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

[Geekhis Khan]

The 6 Best Non-Franchise (at the time) Action Films 1989
From Six in Violence Netsite, November 23th, 1999

Yea, we all remember Back to the Future 2 or Ghostbusters 2 or Willow 2 or Lethal Weapon 2 or Star Trek 5 or Indiana Jones 3. But what about those non-franchise films? So here we go again, another Six in Violence, this time for 1989.

#6 Farewell to the King: It has been called “Milius’ Apocalypse Now”, which is screamingly ironic given that Apocalypse Now was a Milius passion project to begin with. Farewell to the King underperformed at the box office where its dark tones alienated audiences and where it was ironically unfairly compared to Apocalypse Now by critics, but has become a beloved cult classic since, even as controversy surrounds it. Farewell to the King is the story of American WWII deserter Learoyd (Nick Nolte) who escapes a Japanese death squad and becomes the God King of a tribe of Bornean headhunters because his blue eyes are seen as divine. As their God King, Learoyd decides to fight the British rather than rejoin the war or western society. It’s a dark and moody film that addresses issues of civilization vs. savagery, freedom vs. servitude, and human nature. Some have called it a racist film that promotes white superiority with its use of some old 19th Century tropes[1], while others see it as a justified criticism of the hypocrisies of western “civilization”. Like other Milius films, it has become a darling of the political right. And it nearly didn’t come to be as we know it, for original distributors Orion got into an editing war with Milius[2]. Thankfully Universal stepped in and took over the production, allowing Milius to edit his own picture in exchange for doing the third Conan film. Despite its controversy and problematic tropes, Farewell to the King is a moody and atmospheric film and, in my opinion, truly is Milius’s Apocalypse Now.

#5 The Set Up: So, this movie did well at the theaters but mediocre with the critics. Audiences loved the buddy-cop chemistry between Patrick Swayze’s Ray Tango and Bruce Willis’s Gabe Cash[3], even if the script was crapped on by critics. But yea, Swayze’s slick charm as the fancy, wealthy Beverly Hills detective and Willis’s “everyman” charm as the blue collar LA cop meshed well, and that makes this amazingly violent buddy cop popcorn flick, well, pop. It follows the two mismatched cops as they get (you guessed it) set up for a murder, wrongly imprisoned, and then have to escape from prison and clear their names by defeating the evil crime lord Yves Perret (Jack Palance) who had set them up to begin with. It is violent as hell in the most ‘80s action movie way possible, pushing the bounds even for an R rating. It found a new life in VHS and VCD and remains a cult classic today.

#4 Honey, I Shrunk the Kids!: Sometimes a film that begins as one thing becomes another. Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, the sequel to 1986’s InnerSpace, began as a completely different script titled “Teeny Weenies” written by Stuart Gordon and produced by Brian Yuzna. And originally the main character was named Wayne Szalinski and was a freelance inventor who lived in Fresno, and was reportedly written with Chevy Chase in mind. However, once Gordon and Yuzna brought the film to Disney, the resemblance to the popular 1986 Disney film was unmistakable, so Wayne Szalinski was changed to be Jack Putter from the earlier film, a role reprised by Rick Moranis. And yes, technically this was already a franchise film when it released, but you didn’t know that now, did you? Anyway, Putter, now living in Fresno, is trying to reinvent the shrinking technology, which was seized by the government as “dangerous” after the events of the prior film. And while there is a brief cameo by Lt. Tuck Pendleton (Jeff Bridges), this film is all about Putter and his kids, whom he accidentally shrinks in a system test. The rest of the film follows the kids as they navigate the dangers of their own back yard and try to reunite with their dad so that he can re-enlarge them, with a small subplot involving Putter attempting to hide his shrinking technology from a snooping Government Agent. The effects are incredible for the era and the film has just the right mix of scary, fun, and exciting for a family audience, unlike the rest of the films on this literally bloody list. It was a big hit in theaters, spurred a reframing and update to the InnerSpace ride at the Living Body Pavilion in addition to other immersive “big backyard” attractions at the Disney parks. The film was a favorite on VHS and VCD and spawned two sequels, even if it has fallen a bit out of the public eye in recent years.

Similar to this, but as a Late '80s flick

#3 Manhattan Transfer[4]: Next is an ensemble heist action-comedy and modern-day Robin Hood story out of Paramount fronted by Eddie Murphy. The action follows a team of former employees of Franklin Toys who lost their jobs when their Brooklyn-based company was bought out and dismembered for a quick buck by corporate raider Jason Burnes (Michael Douglas[5], playing the in-universe “guy that Gordon Gekko was based on” in a double-meta-joke bit off stunt casting). Angry about it all and ready to “take back what’s ours”, Murphy’s Cedrick Lawrence, a former shipping manager, recruits charismatic shift foreman Lamar Kingman (Richard Pryor), genius accountant Schlomo Rosen (Gene Wilder, who also directed), snarky factory maintenance tech “Jersey” Jim Mattocks (Bruce Willis), and electronics prodigy Clarence Clay (a then largely unknown Don Cheadle) in a scheme to steal all of the money that Burnes made from the raid and redistribute it among the former Franklin workers. This ends up requiring the team to break into Burnes’s Manhattan penthouse suite past his extensive security systems and guards in order to hack his home office computer, all so that Rosen can institute a clandestine wire transfer of all of the millions in ill-gotten funds to a third-party account. The film is a pretty by the numbers heist film, but is also one hell of a lot of fun, with excellent comedy and chemistry between its ensemble actors. And thus, it did well both at the box office and on home media even. It’s been kind of forgotten following a spate of similar films in the 1990s and 2000s, but it remains one of the best in the genre and one of my personal favorites.

#2 Roadhouse: For second place we have a second so-over-the-top-it’s-good action flick, in this case the film that was marketed as a “Honky Tonk Cocktail” in reference to the hit Hyperion drama of the prior year. Like Cocktail it’s set in a bar (well, a roadhouse) and it features an old mentor (Sam Elliott) teaching an edgy young New Kid (Mickey Roarke) the rules of the road. Oh, and they’re bouncers, not bartenders. Bouncers that literally kick ass. Like The Set Up, it is violent as hell. And it’s not a gritty drama like Cocktail, it’s a full-on martial arts flick with leather-clad bikers instead of ninjas. High kicks, flying punches, and even a torn-out larynx ensue. This is quite possibly the manliest movie ever made. If it was any more hyper-masculine it would veer into Gay and I’d have to pass it along to Dirk and Donny. In fact, it’s so fucking over the top that you’d swear it was a parody of violent ‘80s action flicks if it wasn’t so obviously taking itself hyper-seriously. This film is loved, mocked, and loved and mocked at the same time, and deservedly so. In fact, make a double-feature of this and The Set Up and you will get to enjoy The Last of the Breed, two transition pieces that capture that quintessential ‘80s-ness at a time when that was already on the way out.

#1 Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure: And finally, it’s the little movie that refused to not be made! Bill & Ted began as a most excellent stand-up sketch by comedians Ed Solomon and Chris Matheson, which the duo converted to a sweet screen play called “Bill & Ted’s Time Van” in, like, ’87, dudes. Director Steven Herek called it “laugh out loud” funny and noted that it was, like, “either going to be a huge hit or a huge flop.” Like, whoa! The bodacious screenplay was about to be taken up by Fantasia Films, but like instead got picked up by De Laurentiis Entertainment due to a bizarre set of circumstances like way too complex to explain here, bro. Then the time travelling van idea, later a ’66 Chevy, was deemed too much like the DeLorean from Back to the Future, so this got changed to a much more totally original idea of a time travelling phone booth. Um, did someone, like, call a Doctor? Hey, at least it wasn’t, like, blue and bigger on the inside, yea? And yea, I can totally already see the comments loading up with “but Bill & Ted isn’t an action movie!” It’s got action. It’s close enough. I like this movie. It’s righteous. Piss off. Anyway, after like totally auditioning literally hundreds of actors, Solomon and Matheson found Keanu Reeves and they knew immediately that they’d found their Ted. Reeves had been on the hook to star in Young Guns, but had to drop out due to an unexpected rescheduling of the principal photography date. Several more auditions found their Bill in Alex Winter, someone they’d totally dismissed the first time through but decided to give one more chance. After searching through the rolls of glamorous rock stars to play Rufus, they ended up discovering George Carlin. It was like fate; preordained. Or like if some sort of radical time traveler was, like, interfering to make it happen in just a certain way[6]. Fate even seemed to intervene when De Laurentiis Entertainment went bankrupt and was bought up by Hollywood Pictures/ABC. Michael Eisner at first wanted little to do with the puerile teen Sci-Fi comedy and was going to can it (bogus!), but the most righteous Jeffrey Katzenberg saw potential. His faith was rewarded when Bill & Ted became a hit, grossing $40.5 mill against a modest $6.5 mil budget. Fate can, like, have most strange but most excellent plans.

---

[1] Specifically, the one TVtropes.org calls “Mighty Whitey”.

[2] In our timeline Orion’s cut enraged Milius and “ruined” it in his opinion. Here another studio gives him the creative freedom he wants, but in return for another film. I’m assuming that his cut has better legs, but its hard to say given subjectivity and the blindness of creators for their own work.

[3] Yes, this is essentially this timeline’s Tango & Cash.

[4] Original to this timeline! With Harlem Nights done a year Pryor…err…prior and Beverly Hills Cop not really a “thing” in this timeline, Murphy and Pryor decided to have some fun in the gap in his schedule.

[5] Blame Ms. Khan again!

[6] “No way!” you say? Yes way! Unlike every other production in this timeline, which you can assume to have at least some minor changes to dialog, editing, or other aspects, Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure is exactly the same, scene for scene, line for line, as the film we all know and presumably love. You can thank Mrs. Khan for this one too. She suggested “what if Bill & Ted was exactly the same movie?” Essentially, what if all the little butterflies piled up and seemingly conspired to result in the exact same film for all intents and purposes as we got in our timeline? And I’d never event talked about Second Order Butterflies with her! She framed it in Lebowskian terms, like the film just “abides” with the winds of allohistorical change. Consider this just a fun meta-humor bit and your ticket to not take all things in this timeline too seriously.

---

P.S.: RETCON ALERT. Taking a cue from @Mackon (thanks!), who made a good point about the BBC's public ownership at least insisting on a British Companion. So Lark Vorhees is out, and a different Companion is in.

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

And hire a more older actor to play Anakin in the first movie; a teen ager will make the idea that Padme and him fall in love and that the Jedi council has strong concern to train him more belieavable Christian Slater, maybe?

www.alternatehistory.com

 

[Geekhis Khan]

Who You Gonna’ Call Now? (1989)
Nostalgia was Way Better when I was a Kid Netsite, July 18th, 1999

When Fantasia’s Ghostbusters proved a smash success in 1984 it became all but guaranteed that there’d be a sequel. The continuing success of the Ghostbusters animated series, made in partnership with Filmation, finalized that guarantee. MGM Vice Chair Bernie Brillstein, who’d once represented half of the cast, and had been instrumental in the first film’s acceptance by a hesitant Disney, was pushing hard for a sequel.

But there was a problem. Actually, there were five problems: Bill Murray, Eddie Murphy, Dan Ackroyd, Harold Ramis, and Ivan Reitman. Each had a veto over any script. Each demanded a share of the box office (some reports say 10% each, but Ackroyd denies it was that high). And most confoundingly, each had a busy career, so reuniting for a sequel became a near-impossible game of cat herding.

So, how do you make it happen? Ramis and Ackroyd spent a few years working on a script, beginning with an idea set in Scotland at a haunted castle and involving fairy rings and an underground world. This eventually evolved into the underground river of slime idea. There was also a challenge in what to make the ultimate threat. Eventually, it took the form of Peter and Dana’s possessed child Oscar.

“I’d had this idea for a child who had adult focus and agility,” said Ramis. “I’d been kicking it around for a horror film, but this let us expand on Bill and Sigourney’s [characters’] relationship. However, Danny was afraid that focusing on them would distract from the relationships between the Ghostbusters themselves.”

“I suggested that we make it like an extended family,” said Murphy. “You know, ‘brothers of different mothers’ stuff. [Peter and Dana’s kid] Oscar could, you know, have like grown up with the three of us [other Ghostbusters] as uncles, so we all have a stake in his safety. And then, like, being around all of that ghostly energy and all…it makes sense, you know, right?”

“Once Eddie added in the extended family angle, it was easy to merge that into the larger threat,” said Ackroyd. “Harold had an idea that the ‘threat’ was really the negative emotions and anger of the City itself. Back in the late ‘80s all the cities were increasingly these dirty, angry, crime-ridden places. You’d go to the movies and get machine-gunned on the street. So Harold said, ‘what if everyone in New York City had to be nice for forty-eight hours?’ It’s an inherently funny concept and it allowed us to see the whole thing play out in miniature with our extended Ghostbusters family.”

With the recent UPA Godzilla animated film on everyone’s mind, the idea of a kaiju-style battle seemed a natural. Thus, the story that emerged was one where all of the negative emotions of New York City were feeding this Lovecraftian eldritch horror that lived below the earth and manifested at first in a river of slime in the sewers. This starts to manifest in a feedback loop of New York negativity and anger that we can see playing out in the streets and characters alike. It starts in small ways (“Yea, up yours too, buddy!” says the Rabbi to the Garbage Man), but it soon starts to grow more destructive and violent. The Ghostbusters are all fighting with one another. Peter and Dana in particular are on the verge of divorce. Snarky receptionist Janine Melnitz (Annie Potts), who, following the canon established in the animated series, has an unrequited crush on the stoic Egon, starts to chew him out for ignoring her. Even the nerdy Louis Tully (Rick Moranis) is becoming “quite the dick”[1].

