A Hippie in the House of Mouse (Jim Henson at Disney, 1980)
- Thread starter Geekhis Khan
- Start date
- Status
Since Nat Geo is owned by Disney OTL (thanks to them purchasing Fox), I'm gonna go on a limb and say that Triad should get Nat Geo while Disney goes on to found an earlier Smithsonian Channel.
Maybe? It's certainly a contender for a South American Disneyland along with Brazil but it's not as clear cut as other places like Europe, Oceania, or China.
I learned that the three safest countries in South America are Uruguay, Chile, and Argentina and I only inquired because someone said Antarctica was too far away for even a cruise but that wouldn't be true of a South America Disney park.
Honestly, from a business perspective, Nat Geo is more well known and accessible to most americans through its magazines, compared to the museums of Smithsonian all located in one place (DC) and while not that far from most metropolitan areas, isn't exactly on half of most americans' radar. You can see Bernie using this to go with a National Geographic Channel.
It can be done without allohistorical winks to the audience.
Buenos Aires seems the most likely to place a Disneytown/Disneyland aside from Rio de Janiero or Sao Paolo but it really just depends on the existing demand ITTL.
Fair enough. Either way, I'd enjoy what Disney could do to both companies, such as Nat Geo in terms of anthropology or paleontology. Plus, it could pair well with Disney's Jurassic Park when it comes out.
I don't know if anything ever came of this partnership but it does provide a back door for Disney being involved with the National Geographic Channel:
National Geographic, NBC Form Cable TV Partnership
Media: Venture with network enables 100-year-old society to join international market.
www.latimes.com
If you're talking about Lord Grade as far as a I know there was no bankruptcy but rather a hostile takeover of ACC by Robert Holmes à Court in 1982. I imagine his career path is some what similar to OTL:
Lew Grade - Wikipedia
Assuming a better public opinion of AIDS and HIV Isaac Asimov's family may not hide his HIV status when he dies in 1992, especially if they reveal how it happened:
en.wikipedia.org
If we're saving Sam Kinison this is the year to do it:
en.wikipedia.org
I wonder if enough small changes have altered Jeff Porcaro's death:
en.wikipedia.org
Another possible scenario where minor changes around the world could save some one:
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
Lets not forget Conor Clayton:
www.oversixty.com.au
(one interpretation what Conor Clayton may have looked today)
Isaac Asimov - Wikipedia
Sam Kinison - Wikipedia
Jeff Porcaro - Wikipedia
David Ruffin - Wikipedia
Julissa Gomez - Wikipedia
Steve Clark - Wikipedia
Dottie West - Wikipedia
Bill Graham (promoter) - Wikipedia
Victor Chang - Wikipedia
Johnny Thunders - Wikipedia
Denny Hulme - Wikipedia
What really happened when Eric Clapton's 4-year-old son died in 1991 | OverSixty
It was an unthinkable loss for any parent and now the full details have been revealed.
(one interpretation what Conor Clayton may have looked today)
Not even close. The country is trapped in a near constant cycle of debt, default and inflation, occasionally hyper-inflation, it hit well over 5000% in the 1998 to 2002 crisis (it's important to be precise on dates because there have been so many). It's so bad there is the "Argentine Paradox" - it is the only country that got relatively poorer over the 20th Century.
Brazil Disneyland is more likely, if still a long shot. If someone can convince the Brazilian government that the World Cup and Olympics are a terrible investment (they stadiums end up empty and the long term benefits never arrive) then they could spend some of that money on part-financing a Disney resort and infrastructure and still have many billions left over. It might also mean past-Pip gets a chance to work on the Rio-Sao Paolo high speed rail project, which got sacrificed on the altar of the Olympics and the budget crunch.
Though as mentioned it would lead to some awkward PR and photos, the contrast between the shiny magic kingdom and the favelas would be stark. In any event that wouldn't be till the late 2000s at the earliest and is still something of a long shot.
A Brazilian Disneyland would certainly be more attractive ITTL as a long term investment compared to the Olympics where the infrastructure that was built years ago has continued to decay. Still, I have doubts on whether Brazilians would pour into the resort, as I've heard most are fine with traveling to WDW anyways.
