A Hippie in the House of Mouse (Jim Henson at Disney, 1980)

[Geekhis Khan]

Chapter 11, An EGOT Case
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)

People inevitably accuse me on getting into the music production game just so that I could complete my EGOT[1]. Guess what? They’re right! I make no excuses. I now have the full collector’s set of gaudy golden dust catchers in a glass case on my shelf. And like my friend and fellow EGOT Mel Brooks, I prefer to use the French pronunciation for my EGOT, with the silent T.

Yes, I’m shameless. Sue me. But damn if I didn’t have fun! Not only did I produce albums through Disney Music for all the kid’s stuff (1987’s Waggle Rockin’ won me the Grammy for Best Children’s Album and satisfied my EGOT), but I convinced Tom Wilhite to launch a Hyperion Music label to produce more adult fare. In addition to scores and soundtracks for Hyperion productions, we signed original artists. My first sign was Thelonious Monster, a weird Jazz/Rock/Rap fusion group that I can’t even begin to understand. The name sounded to me like a Sesame Street Muppet. But Jim loved them, and as always, I trust Jim’s judgement. They never sold Gold or breached the Top 100, but got some Grammy noms, found a good and mildly profitable niche audience, and inspired a lot of later bands. Thelonious Monster T-shirts are apparently one of those things (along with Misfits shirts) that even today kids wear to show that they’re “cultured but rebellious”. It’s amazing how profitable rebellion can be for big corporations like Disney.

Hyperion Music was never going to compete with the big boys like Geffen, Virgin, or EMI, but it would make its mark. We signed some real talent over the next couple of years, like Jane's Addiction (at the suggestion of Thelonious Monster), They Might Be Giants (David Lazer saw them in New York and figured correctly that Jim would like them), Stone Temple Pilots (a San Diego band one of the Imagineers suggested), and The Liquid Drifters[2] (another of those weird things).

Movies kept going well. My partnerships with my old SNL friends continued. Steve Martin had his passion project Roxanne, a retelling of Cyrano De Bergerac. Danny Ackroyd and Tom Hanks starred in the comedic retelling of the old radio/TV drama Dragnet[3] in partnership with Universal. Miracle, the story about the Japan Airlines Flight 123 that somehow made a crazy emergency landing in the bay, made a modest profit thanks to being a hit in Japan despite under-performing in the US. And sure, it wasn’t all perfect. Weird Al Yankovic’s The Vidiots barely broke even, though it would go on to become a cult classic. The Fred Savage and Judge Reinhold helmed Vice Versa, a Freaky Friday type thing, broke even when marketing and distribution were considered. And Ron Miller launched a Jim Thorpe biopic that underperformed.

But for the most part there were more hits than misses. Jim brought me a script for Fantasia called Alien Nation, a Sci-Fi story about racism that he loved and which did pretty good (but far from great) at the box office, and later became a cult classic. And we also launched The Cheapest Muppet Movie Ever Made, which it literally was, all but guaranteeing a great profit by simply being too cheap to fail. Frank Oz had moved on to other things, so we brought back Ken Kwapis, who directed Follow that Bird. Finally, Diana took over a script from Universal called Cocktail[4], a dark take on the seemingly glamourous life of a bartender in New York. Author Heywood Gould was annoyed with the changes that Universal wanted, and remarked how we were more willing to work with our creative artists than most studios.

Steve and Lisa even approached me with a script Steve’s sister Anne and her neighbor Gary Ross had written about a teenage boy who gets transformed into an adult. Michael Richards and Jim Carrey both lobbied hard for the lead role, but Anne and Gary wanted Tom Hanks and wanted Penny Marshall to direct. Damned if we didn’t get them. Big released in the early fall hoping to capitalize on back-to-school angst and would go on to gross $152 million. It earned Gary and Anne and Penny and Tom Oscar nominations, and proved to the world what I knew all along, that Tom Hanks had dramatic chops[5].

Meanwhile, I got to have my own wish come true when I found out that Terry Gilliam’s next movie in his sort-of-trilogy was The Adventures of Baron von Munchhausen. As you’re probably sick of hearing me tell you, my Uncle Jack Pearl, the man who inspired me to go into The Business, used to play the Baron on the radio. Not only did I jump at the chance to produce it, but I made sure that it was dedicated to the memory of Uncle Jack, who passed in 1982. I still consider it “his movie”. It would go on to make $115 million that Christmas season against a $35 million budget[6].

Meanwhile, Robin Williams, who was playing the King of the Moon in Munchausen, approached me with another idea: Good Morning, Vietnam[7]. He’d been itching to greenlight the project since ‘79 when he and his agent, Larry Brezner, first optioned Adrian Cronauer's original pitch for a TV show. Williams had seen Red Ball Express and saw it as proof that you could do a war comedy. I greenlit it on the spot and we filmed it simultaneously with Baron von Munchausen. It reached $124 million.

TV was going strong. We launched Roger Rabbit’s Radical Revue, Alf Tales, and Max and the Wild Things on Saturday Mornings, all to great success. Duck, Duck, Goof spawned the spinoff Mickey in the City where Mickey Mouse moves to Big Cheese City and struggles with keeping a job, dating Minnie, and doing the right thing[8]. The Rescuers series was doing very well, so we followed up with a series of The Aristocats, which had a fun, jazzy soundtrack and a musical educational purpose and did OK. We also launched the new Muppet-based shows Mickey’s Clubhouse and Farmyard Follies[9].

Live TV was going great overall. We pushed a new Golden Girls spinoff Empty Nest. For Hyperion we launched the new Mel Brooks series The Nutt House with Harvey Korman and Chloris Leachman, first on NBC (where it did poorly) and then moved it to the Hyperion Channel, where it had a three-season run with a small but dedicated audience[10]. Hyperion TV was starting to become known as “NBC’s junkyard”, but we didn’t care. An underperforming show on Network TV was a breakout hit by basic cable standards, so why waste a good concept? I thought of it like sending the kid that couldn’t cut it in the Majors down to the Minors, and watching him become the home run king there.

We also launched Jim’s next big idea: Inner-Tube, a crazy variety show where we sent our guest stars inside the television for wacky adventures and variety content (the Betty White episode is legendary). It got nominated for a Best Variety Series Emmy, but had high costs and mixed ratings, so it died on the vine. One of those “ahead of its time” things. It’s best remembered today as the place where Tom Whedon’s son Joss cut his writing teeth. We’d relaunch it a decade later when the computer effects costs were far less, where it became a small hit.

But it was Broadway where I began to make my biggest mark. I got a call from my soon-to-be-fellow EGOTist Mel Brooks to talk The Nutt House, but then Broadway came up. We got to talking and soon he said “we should do a show. Maybe something based on Young Frankenstein or, better yet, The Producers.”

“The Producers,” I said without hesitation. A Broadway show based on the movie about a Broadway show? It was either the most ingenious or the most idiotic idea ever. Either way, I was in.

Mel acted incredulous at first. “First you told me it had no legs, and now you want to make a musical about it,” he said to me.

“You’re still going to hold that one against me?” I told him.

“Absolutely,” he said. “So, which of us is Bialystok and which is Blum?”

“I’m the fat one,” I told him. “You figure it out.”

Anyway, we started it Off Broadway in ’88, but soon enough we grabbed a spot at the St. James theater when we got good reviews and started selling out. Mel wrote the script and the song lyrics and we got Menken to arrange and compose the music. We got Buddy Hackett and Ben Stiller to play Bialystok and Blum, the great Robert Preston as De Bris, young but talented Alec Baldwin as LSD[11], Werner Klemperer as the Nazi (naturally), and the fabulous (and gorgeous) Donna King for Ulla. We practically swept the Tonys in ’89, giving Mel his EGOT. It was going so well that I contacted Lord Lew Grade and he called up some colleagues and set us up on the West End with Michael Palin producing and the main characters now Londoners Barrymore and Brown. It did OK.

But that wasn’t the end of my burgeoning Broadway run. For decades Jim had wanted to do a Broadway showcase of his amazing experimental puppetry work: Big Boss Man, Limbo, and the rest. David Lazer and I had a surprise for him. We arranged a deal with the City of New York: a public-private partnership to restore the Palace Theater and in exchange the newly renovated theater would debut Muppetational!, a musical directed by the great Julie Taymor featuring a whole array of strange and wacky Muppet characters from the familiar (Kermit and the like) to the experimental, animatronic, digital, new, and bizarre.

I swear that Jim had a tear in his eye when we told him.

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[1] EGOT = Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony, for those who don’t know the acronym.

[2] Fictional. Think of it as one of those genre-bending early ‘90s things; the type of band that has a Dobro, a sax, a sitar, a synth, an electric bass, and a 20-piece drum set.

[3] Which Bernie produced in our timeline.

[4] Went to Touchstone in our timeline where Eisner and Katzenberg continued to make it lighter and simpler, creating a breakout hit that critics hated but audiences loved. The book itself is more like Anthony Bourdin’s Kitchen Confidential in fictional format.

[5] Produced by James L. Brooks’ Gracie Films and distributed by 20th Century Fox in our timeline. Here Lisa Henson convinced Anne Spielberg to go to Bernie.

[6] In our timeline Gilliam went to Columbia, who tried and failed to constrain him to a $25 million budget. Reports say the film cost as much as $46.63 million, though Gilliam swears he spent only the $35 million he originally asked for. Furthermore, a change in leadership at Columbia (David Puttnam out, Dawn Steel in) led to a deliberate sabotage of the film by the new management. It received a very limited distribution and earned a mere $8 million. To quote Gilliam, “the problem was that David Puttnam got fired, and all these deals were oral deals. ... Columbia's new CEO, Dawn Steel, said ‘Whatever David Puttnam [has] said before doesn't interest me’”. Robin Williams said of this decision, “[Puttnam's] regime was leaving, the new one was going through this, and they said, ‘This was their movies, now let's do our movies!’ It was a bit like the new lion that comes in and kills all the cubs from the previous man.”

[7] Produced by Touchstone in our timeline.

[8] In our timeline Mickey increasingly became a flat corporate mascot throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s to the point where your average person, if asked what Mickey’s personality was like, would draw a blank. Jim and Roy are deliberately attempting to remind audiences why they love the Mouse. They are going for a sincere but slightly befuddled Everyman type, “a Frank Capra character”.

[9] The former is somewhat self-explanatory. The latter is a Vaudevillesque song-and-dance show with Muppet Farm Animals that teaches music and music history.

[10] Cancelled quickly in our timeline.

[11] A character from the movie cut from the 2001 show, I guess because hippies were too far out of public memory??? LSD (his initials) plays Hitler in the Show within a Show.

 

[Geekhis Khan]

Chapter 14; A Lazer Show on Broadway
Excerpt from Renegade Suit, the autobiography of David Lazer (with Jay O’Brian).

Working for Jim Henson is a little like a nicer version of working for Vito Corleone—you’re never really “out” of the business. I’d “retired” in ’84, but by ’88 Jim and Bernie were pulling me back in. My time off had helped me to recover somewhat from my symptoms, and I was ready to help out. Thankfully I didn’t even need to move back to LA, as Jim and Bernie needed me in New York! I was now a “Creative Associate” and the VP of Northeast Regional Management for the Walt Disney Entertainment Company. Essentially, I was there to keep an eye on things in the US Northeast.

First on the list was to swing down to Philadelphia where I met Jim, Dick Nunis, and John Hench (who’d just inherited the Chair and Presidency of the I-Works after Carl Bongirno’s retirement) at the airport. After all the drama between Jim and Dick the last time I’d seen them together, seeing them paling around like best friends was a surreal, but welcome sight. I took them to Sesame Place, and rather than slip in the staff entrance, Jim led us right through the front gate! A park worker (and old friend of Brian’s when he worked there in 1980) named Bill Barretta recognized Jim and immediately rushed to show us around. He showed us the interactive Oscar the Grouch audio-animatronic (which Jim loved) and made enough of an impression that Jim asked me to find a place for him[1] (I took him to Jane and he became one of our most popular new Muppet Performers). Disney’s management had been kind to the Little Park that Could and Sesame Place was definitely a league above where it had been in 1980, with real rides, walkaround characters, and a full-sized replica of Sesame Street itself, named Sesame Neighborhood. But Jim, Dick, and John had even bigger plans.

Sesame Neighborhood (Image source “muppet.fandom.com”)

Sesame Place was going to be the nucleus of a grand experiment, a 30-acre Disneyland in miniature. They called it “The Philadelphia Experiment” and it would be the first Disneytown. The rides would be few and aimed mostly at younger children and their parents, but it would be a place to meet the characters and get a taste of the magic. There’d be rotating shows and attractions and audio-animatronics that changed from year to year (a sample of what the Real Disney had to offer!). There’d be an arcade for games, video and skill alike. And the admission price would be low enough for multiple visits per year by even the most financially challenged families. It hardly held a candle to the “Real Deals” in Kissimmee and Anaheim, but for parents of young children it was a chance to affordably visit something local (or near-local) that could be seen in half a day and get your younger kids home before The Crash[2].

After dark, the shows would change to things more appropriate for teens and adults, and the arcades, shops, restaurants, and games would stay open while the rides shut down. There’d be a Cyclia In Miniature for music and dancing. There’d (obviously) be a Disney Store. Finally, the park would be open in a reduced capacity in the cold winter, with indoor attractions running year-round, avoiding the three to four idle months of a typical northern theme park.

Vintage Disney Store (Image source “thewaltdisneycompany.com”)

The shops and restaurants would be a combination of Disney-owned and operated places and rental clients, making the whole arrangement as much a small mall as a theme park. Marriott would build an affordable hotel next door. The local politicians hoped that the Disneytown would be the nucleus of urban development, and so the City of Langhorne and other surrounding communities were contributing to the pot in an effort to spur economic growth. The EPA and State of Pennsylvania environmental department were brought in to assist in making sure that everything was as minimal impact as possible. We powered things as much as possible in that northern latitude by solar.

If it worked, it would be the first of many to sprout up around the world. It was hoped that the D-towns would whet the appetite for the “Real Deals” at Kissimmee and Anaheim rather that prevent people from going to them. In the end the attendance numbers would tell the story.

The next thing on my list was back in New York. First, I helped Bernie and Mel Brooks get The Producers started Off Broadway, but Bernie had a special plan ahead. We cut a deal with the City of New York to split the costs on refurbishing the old Palace Theater on Broadway as the launching point for a new Broadway show[3]. Let me tell you, the Palace was in poor shape! But by the time we were done it was back to its original glory, only with all-modern electronics and stage sets. The show we would debut there, a big surprise gift for Jim, was Muppetational!

Something like this, but Grander!! (Image source “rebelscum.com”)

Muppetational! was a glorious celebration of all things Muppet, from the early Sam & Friends stuff like “Inchworm”, “Mahna Mahna”, and “I’ve Grown Accustom to Your Face”, through all the psychedelic Nancy Sinatra stuff like Big Bossman, through The Muppet Show and movies, up to modern “Creature Shop/Creatureworks” animatronics. There would even be an appearance by Waldo C. Graphic, the first all-digital Muppet, projected as a simple hologram onto a fog machine cloud! Throw in a few classic and original songs and some choreography, and you had the show that Jim had wanted to do for years, but at a level even beyond his wildest dreams at the time.

Julie’s talents with indirect rod puppetry came in really handy, as we couldn’t just have a simple Kermit Muppet on stage. The audience in the back couldn’t see him! Se we scaled up all the classic Muppets to a scale even the top deck could see clearly. Muppetational Kermit was the size of Jabba the Hutt! It took 3-4 Muppet performers to animate each of these giant Muppets. Amazingly, Julie did it all with very few animatronics or Waldos. She just has a natural eye for clever rod linkages.

Bernie asked me to be the producer, but I wanted another person on board as my co-producer: Jane Henson. Jane was happy to once again be an active part of the Muppets, helping us pour through old sketches and offering guidance on how best to build and perform Sam, Yorick and Mushmellon and the other original Muppets. Heather even helped out after school and on the weekends. It was great visiting the old Muppet Workshop again and working again with the old crew, and great to work with Julie Taymor, an old Henson Foundation grantee, who was the obvious choice for director. At Bernie’s insistence we all but blackmailed Jim into working with us on it, in particular on the choreography with Jane and Norman Maen, and we thus got him both an executive producer credit and a choreography credit with Jane and Norman. The latter job, which involved figuring out how to get the Muppets and human performers to perform together, ultimately won him, Jane and Norman a Best Choreography Tony, one of several Muppetational! took home in 1990.

Julie Taymor, Director, and Norman Maen, Lead Choreographer for Muppetational! (Image sources “playbill.com” & “muppet.fandom.com”)

But the best part for me was seeing Jim and Jane working together again. They make such a good team and Jane honestly deserves more recognition for all the work she did over the years to help make the Muppets happen.

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[1] Bill Barretta joined the Muppets team in our timeline in much the same way according to Barretta in Muppet Guys Talking.

[2] Every parent knows exactly what I’m talking about here. There’s a reason why Reptile World in Orlando made tons of money from exhausted parents by offering a chance to feed a mouse dyed like Mickey to a python—at least until Disney hit them with a “cease and desist” order.

[3] Michael Eisner would work the same deal in our timeline when he decided that Disney should be on Broadway in ’89. Here the same deal has happened earlier through a different route: Bernie Brillstein, who'd wanted to put Muppets on Broadway since the ‘70s.

 

[Geekhis Khan]

New York Times Short Movie Reviews, 1988

The Dark Side of Glamour

The neon lights, the hip soundtrack, the flipping bottles, the excitement, the raw sexuality: this is the shiny veneer of Hyperion’s Cocktail. You could be forgiven for going into Cocktail expecting a light, fluffy, summer popcorn flick, but the R-rated drama film is anything but. Based on the eponymous semiautobiographical novel by Heywood Gould, Cocktail follows the life of Doug Coughlin (Ed Harris), a celebrated and beloved, but jaded and cynical bartender at a swanky SoHo cocktail bar as he brings on a new “apprentice”, the charismatic and ambitious Brian Flanagan (Kiefer Sutherland). Sure, on the surface this is an exciting, hedonistic world of sex, drugs, drinks, dancing, and bartenders so cool they flip around their bottles in the air and tap dance or recite poetry on the bar. But below the neon surface is a world of addiction, withdrawal, self-destruction, jealousy, and sabotage of both the self and of each other. And while Flanagan starts to get sucked into the hedonistic excitement of it all, Coughlin, battling substance addiction and in the midst of a disintegrating marriage plagued with infidelity, is torn between a nagging urge to save the “kid” from the life he has lived and a cynical urge to let the kid take his place while he makes his “escape” to the country. It is a choice complicated by the growing jealousy he starts to feel for this cocky upstart, who soon starts to overshadow him at the bar. The direction by feature newcomer James Foley[1] and editing by Dede Allen is tight, and cuts fast and frantic through the exciting bar scenes, and deliberate and brooding through the dramatic parts. The acting is impeccable: Harris exudes a sense of world-weary wisdom through his “Coughlin’s Laws” and wry observations while Sutherland oozes with bad boy charisma that makes you love, fear, and want to be (or be with) him. With a tightly-written screenplay by Gould and Tom Schulman and the fantastic acting, Cocktail is sure to get some attention from the Academy and audiences alike, and may perhaps be one of those movies that straddles the divide between commercial and critical success[2].

This as a dark drama closer to the book

Cocktail, Rated R for profanity, adult situations, nudity, sexuality, and drug use; ⭐⭐⭐½



Great Athlete, Average Biopic

Legendary athlete Jim Thorpe is undoubtedly a man close to Disney CEO Ron Miller’s heart and it is clear that this biopic staring Lou Diamond Phillips was a labor of love for all who made it. Alas, this by-the-numbers biopic, despite some good performances and a willingness to tackle some of the more uncomfortable and less talked about chapters in Thorpe’s life, fails to win the gold medal here. There is much to like about this. Phillips does a respectable job channeling Thorpe, the costuming and sets are excellent, and the makeup deserves a nod. The biggest issue with this picture is that it tries to bite off far too much, covering the entirety of Thorpe’s life and all the ups and downs, resulting in a film that lacks focus and is in a big rush to pack it all in. In a better world this film would have focused on a narrower part of Thorpe’s amazing life, perhaps focusing on his Olympic triumph and the shameful removal of his medals. Still, for fans of sports and history, or who simply want to see an honest and sincere “good try”, there are worse ways to spend a couple of hours than Thorpe.

Thorpe, Rated PG for occasional ethnic slurs and adult language; ⭐⭐½



Flashy Mindlessness for the MTV Generation

He brought us the “Eat It” to Michael Jackson’s legendary “Beat It” and the “Like a Surgeon” to Madonna’s “Like a Virgin”. And today “Weird” Al Yankovic brings us The Vidiots, which like his derivative parody music videos manages to ape and parody the style of other movies while lacking their substance[3]. The “plot”, if one can generously use the term, involves a daydreaming slacker (Yankovic) ending up with a failing UHF station that goes on to success despite the sabotage of the evil major network station owner (Kevin McCarthy)—think Tucker: A Man and His Dream sucked of everything that made it great and reframed as a cornball comedy. But this is really just a loose framework for showcasing dozens of short, corny clip gags like fake ads for “Conan the Librarian” or “Spatula City”, as though Yankovic was attempting to invoke Zucker Abrams Zucker, Saturday Night Live, or the Kentucky Fried Movie. Alas, he is not up for the task. The film is a jumping mess. The comedic stylings of Fran Drescher and Jim Carrey[4], while entertaining on their own, cannot save this film. Yankovic himself quickly becomes a bore. Perhaps teenage audiences who have already been trained by MTV to have goldfish-like attention spans will appreciate this film. But perhaps Yankovic should stick to 3-minute music videos from this point forward.

The Vidiots, Rated PG for comedic violence, adult situations, and minor language; ⭐ ½



A Towering Explosion

What happens when you take the action-crime thriller and confine it to a skyscraper? You get Nothing Can Last, the newest adventure from Gordon and Silver and distributed by 20th Century[5]. This story was a long time coming, beginning life as a follow-on story to 1968’s The Detective starring Frank Sinatra. But Nothing Can Last isn’t your typical crime noir or heist movie. At its heart it’s a family love story between a jaded retired cop and his estranged daughter, but told in the midst of an explosion-filled action film. Indeed, names like Schwarzenegger and Stallone were being thrown about to star in it at one point, and it certainly has all of those revered and reviled action movie clichés like the endless gunplay, massive explosions, and quippy one-liners. But director John McTiernan and star Paul Newman bring a sense of humanity and indeed vulnerability to the hero, Joe Leland, which transcends the standard juvenile wish-fulfilment narrative of your average action blockbuster. The film also introduces to American audiences the sublime Alan Rickman as the villainous Hans Gruber, a role he plays with gusto and gravitas. Leland is at the Yutani Tower[6] skyscraper to try and make amends with his estranged daughter Stephane (Jennifer Connelly), a Yutani employee, and gets caught up in a hostage situation with a band of radical terrorists in a plot which is both deeper and simpler than it seems on the surface. Leland, who has escaped being held hostage, must now evade capture while simultaneously fighting to stop Gruber’s plan and save his daughter, all the while facing the limits of his age and training compared to the professional killers he faces. This all leads, naturally, to gunfights, fistfights, fire, and explosions, all played in a manner that skirts the line between gritty realism and over-the-top Hollywood excess. McTiernan manages to balance the action, comedy, drama, tension, realism, and excess well, creating a well-crafted action film with heart and soul.

Essentially this, but closer to the original Frank Sinatra vehicle

Nothing Can Last, Rated R for profanity, violence, adult situations, and brief nudity; ⭐⭐⭐



Great Names Can’t Save Harlem from Tedium

Eddie Murphy is the hottest name in Hollywood right now, so it’s no surprise to see him trying his hand at writing and directing in this ensemble period comedy Harlem Nights[7]. The film follows Murphy’s “Quick” Brown and Richard Pryor’s Sugar Ray as they navigate the shady criminal world of jazz age Harlem, battling Michael Lerner’s Bugsy Calhoun and Bruce Willis’s corrupt detective Phil Cantone. This all leads to a series of back-and-forth plots, attacks, schemes, and double-crosses that in better hands could have made for a fun popcorn fantasy. With an all-star cast that includes Redd Foxx, Jasmine Guy, and Arsenio Hall, I went into this movie with high hopes. The costume and set design are excellent, but this is not enough to salvage the film. Unfortunately, while the acting can be fun at times, the pacing is poor, the comedy sputtering, the plot paper-thin and predictable, and the dialog atrocious, resulting in a long, hard slog. None of this bodes well for Murphy’s future as a writer or director. Oh well, we’ll always have 48 Hours, Ghostbusters, and Trading Places.

Harlem Nights, Rated R for violence, adult language and situations, and racial slurs; ⭐⭐



Taking the “Little Guy” to Heroic New Heights

It’s the ultimate “little guy makes big” story in George Lucas’s exciting new fantasy epic adventure Willow, staring Warwick Davis and Val Kilmer. Produced by Lucasfilm and Imagine Entertainment, directed by Ron Howard and distributed by Disney’s MGM, Willow is performing well. The film follows the eponymous dwarf [SIC] Willow as he finds and volunteers to protect the Chosen One, a baby, from the villainous Bavmorda, whom the baby is prophesized to destroy. Along the way Willow enlists Kilmer’s Madmartigan and two tiny comic relief “Brownies” as they travel the fantastic world. While many Hollywood insiders feared that audiences might have trouble connecting to a little person as the eponymous hero, particularly an actor as young and inexperienced as Davis, Davis’s screen presence, balanced so perfectly well by Kilmer’s manic energy, make for a “Buddy Film” of a fantastic new type. Lucas never had any doubts: “I thought it would be great to use a little person in a lead role. A lot of my movies are about a little guy against the system, and this was just a more literal interpretation of that idea.” Willow, with fantastic effects by ILM and Disney’s Creatureworks, is performing well with audiences and may be the hit summer movie of 1988[8].

Willow, Rated PG for violence and mild adult language and situations; ⭐⭐⭐½



The Terror Within

The true terror lies within in Adrian Lyne’s Jacob’s Ladder, a “smart” horror film that’s overtly the story about a troubled Vietnam Veteran who lost a child and is suffering from the combined trauma, but it is ultimately a story of terrors of war and loss. Willem Dafoe stars as Jacob "Professor" Singer, the lead character, who begins experiencing increasingly bizarre and terrifying disassociative episodes. Or are they hallucinations? Or are they supernatural visitations? The film, based on a screenplay by Bruce Joel Rubin, was a long time coming, having been rejected by most major studios before finally coming to Orion. Orion executives Mario Kassar and Andrew G. Vajna in turn recruited Adrian Lyne, luring him away from Paramount and Bonfire of the Vanities. The results were worth the wait[9]. While I dare not say too much lest I give away the twisting narrative’s secrets, this is a psychological thriller mixed with a horror film mixed with a smart slasher. It’s frightening, disturbing, cerebral, and mindbending. See it, just don’t see it alone.

Jacob’s Ladder, Rated R for violence, horror, adult language, and adult situations, ⭐⭐⭐



When Remembrance Goes Wrong

The dystopian science fiction works of Phillip K. Dick don’t often lend themselves to mass-market appeal, as is well illustrated by the critically beloved but underperforming Blade Runner from a few years ago. This was probably running through the minds of Alien scribes Dan O'Bannon and Ronald Shusett when they originally sought to adapt Dick’s “We can Remember it for you Wholesale” into what became Recall. And after years of Development Hell, they were picked up first by Dino DeLaurentis, who brought in horror director David Cronenberg. But where Cronenberg wanted to stay true to the original short story with a few minor tweaks, for example the Martian mutants, O’Bannon and Shusett wanted “Raiders of the Lost Ark on Mars”, and production once again stalled while DeLaurentis began to lose faith when Dune flopped[10]. But then Orion grabbed it in turnaround, and brought Cronenberg with it. He stuck to his dark vision and recruited William Hurt to play Douglas Quail. What ensues is a twisting psychological narrative driven by cutting edge effects and spiked by Cronenberg’s signature dark body horror vision where nothing can be assumed to be real. Ultimately Recall is crowned with an ambiguous ending that leaves all unsure what is truth and what is fantasy, a science fiction “smart slasher” for fans of Alien, Blade Runner, or Eraserhead. How mainstream audiences will react remains to be seen[11], but this singular auteur vision is sure to retain a dedicated following for years to come.

Not quite…

Recall, Rated R for profanity, violence, adult situations, and nudity; ⭐⭐⭐



Crime, Infidelity, and Goldfish

A woman and a man are lovers. The woman meets a new man and the woman and first man pretend to be siblings so that the woman can seduce the new man, who is one of her co-conspirators in a jewel heist. The woman then betrays the new man, and meets and seduces a third man, the second man’s lawyer, so that they can discover the hidden location of the stolen jewels. And in the middle of it all is a fish, called Wanda, the same as the woman. A Fish Called Wanda is a British Noir comedy distributed by Hyperion starring John Cleese, Jamie Lee Curtis, Kevin Klein, and Michael Palin, a silly, sexy, sometimes surreal story in the old French farce tradition. And while British comedy can be an acquired taste for American audiences, tending as it does to fluctuate between bone dry and utterly silly, A Fish Called Wanda manages to pull in the laughs from Brits and Yanks alike. Where Cleese’s prior outing, Clockwise, failed to connect with American audiences, the screening of A Fish Called Wanda I attended had viewers laughing like hyenas. But more than just comedy and sex, A Fish Called Wanda displays outstanding acting and directing that pulls you in, allowing you to accept even the most ludicrous situation and not lose the suspension of disbelief. All four main actors deliver utterly relatable performances even at the most over the top moments, all the while displaying wonderful chemistry with each other. And director Charles Crichton pulls it all together with straight forward but flawless cinematography that compliments the excellent performances he pulls from his actors. A Fish Called Wanda may well become the breakout comedy of 1988. It may even take home some statuettes[12].