This “anger made manifest” possesses young Oscar, who’d grown up around the “ghostly energy” of the containment unit, making him susceptible. This first manifests in slime ejected by Oscar from his mouth and, well, from his diaper, all with clueless Winston and Venkman playing uncle while Peter and Dana were busy having a loud and angry argument in the background. “It was The Exorcist meets Three Men and a Baby,” laughed Murphy. Or as his character Stan Winston put it in the film: “Man, I’ve changed some nasty diapers in my time, but damn, Pure Evil coming out’a that kid!”

Shit just got Evil (Image source “medium.com”)

Eventually, as hijinks ensue, the extended Ghostbusters family (the four Busters, Dana, Janine, and Louis) are consumed by their negative emotions and Oscar becomes the earthly vessel for The Wendigo, named for a mythological Algonquian monster, who in this case is a possessing entity whose terrifying corporeal form lives far below the surface of New York. The Creatureworks go all-out here with the creepy-funny Possessed Oscar animatronic, who leads the crew on a literally wall-crawling chase through the headquarters, releases the ghosts from the containment chamber, and escapes into the slime-filled sewers to lead the new ghostly army.

Ultimately, Possessed Oscar’s goal is to accumulate enough “negative waves” to allow The Wendigo to awaken and rise from the ground. The Ghostbusters, who have now added Janine, Dana, and Louis to the team, have to reverse-engineer the negative emotion slime into “happy slime” as Louis puts it, and then find a way to unite the people of New York City into the “Love Train” that will break the emotional feedback loop feeding The Wendigo.

This ultimately manifests itself in animating the Statue of Liberty with the happy slime in order to battle The Wendigo’s true form, a Lovecraftian horror who erupts from the ground under Central Park. “Godzilla was all the rage at the time thanks to the hit UPA cartoon,” said Ramis, “so we decided to have our own big monster battle.”

Now imagine she’s duking it out with an Eldritch Horror (Image source “tenor.com”)

“Harold and I took the Story and Screenplay credits,” said Ackroyd, “But to be honest we probably should have added Brian Henson’s name. We’d run an idea by him and the Effects team, and he’d kick an idea back our way, and…well…suddenly Possessed Oscar is projectile vomiting slime while crawling on the ceiling and Lady Liberty is battling Cthulhu in Times Square.”

Production went very well and the production team got all the support that they wanted from Fantasia Films[2]. The studio expected it to be a number one hit in the summer of ’89 and put a good $40 million into the production, not counting salaries (the “big five” all claimed an undisclosed slice of the box office). Ghostbusters II: Who You Gonna Call Now premiered on June 2, 1989. Alas, Sam Raimi’s Batman debuted 21 days later and dominated for the rest of the year. GBII as it was styled ultimately made a good $232 million at the box office, which is hard to scoff at, but compared to Batman’s $400+ million it was practically an afterthought.

Reviews were fair to good, but the large ensemble cast meant that few of the actors got a chance to shine, which Ebert in particular saw as “a Liberty-sized waste” given the amount of money the studio ultimately handed over to them (reportedly over $40 million in total). Murray and Weaver “lacked the chemistry” of the earlier film. Slimeball, shoehorned in due to his popularity on the animated series, became “a distraction”. Parent’s groups were upset about some of the violence, crude humor, and frightening imagery. [note to self: insert obligatory diazepam joke here]

And, frankly, the world had largely forgotten about the Ghostbusters after half a decade.

“If we’d premiered in ‘86 or ’87 we’d have broken the box office,” said Reitman. “But in ’89 audiences wanted darker fare like Batman. Any plans for a third installment were shelved indefinitely.”

“The original Ghostbusters was lightning in a bottle,” said MGM Vice Chair Bernie Brillstein with a sigh. “How do you repeat that? The answer is: you don’t.”

Posterity has been kinder to the film, which had a VHS and VCD renaissance. Folks in particular loved the Liberty vs. Wendigo kaiju battle. Rumors abound of a third installment, but finding the time and willingness to get the Big Five together again feels like a high bar to clear. Perhaps in the coming century nostalgia will lead the Ghostbusters back to the big screen.

---

[1] After much argument among the cast, crew, and executives, who feared bad publicity given that the cartoon had attracted a large child audience, they settled on a PG rating with a small handful of light curses, but no “ghost BJs” or anything.

[2] Contrast this to our timeline where Columbia under David Puttnam resisted producing it and it then got ramrodded through principal photography to meet a compressed schedule.

 

[Geekhis Khan]

Part 9: The Death of the Slasher
Excerpt from Slash! A History of Horror Films, by Ima Fuller Bludengore

By 1989 the slasher fandom had openly split over the “smart slasher” trend. Many, particularly fans who were teens in the late 70s and early 80s in the “golden age” of the straight slasher, openly asked for “just a guy in a mask killing people again”. Others liked the smart slasher and it’s political, satirical, comedic, or meta-cinematic take, many of whom were new fans of the genre who had studiously avoided the “dumb slashers” of the past.

Some producers gleefully stuck to the Smart Slasher trend, in particular Wes Craven, whose 1989 film Shocker transformed serial killer Horace Pinker into a creature of electricity during his execution-by-electric chair. In keeping with the “smart”, the film became a parable about the dangers of our overreliance on electronics and in many ways came to mirror elements of Stephen King’s Maximum Overdrive, another of those arguably smart slashers when put to film in ’86. Shocker also asked questions about the ethics of capital punishment and drew parallels between Pinker and the “hanging judge” of a DA who sent him to the chair to begin with.

But as the fan complaints surrounding the recent Halloween 4 and Friday the 13th Part 7 made manifest, the genre was struggling with fans, and the diminishing returns at the box office showed that it was losing casual viewers as well, in part simply because the slasher genre was losing its novelty, smart or dumb. The producers of A Nightmare on Elm Street, like the producers of Friday the 13th, were divided between “reconstructionists” who wanted to return to the simple formula and “revolutionaries” who wanted to keep pushing the limits. As had happened previously with Friday the 13th Part 6, the producers of A Nightmare on Elm Street Part V: Freddy Reborn tried to have it both ways.

Quite a bit like this, but starts out Meta.

The last film left Patricia Arquette the last surviving member of the old Nightmare cast and crew and pregnant with a baby that appeared to be Freddy. As a part of her contract when she agreed to reprise her role in The Devil Inside, she was set to die at the start of Freddy Reborn. As such, when the film begins with her in labor in a hospital bed it was really no surprise to anyone that, in a clear nod to Alien, Baby Freddy bursts out from her belly, glove already “forming” on his hand as a part of his body, and murders the doctors and nurses. And then, in what may be one of the most disturbing scenes in any film, he kills his already dying mom and “suckles” the blood from her bosom as if nursing.

“You Must’ve Been a Beautiful baby…” (Image source “aminoapps.com”)

Baby Freddy then carves a trail of blood through the hospital and down to the morgue, and, in a reverse of what happened in Friday the 13th part 6, crawls into the mouth of a fresh corpse (Jackie Earle Haley), which then bursts into flame and transforms into Freddy Krueger, who turns to the camera, and says “hey, ladies! Freddy’s back! Let’s paint the town red!”

This more blatantly supernatural Freddy, now played by Jackie Earle Haley (who had originally auditioned to play Freddy back in 1984), returns to what he does “best”: invading the dreams of teens in what it is never explicitly stated to be either the “real” or “fictional” worlds. It was at once a return to form and a bit of meta. Now a new set of teenagers like Alice (Ellie Cornell)[1], Dan (Danny Hassel), and Kristen (Tuesday Knight) struggle to avoid their fates as Freddy stalks their dreams. Kristen ultimately contacts Dr. Neil Gordon (Craig Wasson) after Kincaid and Joey die and tells him that Freddy's back. That night, she invites Alice for a sleepover, and Alice accidentally drinks some of Kristen's lemonade (spiked with sleeping pills), pulling her into Kristen's dream. Gordon and Alice figure out what's going on and Gordon dies at the end battling Freddy, allowing Alice to escape alive. In all, once “baby Freddy” has “grown up” it plays far more like one of the original Nightmare stories than the later meta ones and is often seen as a transition back to “dumb” slasher after beginning in the “smart” domain.

You call this “Smart?” (Image source “pophorror.com”)

Directed by Renny Harlin, the film debuted to mixed reviews earning $28 million against its $8 million budget. Haley received mixed reviews from fans as Freddy even as critics generally appreciated his disturbing screen presence. His less campy, more honestly psychopathic Freddy (more in keeping with the original A Nightmare on Elm Street) made some appreciative of the darker turn while others wanted the over-the-top “Hammy Freddy” of Robert Englund. While observant fans who’d been following Freddy’s Nightmares on TV would have noticed that Haley had already replaced Englund at the start of Season 2, a certain segment could only accept Englund as Freddy.

Fans on both ends of the spectrum were also annoyed that, much like in Friday the 13th Part 6, the producers had tried to please both sides of the fandom at once and thus truly pleased neither. While the birth scene became legendary in the fandom and Baby Freddy became the source for massive merchandising and future Net Wit [memes], the film broke no new ground in either the meta nor restorative sense. Renny Harlin’s direction was praised, but many felt the weak screenplay that tried too hard to please everybody “wasted” the concept. This led New Line to put the Nightmare franchise on hiatus.

More like “Jason Takes Macy’s” in this timeline…

A similar fate would befall Friday the 13th. The new borderline antiheroic “nature’s avenger” Jason of Part 7 had tested well with audiences, so Sachs pursued more of the same. Friday the 13th Part 8: Jason Triumphant would see Jason stalking the new shopping mall that popped up near Crystal Lake. In a polemic against both development and commercialism, Jason cuts up the shallow and materialistic denizens of the Happy Lakes Mall. Loaded with dark comedy that often failed to land, Part 8 didn’t really connect with most audiences beyond core slasher fans, managing to reasonably satisfy both ends of the smart-dumb spectrum since it had hints of “smartness” in its anti-consumerist message and plenty of “dumb” blood and gore. However, it ultimately made only $14 million against its $4 million budget, and buzz was mostly negative to middling. Jason, like Freddy and Michael, would go on hiatus.

Smart Slashers were also starting to receive some pushback from those who were either a) annoyed with their clumsy politics and/or b) annoyed that their alleged “smartness” was increasingly debatable. “How ‘smart’ were the last two [Friday the] 13ths anyway?” asked Producer Trey Parker. “They were just generic ‘development is bad’ narratives. And what were Prince of Darkness and Hellraiser but cheesy Frankenstein remakes? Oooh, ‘a bunch of scientists meddle in things they don’t understand and bad shit happens,’ how original!”

Parker, and his friend Matt Stone, both outspoken Libertarians, met at film school at the University of Colorado, Boulder, in 1989. UC Boulder is one of the most screamingly hippie left-wing schools in America (it gives U. Cal. Berkeley a run for its money). And one of Boulder City's biggest problems is affordable housing. The cost of housing is far beyond what the actual working people of Boulder can afford, and they usually have to live somewhere else and commute. A large part of this is the core of environmental activists at Boulder who block any and all development in the city, even for affordable apartments. It's also a place where alleged eco-terrorists like the Environmental Liberation Front (ELF) have openly set up shop.

Parker and Stone decided to partner on their first student film. At first this was going to be “Giant Beavers of Southern Sri Lanka”, a sort of Kaiju spoof. But after a run in with “some really obnoxious hippies on Pearl Street”, they decide to create a student film called The Enlightener as a spoof-smart-slasher and a direct “take that” to the clumsy anti-development environmentalist messages of the latest Friday the 13th films[2]. The Enlightener followed an architect/engineer who is building new family housing for low-income families in Colorado when a member of the American Socialist Society for the Health and Organic Love of the Earth (ASSHOLE, pronounced “as-shoal” by its members) sets fire to the buildings in “protest”, not knowing that the engineer is working late inside the building. The engineer is badly burnt and assumed dead. Seeking revenge, he goes on a snark and philosophy-tinged slasher-style rampage against the ASSHOLES while dressed as enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, with the plastic mask serving double-duty as a spoof of the V for Vendetta comics, whose anarcho-socialist politics Parker and Stone similarly despised.

Behold the face of doom

Thoroughly tongue-in-cheek and full of outrageous and offensive humor, the student film, though given a poor grade by their left-wing professor, became an underground hit, particularly among architecture and engineering students, contractors and construction workers, conservatives, slasher fans (both smart and dumb), and people just sick of “Gen-X hippie wannabes” in general. Troma Studios would buy the idea from Parker and Stone in 1990 (but were not ready to let them direct), leading to 1991’s The Colorado Hippie-Slasher directed by Toxic Avenger director Lloyd Kaufman. The film dropped the “Rousseau angle”, instead turning “Jackie” into a burn-scarred “Freddy wannabe”. Most fans of the Smart Slasher genre found the Troma film to be vastly inferior to the original student film. Parker and Stone would eventually produce the version they wanted in 1998, which became a classic of the genre.

