Thanks, I'll fix that.
Thanks, and thank Kalvan. You'll see some crazy alternate computer platforms soon enough.
And Chuck Peddle will be seen again.
A Hippie in the House of Mouse (Jim Henson at Disney, 1980)
- Thread starter Geekhis Khan
- Start date
- Status
Thanks, I'll fix that.
Thanks, and thank Kalvan. You'll see some crazy alternate computer platforms soon enough.
And Chuck Peddle will be seen again.
Shouldn't that be "bloodied, but unbowed"?
Seconded! I just had a look up on the Micro (and Acorn Computers) and was blown away by how ambitious and foundational to modern architecture the Micro was.
After the hints at big things coming from Commodore (like that three-way collaboration between Disney, Commodore, and Nintendo) I'd love to see British manufacture like Acorn getting some love, if only for a chapter title like "Apples to Acorns, Early Computing's Strange Obsession with Fruit".
Yep. Oh those ones that Spell Check misses!
So far we've been very US/Japan-centric, but @Kalvan and I will see what we come up with. I may have to steal that chapter title.
marathag
Banned
Atari 400/800 and Radio Shack TRS-80?
TI-99 2.8M sold from 1981
Atari sold 4 million
Tandy sold 6M Model 100 portables alone, and then all the other Model I, II ,4 and CoCos
Radio Shack sold more PCs than Commodore and Apple combined til 1980
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I realize something...how that was a market just died and no one care, for me, the real PC was the Intel Based ones, heck i remember how incredible was the original Pentium
Oh, don't worry. Things will get much better, or at least more interesting than OTL soon...
Tandy and Atari (among others) will come up in the next computer post, fear not.
Henson Bio VIII: Lisa & Brian
Chapter 13: Next Steps and The Next Generation
Excerpt from Jim Henson: Storyteller, an authorized biography by Jay O’Brian
In 1980 while Jim Henson pursued his “Disney plan”, his eldest daughter Lisa was pursuing her studies at Harvard University, where she was pursuing a bachelor’s degree in folklore and mythology. For all of her life, Lisa had been immersed in the family business, acting in Sesame Street shorts, following her father to awards ceremonies, sitting in on productions and production meetings, and even getting the chance to participate when Jim asked her opinions on the productions. This all planted the seeds of her future career.
When she was accepted to Harvard, Jim was immensely proud, and told everyone. Among the people he told was Star Wars creator George Lucas, whom he was visiting to discuss Henson Associates' impending contract to do the special creature effects[1] on the third Star Wars movie. Lucas, who had taken classes in mythology and folklore himself while in film school, and had been highly influenced by the works of Joseph Campbell, was intrigued and asked frequently about her studies. “Straight A’s,” Jim told him, proudly. George smiled, and then, without asking Jim, had an assistant reach out to Lisa in college and offered her a summer internship[2]. After calling her dad, who was pleasantly surprised (and swore he didn’t put Lucas up to it), Lisa accepted the offer.
Lisa Henson started her internship with Lucasfilm in the summer of 1981. She expected to be pulled into pre-production on the third Star Wars movie, which she knew would feature her dad’s creatures, but instead she was asked a lot of questions about Chinese folklore, in particular Journey to the West. She told him what she knew at the time. Then she was brought in on a production meeting, not with Gary Kurtz as she expected, but with Steven Spielberg and Kathleen Kennedy, who were the director and producer, respectively, for the soon-to-be mega-blockbuster hit E.T. The three were discussing the impending sequel to the highly successful Raiders of the Lost Ark, as yet unnamed. Lisa was mostly there to take notes, but, encouraged by her father’s trust in her opinions, she also asked questions and interjected her ideas. Rather than getting shot down for her insolence, as might have happened at most Hollywood studios of the era, she was listened to and her ideas were respected, particularly by Kennedy, who had begun as an assistant herself, but who had soon been promoted for her clever production ideas.