Personally I'd rather have the Brazilian government invest in that rail project or even just improving the conditions of the poor but alas, that's probably not going to happen.
Aside from that, I actually think a Brazil Pavilion at EPCOT is a more interesting/realistic proposition for Disney to build rather than just plopping a Disneyland or Disneytown at Rio, but that's just me.
Agreed. It would be seen as a monolith of the rich and the elite that might even be built on top of appropriated land from the poor. That's a recipe for a PR disaster very similar to the 2016 Olympics, but one that would linger for a long while with the Brazilian public.
Henson Bio XXI: Parks and Recreation
Chapter 17: Renaissance Man (Cont’d)
Excerpt from Jim Henson: Storyteller, an authorized biography by Jay O’Brian
In the spring of 1992 Jim Henson led the opening ceremonies for Disneyland Valencia alongside Ron Miller and Dick Nunis. It was an exciting culmination of years of design, construction, deal making, and partnerships that had alternately been a joy, a burden, a frustration, and, now, a celebration. And what a celebration! The locals took the week off for all intents and purposes and turned the whole town into a festival. Disney probably could have fought a war with the number of fireworks they set off. Whole streets in Pego and Denia were closed, the celebration becoming like a miniature carnival. Even the anarchists’ protest became a festive event that got absorbed into the larger fiesta atmosphere after word came down that Valencia CF had managed to beat the mighty FC Barcelona 2-1.
Spain had become a regular place to visit for Jim over the past few years as the park construction continued, and he’d developed a passible command of the Spanish language, though his odd mix of New York Puerto Rican, LA Chicano, book-Castilian, and Catalan tended to cause near universal confusion. His fame posed few issues for him there. People would smile to see him and tourists would occasionally ask him for an autograph as he walked the increasingly-less-quiet streets, but they would mostly just leave him alone. And the one time he’d been accosted by some inebriated punks looking to hassle the awkward old foreigner, he had “Kermit” talk his way out of the situation, said “punks” buying him a drink instead[1].
He was really growing to love the freewheeling, informalized nature of tapas culture and growing to appreciate Spanish wine and sangria, though he wasn’t quite ready to try the absinthe since he’d heard that it was narcotic[2]. He implemented tapas stations at Disneyland Valencia from opening day, where they proved popular and profitable enough that he added localized “tapas” options to other Disney parks[3], where they fit in well as part of a long history of eat-as-you-go “street food” at the parks, albeit with higher quality and better health than the standard pizza, popcorn, and churro fare.
Life in LA had opened him up to Spanish culture even more than his time in New York already had, and as such Valencia felt a lot like California to him, only with less traffic, though admittedly what the traffic lacked in volume it more than made up for in chaos. Who knew a Fiat or Renault could be such a dangerous vehicle? Still, he felt safe and respected walking down the medieval streets of Pego and Denia with Daryl Hannah, whom he was still seeing. No Paparazzi hounded them. No one seemed bothered by him and Hannah being together, wealthy and powerful men having affairs with younger beautiful women being almost the cliched expectation in the Mediterranean. While he and Daryl alike were utterly appalled at the continued existence of bullfighting, which they considered ritualized murder, most aspects of Spanish culture and society appealed to them[4].
He floated ideas of a deeper relationship with Daryl, but she was uninterested in anything like formal ties, a hippie free spirit to the end. She often insisted on paying for her own meals and travel despite the fact that Jim had more money than he had any idea what to do with. He instead respected her distance and enjoyed her intimacy. He briefly went back to vegetarianism with her before reverting quickly to become a pescatarian for the most part. In Spain, however, he frequently “cheated” behind her back in that regard, since the meats were just so much better than anything in the US, though he ironically ended up refusing to eat octopus after discovering just how intelligent that they were even as he made excuses for the occasional pork.
One morning in Denia he awoke before dawn and walked to the shore in time to see the sunrise. He reflected on how much had changed in his life, and in his family’s life. Jane was still running the CTW. Lisa was on her way to become the head of Fox Studios. Brian was an executive at Disney by his own merits. Cheryl was managing her new career in costuming, primarily with Tim’s Skeleton Crew, and bugging him to launch a Dark Crystal TV series. John was running a major charity, underwritten by President Carter. And Heather had graduated from CalArts and rather than pursue a position at any of the numerous opportunities that awaited her among the companies of Hollywood given her name and connections, she was founding her own small studio with some of her CalArts friends! He offered her a fallback job at Disney if the bold but risky plan fell through, which he well expected that it might.
