He had already left Disney over a year before either of them came out.
A Hippie in the House of Mouse (Jim Henson at Disney, 1980)
- Thread starter Geekhis Khan
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I remember watching FernGully as a kid, I still sort of remember it...nice to see it doing better this go around, if only for the sake of the people involved.
That's awesome! Too bad those kids aren't old enough to vote yet or else Al Gore will have a great win at his hand.
Maybe in 2002?😅
Oh Jeff please, you are working for Disney!
Stop being such a dick to other animation studios, it's not like Disney is going bankrupt anytime soon
Considering what happened not even a decade earlier, its that near extinction sorta mindset
Well, we put a Muppet show in your Muppet show!Hey, you like the Muppet Show?
Or was that not the reference you were looking for?
No, Allen. That was not.
Btw what are the Muppets up to these days?
The hype has passed a decade ago and much of the Old Guard has either moved on to other projects or has sadly passed away.
Any plans for a little Muppets revival @Geekhis Khan ? Molly would appreciate it!
A fantastic addition to the Disney collection, with FernGully's environmentalist message spreading much wider to a generation of 90s kids.
I'm thinking that FernGully will have a far reaching impact on Disney and its executives (Roy and Jim especially), so I can expect it to return in some fashion like in EPCOT or even in a Tomorrowland.
As always, can't wait for more!
Note that they're still making movies with the Muppets cast (with more on the way) and make regular appearances in Disney shows and commercials, so it's not like people forget about them....PLUS THERE IS LITERALLY TWO MUPPETLANDS IN MK AND VALENCIA
Okay, this is definitely headcanon, but I can totally imagine Molly eating Swedish Meatballs at MK's Swedish Chef Smorgasbord while having the biggest smile on her face at some point during her visit to WDW and that makes me happy for some odd reason. 😁
I'm thinking that FernGully will have a far reaching impact on Disney and its executives (Roy and Jim especially), so I can expect it to return in some fashion like in EPCOT or even in a Tomorrowland.
As always, can't wait for more!
Muppets are better off than OTL with Jim not being dead, so that's a plus. 👍
Note that they're still making movies with the Muppets cast (with more on the way) and make regular appearances in Disney shows and commercials, so it's not like people forget about them....
Okay, this is definitely headcanon, but I can totally imagine Molly eating Swedish Meatballs at MK's Swedish Chef Smorgasbord while having the biggest smile on her face at some point during her visit to WDW and that makes me happy for some odd reason. 😁
I desperately want them to come back in a new show but I also want to be shocked at the high quality ideas that Geekhis is cooking up in his head right now, so I will wait patiently until that time comes. A failed revival will simply not do for this crazy cast of lovable puppets.
That's adorable especially since in my Headcannon she's the girlfriend/fiance of Larry from the nostalgia show and he's not really as excited as her😂
Why during midterm elections?
ITTL Jeff doesn't work for Disney.
Hopefully The Muppet Christmas Carol in 1992, I think there was talk of a Muppets Shakespeare film in 1994, and Muppet Treasure Island in 1996.
Sorry meant the presidential election.
I know, I was referring to the foot note that explains how Jeffrey Katzenberg sabotaged FernGully IOTL. 🤨
With a major studio like MGM this may not fall into developmental hell:
muppet.fandom.com
With the close association between George Lucas and Disney ITTL we may get Kirk Thatcher's version of Muppets in Space:
muppet.fandom.com
A project that various times OTL involved Kathleen Kennedy, Jim Henson Creature Shop, and Disney:
muppet.fandom.com
Considering the route that the USR is taking ITTL Disney might revisit this idea:
muppet.fandom.com
As this concept proves it's possible to make the Little Mermaid into a live action Muppet film, though honestly it probably works better as an animated film:
muppet.fandom.com
The Seven Deadly Sins (film)
The Seven Deadly Sins was a screenplay written by Anthony Minghella, which was in pre-production by Jim Henson Productions for ten years and never produced. The plot involved a man suffering a spiritual crisis. Faced with losing his wife and children to another man, the protagonist attempts...
muppet.fandom.com
Muppets in Space
Muppets in Space was an early concept for a Muppet movie with a science fiction theme. In August 1998, Jerry Juhl told fan site Muppet Central that in 1996, he and Kirk Thatcher had separately begun to develop movie ideas for the Muppet characters' next feature film. Thatcher's movie concept was...