But if The Enlightener was savaging the “pseudo-smart” tropes of Friday the 13th Parts 6 & 7 specifically, then Joss Whedon and George Romero’s Final Girl was the film that took the entire slasher genre to task. Produced and released by Fantasia Films, its first R-rated picture, Final Girl was a deconstructive, overtly feminist narrative. The film follows a woman known as Rhonda (veteran British “scream queen” and dramatic actor Catriona MacColl), a waitress who is far more than she seems. From the first set piece where we see the terrified blonde waitress chased by the masked killer amid all the usual tropes and cliches of the slasher formula, we are lulled into a false sense of the familiar…at least until the moment when the waitress, seemingly trapped by the killer in the dead-end alley, suddenly drops the “helpless bird” act, says, “ah…alone at last!”, draws a pair of hidden blades, and proceeds to turn the killer into the killed.

Not really this, but has shades of it

Rhonda, in reality an immortal Hero of the classic form originally born “on the plains of ancient Scythia” and an avatar of the “spirit of righteous feminine power” variously worshiped as Isis, Athena, Freya, or Durga, is the “scary story that monsters tell to their offspring” and an avenger of the helpless victims everywhere. And Southern California is this year’s hunting ground for her, stalking and slaying the various demons, vampires, monsters, and possessed killers of the region. But she’s here to do more than kick demonic ass, she’s also here to help turn the would-be victims into the victors, training a “new” Hero to carry on the work when she moves on, as shown by her tutelage of the gum-chewing, up-talking teen Valley Girl Elizabeth “Buffy” Majors (Heather Graham in her first major supporting role). Despite appearing to be a classic materialistic airhead stereotype, Buffy’s resilience impresses Rhonda when, assaulted by a vampire (played by Paul Reubens!), she pauses her screaming long enough to kick him squarely in the balls.

Beyond Girl Power (Image source “indiatvnews.com”)

“We wanted to invert the Hollywood formula of the little blonde girl who goes into a dark alley and gets killed in every horror movie,” said writer and co-producer (with Cheryl Henson) Joss Whedon, “and subvert that idea and create someone who was a hero. The very first mission statement of the film was the joy of female power: having it, using it, sharing it[3].” To direct, Henson and Whedon managed to score horror legend George Romero, himself just coming off of the critically acclaimed smart thriller Monkey Shines. They’d been impressed by the intelligence, toughness, and resilience of his heroine Dr. Susan Bowman from his “Zombie Magnum Opus” Day of the Dead.

The script and the ensuing picture didn’t just expose or call out the tropes of the slasher genre, they gleefully slaughtered them, pointing out their inherent sexism, misogyny, racism, and sociopathy, usually with a wry comment or lampshade-hanging that brushed up against the fourth wall without breaking it. Buffy’s friend Dwayne Jackson (Chris Rock), for example, irately asks the demon pursuing him why he “always has to go after the Black man first?” At one point, Buffy’s teacher even plays the class the scenes from late in Birth of a Nation where the “marauding Negroes” (white men in black face) chase the virginal white women with the intent to rape (because apparently Black men have nothing better to do with their time in this universe), all the while pointing out how “all the modern horror tropes all derive from this one racist set piece.”

“We wanted to flip the script,” said Romero. “We wanted to show that, regardless of whether you chose to call it ‘smart’, at its heart the Slasher had serious issues that went far beyond cliched expectations.”

“Final Girl should have been named ‘Final Slasher’,” lamented Halloween film series producer Moustapha Akkad. “How do you have Michael Meyers or Jason or Freddy chase and kill teenage girls when Final Girl makes that look like a sexist power fantasy?”

Final Girl performed well enough at the box office to set the horror community abuzz, and with its tongue-in-cheek self-awareness of its own pretention and willingness to slay both dumb and smart slashers, it is often seen as the moment that heralded the “Death of the Slasher” in 1990. Some claim that Parker, Stone, Romero, and Whedon together killed the slasher while both Revolutionaries and Reconstructionists blamed one another for the “death” of the Slasher. The cold, hard truth was that, after over a decade of the slasher formula, smart or dumb, audience tastes had moved on. The early 1990s were to be the era of the “cerebral thriller”. Films like Silence of the Lambs, Basic Instinct, and The Boss looked at what audiences considered at the time to be more realistic portrayals of serial killers. Simple hack-and-slash films were passé; a cult fandom. And despite some attempts to relaunch them to wider audiences in the 1990s, would largely be seen as a “dead genre” with a limited audience alongside westerns and pirate films.

Yes, the Slasher had been cut down, a dying genre with a dwindling fandom. It lied there in the mud and rain, its life’s blood leaking away, surely gone for good.

But as any slasher fan knows, the killer is never really dead.

---

[1] Freddy-fedora tip to @Unknown for the casting help and some plot ideas.

[2] Rousseau powdered wig tip to @El Pip for the idea.

[3] Derived from real-world quotes by Joss Whedon about Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which was, of course, what his vague idea for “Rhonda the Immortal Waitress” became in our timeline. The “Smart Slasher” phenomenon has allowed his idea to gain momentum a couple of years earlier than in our timeline.

 

[Geekhis Khan]

Rocketing to the Deepest Subconscious
Post from Cinema Surrealismé Netlog, by Darque Tydd, April 9th, 2007

Cinema Surrealismé can come in many forms, from the absurd to the cerebral to the comedic to the nightmarish. But it’s rare to see all of this in one feature. It should be no surprise that when these things do come together, you’ll find that David Lynch was behind it.

And no film embodies this more than 1989’s Ronnie Rocket, the second Lynch film distributed against all seeming laws of probability by the House of Mouse, this time under the Fantasia label. Ronnie Rocket was the price that Disney-MGM paid for bringing Lynch on board to direct Less than Zero in 1987. It was a passion project for Lynch and one which he’d been pursuing for nearly a decade, beginning with Mel Brooks in the days of The Elephant Man. And indeed, Brooksfilm partnered with producer Terry Gilliam, Disney’s “Skeleton Crew” of Tim Burton and Henry Selick, and Fantasia Films to see it through. Selick and Gilliam would produce and Henry Chiodo would partner with the Creatureworks to manage the effects.

Hypothetical movie poster by Maria Tran Larsen (Image source here; follow link for her thoughts on the opening credits too)

Unlike The Elephant Man and Less than Zero, which had borderline mass market appeal, and Blue Velvet which also skirted the mass market, Ronnie Rocket was, like Eraserhead, pure distilled Mindfuck of the highest proof.

It was the strange and convergent tale of two bizarre men out of their depth. One is a badly deformed man named Ronald del Arté (Michael J. Anderson), who gets turned into the cybernetic Ronnie Rocket by the sketchy back-alley surgeons Bob and Dan (Patrick Kelly and Jack Nance) and their femme fatale love Deborah (Laura Dern). The other is an unnamed Detective (Kyle MacLachlan) who tries to probe deeper into the heart of the postindustrial City with the help of Terry (Harry Dean Stanton) while being pursued by the menacing Bill (Miguel Ferrer) and the nefarious Doughnut Men (all played by Dennis Hopper). It also features Freddie Jones as Mr. Murdough the principal of Ronnie’s sketchy High School, Frances Bay as Ronnie’s Mother, Everett McGill as Ronnie’s Father, and Charlotte Stewart as the aunt. Isabella Rossellini plays the dreamlike recuring love interest in the form of Celia and Diana and the sore-covered Gerstein for that extra bit of mindfuck. David Lynch cameos as the amoral music executive Mr. Barko and Tommy Lister, Jr., as his enforcer Mr. Green. Meanwhile, the surrealisté alternative rock band Primus, who’d played in Less than Zero, plays the rest of Ronnie’s band, with Les Claypool as Johnny, Larry LaLonde as Al, and Tim “Herb” Alexander as Fred.

The Detective works his way through a dreamscape of post-industrial urban decay, pursued by nefarious Doughnut Men, and tempted by the siren’s call of beautiful women/a beautiful woman who appears and disappears from his life, all the while trying to discover the unnamed mystery at the heart of the decaying city. Simultaneously, Ronnie’s burgeoning rock & roll career is less a glorious Rock God moment and more a man being electrically tortured to the amusement of the audience, accompanied by the tap dancer Electra Cute (Jane Wiedlin). As their stories diverge and then re-converge, Ronnie’s and the Detective’s stories lead ultimately to a mindfuck too bizarre for words. You’ll just have to see it for yourself[1].

Does this seem utterly unlike a Disney film, even a Fantasia one with the Skeleton Crew behind it? Well, it is. When MGM Chairman Tom Wilhite first agreed to sign Lynch for Less than Zero, he flippantly optioned the Ronnie Rocket script without reading it. When Less than Zero proved mildly successful, he was obligated to put Ronnie Rocket into production. By that point he’d read, or at least tried to read, the bizarre surrealisté tale. He was terrified at what he read. He came close to putting it into turnaround anyway and paying to cancel the contract. Henry Selick and Terry Gilliam convinced him to give them a small budget and a sound stage. The actors, all Lynch regulars, worked for not much more than scale in some cases. Most of the budget went to special effects and sets. They pursued a limited arthouse release. Everyone knew that this was never going to be a mass market hit. Mel Brooks served as executive producer, bringing in funds from various Hollywood art snobs and surrealistés (including “schlock” director John Waters, dark surrealisté artist H.G. Giger, and famed surrealisté artist Salvador Dali just months before his passing) who just wanted to attach their names to the picture. The film would only make back its $9 million budget ten years later, mostly from a steady trickle of home video sales and midnight showings.

Ronnie Rocket concept art by David Lynch (Image source “whatculture.com”)

But the art world went crazy for it. The New Yorker wrote a major article about it. It inspired a line of high fashion by Cheryl Henson that made a splash in New York and Paris. Critics ranged from ebullient at its surreal tone and dark vision to shocked and appalled at its nightmarish imagery. It won awards, including honorable mention at Cannes and gold at Sundance. Audiences either loved it or walked out in disgust. It went “cult”, by which the Hollywood Ministers of the Mundane mean “it insults audiences by asking them to use their brains”.

And yet for Disney-MGM, the film gave them more industry gravitas. Big name directors and producers expressed interest in working with a studio willing to take a chance on something so far above the mainstream. MGM producer Bernie Brillstein entered into discussions with Lynch and his agent Tony Krantz over a possible television series. Salvador Dali, just prior to his passing, helped finally put his old animation project “Destino”, first developed with Walt Disney himself[2], into active production as a short for the upcoming Musicana.

Disney and Dali in the 1940s (Image source the Walt Disney Family Museum)

The film even gained the attention of Disney Studios Chairman Jim Henson, who approached Lynch and Gilliam with a screenplay written in 1967 by his longtime collaborator Jerry Juhl based on a story that he helped develop.

The piece was a whimsical bit of comedic surrealismé called “Tale of Sand.”

---

[1] Or at least read about it. Here’s a link to the screenplay. No Mind Screwdrivers will be provided to assist in loosening the Mind Screw.

[2] You called it, @Denliner!

 

[Geekhis Khan]

Conan the Conqueror (1989), a Retrospective
From Swords and Spaceships Magazine, July 1999

NARRATOR (AKIRO): In the sunset of the Hyborian Age, a barbarian child would become a slave, a slave would become a warrior, a warrior would become a king, a king would become a prisoner, and a prisoner would become…a conqueror!

For musical reference

---

1989, ten years ago, brought us the conclusion of the 1980s Conan Trilogy, assuming one doesn’t count Red Sonja, and who does? Director John Milius would return to Universal in exchange for the studio taking over post-production and distribution of Farewell to the King from the hesitant Orion and allowing Milius creative control over the final edit. Also returning were Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mako, Gerry Lopez, and Grace Jones for the final and, many feel, most epic of the three films. Conan the Conqueror[1] combined plot elements from the Conan the Usurper and Conan the Conqueror story compilations into a four-act narrative that closed out the Conan saga.

The film follows on a few years following the events of Conan the Destroyer, but returns to the R-rated roots of Conan the Barbarian in a hope to return the franchise to its triumphant beginnings and away from the sillier, more child-friendly sequel, which badly underperformed.

Our film begins with a delightfully over the top Mako narration, which exposits to us the evil oppression of Mad King Numedides of Aquilonia (Peter Cushing). The first act sees an older Conan, backed by Subotai (Gerry Lopez), lead a revolt against Numedides and become King of Aquilonia himself. This act is one of the most popular of the film as it features one of the most epic battle scenes in a Conan film and ends on a triumphant note. It also fulfils the last promise of the original film, and sees Conan seated on a throne.

---

NUMEDIDES: You dare raise your blade against me, Cimmerian? You fool! I am blessed by the Gods! I cannot be touched! By this power, I rule!

[CONAN beheads NUMEDIDES with a single swing of his massive battleax]

CONAN: By this ax, I rule!

---

King Conan (Image source “player.one”)

Act II, however, sees these good times quickly end, for Conan is revealed to be a better swordsman than an administrator in a Mako-narrated montage of empty hedonism and political decay. Soon Conan’s mismanagement and a growing sense of animosity among the Aquilonian people for being ruled by an ethnic Cimmerian leads to unrest and ultimately uprising. Conan, too drunk to resist, is soon deposed and imprisoned by rebel leader Ascalante (Alan Rickman), who is aided and advised by his slave Thoth-Amon (Pat Roach), who was formerly a powerful Stygian wizard until his defeat and apparent death at Conan’s hands in the last movie. In the unrest, Subotai is killed in a heartbreaking death scene and Conan is reduced to a prisoner once again.