The talk at the time was on having the story set in China and somehow adapting the Monkey King legend. There were some vague ideas, like using the peaches of immortality as a McGuffin and something about a religious cult or people eating insects, but few specific details beyond the fact that they didn’t want to use Nazis as the villains this time. Lisa suggested using a mask as the McGuffin, citing the important role masks played in many mythological traditions[3], in particular with the Monkey King, who was always portrayed in traditional dances by a performer in a monkey-like mask.
There was brief talk about having the film be a prequel as a way of avoiding the Nazis, though Spielberg really wanted to bring Marion Ravenwood back as the love interest, which would be difficult to do in a prequel without violating established canon. Ultimately, the Chinese setting allowed the antagonists to be the Imperial Japanese, though they mulled ideas on how to make them somewhat sympathetic so as not to alienate Japanese audiences. More ideas manifested in subsequent meetings, from Indy and Marion being unwillingly dragged into the service of the Chinese Tongs of Shanghai, to a battle with Ninjas in a mountaintop monastery in Tibet, to a scene full of swarms of creepy insects, to a motorcycle race across the top of the Great Wall, to a child sidekick.
Lisa was asked to put together a film treatment, which proved a new challenge. She’d never done a film treatment before (most of her writing at this point had been academic[4]). Over the next few weeks, she typed up a simple, 20-page treatment that captured all of the major points they’d discussed at the meetings. It had a rough three-act structure, a menacing Japanese Imperial Army officer named Yamato Oni, a Chinese orphan tuned Indy’s assistant named Wu Lee (or “Willie”, after George Lucas’ dog), an arrogant Tong gangster named “Iron Hand Chang” (later changed to “Lau Che”), and Chang’s enforcer, a short, squat, bow-legged, gap-toothed, ever-smiling mute named “Hóu,” whom Indy referred to as “shorty[5]”. She gave the treatment the title “The Mask of the Monkey King” and handed it to Lucas right before she returned to her classes at Harvard that fall.
She returned to Lucasfilm in the summer of ’82, where she assisted in production of what was then being called Revenge of the Jedi. She was then sent to work with Lawrence Kasdan[6], who was turning her film treatment (heavily edited by Lucas and Spielberg by this point) into a working screenplay. She assisted Kasdan, learning quite a lot about narrative structure and dialog from him, eventually resulting in the first draft of “Mask of the Monkey King,” subtitled “An Indiana Jones Adventure” to remind audiences that this was the movie they were looking for.
In June of 1983 Lisa graduated Summa Cum Laude from Harvard, something that her father Jim proudly recorded (with two exclamation points) in his Red Book. She was considering taking a production job with fellow Harvard grad Lucy Fisher at Warner Brothers[7], but she soon got a call from Kathleen Kennedy, now a partner and cofounder of Amblin Entertainment. “How would you like to be my associate producer on Mask of the Monkey King?” It was a project that Lisa had been attached to practically since its inception, and whose direction she had done a lot to help steer. Lisa hardly hesitated before saying “yes.”
While Lisa was attending Harvard, her younger brother Brian was working at WDI with the Imagineers. After a rocky start full of silent resentment over the apparent “nepotism”, Brian had made a name for himself with the Imagineers thanks to a positive attitude, a strong work ethic, and a natural engineering aptitude. He was quickly becoming as much of a mascot of the Disney Imagineering as the Figment animatronic he designed and built.
By this point he’d begun to absorb some of the culture of WDI. He cut his hair shorter (though it was still longer than most of his coworkers). He wore collared shirts, or even coats and ties on occasion. He discovered the art of strategic dry sarcasm, particularly when dealing with the finance and marketing folks, who had little understanding about the capabilities and limitations of technology and engineering. But one thing that he did not have that many of his coworkers did was a scientific degree.
Brian had studied astronomy and physics while a student at Phillips Academy prep school in Andover, Massachusetts, and was considering pursuing a similar degree at a university[8], but the Imagineers at MaPo were urging him to study engineering up the road in Pasadena at the California Institute of Technology, or Caltech. He applied and was accepted into the Mechanical Engineering department in the fall of 1982.