(Images by @Denliner)
He returned to LA and into a rather mad summer of movie releases and park decisions, greenlighting in particular three new Disneytowns in Seattle, St. Louis, and Chicago. The Seattle site was built on Pier 57 in partnership with the landowner, Hal Griffith, who’d been trying to develop the pier into an amusement park for years and was super-enthusiastic, even footing much of the bill himself. The Chicago Disneytown was likewise built on the waterfront, in this case on the site of the old Navy Pier, made in partnership with the Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority. The 50-acre space was already mostly filled with historical structures, which required some careful renovation (aided by restoration grants) to allow for track rides and for recycled Hooked! sets to be put in as a walk-through attraction. Both Disneytowns would feature their own localized versions of Disney’s Pier Revue, with the Seattle site featuring Chinook-influenced artwork and themed like Adventureland (complete with a Pacific Northwest “Enchanted Potlatch” in the vein of the Enchanted Tiki Bar and a localized version of the Adventurer’s Club) and the Chicago site given a 1920s gothic revival take on the “Hyperion” style and made vaguely analogous to New Orleans Square. The Chicago site featured a “Gangstertown” animatronic dark track ride and “Blues City,” a blues and jazz themed music club. Universal would later create “Jake & Elwood’s House of Blues” in response, which put Bernie Brillstein, a producer for The Blues Brothers, into a strange position.
Both sites would do spectacularly well in part thanks to their enviable locations right downtown and in the case of Seattle in particular thanks to the long, dark, wet winters, which made the happy glowing neon of the Disneytown a welcome respite.
Image by @Denliner.
The St. Louis site, on the other hand, struggled from the very start. It was a labor of love for the whole Disney family, an attempt to recreate Walt’s old plans for Riverfront Square. It was tied to Main Street USA and designed to be “Marceline in its heyday” in honor of Walt. But hopes to build it near the Gateway Arch to original plans were dashed quickly as the City of St. Louis, likely due in part to intense lobbying by Warner Brothers’ Six Flags, rejected the plan. Instead, they built across the river in the Eagle Creek area, not far from the historic Cahokia Mounds. The development effort went well, with the local governments all eager for something to compete with St. Louis and with luck stimulate the struggling local economy.
But all did not go according to plan. After a promising opening day in 1993 and an initial surge of visitors, Six Flags St. Louis began ruthlessly undercutting the small Disneytown in every way. Ticket prices were slashed and locals were given even greater discounts. If Disneytown scored a big-name entertainer, Six Flags would try to pay them more to come to Six Flags or would run a competing act. Disney even alleged that Six Flags was sending limos to grab musicians bound for the Disneytown at the airport and instead rushing them to performances at Six Flags, though Six Flags denied the accusations[5]. And most devastatingly, existing plans to expand the Six Flags park into a full-blown Warner Movie World were accelerated, as they had been in Dallas in response to the San Antonio Disneytown, but in this case being right across town it was able to undercut the Disneytown directly.
As close to enraged as anyone ever saw him, Jim tried to fight the flagrant bullying as he saw it as best as he could, with ad campaigns that played up the “Walt’s hometown” angle and framed it as a “David and Goliath” story, but it was really hard for a company like Disney to play the “little guy” card. The little park continued to suffer losses each quarter. The board, who desperately wanted to keep that resort in particular alive to honor Walt, would have to face a tough decision on whether to spend hundreds of millions of dollars trying to upgrade the Disneytown into a full-blown Disneyland capable of going toe-to-toe with Six Flags, or simply accept defeat and cut their losses.