A Fish Called Wanda, rated R for sexuality, adult situations, profanity, and occasional violence; ⭐⭐⭐⭐



Cheap, but Fun (If not Amazing)

It’s The Cheapest Muppet Movie Ever Made. Seriously, that’s its title, with the ironic subtitle “Into the Teeth of the Demons of Death”. And adjusted for inflation, it’s true, costing a mere $8.1 million to make [in 1988 dollars]. Even the associated Short, Hand Jive, is cheap: imagine The Muppets, but without the actual Muppets, just a bunch of talking hands![13] The plot of the film involves Kermit, far too busy to produce or direct the next Muppet feature, handing the reigns to Gonzo, who promises “a show like you’ve never seen before!” And oh boy is it ever. The film alternates between a “behind the scenes” plot where Director Gonzo is driving the Muppets nuts with his increasingly insane and totalitarian direction (think of the worst rumors you’ve heard about Kubrick or Herzog) and the increasingly cut-rate scenes from Gonzo’s movie. The movie-within-a-movie starts with a huge Old Hollywood Busby Berkley number (that blows half of his budget) and works its way down through cheaper and cheaper sets until turning into black-and-white Super 8 film, and then to a slideshow of poorly-drawn storyboards narrated by Gonzo. Then Gonzo gains a corporate sponsorship from “Iggy’s Itch-Away Spray” and ends the movie in 70 mm widescreen extravaganza. And before anyone complains that I’m spoiling the plot, the events literally don’t matter. The plot of the film itself is as thin and pointless as the plot of Gonzo’s show-within-a-show. It is deliberately convoluted and confusing, and it is all really an excuse to move from one self-aware set piece to another, which Kermit wryly and openly admits to the audience. It playfully skewers every popular film you can name from classics like The Wizard of Oz to Star Wars to Ghostbusters to new MGM release Willow to even the other Muppet movies. And were these set pieces not so much madcap Muppets fun, it would be a confusing mess, but somehow the shameless “no fourth wall” chaos makes for a fun time highlighted by the brilliantly self-aware soundtrack by Weird Al Yankovic, whose diegesis the Muppets openly debate in the film. Don’t go in expecting big lessons or a deep story, but if you like the Muppets and you like music and you like to burn 90 minutes in laughter then The Cheapest Muppet Movie Ever Made is your flick.

One of the Actual Posters (at least in this timeline; Image source “muppet.fandom.com”)

The Cheapest Muppet Movie Ever, rated G; ⭐⭐½

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[1] Foley is best known at this point for directing Madonna’s music videos. Producer Diana Birkenfield deliberately chose a music video director in order to give the film that “rock star” look.

[2] In our timeline Touchstone turned it into a vapid summer popcorn flick. It was a critical bomb but audiences loved it and it was a blockbuster. Bartenders on the other hand felt betrayed by Gould and were soon inundated with requests for “flair” and poetry. Here, Hyperion has stuck closer to the book, which is a fictionalized tell-all in the vein of Kitchen Confidential. The result is a critically-acclaimed, Oscar nominated drama that will, thanks to the sex and flair, attract audiences (it will make a good $77 million against a $20 million budget) but will not be the OTL blockbuster.

[3] Yes, this is effectively UHF. Like UHF the critics will hate this. Unlike UHF Disney will release it in March of ‘88, so it’ll not face as much competition as UHF did and make a modest profit ($18 Million against its $5 Million budget) and will remain a beloved cult classic.

[4] Plays Stanley Spadowski, the role Michael Richards played in our timeline.

[5] In our timeline a very long and random set of circumstances would lead this production to become Die Hard starring Bruce Willis, a movie that would not just be successful, but redefine the action genre, leading to upcoming action films being pitched as “Die Hard on an [X]”. Here it’s successful ($85 million against its $30 million budget) but not a genre-defining moment. Still, it’ll be seen as one of the first films along with Lethal Weapon that marked the shift away from hyper-masculine action flicks to more gritty realism. The name is based on the novel title Nothing Lasts Forever, only in this timeline as in ours another film by that name premiered in the mid-1980s.

[6] As in the original story. This name has caused a nearly unlimited number of fan theories to proliferate.

[7] Debuts a year earlier since Murphy didn’t do Beverly Hills Cop 2, which doesn’t exist in this timeline.

[8] Will make about $165 million worldwide and about $72 million domestically, notably better than in our timeline since Disney (Hyperion) is also distributing Big (which was a major competitor for Willow in our timeline), and has thus moved Big to the fall to be less directly competitive to their own product. Willow might have done even better had a certain to-be-announced family film not been released.

[9] In our timeline Paramount eventually claimed it, greenlit it with Lyne, and then changed their mind thanks to a management shakeup. Ultimately Carolco picked it up and it released in 1990. Here recall that Kassar and Vajna succeeded in grabbing Orion in ’86 and almost immediately take on the Rubin script. It will roughly break even and become a Horror Classic like in our timeline.

[10] All as per our timeline so far. Eventually Carolco grabbed it and made a deal with Arnold Schwarzenegger giving him near total control. Once he sunk his claws into it Schwarzenegger turned it into a unique and beloved classic late-80s action SciFi adventure that reached the top ten in gross box office receipts in 1990, the bastard.

[11] Will certainly not break the Top Ten, but with a twist ending (is Quail really a government assassin or an office worker stuck in a program?) driving word-of-mouth it will be a sleeper that goes on to make a fair profit and becomes a cult classic.

[12] As in our timeline will make over $175 million worldwide against a rock-bottom $8 million budget and will get Oscar nominations and take home a British Imperial Ton of BAFTAs.

[13] Think Oobi.

 

[Geekhis Khan]

Interviews with UPA’s Henry Saperstein (HS) and Ricardo Delgado (RD)
Select Questions and Answers from “Looking Back at Godzilla: Lord of Fire”, San Diego Comic Con, 1997

A Guest Post by @GrahamB (with minor continuity modifications by me)

Rumor has it that the movie nearly didn’t happen; can you tell us what happened to get it made?

HS: Well, you’re right, the whole thing nearly didn’t happen! We had a hell of a time trying to find an animation studio that we felt was up to the job. The whole reason for using animation was so that we didn’t need thirty-million dollars to make a live-action movie, but we didn’t want it to look cheap!

We always assumed [that] we’d use a Japanese [animation] studio, since they were making really impressive stuff without breaking the bank, but when I started asking around for availability I kept getting ‘sorry, we’re full with other work’! This lasted a couple of months actually, and then our friends over at Toho send us this little studio from Kyoto who they thought we’d like[1]. And we did like them but they were still too small to handle the whole movie themselves.

So, I’m struggling to find another studio who could handle what we were asking and then I get a phone call: [pantomimes picking up the phone] “Hey Henry, it’s Don Bluth. I heard you were looking for animators!”

Just how he found out about Godzilla I’ll never know, because I wasn’t even looking at that side of the planet! Now, I don’t know about you, but I still count Don as probably the greatest character animator of all time, and here he is swooping out of the blue with an offer I’d have been an idiot to turn down, so I said “yes”.

So now we’ve got two animation studios: Bluth and his crew in Dublin for character and creature animation, the Kyoto crew for backgrounds and effects, and us in the middle for preproduction, scripting, and storyboarding. As long as we could get that right, we’d have a movie.

Did you ever consider working with Disney?

HS: Never in a million years! (laughs)

RD: (laughs) Yea, I can hear Roy Disney now. “Ah, the UPA Commies come crawling back![2]”

HS: Yea, Disney at the time was the animation studio, and still is, and they were cranking out work at a rate nobody’d seen since the Forties, real top-of-the-industry stuff, mind you. They’d just released Where the Wild Things Are, which sent shockwaves through the animation world. The stuff they’d done with DIS stations and CHERNABOG were revolutionary, and paired with the failure of Richard Williams’s and Don Bluth’s visually breathtaking The Thief and the Cobbler, it was like that moment when we all knew that hand drawn animation’s days were numbered, even if we didn’t want to admit it to ourselves yet. But Disney animators work on Disney projects, they generally didn’t farm out work unless you were like Spielberg and had an “in”. That and they were just way outside of our price bracket, even if we’d actually had a way to get our foot in the door.

Similar to this Stan Winston 1994 design from Our Timeline (Image posted by Muto on “pinterest.com”)

You were involved in making Godzilla’s new look, can you tell us about the process behind it?

RD: One of the advantages of animation, obviously, is that you can do things that wouldn’t be possible with suitimation or puppetry or even CG at the time. We also had the freedom to make our own Godzilla, so we wanted to make something that looked less like a guy in a suit and more like a real animal. We couldn’t change things too much, it still needed to look like Godzilla, but his design came pretty naturally once we started working on it. He’s got a lot of crocodile and bear in his design and that shows in his body proportions and head shape, with the eyes and nostrils on top of the head and having his arms a little longer than his legs.

We especially agonized over the legs, which seems really silly now considering how fast the rest of him came together. Classic Godzilla’s got these really dumpy thighs ‘cause it’s a guy in a suit and the suit has to take some of its own weight. We didn’t have to worry about that, but we wanted to keep Godzilla's legs good and sturdy so it’d look like they’d take his weight, so they’re relatively short for his body but really well muscled. The whole effect is to make Godzilla look like he's equally comfortable on land as he is in the water, a truly amphibious monster.

HS: We figuratively gave him the world’s biggest Thigh Master! (laughter)

RD: We also have Godzilla lean forward more. He’s not upright like in the Japanese films; again, he’s not a guy in a suit, so we could have a more dynamic, aggressive pose for him. I think he’s got a pretty consistent 30–40-degree tilt for most of the film, but then in the finale when he’s really mad, he’s really leaning into it and the tail comes up and he starts looking like a T. rex at that point. We’re all very pleased with how well he turned out.

Your Godzilla’s smaller than the Toho Godzilla, was that intentional?

RD: That was an accident, actually! Toho sent us a bunch of info about Godzilla, stuff we’d make good use of during the planning stages. One of the points in that package is that Godzilla is one hundred meters tall; more than three hundred feet. Somewhere along the way that got mixed up and “one hundred meters tall” became “one hundred meters long”. Now, that’s still a big boy, a whole football field plus end zones, but he’s much smaller than Toho’s design. That actually worked to our advantage; the smaller Godzilla scaled really well with the buildings in Honolulu, something I don’t think would have worked so well if we’d set the movie in New York or LA.

Actually, now that I think about it, our Godzilla is about the same size as the original 1954 Godzilla, isn’t he? [Confirmation from off-stage] Oh he is! I’m happy to hear that, no wonder that size felt so right!

HS: Um, yes, always my plan the entire time! (coughs suspiciously, eliciting laughter)

Lavapentis is similar in shape to this (Lagiacrus from Monster Hunter), but replace the legs with smaller “flippers” and wrap it in lava rock (Image source “pinterest.com”)

Where did the design of Lavapentis come from?

RD: Believe it or not, Lavapentis was the backup plan! The original idea we had for the movie was for some damn fool to try and kill Godzilla with a nuke but not only would it not work, but it would supercharge the big guy, so now he’s even more aggressive and dangerous but he’s also overheating and in danger of having a meltdown[3]. Of course, right when we were starting production Chernobyl happened... [knowing sounds from the audience] …yea, so we thought “maybe a movie about a nuclear meltdown would be in bad taste right now”.

Fortunately, with Godzilla you can always just fight another monster, so we started brainstorming ideas. We threw everything at the wall: space octopuses, rock monsters, slime monsters, giant alien space bats, you name it. Eventually we settled on a sea serpent sort of creature, which wasn’t something you could do very well with suitimation and look convincing, and then we combined it with some of the ideas for the rock monsters to make a lava snake that lives in volcanoes. We really wanted to have that connection to volcanoes now that we’d settled on Hawaii for the movie’s setting.

Why Hawaii?

HS: Excuse for a research trip. [crowd laughs] With all seriousness, when we first started working on the project, we very quickly decided that it would be tacky to have Godzilla plough through Manhattan just because it’s an “American Godzilla”[4] so we were looking for something on the Pacific coast, probably LA or San Francisco. Some of the crew suggested Portland because then “nobody would care if it got leveled” [audience laughter, a couple of groans]. Then someone, I can’t remember who, brought up Honolulu and everyone immediately agreed. It just felt right, you know? It’s a decently-sized city with a good mix of tall and low buildings we can use for scale, there’s a great mix of landscapes to play with, Pearl Harbor is right there so we could play with both the Army and Navy in the picture, and finally Hawaii has volcanoes. Plus, it’s a place popular with the Japanese too, so it would be a good place for an “east meets west” crossover.

RD: The idea of a volcano monster was an early concept from the West Coast time, but there aren’t any volcanos of the right type on the West Coast, if you know what I mean. Mount St. Helens blew up in 1980, still very much in recent memory, so we first thought about having a monster burrow its way out of there. But [the volcano] was all drab smoke and ash and not much in the way of glowing fountains and rivers of lava. We hemmed and hawed about it, but once Hawaii was on the table, we went for it. Hawaii’s got volcanoes that are erupting all the time, and with great lava geysers that look spectacular, and that pretty much set the rest of the film. Best of all, it’s in the middle of the Pacific, Godzilla’s stomping grounds. It was perfect.

Did the T rating trouble you at all?

HS: Not at all! We wore it like a badge of honor, like “this is a real Godzilla movie!” We were pleased that despite the jump to animation, people still took it as seriously as the live-action films, which when I think about it, was actually a pretty low bar. [laughter]

What’s your favorite scene?

RD: Honestly, it’s probably the very first one, before the title card. You’ve got the sun filtering down through the water and a school of tuna swimming past you, quite serene. Then Godzilla himself comes out of the murk and swims up and over you, like a reverse of the opening of Star Wars, blotting out the sun with his shadow. Then the title card appears with the classic Godzilla three-note “bum bum buuum, bum bum buuuummm”. [cheers, laughter, and applause] To me that totally summed up the feel of the movie right from the get go. I don’t think any other movie in the franchise has been able to outdo that shot of Godzilla swimming above you, it’s really something.

HS: Like most people, mine’s the final Mauna Loa battle. Just everything about it was spectacular, I’ve never seen such rage on screen like that before. I think there’s only like a dozen hits [between the monsters] in the whole fight, but each one hits like a plane crash, just so much power in every one of them. I can’t praise Bluth and his team enough for giving the monsters so much mass and power, especially when they’re moving quickly like they do there, just really charging at each other in the middle of an erupting volcano!

[addressing the audience] Now, you’ll like this, this is the dirty little secret of that scene: it was probably half the cost of the Honolulu battle. The lava was mostly rotoscoped from real footage of Mauna Loa eruptions and then having the monsters in silhouette for large portions of the fight meant we didn’t have to animate a lot of the details, so we could put all the focus on getting the motion right.

RD: There's a great moment related to that fight I'll never forget: I was at one of the premier events and right after the climax, when Godzilla delivers the death-blow and the whole mountain explodes, there's that moment of quiet when all the human characters are just stood in shock as Mauna Loa collapses in on itself and this one guy, way at the back of the theatre goes “Oh my God, did they kill him!?” Right on cue Godzilla walks out of the crater with Lavapentis in his jaws to the classic theme song and the whole theatre starts cheering. That's when I knew we really had a winner.

HS: Yea, winner indeed; thirty-nine million against a ten-million-dollar budget was pretty darn good for ’88. Maybe we would have broken $50 mill if we’d been PG, who knows? Still, it was a win for UPA, Universal, and Toho, of course, but also a big win for Bluth, who was desperate for work following the failure of The Thief and the Cobbler. Between that film’s impact on his reputation and Godzilla: Lord of Fire’s success, I like to think that we helped pave the way for his later films.

It also marked the triumphant return of UPA to our animation roots after decades away. We even entered into discussions for an animated TV series based on Godzilla and King Kong for Universal, who was looking to boost interest in King Kong in particular ahead of their expansion into theme park animatronics. This eventually became 1992’s Monster Mayhem with Kong and Godzilla, of course. By then, Kyoto Studios was up to the task of animating it all by themselves and became our go-to partners.

RD: They called it “…with Gojira and Kongu”, of course. [audience laughs]

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[1] Yes, this would be the Kyoto Animation, who in the ‘80s is still a new, small company that did work for other studios. Even then they were known for quality, but they were simply not big enough to handle the whole movie themselves unless you extended the production a couple of years.

[2] The original UPA was formed in 1941 in the wake of the ’41 Strike by ex-Disney animators who were openly rebelling against Walt’s increasingly anti-Union sentiments. Disney referred to them as “the Commies down the river”.

[3] Toho themselves would use the meltdown idea in our timeline’s Godzilla vs. Destoroyah in 1995.

[4] Here’s looking at you, Tri-Star!


And thanks again to @GrahamB for the guest-post!

 

[Geekhis Khan]

Part 7: Freddy Murders the Fourth Wall (Cont’d)
Excerpt from Slash! A History of Horror Films, by Ima Fuller Bludengore

As is often the case, the end of the prior film sets up the sequel. In a last bit of meta-cinematics in A Nightmare on Elm Street III: The Waking Nightmare, Robert Englund was the one to kill the “Freddy” entity, and observant viewers would have noticed Freddy’s face reflected in his eyes as he made the killing blow. Really observant viewers would have seen the image in his eyes as he winked at the camera after walking off, his arm around Patricia Arquette.

Not this at all!

And for A Nightmare on Elm Street Part IV: The Devil Inside, if going “meta” had proven successful for Part III, then Part IV would surely succeed by going “double-meta”! This film, directed by Renny Harlin, sees Robert Englund basking in the glory of his newfound fame following the success of The Waking Nightmare, where he got to kill Freddy himself as Robert Englund, symbolically freeing him from typecasting. He and Patricia Arquette are now married and expecting a baby girl. He’s also starring in a new Romantic Comedy with Patricia called “A Dream Within a Dream” with big hopes of escaping life as a slasher star (the film even jokes about his appearance in Star Trek [The Next Generation]). But ever since he’d starred in Waking Nightmare he’s been having these headaches and disturbing but amorphous dreams, as well as strange impulses to grab a knife and kill someone. His therapist (Betsy Palmer of Friday the 13th fame in a stunt casting) explains to him that this is all really just a result of his stresses as an expecting new father, stresses that are increased when the Obstetrician (George P. Wilbur in another stunt casting) reveals to Patricia and him that – and he didn’t know how he missed it before – they are in fact having twins, one girl and one boy!

“Scout’s Honor, no more cutting remarks!” (image source “cinemablend.com”)

His stress continues and his headaches are met with blackouts. He starts having terrifying dreams about seeing Freddy in the mirror or having Freddy murder his friends and coworkers in ironic dreamlike ways. And then his coworkers, including director Wes Craven, start actually getting killed by someone dressing as Freddy, complete with glove as murder weapon and smart-assed comments (“Wes, you always were a hack!”). Police are baffled. A detective advises that he and his wife should be careful because “this obsessive nut is still out there”.

“Who could be killing my friends?” (Image source “sparklight.com”)

Slowly Robert’s life starts to unravel. “A Dream within a Dream” is a flop (Gene Shalit calls it “A Dread within a Dread”[1]) and his promising opportunity to star in the prestige period drama “What Dreams May Come” disintegrates after blistering reviews of his acting. He grows sullen, starts abusing alcohol, and starts visibly losing his temper. He has a nightmare about an in-utero Freddy strangling a twin sister with her own umbilical cord and awakes to find the sheets bloody, Patricia in shock after having a horrid miscarriage. His therapist tells him that the dream was probably a manifestation of subconsciously hearing her cries of distress, but he yells “I know what I saw!! There’s a monster in my wife!” and starts tearing apart the room. She calls the cops and he runs, collapsing to the ground with a splitting headache and “awakes” with a Freddy smile.

“There’s a monster in my wife!” (Image source “rottentomatoes.com”)

Robert-as-Freddy continues his murder spree, killing off his old co-workers, contacts, and Gene Shalit one by one in ironic and bloody hilarious ways before finally turning his attention to Patricia. She is bawling and shrieking as he chases her, but she manages to fight back with various household items, finally beating him to bloody death with a can of Happy Bunny String Beans. The cops arrive and escort her away.

It then cuts to Robert’s funeral and then Patricia’s interview with Larry King where she relays the terrible tragedy of her husband Robert and how she’s coping as well as possible given the horror of it all. She concludes that “at least I have Robby Junior to remember him by,” panning down to her baby bump, where we see a hand the shape of Freddy’s glove as it briefly presses a bulge out from it.

The film performed well when it debuted in the Summer of 1988, making $46 million at the box office against a $5.5 million budget[2], but fans were getting a bit tired of the “meta” schtick. Still, the blood and gore and sarcastic Freddy quips were sufficient to keep slasher fans happy. Critics were more appreciative, as were the actors, who got the opportunity to flex their talents more than one would typically expect in a “Part 4” slasher, with many hoping that this chance to demonstrate some real acting would be their ticket out of typecasting, ironically enough given the themes of the film.

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[1] Talk about meta, when I first typed “A Dream within a Dream” it came out as “A Dream within a Dread”! That’s what spurred this review!

[2] Costs a bit less than in our timeline, but also makes a bit less.

 

[Geekhis Khan]

So, from a psychotic, pizza-faced murderer to Politicians. No message here, I swear!

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Gary Hart accepts Democratic Nomination for President
From New York Times, July 21st, 1988

Atlanta – Senator Gary Hart of Colorado and running mate Senator Lloyd Bentsen of Texas have accepted the Democratic nomination for President and Vice President of the United States. After virtually sweeping the Super Tuesday primaries, Hart confidently wrapped up the nomination despite some persistent opposition from Jesse Jackson of South Carolina and Al Gore of Tennessee. Thanks to a post-convention bump and lingering controversy surrounding the Iran-Contra Affair, Hart and Bentsen lead in the polls over assumptive Republican opponent Vice President George Bush of Texas. Hart’s campaign was “brilliantly executed” according to… continued on pg. A14.

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VP Bush accepts Republican Nomination for President
From New York Times, August 18th, 1988

New Orleans – Vice President George H. W. Bush accepted the nomination for Republican Presidential Candidate. Long the assumed heir apparent, Bush rode Ronald Reagan’s coattails to primary victory over rivals Bob Dole, Pat Robertson, and Jack Kemp. Bush named Indiana Senator Dan Quayle as his running mate despite some rumblings of opposition at the convention, which required a ratification by voice vote. Despite lingering political fallout from the Iran Contra Affair, Bush has received a post-convention bump, pulling slightly ahead of Democratic nominee Gary Hart in recent polls such as the Gallup… continued on pg. A12.

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“Monkey Business” Dogs Hart Campaign
From New York Times, August 24th, 1988

Democratic Presidential hopeful Gary Hart is sagging in the polls in several key swing states following accusations of extramarital affairs that emerged last week[1]. Though Hart denies any wrongdoing, a compromising photograph following a yacht trip with young women aboard the fittingly named “Monkey Business” continues to make the rounds in the press, almost like a talisman of the alleged infidelity. Vice President George Bush has used the scandal to reinforce his message of “family values”, citing the scandal as proof of the Democrats’ “disconnection with the moral values of our nation.” The revelations are likely to cost Hart with religious voters and suburban women, which could cost him dearly in midwestern swing states like Ohio and Michigan. Hart calls the rumors “utterly false” and deflects the offending image as a “set up”. Tabloids, meanwhile, are running nonstop articles about… continued on pg. A 11.

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Carnac the Magnificent (Johnny Carson): (holds envelope to his head) Groucho Marx, Bonzo the Chimp, and Gary Hart.

(hands envelope to Ed McMahon, who opens it)

Ed: (reading letter) “Celebrities famous for ‘Monkey Business’.”

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[1] The Hart campaign kept the images under wraps longer than in our timeline since Dana Weems held off longer before she told her story to the press. The Monkey Business was owned by a campaign donor, so the infamous ship seemed like it could appear in this timeline. And Donna Rice was apparently deliberately hoping to hook up with Hart, at least according to Weems. Plus, some things are just too crazy to butterfly.

 

[Geekhis Khan]

Seven Great ‘80s British Shows you Never Knew had American Origins
From Five Alive! Netsite, posted May 4th, 2017

You’ve seen it happen a thousand times: a popular British show is remade – and in the opinions of the original British fandom ruined – by American producers for American audiences. But what about the reverse?[1] We all know about game shows and music shows, but how about that handful of cases where a classic bit of Americana became “repatriated” as it were for British and Commonwealth audiences? Well, thanks in a large part to the late Robert Holmes-à-Court and his bizarre long-running partnership with American entertainment mogul Ted Turner, it happened more often than you think. Here are seven of them:

#7 – The Knowledge (Taxi), 1987-1992

It almost seems natural to take a series based upon the iconic Yellow Cabs of New York and translate it to the iconic Black Cabs of London[2], which have a culture of their own. Such was BBC 2’s The Knowledge. Based on the classic American SITCOM Taxi, The Knowledge followed the lives of working-class London Cab Drivers and their unique culture, including the make-or-break test known as “The Knowledge”. David Jason led the cast as the “seen it all” Winton Ringer, self-appointed “keeper of the Knowledge” who annoys his coworkers with his constant quizzing. He is supported by a cast of crazy cabbies like Sylvester McCoy’s clownish but clever schemer Angus McDaniel, Wendy Richards’s exhausted Cockney single mom Elaine Manning, and Nigel Planner’s neurotic and melancholic Nigel Newman. The series combined a cast of excellent comedians, clever writers, and a brilliant localized adaption of the original premise. It found an appreciative audience in the UK and even led to its own short-lived Melbourne-based spinoff on Australian TV. While the humor was drier and more irony-based than the American original, it none-the-less found an audience in the States on PBS.

#6 – Sifton’s Pilgrims (Little House on the Prairie), 1988-1994

Robert Holmes-à-Court’s on-and-off strategic partnerships with Ted Turner’s CBS led him to become quite familiar with classic American television, in particular some of the “wholesome Americana” that Turner loved. And there were few shows more wholesome than Little House on the Prairie. H-A-C’s producers took the idea and reframed it for a Commonwealth audience, moving the setting to Victorian Era Alberta, Canada, resulting in Sifton’s Pilgrims, named for then Minister of the Interior Sir Clifford Sifton, who encouraged settlement of the Canadian Great Plains, in particular by “undesirable” immigrant groups. The series follows the Baciu family, Romanian immigrants struggling to dig out a living in the harsh climate. Marcel Lureș plays the stern but gentle patriarch Radu Baciu, instilling a gentle pathos to the character as he struggles with the elements, fatherhood, ethnic discrimination, and a complicated relationship with the local Cree First People (they’d receive a much more nuanced treatment than the generic “Indians” received in the original Little House). While Sifton’s Pilgrims didn’t become the long-running cultural touchstone that its inspiration was, it none the less found an appreciative audience and won numerous BAFTA and Canadian Screen Awards over its 6-year ITV run.

#5 – The Good Years (Happy Days) 1989-1999

BBC 4 developed probably the strangest and most removed of adaptions with The Good Years, which you’d probably never guess was derived from Happy Days. Yes, we’d never have guessed either. Most of us at Five Alive assumed (incorrectly) that it was based on The Wonder Years! However, the 1950s setting of the American original was not exactly seen as a “happy” time in Great Britain, so instead they relocated the place to 1920s Coventry[3]. Like its predecessor, it was a SITCOM built upon nostalgia for a “better time” where the country was in the midst of a cultural and economic upheaval. The film followed the working-class Cunningham family as they struggled with life and a changing culture, including the sudden appearance of Jazz music “noise”. Teenaged Richie Cunningham (Gian Sammarco) would become the breakout star as audiences sympathized with his struggles to fit in. In a bit of irony, the Fonzie-inspired character of Arthur O’Malley (Declan Donnelly) never caught on and thus never took off like his Italian American forebearer.

#4 – Somerset Breeze (The Andy Griffith Show) 1988-1994

Perhaps Ted Turner’s favorite old American SITCOM was The Andy Griffith Show, a show from the 1960s set in a small North Carolina town. Turner played it daily on some CBS affiliates. H-A-C took it as a personal challenge to find a way to reframe it for British audiences. The result was Somerset Breeze, starring Toby Longworth as the genteel Constable Andrew Griffin and Adrian Edmondson as his excitable Deputy Bernard “Bernie” Piccolo. It follows “Constable Andy” as he deals with his single fatherhood of young Ollie (Nick Pickard) and the eccentric citizens of the fictional town of “Warm Springs, Somerset”. The series was “painfully sincere” in the words of critics, but struck a chord with rural and ex-rural audiences as a romantic view of the “simple country life”. It was also popular, like its inspiration, for breaking down the “backwards simpleton” stereotypes associated with rural village Britons in general and Somerset in particular. While hardly a breakout hit, it held a dedicated audience throughout its run and remains a sort of cultural touchstone for rural Britons.