He regretted the decision almost immediately. While he’d done well at his studies at Phillips Andover, Caltech was a different world. Phillips had small, intimate classes with teachers dedicated to the students' learning. Caltech, at least during the “freshman flunkout”, was full of huge auditoriums with classes taught by disinterested professors whose primary interest was with the research they were doing, the teaching being to them an unwanted side requirement. The workload was ridiculous, with 70-hour study weeks considered standard.
Also, the math was proving a far greater challenge than he’d expected. “I’d taken some basic calc[ulus] and trig[onometry] at Phillips,” Brian reported, “but this was a whole new level. Differential equations, multivariable calculus, Fourier and Laplace transforms, Euler’s identity.” The classes were pass/fail for freshmen, and he was getting dangerously close to the “F” on several classes.
Brian considered dropping out, but the Imagineers urged him to stay. “You just have to get over the hump,” one of them said. “It’s the hardest workers that make it through [the degree],” another advised him, “not the smartest ones.” Brian was urged to study with his fellow students, relying on them to learn rather than on his professors. He did so, finding them all to be in the same boat that he was.
“There was never enough time,” said Brian, “but there was never enough time for anyone, so we all worked together. There was no backstabbing, bickering, or jealousy. It was all-for-one and one-for-all.”
Brian also had a serious resource to fall back upon: the Imagineers, most of whom were happy to offer assistance and informal tutoring. They were some of the brightest engineering minds in the business, which could be a disadvantage if the math was too “intuitive” to them to express to others.
By his junior year in 1984/1985 he was settling in and catching up on his classes. He was rewarded with a new way of looking at the world, an analytical way of thinking that let one break the world down into its component parts. Suddenly, the mechanical and electrical interactions that he’d always understood at an intuitive level had names, and governing equations, and ways of being decomposed and reconfigured on paper before you ever bent metal or twisted wire. “It was like seeing the world through new eyes,” said Brian. “It was like peeling the skin back from the universe and seeing the clockwork that it runs on.”
Even so, classes remained challenging and the workload heavy. He struggled in particular with thermal dynamics, an infamous course derided by many as “thermal goddamnics”. He also found electrical theory courses particularly frustrating since they traced electric current flow “backwards”, from the positive terminal to the negative, against the actual flow of electrons from the negative to the positive[9]. The perverse justification of “hole flow”, or the “flow” of the empty electron bands (“holes”), did not make things better. You might as well style gravity as the earth rising to meet the dropped object! Admittedly, the math would work out either way.
He was popular with his fellow students and was soon past the freshman/sophomore hump, with his professors now engaged and interested in what he was doing. His fellow students called him “Fig” after Figment and he was soon recruited into the latest “RF” or prank, one that was intended to outdo the infamous “Rose Bowl scoreboard change” of the previous year. One of the co-conspirators said, “Hey Fig, you work for Mickey, right? Let’s literally ‘RF[10]’ this!”
The target was the rival Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or MIT. Brian resisted putting a literal “F” in the “RF” given that such obscenities could cost him his presumptive position at WDI, but the “R” was a go. Over Summer Break of 1985, while others were heading to the beaches, they were heading indoors. With an assist from some Caltech alumni at WDI, they constructed their “R”. Just before opening weekend for MIT’s Fall ’85 semester, the “RF squad” rented a van and drove to Boston. That early morning, disguised as workers for the “Roger Fox Contracting Company”, they bluffed their way past a security guard and assembled their contraption atop the roof of the MIT Dome (to this day Brian refuses to reveal how they did it).
The MIT Great Dome remains a favorite target of “Hacks” to this day (Image source “alum.mit.edu”)
New and returning MIT students arrived that morning to see an animatronic Mickey Mouse in cap-and-gown, powered by a solar panel, waving to them. “Welcome MIT Students!” the oversized sign he carried said, “Sorry that you weren’t accepted into Caltech!”
The prank made headlines in both Boston and LA. It earned Brian and the crew positive notoriety from their fellow students and even a school credit from an admiring Caltech professor for a “Special Electromechanical Communications Project in Collaboration with MIT”. Jim recorded the event in his Red Book: “Brian and friends bring Mickey to MIT. Make headlines.”