But this struggle was still in the future in the spring and summer of 1992, and Jim was at a height of personal success. Despite the initial resistance of many in animation, Roy Disney in particular, Shrek! was completed and released that July. The Amblin-coproduced animated “anti-fairytale” was released under Fantasia Films and Spielberg’s new “Amblimation” label since Roy and others objected to releasing it under the Disney label with its frequently rude and misanthropic humor. And despite the assumption by many that it would be a flop with its hideously gross Princess, the film became a noteworthy success, earning $182 million against its $34 million budget[6]. The film did well with boys ages 7 to 12 precisely because of the “ugliness” and it also did very well with teens and young adults due to the satirical and deconstructive elements and stealthy adult jokes.
By contrast, The Bamboo Princess, done in partnership with Studio Ghibli, was turning into a beautiful masterpiece and The Little Mermaid was taking on a spectacular life of its own with Freddie Mercury and Alan Menken teaming up for the soundtrack. Both films followed a more traditional Disney Princess model, though the former was, despite intense lobbying by Roy and others, going to retain the bittersweet original ending at the unbending insistence of producer and writer Isao Takahata. Even so, Bo Boyd was having a field day with the toy lines, with Disney Princesses now an ever-increasing brand in their own right, and with a span of cultures and personalities to choose from, from the sweet and persistent Cinderella to the spoiled Princess Jasmine to the literally haunting Princess Keli to even the hideous Princess Argyle from Shrek, who had her own small but devoted fandom[7].
And on the subject of Shrek, the titular character’s voice actor was another Second City turned Saturday Night Live actor that Bernie’s daughter Leigh managed named Chris Farley. The young man was at once hilarious and loaded with pathos, which made him so relatable even while acting in a totally over-the-top manner. His vocal takes on Shrek were nearly as sidesplitting as Robin Williams had been on Aladdin with each and every minor little crisis or inconvenience blown wildly out of proportion in the funniest way possible. He and fellow SNL-er Steve Martin, who played the obnoxious antagonist Prince Guyling, were hilarious playing off of each other. For that matter, every voice actor was enhanced by playing off of Farley. Fran Drescher and Gilbert Gottfried as his parents, Carol Kane as the Princess Argyle, and even the great George Carlin as the literal wise-ass Donkey.
Behind the scenes, though, Farley was quickly emerging as another “worry case” for Jim. Farley idolized John Belushi, and was following his same career path. Unfortunately, that included the self-destructive habits. Farley, like Forrest and Phoenix, was heavily into drugs. Jim and John began to call them the “three Fs” based upon the phonetics of their last names (even though Phoenix was a Ph) and began to wonder if there was any hope for any of them. Forrest in particular was spiraling fast, and Phoenix and Farley were right behind him. Phoenix seemed to regret the drug abuse, but Farley practically seemed to want to die in a drugged-out self-immolation, taking the Belushi route all the way to the fiery end, as it were.
Bernie, Leigh, Jim, and John pushed Farley into rehab, but after emerging sober he quickly returned to substance abuse. And Jim began to wonder if trying to save lives was a Sisyphean task.
[1] In a similar event in history, Johnny Weissmuller, who played Tarzan, used his famous yodel call to save himself from revolutionaries in Cuba after the Batista regime fell.
[2] Not actually true, mind you, but in 1992 it was still illegal pretty much everywhere in the world except Spain based upon a false belief in its narcotic properties that just wouldn’t die.
[3] Another brilliant idea from Mrs. Khan! Probably a better idea than the Handwich, I dare say.
[4] Daryl Hannah was far less than impressed by the machismo culture, mind you.
[5] Morning talk shows allegedly did this nasty trick to steal talent from each other.
[6] Will not become a phenomenon like in our timeline, but a fun if forgettable film that has a cult following. There will be no sequels. More on Shrek! in a future post.
[7] Perfect for the young Daria type who wants you to know that she’s her “own person” and has no time for your stupid old beauty standards, thank you very much, and doesn’t care one bit what you think of her. Look at her not caring what you think!
Excerpt from Jim Henson: Storyteller, an authorized biography by Jay O’Brian
In the spring of 1992 Jim Henson led the opening ceremonies for Disneyland Valencia alongside Ron Miller and Dick Nunis. It was an exciting culmination of years of design, construction, deal making, and partnerships that had alternately been a joy, a burden, a frustration, and, now, a celebration. And what a celebration! The locals took the week off for all intents and purposes and turned the whole town into a festival. Disney probably could have fought a war with the number of fireworks they set off. Whole streets in Pego and Denia were closed, the celebration becoming like a miniature carnival. Even the anarchists’ protest became a festive event that got absorbed into the larger fiesta atmosphere after word came down that Valencia CF had managed to beat the mighty FC Barcelona 2-1.