#3 – Jackeroos (Rawhide) 1988-2007

Just as Little House on the Prairie would inspire H-A-C to produce Sifton’s Pilgrims, so would that most classically American of genres, the Western[4], inspire Jackeroos. Primarily based on Rawhide (with a touch of Bonanza and Gunsmoke) and originally called “Greenhide”, Jackeroos was an ITV-Australian Broadcasting Corporation co-production set, naturally, on a cattle ranch in the Australian Outback. Jackeroos has the distinction of not only becoming a hit in the UK, Australia, and New Zealand, but also briefly becoming a minor hit on CBS, riding the American Australiophilia of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s (the Outback Steakhouse chain became a major sponsor). Paul Hogan (naturally) claimed the lead role of headstockman Gil Duncan in 1988 before being replaced by Bryan Brown as Benny O’Duffy in 1992 when Hogan’s Hollywood production career took over most of his time. Fans of the Western genre found much familiar in Jackaroos, as it relied heavily on the classic tropes. But the Australian slang and exotic setting made it just different enough to be something “new and interesting”. It also renewed interest in America for the Western genre, Aussie Jackeroos ironically coming to the “rescue” of a “dying genre” in the States.

#2 – Roughneck Royals (Dallas) 1984-1990

Soap Operas were certainly common and popular with British audiences between EastEnders and Coronation Street, among others. So naturally the ridiculously popular US Soap Dallas would gain the attention of BBC executives. However, what is the British equivalent of the Texas Oil Barons of the 1980s? The answer was determined to be the Scottish North Sea Oil Barons. Tentatively titled “Aberdeen”, the series was greenlit by BBC One and ultimately launched in the fall of 1984 under the title Roughneck Royals. The show followed the nouveau riche Albion family, who made their fortune in the North Sea oil fields, following in particular the amoral and manipulative patriarch Sir Bearnard Albion, KBE, (David McCallum) and his honest but put-upon son and heir Banner (Ewan Stewart). Like its American inspiration, much of the drama came from the family’s dirty secrets and interpersonal drama and the dark underbelly of business. Unlike the American show, Roughneck Royals added in the principally British issue of the conflict between the newly-entitled nouveau riche and the ancient aristocratic families, with matriarch Dallas Albion (Lorna Heilbron) constantly fighting, despite her common origins, to be accepted by High Society, as represented by rival Lady Daracha McBeth (Siobhan Redmond), who has her own secret monetary problems. Meanwhile, the spoiled and selfish daughter Fiona Albion (Simone Lahbib) was secretly having an affair with the abusive alcoholic working-class Roughneck Malcolm (Iain Glen), whose last name was never revealed as a deliberate sociopolitical statement. Like its inspiration, Roughneck Royals had its own “who shot JR?” moment when David McCallum began seeking new employment opportunities in 1988. They made Sir Bearnard’s apparent murder a cliffhanger, which failed to generate the viewer excitement that was hoped. McCallum ultimately left for another role when the BBC proved unwilling to give him the pay that he demanded to return, and thus the character died in his coma, his daughter Fiona revealed to have shot him in self-defense. With control of the company going to the likeable Banner, audiences dropped off despite an attempt to build drama between Banner and his shady CFO Ian (Gray O’Brien), resulting in cancellation in early 1990. Roughneck Royals never achieved the fame or infamy of its US inspiration, but did influence a host of similar dramas in the 1990s.

#1 – Dreadnaught (Battlestar Galactica) 1992-1995

When new ITV producer John Nathan-Turner saw what was happening to the long-running Dr. Who, which he used to run for the BBC, he was not amused. He became even less amused to find that there was an American version of Red Dwarf in production. He decided to strike back for the (British) Empire. First, he attempted to adapt a major classic like Star Wars or Star Trek, but the licensing fees were more than ITV was willing to spend. He encountered a similar issue with King Features’ Flash Gordon. And it seemed that a Buck Rogers series was already in production by Disney. He considered Lost in Space, but ultimately chose to adapt the 1978 TV adventure Battlestar Galactica. Ultimately, this evolved into Dreadnaught, the story of the HMSS Stalwart, last of the “Dreadnaughts” that once protected the 12 Human Colonies from their enemies. It escorts a ragtag fleet of human survivors seeking the “New Earth”, who are pursued by the murderous cybernetic Cylons, which generally get pronounced like “Sylins”, adding to the missed origins of the series by the viewers. The biggest difference from the American version, beyond the British cast and British sensibilities, were the Cylons, who in this case were originally designed and built by the Humans for a long-forgotten war with an alien power. When the Cylons drove the aliens extinct, the humans, guilty about their actions, tried to deactivate the Cylons. They deactivated all but a few Cylon Basestars, which were assumed lost in the event horizon of a black hole. Alas, the Basestars reappeared after escaping the black hole centuries later, now no longer recognizing the humans and assuming them enemies to destroy[5]. Also, there was no human traitor in this iteration. Instead, the Cylons, taking a cue from the Cybermen and Daleks, were sentient and intelligent and could speak for themselves. Casting borrowed heavily from Blake’s 7, including Gareth Thomas as the stern but fair Captain Prospero, Steven Pacey as Lieutenant Starbuck, Stephen Greif as Commander Adamo, Josette Simon as Cassiopeia, and Glynis Barber as Lieutenant Sheba. To save money, the series also used entirely digital effects, still a major novelty at the time. While obviously digital, they were notably advanced for the era. The series also downplayed the Biblical references of the original and instead focused on the politics of war, technology, and shortsighted pragmatism. Direct comparisons were made between the Cylons and the “Smart Bombs” that rained down on Iraq, for example. While the series only lasted three short years and never gained a huge fandom, it did establish a cult following on both sides of the pond and still appears in syndication.

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[1] Hat tip to @El Pip for proposing this idea.

[2] Cabbie-cap tip to @GrahamB.

[3] Tweed cap tip to @TheFaultsOfTheAlts and @Ogrebear. Since Cunningham already seems like a quintessentially English name, I kept it.

[4] Bush Hat tip to @nick_crenshaw82.

[5] Viper helmet tip to @Denliner and @GrahamB.

 

[Geekhis Khan]

Chapter 16: Building a New, Small World (Cont’d)
Excerpt from The King is Dead: The Walt Disney Company After Walt Disney, an Unauthorized History by Sue Donym and Arman N. Said

By the end of 1987 Disney’s foray into Japanese animation had netted only a modest profit, but lots of goodwill with their Japanese partners. While Jungle Emperor Kimba was never going to outsell Muppet Babies on VHS and Castle in the Sky certainly wasn’t selling tickets like Where the Wild Things Are, Chairman and President Frank Wells was willing to allow CCO Jim Henson his “little Japanese thing” as a side benefit for all the great things he was achieving elsewhere. So, in 1988 when Hayao Miyazaki of Studio Ghibli approached Disney with their two latest animation features, My Neighbor Totoro and Grave of the Fireflies, few on the board expected much more than a modest profit, if that.

(Image source “denofgeek.com”)

The two films could not have been more different. Of the two, My Neighbor Totoro was the only one that most on the Disney board wanted to distribute. The story of two little girls befriending a bouncy, bunny-like forest spirit practically weaponized cute[1], even as it dealt with complex subjects like illness, isolation, and fear. Girls 4-7, it was felt, would probably drag their parents in to see it, netting a few million, and perhaps some merchandise would sell, but expectations were hardly grand. Even then, there was some pushback from some of the more conservative alumni of the board, with Associate Director Card Walker recommending against it, feeling the whole “cat-bus thing” for example was too bizarre for American audiences to connect with.

(Image source “BBC.com”)

The other film, Grave of the Fireflies, however, had only one champion in its corner: Jim Henson. The film followed two young Japanese girls as they try to survive amid the devastation of the American bombing campaign of 1945 and its aftermath. It graphically presented the horrors of war. It was a bleak, violent, terrifying tearjerker that delved into dark, emotional places. Most thought it was far too dark and depressing for adults, much less kids. Card Walker hated it, calling it “Jap propaganda”. No one on the board expected it to make much money, even Jim Henson, but the apparent anti-war message and stark beauty resonated with Henson, who was reportedly driven to tears.

The board wanted to negotiate a one-picture deal, but that was not an option. Studio Ghibli was selling it as an unbreakable two-picture deal and would not consider partnering on Totoro alone. Henson was adamant as well, and refused to budge. He even offered to pay the distribution costs for Grave out of pocket. In the end, they accepted the two-picture deal, but planned only a limited arthouse distribution for Grave of the Fireflies. What happened next surprised everyone.

Grave of the Fireflies was dubbed by Judith Barsi (Setsuko) and Eric Stoltz (Seita)[2], rated T, and given the limited release. It started small, but word of mouth built. Despite, or perhaps because of the dark and controversial subject matter, there was a morbid desire by many to see it. A small but dedicated following among young adults, activists, and academics began to build. Professors started taking their students to see it. Middle and High School teachers began to take their students to see it. Arthouse theaters began to renew and expand their showings. The film got a (slightly) wider release. Educational institutes and anti-war organizations began to request copies for showings. While it never became a certified “hit”, it quickly gained a cult status and made a surprising $2.6 million at the box office and another $14 million in home video sales over the next two years. Reviews were near universally positive, with Roger Ebert calling it one of the best and most powerful war films of all time. Grave of the Fireflies was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar (losing out to Pelle the Conqueror), the first animated film to receive the honor.

My Neighbor Totoro on the other hand received a G rating and a wide release. Soleil Moon Frye and Judith Barsi voiced Satsuki and Mei and Alan Thicke voiced the father Tatsuo. Disney accountants predicted about $7-12 million gross earnings and a few million more in merchandise. Early returns on its opening weekend seemed to follow this prediction, pulling in a modest $1.2 million. But then, it exploded, breaking $7 million in its second week and $14 million in its third. Audiences fell in love with its sweet mix of silliness, seriousness, and sincerity and the way it so well captured the childlike way of looking at the world. Critics loved it as well; Siskel and Ebert gave it two thumbs up with Ebert calling it one of the Great Movies. Word of mouth spread like wildfire. Kids loved both the silly, goofy, endearing Totoro and the weird Cat-Bus that so disturbed Card Walker. The small run of merchandise that Disney had produced sold out in days. “Totoromania” had begun[3].

Totoro was on everyone’s lips. Kids played “Totoro” on the playground. It got mentioned in every morning show and the Totoromania phenomenon mentioned in the evening news. It was the talk of Johnny Carson and David Letterman. Girls and boys ages 4-7 dragged their parents back to the theater again and again, laughing endlessly at Totoro’s silly antics and cheering whenever the Cat-Bus arrived. Letterman joked that Disney wasted their money by dubbing it into English because “it’s not like you can hear anything over all the giggling rug rats.” Children 8-12 came out in good numbers as well, as did many teens and adults. College viewers debated whether it was better watched “augmented” or not. Teenage girls and young women dragged their boyfriends to theaters, making Totoro one of the top “date movies” of the year. Many theaters began hosting special “after dark” screenings so that adults could watch the movie in silence. It lasted well over 25 weeks in wide release and longer in smaller “dollar movie” chains and the dwindling number of drive-in theaters.

“Moichendizing…the Power of the Schwartz!” (Image source “ghiblistore.com”)

Disney VP of Consumer Products Bo Boyd scrambled to make deals with any toymaker that he could sign. When Mattel pushed back on the proposed designs for the Cat-Bus, seeing the mix of “plush toy and truck toy” as practical blasphemy, Kenner was more than happy to oblige, producing a toy that sold nearly as well as Totoro plushies[4]. The Cat-Bus toys so often got damaged or destroyed by getting driven through mud, sand, and water that an original Cat-Bus in mint condition is now a rare and valuable collector’s item. Posters and shirts with Totoro and Mary Poppins flying together on their umbrellas sold exceptionally well with all ages, and reportedly still do.

The Disney parks rushed to produce Totoro walkarounds in both Japan and America. Totoro walkarounds and statues began appearing at the Japan Pavilion in EPCOT as well. The “Totoro’s Funny Flight” youth track ride (the cars obviously based upon the Cat-Bus) was put on the fast-track by Imagineering and appeared at Disneyland in both California and Japan and in the Magic Kingdom in Disney World, where it immediately became popular with kids and couples alike.

“I’m Mary Poppins, y’all!” (Image source “jsfreedman.files.wordpress.com”)

My Neighbor Totoro ultimately made over $159 million in the US on its first theatrical release (breaking $200 million worldwide) and sees periodic theatrical re-release to this day, becoming an honorary “Disney Classic” in all but name. VHS sales broke company records. And Jim Henson’s “little Japanese thing” was suddenly very, very big.

And yet it was the unwanted Grave of the Fireflies that would have the longest lasting impact on Disney and on animation. The Oscar-nominated animated film proved that there was a market for dramatic “prestige animation”, leading directly to the creation of the Walter Elias Disney Signature Series. Fantasia retroactively became its “first” title, Grave of the Fireflies the second, and the upcoming Musicana the third. The big question then became “what will be the fourth?”.

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[1] Hat tip to What Culture (IIRC) from whom I blatantly stole this line. They referred to Up as the movie that “weaponized sentiment”.

[2] Voice casting by @Spooner The Trinity.

[3] You know if any Studio Ghibli film is going to break out in the US in the late ‘80s it’s My Neighbor Totoro.

[4] 7-year-old me would have killed for a Cat-Bus toy that was both plush and wheeled.

 

[Geekhis Khan]

Chapter 22: A Cheeky Little Engine
Excerpt from In the Service of the Mouse: A Memoir, by Jack Lindquist

Thomas the Tank Engine joining the Disney family was pure serendipity. It’s funny, of course. At the time, some at the company expressed concern with the deal Jim cut with Britt and Clearwater in ’83, fearing that it’d be too British for American audiences (“what does ‘cheeky’ even mean?”). And yet the truth is that Thomas and Disney are the perfect fit. Walt would have loved Thomas, both because he was a train fanatic himself and because the show’s central lessons of teamwork and maintaining a good work ethic would have resonated with him. And yet even I was amazed at how big that Thomas got, and how quickly. At first the Cheeky Little Engine hardly made a blip, just another timeslot filled on the Disney Channel, and hardly a great slot at that. But like a true sleeper he built up steam through word of mouth until the show blew up so quickly that we moved it to ABC Saturday Mornings.

(Image source “imbd.com”)

After a while I came to realize that Thomas didn’t need marketing, Thomas was marketing! Thomas was selling Disney, not the other way around! We put things we wanted to advertise near things with Thomas on them. And what a collection of merchandise! Model trains of various gauges, obviously, but also shirts, books, posters, and even videogames! Even adult gamers love the Sir Topham Hatt’s Sodor Simulator game line[1]. Merchandise sold like wildfire and [VP of Disney Consumer Products] Bo Boyd called Thomas “the little engine that could print money”. “I could put Thomas’ face on a moldy trash can and it’d sell for $20,” he jokingly told me one day. Of course, we’d never do that, mind you. Much like Walt and Jim, Bo insists on only the highest quality for anything that holds the name Walt Disney, Jim Henson, or for that matter the Reverend Awdry!

It wasn’t long before Thomas and Friends came to Disneyland and the Magic Kingdom. We built a small Thomas and Friends “Sodor Tour” miniature train circuit at Fantasyland aimed at younger children and their families in ‘85. It keeps a long line to this day and our biggest problem is when a five-year-old starts screaming because he wanted to ride Thomas or Percy and instead has to ride Gordon! Marty tells me he’s trying to find a way to let the riders choose their train, but then the problem is that the Thomas and Percy lines would be far too long for children and the others would be nearly empty!

Sort of like this, but far smaller! (Image source “sweetlilyou.com”)

For the 5th Anniversary of Thomas joining the Disney team[2], we went all-out. First off was the release of the feature-length film Thomas’ World Tour, which made over $65 million internationally in theaters and twice that on VHS. Secondly, and more to my heart, we had a special 6-month “Sodor Celebration” event at both Disneylands and Walt Disney World. Every train-based ride or attraction, be it Big Thunder Mountain, the Disneyland and Walt Disney World Railways, the Casey Jr. Circus Train, the Seven Dwarves Mine Train, and even the People Mover all got a Thomas and Friends makeover. Now you could ride Thomas or Gordon along Big Thunder Mountain or see Percy or Toby pulling the Circus Train. Even some of the Monorails got a temporary new paint job.

The Sodor Celebration was such a hit that each year on the date of Ron and Britt signing the contract we have a “Thomas Week” and bring out the special trains for a limited time. You can even get a commemorative “Mickey’s Trainspotter’s Guide”. Even the adults love it, some of whom grew up with Thomas and can now share it with their kids. It still warms my heart to see the excited looks and cries of “It’s James! Look, mommy, it’s James!”.

They could just as easily be saying “Thanks, Jim! Thanks, Jim!”

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[1] Essentially a Railroad Tycoon type game, but simpler and set on Sodor.

[2] Note that the Rev. Awdry’s family still owns the Intellectual Property for the Railway Series characters, but Disney shares the exclusive distribution rights along with Britt Alcott Productions and Clearwater Productions.

 

[Geekhis Khan]

Chapter 27: Expanding into Tomorrow
Excerpt from: From a Figment to a Reality: The Imagineering Method! by Marty Sklar

The late ‘80s were a busy time for us! We launched a half dozen parks, large and small, and a score of new shows and exhibits. The biggest of all, of course, was Disneyland Valencia. But even the tiny little Disneytown in Philadelphia offered substantial Imagineering challenges. But thankfully, Frank Wells sent us some support.

Frank expected a lot from us when he joined the Disney team. He demanded that we account for every penny we spent, but, conversely, he made sure we got every resource we needed to get the job done right. He’d drop everything if you needed him, but it was a two-way street. I’ll never forget being on vacation with my family one week, sitting on a beach, and getting a call from him. He asked if I was willing to fly to New York to support a meeting with Canon. They wanted the Creative Head of Imagineering on hand to describe the plans. I said “Sure, I’ll be back in the office on Monday.”

“I need you there tomorrow morning,” he said. I expressed that I was going with my wife and some friends to the Hollywood Bowl that evening. “Okay,” he said. “Have your friends drive and take your wife home. I’ll send a car to pick you up after the show and take you to the airport for the midnight flight.”

The next morning, I was sitting in Frank’s suite in New Jersey with him and Jim Henson getting briefed on the meeting. By 10 AM we were meeting with the Head of US Operations for Canon. By 2 PM I was on a flight back to LA. By 6 PM, less than 24 hours after leaving the Hollywood Bowl, I was back at my oceanside hideaway[1]. Such is the expectation of a Disney executive!

But Frank didn’t just talk, he listened. When we started experiencing issues with Dragados y Construcciones over construction methods and issues with the Spanish government failing to deliver on its supporting infrastructure promises, along with other issues in site management and questions of responsibility, Frank hired an acquaintance of his from the Portman construction firm in Atlanta, Mickey Steinberg, to serve as VP of Operations for Imagineering. Mickey comes across as willful and opinionated with a short temper (it took Jim a long time to warm up to him), but that all hides a brilliant, organized, and decisive mind. And he seemed to control the very forces of nature. We all recall the moment when he got enraged at some schedule delays in Spain and slammed the table with his fist. His coffee cup jumped three inches into the air, coffee fountaining up from it, and it came down and landed perfectly upright and the coffee landed right back in the cup, not spilling a drop[2]. Not only did Mickey help streamline our project management and improve overall efficiency, but he browbeat Dragados into shape, got proper blueprints made and distributed, and fought to protect our schedule and budget when necessary.

(L-R) Mickey Steinberg, Marty Sklar, L.F. ”Fred” Benckenstein, & Tony Baxter (Image from Walt Disney Imagineering, Image source "inparkmagazine.com" via pinterest)

Everyone naturally assumes “Mickey’s 10 Commandments” of Imagineering design is named for Mickey Mouse. Well, it is, kind of, but it’s really named for Mickey Steinberg.

And Mickey came at exactly the right time. Not only was he able to get Valencia back on schedule and in budget, but he was there to help with the pushback from Spanish politicians, journalists (in particular Manuel Vicent), and anarchists. Some decried the new Disneyland as cultural imperialism. The fact that some local farmers lost their ancestral homesteads (after being very well compensated, mind you) was used against us. Despite the efforts we took to protect the Majal wetlands we were accused of desecrating the landscape. Thankfully the people of Pego overwhelmingly supported us. Some of the families of the land had lived in poverty for generations, perhaps since the days of Rome for all I know. The promise of good, steady jobs in the park or hotels or operations was an alluring alternative to sweating in the orange and olive groves or raising pigs.

We also worked extra hard, as we had in Japan, to find ways of adapting Disney to Spain rather than try to adapt Spain to Disney. This meant meeting with the local clergy, politicians, and elders to determine proper manners and dress standards. It meant breaking long-held taboos on alcohol in the parks, particularly the omnipresent wine, and designated smoking areas. That meant honoring the siesta, but in shifts so as not to totally close the park for 2-4 hours each day. We even designed special employee sleeping quarters in the tunnels to accommodate it. Rather than insist that everyone speak English, both it and Spanish would be the official operational languages of the park and we hired people who spoke lots of languages to be guest interpreters, given that we expected lots of visitors from lots of nations[3].

We broke ground on June 14th, 1988.

We also broke ground on new attractions in the US. Some were small things. We’d featured superhero walkarounds and stage shows ever since we brought Marvel into the family[4]. But we decided to do more. Based on the Indiana Jones Adventure stunt show, we made a Marvel Heroes stunt show. Captain America rode by on a motorcycle and punched the Red Skull. We had Hulk, well, smash. We brought Julie Taymor down from New York to help design the showstopping Spiderman segment, where the actor swings across the stage and over the audience. Brian’s boys rigged up some mirrors to make it look like Spidey was walking across the ceiling at one point. Over the years as different, once-lesser-known Marvel heroes gained public attention, we modified and expanded the show to include them.

The new Canon-sponsored Entertainment Pavilion[5] opened in EPCOT featuring The Great Movie Ride! Just two years earlier in 1986 Frank had acquired the MGM name and park rights to the movies, allowing us to build in attractions based not only on Disney productions like Mary Poppins but also on MGM classics like The Wizard of Oz. Following the announcement of Universal Studios Florida, Frank suggested that we could consider building actual studios and having visitors tour them like Universal was doing, but Jim said “we can just host tours in Burbank”. Instead, he said “wouldn’t it be better if the guests got to make their own movies and TV shows?” As such, in addition to the Great Movie Ride, which would serve as the “bait”, guests of the Entertainment Pavilion would visit educational and entertaining hands-on exhibits and short tutorials about the making of movies, TV shows, plays, and even animation, including the science and technology behind it. They could then direct and even star in their very own shows and shorts in one of the “mini-studios”, with VHS copies of their work available at a modest price (first one free!).

Original Concept Art for the Entertainment Pavilion (Image source Chicago Tribune)

Typhoon Lagoon, a new water park featuring the aftermath of a massive hurricane that hit the Caribbean and US Gulf Coast, opened in ‘89. It was shaped roughly like the Gulf of Mexico and surrounding land in miniature with miniature Caribbean islands and plenty of tropical trees and plants. There was a ship on top of “Montserrat” and characters from Catfish Bend, Boudreaux’s Kitchen, and Emmet Otter all along the “US Gulf Coast” and the Three Caballeros in “coastal Mexico”, and Aztec and Mayan pyramids 20 feet tall with built-in slides. A wave pool, as a nod to Dick Nunis’s old wave machine near the Polynesian, was installed around Atlantic Florida. The waterslides and wave pool were more adventurous than the older River Country, which was temporarily closed and given a swampy makeover as the more toddler and youth-friendly Kermit’s Bayou.

We also opened Pleasure Island on the shores of Lake Buena Vista as an adult playground with shops, night clubs, stage shows, and restaurants. It would serve as a way to keep older guests coming after dark and serve as a testing ground for adult-aimed attractions and shops for the Disneytowns.

Finally, and most impressively, we started design work on Port Disney, a new seaside park with attractions acquired with the long-desired purchase of the Wrather Corporation, to include the SS Queen Mary and the Spruce Goose. We began contracting and lobbying efforts for landfill to build a cruise ship dock, hotels, and the DisneySea park. Jim wanted to extend the Disneyland monorail to Port Disney, but the cost and zoning requirements made this unfeasible (working through the politics of the Long Beach park was overwhelming enough!), so we designed special buses between the Port and Disneyland that at least looked like the monorail or other famous Disney trains. I’ll talk about Port Disney in detail later on. The politics of making it happen to begin with deserves several chapters!

Disneyland Hotel in the ‘80s (Image source “wdwinfo.com”)

The Wrather purchase also came with Walt’s long-running desire: possession of the Disneyland Hotel. Over the decades, the hotel had grown in a haphazard way with towers, shops, water features, and other things that betrayed the decades in which they were built. A refurbishment was badly needed and it was Jim that came up with the idea for how to do it. Rather than try to make the disconnected parts match or start demolishing older structures, why not embrace the anachronism? Why not make each and every section a trip in time? The original rooms would be restored to their 1950’s mid-century glory, complete with vintage-looking appliances and furniture. Same for the ‘60s, ‘70s, and even ‘80s sections. Staff would wear vintage clothing. Retro walkarounds based on original designs were specially constructed. “You don’t just choose where to stay when you stay at the Disneyland Hotel,” said Jack Lindquist’s advert, “you choose when to stay! Travel back in time with Disney!” Naturally we tied it to Main Street USA for the nostalgia factor.

Disneyland Hotel in the 1950s (Image ©Donald Ballard, source “designingdisney.com”)

The newly repatriated Disneyland Hotel would join new hotels like Rocket Tower in Disneyland, the Arabian Nights and Ryokan Yorokobi in WDW, and the Disney World Convention Center[6].

Image by @Denliner

But the biggest challenge for the Imagineers was also the smallest: the debut Disneytown in Philadelphia. On the surface you’d assume that the smaller the park, the easier the build. You’d be wrong. With barely 31 acres to work with, a third of it already taken up by the existing Sesame Place, getting it all to work as a real user experience in its own right and not just a “half-assed Disneyland” as Mickey Steinberg put it, would be a monumental achievement. We knew that we’d need to go for a wider appeal than just the families of young children, as was the target audience of Sesame Place, and we knew that simply trying to replicate Disneyland in miniature would result in that “half-assed” approach. Something new was needed. A “taste of the magic” as Jack Lindquist called it, a few fun hours, locally accessible, intended to whet the appetite for the full parks rather than compete with them.

Thankfully securing the zoning and permitting proved as easy as such things go. Not only was the City of Langhorne an eager partner, but PA Senator John Heinz was an enthusiastic supporter of the effort. We got the permits and permissions that we needed and full support from State and Federal regulators, working openly with them to build in a minimal-impact way that preserved the remaining local ecosystems and water supplies as best as possible in the midst of urban sprawl.

We kept the classic “hub” approach with a glorious bronze statue/fountain of the Castle in miniature and Walt & Mickey in front if it as its focal point, but limited it to three “spokes”, one for Sesame Place, one for the Disney Midway with Disney themed rides and games (including an arcade), and one for Disneytown Proper, based upon Pleasure Island and featuring stores, clubs, and more grown-up fare, including a Club Cyclia. We used all of our best Imagineering magic to make the place feel like an island of magic with spectacular views to the crowning structures at each spoke and any view of the outside world, be that buildings or traffic or power lines, blocked by something beautiful and all built at a scale that made it feel like a significantly larger space than it really was.

Disneytown was open to the public year-round and the entry fees for the other parts were kept low. In partnership with Marriott, we opened the art deco inspired “Horizons Hotel” across the street. The Midway included a stage for several rotating live and walkaround shows, a space for a classic Disney dark ride, and a space for a classic Disney track ride, all of which would rotate on an overlapping yearly basis. The Disneytowns became a place where discontinued rides at the main parks could gain a new life, and soon nostalgic fans were making an effort to visit the Disneytowns to once again experience (and share) the old familiars.

But the Midway, which included child care facilities and professional caregivers, was just the bait. The real source of revenue was the Disneytown Proper. It included the clubs, shops, and restaurants, both Disney and paying rental clients, that made it like an indoor/outdoor shopping mall, but with style and character and no cheesy Muzak. The cornerstone was a Disney Store. As time progressed and the mall thing fell out of favor, we opened it up to designer outlet stores and theme restaurant chains like the Marvel Cafe. Families could come to visit Sesame Place and the Midway in the daytime and then visit the Disneytown in the evening. Or parents could drop the kids off with the child care professionals at Midway and visit the Disneytown in peace while their kids had fun on the rides and meeting Mickey & fiends. Sesame Place, with its toddler target audience and family focus, remained at Jim’s insistence something for families to experience together.

The original Disney Studios in Burbank (Image source “mouseplanet.com”)

Finally, we were spending some money on ourselves. The old Walt Disney Studios buildings off Buena Vista were in dire need of expansion and renovation. The old depression era buildings badly needed a full overhaul and more studio space was needed, so we helped devise a schedule to rotate the staff through the various structures. By 1990 we’d have fresh new fully restored workspaces for all of the employees plus all new studios and workspaces for expanding productions, a new Disney Digital building specifically designed for computers, and an all-new R&D and effects center.

All of this spending spree was partly paid for following the cash-boon that came with the massive success of the 1988 movie season[7], in particular My Neighbor Totoro.

And yet for all the efforts in the late ‘80s, they were just the beginning. The roller coaster ride of the 1990s were just about to begin!

---

[1] Sklar describes this event in Dream It! Do It! It was a meeting with AT&T and obviously, Henson wasn’t there in our timeline.