The MIT administration, being good sports about it, placed the simple animatronic in their “Hack Museum”, where it resides today. MIT students also took their revenge the following year, somehow replacing the Caltech Fleming Cannon with a near-exact polymer replica that appeared to have gone limp and partially melted. A sign read “It’s too damned hot to think in Cali. Go MIT!” It is suspected that MIT alumni working for Disney were secretly involved in this prank in response to their Caltech coworkers.
The great Caltech/MIT “RF-Hack” war continues to this day.
Disney, for its part, disassociated itself with the whole affair, even as Jack Lindquist quietly celebrated the free promotion. They released a statement saying, “The opinions expressed by these pranksters do not represent the opinions of Mickey Mouse and do not represent the views of the Walt Disney Entertainment Company. Mickey and Disney celebrate all education and do not favor one academic institution over another. We have many valued employees from Caltech, MIT, and many other fine universities and trade schools, and we celebrate the skills and imaginations of them all.”
In the spring of 1987 Brian graduated from Caltech with a BS in Mechanical Engineering and certification as an “Engineer in Training”, or EIT. He was immediately hired by Disney Imagineering. However, the Disney he returned to was notably different than the one he’d left behind just a few short years earlier.
The times had changed.
“M-I-T…K-E-Y…”[11]
From Boston Globe, September 3rd, 1985
Oh boy! The Massachusetts Institute of Technology had a new visitor for the start of the Fall semester this week when Mickey Mouse appeared atop the MIT Dome! Not just any Mickey Mouse, but an electromechanical one holding a big sign saying, “Welcome MIT Students! Sorry that you weren’t accepted into Caltech!” Clearly those clever Caltech characters were behind this cross-country Hack. MIT students were amused but are already plotting their revenge. “Well played, Caltech, well played” said Geoff Johnston, a Chemical Engineering Junior, “But your time will come! Slipstick! Slide rule! MIT!” Mickey Mouse has not responded to our requests for comment.
[1] Now that he’s located in LA, Jim made a direct deal with Lucas rather than in our timeline where Lucas simply hired some of Jim’s former employees.
[2] The new contacts led to new butterflies. In our timeline she never worked for George Lucas.
[3] In our timeline this connection between masks and folklore would be explored by her in Mirrormask (2005). She was also partly behind the HA tradition of Masked Balls, which spilled over into Labyrinth.
[4] My assumption here. I have no idea if she did any creative writing by this point.
[5] After being brought in by Lucas to script-doctor Kasdan’s screenplay, Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz changed this nickname to “Short Round” after Huyck’s dog.
[6] In our timeline Kasdan passed on the script, turned off by the sheer negativity of the original treatment of "Temple of Death", which he described as “ugly and mean spirited”.
[7] This was the job she took in our timeline
[8] He did exactly this in our timeline, pursuing the double-major at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He dropped out after a couple of years (reasons unknown to me) and returned to the family business.
[9] As an electronics technician prior to my college years who learned practical electron flow, this drove me nuts too. And don’t get me started on the abomination that it the “current source”.
[10] Let’s just say it stands for “Rodent Fornicate”.
[11] You can thank “Mrs. Khan” for this one.
Excerpt from Jim Henson: Storyteller, an authorized biography by Jay O’Brian
In 1980 while Jim Henson pursued his “Disney plan”, his eldest daughter Lisa was pursuing her studies at Harvard University, where she was pursuing a bachelor’s degree in folklore and mythology. For all of her life, Lisa had been immersed in the family business, acting in Sesame Street shorts, following her father to awards ceremonies, sitting in on productions and production meetings, and even getting the chance to participate when Jim asked her opinions on the productions. This all planted the seeds of her future career.
When she was accepted to Harvard, Jim was immensely proud, and told everyone. Among the people he told was Star Wars creator George Lucas, whom he was visiting to discuss Henson Associates' impending contract to do the special creature effects[1] on the third Star Wars movie. Lucas, who had taken classes in mythology and folklore himself while in film school, and had been highly influenced by the works of Joseph Campbell, was intrigued and asked frequently about her studies. “Straight A’s,” Jim told him, proudly. George smiled, and then, without asking Jim, had an assistant reach out to Lisa in college and offered her a summer internship[2]. After calling her dad, who was pleasantly surprised (and swore he didn’t put Lucas up to it), Lisa accepted the offer.