Spain had become a regular place to visit for Jim over the past few years as the park construction continued, and he’d developed a passible command of the Spanish language, though his odd mix of New York Puerto Rican, LA Chicano, book-Castilian, and Catalan tended to cause near universal confusion. His fame posed few issues for him there. People would smile to see him and tourists would occasionally ask him for an autograph as he walked the increasingly-less-quiet streets, but they would mostly just leave him alone. And the one time he’d been accosted by some inebriated punks looking to hassle the awkward old foreigner, he had “Kermit” talk his way out of the situation, said “punks” buying him a drink instead[1].
He was really growing to love the freewheeling, informalized nature of tapas culture and growing to appreciate Spanish wine and sangria, though he wasn’t quite ready to try the absinthe since he’d heard that it was narcotic[2]. He implemented tapas stations at Disneyland Valencia from opening day, where they proved popular and profitable enough that he added localized “tapas” options to other Disney parks[3], where they fit in well as part of a long history of eat-as-you-go “street food” at the parks, albeit with higher quality and better health than the standard pizza, popcorn, and churro fare.
Life in LA had opened him up to Spanish culture even more than his time in New York already had, and as such Valencia felt a lot like California to him, only with less traffic, though admittedly what the traffic lacked in volume it more than made up for in chaos. Who knew a Fiat or Renault could be such a dangerous vehicle? Still, he felt safe and respected walking down the medieval streets of Pego and Denia with Daryl Hannah, whom he was still seeing. No Paparazzi hounded them. No one seemed bothered by him and Hannah being together, wealthy and powerful men having affairs with younger beautiful women being almost the cliched expectation in the Mediterranean. While he and Daryl alike were utterly appalled at the continued existence of bullfighting, which they considered ritualized murder, most aspects of Spanish culture and society appealed to them[4].
He floated ideas of a deeper relationship with Daryl, but she was uninterested in anything like formal ties, a hippie free spirit to the end. She often insisted on paying for her own meals and travel despite the fact that Jim had more money than he had any idea what to do with. He instead respected her distance and enjoyed her intimacy. He briefly went back to vegetarianism with her before reverting quickly to become a pescatarian for the most part. In Spain, however, he frequently “cheated” behind her back in that regard, since the meats were just so much better than anything in the US, though he ironically ended up refusing to eat octopus after discovering just how intelligent that they were even as he made excuses for the occasional pork.
One morning in Denia he awoke before dawn and walked to the shore in time to see the sunrise. He reflected on how much had changed in his life, and in his family’s life. Jane was still running the CTW. Lisa was on her way to become the head of Fox Studios. Brian was an executive at Disney by his own merits. Cheryl was managing her new career in costuming, primarily with Tim’s Skeleton Crew, and bugging him to launch a Dark Crystal TV series. John was running a major charity, underwritten by President Carter. And Heather had graduated from CalArts and rather than pursue a position at any of the numerous opportunities that awaited her among the companies of Hollywood given her name and connections, she was founding her own small studio with some of her CalArts friends! He offered her a fallback job at Disney if the bold but risky plan fell through, which he well expected that it might.
(Images by @Denliner)
He returned to LA and into a rather mad summer of movie releases and park decisions, greenlighting in particular three new Disneytowns in Seattle, St. Louis, and Chicago. The Seattle site was built on Pier 57 in partnership with the landowner, Hal Griffith, who’d been trying to develop the pier into an amusement park for years and was super-enthusiastic, even footing much of the bill himself. The Chicago Disneytown was likewise built on the waterfront, in this case on the site of the old Navy Pier, made in partnership with the Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority. The 50-acre space was already mostly filled with historical structures, which required some careful renovation (aided by restoration grants) to allow for track rides and for recycled Hooked! sets to be put in as a walk-through attraction. Both Disneytowns would feature their own localized versions of Disney’s Pier Revue, with the Seattle site featuring Chinook-influenced artwork and themed like Adventureland (complete with a Pacific Northwest “Enchanted Potlatch” in the vein of the Enchanted Tiki Bar and a localized version of the Adventurer’s Club) and the Chicago site given a 1920s gothic revival take on the “Hyperion” style and made vaguely analogous to New Orleans Square. The Chicago site featured a “Gangstertown” animatronic dark track ride and “Blues City,” a blues and jazz themed music club. Universal would later create “Jake & Elwood’s House of Blues” in response, which put Bernie Brillstein, a producer for The Blues Brothers, into a strange position.