[2] Another event from our timeline! Too crazy to butterfly.

[3] They’re avoiding some of the arrogant mistakes made in Euro Disney in our timeline, but will it be enough?

[4] Since you asked, @Ogrebear!

[5] Under Eisner, who knew that Universal had a similar idea in the works, this idea expanded into a half-day “Disney-MGM Studios” park.

[6] Rocket Tower is a glass-and-steel building tied to Tomorrowland and resembling a rocket at the launch tower. Arabian Nights (located where the Persian was planned) is tied to Adventureland and the World Showcase and themed with The Cobbler and the Thief (partly Disney funded and distributed). Ryokan Yorokobi (located where our timeline’s Dolphin and Swan are) is tied to the World Showcase and resembles a traditional Japanese Ryokan inn. The Convention Center is located in the cluster with the Contemporary and the Fair Seas and is exactly what it says on the tin. It will bring in organizational and corporate groups.

[7] With an earlier “renaissance” on top of the boom in park profitability, Disney is flush with cash. Also, Disney is sharing some of the costs of Valencia with the Spanish. In our timeline at this point budgets were tighter, particularly for domestic park expansions with all the money going to Paris, which Disney was taking on all by itself.

 

[Geekhis Khan]

Chapter 16: Staring into the Sunset
Excerpt from Jim Henson: Storyteller, an authorized biography by Jay O’Brian

Jim Henson stood on the hills above Laguna Beach and looked out over the vast Pacific. The sun slowly set in front of him. It had been nearly a decade since that fateful night when he and Bernie came up with the insane plan to gain control of Disney. And they’d essentially done it. He now was the creative head for not just Disney Studios, but for the parks, Imagineering, a television empire, and even the venerable MGM. And it had all gone by in a flash.

Jim reflected on how time seemed to go faster the more of it you experienced, as if the clock sped up with each tick. Those first ten years as a child in Mississippi had gone on forever. The next ten years in Maryland through his teens and up to the birth of the Muppets had likewise seemed eternal. But the wild, experimental days of the late ‘50s and early ‘60s with the rise of Sam & Friends, the commercials, Jimmy Dean, Timepiece, and the like, had gone by much faster. The highs and lows of the ‘70s faster still, and now ten years had gone by in a blink. In another 10 years it would be the dawn of the 21st Century, something out of science fiction with flying cars and day trips to Mars like in the Horizons Pavilion, a portrayal which was already looking old fashioned.

As he stared into the sunset, Jim did something that he’d never really done before: he looked backwards. All of his life his eyes had been on the horizon, the future. He was a “Tomorrowland guy”. He appreciated the fun and nostalgia of Frontierland or Main Street USA on a superficial level, but he had never been the type of person who longed for a mythical past. But now the halcyon days of England and The Muppet Show and the familiar, familial atmosphere of HA, hung on in him like a longing. Would it have been better to stay small? He could never know.

For a while he’d been able to participate directly in productions, but there simply wasn’t enough time to be actively involved with it all. He missed the hands-on work, but Frank and Ron were right, as a chief executive he needed to stay focused at the strategic level. Even using such martial terms quietly reminded him of the new world he was in. Being “strategic” meant looking at the Big Picture. It meant choosing from a set of scripts brought to you by Tom, Diana, Margaret, and Bernie or from a set of blueprints brought to you by John Hench, Marty, or Wing. It meant deciding where to place a Disneytown, not drawing what the rides look like. It meant deciding between Port Disney and an expanded Entertainment Pavilion, not designing the Great Movie Ride that went inside the latter.

Success was increasingly defined by the work of others rather than him. Now others were placing the eyes on the new Muppets for Dog City, a task that he’d once reserved for himself as the very soul of the characters. He held the power to greenlight the new Spiderman animated cartoon, but the production of a live action film still relied on whether or not the new Batman movie did well. He could negotiate a deal with his old friend Gerry Anderson to syndicate old Supermarionation shows for the Disney Channel and even greenlight a Space Police collaboration, but Brian and Frank Oz would be the ones working on it. He could help Steve Spielberg select from a set of designs for the dinosaurs in The Land Before Time animated TV series, which spun off from the popular animatronic movie. He could show an amazed Steve Jobs the Waldo C. Graphic all-digital puppet, brought to life on a screen by hand using a waldo as an input rig (Jobs declared it would “revolutionize animation”). He could supervise some of the practical effects for George Lucas’ Willow, but his only contribution to the breakout hit My Neighbor Totoro had been signing the contract with Hayao Miyazaki. Still, trade magazines called him a creative genius based on the success of these films.

Jim had cried when Bernie and David showed him the plans for Muppetational! Partly this was from the joy of seeing one of his old dreams made manifest, but part of it was the bittersweet realization that it would be performed by someone else, not him. He might be able to slip in for a cameo on occasion, but he’d never star in it. However, working on the production and the theater renovation did give him the chance to spend time with Heather and work with his wife again. He was reminded about how talented Jane was and what a good talent scout she was. He offered her a full-time job with Disney, but she refused, instead willingly taking a “contract” job working on Muppetational! She even let him stay in the guest room rather than live in a hotel.

Increasingly, though, the project that captured his imagination was Mort. Lord Lew Grade had mailed him a copy of the book, which was popular in England. It was the latest in a growing list of comedic fantasies by Terry Pratchett about a flat “Discworld” that rode through space on the back of a giant turtle[1]. Mort followed the eponymous young man who was the apprentice to Death, a.k.a. the Grim Reaper, a skeleton in a black hood, the anthropomorphic personification of the end of life. It was, at its heart, a love story. Lew “thought Jim would like it”.

He did. He read through it three times in a row. He marveled over the black-and-white world of Death where time was meaningless save for the billions of “life timer” hourglasses on their endless shelves, each of which marked the lives of the mortals of the Disc, whose sands slipped away second by second, their individual whispers of sound combining to form dull roar.

Concept Art by Claire Keane from 2010 (Image source “clairekeane.squarespace.com”)

He had to make this movie. Or, more precisely, he had to have others make this movie for him. Tim Burton, John Musker, and Ron Clements were excited about the project and produced some brilliant concept art. The film became his obsession.

And indeed, death was increasingly on his mind of late. Ever since the untimely death of his older brother in the 1960’s the shadow of death laid over everything he did. He was perpetually trying to pack everything in, writing and performing like he was running out of time, trying to squeeze value out of every second. And death was also getting closer to home. Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist Hillel Slovak died that summer of a heroin overdose. Anthony Kiedis fled in fear of being held responsible, missing the funeral, which Jim attended. When Anthony returned, still in shock, Jim helped him check into a rehab facility and paid for it all out of pocket.

The scourge of heroin and other drugs was everywhere in LA at the time, and the “War of Drugs” did not seem to be helping, in Jim’s opinion. He was increasingly worried about the young people he knew on the Sunset Strip. Thelonious Monster front man Bob Forrest worried him the most of all. He’d regretfully had to drop the band from the Hyperion Music label after a controversial interview with MTV where a drugged-out Forrest cursed God and Jesus, creating a public uproar that even Disney couldn’t salvage. He checked Forrest into rehab with Kiedis, but Forrest broke out and ran away. Forrest ended up in prison after being found passed out at a bus stop with an ounce of heroin in his pocket. Jim bailed him out and let him crash in the guest bed. “You’re my own personal Jesus, man,” Forrest told him in thanks, only to disappear again that morning. Bernie Brillstein, still reeling from the loss of his friend and client John Belushi, warned Jim not to get too attached.

But if Jim was becoming Forrest’s “Jesus”, then son John Henson was getting a reputation as “The Buddha of the Sunset Strip”. John had returned from Asia a changed man. His several months had taken him across India, Nepal, Tibet, Han China, and Mongolia, a whirlwind of spiritual journeys to temples, shrines, monasteries, and holy sites. The hyperactive, impulsive young man who’d left America had been replaced with a man that seemed 10 years older and 50 years wiser. He regaled friends and family alike with his tales of Hindu ceremonies amidst the ancient temples of India, Buddhist meditations in mountainside monasteries, Taoist divinations and philosophical discussions, and spiritualistic talks with Sufi mystics. He spoke of shakedowns by Indian gangs and Chinese soldiers. He’d briefly met the Dalai Lama among other gurus and holy men and women. He’d lived and worked at many a monastery or shrine, trading work for food and spiritual training, and soon discovered that he had a real passion and talent for woodworking[2].

Compared to all of that, the LA Basin was practically banal, but he still found adventure and purpose. John started going with his dad to concerts and comedy shows on the strip, but soon found a passion for charity. He teamed up with sister Cheryl, who was finishing up an Advanced Study Program with the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising, to try and improve lives for folks living in the LA Basin. He was the first person on the strip to help a homeless person or a scared addict in the midst of a drug-related emergency. He and Cheryl began supporting the local Habitat for Humanity and a local soup kitchen, both financially and through volunteer work. John started leading meditation, tai chi, and yoga classes at an abandoned garage that he refurbished himself. He soon lent space to a drum maker and some artists, creating a small, informal cooperative. He eventually hired a nurse because the addicts of the strip learned that if they were OD’ing or freaking out, they could swing by the space and John would take care of them. “He saved more lives than Cedars-Sinai [Hospital],” remembered Anthony Kiedis.

“We all knew ‘Buddha John’,” said Flea, “He was, like, magical. One time I had this killer knot in my left arm and he asked if he could, you know, look at it. I said ‘yes’ and he jams his knuckle into my arm and it hurt like fuck and I’m like ‘what the hell?’ but he stops and suddenly my arm is totally relaxed and the knot is gone.”

“No one ever fucked with John,” recalled Bob Forrest. “He’d just walk down the strip and the pimps and gang bangers would wave and call out his name. He was so fucking chill and got along with everyone, whatever their race or gang ties and shit. He could be carrying a bag full of cash for the homeless shelter and no one would jump him. This one time some new punk from out of state started hassling him. A couple of Latin Kings came up to the dude and ‘had a talk’ and the punk hopped on the next fucking bus back to Albuquerque or wherever.”

John tried to be there for his father as well. “I could tell that he was in a dark place,” remembered John, “He was carrying a lot of stress and felt like he had so many people depending on him and he lived in mortal fear of letting them down. He’d been taking Tai Chi already, so I helped him with that and some meditation, and it seemed to help. But in the end what he needed was to do something that was hands-on, like in the old days.”

He’d get a chance from the oddest of sources. After returning from rehab, Anthony Kiedis had a request for Jim. “While cleaning up in the center I had this moment of panic where I was sure I was a puppet,” he said. “My hands were plastic and someone was pulling the strings that wasn’t me. I freaked out, but it gave me the crazy idea for the Muppet video to sort of, you know, take ownership of it.”

“Anthony approached us about the Muppet video,” recalled Cheryl. “I thought it was an incredible idea, Muppet versions of Anthony and Flea and Peligro and Frusciante all jamming, wearing nothing but socks on their…you know!” She laughed. “Of course, we really couldn’t be ‘The Muppets’ since there was no way we’d get away with it, so we became Sunset Puppetry.”

Jim, Cheryl, and John recruited Richard Hunt and Dave Goelz and they set up shop in John’s co-op, now officially named and registered as the Sunset Arts and Health Center. “Dad seemed to come alive,” recalled Cheryl. “Making puppets by hand again, designing the rigs and stages, setting the eyes exactly right while the band member he was doing looked on. Peligro thought it was all kind of stupid at first, but even he finally got into it when he helped dad place the eyes. He said ‘Make me look more pissed’.”

“The video looked fucking insane,” Flea remembered, “But it was fucking brilliant. They jammed and lip synced to ‘Taste the Pain’. I think Hunt played me and Jim did Anthony. They eventually played the video on MTV, but only late at night because of the socks-on-cocks, even though they were fucking Muppets. Unbelievable.”

Jim, Cheryl, John, Richard, and Dave all went by pseudonyms in the credits and Jim was soon amused to receive a cease-and-desist letter from Disney’s lawyers. He made a call to Frank Wells and the legal action stopped. Sunset Puppetry would live on, doing the occasional adult show at a place like The Scream, any proceeds going to the local food bank.

And yet even as Jim basked in the joy of the fun, zero-stakes shows, death seemed to stalk him. Richard Hunt came to his home not long after filming the Chili Peppers video. He had a request. “Jim,” said Hunt, “I want Howard [Ashman] and Alan [Menken] to do the music for Mort. I know you like to change up your musicians with each movie, but it’s important that you give it to Howard.”

“Well,” said Jim, “Tim was pushing for Danny [Elfman] to do Mort, but we can consider calling them up for another…”

Hunt cut him off. “He’s dying, Jim. Howard’s dying. I’m dying too.”

---

[1] Technically the world rests on the backs of four elephants who, in turn, stand on the turtle. Much more logical that way.

[2] This is true in our timeline as well. See some of his amazing work here.

 

[Geekhis Khan]

Chapter 15; The Song of Susan
Excerpt from Renegade Suit, the autobiography of David Lazer (with Jay O’Brian)

Jim was devastated to learn about Richard Hunt’s and Howard Ashman’s illness, though at the time I only knew about Richard, who told me himself. Howard’s illness was a secret even to his musical partner Alan Menken at the time. AIDS was very poorly understood back then. Scientists had only recently discovered the HIV virus and the anti-retroviral drugs hadn’t yet seen wide distribution. To have AIDS was a slow but inevitable death sentence. And to make matters worse, it wasn’t getting the attention that it needed. The government was blasé about it all and many of the self-proclaimed moral authorities were blaming the victims, suggesting that it was “God’s justice” in action because the disease was primarily affecting homosexual men in the US.

Jim wasn’t having it. He made sure that Richard and Howard both got every medical advantage they could, which wasn’t much back then. He was also bound and determined to raise awareness. The disease had been something abstract for him (and me) prior to that moment. We were all scared and horrified at the devastation of the disease, but much in the same way we were horrified and scared about the famine in Ethiopia. It was horrible, but it was somewhere else.

Now AIDS wasn’t “somewhere else”. It was killing the men we loved.

Jim, Bernie, Diana, and I decided that we would do something about it. We would use the resources we had to make a difference. Not only was the Walt Disney Entertainment Company going to donate to AIDS research and treatment, but MGM was going to produce a new movie specifically about the AIDS crisis. And we were going to make sure that Middle America knew it was their problem too. The Song of Susan was thus born.

To our happy surprise Ron Miller, Frank Wells, and the board didn’t resist. Frank, in fact, let us know that money was no obstacle. Tom Wilhite, the president of MGM, was happy to support us. Because for all the homophobic victim blaming, the truth was that the disease did not discriminate. Disease, unlike man, never does. We heard more than one story about unambiguously innocent people like children getting AIDS due to blood transfusions, or in some cases simply being born to an infected mother. The disease was guaranteed to spread further. It would not stay in one population no matter how much some people assumed it would. We were going to make it clear to all of America that this wasn’t a “gay man’s problem”, it was everyone’s problem.

Our heroine would be Susan, a young, suburban middle-class girl of 17 whose bike is hit by a drunk driver and who contracts HIV through a blood transfusion. We cast Molly Ringwald to drive home the “girl next door” aspect. Though by all accounts a “good girl” who participates in her church and school, Susan suddenly becomes a pariah in her community as salacious and malicious rumors spread. Suddenly she’s forced to confront the very bigotry and judgement that less privileged people have to go through every day. She befriends Benny, played by Richard Hunt, an HIV-positive gay man, and through their experiences we learn the horrors of disease and prejudice.

We set the film in New York, with Susan a Long Island girl. To write and direct we found Ron Nyswaner, who turned Jim Henson’s film treatment into a deeply moving screenplay. We made it an MGM film to further add gravitas to the production. Diana and I would share the producer credit while Jim and Bernie would claim the executive producer billet. Howard, who was working near non-stop already on Mort and developing songs and a treatment on his own for an animated Aladdin[1], wrote a single, beautiful original song to go with the soundtrack, “The Song of Susan”, performed by Freddy Mercury, who wrote the rest of the beautiful and poignant sound track.

Freddy was an early add, having approached us to work on it, and working for scale at that. He’d lost many friends and loved ones to the disease already. He was honestly irate to hear about Howard. “It’s all bloody bullshit, you know?” Freddy told me years later. “For most of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s I’d slept around and did drugs and basically lived like a stupid rock star with a death wish. Meanwhile, old Howard was faithful and true to every man that he loved, which wasn’t many. And his strongest drug was dry sherry. Unfortunately, one of the men that he loved lived more like I used to. And yet Howard dies and I somehow dodge the bullet[2]. I guess the universe has a fucked sense of irony, you know?”

By this point Howard was losing his once-incredible stamina and we were flying animators and directors and producers out to Fishkill, NY, to work with him. In addition to Richard, Jim secretly had Howard, who was very sick at the time but doing an incredible job of hiding it, make a cameo. Most of us didn’t know about it until the film debuted. It was how most of us learned about Howard being sick.

Howard and Freddy won the Oscar for the song, along with a Grammy for both song and soundtrack. Richard won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for the film. We lost Howard just a year later and Richard a year or so after that.

The Song of Susan received near universal praise at the time of its release. It’s gotten some pushback in recent years, but we remain proud of it and of the awareness we brought to what was an issue that nobody wanted to talk about in 1989.

For me, it will always be my greatest and most important production, not for what it did for my reputation, but what it did for Richard and Howard.

Requiescat in pace, Richard and Howard, and thank you both for the gifts that you gave to us all

---

[1] Aladdin was Howard Ashman’s idea, not a project envisioned in-house. He’d once played the character in Children’s Theater and loved the story and character. In our timeline Katzenberg didn’t like what they’d done with it and pushed it off, recruiting a reluctant Ashman to instead work on Beauty and the Beast, a film originally envisioned by Disney for Richard Williams’ team after Roger Rabbit. With Roger Rabbit animated in house in this world and Williams largely retired now that The Thief and the Cobbler has seen the light of day (much of his former staff went to Bluth), Beauty and the Beast as we know it has been butterflied.

[2] All of these were hard decisions to make, to say the least. Needless to say, determining when and how someone contracts a horrible disease, especially one that can show no symptoms for years, is a serious challenge. Freddy Mercury reportedly had a negative HIV test result in 1982 and hypothetically could have taken steps to protect himself. In this timeline it was a false positive that scared him into playing things more carefully, a small spot of hope and happiness in a sad part of the timeline. By contrast, Howard Ashman reportedly lived a monogamous life the whole time. Alas, his first long-term lover did not, and was dying of AIDS by 1982, so Howard was probably HIV positive already at this point. Hunt’s point of infection I can’t figure out, though according to Jim Henson: A Biography he was living with someone HIV positive by 1986, but was likely positive himself already at that point. Likely he'd been positive since the early 1980s. And this timeline has taken him to some of the early outbreak sites even before HIV had a name. There’s so much indiscriminate randomness to it all, that the end, I had to follow where the narrative took me, which was to accept the randomness and indiscriminate nature of it all, and simply attempt to honor those we lost and celebrate those we didn't in both timelines.

 

[Geekhis Khan]

Sweet 16 and Sweating Circuits
Excerpt from Tech Grrls: The Rise of the Female Technologists 1980-2015 by Dr. Marina Sparks, PE

Picture a teenage girl from the 1980s in your head and what do you see: pink, loose-fitting shirt? Hoop earrings? Leggings? Bubblegum? Posters of boy bands on her wall?

Yea, not these girls.

Tech Grrls in the ‘80s were more than happy to look past the latest copy of Tiger Beat and grab Popular Mechanics instead. A quality set of needle nose pliers was the preferred accessory to any outfit. And they were just as likely to be under the hood of a convertible as behind the wheel.

Valley girl stereotypes aside, life for a teenage girl in the 1980s was not simple or easy, even in the Valley. Torn between a postfeminist world that valued a form of masculine independence marked by the pant suit on one end and a glam, preppy world that pushed soft and effeminate things on the other, the emerging Gen-X woman was struggling to find a balance between these competing poles. Eventually a third wave feminist movement in the 1990s would become the synthesis of this feminist thesis and postfeminist antithesis, but for an intelligent young woman in the 1980s getting taken seriously without going to one extreme or the other became a challenge.

And neither of these directions typically featured turning a wrench or coding in Fortran.

For the Tech Grrl at the time, opportunity and support structures became the critical gateways for finding success in science and engineering. And Nerd Culture at the time wasn’t exactly welcoming, as witnessed by the casual misogyny and rape culture on display in Revenge of the Nerds. Two illustrative examples of the Tech Grrls who broke through the Silicon Ceiling, and whose lives crossed paths more than once in the 1980s, are Heather Henson and Jeri Ellsworth. One was a child of privilege whose father became an entertainment icon and one was a blue collar, small town girl who never fit in.

Heather grew up a millionaire, although you’d never know it. “I spent my childhood in modest houses in suburbia,” she said in our interview. “It never really dawned on me that we were rich. Sure, Dad would fly us out to Italy or Japan over Summer Break and we always had the latest home gadgets, but I never really felt like a rich person. We never lived in a mansion in Beverly Hills, even when we lived in LA when dad went to work for Disney.”

And Heather’s journey into technology was almost accidental. “My brother John and I got free rein to walk around Disneyland when we lived in LA [in the early 1980s] and I got to see all the behind-the-scenes stuff [there]. I grew up seeing how the animatronics worked, helping out my brother Brian in rigging up a waldo or helping Dad frame a shot or helping Caroly [Wilcox] perform Muppet Surgery between takes. It was really the Big Picture of it all that resonated with me, not specifically the production, but the crossover, you know; like how the lighting and sound and colors and movement played together to make the full experience. They call it ‘immersive multimedia’ today, but it didn’t have a name that I’m aware of at the time.”

Heather returned to Connecticut with her mother following her parent’s separation, and thus got cut off from the experiences. “I was like an addict cut off from my source,” she said. “So, when mom and dad sent me to the George School [in Pennsylvania], I joined the AV Club and poked around at the Computer Lab. But it was like riding the birthday party pony after being a cowgirl on the open range. Dad let me intern at Disney over Summer Break where I helped Brian in animatronic effects for The Land Before Time, and I got sidetracked into helping Dad and Frank [Oz] integrate the sound in post. That in turn got me selected to work with Nintendo when we made the videogame. I knew just enough about coding to squeak by and helped code in the Sound effects for the Land Before Time game. If you watch the game’s credits I’m there as ‘H.H.’,” she added with a laugh.

“Yea, Land Before Time, I played that,” said Jeri Ellworth. “I didn’t know that ‘H.H.’ was ‘Heather Henson’ just like I didn’t know that she was the little girl talking to Bit & Byte in the [Disney’s] World of Magic special. I watched a worn-out VHS tape I made of that episode about a thousand times as a kid and I loved every second. When Dad bought my brother a Commodore 64, I ended up being the one who used it.”

Jeri Ellsworth is the type of engineering prodigy that, had she been a boy born in suburbia, she would have had the world handed to her on a silver plate. She taught herself how to use the Commodore 64 by reading the manuals and helped out her dad in the garage. The small town of Yamhill, Oregon, was not exactly a high-tech mecca, though. As it was, her talents with a computer and the internal combustion engine were not ones appreciated by her peers, and she was badly picked on in school. “I was getting mercilessly harassed by this boy in the library,” she said. “He started flicking at my ears, and I just sort of snapped and hit him square in the face with my science book. His nose started bleeding all over the floor. His parents wanted me expelled and the principal gave me an ultimatum to ‘shape up or ship out’, so I joined the science fair as a sort of academic Hail Mary.”

Jeri did an exhibit on, naturally enough, computers, but couldn’t help but to throw in an automotive angle. “I put up magazine pictures of Bit & Byte and polaroids I made of the motherboard inside my C64. I had the computer with me for the presentation and I ran a little graphics loop of an engine piston going through the four-stroke process. The judges were kind of mixed because some of them didn’t think computers were science, but I explained the binary math of it and how binary was translated as hexadecimal assembly code and how a high-level language like BASIC got assembled into [the hexadecimal] and they gave me a ribbon and a trip to Portland for the State competition.”

While at the State competition she caught the eye of a recruiter for Benson Polytechnic High School in Portland. “He came up to dad and me and told us about the new computer program that they had. My grades in Yamhill sucked because I really didn’t care, but I was offered a full ride scholarship anyway. Nintendo was at the time sponsoring ‘promising young minds’ or some crap, so Dad took a job in the Portland City motor pool so that we could afford an apartment. Leaving Yamhill was hard for Dad and my brother, country boys through and through who’d laid down roots, but it was heaven for me. I had little to look forward to in Yamhill but working at Dad’s garage, or maybe opening up a computer store or something[1]. Now they were telling me I’d be writing games for Nintendo or developing a GUI for GEOsoft.”

But Benson had its challenges too. Women had only begun to enter the school in the ‘70s and for Jeri, particularly in the male dominated computer science curriculum, she was a standout. “Part of it was cool, like all the boys were fawning over me. But part of it sucked too. There was this subtle sexism. ‘Oh, how cute, she codes!’ When the boys weren’t trying awkwardly to get down my pants, they were trying to teach me basic shit like it would impress me that they knew how to do a For-While loop. I wasn’t having it. I won the school BASIC coding competition, which totally pissed them off. That’s when the ‘quota’ talk began. Denial much? So, instead I hung out with the garage kids and greasers. We built and raced our own go cart and for a while I was considering dropping out to pursue Formula One. But my Dad felt like we owed Nintendo since they were footing the bill, so he convinced me to do the limited internship up in Redmond.”

If the “boys” in Benson were obnoxious and dismissive, the men at Redmond were actually impressed with her. “Instead of ‘oh, she can code!’ it was ‘holy shit, she actually can code!’ It was a totally different experience. I was everyone’s ‘little sister’ and they were very protective of me. Some of the old men sneered…and by ‘old men’ I mean like 30,” she laughed, “But when I successfully managed the motion tracking algorithm for the Game Boy port of Tetris, even the hardest asses considered me one of the team.”

Heather Henson and Jeri Ellsworth first crossed paths in the summer of 1990. Jeri was working as a summer intern and Heather had just finished up her first year at the California Institute of Arts, where she’d faced the subtle sexism of the animation industry. “They had a subtle way of pushing the girls towards ‘girly’ things like color pallets and the boys towards direction and animation,” Heather noted. “My friends Genndy [Tartakovsky] and Craig [McCracken] would do a project and the professor would complement them on their storyboards and art direction but he’d compliment me and Leslie [Iwerks] on our color choices. Even Craig and Genndy were calling B.S.”

“When I met Heather, I had no idea who she was,” said Jeri. “I had no idea that she’d done the sound on Land Before Time and no idea she was the girl learning binary with Bit & Byte. She was ‘Heather from Disney’ and she was just this super-sweet curly-haired twenty-year-old. She worked with me to develop the color-to-sound timing coordination for the big crystal-stealing-lifeforce cut-screen on our version of Curse of the Dark Crystal for NES Disk and Super NES. I heard that she knew Jack Tramiel, which was cool. I even heard that her last name was ‘Henson’ at some point, but the pieces didn’t come together until much later.”

“I remembered Jeri very well,” said Heather. “I took her under my wing because ‘sisters got to stick together’, right? She was 16, which was the same age I was when I worked on Land Before Time. And even though our personalities were polar opposites – she was really sarcastic and cynical and kind of reminded me of Frank [Oz], honestly – I guess I saw a kindred spirit.”

Neither at the time realized that fate had big things in store for them.

---

[1] This is what she did in our timeline after dropping out of High School. Computers Made Easy built up a small local chain before she decided to try college, only to drop out as “not her thing”. Eventually her technical genius was revealed to the world in 2002 thanks to developing the C64-DTV single board computer that let you play numerous Commodore 64 games on a single plug-into-the-TV joystick.

 

[Geekhis Khan]

An Increasingly Crowded Field
Excerpt from Computer Wars! by Calvin Threadmaker

After losing significant market share due to the disastrous reception of the PC Jr., IBM found itself suddenly a minor player within its own PC architecture. After a massive purge of leadership following this disastrous rollout, IBM Vice President of Manufacturing Don Estridge was named the new company President[1]. Estridge took over at a volatile time in the personal computer business. IBM was facing serious and growing competition by Virgin/Atari, Apple, Commodore, Tandy, and Toshiba, the latter two in particular competing directly within the PC market. Estridge proclaimed that IBM under his watch would continue to set the PC Standard. His immediate answer to this lost share was the IBM PS/2, released in 1987. Based on an Intel 80286 processor, upgradable to an 80486, the PS/2 had the raw power that once again made IBM the PC King [2].