---

ASCALANTE: (to the assembled mob) Why do you bow down to this…Cimmerian usurper? Are you not Aquilonians? Would you raise your sword for a king not of proper Aquilonian blood?

[Crowd cheers and chants “Death to the Cimmerian! Death to the usurper!”]

---

But Act III opens with the rise of the evil albino[2] warlord Xaltotun (Dolph Lundgren), whose demon-helmed warriors defeat the Aquilonian army. King Ascalante is betrayed and assassinated by Thoth-Amon, who joins Xaltotun and is revealed to have been his servant from the beginning. Meanwhile, Conan escapes his confinement with help of the slave girl Zenobia (Uma Thurman), a cunning and beautiful woman who reminds Conan of his lost love Valeria. He learns that the demonic Xaltotun can only be defeated and destroyed by the fabled Heart of Ahriman and thus heads out on a quest to retrieve this powerful McGuffin from the dragon that guards it. He enlists his old comrades Zula (Grace Jones) and Akiro, Wizard of the Mounds (Mako) and they, along with Zenobia, who is a talented thief and hyper-intelligent and cunning, defeat the dragon (effects by Totally Fun animatronics) and claim the Heart of Ahriman, a giant ruby.

---

AKIRO: You dare disturb the mighty wizard again?!? What do you want, Barbarian?

CONAN: I need your help to defeat Xaltotun.

AKIRO: (laughs mockingly) Defeat Xaltotun?! Are you mad?!?

ZULA: (sneers) Come, Conan, forget this coward! (turns to walk away)

ZENOBIA: We need your help to recover the Heart of Ahriman, so that by its power we can defeat Xaltotun!

AKIRO: Ahhh! (wags finger and laughs) That is a different story! (laughs)

---

The final act sees Conan and his team, thanks in large part to Zenobia’s natural abilities to organize and inspire, raise an army and confront Xaltotun and his armies. Thanks to the Heart of Ahriman, Xaltotun is rendered vulnerable and killed by Conan, and his armies are defeated in an epic final battle. Thus, Conan returns to the throne with Zenobia as his capable queen co-regent, Akiro as his magician and advisor, and Zula as his master-of-arms.

---

THOTH-AMON: Master, they have the Heart of Ahriman! We must retreat!

XALTOTUN: (staring fatalistically towards the horizon) Xaltotun does not run.

---

Fans of the Conan movies were generally very pleased with the results save for a small misogynistic fan community who decried the idea that Conan “needed a woman” to rule, though John Milius, hardly a liberal, denied that this was his intent, seeing it as a “behind every great man is a great woman” lesson. Most fans appreciated the return to the R-rated “Milius Conan” after the sillier Conan the Destroyer.

And the film might never have appeared were it not for the relative success of the Fox Pictures He Man film of 1987, which also led to a spike in VHS sales for the first two Conan films and a brief return of interest in the barbarian fantasy genre in general. This was enough to demonstrate a market and Universal greenlit the long-delayed sequel. And with a $82 million international box office against its $49 million budget, it proved profitable, if not bank-breaking. Its success spawned a few low-budget copycats, such as a campy time-travelling Beastmaster sequel and the disastrous Roger Corman adaption of Kull of Atlantis. It even led to the Brooksfilm/Fantasia Films satire The Sword of Cerebus in 1991.

However, this momentary spike in popularity for the genre proved short lived, a final bit of lagging interest in Hypermasculine Heroes as the Everyman Heroes and Byronic Antiheroes of the 1990s began to take over the popular tastes. Even the success of He Man and Conan the Conqueror were successes touched with irony, as many in the audience went to them “for the cheese” as much as anything.

Conan the Conqueror represents the last of a breed. Not only was it one of the last Schwarzenegger films not at least touched by self-aware irony or camp, but it was one of the last films in that purely 1980s “manly” action/adventure style[3].

Will Hollyweird ever return to the land of musclebound barbarians with massive swords? That remains to be seen. But I for one appreciate the films of that almost comically self-reverential era.

---

[1] Crown of Iron tip to @thekingsguard for suggesting this.

[2] An idea added by makeup during production as a silent nod to Elric of Melnibone.

[3] Dirk and Donny will declare it “Definitely Manly, but with strange, subtle urges that it can’t quite explain away.”

 

[Geekhis Khan]

Chapter 4: Mystical Adventure
An excerpt from Seriously, Kaio-What?! A look back at Toonami's Flagship Program from the Man who Created it by Akira Toriyama with assistance from Sugata Kitsuneko

A Guest Post by @Spooner The Trinity [1]

I remember the first time I saw The Dark Crystal. It was after another grueling week of producing the latest chapter of Slump and was waiting for the submission to go through. There it was. The gorgeous artwork on the poster, the stunning creature design, the complex character dynamics and, of course, that incredible score. Did I buy into the hype of Jim Henson's passion project like the rest of my homeland?

In a word, yes.

Akira Toriyama c1989 (Image source “comicvine.gamespot.com”)

There were Skeksis at the opening of Tokyo Disneyland, and of course I enjoyed it. It was one of Jim's best in my opinion! So naturally, that vast boost to the creative juices started bleeding into Slump and later Dragonball when it was starting out. Case and point, I originally wanted just a wandering wild boy in the mountains to harken to Journey to the West as intended, but Arale kept pushing into my head, begging for some attention, so I did the next best thing and created Ruko[2], a natural evolution of Arale whilst being the inverse to both her and Goku. Whilst Goku and Ruko are both natural fighters, Ruko's the brighter of the two and has more of a grasp on socialization. While Arale initially was incredibly childish for her designed age of thirteen, Rue was more emotionally mature and level-headed, often berating Goku for doing stupid things complete with an utterance of BAKA-JAN! (an amalgamation of baka and onee-chan) which Masako [Nozawa] punctuated quite well in her years of voicing both twins. Sure, there were some missteps here and there, such as the 'Princess Melody' angle that kind of went nowhere, but all in all, I'm happy with how Ruko turned out.

And this [cross-cultural influence] actually cut both ways with Japanese exports landing on the American shores. Disney's localization of the Ghibli portfolio comes to mind as does Bio-Force using footage and toys from [Super] Sentai and later the Kamen Rider and Metal Hero brands. Little Nemo was a beautiful misfire and a flick that just couldn't be saved, though TMS did rebound with Batman [TAS] and [Mighty] Orbots and led them right to Tom Rueger at Bird Brain. But it was when I finished the Piccolo Daimou Arc, and the original Dragonball Manga along with it, that my editor got a call from a man named Brillstein at Disney. We were to bring an interpreter to Geauga Lake and, sure enough, there he was, Jim Henson, offering to co-produce an Anime featuring my character designs. The show in question was Kingdom Champions[3], and it featured a group of co-workers at a Superhero Bodega. KC as it became called was designed with a theme in mind: one of embracing the past as you move on into the future, and that translated into plenty of guest heroes from Shonen Jump's history up to that point, showing up throughout the run from Kinnikuman to KochiKame, I even got requests from Marvel and DC to include their heroes. One such character I added was a little lady by the name of Monica Zeppelli from a name I read from [Hirohiko] Araki's Jojo series, I think Araki used her in Stardust [Crusaders] so I lent him Rue as thanks. Speaking of which, I was getting a lot of requests to add characters from Dragonball, and admittedly had Mercenary Tao show up one chapter early on and frankly they never stopped.

When I vented to Jim about it, he made his signature “Hmm...” and said he'd get back to me. The following month, I received a sketch from a man named Steve Ditko which depicted Spiderman alongside two familiar faces: Goku and Ruko in his art style (And fully grown, to boot! Just as I would imagine them being at the time) with a message written by Jim and signed by both men and another friend of theirs, Stan Lee. “There are worse things to be than Kermit.” To this day, I have that picture framed and put on my bedroom wall, it meant that much to me. So, I added the twin seeds of Bardock and added a subplot that now that they've matured enough to be more easily identifiable given biological differences, it means that the twin trick that served them well as far back as Yamcha's debut is now impossible, but it also means that Rue is becoming more distinct from Goku, thus she changes up her hair, brushing it down to her upper back, and it's stuck with her ever since. Other tweaks would be made throughout DBZ to further develop her identity, and it cumulates in her blue sleeveless turtleneck and biker shorts with the arms of an orange hoody wrapped around her waist. (Even the thigh-high boots she wears are different from Goku's ankle-length boots!) When I look at Goku and Ruko back when I was drawing the same character twice to save time and then look to them now, the difference is night and day.

Nowhere was that more evident with how they were portrayed overseas, and I owe a lot of that to the Osmonds[4]. See, when Harmony Gold got the rights to dub Champions, they decided to have actual guest stars voice the guest characters, and while it was a breeze to dial up reprisals from DC's Superfriends or any of the Marvel shows, it was hit or miss with Jump's cast (Hulk Hogan as Kinnikuman certainly was embarrassing to watch). But when I heard Donnie add this blissful mischievousness to Goku and Marie give a dry wit to Rue (complete with translating the Baka-Jan to Knucklehead) it kind of clicked, you know. No wonder they went on to reprise the role for the decades to come, and believe me, there were more adventures to come with those two.

---

[1] With some modifications for continuity by me. Kitsuneko is a fictional ghostwriter based on an actual Dragonball Fan.

[2] Based on an actual Dragonball What if!

[3] Effectively this timeline’s Kingdom Hearts.

[4] Sorry Shemmel-san, your most Iconic role just got butterflied...

 

[Geekhis Khan]

Behind the Scenes of A Quantum of Solace
Article from 007 Magazine #20, 1989, by Patrick P. K. Walther

With the success of The Living Daylights reinvigorating the James Bond brand and positive audience reactions to Sam Neill as Bond overcoming Cubby Broccoli’s remaining reservations, it was a foregone conclusion that Bond #16 would be put into production. The bigger question for the writers was, of course, what to make the 16th Bond outing about?

Not really either of these, but more an adaption of “Risico”

“We considered several settings and ideas,” said writer Michael G. Wilson. “We explored China as a setting, but by this point between Mask of the Monkey King, Empire of the Sun, and The Last Emperor, the novelty [for the once closed off state] had worn away. We explored some of [Ian] Fleming’s old stories, in particular ‘The Hildebrand Rarity’, but it was two other stories in the [For Your Eyes Only] anthology that caught our eyes. We loved the name ‘A Quantum of Solace’, but the story wasn’t really built for an action film. By comparison, ‘Risico’ was a good foundation for a story, though the name was sub-optimal for a wide release feature.”

“Risico” was a story of Italian drug smugglers and Russian double agents with plenty of action at sea. It also lent itself well to current events with its drug runner plot. “We found that we could take the central idea and characters from ‘Risico’ and move them from the Med to the Caribbean,” said co-writer Richard Maibaum. “Miami Vice was very popular, of course, and [Panamanian President Manuel] Noriega was all over the news for apparently supporting drug smugglers[1].”

The plot would largely follow “Risico”, but with elements and characters from “The Hildebrand Rarity” and with the name “A Quantum of Solace”, the name justified in the film when drug runner Enrico Columbo proclaims this to be the “service” he provides: giving his customers “A quantum of solace in this cruel and unjust world.” And despite the interruption of the ’88 Writers’ Strike that cost them Maibaum’s participation halfway through production, they put together a fun and thrilling tale full of adventures on the sea, double- and triple-crosses, sex, and intrigue galore.

El Presidenté Hidalgo de la Peña; any resemblance to real world leaders of the time is strictly coincidental, I’m sure (Image source “them0vieblog.wordpress.com”)

The film sees Bond sent by M to Central America to investigate a drug smuggling ring believed to be working with the tacit support of the President of the Republic of Costa Diabla, a Noriega-like dictator named Hidalgo de la Peña (John Davi), nicknamed “de la Piña” due to his poor complexion. The information comes from a shadowy informant named “Kristatos”. Bond enters into the presidential compound of del la Peña and encounters the seductive Isabella Krest (new sensation Catharine Zeta-Jones), and her charming but abusive husband Milton Krest (Timothy Dalton), who claims to be a conservationist in search of the “Hildebrand Rarity”, an endangered fish. Bond also encounters his target, the drug runner Enrico Columbo (Pedro Armendariz). This, of course, sends him down a rabbit hole of twists and turns with SMERSH agents, Cuban spies, and a dark conspiracy that engulfs the CIA, SMERSH, Columbo’s cocaine cartel, the government of the Republic of Costa Diabla, and MI6[2].

There’s even the return of the nigh-unstoppable SMERSH assassin Necross (Dolph Lundgren), ever looming in the background.

The resulting film was, much like the Connery films, notably more serious than the Moore films, but still willing to push the willing suspension of disbelief in its audiences through explosive action set pieces and humor. “We wanted something that fit with Mr. Neill’s interpretation and kept the shades of grey approach of the prior film,” said Maibaum[3].

Shooting commenced in the spring of ’88 mostly in Costa Rica and Puerto Rico with some set shots at the Estudios Churubusco in Mexico City. Director John Glen spoke highly of the cast and crew. “Mr. Neill is an absolute professional and Mr. Dalton an excellent actor who really put the mystery and menace into Mr. Krest. And of course, the stunning Catharine Zeta-Jones, who I can assure you is far more than a pretty face. I strongly suspect that she will be seen on the big screen again. The crew of Estudios Churubusco were talented professionals.”

Opening Credits (Image source “dangerousminds.net”)

For the opening number, the legendary Gladys Knight sings the haunting Latin-inspired “A Quantum of Solace” with some memorable opening sequences that capture the allure and danger of narcotics. The score was composed and conducted by Michael Kamen, beautifully capturing the moods of the film.