muppet.fandom.com
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was a proposed film version of C. S. Lewis' classic book, the first published in The Chronicles of Narnia series. Option rights to the story were granted to Paramount Pictures in 1993, with Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall as executive producers. In 1996...
muppet.fandom.com
Big Bird Goes to Russia
Big Bird Goes to Russia was a proposed television special that would have seen Big Bird traveling to the Soviet Union. The program would have aired on television in the US, while producers hoped to also broadcast in the Soviet Union. Following the success of Big Bird in China, producers at...
muppet.fandom.com
Little Mermaid's Island
Little Mermaid's Island was a project proposed by Jim Henson in 1990, during talks with The Walt Disney Company, as a spin-off of Disney's animated film The Little Mermaid. Two episodes were shot, but never aired: "Sebastian's Birthday" and "Tell the Truth." It was intended as a daily series to...
muppet.fandom.com
I like the idea of an earlier Narnia adaptation, but is the Creature Shop still a thing ITTL or wasn't it all combined into Disney Iworks?A project that various times OTL involved Kathleen Kennedy, Jim Henson Creature Shop, and Disney:
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was a proposed film version of C. S. Lewis' classic book, the first published in The Chronicles of Narnia series. Option rights to the story were granted to Paramount Pictures in 1993, with Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall as executive producers. In 1996...
Otherwise it could be a hit for Paramount and may lead them to buy the rights to other British books 😉
Brillstein XIII: You Never Know
Chapter 13, The Lion Gets its Teeth Back (Cont’d)
Excerpt from Where Did I Go Right? (or: You’re No One in Hollywood Unless Someone Wants You Dead), by Bernie Brillstein (with Cheryl Henson)
But building back MGM was proving to be a continuous running challenge. You couldn’t just release a single big pic and expect it all to work out from that point forward! Each success bred a need to keep up the momentum and every failure (like Toys) was a stain you had to work hard to clean up. Thankfully, we’d made plenty of good contacts and allies, be they Amblin or Lucasfilm. But while MGM took the spotlight, I still had Hyperion to run, not to mention I was regularly getting asked to support Fantasia productions. Jim, for example, convinced us to take a chance on a PolyGram film for Fantasia by an effects guy named A Gnome Named Gnorm. I was dubious, but then again, I fully expected Spaced Invaders and Killer Klowns from Outer Space, both the creations of effects guys, to crash and burn, so what the hell?
Well, guess what happened?
Yea, hard crash.
But also, we had our contacts with As You Wish, who brought us plenty of TV and film opportunities, not all of which we could handle despite increasing our production footprint into Orlando at the new studios there. We had to put the pause on William Goldman’s A Very Good Year for yet another year in its long life and had to turn down Honeymoon in Vegas (which went to Columbia) and instead followed through with a Sandra Bullock helmed Rom-Com Mr. Right Now for Hyperion, which turned out to be a dud, as did Billy Crystal’s Mr. Saturday Night.
But we did get an option on the Rob Reiner helmed A Few Good Men, based on an Aaron Sorkin play. It involved a court case by Navy JAG lawyers, and Rob wanted Jack Nicholson, who wanted five million bucks. I was dubious, even with Rob involved, so I called up Dave Lazer in New York and sent him to check out the play. He called me back the next day. “Do it,” is all he said.
We brought in Nicholson, who actually proved well worth the price. Even he said it was one of the few times he was worth the price he commanded! Poor Chris O’Donnell and Jodie Foster[1] never stood a chance as the two hero-lawyers! Jack ate them and everything else alive and crapped gold, getting nominated for an Oscar for his performance.
Sometimes a film lands in your lap. Diana Birkenfield convinced me to greenlight a women’s baseball film by Penny Marshall called A League of their Own. Ron Miller was enthralled by the idea, and he urged me to greenlight it alongside a little kid’s hockey film I had low expectations for named The Mighty Ducks by a young scriptwriter named Steve Brill (no relation to Fran) and yet both proved to be breakout successes. Tom Hanks led the former and Judge Reinhold for the latter. Reinholdt, in turn, managed to sell me on a production of the Carl Hiaasen novel Tourist Season, that he’d been trying to launch since ’86, which we handed to Joel and Ethan Coen, who turned it into a fun horror-comedy that ended up with an R-rating but made bank . Joel joked it was also a "sports film", at least from the perspective of the killer!