IMB PS/2 (Image Source “computinghistory.org.uk”)

Spoiler: IBM PS/2

NAME	PS/2
MANUFACTURER	IBM
TYPE	Business or Home Computer
ORIGIN	Japan/U.S.A.
YEAR	1987-1991 (Replaced by Aptiva and PS/3)
CPU	Intel 80286 (or second-source variants from AMD, IBM, Rockwell Semiconductor, or NEC), Intel 80386 (or second-source variants from IBM, AMD, or Cyrix), Intel 80486 (or second-source variants from IBM, AMD, or Cyrix, 1989 refresh), Intel 80486DX (Built-in FPU), Optional 80x87 FPU
CLOCK SPEED	12 Mhz (8520) to 45 MHz (8540/45 models featuring 80486 only)
BUILT IN LANGUAGE	Microsoft Q-Basic, upgradable to Microsoft Visual Basic (1990)
RAM	640K (Standard), expandable up to 3 3/8 MB Extended, 4 MB total (286), 32 MB (386 and 486), or 2 GB (via expansion cards), IBM pioneered the 72 pin SIMM module for RAM
VIDEO RAM	384K (1987), 2 MB total (XGA, 1989)
GPU	VGA+x2 Intel 83720 (Based on the NEC uPD72120), Maximum Resolution of 720×400 (70 Hz), 640x512 (60 Hz), or 800x500 (49.96 Hz), capable of displaying up to 2,048 colors onscreen (256x240 and 320x196 resolutions only, 256 colors at maximum resolutions) out of a master palette of 262,144. Optional XGA Graphics Card (1989) extended colors onscreen to 65,536 colors onscreen at 640x480, and added support for up to 1280x800 (256 Colors). There were also numerous third-party graphics card solutions, including the ATI Video Wonder and Microsoft MSGX series
VIDEO CPU	IBM ROMP (XGA in 1989)
SOUND	Beeper, (An amazing plethora of optional sound cards, most famously the Roland Ad-Lib and Sound Canvas families, and the Creative Labs SoundBlaster series)
I/O	EGA (7 pin) monitor out, VGA (15 pin) monitor out, PS/2 8 pin Keyboard and Mouse, x2 RS-232 Serial port, x2 to x4 720K-1440K 3.5" or 640K-1280K 5.25" floppy drives (mix and match), and several hard drive options. And anywhere from 4 to 12 MCA expansion ports.
FORM FACTOR	Pizza Box (8520), Horizontal Upright (8525, 8530, 8540), Full Tower (8535, 8545)
OS	OS/2, Optional IBM AIX and Microsoft XENIX (UNIX distributions based on AT&T System V)
MSRP	$1,350 (8520) to $4,200 (8535), $5,000+ (8545, 1989)

Though rather pricey compared to competitors, the IBM PS/2’s brute force and versatility of configuration options carved out a strong market share, particularly in business and industry. IBM was back in the game. Under Estridge’s leadership, IBM reclaimed the PC throne, becoming the example to beat, the “Once and Future King” of the PC architecture, according to PC Magazine. But success, as it tends to, breeds competition.

Increasingly, this competition was from the “two Ts” of Toshiba and Tandy. Toshiba had emerged with the TOPS line, bolstered by Hi Toro chipsets. The TOPS RX series, known as the “T-Rex”, naturally, appeared in 1988 and made a splash on both sides of the Pacific. At half the price on average than a roughly-equivalent PS/2, the T-Rex made inroads in the home PC and small business markets, offering stiff competition to Tandy in particular.

Spoiler: Toshiba TOPS RX series (“T-Rex”)

NAME	Toshiba TOPS RX
MANUFACTURER	Fujitsu/Tandy
TYPE	Personal Computer
ORIGIN	Japan/U.S.A.
YEAR	1988-1992
CPU	Toshiba TMP 68010-68030 (Licensed CMOS second-source variants of the Motorola 68000 series)
CLOCK SPEED	6.38 MHz (TOPS RX EXL in Legacy Mode), 10.74 MHz (EXL in maximum native mode clock speed), 16.06 MHz (RX Pro, 68020), 25 MHz (RX SuperPro, 68030)
KEYBOARD	Full-stroke 102 keys with numeric keypad, function and arrow keys
BUILT IN LANGUAGE	Tandy Color/Disc Basic 3.5 (Based on Fujitsu and Microsoft F-Basic)
RAM	768K (EXL) to 2 MB "Fast RAM" (SuperPro)
AUDIO/VIDEO RAM	768K-2MB “Fast RAM” (Stacked Pseudo-SRAM)
GPU	AGNES II (Video MMU, Blitter, and Sprite Generator)+ DENISE II (Video Adaptor and Color Generator)
VIDEO CPU	Second Hitachi H8-500 @7.14 Mhz
RESOLUTION	1024x1024 or 1280x800* (128 Colors), 512x512 or 640x400 (2048 Colors) Capable of displaying 16 instantiations of 16 unique sprites, for a total of 256 onscreen at once. 16 times the blitter bandwidth, Up to four separate scrolling fields, each with its own blitter functionality**
SOUND	PAULA (Also controls the keyboard, joystick/mouse jacks, and floppy drives) + SEGA PCM (16 Channels 10-12 Bit PCM) and Yamaha YM2610A+YM3016 DAC: Six concurrent FM channels (voices), four operators per channel Three SSG channels: compatible with YM2149 (Atari ST) One programmable noise channel ADPCM-A: Six ADPCM channels, fixed pitch, 18.5 kHz sampling rate at 12-bit from 4-bit data ADPCM-B: One ADPCM channel, variable pitch, 18.5–55.5 kHz sampling rate
OTHER CHIPS	ZORRO II (Expansion I/O)
STORAGE	x2 3 1/3" Floppy Disc Drives, Several Toshiba and Hitachi Hard Drive Options.
I/O	2 to 5 x Zorro II slots, Video slot, Serial/RS232, Parallel/Centronics, RGB & composite video outputs, x2 Joystick/Mouse, 2 x Stereo audio, Keyboard@, External floppy, x2 66 Pin Generic SCSI ports
FORM FACTOR	Keyboard Console (EXL), Horizontal Upright (Pro and SuperPro)
OS	WorKBench 1.3+ Kickstart 1.3, Kanji/Kana/Hangul fonts package in Far Eastern Markets
MSRP	$675-$2,450 or 105 times that in Yen, or 1050 times that in South Korean Won (1989)
NOTES	* Pro and Super Pro only, Master Palette is still 4096 colors ** when all four fields are in use, blitter speed per field is a "mere" 4X the AX/OCS chipset.

Meanwhile, Tandy’s sins were coming back to haunt them. Late in 1986, the management board of Fujitsu discovered that someone had plagiarized their computer architecture! This was discovered from reading the latest issue of Computer World. The culprit was, of course, Radio Shack, the electronics store chain, or, rather, its corporate owner Tandy, whose third edition of the TRS-80 Color Computer bore far too many similarities to the Fujitsu FM-77 to be coincidental. Ironically, it appeared that Tandy had even improved on the design, at least somewhat. The joystick ports were read from the main CPU rather than the Video processor, for example. Nonetheless, anyone who wrote software in BASIC, stuck to Roman alphabet text, and bound sound via .vgm and .mml files, was effectively writing for both files.

But what could be done? Legally speaking, very little. The Color Computer 3 lacked any and all ports and interfaces under Fujitsu patent, except where they purchased Fujitsu chips at full price from reputable distributors[3]. Meanwhile, Tandy appeared to have idiomatically crossed all its “Ts,” “Xs,” and “Fs” and dotted all its “Is” and “Js” with Microsoft and Microware, meaning that lawsuits in American courts over software copyrights would fail the laugh test once things entered the Discovery phase.

But hope was not lost entirely. Fujitsu fired off a Cease-and-Desist letter to Tandy's legal department, threatening bad legal consequences on very vague terms if the Color Computer 3 saw availability in the Western Pacific Rim without Fujitsu's approval, even if they went through “licensees and/or cutouts.”

Perhaps having anticipated this development, the Fujitsu board of directors and Japanese home office legal department soon received a message via courier, signed by the chairman of the Tandy board of directors. It implored its receivers not to enter into any rash legal process, and explained that they were working on the next generation of the series with Hitachi. In fact, rather than cross swords, perhaps a trans-Pacific alliance was called for? Thus, what began as a theft soon became a partnership, and in 1988 the first fruit of the Fujitsu-Tandy-Hitachi partnership, the FM-77 AVR/CoCo 4, was born.

Fujitsu FM-77/TRS-80 CoCo 4 (Image source “museum.ipsj.or.jp”)

Spoiler: Fujitsu FM-77 AVR/Radio Shack/Tandy TRS-80 Color Computer 4

NAME	Fujitsu FM-77 AVR/Radio Shack/Tandy TRS-80 Color Computer 4
MANUFACTURER	Fujitsu/Tandy
TYPE	Personal Computer
ORIGIN	Japan/U.S.A.
YEAR	1988-1992
CPU	Hitachi H8-500, 16/24-bit extension of the 6308, featuring 24-bit sized registers and 16-bit instruction length.
REAL TIME CLOCK	Ricoh RP5C15
KEYBOARD	92 Key Keyboard with Number Pad, Arrow Keys, and 10 Function Keys
SPEED	8.184 Mhz
BUILT IN LANGUAGE	Tandy Color/Disc Basic 3.5 (Based on Fujitsu and Microsoft F-Basic)
RAM	256 K (expandable to 1MB through expansion modules, or up to 8MB through third-party expansions)
VIDEO RAM	384K, Expandable to 1 MB
GPU	GIME II (Fabbed By Microchip Technologies, Based on the Motorola 6847) All graphics modes of the CoCo 3, plus 320x200 (262,144 Colors Onscreen), 440X200 (65,536 Colors), 640x200 (4096 Colors), 640zx400 (256 Colors), 896x560 (64 Colors)
VIDEO CPU	Second Hitachi H8-500 @7.14 Mhz
SOUND	Yamaha YM2610 (FM-77) or Tandy CR 8496 (Clone of the Texas Instruments SN76496) Three Channels Geometry Synthesis, One Channel White Noise) + Yamaha Y8950 and custom 8-bit DAC, (CoCo4)
STORAGE MEMORY	x2 Double Sided, Double Density3 1/" floppy drives. 640K capacity.
I/O	Tape, A/V Multi-Out, 15 pin VGA out, 2 joystick ports, x3 RS232, Cartridge Slot, numerous other I/O on FM-77
FORM FACTOR	Pizza Box with Separate Keyboard (FM-77), Keyboard Console (Resembles a Tandy 1000 HX but with the CoCo3 keyboard layout)
OS	Microware OS-9, level 3.x
MSRP	$449.95 (CoCo 4), ¥89,750 (FM-77)
NOTES	Tandy also marketed the "Tandy Video 3" video card for ISA and MCA form factors as a compatibility upgrade for its own 1000 MSDOS machines, and other PC Clones as well. *Used in subsequent iterations of Creative Soundblaster cards until the debut of Sound Blaster Live!

The release of the Hitachi H8 powered Fujitsu FM-77 AVX40/Tandy Color Computer 4 in April 1988, or rather the end or their production runs in early 1992, would mark the end of an era. That year would also see the end of production for the Apple IIc+ and IIe+, Commodore 640, Sinclair ZX Spectrum, and Orange Logic Sanguinello. Also, Atari, Acorn, and Sharp would cease software, warranty and legacy support for the 14X0, BBC Master, and X1 series of 8-bit home computers. That year marked the end of (relatively) simple machines with built-in high-level languages, meant for enjoyment by the programmer-hobbyist, with only MICKEY machines in schools, and some winning bidders at surplus auctions, left to carry the torch until MICKEY too ceased production in 1995.

Yet, even as Tandy and Fujitsu were releasing one of the last of the old, they were developing something new, a machine seemingly out of left field, that took the world by storm, revitalized a stagnant niche, and inspiring a generation of coders, and a generation of copycats, too. Fujitsu and Tandy continued their partnership with the FM-Towns/Tandy 5000/10,000, a series with numerous sound and video options, making it popular with home gamers. But the big advantage of the FM-Towns/Tandy 5000/10,000 was its inherent flexibility of its modular design, which allowed for easy upgrades to processors, memory, video, and audio. As such, the Towns/5000/10,000 had real staying power, managing to live on for nearly a decade, and unheard-of lifespan for a computer line.

Fujitsu FM-Towns/Tandy 5000/10,000 (Image source “old-computers.com”)

Spoiler: Fujitsu FM-Towns/Tandy 5000/10,000 Series

NAME	Fujitsu FM-Towns/Tandy 5000/10,000
MANUFACTURER	Fujitsu/Tandy
TYPE	Personal Computer
ORIGIN	Japan/U.S.A.
YEAR	1989-1997
CPU	1989: Intel 80386DX (32-bit) @ 16 MHz 1993: Intel i486DX @ 33-66 MHz / Intel i486SX @ 25 MHz 1994: Intel i486DX @ 33-66 MHz / Intel i486SX @ 33 MHz 1995: Intel Pentium @ 90-120 MHz 1996: Intel Pentium Pro@ 133-200 MHz
REAL TIME CLOCK	Ricoh RP5C15
SYSTEM CONTROLLER	BUDDHA (1987), MESSIAH (1988), SCOTCH (1989), DOSA (1991)
SPEED	25Mhz (Equivalent to a 100Mhz Intel 80386 or 80486, or Motorola 68020, or 50 Mhz Motorola 68030)
RAM	Default: 1-2 MB (1989), 4 MB (1993), 6 MB (1994), 8-16 MB (1995) Upgradable: 10 MB (1989), 64 MB (1993), 128 MB (1995)
VIDEO RAM	656 KB Main VRAM: 512 KB Sprite RAM: 128 KB (1024 sprites)
TEXT RAM	16 KB
GPU	Sprite controller: CYNTHIA (1987), CYNTHIA II (1988), BETHANY (1993); CRT controller: VINAS 1 + 2 (1987), VICON (1988); Video controller: VSOP (1987), VIPS (1988); Video data selector: RESERVE (1987), CATHY (1988); Consolidated Video Controller: POLICE (1993)
RESOLUTION	256x256, 320x240, 352x232, 360x240, 640x400, 640x480, 1024x768, 1024x1024, 1120x750
COLOR PALLETE	12-bit (4096 colours) @ 640x480 / 640x400 (2 planes) 15-bit (32,768 colours) @ 320x240 (2 planes) 24-bit (16.78 million colours) @ 640x480 (1 plane) Simultaneous colours: 1989: 4-bit (16 colours) @ 1024x1024 / 1120x750 (1 plane) 4-bit (16 colours) @ 640x480 / 640x400 (2 planes) 8-bit (256 colours) @ 640x480 (1 plane) 15-bit (32,768 colours) @ 320x240 (1 plane) 1994: 15-bit (32,768 colours) to 24-bit (16.78 million colours) Sprites: Up to 1024 sprites @ 16x16 pixels each
SOUND	CD audio: 16-bit sampling @ 44.1 KHz, Redbook audio FM synthesis audio: Yamaha YM2608 sound chip+YM3016 DAC, 6-channel stereo (FM Towns) Yamaha YM3812+YM3014 DAC (Tandy), Upgraded to YMF262 (1992) and YMF278 (1995)* PCM audio: 1989: Ricoh RF5c68 sound chip, 8-channel stereo, 8-bit sampling @ 19.2 Hz 1994: 16-bit sampling @ 48 KHz, stereo Optional sound card: Creative Sound Blaster AWE32 (1994)
STORAGE MEMORY	CD-ROM (540 MB), 2x 3.5" floppy disk (1.2 MB) drives, hard disk drive Optional storage: 5.25" floppy disk drive, hard disk drive CD-ROM drive speed: 1x (1989), 2x (1993), 4x (1995)
HARD DISK DRIVE	Default: 20-40 MB (1989), 170-340 MB (1993), 850 MB (1995) Upgradable: 45 MB (1989), 3.2 GB (1997)
I/O	Keyboard, mouse, gamepad, joystick
OTHER OPTIONS	Video card, microphone, modem, SCSI card, VGA card, dual-monitor support
OS	Default: Towns OS (1989), Towns OS 2.1 (1995), Digital Research DRDOS+Tandy Desk Mate GUI Supported: MSDOS 4.X (1990), Windows 3.1 (1991), Windows NT (1993) Windows 95 (1995)
NOTES	Tandy also marketed the "Tandy Video 3" video card for ISA and MCA form factors as a compatibility upgrade for its own 1000 MSDOS machines, and other PC Clones as well. *Used in subsequent iterations of Creative Soundblaster cards until the debut of Sound Blaster Live!

And not only were corporations increasingly flooding the PC market with both home and office PC clones, but small “Hack Shops” began popping up around the world in garages and flea markets, the nerdy equivalent of motorcycle chop shops, where unholy blends of different manufacturers’ chipsets and boards and hard drives were used with various cracks and clones of operating systems. “Hacker”, a word that began at MIT to refer to pranksters and not to be confused with the malicious or criminal “cracker”, soon became a subculture in its own right with its own style, language, and conventions, at once nerdy, shady, egalitarian, and elitist. “Hacker” could now refer to hobbyists, hack shop gurus, pranksters, criminals, or “chip chucker” hacker wannabes. This began to take on artistic as well as technical pathways, with “pimped out” and individualized towers and peripherals becoming as much a part of the challenge as seeing how insane of an overclock you could pull off without “letting the magic smoke out”. For example, one (in)famous Hacker, “Gram Crakr”, souped up an old TRS-80 CoCo 4, gave it a black-and-white color scheme, and called it the “Trash Panda”[4].

Commodore, PC, and Virgin/Atari systems were the frequent subjects of hacks, with even the venerable Commodore 64 still living on in increasingly “Frankensteined” kits and hacks. Commodore’s X816/X832 series, another popular computer with Hackers, would hit the market in 1987 in partnership with Sharp.

Spoiler: Sharp X650X0/Commodore X816/X832

NAME	Sharp X650X0/Commodore X816/X832
MANUFACTURER	Sharp/Commodore
TYPE	Business/Home Computer
ORIGIN	Japan/U.S.A.
YEAR	1987-1994
CPU	1987: Ricoh 5A26 or WDC 65832 @ 10.74-14.28 MHz (Sharp) MOS Technology 12510-12520 (pin compatible, but several minor timing changes and upgrades) 1991: 16-bit CPU Dropped, 32-bit CPU upclocked to 25 MHz 1993: CPU respun to .8u, Upclocked to 45 MHz
FPUa	1990: Banchu Bronta 6 / Banchu Cammago 4007 (based on AMD/Intel) 1991: SharpCZ-6BP1 / CZ-6BP1A (based on 32-bit Motorola MC 68881) @ 16-25 MHz (160-240 kiloFLOPS) 1992: Motorola MC 68882 (32-bit) @ 25-50 MHz (254-528 kFLOPS)
REAL TIME CLOCK	Ricoh RP5C15
SYSTEM CONTROLLER	BUDDHA (1987), MESSIAH (1988), SCOTCH (1989), DOSA (1991)
SPEED	25Mhz (Equivalent to a 100Mhz Intel 80386 or 80486, or Motorola 68020, or 50 Mhz Motorola 68030)
RAM	1.5 MB, Expandable to 8 MB, or up to 2 GB via expansion cards
VIDEO RAM	1987: 1072 KB Graphics (bitmapped) memory: 512 KB Text (bitmapped) memory: 512 KB (omitted on Commodore) Sprite memory: 32 KB Static RAM (SRAM) memory: 16 KB 1994: 3120 KB
STATIC RAM	16 KB (1987), 128 KB (1992)
ROM	1 MB (256 KB BIOS, 768 KB character generator, 64KB on Commodore)
GPU	Sprite controller: CYNTHIA (1987), CYNTHIA II (1988), BETHANY (1993); CRT controller: VINAS 1 + 2 (1987), VICON (1988); Video controller: VSOP (1987), VIPS (1988); Video data selector: RESERVE (1987), CATHY (1988); Consolidated Video Controller: POLICE (1993)
RESOLUTION	All Commodore Vic-20, 64, and 256/640 resolutions, plus: 1987: 256x240, 256x256, 320x200, 512x240, 512x256, 512x512, 640x400, 768x512, 960x600, 1024x1024, 1280x800 1994: 256x240, 256x256, 320x200, 512x240, 512x256, 512x512, 640x400, 768x512, 960x600, 1024x1024, 1280x800, 1280x1024, 2048x1280 (30 Hz)
COLOR PALLETE	1987: 16-bit (65,536 colors) 1993: 24-bit (16.78 million colors)
COLORS ON SCREEN	1987: 4-bit (16 colors @ 1024x1024) to 8-bit (256 colors @ 512x512) 1988: 4-bit (16 colors @ 1024x1024); 9-bit (512 colors @ 512x512, 2 planes); 16-bit (65,536 colors @ 512x512, 1 plane) 1994: 8-bit (256 colors @ 1280x1024) to 24-bit (16.78 million colors @ 1024x768) Sprites: 256 hardware sprites on screen @ 64x64 pixels each (1987); 1024 sprites @ 256x256 Pixels (1988); 4096 sprites @ 256x256 Pixels (1993) Planes: 4 (@1024x1024) to 16 (@ 512x512)
POSSIBLE AV OUTPUTS	VGA (Monitor Output) Component (RGB)
GRAPHICS HARDWARE	Hardware scrolling, priority control, super-impose
DISPLAY MONITOR	15" to 21" CRT monitor
SOUND CPU	SHERRI, Based on the Zilog Z280 (Sharp), MOS Technology 8510 (Commodore) FM (Frequency Modulation) synthesis sound ship: Yamaha YM2151 @ 3.5 MHz Features: Stereo, 8 channels, 4 operators, 8 double-octave chords, noise generator DAC (Digital-to-Analog Converter) sound chip: Yamaha YM3012 PCM (Pulse-Code Modulation) sound chip: Oki MSM6258V @ 15.6 KHz (Sharp Only) Features: 4-bit mono ADPCM (Adaptive Differential PCM), 1 voice Sampling rate: 22 KHz PSG/Geometry Synthesis+PCM: SID III (Commodore Only) 8 Channels Geometry Synthesis. Each Channel can also do 8 bits PCM Synthesis, or two adjacent channels can be consolidated to do 16 bit PCM Samples. 22 KHz Maximum Sample Rate MML (Music Macro Language) format: MDX
SOUND MEMORY	64 KB
PCM SOUND EXPANSION	PCM-8 Mercury Unit (8 channel PCM), Introduced 1990, becomes part of stock sound system 1993 MIDI modules: Roland MT-32, Roland Sound Canvas (SC-55, SC-155, SC-88VL, SC-88 Pro), Yamaha MU series MIDI cards: Sharp CZ-6BM1, System Sacom SX-68M / SX-68M-2, Creative Labs
MEMORY CONTROLLER CHIPS	Memory controller: ET (1987), OHM (1988), OHM2 (1989), McCOY (1989) DMA (Direct Memory Access) controller: Hitachi HD63450 Main RAM (Random Access Memory) memory: Default: 1 MB (1987), 2 MB (1989), 4 MB (1992), 8 MB (1994) Upgradable: 12-16 MB
STORAGE MEMORY	Floppy disk (1.2 MB), hard disk drive
HARD DISK DRIVE	10 MB (1987), 20 MB (1988), 40 MB (1989), 81 MB (1990), 324-500 MB (1994), 500 MB (1995), 1-2 GB (1997)
FLOPPY DISK DRIVE CONTROLLER	NEC 72065
HARD DISK DRIVE CONTROLLER	Fujitsu MB89352A SCSI HDD Controller
I/O CONTROLLER CHIP	SICILIAN (1987), IOSC (1988), IOSC-2 (1989), PEDEC (1990)
SERIAL PORT CONTROLLER	Zilog Z85C30 dual-channel serial controller
PRINTER PORT CONTROLLER	NEC 8255
MULTIFUNCTION PERIPHERAL CONTROLLER	Motorola 68901
EXPANSION SLOTS	2 (1987), 4 (1989); Keyboard input, two joystick inputs, TV tuner control, NTSC video image decoder, AUX stereo inputs/outputs, Two floppy disk drives (5.25 drives or 3.5 drives depending on the model), Media disk drive, 3D goggles port
OTHER OPTIONS	Mouse, trackball, online modem, LAN card, SCSI card, hard disk drive
OS	GEOS (various versions)
MSRP	$1350
NOTES	a) Floating Point Unit math co-processor b) Micro-Controller Unit co-processor This was the last Commodore Series in the 6502/PET compatibility chain.

Virgin/Atari, meanwhile, was staying in the game with the sleek, futuristic 3000X, another high-end machine worth the high price tag, which was making a name for itself within start-ups and high-brow businesses from Paris galleries to Zurich financial offices to Manhattan advertising firms to Tokyo corporations to Silicon Valley software companies. Virgin became a market in and of itself, taking deep bites into both the Macintosh and PC markets, and properly hacked 2000X/3000X systems even worked as a reasonable placeholder in audio-video startups until a DIS or Silicon Graphics station could be acquired.

Spoiler: Virgin/Atari 3000X

NAME	Virgin/Atari 3000X
MANUFACTURER	Virgin-Atari Computers
TYPE	Business/Home Professional Computer
ORIGIN	UK/U.S.A.
YEAR	1988-1992
CPU	MIPS R3000+MIPS R3010 FPU, 21 MHz, Optional 30 MHz version
SPEED	25Mhz (Equivalent to a 100Mhz Intel 80386 or 80486, or Motorola 68020, or 50 Mhz Motorola 68030)
RAM	1.5 MB, Expandable to 8 MB, or up to 2 GB via expansion cards
VIDEO RAM	1.5 MB, Expandable to 8 MB, or by video card
GPU	HEATHER II (Display Controller/Video Data Selector) + VIVIAN (Video MMU/DMA) + x2 QUARTER (32 SILVER Object generators and 192 PENNY Sprite engines total) Capable of displaying a maximum of 65536 Colors on screen AT 640X480 out of a master palette of 715264, With a maximum resolution of 960x720. Optional Texas Instruments TMS32010 DSP+TMS32015 Video FPU
SOUND CPU	Synertek 65010 (65816 with 3 16-bit data busses)
SOUND CHIPS	PORKEY (CMOS version of QuadPOKEY, adds 10 bit wavetable functionality per channel), Yamaha YM2414 (FM Synthesis Chip, 8 channels, 4 operators each, eight possible waveforms)+YM3014 DAC, AMY II (Sixteen Channels Additive Synthesis, Eight Operators Each)
OTHER CHIPS	3rd AMD Am29101 (I/O Controller), AMD Am29114 (Keyboard, Joystick, and Mouse Interface), x2 AMD Am29982 4x4 bus exchangers (MIT NUBUS based), x4 Fujitsu MB89352A (SCSI controllers)
I/O PORTS	x4 21 (7, 7, 7) Pin Mouse/Joystick jacks, 8-pin radial keyboard port (not compatible with PC/XT or PS/2 keyboard jack) RF, A/V Multiout, Coaxial Cable TV, 40+10 Digital/Analog Monitor Port, X2 840/1680K 3 1/2" Floppy Drive, x3 3.5 mm speaker jack, x2 49 Pin(7x7) 8-bit SCSI Floppy Drive Port, 72 Pin SCSI Hard Drive Port, 72 Pin (inverted alignment) Printer Port, x6 Expansion Slots, Based on the MIT NUBUS Standard
OS	ATX, BSD Kernel Based, C and BASH Shells, SNOW GUI
FORM FACTOR	Upright horizontal, separate keyboard (Resembles the Steel Series APEX A300)
MSRP	$1750

Apple, meanwhile, was struggling. The venerable Apple II lines were fading away and the Macintosh had carved out a respectable market share, but the closed architecture and “not playing well with others” approach to software development were causing the “Mac” to lose market share to Virgin and PC while the end of the Apple II line essentially ceded the low-end home market to Commodore and Tandy.

Apple Macintosh II

Spoiler: Apple Macintosh II

NAME	MACINTOSH II
MANUFACTURER	Apple
TYPE	Business Computer/Professional Workstation
ORIGIN	U.S.A.
YEAR	1987-1989
BUILT IN LANGUAGE	None
KEYBOARD	Full stroke 81 keys with numeric keypad and cursor keys Optional extended 105 key keyboard with 15 function keys ($229) Optional extended 105 key keyboard with Cherry mechanical keyswitches ($349)
CPU	Motorola 68020, Optional Motorola 68030 ($750)
SPEED	15.66 MHz
CO-PROCESSOR	Motorola 68881 (numeric coprocessor)
RAM	1 MB, up to 8 MB on board and 2 GB via NuBus add-on slots
ROM	256 KB
GRAPHIC MODES	640 x 480 (The MAC II uses a NUBUS video card, this card could be replaced with any other more powerful one).
COLORS	16 or 256 among 16.7 millions
SOUND	Custon 8-bit DAC, Several Apple and Third-Party Sound Cards. Macintosh Music System (Imagine DOC+X2 Yamaha YM2149) a frequent optional pack-in
SIZE / WEIGHT	47.4 (W) x 36.4 (D) x 14 (H) cm / 12 Kg
I/O PORTS	Six Internal MIT NUBUS slots (10 MHz, 32 bits), ADB (2: Keyboard, mouse), RS232/422 (2), Disk, Monitor
BUILT IN MEDIA	1 or 2 3.5'' floppy disc drives
OS	Macintosh System 4.0 + Finder 5.4 (can boot up to System 7.5.5)
POWER SUPPLY	Self-configuring switching power supply unit
PERIPHERALS	20 to 80 MB SCSI hard disk
MSRP	$3769 (1 x 800 KB FDD, 1 MB of RAM) Hard discs: 20 MB ($999), 40 MB ($1599), 80 MB ($2699)

While Apple continued to produce the Macintosh in his absence, Steve Jobs continued to move forward with Beacon Computers, releasing the Cornet in 1988 with its Overture OS and ARIA GUI [5]. While networking and modems were practically an afterthought with most computers of the era, Beacon, anticipating the power of the Internet to come, was building a machine that was designed for networking. The Cornet was a generation ahead of its time, a system preconfigured for the burgeoning internet age, capable of working as a net crawler or a net server. The handful of public websites available on the Usenet found the perfect server host in the Cornet. As such, the Beacon gained a lot of attention from professionals, but it was having a hard time carving a market share out from Apple, IBM, and Virgin/Atari when few companies or private individuals were spending much time on the fragmented and limited “Net” of the late ‘80s.