Both sites would do spectacularly well in part thanks to their enviable locations right downtown and in the case of Seattle in particular thanks to the long, dark, wet winters, which made the happy glowing neon of the Disneytown a welcome respite.
Image by @Denliner.
The St. Louis site, on the other hand, struggled from the very start. It was a labor of love for the whole Disney family, an attempt to recreate Walt’s old plans for Riverfront Square. It was tied to Main Street USA and designed to be “Marceline in its heyday” in honor of Walt. But hopes to build it near the Gateway Arch to original plans were dashed quickly as the City of St. Louis, likely due in part to intense lobbying by Warner Brothers’ Six Flags, rejected the plan. Instead, they built across the river in the Eagle Creek area, not far from the historic Cahokia Mounds. The development effort went well, with the local governments all eager for something to compete with St. Louis and with luck stimulate the struggling local economy.
But all did not go according to plan. After a promising opening day in 1993 and an initial surge of visitors, Six Flags St. Louis began ruthlessly undercutting the small Disneytown in every way. Ticket prices were slashed and locals were given even greater discounts. If Disneytown scored a big-name entertainer, Six Flags would try to pay them more to come to Six Flags or would run a competing act. Disney even alleged that Six Flags was sending limos to grab musicians bound for the Disneytown at the airport and instead rushing them to performances at Six Flags, though Six Flags denied the accusations[5]. And most devastatingly, existing plans to expand the Six Flags park into a full-blown Warner Movie World were accelerated, as they had been in Dallas in response to the San Antonio Disneytown, but in this case being right across town it was able to undercut the Disneytown directly.
As close to enraged as anyone ever saw him, Jim tried to fight the flagrant bullying as he saw it as best as he could, with ad campaigns that played up the “Walt’s hometown” angle and framed it as a “David and Goliath” story, but it was really hard for a company like Disney to play the “little guy” card. The little park continued to suffer losses each quarter. The board, who desperately wanted to keep that resort in particular alive to honor Walt, would have to face a tough decision on whether to spend hundreds of millions of dollars trying to upgrade the Disneytown into a full-blown Disneyland capable of going toe-to-toe with Six Flags, or simply accept defeat and cut their losses.
But this struggle was still in the future in the spring and summer of 1992, and Jim was at a height of personal success. Despite the initial resistance of many in animation, Roy Disney in particular, Shrek! was completed and released that July. The Amblin-coproduced animated “anti-fairytale” was released under Fantasia Films and Spielberg’s new “Amblimation” label since Roy and others objected to releasing it under the Disney label with its frequently rude and misanthropic humor. And despite the assumption by many that it would be a flop with its hideously gross Princess, the film became a noteworthy success, earning $182 million against its $34 million budget[6]. The film did well with boys ages 7 to 12 precisely because of the “ugliness” and it also did very well with teens and young adults due to the satirical and deconstructive elements and stealthy adult jokes.
By contrast, The Bamboo Princess, done in partnership with Studio Ghibli, was turning into a beautiful masterpiece and The Little Mermaid was taking on a spectacular life of its own with Freddie Mercury and Alan Menken teaming up for the soundtrack. Both films followed a more traditional Disney Princess model, though the former was, despite intense lobbying by Roy and others, going to retain the bittersweet original ending at the unbending insistence of producer and writer Isao Takahata. Even so, Bo Boyd was having a field day with the toy lines, with Disney Princesses now an ever-increasing brand in their own right, and with a span of cultures and personalities to choose from, from the sweet and persistent Cinderella to the spoiled Princess Jasmine to the literally haunting Princess Keli to even the hideous Princess Argyle from Shrek, who had her own small but devoted fandom[7].