With these elements combined, A Quantum of Solace is Jams Bond as it’s meant to be: stunning, sexy, and thrilling, while also exploring deeper issues of the depths that man will sink to for “the greater good”.

“We expect that Quantum of Solace will play well[4],” said Cubby. “It has all of the action and suspense and sensuality that one expects from the Bond franchise, while also reflecting the world of 1989 in a meaningful way.”

---

[1] A few months after the release of this film (and it’s equivalent from our timeline) the US invaded Panama in the winter of 1989/90 and toppled Noriega in a quick and overwhelming invasion that helped rebuilt American faith in its armed forces and also established the long-running US tradition of righteous-sounding operational names that played well in the press, calling itself “Operation Just Cause.” Some comedian (Howie Mandel?) of course had a different take: “Why did we do it? Just ‘cause!”

[2] The big twist will be that Columbo is secretly a double agent working with the CIA to take down de la Peña and Kristatos is actually Milton Krest, a double-agent himself who is not just smuggling drugs, but smuggling Cuban and Soviet intelligence agents, including Necross, into Florida in a plot to assassinate the American President as he visits the Air Force Bases there and frame American peace protestors in a bid to incite civil unrest in America. It all culminates with Krest’s big yacht Wavekrest exploding.

[3] In our timeline Bond 16 was designed with Dalton’s darker bond in mind, resulting in the violent License to Kill.

[4] Will make a good $175 million against a $32 million budget and prove popular enough with the fans to greenlight a third Sam Neill Bond film.

 

[Geekhis Khan]

Declassified: The Flipping of Robert Hanssen
Post from Declassified: The Lives and Stories of Real-Life Spies, by N. Cognito

What makes a person become a spy for another nation? Why betray your home country to the benefit of another? For some, the reasons are ideological, such as dedicated Marxists Julius and Ethel Rosen, who gave Stalin the secrets of nuclear weapons. For others it’s national or cultural, such as Jonathan Jay Pollard who spied on the US for Israel. For some, the reasons are monetary, like basic greed or a need to pay off debts or feed a substance addiction. For some it’s the results of blackmail after being compromised. Some are disgruntled about a lack of career opportunity or disaffected with their careers and seeking revenge.

And yet for others, the only reason for their betrayal seems to be because they can.

For a decade from 1979 to 1989, FBI Agent Robert Hanssen betrayed America to the Soviet Union for a grand total of roughly $500,000 and various gifts. An espoused anti-Communist and devout Catholic, he had no apparent ideological reasons for approaching the GRU and KGB. He had no personal or familial ties to Russia or any other Soviet Republic. The amount of money that he gained was significant, but hardly sufficient to become independently wealthy, and while he was clearly living beyond his apparent means, he was not living a life of abject luxury. He had no noteworthy debts or drug or alcohol issues. The Soviets appeared to have no blackmailable information on him. His career path was advancing and he had no reported issues with his superiors.

Instead, Hanssen was an underconfident, self-important loner who’d been emotionally abused by his father and needed to feel important. He had few friends and alienated many of his colleagues with his antisocial personality and sense of smug superiority. He was obsessed with spies from a young age, in particular James Bond, and over the years bought bond-related objects like Leica cameras, a shortwave radio, and a Walther PPK. Even a Swiss bank account.

He also had free access to lots of Top Secret documents, plenty of free time on the job, and little supervision of his actions. His numerous incidents of mishandling classified documents and unauthorized disclosure, though well known by his subordinates, went largely unreported and undisciplined.

When Hanssen approached the GRU in 1979 for $21,000, the reasons seemed to be based mostly in the thrill of it all, and a chance to demonstrate to himself his own intellectual superiority over his peers. The espionage continued until 1981 when his wife nearly caught him reviewing a GRU document in the basement, after which he cut off communications with the GRU. But in 1985 the “bug” must have bitten again, because he contacted the KGB under the pseudonym Ramon Garcia, ultimately giving them such critical intelligence assets such as the names of KGB double-agents Sergey Motorin and Valeriy Martynov, leading to their execution. Hanssen also compromised the FBI's espionage investigation of senior State Department official Felix Bloch, who was suspected of providing information to the KGB, as well as an FBI report on possible Soviet penetrations.

The signs of his duplicity were clear in hindsight. He constantly sought access to classified information that he had no “need to know”. He lived well above his apparent means, sending his kids to expensive private schools, buying new cars, and paying for an addition to his home in cash. And yet he never garnered any suspicion from the bureau. In fact, in 1987 he was assigned with the job of seeking out a suspected Soviet mole within the FBI, effectively tasked with finding himself!

By 1988 however, he was overconfident and getting sloppy, giving away secrets that openly identified him as an FBI employee. Hanssen even recommended to the KGB that it recruit his close friend Jack Hoschouer, serving at the time as a military attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Bonn. He became sloppy about hiding the massive stacks of cash he had at home. Still, none of his actions or unexplained wealth set off any alarms within the FBI Counterintelligence[1].

All that would change when a new Counterintel agent was assigned to the unit. This employee was Debra Evens[2], who joined the FBI in 1984 and became an agent in 1987. She was initially assigned to the New Orleans Field Office, working on civil rights and white-collar crime issues, but was quickly sent on temporary duty to Los Angeles to work on a growing investigation into child trafficking and sexual abuse at Alphy’s Soda Pop Club and other locations in LA, all with ties to some relatively big Hollywood names. She gained distinction working on the case, managing to turn an accused underground bartender at Alphy’s and blow the case wide open, resulting in several arrests of long-time abusers and the closing of Alphy’s in 1988. Per her request, she was sent to the Foreign Service Institute in Rosslyn, Virginia, in 1988[3] where she studied counterintelligence and the Russian language.

Special Agent Debra Evans c.1987 (Image source “iup.edu”)

This combination of skills naturally got her assigned to the counterintelligence office at the J. Edgar Hoover building in Washington, DC. By this point, suspicions remained that there was a Russian mole in the office, and she joined the investigation. Oftentimes, simply having a new set of eyes on the problem is the most critical part of finding the solution, and Evans, upon striking up casual conversations with the rest of the unit, began to grow increasingly suspicious of Hanssen. Although her suspicions were largely laughed off by her supervisors, she was still given the permissions to investigate Hansen, assured that she’d find nothing.

Instead, she found more than she bargained for, including a bank account in Hanssen’s own name in a bank across the street from the FBI building which had tens of thousands of dollars deposited in large amounts at seemingly random times. She soon interviewed Hanssen’s brother-in-law Mark Wauck, an FBI agent himself who had been growing slightly suspicious of Hanssen, and he agreed to poke around. Eventually, Wauck found out from his sister Bonnie that she’d found a stack of cash in his dresser as well as other suspicious or incriminating actions. Evans and Wauck presented their evidence to the Counterintel office in a secret meeting in the summer of 1989, and the office now took the news seriously and arranged a tail for Hansen, ultimately catching Hanssen making a drop with some false intelligence they’d arranged for him to “find”.

Hanssen was reportedly quietly interrogated, ultimately spilling the beans.

“He was very proud of himself,” Evans remembered in an interview long after many of the events were declassified. “It was all a game to him, and a chance to play James Bond. But the men he’d gotten killed were critical US assets, not faceless SPECTRE goons. I wanted him prosecuted to the highest, but [FBI] Director [William] Sessions had different ideas.”

In 1989, FBI Director William Sessions was facing increased scrutiny from the George Bush administration. Attorney General Dick Thornburgh[4] was putting lots of pressure on Sessions over what Thornburgh described as “insubordination and possible corruption” and which Sessions described as “a lack of sufficient loyalty to the administration.” As such, Sessions was under increased pressure from Thornburgh to “root out corruption and incompetence”, with an unspoken threat of termination hanging over it all. Sessions needed a “big win” to “keep the wolves at bay”, and with the Berlin Wall having just fallen and President Bush increasingly concerned about what Gorbachev and other high-ranking Soviets had planned, he saw potential in using Hanssen to his advantage and the nation’s.

“Director Sessions knew that President Bush wanted more insight into the Soviets,” said Evans, “And I’d have thought that taking down the man who was exposing our assets would be win enough, but he wanted to flip Hansen and use him against the Soviets.”

Robert Hanssen was made an offer he couldn’t refuse. While the details remain highly classified, a FOIA request revealed that Hanssen’s deal included provisions where he could avoid jail and even keep some of the money from the KGB, but only if he worked with the CIA and NSA without pushback and agreed to constant monitoring and sharing with the CIA all communiques he had with the Soviets. Hanssen would thus be a veritable Triple Agent, feeding his Soviet handlers false information and planted stories in a way that would protect current US assets and shift suspicions onto Soviet agents that the US considered a threat. It was a complicated arrangement and ultimately doomed to failure, but if even a few years of the plan could be maintained during the critical period marking the end of the Cold War, it could reap massive benefits for the US and NATO, or so Sessions and Baker believed.

“The egotistical bastard loved it,” said Evans, referring to Hanssen and still clearly irked years later.

---

[1] Everything prior to this is as per our timeline, plus or minus a few minor changes. Read all about it here. In our timeline he remained undiscovered until 2001 despite exhibiting all the classic signs of spying that should have set off alarm bells in counterintelligence.

[2] Real person. Read about her distinguished career in our timeline here, which ironically included working on our timeline’s Hanssen investigation.

[3] A year prior than in our timeline due to serving on the Alphy’s case and gaining the earlier notice of her superiors.

[4] On a related note, butterflies prevent the airplane accident that killed Pennsylvania Senator John Heinz in 1991 in our timeline, so Thornburgh never quits as AG to pursue the Senate seat, so William Barr never takes over as AG as he did in our timeline.

 

[Geekhis Khan]

Chapter 12, Making a Difference
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)

When Grave of the Fireflies was nominated for [the Academy Award for] Best Foreign Language film the Disney board came to realize what Jim had realized half a decade earlier, and what Walt had realized almost half a century earlier: that there was a market for high-brow animation. They spun up the Walter Elias Disney Signature Series shortly thereafter, and we borrowed Bob Zemeckis’s DeLorean and made Fantasia the first film produced under the label. Grave of the Fireflies became title #2 and the upcoming Musicana #3. So, the combined boards of the Disney and MGM studios were brought in to meet the Executive Committee in order to brainstorm on what would be title #4, the first film consciously produced under the WED Signature line.

They should have just asked me to begin with. The answer was obvious.

“Maus,” I said.

“What, like Mickey?” asked Ron Miller.

“No, M-A-U-S, not M-O-U-S-E,” I said. “It’s about the Holocaust.”

The dead silence let me know I’d struck home. We dispatched a Gofer to grab a few copies of the Art Spiegelman comic and the combined board flipped solemnly through the stylistic representation of the horror of one of history’s greatest crimes against humanity. Jim nodded. Ron nodded. Frank nodded. We were greenlit for what I immediately knew was the most important production of my life.

I’d barely started pre-production when Steve Spielberg got wind of it. He immediately offered to foot half the cost and assist in production any way he could. Mel Brooks and Jack Tramiel of Commodore found out too, and similarly offered their support, fiscally and/or physically. Steve didn’t ask for any credit, but I insisted that he tie his name to it. We needed the full gravitas of his name. He humbly accepted an Executive Producer credit. As word continued to circulate, Silver Screen Partners III was inundated with various wealthy menschen wanting to give us their money. Even lots of wealthy goyim were on board. This was important. We could not allow it to fail.

Naturally, we almost immediately ran into a roadblock. Art Spiegelman slammed the phone in my ear when I called. He refused to even consider a Disney film of Maus. Honestly, I don’t blame him. I also don’t just give up. Steve and I practically stalked the poor bastard until he agreed to meet with us. We met him (sort of ironically) at Katz’s, along with Mel Brooks. “No fucking costumes,” Art said, meaning the walkarounds. “No rides, no T-shirts, no toys, nothing. And sure as hell no fucking songs!”

Funny stuff

“What kind of asshole do you think I am?” I asked him. “None of those things were ever on the table!”

“I was there,” said Mel. “During the war. I saw it all with my own eyes. You think I’ll let this putz,” he pointed to me, “make a mockery of it? Jack [Tramiel] nearly died at Auschwitz. Both his parents did. And we are dead serious here.”

“Dead serious,” I repeated. “I was going to send my dad on a trip to see his old home town in Russia, but it doesn’t exist anymore!”[1]

“Ok,” said Art, “But I want one very strange favor.”

He asked. We agreed. The next morning Frank Wells, Jim Henson, and a very special guest flew up to New York on the Disney Gulfstream.

You see, the New York Times booklist, specifically one schmuck of an editor, refused to put a “comic book” with anthropomorphic mice and cats on the nonfiction list, and instead listed it as fiction. “I shudder to think how David Duke ... would respond to seeing a carefully researched work based closely on my father's memories of life in Hitler's Europe and in the death camps classified as fiction,” he told the Times.

But the King of All Schmucks replied, “Let's go out to Spiegelman's house and if a giant mouse answers the door, we'll move it to the nonfiction side of the list!” [2]

We called his bluff. Steve Spielberg himself invited the Times Editorial Board to visit Art’s house. Needless to say, when the front door opened our “special guest” greeted them: a Disneyland performer in a Mickey Mouse walkaround.

“Fine, fine, we’ll move it to non-fiction!” the schmuck relented.