Beacon Cornet (Image source “prepressure.com”)

Spoiler: Beacon Cornet

NAME	Beacon Cornet
MANUFACTURER	Beacon
TYPE	Business Computer/Professional Workstation
ORIGIN	U.S.A.
YEAR	1988-1991
BUILT IN LANGUAGE	C shell is a full, Turing Complete, ANSI/ISO C compiler with certain additional packages for Cornet hardware.
KEYBOARD	95 Key keyboard with number pad and function keys, Cherry mechanical keyswitches
MOUSE	Two button laser mouse.
CPU	AMD Am29000, 32 Bit RISC+AMD Am29433 (Hardware 32x32bit=64bit multiplyer)+optional AMD Am29325 or 29027 FPUa
SPEED	25Mhz (Equivalent to a 100Mhz Intel 80386 or 80486, or Motorola 68020, or 50 Mhz Motorola 68030)
RAM	2 MB (standard), up to 64 MB possible by populating all system RAM slots with the densest memory of the dayb.
VIDEO RAM	2 MB (Standard), up to 64 MB possible by populating the VRAM slots, or by graphics card.
VIDEO CPU/GPU	x2 AMD Am29101 16-bit Microprocessor+x2 AMD Am29130 24-bit shifter (2D System), AMD Am29501 DSP+x4 AMD Am29510 16x16 bit=32 bit multiplyers, x4 AMD Am29520 pipeline registers, x2 AMD Am29526 trigonometry generators. (3D System)c
RESOLUTION	2304x1536 (Monochrome), 1152x768 (1 field of 16 colors, or 2 fields 4 colors each), 576x384 (one field of 65536 colors, two fields 256 colors each, or four fields 16 colors each) , 288x192 (one field 262,144 colors, two fields, 512 colors each, three fields, 64 colors each, six fiekds, 8 colors each)d
COLORS	2,097,152 (seven levels each of RGB, plus one bit of color blending and two bits of translucency)
SOUND CPU	Motorola 56000 Audio DSPe
SOUND CHIPS	Yamaha YM3812f (Nine Channels FM Synthesis, 4 operators each), National Semiconductor LMC 1992, Imagine DOC IIg
AUDIO BUFFER	256K+system RAM as reallocated by software, or by sound card.
OTHER CHIPS	3rd AMD Am29101 (I/O Controller), AMD Am29114 (Keyboard, Joystick, and Mouse Interface), x2 AMD Am29982 4x4 bus exchangers (MIT NUBUS based), x4 Fujitsu MB89352A (SCSI controllers)
I/O PORTS	x4 50 pin 8-bit SCSI connectors, x4 66 pin16-bit SCSI connectors, x4 9 pin circular keyboard, mouse, and joystick ports, 76 pin proprietary Laser Printer port, 8 (6 open) custom pinout NUBUS expansion slots, x2 token ring ports.
BUILT IN MEDIA	Sony Magneto-Optical Disc Driveh, X2 double sided, extended density 3 1/2" floppy drives (2, 880K capacity), x2 40MB Seagate Hard Drive
OS	OVERTURE, A POSIX-compliant UNIX distribution based on the Carnegie-Mellon MACH kernel, "Aria" GUI, C and BASH Shells.
POWER SUPPLY	Self-configuring switching power supply unit
MSRP	$5800
NOTES	a) The AM29325 had roughly 8/5 the FLOPs, but the Am29027 features an extra 16 bits of spillover (80 vs. 64) internal precision, for when results have to be quickly reused by software. b) OVERTURE's memory map could address up to 2GB of System RAM. c) The 3D system's rasterization power is roughly comparable to the Atari Hard Drivin'/Namco System 21 Arcade hardware, but somewhat less versatile due to only outputting triangles. d) fairly tricky dividing a total of 18 display color registers to get even results. e) The 56000 also provided DAC functionality, so Jobs could keep the usual YM3012/14/18 off the motherboard at the expense of an extra 512 bytes or so of sound stack code. f) Also used in the Roland Ad Lib and Creative Labs Sound Blaster cards, g) Based on the DOC, but with bit width per channel doubled to 16. h) Optical disc format provides capacities from 128 MB (Single Sided, Single Density) to 512 MB (Double Sided, Double Density), but that last did not become standard until 1990, necessitating an upgrade to earlier machines.

But Jobs had more than one job, as it were. While Disney computers were becoming best known for their high-end graphics and sound users, Jim Henson and Steve Jobs were growingly increasingly interested in a much humbler audience: kids. Specifically, Henson wanted to produce a small, cheap, simple windowing-GUI-based system that “even a 4-year-old can figure out.” Much as he had with Sesame Street, Henson wanted to give the underprivileged children a fighting chance at education, this time computer literacy, and thus he and Jobs brainstormed a new closed system with big, colorful, and soft keys, an extremely simple and intuitive mouse-and-GUI system, and a colorful, non-threatening appearance. Furthermore, it would be dirt cheap, with bulk discounts for educators and some charity discounts or giveaways such that “every elementary school in the world” should be able to afford a lab of a couple dozen computers. Jim quickly sketched out a small, dome-shaped computer with Mickey Mouse ears on the monitor. Jobs took it to the Imagine, Inc., team, and they set to work.

The idea grew into “Project Mickey”, an idea that was quickly blessed by both Consumer Products VP Bo Boyd and Marketing VP Jack Lindquist due to the positive branding and potential profits that came with it. The Imagine, Inc., team soon developed the Magical Integrated Computer Kernels for the Education of Youth (MICKEY) system, a fully integrated computer system with mouse ears on the monitor and the mouse alike, and the red, yellow, white, and black color pallet of the eponymous mouse. It had limited expansion capability and only a relative handful of software applications (the games were universally educational), but the primary goal was to teach basic computer literacy to the very young. Introduced at the 1988 Disney EXPO, schools across North America bought the system, as did some schools in South America, Europe, Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea. Nintendo even began license-builds of MICKEY for the Asian market. Private sales were noteworthy as well, with an entire secondary market emerging for “used MICKEYs”. [6]

Spoiler: Project MICKEY

NAME	MICKEY
MANUFACTURER	Imagine, Inc.
TYPE	Early Education/Youth
ORIGIN	U.S.A.
YEAR	1988-1995; replaced by MICKEY 2.0, with DONALD internet service
BUILT IN LANGUAGE	LOGO, Assembly Monitor, and Mayhem (interactive sound stack reading and exporting as .mml and .vgm sound files)
KEYBOARD	(104-key rubber dome keyboard with function keys, Mickey and Minnie keys, 7 different lockable shift keys, and a number pad)
CPU	MicroMIPSa
SPEED	8.95 Mhz
RAM	196K
VIDEO RAM	80K (60K frame buffer, 16K Sprite RAM, 4K Tile RAM)
GPU	YENSID, Resolution: 256x240 (256 Colors), up to 3 tile-based scrolling fields, or 1 tile and one bitmap, capable of displaying up to 64 16x16 pixel sprites on screen (no scanline limits) with a master palette of 4096 colors.
SOUND CPU	Western Design Center 65C108
SOUND CHIPS	x2 Phillips SAA 1099b + Imagine DOC
AUDIO BUFFER	48K
OTHER CHIPS	MINNIE (Bus Driver and I/O Controller), Intel 8048/51 (Keyboard Interface), x2 NEC 27065 (SCSI controllers), Motorola 68901 (Joystick and Mouse interface)
I/O PORTS	Cartridge Slot (pinout based on Commodore User Port), Monitor Port (Based of 15 pin VGA, but not physically or electrically compatible with it, x4 Apple II style joystick/mouse ports (mouse pointer keyed to port 4 by default), x2 3 mm audio jack, x3 66 pin generic SCSI ports, x6 expansion slots (based on an inverted, half height IBM ISA mechanical and electrical pinout)
OS	MAGIC (Programming Language command prompt or windowing GUI, uses ConTiki for screen shots)
FORM FACTOR	Keyboard Console between classic Apple II and Atari 800XL in size.
MSRP	1988 $325 (Console, Monitor, and one 3 1/2" disc drivec)
NOTES	a) 16 Bit processor based on the MIPS Architecture. b) 6 channels each of geometry synthesis. Used in the SAM Coupe, the Phillips Diamond series of not-quite PC Clones, Several arcade games by Century Electronics, and in the Creative Labs Game Blaster and Sound Blaster sound cards. c) MAGIC's floppy format means a Double Sided, Double Density disc could hold 800K, and a Double Sided, High Density disc could hold 1600K.

It’s been said that an entire generation learned computer literacy on MICKEY systems, which became alternately beloved or despised depending on the level of computer snobbery of the user. MICKEY became a cultural icon of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s with MICKEY Clubs and nostalgia netsites popping up at the turn of the millennium. There was even a bizarre sub-subculture of “MICKEY Hackers”, a.k.a. “Mackers”, “Hackeys”, or “RATZ” (a name, not an acronym), with “what can you do with the Mouse, bra?” becoming the running challenge for Hackers and RATCON becoming an event in its own right. Needless to say, several ironic and bathos-filled physical transformations of the MICKEYs began to appear, the iconic ears a frequent target of transformation and abuse [7].

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[1] Estridge and his wife and several other IBM employees were killed in our timeline on August 2nd, 1985, after their flight crashed on landing following a rare microburst weather event. Even the tiniest of literal butterfly flaps can change this, so as such he and his wife are still alive in this timeline.

[2] The CPU selection is Estridge and IBM recognizing Atari, Apple, and Commodore as competition. In OTL, IBM refused to acknowledge the cloners, and thus never put better than a 286 on the motherboard. Better CPUs were a do-it-yourself job, requiring a riser socket due to different pinouts (because the 386 and above were 32 bit processors).

RAM is Based on our timeline; you gotta’ love that 640K System RAM limit on MS-DOS!

GPU: There are secret sauce differences from our timeline: the Intel graphics chips permit localized graphics interrupts during VBlank, allowing for a crude form of blitting. The ROMP in the XGA card is effectively IBM's take on the Fujitsu-Tandy method of object generation. Also, more Video RAM overall compared to our timeline.

I/O Ports: This is Estridge's biggest contribution compared to our timeline: the MCA bus and slots are still physically, electrically, and bus signal backward compatible with 8 and 16-bit interface PC Bus (ISA) expansion cards while being up to 32 times as fast in full native mode at 32 bits wide (386 and 486 models only, of course). More typical bandwidth gains are on the order of X8. This combined with fewer overall cloners will keep IBM on top.

[3] Fujitsu's management might have been legalistic hard-asses, but they weren't ARM or Qualcomm in the ‘00s and New Teens.

[4] As requested, @GrahamB.

[5] Resembles our timeline’s NExTSTEP.

[6] In our timeline the MicroMIPSa CPU extension was developed in 1996. The Sound CPU is essentially the Hudson HuC6280, complete with the mass move instructions, but minus the built-in sound channels, and a different port and bus architecture.

[7] And, as always, hat tip to @Kalvan for the Computer help!

 

[Geekhis Khan]

An Increasingly Crowded Field (Cont'd)
Excerpt from Computer Wars! by Calvin Threadmaker

Video Game Consoles

The home video game market, meanwhile, was getting even more competitive as Japanese consoles vied with US ones for the international market. Atari vied primarily with Nintendo and the upstart Sega, each system gaining a dedicated following and gamers arguing endlessly on which was “better”. The Old Warhorse of Atari stayed strong with the 10400, also known as the Lynx, keeping its market share through the combination of a quality product matched with brand loyalty. Despite Virgin Computer’s increasingly elite status, the Atari home game console remained an egalitarian “everyman’s” video game system built on familiarity and nostalgia. “Brave and brotherly” Bentley Bear and “athletic and adventurous” Colette Caracal, stars of an increasing number of video games (notably including Colette’s debut in Crystal Castles Crash Course), had emerged as the brand mascots and Atari’s answer to Mario and Luigi[1].

Spoiler: Atari 10400 Lynx

NAME	Atari 10400 of Atari Lynx
MANUFACTURER	Virgin/Atari
TYPE	Home Game Console
ORIGIN	U.S.A.
YEAR	1988-1997
CPU	Synertek 65010
CLOCK SPEED	1.785-12 MHz
RAM	96K
VIDEO RAM	64K
GPU	LAVENDER (Display Adaptor, Color Generation, Video Data Selector)+NICKELa (Object Generator, Video DMA/MMU)
RESOLUTION	All resolutions of Atari 2600 and 5200/8-Bit Computers, plus 320x204 (512 Colors Onscreen at Once), 640x408 (30 Hz, [25 Hz PAL and SECAM] 320 colors onscreen)
MASTER PALLETE	44704 (NTSC), 32768 (PAL and SECAM)b
SOUND	TITAN (Atari 2600, 5200, and 8-bit System-on-a-chip, 2 channels Geometry Synthesis), QuadPOKEYc (16 Channels Geometry Synthesis), AMY 8 Channels Additive Synthesis, 8 Operators each)
OTHER CHIPS	TITAN (Atari SOC consisting of ANTIC and an amalgamation of TIA and GTIA), X2 Synertek 65C21 PIA II (controller I/O), SLAPSTIC (Security/Merket Lockout [Non-North American Markets Only)
I/O	Cartridge Slot (Compatible with 2600 and 8-bit computer cartridge slots up to 1200/800 XL), x4 21 Pin Controller Jacks, RF Out, AV Mulit-Out, Coaxial Cable TV (NTSC) or SCART (PAL and SECAM), X2 Atari SIO Ports
NOTES	a) LAVENDER is based on HEATHER, but with PAL/SECAM color generation hardware, too. NICKEL combines 4 SILVER Object Generators with 16 of PENNY Sprite Engines, or one half of each original's graphics prowess, and a simplified VIVIAN. Each Object Processor could either be used for a single scrolling field, a mobile "player" sprite, 80x408 pixels in size, or any number of single frame Blitter BOBs within that space, as defined by software. Each "Sprite" has 84 different frames of animation and can be multiplexed up to 16 times (or more, if the cartridge contains more spare Video RAM) without flicker, slowdown, or collision detection issues, for a theoretical maximum of 768 sprites onscreen. All sprites (except Text and Text Relief) feature x and y axis flip, several sprite categories feature scaling, zoom, and rotation effects (albeit controlled by the CPU), and 2 of them feature both. There are a grand total of 16 different categories of sprites. b) The PAL/SECAM color palette is 5 bits each of RGB. c) QuadPOKEY also handles the analog component of controller I/O and the SIO serial ports, including a hypothetical keyboard interface.

Sega, meanwhile, launched the Mega-Drive[2]. Compared to the 10400, the Sega had arguably better graphics, particularly at high resolution[3]. The Sega Mega-Drive found a welcoming market in Japan, but was having a hard time breaking in to the North American market, which was dominated by Nintendo and Atari. The Sega Mega-Drive carved out a niche market presence in many select cities and regions in the US and thus saved the brand. It would eventually break out as a minor competitor to both Atari and Nintendo both in the US, typically in regional markets, and grew to become one of the larger competitors in the Asian marketplace.

Spoiler: Sega Mega-Drive

NAME	Sega Mega-Drive
MANUFACTURER	Sega
TYPE	Home Game Console
ORIGIN	Japan/USA
YEAR	1988-1998
CPU	Zilog Z280, 14.30 MHz (NTSC), 14.16 MHz (PAL and SECAM)
RAM	64K Program RAM +16K Work RAM+32K Audio Buffer, 112K total
VIDEO RAM	128K PseudoSRAM (Dual Framebuffer)+8K SRAM(Sprite Attributes)
GPU	Sega VDC 3 (Based on Texas Instruments/Yamaha V9958)+315-5242 (Special Color Encoder), +315-5250 (Scalar Math Coprocessor)
RESOLUTION	512x448 (4 Colors), 320×240 (NTSC) or 400×288 (PAL and SECAM) scalar mode resolution. 128 Sprites Onscreen, each sprite may use one of 16 CLUTS of 16 colors each. Tiles are 8x8 pixels, with a maximum of 8 CLUTs of 8 colors each onscreen. Sprite size from 8x8 to 128x128, with butter smooth scaling, zoom, and rotation. Maximum of 4 scrolling fields: 2 tile and 2 bitmap (32 colors each bitmap).
COLOR	384 onscreen out of a master palette of 98,304a
SOUND	Yamaha YM2608 (Japanese Market) or Yamaha YM2151+ YM3014 DAC+ Texas Instruments SN76496 (North America and Europe)+ Sega PCM (16 Channels, 12 bit sampling at 31.25 KHz)b
MSRP	¥22,500 (1988 Japan), $195 (US)
NOTES	a) Several cartridges, and the SegaCD peripheral added in extra System and Video RAM, adding more available CLUTS and onscreen colors. b) The differing sound chips, cartridge shapes, and pinouts functioned as market lockouts between regions, as well as the different regional television color encoding and voltage differences between US/Japan and Europe.

NEC, meanwhile, swung for the fences with the NEC PC Engine, made in partnership with Magnavox and Phillips. In terms of marketing, it promoted itself as better than the Famicom/NES, but cheaper and easier to code for than the 10400 and Mega Drive/Genesis, plus they added a CD-ROM peripheral, something novel in 1987. While it struggled to find a market in the US, it did well in Japan.

Spoiler: NEC PC Engine/Magnavox Odyssey3/Phillips VideoPac 8000

NAME	NEC/Magnavox/Phillips
MANUFACTURER	NEC
TYPE	Home Game Console
ORIGIN	Japan
YEAR	1987-2008 (Japan), 1988-1996 (North America & Europe)
CPU	Hudson Hu62010a
CLOCK SPEED	10.74 Mhz
RAM	48K
VIDEO RAM	128K
GPU	Hudson Hu6260+x2Hu6270, capable of displaying a maximum of 96 32x32 pixel sprites onscreen, with a maximum of 24 on any scanline. Capable of displaying up to 482 colors onscreen out of a Master Palette of 32,768. Resolution modes of 256x224, 288x240, 512x448 (interleaved), and 576x240, capable of displaying up to 5 scrolling fields (4 tile and 1 bitmap)
COLOR	384 onscreen out of a master palette of 98,304*
SOUND	12 Channels Wavetable Synthesis from CPU, Plus Yamaha YM2149 (Three Channels Geometry Synthesis + 1 Channel Sawtooth and White Noise, Japan and North America) or Phillips SAA 1099 (Six Channels Geometry Synthesis, Europe)
AUDIO BUFFER	16K
SOFTWARE MEDIA	Hu-Card/Turbo Chip, maximum size 8MB (64 Megabits)
CONTROLLER	Directional Cross, Start, Select, and two action buttons, plus a four-level auto fire stitch for each button
MSRP	¥15,250 (Japan, 1987), $164.99 (U.S., 1988)
NOTES	* The Hu62010 is a 6280 extended to 16-bit instruction and register length, a 30-bit address bus, and double the sound channels.

But one of the biggest players on both sides of the Pacific was the venerable Nintendo, now with the Nintendo Disk System. With outstanding graphics, a for the time revolutionary Disk peripheral, and a competitive cost, Nintendo became the company to beat in Japan, holding on to the number one slot in Japan despite a strong showing from Sega. The Disk remained popular in Japan well into the 1990s, and was a league above the competition in the US. But alas, it was a bridge too far in 1988 for the US market with its non-standard (and fragile and expensive) Disk peripheral system. As such, despite an advertising blitz, the system undersold in the US, causing Nintendo to pull it back from all but a few high-end specialty shops in 1989, an embarrassing but far from fatal setback for the company that remained the “king” of home video games worldwide[4].

Spoiler: Nintendo Disk System peripheral (North American Version)

NAME	Nintendo Disk System
MANUFACTURER	Nintendo
TYPE	Home Game Console
ORIGIN	Japan
YEAR	1987-1998
CPU	Ricoh 2A04 (Based on the MOS Technology 6502)+Creative Micro Devices JiffyDOS ROM
RAM	24K System RAM and 24K Video RAM
BANDWIDTH	62.5 Kilobytes/Second
GPU	Hudson Hu6260+x2Hu6270, capable of displaying a maximum of 96 32x32 pixel sprites onscreen, with a maximum of 24 on any scanline. Capable of displaying up to 482 colors onscreen out of a Master Palette of 32,768. Resolution modes of 256x224, 288x240, 512x448 (interleaved), and 576x240, capable of displaying up to 5 scrolling fields (4 tile and 1 bitmap)
AUDIO BUFFER	16K
CAPACITY	3.5" Floppy Disc, 432K (Single Sided, Double Density), 864K (Double Sided, Double Density, 1728 K (Double Sided, High Density)
OTHER CHIPS	Okidata MSM5205 (single channel, 4 bit ADPCM Synthesis), Yamaha YM2203+YM3014 DAC (Three Channels FM Synthesis, Four Operators Each.) Nintendo Memory Management Controller 3 (Real-time clock, IRQ timer, Split Screen functionality without sacrifice of Sprite 0, additional video data manipulation at V-Blank permits the use of the entire NES Master Palette of 52 colors onscreen, and limited sprite multiplexing (within scanline limits) without flicker or slowdown.
MSRP	(1987) $135 (stand-alone), $189 (Ultimate System Package [Control Deck+ 2 Controllers, Zapper Light Gun and Disc System, replacing ROB])[5]

But they would soon face more competition on their own doorstep too. After the shellacking that the Atari 2800 received in the early Eighties (when it came out right on time to face the Famicom), Atari was reluctant to market the 10400 directly in the Land of The Rising Sun. Furthermore, Virgin computers were being sold in Japan and Korea as hardnosed businesses machines, and featured special 512K Kanji ROMs. A game console would undermine this increasingly professional image. Instead, they looked for a partner. Atari had reciprocal licensing and distribution agreements with Namco and Taito that went back to the 1970s. As such, Virgin/Atari made common cause with Namco, resulting in the StarFlare.

Spoiler: Namco StarFlare

NAME	Namco StarFlare
MANUFACTURER	Namco in partnership with Virgin/Atari
TYPE	Home Game Console
ORIGIN	Japan
YEAR	1988-1996
CPU	Ricoh 5A26, A Second Source version of the Rockwell Semiconductor 65816A with demultiplexed address pins and 3 16-bit data busses
CLOCK SPEED	12 MHz
RAM	96K
VIDEO RAM	64K
GPU	LAVENDER (Display Adaptor, Color Generation, Video Data Selector)+NICKEL* (Object Generator, Video DMA/MMU)
RESOLUTION	320x204 (512 Colors Onscreen at Once), 640x408 (30 Hz, [25 Hz PAL and SECAM] 320 colors onscreen)
MASTER PALLETTE	44704
SOUND	Namco CUS30 (8 Channels Wavetable Synthesis)+Namco C219 (16 Channels 8-Bit PCM Synthesis)+Atari AMY
OTHER CHIPS	Motorola 68901 (Controller Interface), SLAPSTIC (Security/Merket Lockout [Non-North American Markets Only)
I/O	Cartridge Slot, x4 21 Pin Controller Jacks, RF Out, AV Mulit-Out, Coaxial Cable TV, X2 Special I/O ports
CONTROLLER	Directional Cross, Start, Select, and two action buttons, plus a four-level auto fire stitch for each button
MSRP	(1988) ¥19,700
PACK IN GAMES	Rolling Thunder (1988-90), Galaga 5R (1990.-92), Numan Athletics (1993-96)

With so many potential platforms, videogame manufacturers struggled to determine the best way forward. Should one concentrate on a single OS, or develop versions for several or all OS options? Tecmo, for example, went for the latter approach, developing versions for numerous platforms, such as its popular 1987 release based upon the novel/manga/anime series Vampire Hunter D.

Vampire Hunter D

8-bit Version is similar to this (actually from Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon; Image source “pcgamer.com”)

16/32 Version is similar to this (actually from Castlevania: The Lecarde Chronicles; Image source “youtube.com”)

Spoiler: Vampire Hunter D

NAME	Vampire Hunter D
PUBLISHER	Tecmo (Nintendo Famicom Disk System, Nintendo Entertainment System , Sega Master System [Japanese Market] Sharp MZ/X-1, X65xxx, Fujitsu FM-77, FM Towns, Tandy 1000DX/5000, NEC PC88, PC93/98, Toshiba TOPS, Virgin/Atari 3000X), NEC Avenue (NEC PC Engine), Broderbund (Sega Master System [US Market], Atari 10400, 1400XL/1450EXL, MSDOS, Commodore 256/640, X816/832, Magnavox Odyssey 3, Tandy CoCo3, Apple IIe+/IIc+, Macintosh [System 3 or higher]), Virgin Mastertronic (BBC Micro/Master, Acorn Archimedes, Sinclair ZX Spevtrum 128K. QL, SAM Coupe, Amstrad CPC, Exetel Excelvision, Thompson T09, Phillips VideoPac 8000)
DEVELOPER	Tecmo Consumer Team 4 (Eventually renamed Team Ninja), Virgin Mastertronic for the European Versions.
ORIGIN	Japan
RELEASED	1987
NOTES	The 8-bit and 16/32 but versions adapt different stories from the series, though there are references to elements of each in the other game.[6].

In general, the late ‘80s were a time of transition for both computers and for game consoles. The Quickening of ’84 had shaken up the field and knocked off some old names, but allowed for the market entry of new competitors and a growing “worldwide” market. It also introduced the first “web capable” machine in the Beacon Coronet. Things would only get stranger as things moved into the 1990s.

---

[1] Hat tip to @TheFaultsofAlts for coming up with Collette Caracal and thanks to @nick_crenshaw82 for reminding me about Bentley Bear. And thanks all around to all the other readers who helped develop these characters.

[2] Compared to our timeline, the Sega Genesis of this timeline is a more elegant system solution. The use of the Z280 means that there need be fewer PCB layers to the motherboard compared to using a Z80 and a Motorola 68000, while still allowing backward compatibility with the Mark III/Master System and SG1000. It is also much closer to the Sega Scalar arcade hardware of our timeline (specifically the Out Run model). Compared to the then-cutting-edge X-Unit/Afterburner hardware at the time of its release, it possesses no hardware Road/Horizon field, only half the hardware sprites, and sprite and tile CLUTs are severely cut down. However, as the Z280 is more than twice as powerful clock for clock (clocked at 14.30 Mhz rather than 10.74, and featuring twice the instructions per clock ratio and hardware multiply and divide), this is less of a hardship, as the CPU and Math Coprocessor can be used to bit-bang that layer with some caveats. A significant source of cost and motherboard space savings comes from the use of stacked Video RAM, a technology Sega managed to get at a discount from Toshiba in a story all its own. Mostly, this results in fewer rocks, trees and billboards in racing games, and smaller vapor trails and explosions in air combat games, and more repetitious object color schemes. Also, while slowdown and screen tearing were far rarer compared to the machine of our timeline when running comparable software, when it did happen, there could be massive audio desync and artifacts, which is (literally) unheard of in the Mega Drive/Genesis of our timeline. Essentially, the difference between this console and Sega's Scalar hardware iterations is the difference between the Sega Master System and System E arcade hardware.

[3] This came down to hardware decisions made by Richard Branson. The “missing 72 horizontal rows” of the 10400's highest resolution were the result of its Video RAM limitations: 640x480 would have demanded 75K Video RAM, which made for odd addressing math, when Branson at the time was obsessed with keeping costs low to meet the MSRP with sufficient margin and not make it a loss-leader (especially with North American Market models of the machine produced in the US) or be accused of Market Dumping. This was also the logic behind NICKEL: it was fabbed on a 2-micron process, making the cost of masks relatively cheap. If Branson had gone for a cutting edge 1.25-micron process, and had he been willing to absorb the mask costs, he could have fitted a grand total of 16 Object Processors, 64 Sprite Engines, and the spatial components of PENNY with no problem. It wouldn't have been game over for Sega, however; RAM costs would still have been an issue.

[4] Mario Hat Tip to @Pyro for pointing out this possibility.

[5] Adjusting for exchange rates, this is $50 more expensive than the Japanese Famicom version, but $50 cheaper than the OTL version CMD made OTL for the Commodore 64. This was due to Nintendo offering them the use of their vendor supply chain and subsidizing the masks for the additional silicon. The Japanese Famicom Version used 3x2.8" Hitachi Memorex discs with a max capacity [formatted] of 288K, though no Nintendo or Third-Party publisher software used it. The largest Famicom game to come out on disc was Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, which used 2 144K discs. Almost no software came out for it after 1988.

[6] The US Nintendo version was on floppy disc, leading ultimately to the Tecmo Console version of Ninja Gaiden to be released in 1990, as a Metroidvania style Beat-'em up with strategically placed cutscenes, like River City Ransom meets Solstice. As a result of all of this, Ninja Gaiden's imitators from our timeline, like Shadow of the Ninja, Ninja Crusaders, and Wrath of the Black Manta have been completely butterflied away.

 

[Geekhis Khan]

Part 8: Old Voices and New Voices
Excerpt from Slash! A History of Horror Films, by Ima Fuller Bludengore

With the “Smart Slasher” now a thing, the slasher and horror genres began to take off in different directions with old favorites and new creators taking things in completely different and often socially relevant ways. 1986’s Day of the Dead, made with a comparatively massive $7 million budget thanks to the success of Raimi’s Friday the 13th Part 5, was the biggest zombie film yet made, the “Gone with the Wind of zombie films,” according to Romero[1]. Like its predecessors it addressed consumerism and prejudice, albeit in a very abstract and flesh-eating way. “Nobody had done Zombies on this scale,” recalled Sam Raimi. “Freaking zombies like you’d never seen at the time. And if I somehow led to this happening, then my work is done!”