Lisa Henson started her internship with Lucasfilm in the summer of 1981. She expected to be pulled into pre-production on the third Star Wars movie, which she knew would feature her dad’s creatures, but instead she was asked a lot of questions about Chinese folklore, in particular Journey to the West. She told him what she knew at the time. Then she was brought in on a production meeting, not with Gary Kurtz as she expected, but with Steven Spielberg and Kathleen Kennedy, who were the director and producer, respectively, for the soon-to-be mega-blockbuster hit E.T. The three were discussing the impending sequel to the highly successful Raiders of the Lost Ark, as yet unnamed. Lisa was mostly there to take notes, but, encouraged by her father’s trust in her opinions, she also asked questions and interjected her ideas. Rather than getting shot down for her insolence, as might have happened at most Hollywood studios of the era, she was listened to and her ideas were respected, particularly by Kennedy, who had begun as an assistant herself, but who had soon been promoted for her clever production ideas.
The talk at the time was on having the story set in China and somehow adapting the Monkey King legend. There were some vague ideas, like using the peaches of immortality as a McGuffin and something about a religious cult or people eating insects, but few specific details beyond the fact that they didn’t want to use Nazis as the villains this time. Lisa suggested using a mask as the McGuffin, citing the important role masks played in many mythological traditions[3], in particular with the Monkey King, who was always portrayed in traditional dances by a performer in a monkey-like mask.
There was brief talk about having the film be a prequel as a way of avoiding the Nazis, though Spielberg really wanted to bring Marion Ravenwood back as the love interest, which would be difficult to do in a prequel without violating established canon. Ultimately, the Chinese setting allowed the antagonists to be the Imperial Japanese, though they mulled ideas on how to make them somewhat sympathetic so as not to alienate Japanese audiences. More ideas manifested in subsequent meetings, from Indy and Marion being unwillingly dragged into the service of the Chinese Tongs of Shanghai, to a battle with Ninjas in a mountaintop monastery in Tibet, to a scene full of swarms of creepy insects, to a motorcycle race across the top of the Great Wall, to a child sidekick.
Lisa was asked to put together a film treatment, which proved a new challenge. She’d never done a film treatment before (most of her writing at this point had been academic[4]). Over the next few weeks, she typed up a simple, 20-page treatment that captured all of the major points they’d discussed at the meetings. It had a rough three-act structure, a menacing Japanese Imperial Army officer named Yamato Oni, a Chinese orphan tuned Indy’s assistant named Wu Lee (or “Willie”, after George Lucas’ dog), an arrogant Tong gangster named “Iron Hand Chang” (later changed to “Lau Che”), and Chang’s enforcer, a short, squat, bow-legged, gap-toothed, ever-smiling mute named “Hóu,” whom Indy referred to as “shorty[5]”. She gave the treatment the title “The Mask of the Monkey King” and handed it to Lucas right before she returned to her classes at Harvard that fall.
She returned to Lucasfilm in the summer of ’82, where she assisted in production of what was then being called Revenge of the Jedi. She was then sent to work with Lawrence Kasdan[6], who was turning her film treatment (heavily edited by Lucas and Spielberg by this point) into a working screenplay. She assisted Kasdan, learning quite a lot about narrative structure and dialog from him, eventually resulting in the first draft of “Mask of the Monkey King,” subtitled “An Indiana Jones Adventure” to remind audiences that this was the movie they were looking for.
In June of 1983 Lisa graduated Summa Cum Laude from Harvard, something that her father Jim proudly recorded (with two exclamation points) in his Red Book. She was considering taking a production job with fellow Harvard grad Lucy Fisher at Warner Brothers[7], but she soon got a call from Kathleen Kennedy, now a partner and cofounder of Amblin Entertainment. “How would you like to be my associate producer on Mask of the Monkey King?” It was a project that Lisa had been attached to practically since its inception, and whose direction she had done a lot to help steer. Lisa hardly hesitated before saying “yes.”
