since they have already gone with Chernobog, even though it comes from the Fantasia film. In that case, why not name it after Belobog, the supposed light counterpart to Chernobog?

The Baldo setup is an ingenious solution to the problems with expressing Spiderman's movement in an era without motion capture. You could say that it's a primitive iteration of the technology, although I suppose by the 2000s the Baldo setup would already be outdated, according to the post. Still, having that kind of technological dominance for most of the 90s would be a pretty huge boon to Disney and their future live-action movies. I wonder if the Waldos could be used for something other than films....maybe a theme park perhaps? 😉

So far I'm really curious about how far CGI technology could go. Hollywood and the rest of Western media might have a more comfortable time implementing the technology compared to OTL. I can't wait to see Babylon 5 and the Star Wars Prequel Trilogy come to life in an entirely new light!
 
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Speaking of FX, I wonder what happened to IBM's Entertainment Effects division's visual FX and its techniques. Yeah, its way back, but its real. Any stuff they did specifically?
 
Also, apparently the X-Men series has been quite a success; definitely not the show we know, so we shouldn’t necessarily expect original stories like “One Man’s Worth” (the story which retroactively led to the comics’ own “Age of Apocalypse” timeline) or even the exact same lineup of characters… And that’s assuming that Chris Claremont was still disallowed to implement all his crazier ideas (like Gambit bring a created avatar of Mr. Sinister rather than his own person, Sinister himself being a childhood acquaintance of Scott’s, Apocalypse being the third Summer’s brother sent back in time thousands of years, Mystique being Nightcrawler’s fath— actually, that last one IS the one that I wish we’d actually get in the comics even now; the rest, I dunno…)
Except "One Man's Worth" first aired after Age of Apocalypse ended. Given how television productions go, I would imagine that the X-Men producers either developed the idea independently or in tandem with the the comics as the storylines are planned months in advance in both mediums. As for Chris Claremont, I recall that that disagreements between him, editorial, and artist Jim Lee led to his departure.
 
So with computer tech advancing at a slightly faster rate and CalArt being a feeder to Disney's animation depart it's not impossible for Henson/Disney learning of Kerry Conran's Sky Captain project and expanding it into a movie under their label or maybe even a TV show done it a similar fashion to the serials.
Abandoning cels is a shame (since I love cel animation to the core, due to how Japan made use of it in the 80s and 90s), but there's no doubt that the cheaper and more economical digital method is the future.
Maybe someone will figure out a way to print out digital cels for collectors and archivists.
 
Except "One Man's Worth" first aired after Age of Apocalypse ended. Given how television productions go, I would imagine that the X-Men producers either developed the idea independently or in tandem with the the comics as the storylines are planned months in advance in both mediums. As for Chris Claremont, I recall that that disagreements between him, editorial, and artist Jim Lee led to his departure.
The Age of Apocalypse storyline started in the comics in January 1995; "One Man's Worth" was broadcast that September. Fairly sure it was a tandem with the comics, as many of the shows were adaptions of comics storylines. Though rather scrambled in order, as Nightcrawler was only introduced in the fourth season (the episode before "One Man's Worth"), while characters created in the late 80s to early 90s reached the screen well before that time.

Trevor Fitzroy and Bantam, working under Master Mold's orders, were the assassins on the TV version. But then again, they'd have to explain the existence of Legion in order to set him up for the storyline. And considering the show had to water down Joseph MacTaggert from being very physically abusive to merely an absentee father, I don't think Legion's origin story would've made it past the censors.
 
The advanced real-time Fazakas waldo-input was a game changer in this regard. Now Brian or another experienced Muppet performer could guide the flight of a magic carpet or dastardly parrot, or steer the actions of Omar, Aladdin’s best friend turned into a monkey by Jaffir the evil Wazir, all using a waldo for the input rather than have a coder at a keyboard spend hours trying to set and reset the parameters in a few lines of code one number at a time while a director patiently sat over their shoulder. Hours and thus dollars were saved simply by having the waldo-performer guide a wireframe object through a wireframe world, the computer simply recording and optimizing the parameters automatically. These could then be automatically loaded into the preset digital “objects” such that the digital creature now reproduced the performer’s motions with just a bit of post-processing cleanup to eliminate any blur, distortions, or goofs.
It struck me about half-way through this paragraph that what was being described is foundationally similar to how 3D video games work, only with a much more precise control system. I suspect there will be industry knock-on effects from the work done in animation as word spreads through the usual channels of 'how'd you do that?' conversations.
 
Maybe someone will figure out a way to print out digital cels for collectors and archivists.
Doesn't seem likely that digital cels are possible during production, which sucks.

Well this is a video that turns my entire conception on digital animation up on its head. No idea that Japan had also been experimenting with digital animation independently and that Ghost in the Shell was rendered digitally!

Now I wonder whether this Disney will follow a fairly similar path that the anime industry in trying to emulate traditional cel animation in their future 2D animation films. Aladdin might not even look that different compared to its OTL counterpart if that's the case.

As for Don Bluth, we'll see how long he still uses hand drawn cels before inevitably trying to use computers for digital animation....
 
Original versions of Disney films:
Do to the close relations between Amblin Entertainment and Disney the film Hook could be a Disney film and as such closer to the Disney material (still hope it remains relatively unchanged ITTL):
Geekhis has confirmed Hook won’t exist due to Spielberg’s collab with Michael Jackson in the mid-80s essentially scratching that itch for him (that Peter Pan show they made together, can’t remember the name).
The Age of Apocalypse storyline started in the comics in January 1995; "One Man's Worth" was broadcast that September. Fairly sure it was a tandem with the comics, as many of the shows were adaptions of comics storylines. Though rather scrambled in order, as Nightcrawler was only introduced in the fourth season (the episode before "One Man's Worth"), while characters created in the late 80s to early 90s reached the screen well before that time.

Trevor Fitzroy and Bantam, working under Master Mold's orders, were the assassins on the TV version. But then again, they'd have to explain the existence of Legion in order to set him up for the storyline. And considering the show had to water down Joseph MacTaggert from being very physically abusive to merely an absentee father, I don't think Legion's origin story would've made it past the censors.
According to the show’s writers, they were the ones to come up with the concept of “One Man’s Worth”, the comics were the ones who were inspired to “copy” them. I believe them too, because Animation Lead Time means that you’re working on episodes months pre-release (possibly even a year in advance, considering the need to come up with ideas and then write scripts); comics can also take a while but in the era of hand-drawn animated shows they were being completed quicker… In fairness, both stories are drastically different takes on the concept, so I don’t think either was being lazy about it.

As a side, this is why Morph’s voiceover in the X-Men season 1 finale doesn’t gel with the episode’s last moments, it was added one due to his sudden popularity leading to his death being retconned (and Season 1 was produced for a decent amount of time before it was released in full, so they had time to work Morph into the story).

I can’t say how differently adaptations would appear ITTL, although the thought of an adaptation of God Loves, Man Kills tickles me (it’s the late 80s/early 90s in a different world after all, and they may actually be using Kitty Pryde and Nightcrawler this time…)
 
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