One of these films is not like the others...or is it?
But it’s never that simple when you work for Disney, where the parks are bringing in about five billion bucks to the studios’ one billion, and the latter starts to feel more like a promotional campaign for the former at times. And the truth is that for all of their differences in rating and target audience, the two sports films were a great compliment for the new Disney Good Sports Resort, so we got a lot of promotional backing from Jack Lindquist and Dick Nunis, who wanted to see Ron Miller’s big dream made a reality. We were able to do a lot of filming right there for both films. We even leveraged some government funds under Title 9 to spin up girls’ sports using League as a promotional vessel. You won't believe who ultimately became our patron there! Rosie O’Donnell, one of the films’ stars, was eager to help out there as well, even as she ended up clashing with Dick and later our external patron on many occasions.
Fun times.
And that’s just a peak at the wrangling that you do in production. You get lucky, having a film fall in your lap. Sometimes that film leads to other films or other opportunities you couldn't have imagined. You go whole-hog to sponsor a “can’t miss” like Mr. Right Now or Mr. Saturday Night. You make hard choices, sometimes producing A Few Good Men, and sometimes producing A Gnome Named Gnorm. And sometimes a forgettable pee wee hockey film starring an ex-Brat-Packer is a hit when the clever film by a comedy legend instead crashes and burns. No way to know, so you keep swinging knowing you won’t hit them all.
But you keep at it, and you love what you do.
And that, in a nutshell, is show business.
[1] In our timeline it went to Castle Rock’s partner Columbia, who chose Tom Cruise and Demi Moore, two sex symbols at the height of their sexy. Nicholson still ate them alive.
Excerpt from Where Did I Go Right? (or: You’re No One in Hollywood Unless Someone Wants You Dead), by Bernie Brillstein (with Cheryl Henson)
But building back MGM was proving to be a continuous running challenge. You couldn’t just release a single big pic and expect it all to work out from that point forward! Each success bred a need to keep up the momentum and every failure (like Toys) was a stain you had to work hard to clean up. Thankfully, we’d made plenty of good contacts and allies, be they Amblin or Lucasfilm. But while MGM took the spotlight, I still had Hyperion to run, not to mention I was regularly getting asked to support Fantasia productions. Jim, for example, convinced us to take a chance on a PolyGram film for Fantasia by an effects guy named A Gnome Named Gnorm. I was dubious, but then again, I fully expected Spaced Invaders and Killer Klowns from Outer Space, both the creations of effects guys, to crash and burn, so what the hell?
Well, guess what happened?
Yea, hard crash.
But also, we had our contacts with As You Wish, who brought us plenty of TV and film opportunities, not all of which we could handle despite increasing our production footprint into Orlando at the new studios there. We had to put the pause on William Goldman’s A Very Good Year for yet another year in its long life and had to turn down Honeymoon in Vegas (which went to Columbia) and instead followed through with a Sandra Bullock helmed Rom-Com Mr. Right Now for Hyperion, which turned out to be a dud, as did Billy Crystal’s Mr. Saturday Night.
But we did get an option on the Rob Reiner helmed A Few Good Men, based on an Aaron Sorkin play. It involved a court case by Navy JAG lawyers, and Rob wanted Jack Nicholson, who wanted five million bucks. I was dubious, even with Rob involved, so I called up Dave Lazer in New York and sent him to check out the play. He called me back the next day. “Do it,” is all he said.
We brought in Nicholson, who actually proved well worth the price. Even he said it was one of the few times he was worth the price he commanded! Poor Chris O’Donnell and Jodie Foster[1] never stood a chance as the two hero-lawyers! Jack ate them and everything else alive and crapped gold, getting nominated for an Oscar for his performance.
Sometimes a film lands in your lap. Diana Birkenfield convinced me to greenlight a women’s baseball film by Penny Marshall called A League of their Own. Ron Miller was enthralled by the idea, and he urged me to greenlight it alongside a little kid’s hockey film I had low expectations for named The Mighty Ducks by a young scriptwriter named Steve Brill (no relation to Fran) and yet both proved to be breakout successes. Tom Hanks led the former and Judge Reinhold for the latter. Reinholdt, in turn, managed to sell me on a production of the Carl Hiaasen novel Tourist Season, that he’d been trying to launch since ’86, which we handed to Joel and Ethan Coen, who turned it into a fun horror-comedy that ended up with an R-rating but made bank . Joel joked it was also a "sports film", at least from the perspective of the killer!