While Lisa was attending Harvard, her younger brother Brian was working at WDI with the Imagineers. After a rocky start full of silent resentment over the apparent “nepotism”, Brian had made a name for himself with the Imagineers thanks to a positive attitude, a strong work ethic, and a natural engineering aptitude. He was quickly becoming as much of a mascot of the Disney Imagineering as the Figment animatronic he designed and built.
By this point he’d begun to absorb some of the culture of WDI. He cut his hair shorter (though it was still longer than most of his coworkers). He wore collared shirts, or even coats and ties on occasion. He discovered the art of strategic dry sarcasm, particularly when dealing with the finance and marketing folks, who had little understanding about the capabilities and limitations of technology and engineering. But one thing that he did not have that many of his coworkers did was a scientific degree.
Brian had studied astronomy and physics while a student at Phillips Academy prep school in Andover, Massachusetts, and was considering pursuing a similar degree at a university[8], but the Imagineers at MaPo were urging him to study engineering up the road in Pasadena at the California Institute of Technology, or Caltech. He applied and was accepted into the Mechanical Engineering department in the fall of 1982.
He regretted the decision almost immediately. While he’d done well at his studies at Phillips Andover, Caltech was a different world. Phillips had small, intimate classes with teachers dedicated to the students' learning. Caltech, at least during the “freshman flunkout”, was full of huge auditoriums with classes taught by disinterested professors whose primary interest was with the research they were doing, the teaching being to them an unwanted side requirement. The workload was ridiculous, with 70-hour study weeks considered standard.
Also, the math was proving a far greater challenge than he’d expected. “I’d taken some basic calc[ulus] and trig[onometry] at Phillips,” Brian reported, “but this was a whole new level. Differential equations, multivariable calculus, Fourier and Laplace transforms, Euler’s identity.” The classes were pass/fail for freshmen, and he was getting dangerously close to the “F” on several classes.
Brian considered dropping out, but the Imagineers urged him to stay. “You just have to get over the hump,” one of them said. “It’s the hardest workers that make it through [the degree],” another advised him, “not the smartest ones.” Brian was urged to study with his fellow students, relying on them to learn rather than on his professors. He did so, finding them all to be in the same boat that he was.
“There was never enough time,” said Brian, “but there was never enough time for anyone, so we all worked together. There was no backstabbing, bickering, or jealousy. It was all-for-one and one-for-all.”
Brian also had a serious resource to fall back upon: the Imagineers, most of whom were happy to offer assistance and informal tutoring. They were some of the brightest engineering minds in the business, which could be a disadvantage if the math was too “intuitive” to them to express to others.
By his junior year in 1984/1985 he was settling in and catching up on his classes. He was rewarded with a new way of looking at the world, an analytical way of thinking that let one break the world down into its component parts. Suddenly, the mechanical and electrical interactions that he’d always understood at an intuitive level had names, and governing equations, and ways of being decomposed and reconfigured on paper before you ever bent metal or twisted wire. “It was like seeing the world through new eyes,” said Brian. “It was like peeling the skin back from the universe and seeing the clockwork that it runs on.”
Even so, classes remained challenging and the workload heavy. He struggled in particular with thermal dynamics, an infamous course derided by many as “thermal goddamnics”. He also found electrical theory courses particularly frustrating since they traced electric current flow “backwards”, from the positive terminal to the negative, against the actual flow of electrons from the negative to the positive[9]. The perverse justification of “hole flow”, or the “flow” of the empty electron bands (“holes”), did not make things better. You might as well style gravity as the earth rising to meet the dropped object! Admittedly, the math would work out either way.
He was popular with his fellow students and was soon past the freshman/sophomore hump, with his professors now engaged and interested in what he was doing. His fellow students called him “Fig” after Figment and he was soon recruited into the latest “RF” or prank, one that was intended to outdo the infamous “Rose Bowl scoreboard change” of the previous year. One of the co-conspirators said, “Hey Fig, you work for Mickey, right? Let’s literally ‘RF[10]’ this!”