Frank and Art signed the deal on the spot. The Times ran an apology article about it all, even mentioning the dinner with Mickey.

And yet, once it was announced that Disney was making a movie based on Maus, the real controversy began. People reacted pretty much the same way that Art had to the idea. A letter-writing campaign called “Don’t ‘Mickey’ Maus” began flooding our inboxes. Political cartoons featuring a Vladek or a Nazi Cat walkaround next to Mickey and Roger Rabbit appeared in the editorial section of various papers. In hindsight the outrage should have been obvious. We needed a full-blown charm offensive just to keep the outcry from poisoning the well.

Steve, Mel, Jack T., and I made the rounds, doing interviews, visits to various foundations, even meeting with the Don’t ‘Mickey’ Maus movement’s leaders. We made it abundantly clear that this was going to be held in only the highest of reverence and indeed sanctity. This was serious. This was the story that everyone had to see. We publicly announced that all profits – actual real studio profits, mind you, not “shell company profits” – would go to support building the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The uproar died down for the most part, but then spun right back up again from a new front: The Polish-American community.

(Image source “polishcultureapcp.com”)

Yea, I didn’t see that one coming. Art had portrayed each ethnic group as different species of animals: the Jewish people were mice, the Germans cats, the Americans dogs, and the Poles were pigs. In fact, even plenty of Jewish scholars pointed out the irony that the animal motifs reflected Nazi concepts of racial identity. Yea, they were kind of right. Steve and I convinced Art to let us loosen up the species thing, with only the Polish collaborators and opportunists portrayed as pigs and the rest of the Poles, particularly the ones who sheltered the Jews, portrayed as noble horses. This partly placated the outrage, but there would still be an air of controversy underlying the production, and there remains one to this day.

We went into production in 1988. Steve brought in Judy Freudberg and Tony Geiss to help write. I recruited Tim Burton as art director, with his German Expressionist look perfect, I felt, for both the time period and the horror and paranoia of the setting. Tim by this point had a whole class of new artists inspired by his style at Disney to call upon, a group the other animators and producers called “The Skeleton Crew”. The combination of Art Spielman’s comics-inspired art and Tim and the crew’s stark lines, Dutch angles, and lots of white and black space resulted in a minimalist style that coincidentally lent itself to relatively low-cost animation, meaning that we could devote more funds to promotion.

On June 27th, 1990, we debuted in New York at the Waverly Theater in Greenwich Village, sporting a T rating. Not a dry eye in the house. Shocked silence at the end, followed finally by a standing ovation. The film saw wide release. We received wide acclaim. We raised over $14 million for the Holocaust Museum and, more importantly, raised awareness, which was the real aim of the project.

Never forget!!

The film gets daily screenings at the Holocaust museum. It gets play in educational settings. Video sales remain steady, the profits to this day all going to the museum and related charities.

Maus certainly didn’t turn the biggest profit of my career. It didn’t personally earn me a dime. Sure, a lot of us got more stupid golden dust catchers for our efforts. But who the hell cares?

As Jim always makes clear, making something important is a far bigger deal than fame and fortune.

---

[1] Bernie relates this dark anecdote in Where Did I Go Right?

[2] Both of these quotes are real.

 

[Geekhis Khan]

Remembering The Song of Susan (1989)
Post from The Rainbow Connection: Exploring Disney’s Long and Troubled Relationship with Queerness netlog, by Ian Malcolm Scott, posted December 12th, 2009

You asked for it, you’re getting it. MGM’s 1989 Oscar darling The Song of Susan, Disney’s first intentional foray into the world of gayness if you don’t count the trans men in The Ballad of Edward Ford or male prostitutes in Less than Zero. (hmm…what was it with Disney in the ‘80s naming their dramas “The {musical performance} of {person}?) Anyway…naturally for a late ‘80s movie, it’s about AIDS.

I expect this week’s comments to be…interesting…

So, for those of you living under a rock, The Song of Susan is the 1989 story of a suburban white girl played by Molly Ringwald doing her damnedest to look 17 when she was pushing 22. It’s the very first mass-market AIDS movie and one of the few movies at the time willing to acknowledge homosexuality as more than something to fear or laugh at. It was controversial at the time and it’s controversial today, but for totally different reasons.

First off: elephant in the room. Yes, this movie was totally het-washed. Our protagonist is a straight suburban WASP girl. The gay men were mostly secondary characters with only Richard Hunt’s Benny as a supporting actor with a definitive role. This movie gets a lot of hate for this today, and, yes, I’m sort of with you there. That said, the very fact that they were working so hard to have positive queer roles in 1989 is a quantum leap above, say, Crocodile Dundee from just 3 years earlier where our “hero” sexually assaults trans women and it’s played as a big joke, or Silence of the Lambs from three years later where the trans woman is a mass-murdering psychopath [1]. Yea, I’d rather that they’d made Hunt’s Benny the star, but the very fact that they cast a gay man who was dying of AIDS as a gay man dying of AIDS (Hunt would pass away from complications of AIDS in 1992) rather than find some straight A-lister to play the role, was huge in ’89 and would have been pretty big in ‘99.

And ironically given some of the hate it gets today, it was actually very controversial in its own time, but for opposite reasons! James Dobson of Focus on the Family virulently attacked it as an assault on moral values for having the audacity to portray gay men as victims of a disease and for deliberately pushing back on the "God's wrath" narrative. Some boycotted it at the time for its sympathetic portrayals of gay men and AIDS victims. It became one of those cultural touchstones and whether you liked or hated it said more about your politics than your tastes, which is ironic because the production team deliberately tried to keep partisan politics out of it to make it a more universal story.

The big thing those of us outside of the cis/het WASP world need to realize is that we are not the target audience here. This movie was produced predominantly by cis/het white people for cis/het white people. It was a rallying cry and call to action for a privileged group to quit sitting on the sidelines and do something. This was a time when the Reagan and Bush administrations were not really taking the AIDS crisis seriously and your average WASP was happy to say “not my problem”, or worse blame the gay community for spreading “our” disease to the rest of the “normal” population. The goal of the film was to raise awareness and create action and, in this respect, it was a smashing success. Not only did a shit-ton of people actually see it (it made over $150 million worldwide) but it fucking dominated the Oscars that year, including a nom for Molly, a win for Hunt, and even a statue for Howard Ashman’s eponymous tearjerker song. It even edged out Driving Miss Daisy for Best Picture.

So, is it worth the hype? Is it worth the hate? Well, as much as I love Ron Nyswaner and appreciate what he was trying to do here, the plot of this can be really ham-fisted at times. They basically tell you what to think and who to love and who to hate. Not much subtlety or nuance. Of course, that was kind of common at the time and kind of the point of this overt morality play, so whatever. I think Molly does a great job, even though her character is written so damned near perfect that it’s hard to identify with her humanity. That was deliberate, of course. Back then you had to make a character above reproach in order to force the audience to realize that they couldn’t just blame her illness on her being a slut or something. It’s the same trick they did with Angel in Rent and Sidney Poitier’s character in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. If you hate the character it’s because you’re a bigoted asshole, you bigoted asshole. Subtle? No, but it wasn’t meant to be. It comes across as condescending today, but for 1989 I’ll give it a pass.

I can’t hate this movie. Richard Hunt deserved his Oscar. His casting was assaulted as a stunt by some, and others didn’t think he’d have the dramatic chops since he was “just a puppeteer”. What they forget is that Hunt not only had to put on seriously funny and believable performances on a regular basis while working with the Muppets, but he had to do it indirectly through felt (much like Ginger Rogers’ “backwards in heels”). He joked to Regis that while it was his most universally praised performance, it was ironically “the easiest job in my career. I just had to be me, not an eager assistant, a snarky old man, or a giant neurotic monster.” And yea, the reality subtext of his own impending death hanging over him is palpable in his performance. He’s a man struggling with his own mortality. You can even see the physical strain the performance was having on him. He was amazing.

And if you can watch the scene with Howard Ashman in the hospital bed, a man clearly suffering in reality, and not bawl like a baby, then I question your humanity. That wasn’t a set and the chest tube wasn’t a prop. That was Howard in St. Vincent’s hospital after getting that chest tube to help fight a lung infection. And that wasn’t makeup, folks. That was the face of an actual dying man, and one brave enough to show the world what he looked like in the end.

Now, there’s a common complaint that Disney/MGM was “profiting off of AIDS.” That argument doesn’t hold water. 100% of profits, an amazing $80-90 million once marketing was considered according to some reports, went to AIDS research. They practically faced a shareholder revolt over that one. AIDS-related charities also saw a 400% increase in private donations following the release of the film. And congress finally started passing bills on AIDS response. Is this just because of the movie or is it a coincidence? Hard to say for sure since by 1989 AIDS awareness was growing, but yea, if the goal of the movie was to help people with AIDS then they succeeded.

So, yea, I totally get why a lot of people hate this movie. There’s a lot of things that don’t hold up that well today. I won’t give them the old “a product of its time” excuse, because they frankly could have done better at the time. They could have and should have made Hunt the star and given us a braver, bolder look into the struggles of queer people in America in the late 1980s rather than a flawless white woman and her magical queer best friend, but they didn’t. And yet the film was a good step forward and a hell of a lot better in how it portrayed gay men and trans women than the typical portrayals of queerness for the era. If it doesn’t hold up as well as it did in 1989, then it still deserves credit for pushing the boundaries of the time and showing the world that being queer and having AIDS was not a crime nor a sin.

And considering, despite the MGM label, that it was Disney putting this movie out, I for one think the film should get a qualified pass for its weaknesses and be applauded for what it did get right.

---

[1] To be clear, in the movie Silence of the Lambs it’s pointed out that Buffalo Bill isn’t actually a trans woman, but this comes across to many as a Band-Aid to try and sweep the Unfortunate Implications under the rug.

 

[Geekhis Khan]

Chapter 12: Flirting with Death’s Daughter
Post from the Riding with the Mouse Net-log by animator Terrell Little

We were well into production on Mort when Frank and Jim flew us out to Howard’s place in Fishkill, a small town in New York near Poughkeepsie[1]. We’d been seeing less and less of Howard of late and he’d been working shorter and shorter hours, which was frustrating us, and now we were expected to rip up our lives, leave our families behind, and live in a Residence Inn in Bumfolk, NY, and get driven out to Bill and Howard’s mountain top fortress of solitude every morning. When you work in Hollywood you get used to dealing with needy famous people with fragile egos, but this was ridiculous.

Jim, Tim, Andreas, Ron Clements, John Musker, Steve Hulett, and I flew up in the Disney jet (my first flight in a private jet). We met David Lazer there. Jim stayed a couple days to set things up and look over the concept art and then left with David to go to New York City, where they were restoring a theater and setting up a new Muppets play. The rest of us stayed and worked with Howard, Alan, and Danny Elfman, who’d been flown up separately. The writers were soon writing and us artists soon drawing concept art to help inspire Howard, Danny, and Alan. We freely shared our thoughts and opinions and the project evolved. Howard, despite being clearly exhausted, wrote like he was running out of time, which, unbeknownst to us, he was.

“Death hangs over this house,” Tim said to us out of the blue one day. We figured it was Tim being Tim, but somehow, he knew.

The irony that we were making an ultimately hopeful Disney cartoon about Death was not lost on any of us, though only Howard, Bill, and Jim knew just how ironic this was at the time. And yet even not knowing about Howard’s illness at the time, the whole production took on a strange resonance from our experiences working with the dying Howard, which can be felt in the finished product. Suddenly death, and indeed Death, seemed closer and more intimate than ever before. And Mr. Pratchett’s views on Death were, strangely, somewhat comforting, actually. Death wasn’t some malign force, but a fact of nature, a dispassionate professional doing an important and largely thankless job. But, busier than ever, he takes on an apprentice, the eponymous Mort. Mort, of course, has all of the passions and emotions of a human, unlike the arch-professional Death, and in a fit of passion Mort disrupts the natural order by intervening and saving the life of the beautiful Princess Keli from an assassin, with lasting supernatural consequences. Meanwhile, Mort is developing a complicated and often acrimonious relationship with Death’s adopted daughter Ysabel, giving a new meaning to “flirting with Death” (or at least his daughter). And Daddy Death isn’t too happy about either development.

You’d think that working in such a quiet, natural, bucolic setting would be a calm and joyous experience. You’d be wrong. Howard’s hidden illness was causing him extreme pain and discomfort which manifested in a short temper. Howard had always been a bit opinionated and didn’t like it when his ideas were questioned (something that he shared with pretty much the entire Disney Animation department, yours truly included), but up in Fishkill he was increasingly short tempered. In the morning he’d bring everyone doughnuts and show such sweetness, but then turn on a dime and rip your head off. In hindsight, it’s easy to understand why, but at the time it was straining our relationship.

We had a brief visit from Mort author Terry Pratchett, who’d tagged along with Jim one week. He (in his words) helped “muck about” with the evolving script and storyboards. He was a fun and jolly guy, but you could tell there was a powerful and complex mind working there with some deep and wry reflections on life and humanity. He and Howard occasionally argued and at one point there was a “snap” and Terry was threatening to walk out. Jim and Bill, Howard’s partner, dragged them both into a back room. We expected yelling, but it was dead quiet. When they emerged, Terry and Howard were actually holding hands. A melancholy seemed to hang over the room from that point forward. In hindsight they must have pulled Terry into the secret. Afterwards, Terry and Howard and Jim worked closely together for the rest of the visit, Terry gave Howard a hug on the way out the door the last time.