One of these films is not like the others...or is it?
But it’s never that simple when you work for Disney, where the parks are bringing in about five billion bucks to the studios’ one billion, and the latter starts to feel more like a promotional campaign for the former at times. And the truth is that for all of their differences in rating and target audience, the two sports films were a great compliment for the new Disney Good Sports Resort, so we got a lot of promotional backing from Jack Lindquist and Dick Nunis, who wanted to see Ron Miller’s big dream made a reality. We were able to do a lot of filming right there for both films. We even leveraged some government funds under Title 9 to spin up girls’ sports using League as a promotional vessel. You won't believe who ultimately became our patron there! Rosie O’Donnell, one of the films’ stars, was eager to help out there as well, even as she ended up clashing with Dick and later our external patron on many occasions.
Fun times.
And that’s just a peak at the wrangling that you do in production. You get lucky, having a film fall in your lap. Sometimes that film leads to other films or other opportunities you couldn't have imagined. You go whole-hog to sponsor a “can’t miss” like Mr. Right Now or Mr. Saturday Night. You make hard choices, sometimes producing A Few Good Men, and sometimes producing A Gnome Named Gnorm. And sometimes a forgettable pee wee hockey film starring an ex-Brat-Packer is a hit when the clever film by a comedy legend instead crashes and burns. No way to know, so you keep swinging knowing you won’t hit them all.
But you keep at it, and you love what you do.
And that, in a nutshell, is show business.
[1] In our timeline it went to Castle Rock’s partner Columbia, who chose Tom Cruise and Demi Moore, two sex symbols at the height of their sexy. Nicholson still ate them alive.
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Sporty Post @Geekhis Khan !
I'm not sure from the wording here.
Glad that Mighty Ducks is still a cultural touchstone of this generation. However I guess that the real life Ice Hockey team doesn't exist since Bernie didn't mention it.
He takes his falls as gracefully as his rises, unlike most producers who pretend that they can see if something will be a hit or a disaster by just looking at the screen play.
It failed right?I fully expected Spaced Invaders and Killer Klowns from Outer Space, both the creations of effects guys, to crash and burn, so what the hell?
Well, guess what happened?
I'm not sure from the wording here.
Is that the movie were Tom Cruise can't handle the truth or am I confusing it with another one? Well regardless he isn't in it here so what is he doing? His last hit film in TTL was Top Gun in '86, right?But we did get an option on the Rob Reiner helmed A Few Good Men, based on an Aaron Sorkin play. It involved a court case by Navy JAG lawyers, and Rob wanted Jack Nicholson, who wanted five million bucks. I was dubious, even with Rob involved, so I called up Dave Lazer in New York and sent him to check out the play. He called me back the next day. “Do it,” is all he said.
We brought in Nicholson, who actually proved well worth the price. Even he said it was one of the few times he was worth the price he commanded! Poor Chris O’Donnell and Jodie Foster[1] never stood a chance as the two hero-lawyers! Jack ate them and everything else alive and crapped gold, getting nominated for an Oscar for his performance.
I guess League here is without Madonna? Because she might be a great singer, but she's not a great actress!
Glad that Mighty Ducks is still a cultural touchstone of this generation. However I guess that the real life Ice Hockey team doesn't exist since Bernie didn't mention it.
Tourist Season sounds like a lot of Fun and I bet that old school slasher fans will love the use of gory violence without trying to be deep and meta about it! Like a classic slasher in anything but name.
I love Bernie's honesty!
He takes his falls as gracefully as his rises, unlike most producers who pretend that they can see if something will be a hit or a disaster by just looking at the screen play.
Glad The Mighty Ducks is still here, and nice surprised at League of their Own being here; not surprised they get used for the Sports Resort. Tourist Trap sounds [morbidly] fun as well.
Need to watch A Few Good Men someday.
I know! It turned out to be a mega-hit hailed as the new Grapes of Wrath that swept Oscars and grossed billions and is the ultimate pop culture staple!/sJim, for example, convinced us to take a chance on a PolyGram film for Fantasia by an effects guy named A Gnome Named Gnorm. I was dubious, but then again, I fully expected Spaced Invaders and Killer Klowns from Outer Space, both the creations of effects guys, to crash and burn, so what the hell?
Well, guess what happened?
Need to watch A Few Good Men someday.
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