Meanwhile, Clive Barker and John Carpenter expanded beyond the “masked lunatic kills people” trope and branched into new possibilities, such as the literal “hell on earth” concepts of Hellraiser and Prince of Darkness. The two hell-on-earth films inevitably drew comparisons between their literal hell appearances and their themes of the dangers of unfettered pursuit of knowledge at the expense of ethics and the consideration of the consequences[2].

Hellraiser saw the appearance of a cursed puzzle box unleashing literal demons, in this case stylized in extreme bondage gear, and saw them attempting to drag the unwitting fools who released them back to hell with them. It played against concepts of cultural desecration, tomb robbing, and unfettered curiosity, ultimately culminating in an open condemnation of Euro-American imperialism and colonization. It would go on to spawn its own series of films with “Pinhead”, leader of the malicious but strangely sympathetic demonic “cenobites”, becoming iconic in his own right.

Prince of Darkness would bring the literal devil to earth in the form of an ancient conspiracy, a strange green ooze, and curious-to-a-fault scientists who attempt to study the liquid’s “quantum properties”. They literally unleash Satan in their Frankenstein-like pursuit of forbidden knowledge. While a stand-alone film, Carpenter later grouped it with the earlier The Thing and later In the Mouth of Madness as his “Apocalypse Trilogy”.

Yet another take on the smart slasher came from Don Mancini. Inspired by the classic “possessed doll” stories and the uncanny realism of automated toys like Teddy Ruxpin and My Buddy[3], Mancini devised what he called the “ultimate take-down of child-targeted consumerism” with Child’s Play. It begins when the convicted killer Charles Lee Ray is gunned down by cops right in front of a young and lonely boy named Andy, who has just bought a new “Chucky” automated doll with his parents. Suddenly there is a string of grisly murders surrounding Andy, who blames them on “Chucky”, who he claims “must have been possessed by the guy they shot.” It remains ambiguous right to the very end whether Andy is the killer and hallucinating Chucky in a trauma-induced psychosis, or if indeed the doll itself is possessed by the killer[4].

In addition to the ambiguity, Mancini layered it with jabs at consumerism, in particular child-targeted marketing. “This was the golden age of merch-driven entertainment and direct marketing to kids,” said Mancini in an interview, “So we let them have it. Chucky kills a woman by smashing her face into a television and quips about what ‘TV does to your brain.’ Or he reenacts a scene line for line from GI Joe or the A team or He Man as he guns down or cuts up someone, quipping about how ‘I always wanted to be like B.A.’ or something like that. The goal was to show how little real difference there was between what we show to our kids, like war cartoons, and what we forbid them from watching, like horror films. We also poked at marketing and product placement when we could.”

“I’d kill for a Sweetie Kitty® Juice Box, whadabout you, kid?” (Image source “tvline.com”)

Chucky spawned an ongoing series, combining the inherent creepiness of the possessed doll trope with the snarky quips of Freddy. While Andy and the ambiguity would be dropped by the end of the second film, it remained openly anti-consumerist in its themes. It also took every opportunity to hold parents to task for the violence they let their kids watch, breaking the fourth wall on occasion: “Seriously, kids, your parents let you watch this shit?” And while the original anti-consumerist message inevitably got lost or downplayed in the sequels, it is occasionally cited in academic surveys on anti-consumerist works.

Smart Slasher? Or Intellectual Thriller?

1987 had seen the debut of Adrian Lyne’s Fatal Attraction, whose status as a “smart slasher” is in dispute. Featuring the story of a married businessman (Michael Douglas) who has a torrid affair with a lonely woman (Glen Close) and then dumps her in favor of returning to married life, it ultimately becomes a cautionary tale on the destructive nature of infidelity and the objectification of women. The rejection causes the spurned woman to lose her mind and leads her to stalk him and his family, ultimately ending in bloody violence and the desecration of a perfectly good soup. The film was a breakout success, received Oscar nominations and wins, and was praised by critics and Hollywood luminaries, none of whom would place the film alongside Freddy or Jason. However, the slasher genre production community gladly laid claim to it, leading to it becoming an influential film for the genre even as its status within was a source of argument.

Two films in particular would take direct influence from Fatal Attraction. The first of these films was by slasher newcomer Mary Lambert, who, following in the for-the-time feminist footsteps of Fatal Attraction, wrote and directed Sweetie Pie, released by New Line and starring Jennifer Tilley. It was the story of a young and idealistic ingenue actress named Susanna who is repeatedly sexually harassed and assaulted by her Hollywood male producers and directors and forced to do uncomfortable nude scenes, ultimately culminating in a violent rape by her producer[5]. Susanna’s mind breaks and she becomes a serial killer, murdering all the men in the industry who wronged her and other women. The film also hung a critical lampshade on the exploitative nude and sex scenes in the film itself, and by extension the presumably titillated viewers. While Sweetie Pie underperformed at the box office, it became a cult classic and a celebrated early critique of the culture of sexual harassment, assault, and sexism in the industry. It eventually led to a sequel in the 1990s when such issues were gaining national prominence. Lambert’s work would also gain the notice of executive Lindsay Doran, who would tap her for direction on Steven King’s Pet Cemetery in 1989.

Not this at all…

The next film influenced by Fatal Attraction was, of all things, the next Friday the 13th film, with producer Barbara Sachs openly seeking to develop a Friday the 13th that “would win an Academy Award”. Originally planned to be a Jason vs. Freddy crossover, New Line, who was “winning” the inter-franchise rivalry, dropped out of the plans since they didn’t “need” Jason, though Jason arguably needed them. Writer Daryl Haney proposed a “Jason vs. Carrie” concept where the Final Girl would be psychic, and proposed adding a spousal abuse subplot to add gravitas. However, Sachs had a different idea. Taking influence from the greed-driven cover-up in Jaws, she developed a concept of a developer paving over Camp Crystal Lake and Jason’s Grave in order to put up condos. She proposed it as an environmental and anti-overdevelopment message, Jason re-envisioned as a “defending spirit of the natural”, flipping the script and making Jason arguably the hero and the thoughtless developers he murders the villains.

Though executive producer Frank Mancuso Jr. resisted the idea at first[6], the “flip the script” aspect, making all of the “victims” not dumb and arguably innocent teens but malicious “nature defilers” intrigued him more that the “Jason vs. Carrie” script, so he greenlit the effort. “Fans tended to root for Jason anyway,” said Manusco, “So why not give them a reason to do so?” Tom McLoughlin returned to direct, keeping some of the Raimi-inspired camera work, and turned the entire thing into a “nature’s revenge” tale that made a good $23 million at the box office. While the Academy, to Sachs’ disappointment, wanted nothing to do with the film, the fans generally appreciated the “Jason saves the Earth” aspect, or at least liked seeing snotty rich people getting cut into bits. Some fans revolted at the “politics” of the tale, but in general the film is considered one of the stronger in the franchise today. Despite the eco message, it’s arguable how “smart” the film is, with many fans seeing it a “just another Jason film” and a long way from the Raimi-made psychological horror of two films prior.

Sort of this, but “Smart”

And in the midst of the growing debate of “smart vs dumb” came the relaunch of the Halloween franchise, which had been languishing for half a decade following the profitable but fan-hated Halloween III, which had dropped Michael Myers in exchange for an unrelated story involving witchcraft and science fiction elements. Halloween 4: The Inevitable Return of Michael Myers was a return to form, taking off where Halloween II left off, but included a “smart” element: the events of the previous films had led to the community banning Halloween and anything related to horror[7] in an effort to hide the uncomfortable past. The events of Michael’s murderous return are played against larger themes of censorship and the futility of trying to hide the uncomfortable or socially unacceptable. For example, the “death by sex” trope is avoided and instead it is the prudish parents and friends who attempt to stop the teens from having sex or enjoying sexual things whom Michael slaughters. The lesson becomes one of the unavoidability of discomforting things like death, sex, and fear with Michael now an avatar for the inevitability of these human things and the futility and indeed danger of trying to hide or suppress them.

By this point, however, the horror/slasher fandom was vocally divided between those “revolutionaries” who favored the new “smart” approach and the “reconstructionists” who wanted a return to the straightforward “dumb” hack & slash of the genre’s roots. The “smart” directions taken in Friday the 13th Parts 5-7 and A Nightmare on Elm Street were now entering into the Halloween series as well, which many reconstructionists had hoped would hold on to the original “dumb” approach. This segment of the fandom, already on edge following the “heresy” of Halloween III, was becoming increasingly loud and vociferous and demanding that Halloween go back to its roots. Halloween executive producer Moustapha Akkad and producer/creator John Carpenter were at a severe disagreement on this point, with Akkad siding with the reconstructionists and Carpenter with the revolutionaries. Akkad eventually won out and Carpenter sold his rights to the franchise, eager instead to explore new and original ideas.

Sort of this, but no Man in Black or Thorn subplots, just pure “Michael Kills People” goodness

Thus, the plot of Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers, was a simple return to the very simple original formula. Michael appears, and murders occur. Rachel’s parents die almost immediately at Rachel's house. Lindsay, Tina, Samantha, and Spitz die at the barn. The death of Lindsay in particular hit home as she'd been established as another older sister to Rachel. And finally, Rachel dies at the Myers house, meaning that Jamie's whole foster family is now dead. It ends with Jamie saying that Michael will never die as Michael is taken away[8].

Reconstructionists celebrated its simple slasher plot without any “intellectual bullshit” to bog it down. Revolutionaries saw it as a letdown after the “promise” of Halloween 4 and in particular cited John Carpenter’s abandonment of the franchise as evidence of their “rightness”. Halloween 5 thus became the first major battlespace of the fan divide between the two factions. It would not be the last.

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[1] Since you asked, @farmerted555. Random butterflies based on Romero’s involvement with this timeline’s Tales from the Darkside delayed the film for a few critical months, allowing Raimi’s success to convince the studio to give Romero the full $7 million he was requesting, resulting in the zombiest of zombie films yet.

[2] Both films are largely as in our timeline. The biggest change is that the underlying themes are more overt and the characters are shown to be smart, but this proves not enough to avoid the consequences of their actions.

[3] What, me creepy?

[4] Apparently, this ambiguity was in the original script, but was dropped so as not to “confuse” the presumably knuckle-dragging idiots in the audience. Note that both Andy's mother and Detective Mike die in the end, and thus Andy needs to go to a foster home in the sequel. And Hockey-Mask tip to @Unknown for alerting me to the original script!

[5] Any resemblance to a particular studio Producer strictly coincidental, I’m sure.

[6] All of this follows our timeline except that a) there was no “smart slasher” fad in our timeline and b) Sachs never got the idea to “flip the script” and make Jason quasi-heroic, instead making it just a Jason movie with an “evil developer” thing tacked on. Manusco rejected Sachs’ idea and went with Haney’s resulting in Friday the 13th Part 7: The New Blood. It was panned and underperformed.

[7] This was writer Dennis Etchison’s original plan and based on his parent’s refusal to let him see any scary films as a kid, which led to him obsessing over them. The idea was rejected in our timeline for being “to cerebral”, but in this timeline the “Smart Slasher” is in vogue.

[8] Plot based on ideas from @Unknown.

 

[Geekhis Khan]

Hocus Pocus (1988), a Spooky Delight!
From Swords and Spaceships Magazine, October 1998

What happens when you combine the visions of Steven Spielberg, Tim Burton, and Jim Henson? You get Hocus Pocus, Disney’s 1988 Halloween release! The film was directed by Tim Burton and starred Chloris Leachman[1], Kathy Bates, and Kim Cattrall as the three Sanderson Sisters, Salem witches who have returned to earth after centuries to torment our teenage protagonists. Sean Astin voices (and plays in live action appearances) Tackery Binks, a 1688 teen turned into a black cat by the witches. Cory Feldman and Drew Barrymore play the teenaged protagonist Max[2] and his crush Allison. A young Vinessa Shaw[3] plays Max’s little sister Dani while Josh Brolin and Judd Nelson play the bullies Bert and Ernie, whose names become a source of amusement. The film was originally slated to be directed by Spielberg, but he chose to spend time with his new family instead and gladly handed the directorial reigns to Burton and production to Lisa Henson in partnership with her father Jim as executive producer. It was the father and daughter’s first official work together since the Henson merger with Disney.

+

= this timeline’s film (with a twist of The Goonies)

And if all of this seems like an odd combination of talent, then you’re right, because this film had one of the oddest productions you’ve ever heard of. The film started life when writer David Kirshner and his daughter saw a black cat one night and Kirshner made up a story on the spot about it being a kid turned into a cat by witches long ago. The story became a screenplay that Disney CEO Ron Miller picked up in early 1984[4], where it became known as “Disney’s Haunted House”, possibly in reference to the Haunted Mansion attraction. Kirshner wanted Spielberg to direct, but at that point Spielberg wasn’t interested in working with Disney, as he’d hoped to spin up his own child-friendly competing brand. But then the 1984 ACC hostile takeover bid was launched and Spielberg suddenly found himself playing the White Knight for his Disney rivals! He became an “associate director of the board” and joined the production and hoped to direct, bringing in Goonies scribe Chris Columbus to script doctor. However, other projects took precedence, so production was delayed until 1988.

By then, Spielberg was a new father and wanted to be there for his son, so Tim Burton, by then the successful director of Jonathan Scissorhands, was asked to take over, which he did. Burton originally wanted River Phoenix and Winona Ryder as Max and Allison, but Phoenix was committed to the film Running on Empty and Ryder was committed to Heathers, the first time that Burton was denied his preferred collaborators. The selection of Barrymore was seen as a risky move, as the troubled child actor had just emerged from rehab for alcohol and cocaine addiction at the tender age of 13. Other studios weren’t touching her. Reportedly Spielberg, who was her Godfather, convinced Burton to choose her in an overt attempt to restart her life and career.

Hocus Pocus is truly a product of its time, a PG-rated teen horror-comedy in the vein of The Goonies or The Lost Boys and starring many of the same names. It retains that nightmare juice common to Disney and Henson productions of the time, but manages to layer in some borderline slapstick like in The Goonies, helping to soften the blow, making it a sort of transition piece. It also shares a diegetic pseudo-musical nature with Burton’s later Beetlejuice, with the witches singing Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ “I Put a Spell on You” (complete with Hawkins cameo in the band[5]) and other Halloween-ish songs during the run of the film. It features Creatureworks effects, most notably the kid-turned-cat Binks, and some epic makeup for the witches that transforms them into hideous monsters when their “true form” is revealed. Jim Henson’s hands can be seen all over this, with a story that’s clearly influenced by Roald Dahl, in particular The Witches, a book that Henson had expressed interest in making into a film[6]. It’s a miracle that they never got sued.

MAX: Really? You’re named Bert & Ernie? Like the Muppets?

ERNIE: (pushes Max) Shut up!

MAX: I guess I won’t ask about Rubber Duckie.

BERT & ERNIE (together): SHUT UP!!

The film begins in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1688 where 14-year-old Thackery Binks (Astin) witnesses his sister being abducted by witches. He tries to save her, but the three witches, sisters Winnifred, Mary, and Sarah Sanderson (Leachman, Bates, and Catrall) manage to steal his sister’s youth using a spell from their sentient spell book and turn Binks into a black cat, cursed with immortality. The witches are soon caught and hanged by the townspeople, but cast one last spell, vowing to return when “the black flame candle is lit by a virgin”. Binks, now a cat, calls out to his father (Doug Jones), but his cries sound like meows to his father, who chases him away. A little girl notices that Binks can talk, but her parents don’t believe her and drag her away, leaving Binks alone.

The film then flashes forward to the “present day” of 1988 where 14-year-old Max Dennison (Feldman) and his family have recently moved to Salem from Los Angeles. He’s a fish out of water who gets harassed by upperclassman bullies Bert and Ernie (Brolin and Nelson) and develops a crush on the beautiful Allison (Barrymore). For Halloween the class goes on a field trip to the “Old Sanderson Cottage” museum where the teacher exposits the legend of the Witches Three and the candle that will burn black if lit by a virgin on “the night of Samhain”, or Halloween. The legend is listed as the “inciting incident” for the later Salem Witch Trials. Max scoffs at the “local superstition”.

That night, he’s asked by his parents to take his little sister Dani trick-or-treating, which mortifies him. Eventually they end up at Allison’s house where Max flirts with the coy Allison, and finds out that Bert is her older brother. Bert & Ernie harass Max and dare him to break into the Old Sanderson Place with them. Dani tells him not to, but he wants to impress Allison, so he gives in. While there, he’s pressured by Bert & Ernie into lighting the black flame candle, releasing the Witches Three. They also meet Binks, who as a cat can only be understood by virgins. The witches smell out the “youth” of the teens and attempt to steal Dani’s youth for themselves. Max, however, uses trickery and his lighter to set off the fire sprinklers and the youth are able to escape, grabbing the witches’ spell book on the way out on the advice of Binks.

BERT: I dare you to light that candle, virgin!

MAX: First, witches are a myth, and second, I’m not a virgin, so nothing could possibly go wrong anyway, right? (goes to light the black flame candle)

VOICE (BINKS): No, you fool!!!

DANI: (scared) Max, don’t!

ALLISON: (nervous) Really, max, you don’t need to do this.

ERNIE: What, are you scared the old witches are going to break out through the floor, Max? Do it!

BERT & ERNIE chant “Do it! Do it!” over and over.

MAX goes to light the candle, but BINKS the cat attacks him.

MAX: Ah! Crazy cat!

MAX throws off BINKS and lights the candle, which burns with a black flame. Suddenly everything starts to shake and eerie green light glows from the floorboards. Everyone looks scared.

BINKS: (jumps up on the table) Oh, great, now you’ve done it!

All turn towards the cat and stare in amazement.

BERT: Wait, you can talk?

BINKS: Yes, but only virgins can hear me.

ERNIE: Well, that shows you because we’re not virgins! (beat) Oh… (looks embarrassed)

DANI: Um, can we just get out of here now?

Suddenly in a flash of fire and lightning the WITCHES THREE burst from the floorboards, cackling, as the youth run and hide.

The youth now go on the run from the pursuing witches. On the advice of Binks they shelter in the “Holy ground” of the graveyard, but the witches try to capture them from their brooms and then Winnie resurrects the corpse of Binks’s own father William Binks as a zombie[7] (Jones). This leads to a series of chase scenes and hijinks as the witches interact with the modern world, including one popular scene where they meet a man dressed as the devil, mistaking him for their “master”, much to the annoyance of his wife (cameos by Alice Cooper and his wife Sheryl Goddard[8]). They end up having their brooms stolen by kids while they hang with “master” and end up commandeering a modern broom, a mop, and an upright vacuum cleaner instead, which made the poster. In another scene they come across the town’s parents partying and Sarah leads her magical rendition of “I Put a Spell on You” that causes the adults to dance without stop, presumably until they die. The real Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, who’s playing in the band, complements her on her performance.

The ongoing fight sees the witches incinerated and supposedly defeated, and then sees Allison read their spell book and learn to use a circle of salt to block the witches’ magic. She’ll place a salt circle around the witches, which breaks their glamor, revealing their hideous, demonic “true forms”. This ultimately leads to the final showdown with the Witches[9] and Max and Allison getting together. But you'll just have to watch the film yourself, I won't describe it all here. And don't worry, kids, there's a happy ending.

Max and Allison kiss as the sun rises behind them, framing them in warm light.

BERT: Oh, hell no!

BERT starts to walk towards them, hands curled into fists, but he’s stopped by Ernie’s hand on his shoulder.

ERNIE: (tear in his eye) They make such a cute couple!

BERT: (pushes ERNIE) Dude, it’s my little sister!

Hocus Pocus was primarily filmed in Disney Studios with some location shots in Salem, Mass, and other locations around New England. The set design, costume design, and cinematography all have Burton’s fingerprints all over them, with just a touch German Expressionist and Victorian elements even when the action is in the 1980s or 1680s. Chiaroscuro, Dutch Angles, striped outfits, pale makeup, desaturated color, Danny Elfman score…the works. The results are creepy and scary, but not too traumatizing. And audiences agreed, making a good $68 million against its $19 million budget[10]. Nothing spectacular, but a good, solid film, particularly in the “dump month” October time slot. It also proved that Tim Burton’s earlier success as a director wasn’t a fluke and helped lead to his long-running career.

Sean Astin was delightful as Binks, Corey Feldman and Drew Barrymore had great screen chemistry together as Max and Allison (considering that they started dating while in production it wasn’t just good acting, apparently!), and Vinessa Shaw was adorable as Dani. But what made the film really work was the witches themselves. Chloris Leachman was her usual just-the-right-amount-of-over-the-top as eldest Sanderson sister Winnie, Kathy Bates was diabolically likeable as macabre middle-sister Mary, and Kim Catrall was delightfully seductive (and flighty) as youngest sister Sarah. The three witches devour every scene with cackling delight. Chloris Leachman manages to be domineering and crazy in just the right way. Kathy Bates demonstrates that “sweet and likeable” to “absolutely psychotic” switch-flip that she’s so damned good at. And Kim Cattrall manages to push more than one preteen boy a little further along the developmental pathway with her seductive performance of “I Put a Spell on You”. Seriously, a much as we all love Corey Feldman, Drew Barrymore, Josh Brolin, and Sean Astin, you could remove all of the teens from this picture and just watch the Witches Three for 90 minutes.

And while it’s hard to imagine anyone else in these roles, the truth is that others were considered. Angelica Huston was Jim Henson’s favorite for Winnie, but she had a conflict and instead went on to work with Burton in Beetlejuice. Michelle Pfeiffer was considered for Sarah, but turned down the role. Meg Ryan was considered, but passed over as “too wholesome”. And Rosie O’Donnell, still largely a “nobody” at the time, auditioned for Mary, but was passed over for Bates.

The film also generated some controversy, with the Wiccan community decrying it as “slanderous” to their faith[11]. Jim Henson did an interview with The Wiccan (now Pagan Dawn) where he expressed his own faith and beliefs, which were, he assured them, quite in line with Wicca and tried to assure them that it was all meant as a fun scary story based on the “myth” of witches rather than true Wicca. Since he’d also been the driving force behind The Dark Crystal and The Black Cauldron, which were largely loved in the Pagan/Wicca community, he was largely forgiven. However, the interview would cause Henson and Disney problems later.

Ten years after its release, the film has gone on to become a Halloween classic and continues to sell well on home media. The Disney Channel plays it every Halloween season, where it has become a holiday tradition. It’s considered a “criterion film” in the Tim Burton canon by fans and professionals alike, representing a pivotal moment in his career from up-and-comer to go-to director. It also marks a fun crossover between Spielberg, Burton, and Henson, capturing elements of all three of their unique interests and talents all the while retaining its own unique flavor.

As for those of us at Swords and Spaceships, well, we just can’t get enough of it.

---

[1] The part of the eldest witch Winnie was written with her in mind, but production dragged into the ‘90s and Bette Midler played the part in our timeline…a role that she absolutely loved playing. Alas, she’s doing “high concept” work for Hollywood Pictures in this timeline at the moment. And Requiem in Pace to Chloris Leachman, who passed away in January of 2021.

[2] Needless to say given the shared actor, there will be numerous fan crossover theories between Hocus Pocus and Where the Wild Things Are, even though the timelines clearly do not align.

[3] Fun with irony casting: she played Allison in the version from our timeline made in 1993.

[4] As happened in our timeline.

[5] Witch’s Hat Tip to @TheMolluskLingers.

[6] In our timeline he did Executive Produce a version of The Witches, and ran headlong into Dahl’s cantankerous dislike for the changes he made, in particular the happy ending. In this timeline he does Hocus Pocus and scratches that itch in ’88.

[7] Changed by Chris Columbus from Winnie’s ex-husband in order to increase the emotional stakes.

[8] Garry and Penny Marshall in our timeline. Different timeline means different connections.

[9] Effectively follows the same story beats at the film from our timeline, the big differences being the bullies are a main part of the cast and “Bert” (different name in our timeline) being Allison’s older brother. Also, the Witches have ugly “true forms” hidden under mystical glamours in a twist taken from The Witches by Dahl. No spoilers here for those who haven’t seen it.

[10] Better than Hocus Pocus did in our timeline thanks largely to the “Burton touch” giving it that unique look that clicked with audiences in the late ‘80s and from being more in line with the zeitgeist than in ’93 (performs largely on par with our timeline’s Beetlejuice). Did significantly better than The Witches, which got great reviews but was “screwed by the studio” when Lorimar got bought out by WB just before release and they screwed with the release dates and failed to promote it.

[11] A similar thing happened with The Witches (1990), which led Henson to do some damage control.

 

[Geekhis Khan]

Warning: the following post explores humanity at its ugliest. This is not a happy post and reader discretion is advised.

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Chapter 16: Building a New, Small World (Cont’d)
Excerpt from The King is Dead: The Walt Disney Company After Walt Disney, an Unauthorized History by Sue Donym and Arman N. Said

Henson’s new Child and Teen Actor Support Services were about to get their first major tests in 1988. It all started when producer Steven Spielberg convinced director Tim Burton to hire his Goddaughter Drew Barrymore for the role of love interest Allison in Hocus Pocus. This was compounded when Corey Feldman was subsequently brought in as the lead Max. Both had suffered from serious childhood traumas in the early ‘80s and both had histories of serious substance abuse. And just as Hocus Pocus centered around evil monsters stalking children, the real events behind the shiny veneer would end up exposing some of the worst that Hollywood had to offer for child actors.

Barrymore was practically the poster-girl for “troubled child actor” in 1988. Her father, renowned actor John Drew Barrymore, was a violent alcoholic who left the family when she was 6 months old. Her mother, Jaid, was herself a troubled actress with substance abuse issues and who treated Drew as an adult friend rather than a daughter. This included taking her as a child to the notorious Club 54 in New York where drugs and sex were the norm. Barrymore reported that she began putting Bailey’s Liqueur on her ice cream at age 7 and was doing cocaine by age 12. By age 13 she’d had a mental breakdown and a cocaine addiction and had been committed to a rehabilitation facility by her mother[1]. When she emerged from rehab, she went into production on Hocus Pocus even as other studios laughed her out the door as “damaged goods”.

Barrymore and Feldman at the 1989 Academy Awards

“Yea, Steve [Spielberg] saved me,” she said in a later interview. “He’d always been like the rock that grounded me, even when mom and the studios were sending me into a very crazy orbit. I felt like I could tell him anything and that he’d support me, and yet I didn’t tell him much. I’d always stop shy of involving him in the biggest issues. I tried to keep my problems to myself and not drag him into them[2].

“I knew that the career had been hard on her, but I didn’t realize until she’d been committed just how bad it had gotten.” said Spielberg. “It was an awakening for me, particularly as a new father, that I had to put aside my own childish ways and take further responsibility, not just for my son, but for the other kids under my [professional] care.”

Barrymore emerged in fairly good shape from her stay, citing the time as an important experience. Still, though, the return to the crazy life of LA youth culture would prove a challenge. On set she and Corey Feldman developed a relationship[3]. Feldman was, at this point, addicted to heroin.

“They were like two broken birds who’d found one another,” said an anonymous friend whom we shall call “Tommy”. “The big question was whether Drew could pull Corey out of the abyss or whether he’d drag her back in.”

Feldman and his friend Corey Haim had endured the worst that Hollywood had to offer. By age 16 both had reportedly suffered from sexual assault and rape at the hands of trusted family friends. Both had gravitated towards drugs as an escape from the ugliness of their reality.

“Like any place where children gather away from their parents, be it schools, camps, youth sports, scouts, or sadly even some religious organizations, Hollywood had its predators,” said Tommy. “The worst offenders were Alphy’s [Hoffman] crew down at Alphy’s Soda Pop Club, which was a club for underage actors where parents were few and where alcohol and drugs could be had if you know who to ask. But Alphy was a creep and he and his crew used to hang out there and, like, groom kids for abuse, to be blunt. Him, Jon Grissom, Marty Weiss, and others I dare not name…total scum.” [Editor’s note: Grissom and Weiss have both been convicted of child molestation and sexual assault. Hoffman denied the allegations[4]]

“We started to realize that something was wrong,” said Lisa Henson in a later interview. “Drew was bright eyed and enthusiastic at first, and then, well, suddenly she wasn’t. We noticed signs of self-abuse and drugs. Corey was increasingly late, and showed up one day obviously on something. The councilors talked to them. We dug deeper. Sure enough, both Drew and Corey were using again.”

“I’d slipped back into Coke,” said Barrymore, “But Corey was doing Horse. I never touched the stuff. I knew exactly how much darkness was in me, and I knew exactly where the line was. I knew that if I tried H, I’d never escape it alive[5]. I was getting bugged by my dad, who wanted money, Corey was having a very hard time…he’d been having nightmares over what had happened to him and Corey Haim. We’d hang with Corey H., but he was having an even harder time.”