And then, suddenly, it was time to record. We all flew back to Burbank and met the stars, always one of the most exciting parts of any production. We had River Phoenix doing the voice and singing for Mort, Helena Bonham Carter as Ysabel, Winona Ryder as Princess Keli, Michael Palin as Death’s manservant Albert, and Christopher Lee as Death. I only vaguely knew Lee at the time as a Bond villain (Tim knew him through some old low-budget British horror films), but he was totally fascinating. Tim had originally wanted Vincent Price for the voice and Jim had imagined Thurl Ravenscroft, but Terry convinced us to consider Lee, and even Tim quickly admitted that Lee was exactly the right choice.

Even with such completely gorgeous people in the room as Helena, Winona, and River, Lee commanded all the attention. He’d been a commando in World War II. He had been in hundreds of plays and movies, making me embarrassed that I only knew him as a villain in one of the less amazing Bond flicks. He even freaked us all out by explaining to the voice actor playing the assassinated king the correct sound that a man stabbed in the back should make[2]. It wasn’t that he knew the sound that freaked us out, it was how casually and nonchalantly he explained it, like he was teaching us the proper sound a kitten should make when it mews. Even when he did the voicework and singing (he’d almost gone into opera!) you had to suppress a shiver at times. Certain lines stuck with you, like “THAT’S MORTALS FOR YOU. THEY’VE ONLY GOT A FEW YEARS IN THIS WORLD AND THEY SPEND THEM ALL IN MAKING THINGS COMPLICATED FOR THEMSELVES.” (I of course need to write that in all-caps, as anyone who’s read the book knows).

And Howard seemed to come alive throughout the recording, back to his old energetic self, though I’d occasionally catch him leaning, exhausted, against a wall when he though no one was watching. He and Christopher Lee in particular had a bond. Lee seemed to “get” what Howard wanted, and Howard said wonderful things about him afterwards. He said to Lee at one point “I hope it’s you I see waiting for me afterwards.” I didn’t know at the time what he meant.

It was while all of this was going on that A Small World debuted. We watched the numbers and reviews with baited breath. There was a fear that the film would be dead-on-arrival. “Common wisdom” at the time was that a “girl film” couldn’t compete, and we had lots of direct competition. Don Bluth was back for revenge with All Dogs Go to Heaven and Hollywood Pictures was putting out Return of the Littles just a week earlier to try and make us look like the copycats. We all celebrated when A Small World was a hit. People around the world were humming “A World of my Own” on the street, which made Howard and Alan very happy and all of us happy for them. They’d eventually get an Oscar for it.

There was a small break from Mort while Howard and Alan composed “The Song of Susan” with Freddy Mercury for a new MGM film (another Oscar for him in ‘90) and then another break later still when Jim brought us all back to LA with no notice. It turned out that Howard had caught an infection and was in the hospital. Secretly, Jim, Molly Ringwald, and Richard had, with Howard’s permission, made a special deal with St. Vincent’s to record a cameo with Howard for The Song of Susan. When we ultimately saw it for the first time when The Song of Susan debuted, suddenly we animators all knew and it hit us like a knife to the gut. Afterwards, Howard refused to speak to any of us about it, so we respected his privacy. But it hung there like a scythe, even if that scythe was softened when we knew that the kindly being who held it held no ill will.

And the second that the music was done for Mort, we all went back to Fishkill and started working on the music for Aladdin. Back during the making of A Small World Howard had put together a treatment and some songs, but it was largely felt by management that such a project would be seen as a copy of The Thief and the Cobbler. But after The Song of Susan cameo the animation department overwhelmingly chose it to be our next film, and we chose it for him, and by the time Aladdin screened in 1991 it was felt that the underperforming Thief and Cobbler would be largely forgotten outside of animation circles. The songs for Aladdin were delightful and a lot of fun to work with as an artist, and they were Howard and Alan at their best.

“The Song of Susan” or “Humiliate the Boy” will bring a tear to my eye every time. But for me, it’s the soundtrack for Mort that always resonates with me and reminds me of what was so great about Howard, the man I’d once laughed at who’d become something so inspirational, so amazing, so dignified, and such a tragic personal and collective loss. Death’s song “To Be Alive” (or Death’s Lament), sung as he explores the living world, trying to understand humanity, is so layered with the nuance and subtext of a man facing is own mortality with both curiosity and acceptance that I can’t even begin to fully fathom it all, and I may not until I’m staring down that road myself. Perhaps not even then.

Howard never finished the recording for Aladdin. He worked right up to the very end, but eventually his illness got to the point where he had to be hospitalized with the score about two-thirds recorded. Alan and Danny completed the recordings based on Howard’s annotations, but we’ll never know what his final versions of many of the songs would sound like.

Death came for Howard not long after Mort debuted in late 1990. They screened it for him in his hospital room and later told him the news about his third Oscar for “To Be Alive” while he was on his death bed. Alan would be the one to accept the Oscar for him as he lay dying.

While Terry Pratchett was visiting back in better days, Howard confessed to him that he hoped that Terry’s take on Death was the right one. “He seems like a fellow I’d like to meet.”

(Image source pinterest.com)

---

[1] Eisner and Wells did the same thing when Ashman was working on Beauty and the Beast.

[2] He explained the same thing to Peter Jackson during Lord of the Rings.

 

[Geekhis Khan]

Death and his “Granddaughter” Susan from the ITV Hogfather miniseries in our timeline (Image source “fashionthatpays.files.wordpress.com”)

“All right,” said Susan. “I'm not stupid. You're saying humans need... fantasies to make life bearable.”

REALLY? [said Death] AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.

“Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—"

YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.

“So we can believe the big ones?”

YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.

“They're not the same at all!”

YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME...SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.

“Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what's the point—"

MY POINT EXACTLY.

― Terry Pratchett, Hogfather

 

[Geekhis Khan]

Putting Things Right…Quantum Leap (1989-1995)
From The TV Obsessive, by Hanmii Dahri-Mote, a regular column in TV Guide and other publications

Life is unfair. Bad things happen to good people, while bad people grow rich, grow old, and die in luxury. We seek solace in religion and philosophy and fantasy, hoping to find justice and rightness in a world that refuses to be right or just. I recently lost someone that I love and saw the perpetrator escape with little consequence due to his connections, so such things have been on my mind of late. And while this column is usually a fun deviation into nostalgia, the truth is that the entertainment that we consume is quite often, it seems, the world as we wish it to be, where fairness and justice always win and the evil and the self-serving get their comeuppance.

That’s why I’m suddenly finding myself binging old VHS copies of Quantum Leap (1989-1995)[1], a show about Cosmic Justice using a science fiction pretext. The show, from Belisarius Productions, featured Scott Bakula as Dr. Sam Beckett, a quantum researcher who, due to an experimental accident, “leaps” into different bodies from people within his lifetime[2]. Assisted by the holographic projection of his crusty partner Al Calavicci and an artificial intelligence named “Ziggy”, he remains trapped in the other person’s body until he’s able to “put right which once went wrong”, typically in the form of preventing the death of an innocent or other injustice, before he can leap to the next body, forever hoping to one day leap back into his own life in the near future. It’s overtly nostalgic for the past times that each episode is set within, but also doesn’t shy from addressing the problems of that era, from racism to sexism, to homophobia.

(Image source “slashfilm.com”)

The show takes the form of a murder mystery of sorts and usually centers around themes of justice, typically social justice but also financial or environmental or legal justice. It deals with some “wrongness” that had happened in the past and puts it “right”. It could be a black man suffering at the hands of the segregated south, a young man driven by school bullies into a situation that would prove fatal, or a housewife that’s the victim of abuse. The dark subject matter was softened with comedy and situational irony, with Scott Bakula frequently appearing in drag or otherwise pushed into circumstances way out of his comfort zone. His “Oh, boy…” catchphrase captured both the sheer weight of the circumstances and the inherently wholesome and innocent nature of Sam himself. You had to root for this guy, and not just because of the inherent good that he was doing.

(Image source “ascmag.com”)

The formula struck a chord with audiences, who tuned in in huge numbers, making Quantum Leap a certified hit. Not only was it a fun show, but it’s what we wish could happen when we look back at the terrible things that happened in our lives, from the preventable death of an innocent or good person to the avoidance of some catastrophe. And it does this, at least in the early seasons, with a good scoop of humor and naturalistic drama. Later seasons delved into more overtly spiritual areas, particularly seasons 5-7 on Hyperion, which individual viewers either loved or hated, though arguably from a strictly writing standpoint it killed some of the mystery that carried the show forward as much as did the clever writing, great chemistry between Bakula and Stockwell, and inherent sense of justice.

(Image source “billprickett.com”)

The show holds up well for the most part, though it is, like the original Star Trek, both ahead of its time and a product of its time. The show is unafraid to touch the third rails of race, gender equality, and even LGBTQ issues (in one episode, the issue of gays in the military was addressed, which was timely in the era but also bravely taking a stance against hate when this was a controversial stance to take). On the other hand, it relied heavily on the White Savior trope, which was honestly nigh unavoidable given the very premise of the show. The frequent use of Sam in drag can be seen either as an ahead-of-its-time acknowledgement of nonbinary gender identity, or seen as an anachronistic throwback to “drag as heteronormative comedy”. And Al’s Standard ‘80s/’90s Comedy Misogyny and the use of Male Gaze don’t play as well today, even as they were standard comedy fare at the time. But such anachronisms aside, the show’s inherent sense of Justice is what makes it work so well even today.

Is this just mindless wish fulfilment? It certainly makes for good television, but is it, as some have accused, setting up false promises of justice and rightness in an unjust world? Does it make the pain of losing a loved one all the more painful by giving us a subconscious feeling that this is “not the way it’s supposed to be?” Is it, in a few words, making the pain of injustice worse with a Pollyanna-like view of the universe?

(Image source “themindreels.wordpress.com”)

Perhaps we seek such fictional justice for a reason? Perhaps it’s a critical part of how we learn to develop a sense of justice and avoid cynicism and hopelessness. Perhaps this is how we inspire others to seek to achieve justice? Who knows? I’m no philosopher.

(Image source “icv2.com”)

It’s easy to dismiss shows like Quantum Leap as mindless wish-fulfilment and escapism from an unjust world, but perhaps we need to give it and things like it a closer look.

---

[1] Hat tip to @Clorox23.

[2] I figured that Bellisario was working from his own personal set of objectives and with a high degree of independence. As such, there’s reason to expect second order butterflies can apply here.

 

[Geekhis Khan]

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

1990 and the new decade brought new possibility, but still, a melancholy hung over Jim. Death seemed to be everywhere. The previous December a terrorist bomb exploded aboard a Pan Am flight returning to the US from Germany, killing hundreds. A man with a pistol killed a bunch of people at a McDonalds in West LA, seemingly for no reason at all. Gang violence and drug related deaths were growing across America. Closer to home, he’d learned from Bernie Brillstein about Corey Haim’s overdose death, followed all too soon by Corey Feldman’s fatal auto accident. He’d watched Howard growing weaker every day. Richard Hunt was visibly turning paler and thinner. The specter of that damned disease and the anemic response to it chewed at him. The Song of Susan was a hit. It won awards. It raised awareness. It raised tens of millions of dollars for AIDS research. But it couldn’t save Richard and Howard, whose sands continued to slip away.

And yet a small but vocal group of shareholders were crying foul over the whole affair. Tens of millions were being “wasted” on charity. Even during its production some of these shareholders questioned why resources were being spent on “an AIDS flick”. It was a small minority, led by a vocal day trader and occasional arbitrageur, but the noise was increasing. Frank Wells said it was just a power play, and that most investors saw the advantages of positive publicity and brand improvement for long term growth, and yet with the economy sliding ever deeper into recession, some were starting to feel the bite in real time. Frank Wells ran as much interference as he could, pointing out (somewhat accurately) that with the charity they’d probably dodge enough taxes over the next three years to more than make up for the perceived “loss”, and yet even many of the more patient shareholders and their representatives were clamoring for an explanation as to why the company ever agreed to give up all of the profits. Honestly, Frank had only agreed to the charity because no one expected the movie to be a hit with general audiences. Disney stock prices had actually dropped because of it and papers were calling it “the costliest success in history”.

It baffled Jim. Disney had made them all a fortune between all of the other massive hits, the growing park attendance, and hotel revenues over the last seven years, and yet they wanted more. How much did one man need? Jim was now so rich that he couldn’t think of anything to spend it on, so he spent it on son John’s charity work or new educational projects. He funneled his own bonuses back down to the employees. The shareholders hadn’t complained about the profits of Maus all going to charity, but then again, that film only made a few million. The Song of Susan broke $120 million gross. He accepted that he had a duty to the shareholders, but this was seriously ridiculous. He urged them to pay a visit to Howard and see the human cost, but for the most part the pleas fell on deaf ears.

It sucked the life from him.

Still, the company moved forward with a life of its own. Cheryl’s “The Song of the Cloud Forest” had been a major success on Disney’s World of Magic. Its hyper-color puppetry was some of the most visually stunning and beautiful stuff the Muppet Workshop had produced in years. It was a beautiful and sentimental work that none the less addressed a serious existential issue: habitat destruction and extinction. He’d delighted in watching the life-affirming creation of his middle daughter’s new special, and was particularly proud and happy to present it on World of Magic, but alas the reigns of production were almost completely out of his hands.