The target was the rival Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or MIT. Brian resisted putting a literal “F” in the “RF” given that such obscenities could cost him his presumptive position at WDI, but the “R” was a go. Over Summer Break of 1985, while others were heading to the beaches, they were heading indoors. With an assist from some Caltech alumni at WDI, they constructed their “R”. Just before opening weekend for MIT’s Fall ’85 semester, the “RF squad” rented a van and drove to Boston. That early morning, disguised as workers for the “Roger Fox Contracting Company”, they bluffed their way past a security guard and assembled their contraption atop the roof of the MIT Dome (to this day Brian refuses to reveal how they did it).
The MIT Great Dome remains a favorite target of “Hacks” to this day (Image source “alum.mit.edu”)
New and returning MIT students arrived that morning to see an animatronic Mickey Mouse in cap-and-gown, powered by a solar panel, waving to them. “Welcome MIT Students!” the oversized sign he carried said, “Sorry that you weren’t accepted into Caltech!”
The prank made headlines in both Boston and LA. It earned Brian and the crew positive notoriety from their fellow students and even a school credit from an admiring Caltech professor for a “Special Electromechanical Communications Project in Collaboration with MIT”. Jim recorded the event in his Red Book: “Brian and friends bring Mickey to MIT. Make headlines.”
The MIT administration, being good sports about it, placed the simple animatronic in their “Hack Museum”, where it resides today. MIT students also took their revenge the following year, somehow replacing the Caltech Fleming Cannon with a near-exact polymer replica that appeared to have gone limp and partially melted. A sign read “It’s too damned hot to think in Cali. Go MIT!” It is suspected that MIT alumni working for Disney were secretly involved in this prank in response to their Caltech coworkers.
The great Caltech/MIT “RF-Hack” war continues to this day.
Disney, for its part, disassociated itself with the whole affair, even as Jack Lindquist quietly celebrated the free promotion. They released a statement saying, “The opinions expressed by these pranksters do not represent the opinions of Mickey Mouse and do not represent the views of the Walt Disney Entertainment Company. Mickey and Disney celebrate all education and do not favor one academic institution over another. We have many valued employees from Caltech, MIT, and many other fine universities and trade schools, and we celebrate the skills and imaginations of them all.”
In the spring of 1987 Brian graduated from Caltech with a BS in Mechanical Engineering and certification as an “Engineer in Training”, or EIT. He was immediately hired by Disney Imagineering. However, the Disney he returned to was notably different than the one he’d left behind just a few short years earlier.
The times had changed.
* * *
“M-I-T…K-E-Y…”[11]
From Boston Globe, September 3rd, 1985
Oh boy! The Massachusetts Institute of Technology had a new visitor for the start of the Fall semester this week when Mickey Mouse appeared atop the MIT Dome! Not just any Mickey Mouse, but an electromechanical one holding a big sign saying, “Welcome MIT Students! Sorry that you weren’t accepted into Caltech!” Clearly those clever Caltech characters were behind this cross-country Hack. MIT students were amused but are already plotting their revenge. “Well played, Caltech, well played” said Geoff Johnston, a Chemical Engineering Junior, “But your time will come! Slipstick! Slide rule! MIT!” Mickey Mouse has not responded to our requests for comment.
[1] Now that he’s located in LA, Jim made a direct deal with Lucas rather than in our timeline where Lucas simply hired some of Jim’s former employees.
[2] The new contacts led to new butterflies. In our timeline she never worked for George Lucas.
[3] In our timeline this connection between masks and folklore would be explored by her in Mirrormask (2005). She was also partly behind the HA tradition of Masked Balls, which spilled over into Labyrinth.
[4] My assumption here. I have no idea if she did any creative writing by this point.
[5] After being brought in by Lucas to script-doctor Kasdan’s screenplay, Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz changed this nickname to “Short Round” after Huyck’s dog.