Disney councilors talked to Feldman and Barrymore. In time, stories of assault and rape came out from Feldman, and the councilors were legally obligated at that point, despite the councilor-client privilege, to report the abuse to the FBI. An investigation eventually turned up evidence of drugs and underage drinking at Alphy’s, and authorities collected accounts of assault and rape. Alphy’s was forcibly closed in 1988 following multiple state and federal charges for violating drug and alcohol rules. Alphy himself managed to settle out of court with his accusers and was never formally charged, but the negative publicity made him “damaged goods” in Hollywood and the target of harassment. He took his own life by gunshot in 1994, maintaining his innocence in his suicide note. Jon Grissom and Marty Weiss were arrested, tried, and convicted based on the accounts of multiple witnesses. Others in Hollywood faced similar charges over the following years with some arrests, some settlements, and some people simply disappearing from the limelight[6].

This would be the start of a massive and very public investigation into the treatment of children in acting, not just in Hollywood, but across the country. California expanded upon the California Child Actor's Bill (the so-called Jackie Coogan Act) with the Federal Government implementing similar laws in 1991 with strong bipartisan support. Those who worked with child actors would, like educators, medical professionals, and child therapists, be subject to background checks and “two in the room” mandates. Vetted chaperones would be required at businesses marketed for underage persons. While this certainly didn’t end abusive practices, but rather drove them further into the shadows, there was a statistical drop in the number of abuse cases reported to therapists and authorities as the more flagrant abuse cells, the ones which operated at the edge of plain sight, the ones that people just “didn’t want to see” since the abusers were well-connected and profitable allies, were broken up.

It would be nice to say that everything ended on a happy note. While the number of objectively false accusations was greatly exaggerated in a deliberate disinformation campaign, there were a few high-profile cases of people getting caught up in accusations without evidence and seeing their careers sidetracked. LGBTQ rights groups became unfairly targeted, particularly by an awakened Save Our Children organization led by singer and anti-gay activist Anita Bryant in alliance with Jerry Falwell. Combined with growing anti-gay sentiment due to victim blaming resulting from the AIDS crisis, it led to a surge in hate speech and hate crimes against LGBTQ people.

In the most extreme case of backlash, NAMBLA headquarters was burned to the ground in an unsolved case of arson in what even the most outspoken child rights activists called “an unacceptable use of violence” even as they condemned the organization’s overt aims at decriminalizing child sex abuse. Speculation remains that it was an inside job done for the insurance, though evidence to support this claim is sparse. While very few people or groups have come to NAMBLA’s defense as an organization, and those who have almost unanimously have done so for free speech reasons alone, nearly all have spoken out against violence of any type as unacceptable.

And alas, as too often happens, the victims themselves also suffered backlash. Corey Feldman and Corey Haim in particular became the target of anonymous harassers that Feldman called “the wolfpack”. The stress of it all, combined with the constant press barrage following their testimonies, drove them both deeper into substance abuse. “Corey [Feldman] became increasingly sullen,” recalled Barrymore. “I knew that he was using again even though we’d decided to go sober together earlier that year. He was increasingly angry and shoved me to the ground at one point. He apologized, and left. He refused to speak to me after a while, out of shame or fear of hurting me, I suspect, and we sort of drifted apart.”

In October of 1989 Corey Haim died from a heroin overdose. Friends speculated on whether it was accident or suicide. Feldman, who admitted to a mutual friend that he had given Haim the heroin, blamed himself. In March of 1990 he lost control while driving at excessive speed through the Hollywood Hills after dark. He drove off the road and was killed in the ensuing crash. His autopsy showed excessive amounts of alcohol and various drugs in his system. It was ruled an accident, though friends and family suspect suicide. Barrymore and Lisa Henson would later produce the celebrated and controversial documentary Lost Boys: An Elegy for Two Coreys, directed by Abigal Disney, that described their lives, the abuse, and their tragic deaths and served as an elegy for all of the “Lost Boys” and “Lost Girls” of Hollywood.

Barrymore slipped back into substance abuse following the Corey’s deaths and was later rushed to the hospital after an apparent suicide attempt at 14, though Barrymore maintains that she was shallow-cutting as a cry for help. Barrymore spoke of the event later: “Steve and Lisa helped get me back into rehab, helped be gain emancipation and live as a legal adult, and then got me a place to stay with [folk musician] David Crosby, who was committed to sobriety and wanted to give me a safe and sober place to live. I won’t say that I immediately went sober and never looked back, but, like it was the start of turning things around. I’d gone through my midlife crisis at 14. And yea, boo-hoo, mommy had me committed. Life can fucking suck, but it seriously could have been worse for me.”

When asked about the Coreys, Barrymore became quiet. “It was a goddamned American tragedy. Life as a child star is hard enough when you’re not the target of sickoes. [The Coreys] were victims. Every so often some NAMBLA-head starts complaining to me about the fucking ‘witch hunt’ and blames them for somehow starting it. Only the advice of my attorney keeps me from kicking them in the fucking balls. Don’t play the fucking victim card with me. I know the actual victims. Corey and Corey never ‘consented’ to shit. It frankly fucked them up. I thought that I was fucked up until I had frank talks with the Coreys.”

“Tommy” was blunter. “Corey H. was 13 when he was fucking raped. He never recovered from the trauma. It ultimately fucking killed him. Corey F. too. The assholes who did that to them aren’t just rapists, they’re fucking murderers.”

Barrymore seemed to agree. “They called it a ‘witch hunt’. Well, guess what, there were actual fucking ‘witches’ abusing those kids. I’ve got no fucking sympathy for them.”

---

[1] All true in our timeline. She’d end up back in rehab at 14 after an apparent suicide attempt (Barrymore maintains that it was an attention-seeking “shallow cut” and that she hadn’t seriously considered taking her own life).

[2] She expressed similar views on her Godfather in our timeline. She apparently didn’t confide much in him, and he of his own occasionally intervened to give her guidance and support. So despite some rumors of him leaving her in the lurch, my research indicates that he’d have done more for her if she’d let him.

[3] They dated in our timeline at this time too.

[4] Author’s Note: Grissom and Weiss were both convicted of sexual assault in the early 2000s in our timeline. Hoffman has been accused, but never charged or convicted. Here’s an article describing the allegations against Alphy’s Soda Pop Club. I have no personal knowledge one way or another as to the truth of any of these allegations. “Tommy” is a fictionalized representation of the accounts of the several witnesses to Alphy’s club in our timeline and can be assumed to be one of them in this timeline, though I’ll not assign a specific name.

[5] Barrymore has said similar things in our timeline.

[6] Over the years various Hollywood actors, producers, and other industry people have been accused of such deeds. I won’t speculate here who is accused, convicted, etc. of such crimes. I’m trying to stick with the known facts here. Some specific infamous names will appear in later posts.

 

[Geekhis Khan]

Chapter 7: David looking for a Goliath
Excerpt from Man of Iron: The Michael Eisner Story, an unauthorized biography by Anthony Edward Stark

By 1988 Hollywood Pictures had a several hits under its belt, like Down and Out in Beverly Hills, The Color of Money, Outrageous Fortune, and Three Men and a Baby, as well as a few middling performers, like Tough Guys[1], Ernest Goes to Camp, Stakeout, and Can’t Buy Me Love. Others didn’t do nearly as well, like My Science Project and Off Beat, the latter a critically liked movie doomed by mis-marketing. Meanwhile, Dead Poets Society, directed by Peter Weir and starring Liam Neeson[2], was in production and would prove a hit the following summer, earning several Oscar nominations and winning for Best Original Screenplay. Nearly all of these films followed the “limited budget-undervalued actors-high concept” triad of Eisner’s “Formula”. The Formula appeared to be working and Eisner and Katzenberg’s cache in Hollywood was skyrocketing.

With this success came a growing budget and staff. Even so, the ambitious Eisner looked for opportunities to expand into new areas, in particular feature animation. Perhaps the rebuke of Disney still stung. Whatever the case, Eisner learned that Disney’s next animated project following Where the Wild Things Are was to be based upon the book Mistress Masham’s Repose, a story where a little girl interacts with a secret world of Lilliputians. He immediately smelled disaster. The layered satire of colonialism was at odds with The Formula, being as far from “high concept” as possible. Worse yet, it starred a girl protagonist, which Jeff Katzenberg remarked would cut revenues by 25-50%. And worst of all, it was based upon a 1940s novel far out of the collective memory.

There was some buzz in the studio to consider animation after Wild Things’ success, but Eisner saw a different opportunity. One of his children had watched the show The Littles on Saturday Mornings years before[3]. He and Jeff could relaunch that franchise on film, debuting a week before Mistress Masham, now called A Small World, and thereby make Disney into the “copycat” in the public eye. This would be the last nail in the coffin for Disney’s return to feature animation, thereby potentially crippling the studio for a while. Eisner and Katzenberg approached DIC Entertainment and sold them on the idea that The Littles were ripe for a renaissance, piggybacking off of the Disney hype while simultaneously putting the Mouse in their place. For a modest investment of a few million dollars, DIC and Hollywood could split a gross of up to $40 million. They just needed a good script.

Eisner and Katzenberg rejected about 25 scripts that DIC sent to them before finally just sending them a copy of the screenplay for National Lampoon’s Vacation and essentially saying “do this”. Even then, Eisner had the screenplay they got back severely doctored. The result was Return of the Littles and involved the Littles travelling with the Bigg family on a road trip across the country to visit the “Giantland” theme park, an obvious parody of Disneyland. It was a good screenplay that added some depth to the generally superficial relationships of the Littles. However, the sheer audacity of the screenplay, with its road trip aspect and the complex third act set pieces that had the Littles scrambling to make it through the gears and roller coaster wheels of the park, were intimidating to the animators given the budgetary limitations. Furthermore, Eisner and Katzenberg refused to give them more than a $12 million budget, in keeping with The Formula that insisted that lower budgets force creative innovation. While this can certainly be true for a live action picture, the inherent time and materials costs associated with animation limit what measures can be taken to cut costs without sacrificing quality.

Things became further confused in 1986 when DIC began experiencing severe financial difficulties thanks to rising production costs in Japan. Eisner talked ABC CEO Thomas S. Murphy into buying up the troubled studio, which was integrated into Hollywood Pictures as “Hollywood Animation”. Eisner assigned Katzenberg to run the new acquisition, which he did in his usual heavy-handed way, soon becoming known among the animators as “The DIC Head”. The DIC animators and producers struggled to explain the limitations of animation to him and how it was different than live action. For example, there was no “master” or “extra takes” and you couldn’t just cut and paste in editing since the sound and movement were intrinsically integrated into the action on the one and only copy of the original film reel. Post-animators at Animation City Editorial Services in Canada looked on in horror as Katzenberg took a pair of scissors to a length of film and started cutting and taping the pieces back together as you would when editing a live action show[4].

The results were incredibly disjointed. Furthermore, the rushed schedule to meet the November 1988 deadline and the limited budget forced further shortcuts on the part of the animators, who made extensive reuse of scenes and poses and often drew on the “fives” or even “sixes” to reduce the cost and accelerate the production.

The final movie was a mix of clever written scenes and dialog, cut-rate animation, and choppy, awkward motion and scene transitions. Katzenberg tried again to edit things himself, but only made things worse. Alas, the deadline was here and the movie released on schedule. Eisner and Katzenberg hoped that it wouldn’t matter, particularly since the aim of the film was ultimately to undercut Disney rather than mark any meaningful foray into feature animation. All said, the results were nothing to be proud of for anyone involved, and the whole thing ultimately became an important lesson-learned for Eisner and Katzenberg on the limits of animation as a medium[5].

Even with the questionable results of Return of the Littles, Eisner was starting to gain influence within ABC beyond his immediate area of control, with producers from other areas like television consulting with him. He convinced Stoddard to allow Hollywood Pictures and Animation to expand into the TV arena on a trial basis, creating Hollywood Pictures Television, or HPTV, on basic cable. He pursued several animated television shows, ultimately resulting in Adventures of the Gummi Bears and Miximals. But Eisner also wanted to get into live action television, resulting in the short lived western Wildside and the popular four-year sitcom Tool Time[6] starring Jeff Doucette.

Eisner also took aim at his old bosses at Paramount and at the old franchise that he used to produce: Star Trek. Even before Star Trek: The Next Generation officially aired on PFN in 1987[7], Eisner knew about the long running attempts to bring Trek back to the small screen. Eisner and Katzenberg wanted to build a competing show. But what? At first, he approached George Lucas about Star Wars. It was the natural place to go given that ABC had hosted the recent Ewaaks made for TV movies and the Droids and Ewaaks cartoons. They kicked around a few ideas, but Lucas was unenthusiastic about any of them[8] and demanded a level of quality that would have been very costly to produce. Furthermore, Lucas’s ILM was busy doing the effects for Willow and Star Trek. Discussions fell apart quickly, though Lucas suggested that Eisner could talk to Disney Imagineering for effects.

Eisner and Katzenberg tasked their staff with coming up with new ideas for the Science Fiction series. They wanted an existing IP with an established fandom, but a universe expansive enough for them to be able to go from planet to planet and location to location without having to stay tied to an over-plot, making the show easy for episodic television[9].

Eventually, someone proposed Larry Niven’s Known Space setting. Full of crazy aliens and crazier planets, an immersive backstory, and most notably, the impossibly huge “Ringworld” itself, offering potentially unlimited biomes to visit, Known Space appeared to offer everything that a good Sci-Fi series would need. The biggest production challenge would be the special effects, particularly since so many of the Known Space aliens went far beyond the “rubber forehead” humanoid aliens common to the Star Trek universe. But Eisner knew just who to talk to: Disney’s Creatureworks, even as he secretly worked to undermine their upcoming animation feature.

With Ringworld chosen for production, Eisner dispatched Katzenberg to secure the rights to the setting from Larry Niven. Katzenberg secured the rights not just to Ringworld and the Known Space setting, to include the popular Gil “The Arm” Hamilton stories, but also secured the rights to the unrelated Draco’s Tavern stories. This latter acquisition would ultimately prove critical since there was one crucial gap in the acquired rights that would greatly complicate production on the Ringworld television series.

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[1] In this timeline when the Burt Lancaster character goes with his younger girlfriend to see the Red Hot Chili Peppers, among the faces in the audience are Jim Henson and his then-girlfriend Emily Hotchkiss.

[2] Weir’s original choice for the role. I loved Robin Williams in that role (who didn’t?!), but I’d absolutely see it with Neeson.

[3] Speculating here. It was a pretty popular cartoon at the time.

[4] This mirrors what happened in our timeline in 1984 when Eisner assigned Katzenberg with the job of “fixing” the animation department and he came in like Atilla to Rome. Read about the results in Steve Hulett’s Mouse in Transition blog starting here.

[5] Katzenberg in our timeline to his great credit eventually took the time to learn the craft and thus became an expert in animation production. The Disney Renaissance and the success of Dreamworks SKG are a testament to his ability to learn and move forward. Unfortunately, a lot of real talent and some promising projects were lost in the process.

[6] The Gummi Bears mirrors the Disney cartoon from our timeline while Miximals are essentially The Wuzzles. Wildside is effectively the same as the show from our timeline. Tool Time is Home Improvement three years earlier, but only becomes a middling success.

[7] Ran in syndication in our timeline.

[8] Are you really surprised? Essentially, Eisner wants something action oriented, relatively cheap, and episodic that can take advantage of existing sets and recycle special effects. Lucas wants something more child friendly like Caravan of Courage with minimal effects that can be filmed relatively cheap, but still display a high level of quality. Among the ideas pitched by Eisner were a show that followed a ragtag bunch of smugglers and rebels hiding from the empire and a pseudo-western starring Boba Fett, a character whose popularity Lucas never really “got”.

[9] In the days before streaming and binging, having a meta-plot could be a barrier to building an audience (try starting a bingable series halfway through and out of order and see how confused you get), particularly since shows could be preempted, missed, or played in no particular order. As such, “Monster of the Week” plots were typical since audiences could watch them in any order and not really miss anything.

 

[Geekhis Khan]

“Known Space” Gets Better Known (1988)
From Nostalgia was Way Better when I was a Kid Netsite, Aug. 21st, 1999

Space, the Only Frontier in Television yet to be permanently colonized by anyone not named Rodenberry. From the Golden Age of black & white and Lost in Space to the Silver Age of post-Star Wars cash-ins to the current Bronze Age, many have risen, but few have persevered.

And one of the best attempts, and one which maintains a dedicated cult following to this day, was 1988-1991’s Ringworld, based upon the Known Space series of stories by SciFi author Larry Niven, with a splash of Draco’s Tavern, a twist of Mos Eisley, and a soupçon of Kung Fu and Bonanza all shaken over Indiana Jones and poured into a Star Trek shaped container. And much like other movies and TV shows I’ve covered here in the past, Ringworld makes us ask, “can beauty come out of ugliness?” For, let’s face it, Ringworld owes its existence to the fact that Michael Eisner of Hollywood/ABC wanted revenge. You see, he was basically run out of town at Paramount, rejected by Disney, and had largely fallen back to his old haunts at ABC as the head of Hollywood Pictures, and later Hollywood Animation and Hollywood Television. And as the former driving force behind the return of Star Trek to the big screen, he was ready to strangle his old baby rather than see it fall into the hands of another daddy.

At first, he tried to produce a Star Wars series. Naturally. Hell, ABC had an existing relationship with George Lucas via Caravan of Courage and its sequel and the Droids and Ewaaks cartoons produced by Disney Animation. But Eisner wanted to Trekify Star Wars while Lucas wanted more fucking Ewaaks or something, so the deal died in utero and Eisner and co. went looking for another option.

In stepped Larry Niven. Or, rather, in stepped Jeff Katzenberg into Niven’s life. The Known Space setting was perfect, after all. It lent itself to both Trek-style galaxy-crossing adventures and Indiana Jones style exploration of new civilizations on the mysterious Ringworld itself, an orbit-spanning artificial world built at one astronomical unit around a Sol-like yellow dwarf sun…a near endless earth to explore and a near infinite level of possibility. It was also full of unique alien species that ranged from somewhat familiar in form (the cat-man Kzinti), to truly bizarre (the sessile Grogs), to some combination thereof (the obnoxious Pierson’s Puppeteers). It had Space Spies like Gil Hamilton, Comic Relief Aliens like Nessus, and even a Space Bartender in Rick Schumann.

And for those three Known Space fans who haven’t seen the series, yes, Rick Schumann is not a part of Niven’s Known Space, but the main character from the Draco’s Tavern series of unrelated Niven stories. You see, when Katzenberg negotiated the rights with Niven, he also acquired the Draco rights as an excuse for Niven to squeeze out another $20,000 in licensing royalties. This afterthought turned out to be a lifesaver for the series…and the biggest source of fan anger. Because for all the rights, worlds, and characters acquired by ABC, there was one crucial species that was lacking: the cat-like Kzinti, nemesis from the Man-Kzin Wars stories/backstory, and the species behind one of the central characters of Ringworld, Speaker-to-Animals.

Kzinti in Star Trek: The Animated Series (Image source “memory-alpha.fandom.com”)

It turns out that in the 1970s, during the short run of Star Trek: The Animated Series, Niven sold the rights to the Kzinti to Paramount as a Star Trek race. Oops.

Katzenberg approached Paramount about buying back the rights…and was shown the door. Instead, Star Trek: The Next Generation S1:E19 introduced Lieutenant Trass, a Kzinti Star Fleet officer, just to reinforce the rights and poison the well for Hollywood/ABC. Paramount knew why Eisner was producing Ringworld (they weren’t dummies) and were having none of it. No sell. ABC needed a new Big Scary Alien species to fill in the Kzinti-shaped hole. They considered using a Pak Protector, but Eisner didn’t like the “old man” angle. So, they imported the Chirps.

The Lovely Lady on the Right is a Chirp (presumably Rick Schumann on the left; Image source “jamesdavisnicoll.com”)

The Chirpsithra, or “Chirps”, are 11-foot tall (reduced to 8-foot for the TV show for logistical reasons), insect-like species from Draco’s Tavern who farm headless human clones for food and are utterly terrifying to behold. And yet, ironically, they fear humans since any species that “willingly poisons itself” for recreational purposes is surely no one to fuck with. Even though the Chirps, who live on tidal-locked planets close to red dwarf stars, would have no reason to war with humans, the setting was retconned in the TV universe to “find-replace all” “Kzin” to “Chirp”, with the “Man-Chirp Wars” becoming a critical point of backstory.

So, the series went forward as a sort of hybrid of Ringworld, Gil “The Arm” Hamilton, and Draco’s Tavern centered somewhat loosely around the events of the Ringworld novel series, with plot lines from the other stories lifted and repurposed into episodes. The story would follow Louis Gridley Wu, Nessus the Pierson’s Puppeteer, Speaker-to-Animals (now a Chirp), Gil Hamilton, and Teela Brown as they explored the newly discovered Ringworld on a week-by-week basis, with occasional jaunts around the galaxy in Wu’s not-at-all-based-on-the-Millennium-Falcon-trust-us space ship “The Lucky Dragon”, just to remind viewers that this was “Sci-Fi”. Draco’s Tavern and its characters and clientele were relocated from Earth to “Draco Station”, a small exploratory colony founded on the Ringworld. Gil “The Arm” Hamilton, meanwhile, joined the regular cast, his arm now cybernetic rather than some psychic “phantom limb” in order to both cut effects costs and so as not to “confuse” the morons at home. The agency he served became the Galactic Surveillance and Intelligence Department (GSID) rather than the campy “ARM” (Amalgamation of Regional Militia) from the stories.

Each week the characters would explore the Ringworld or some faraway planet, face its Peril/Monster/Challenge/big glowy thing of the week, and live (save for the occasional equivalent of a Red Shirt) to tell the tale over drinks at Draco’s Tavern.

Needless to say, the fandom openly accepted the pragmatic changes with hardly a complaint. Oh, and did I mention that I have green, temperate real estate for sale on the sunny side of Mercury? Act now, supplies are limited!

Yea, the hard-core Known Space fandom was not happy with the changes, but the average Sci-fi fan couldn’t care less and enjoyed the show. Since it was produced at a time when the Internet was only populated by a handful of college “use-net” nerds, the complaints were largely contained to Cons and trade mags. Instead, most Sci-Fi fans were happy to have a new TV option, though pissed when ABC at first ran it head to head against season 2 of PFN’s ST:TNG. Thankfully, once TNG managed to soundly kick Ringworld’s ass through sheer Brand Recognition power, ABC moved the series to HPTV on basic cable where it squeezed out three struggling seasons.

Now, thanks to syndication and VHS, and then VCD, Ringworld the Series has managed to live on and build a strong cult following, ironically much as Trek did before it. And despite the changes from the source material and its vengeance-based origins, it is frankly a great series for its time. It was the first Sci-Fi series to focus on a non-white lead. You had the great Dennis Dun, previously best known to nerds for his role as the true hero in Big Trouble in Little China, as Louis Gridley Wu, the 200-year-old man who, thanks to “science”, looks like he’s in his late 20s or early 30s. Dun did a great job in playing the “old man” despite being a young actor, and got to use his Kung Fu moves to fight monsters and aliens and natives (oh shit!). In an era where gross Asian stereotypes somehow still pervaded movies and TV alike, it was ahead of its time. Even “arch-progressive” Star Trek took until the 1990s to cast a non-white-male as a lead.

Pierson’s Puppeteer (Image source Barlowe's Guide to Extraterrestrials)

Wu was joined by two aliens, each brought to life by Disney’s Creatureworks (which caused some tensions on set after Hollywood Pictures ran The Littles up against A Small World). These were Nessus, a three-legged, two-snake-headed Pierson’s Puppeteer, and Speaker-to-Animals, a Chirp. In what can be seen as either a fan-service coup or a desperate attempt to attract Sci-Fi fans, the former was voiced by Star Wars alum Anthony Daniels (a.k.a. C-3PO) and the latter voiced by disgruntled ex-TNG cast member Denise Crosby, who was happy to play (or at least voice) the badass Speaker from the female-dominated Chirpsithra. While Speaker was a straight-forward full-body suit worn by an actor on stilts (with remote animatronic hands and face), Nessus was a TV practical effects coup for the time, with scenes alternating between a full-sized “walkaround” puppet (whose puppeteer had his hands in the “heads” and his feet in the “forelegs”, with a third puppeteer off-camera controlling the third “back leg”), and a “Muppet” version for close-ups. As a running meta-gag, Nessus hated the human name for his species, “Pierson’s Puppeteer”, insisting righteously that he was “not a puppet!”

The two characters proved to be great foils for each other, with Crosby’s Speaker being a savage, brave, and bloodthirsty warrior and Nessus being a righteous coward, the irony being that by the standards of his species, who considered cowardice to be a cardinal virtue, he was “insanely brave”.

And yes, Nessus has more than his share of haters and has been declared the “Scrappy Doo” of Ringworld on more than one occasion.

Added to this main cast was Gilgamesh “Gil” Hamilton, played by veteran TV “cool guy” Dirk Benedict of Battlestar Galactica and A-Team fame, arguably another blatant attempt to bait Sci-Fi fans. As stated before, he was now an agent of GSID rather than ARM and had a cybernetic arm rather than a “phantom limb”. Gil added a love triangle aspect with Teela while also adding in the hot-shot “plays by his own rules” bad boy that every ‘80s/’90s TV show was required by law to have. Rounding out the central cast was Teela Brown (Kim Fields), who played the “young and naïve” adventurer and potential love interest for both Wu and Gil, and who’s name created unending “He Man” jokes and crossover theories, particularly when it was revealed that story manager J. Michael Staczynski[1] used to storyboard for She-Ra. Needless to say, the novel’s schtick about her being Wu’s long-since descendent was dropped to avoid the inevitable incestuous subtext.

And if it seems dismissive of me to list her last, well, that’s because that’s how the show’s writers for the most part treated her: an add-on. The Chick. Straczynski reportedly tried to give her a larger role, but executives kept cutting out the “Chick sub-plots” assuming that they’d alienate the show’s target young male demographic.

“Yea, young men hate seeing attractive women fighting monsters,” Straczynski reportedly shot back with as much sarcasm as possible.

But the producers weren’t done yet, as they added the supporting characters of Rick Schumann (Mario Van Peebles) and 2E-94 or “Tooey” (voiced by Christopher Hewitt of Mr. Belvedere fame), who together ran Draco’s Tavern. Rick became both the bartender “confidant” and “fountain of wisdom” as well as using his boxing skills on occasion to help out the main cast. Tooey was a hovering, 6-armed, drink-mixing robot with a digital face based on Jim Henson’s old “Limbo”[2] character, and was a dispenser of both dry wit and dry martinis. Tooey was brought cleverly to life by the Creatureworks using a steady-cam rig to simulate the “hover”.

Pak and Grog (Image sources “wikimedia” and “larryniven.fandom.com”)

Finally, there were the recurring characters, who were some of the fan favorites. First there was Benjamin Bratt’s “Seeker”, a Ringworld native who tended to fluctuate between “noble savage” trope and “magical native” trope depending on the writer, and who offered yet a third potential love interest for Teela, who by this point was being slut-shamed by fans. There was a juvenile Pak who was known as “The Kid” despite his tall stature (voiced by Johnathan Winters in yet another Sci-Fi in-joke). And finally, there was the snarky snitch/information broker at the back of Draco’s Tavern, a Grog voiced by John Cleese via a computerized “translator”. Originally a one-time throwaway character in S1:E6 “Word of Grog”, fan-love brought the nameless Grog back as a recurring character, where he gained the name “Beedemil” or “Beed”, which was the Creatureworks design team’s nickname for the sessile (i.e. unmoving) alien.

Get it? He’s “Beedemil” because he’s “sessile”. Seriously, I won’t explain it; you figure it out.

The combined results of all of these pieces were delightfully batshit. Fans have compared it to a cross between OG ‘60s Start Trek, the ‘70s Buck Rogers series, the original Star Wars (i.e. Episode IV), and a bit of “Pigs in Space”, though this latter is really just a joke on the Muppets connection. It had fistfights, bar fights, space ships, explosions, spies, assassins, angry natives, mysterious ancients, ruined temples, snarky robots, obnoxious aliens, sexy space tyrants, star pirates, love triangles, bromances, spats, arguments, makeups, breakups, teamwork, and a Grog in a Pear Tree…err…at the back of a seedy bar. It was a Sci-Fi kitchen sink of all the tropes and clichés of your favorite TV Sci-Fi shows shamelessly thrown together into a mélange of unapologetic crazy awesome.

Anyway, Ringworld made it through three seasons, two-and-a-half of them on the newly launched HPTV, before calling it quits due to flat ratings. The show has its faults and betrays some of the casual clichés and stereotypes of its day, but damned if it isn’t fun popcorn viewing. It has maintained a cult following and led to many a fan-fight between “Bookies” and “Showies” over whether the Ringworld books or the show were better. “Trekkers” and “Ringers”, despite some animus when the show first aired, maintain a mostly friendly rivalry to this day, as do the small but fanatical “Buckaroos”, who I’ll get to in a future installment. Nessus remains a favorite cosplay for both fans of the character and shameless trolls alike. There’s talk about an upcoming reboot series on HPTV[3].

Altogether, Ringworld marks a bold new step in TV Sci-Fi that, despite its vengeance-driven origins and divergence from the source material, remains a favorite of Sci-Fi fans to this day.

And yes, readers and commenters, it is possible for me to talk about things that didn’t give me childhood trauma. You freakin’ happy now?!?

I need a Xanax.

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[1] More on him in a future installment.

[2]

[3] The Hollywood Pictures TV station (basic cable) eventually launched a CG-heavy reboot in 2004. It was darker and edgier and managed to find a completely different, more disaffected and cynical audience, leading to a huge second split in the fandom between the “old” and “new” series.