And on the subject of Shrek, the titular character’s voice actor was another Second City turned Saturday Night Live actor that Bernie’s daughter Leigh managed named Chris Farley. The young man was at once hilarious and loaded with pathos, which made him so relatable even while acting in a totally over-the-top manner. His vocal takes on Shrek were nearly as sidesplitting as Robin Williams had been on Aladdin with each and every minor little crisis or inconvenience blown wildly out of proportion in the funniest way possible. He and fellow SNL-er Steve Martin, who played the obnoxious antagonist Prince Guyling, were hilarious playing off of each other. For that matter, every voice actor was enhanced by playing off of Farley. Fran Drescher and Gilbert Gottfried as his parents, Carol Kane as the Princess Argyle, and even the great George Carlin as the literal wise-ass Donkey.
Behind the scenes, though, Farley was quickly emerging as another “worry case” for Jim. Farley idolized John Belushi, and was following his same career path. Unfortunately, that included the self-destructive habits. Farley, like Forrest and Phoenix, was heavily into drugs. Jim and John began to call them the “three Fs” based upon the phonetics of their last names (even though Phoenix was a Ph) and began to wonder if there was any hope for any of them. Forrest in particular was spiraling fast, and Phoenix and Farley were right behind him. Phoenix seemed to regret the drug abuse, but Farley practically seemed to want to die in a drugged-out self-immolation, taking the Belushi route all the way to the fiery end, as it were.
Bernie, Leigh, Jim, and John pushed Farley into rehab, but after emerging sober he quickly returned to substance abuse. And Jim began to wonder if trying to save lives was a Sisyphean task.
[1] In a similar event in history, Johnny Weissmuller, who played Tarzan, used his famous yodel call to save himself from revolutionaries in Cuba after the Batista regime fell.
[2] Not actually true, mind you, but in 1992 it was still illegal pretty much everywhere in the world except Spain based upon a false belief in its narcotic properties that just wouldn’t die.
[3] Another brilliant idea from Mrs. Khan! Probably a better idea than the Handwich, I dare say.
[4] Daryl Hannah was far less than impressed by the machismo culture, mind you.
[5] Morning talk shows allegedly did this nasty trick to steal talent from each other.
[6] Will not become a phenomenon like in our timeline, but a fun if forgettable film that has a cult following. There will be no sequels. More on Shrek! in a future post.
[7] Perfect for the young Daria type who wants you to know that she’s her “own person” and has no time for your stupid old beauty standards, thank you very much, and doesn’t care one bit what you think of her. Look at her not caring what you think!
Disneytown Seattle and Chicago look like fun. For the former, I can only imagine how the grunge and other rock genres would be affected by economic butterflies it would bring, and the Enchanted Potlatch sounds like excellent representation for native american culture. However, I don't really get an adventureland theme here since the ones elsewhere aren't the rainforests of the Pacific Northwest. For the latter, I can only assume this would butterfly the Childrens' Museum and the Shakespeare Theatre present in OTL.
I do hope that St Louis can rebuild and compete with WB.
No Shrek sequels? Schaffrilias would be pissed.
I do hope that St Louis can rebuild and compete with WB.
No Shrek sequels? Schaffrilias would be pissed.
Jim has, clearly, never been to Italy.
Turning 1980s FIAT Panda models into deadly weapons is basically the national sport over here.
You can't be serious -- I can see nighttime talk shows doing this -- but morning talk shows are a horse of a different color.
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Come on @Geekhis Khan I through this was supposed to be a realistic timeline!😂
Hollywood beware, the Hensons are here!
No seriously, good luck to Heather!
What's the name of her studio? Is she also a pun master like her dad?
Shrek sounds interesting. Like a mixture between the original book and the fairytale satire of the film.
The casting is also on point. Chris Farley as Shrek is something we are already familiar with and Fran Drescher and Gilbert Gottfried as a presumably bickering married couple sounds fun!
Can't wait for the full post about Shrek!
What makes this less realistic than this:
Why Sheriff's win over Real Madrid can be celebrated and lamented at the same time
Sheriff Tiraspol's Champions League fairy tale is also a reminder of how unfairly rare it is for a small nation to even get a chance at this level.
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