[6] In our timeline Kasdan passed on the script, turned off by the sheer negativity of the original treatment of "Temple of Death", which he described as “ugly and mean spirited”.
[7] This was the job she took in our timeline
[8] He did exactly this in our timeline, pursuing the double-major at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He dropped out after a couple of years (reasons unknown to me) and returned to the family business.
[9] As an electronics technician prior to my college years who learned practical electron flow, this drove me nuts too. And don’t get me started on the abomination that it the “current source”.
[10] Let’s just say it stands for “Rodent Fornicate”.
[11] You can thank “Mrs. Khan” for this one.
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While "Short Round" may have been Huyck's dog. I always saw the character and his name as being a deep cut to Samuel Fuller's Steel Helmet. Which featured a South Vietnamese child soldier nicknamed Short Round. If I may ask that you keep that reference. Samuel Fuller is such an underrated director and I see this as one of the biggest references to his work.
I hope this doesn't ruin his intuitive abilities in electrical engineering.
Huyck's dog was indeed named after the Steel Helmet character, so the indirect reference is still there. In this case The Kid Sidekick earned the name Willie (per Lucas' dog) first, leaving Hou with the other name.
It actually enhances it. Now he has a new frame of reference to "think like an electron" as it were.
Thanks. NeXT and Star Trek will each find their way into the TL soon enough.
As a real-life physics physics/math double major (among other things...), this seems like a lot to drop on a freshman. Okay, multivariable calculus is just Cal III and could be done by a freshman with a high school calculus background, but the rest we didn't really use until later in sophomore or even junior year (or, in all honesty, at all; I haven't actually solved a differential equation in years).
Also, you misspelled "identity" in "Euler's identity".
It's actually really useful and important in some solid-state physics cases. More generally, there are a lot of condensed matter physics situations where it's better to pretend that there's a fake particle that produces the right outcome (a quasiparticle) doing the whatever it is rather than the real particles doing what they actually do, because it's simpler and easier to work with, and can sometimes even produce interesting insights into how the physics is actually working.
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As a real life Electrical Engineer turned Biomedical Engineer I feel the pain here. Full disclosure, I've put some of my own autobio experience into this post. The MVC and DE stuff would be Sophomore year, but still a lot on top of everything else. And big- and middle-name engineering schools in the US deliberately drop a lot on freshmen and sophomore Engineering students because they're deliberately weeding out a majority of the class. Part of it is economics (big up front classes to bring in $$, smaller J/S classes to produce talented graduate Engineers for the reputation), part of it is due to accreditation requirements, part of it just "tradition" of offering Freshman Engineers a drink from the fire hose. I totally respect that CalTech makes the flunkout classes Pass/Fail. My Undergrad didn't and I left my Freshman year with a 2.2 GPA and had to claw my way back up to a 3.3 by graduation.
Oops! I'll fix.
Yep, it makes something resembling sense to follow the "holes" when you get deeper into semiconductor physics, particularly at the PN junctions where everything goes all quantum on you, but as an ME he isn't digging nearly that deep. That said, when trying to understand basic circuit theory it can be a real pain, particularly for someone who learned as a practical electrician or technician and suddenly has to relearn everything backwards. It certainly was for me. It's also done primarily out of tradition rather than practicality (it's the way the physicists wrote the equations in the 18th and 19th century long before electrons were discovered and it would take too much work to change them all and reteach everyone). Although it did finally explain why the "arrow went backwards" on the diode symbol. As a tech I always thought they'd drawn the diode symbol backwards.
Oh, of course, I'm fully aware of that. If you think electromagnetism is bad, wait till you read up on astronomy, which is basically a crazy mess of "this is about as good as we could do at the time, and we're still doing it because it would be too much work to change" dating back literally thousands of years.
I majored in history and minored in computer science. I absolutely feel The Khan's, and Brian's respective pain. My original career plans involved historical political/military simulations a-la Koei and Paradox Entertainment, with novels and screenwriting as a fallback. I'm closing in on a twenty year anniversary as a telephone operator instead, or would be if not for that nanoscopic spikey ball that must not be named...
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