Instead, a darker picture absorbed his time: Mort, a beautiful but bittersweet story that resonated with the context of Howard’s imminent passing. Howard’s chilling lyrics, set to Alan and Danny’s amazing, ethereal score with its mix of minor key and Phrygian scale, captured the longing, existential ennui of the four central characters. And certainly, the haunted and haunting (literally) Princess Keli was unlike any Disney Princess to come before! Jim and Terry Pratchett had gotten along very well during its creation. Terry mentioned that he had an idea for a follow-up to Mort. While Disney generally didn’t do “sequels” Jim swore he’d give it a look when it arrived. He made a note to look at all of Terry’s writing. The animated feature was shaping up to be amazing. The pencil test sequences, tied to the fantastic voice work, was astonishing.

Up next was Aladdin, Howard’s personal passion project fashioned in the vein of the old Bob Hope/Bing Crosby musicals and the old Swing Age jazz scene with a Genie based on Cab Calloway. Jim flew out to New York, checked on the plays and Sesame Street, and went up to Fishkill. Howard and Alan were rushing to finish the music while Howard still breathed, but the clock was ticking. The doctors claimed that there was less than a year. Howard, voice weaker than it had been just weeks before, lamented how much he wanted to stay longer, but there was so much to do and so little time. Jim, though not facing Howard’s definite looming mortality, knew all too well about that.

Jim drove down to Philadelphia, nearly getting into an accident on I-95 as his mind wandered, to check on the Disneytown, set to open that year. He was happy to visit Sesame Place, which held a special place in his heart. He wanted to stay longer, but time was running out. He had to fly down to check on Typhoon Lagoon and then jet back to Burbank.

The latest Studio Ghibli release, Kiki’s Delivery Service, a brilliant story about when the “magic” of talent is lost due to the drudgery of work, had made a good $36 million, not My Neighbor Totoro success, but more in keeping with the usual returns on Japanese anime imports. The continued success of the partnership led Henson and Miyazaki to establish an “animator’s exchange program”.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was about to release. Jim was exceptionally proud of the film and glad that they’d managed to beat out Warner Brothers and Paramount to make it[1]. The animatronics were working exceptionally well and really bringing the Eastman and Laird characters to life.

Batman had been a smashing success (he sent his congratulations to Lisa’s boyfriend Sam), so they greenlit Spiderman in partnership with Orion Pictures after reclaiming the film rights from Canon when they reverted in 1990. It was to be the first time the webslinger had been on the big screen to the best of his knowledge. They put it under MGM. Lisa’s own Indiana Jones movie, The Judgement of Anubis, her first credit as Producer, was likewise a smashing success. In the excitement of their twin blockbusters, Sam and Lisa decided to get married. The spur-of-the-moment wedding was a fun chance for the whole family to gather, but the marriage itself wouldn’t last, ending in amicable divorce in 1991.

As for MGM, the Entertainment Pavilion and its MGM-themed Great Movie Ride was a smashing success, though Universal Studios, under construction in Orlando, could pose a challenge once it opened. Frank was furious at the Universal plan and wanted to build up a competing resort. It seemed to Jim like a waste of time and money just to hypothetically “compete” with Universal Studios. Instead, why not make the existing parks more attractive? A new Indiana Jones themed stunt show in Adventureland seemed like the obvious choice. Triad, owners of Paramount, were happy to support anything that undermined arch-rival Universal. As for studio tours, the newly expanded Burbank lot offered the perfect place for tours, and with sets much more likely to actually be occupied and “in production” than some hypothetical new lot in Kissimmee. And as the number of active productions increased, they indeed began building new studios and sound stages in Orlando, with a “yellow brick road” from the Entertainment Pavilion that offered Studio tours from EPCOT as well.

Then you had Port Disney and the DisneySea park to go with it. And there was Disneyland Valencia…he really needed to find the time to visit the site again. He and Frank spent hours of time going over concept art, test reels, blueprints, spreadsheets, schedules, release plans…still so little time for it all.

He took a little time off, and most of it was spent at Sunset Puppetry doing increasingly surreal and adult shows for the teens and young adults on the Sunset Strip. At one point he and his kids went scrambling when a gunfight broke out on Sunset Boulevard, apparently a drug deal gone bad. Having lived in New York in the 1970s, he was no stranger to urban crime, but LA was getting bad. There was this feeling of a bottle under pressure just waiting to explode when the right stimulus came along. He wondered if he needed to find a quieter, less dangerous pastime!

Fatefully, he decided that a return to the calm nature walks that he used to take with Emily would be a better pastime. One evening in May during sunset he was taking a walk along the coastal rocks. He’d spent a lot of time walking along these rocks and others like them and he’d received his share of cuts and scrapes and bruises from the occasional slip or stumble. When he slipped and gouged his leg on a rocky outcropping, the bleeding wasn’t excessive. He took the bandana from his head and fashioned it into a makeshift bandage and finished his walk. When he got home, Bob Forrest was there, strung out, paranoid. He and son John spent the night talking him down and trying in vain to convince him to go into rehab. He should have been thinking more about himself at the moment, but as always, he put the needs of others first.

The next morning Jim finally took a shower. The gouge on his leg was swollen and red now. He put some ice on it and went to work. Mort was in full animation. He walked along the hallways of the Animation, 3D, and Ink & Paint buildings. Some of the animators remembered him having a slight limp. John Lasseter was managing the DIS animation stations and compilers, which were crunching through backgrounds, the framing effects for the Turtle-borne Discworld, and the digital animation for the thousands of life timers, their sands slowly slipping away. Inkers and painters were compiling cels of Death in a hundred poses and expressions: a looming menace, a kindly father, an angry spirit, a welcoming host.

Over the next two days the swelling in his leg got worse. The heat and discomfort throbbed, distracting him slightly as he watched the premier of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and spoke to the press. A white plug of pus filled the gouge. The red had travelled up his leg almost to the knee. John gave him some special teas, led him through some healing exercises, and suggested that he rest. Bob Forrest, still crashing there, suggested that he should see a doctor. Jim shrugged. He hated to be a bother. There was too much to do and too little time for it all. Work went on. He was exhausted when Saturday came around. John told him to go to bed, but he’d promised Dick Nunis that they would go surfing that morning and he never wanted to break a promise, however small.

He met Dick Nunis on the beach that day, but they wouldn’t make it to the waters that day. “I met him at the beach and I immediately saw the leg,” Nunis recalled. “It was infected, and bad. I said, ‘Jim, you stupid son of a bitch! We’re going to the hospital!’ He demurred and refused. He said he was ‘fine.’ I wasn’t having it. I physically dragged him to the car and drove him to the emergency room against his will[2].

“He said something like, ‘Look, I really don’t want to impose,’ and I said to him, ‘don’t you think your dying might just impose on the rest of us who have to pick up the pieces?’”

The doctors immediately put him on intravenous vancomycin. They dug out the pus plug and drained the wound, wicking out the pus and infection, cleaning it thoroughly. “Another two days or so and he might have gone into septic shock,” said Nunis. “The attending physician explained to Jim what that meant in excruciating detail. Jim said he’d seen it happen and went white as a ghost.”

And seen it he had, just weeks before at St. Vincent’s Hospital in New York as Howard Ashman struggled through a systemic infection that his body couldn’t fight.

“I didn’t want to be there [at the emergency room],” Jim said of it all later. “Hospitals freak me out. I hated all of the attention. The IV made my skin flush red and hot. I honestly didn’t shit right for a week, pardon my language. But Dick saved my life. It didn’t fully set in until later just how close I’d come. Terry’s Reaper seems like a nice guy given everything, but I’m in no personal hurry to meet him.”

The event would leave a lasting impression on Jim. The constantly flowing sands of time and his own looming mortality had always hung over his head, but always in the abstract. Here he’d literally faced death. He didn’t want to be a bother for others, but all of the attention he received afterwards made it clear to him that all that they wanted was for him to be in their lives. The following days would reaffirm to him that, for as alone and isolated as he’d felt from atop the peak, he wasn’t alone as long as he had friends, family, and coworkers who loved and respected him as much as he loved and respected them.

Jim Henson wouldn’t spend another minute dwelling on the things that had been lost, only on what, and who, he had in his life. He’d been given more time, and he wasn’t going to waste a second of it.

Sunset…or Sunrise? (Image source “unsplash.com”)

- ∞ -

---

[1] In our timeline nobody wanted to take a risk on TMNT because the He Man movie had been a total flop. In this timeline He Man is a modest success, so there was a short bidding war for the popular characters.

[2] It’s necessary to be a Dick some days.

 

[Geekhis Khan]

Part VIII: Borrowed Time​

“But there never seems to be enough time

To do the things you want to do

Once you find them”

– Jim Croce, “Time in a Bottle”

* * *​

Chapter 17: Expansion and Challenges
Excerpt from The King is Dead: The Walt Disney Company After Walt Disney, an Unauthorized History by Sue Donym and Arman N. Said

Frank Wells looked out over the Disney lot from his window (a small bit of executive indulgence) and reflected upon how far things had come in the nearly 7 years since he’d joined Disney. He’d joined a small, quiet studio in the midst of a cultural crossroads, one where idle employees and risk-adverse managers had allowed a timid ennui to overtake a corporate culture once dominated by a single man’s dream. Now Disney was again a leading light in Hollywood. It now owned MGM, one of the Great Old Studios of Hollywood’s Golden Age, in addition to its growing Hyperion and Fantasia labels and the growing and expanding parks. Disney productions were making a huge mark around the world on the big screen, television, home video, the radio, and even the stage at Broadway, where Muppetational! was a breakout hit being compared to Cats both for its lack of a central story and for its ability to tap directly into a larger cultural zeitgeist.

The lobby of the Original Animation Building, which still served as the symbolic heart of the company, now officially named the Walter Elias Disney building, was loaded with cases full of Oscars, BAFTAs, Emmys, Tonys, Grammys, Golden Globes, Annies, and other awards. Some were proclaiming a “new Golden Age of Disney”, but the competing title of “Renaissance Age” seemed more appropriate to Wells. All they did, after all, was restore the House that Walt Built, both figuratively and literally.

Wells looked upon the new 1990s with both hope and reticence. The boom years of the 1980s, where greed was a virtue and GDP was ever-climbing, were over, and all signs pointed to continued recession. The Fed, fearing inflation, had raised interest rates and the GDP had plateaued and was starting to trend downwards already. And then Saddam Hussein, that wannabe gangster in Baghdad, had invaded Kuwait, sending oil prices skyrocketing. That sent fuel prices skyrocketing, which in turn sent food and consumer goods prices skyrocketing due to shipping costs, and (most critically for Disney) sent airline ticket sales and summer car trips plummeting, meaning that trips to the Disney parks & hotels were dropping.

It was a hell of a time to be opening a new park, but Disneyland Valencia was still on schedule to open in the spring of ’92. Wells had hoped that the downturn would be short, perhaps “Operation Desert Shield” would scare Hussain back into Iraq without a shot fired, and oil prices would start to drop again. But instead, Hussain promised a “mother of all battles” and Desert Shield turned into Desert Sword, rockets flew, bombs fell, and retreating Iraqi soldiers set all the oil wells on fire, causing oil prices to skyrocket further. Wells surmised that the recession would last until the mid ‘90s at least. Disneyland Valencia was going to start on a low note. It had honestly cost too much and he was as much to blame for that as anyone, having directed John Hench, Mickey Steinberg, and Marty Sklar to spare no expense. He himself had pushed for the domed alleyways to be perfect down to the smallest detail[1].

Wells knew that Disney’s stock price was going to drop. It was dropping already thanks to lower-than-normal park and hotel attendance and increased overhead costs due to high fuel prices. He warned the board. But some of them were fixated on the money “lost” on AIDS research with Song of Susan and other small-fry “grass is greener” things. Peter Dailey, undoubtedly parroting Stanley Gold, was asking why the Sesame Street Muppets weren’t being brought into Disney, but still in Henson’s private hands. That old forgotten canard had gained new wings when someone at the New York Muppet Workshop tossed a certain furry red monster Muppet that no one else wanted to a young Muppet performer named Kevin Clash, creating a phenomenon[2]. Elmo-mania was sweeping across America and the shareholders wanted a piece of the action. Wells noted, wryly, that only the super-rich can be that damned entitled.

But Wells had bigger issues to deal with than entitled shareholders. It was an all-out blitz to get Disneyland Valencia ready by ’92. The castle was being built from actual stone and real hand-made stained glass because Europeans were certainly not going to be impressed by pink concrete and fiberglass when the “real deal” was available in every small medieval town, including several near Pego. The highways and rail lines were finally going in and the port at Dénia was being upgraded per the Spanish government’s promises. Water treatment plants were making the tap-water safe for consumption. Solar and wind farms[3] were supplementing the natural gas cogeneration plant to power it all. The protective berms and retaining ponds were going in to protect the wetlands from pollution and runoff, but at a cost far higher than originally projected. The local farmers had been well compensated for their lands and were making good money helping to construct the park. The American Disney employees were learning passable Spanish and a second new language, generally French or German, so that they could better greet and negotiate. Had the economy held, Wells would have been confident of success, but now he had doubts.

On top of that, Mickey Steinberg had managed to get into an argument with Dragados about construction methods, with a real difference between US and European standards emerging. Mickey swore that only Imagineers could do the work and wanted to put everything into the hands of the Imagineers, cutting out Dragados almost entirely. But since the Spanish Government backed Dragados and was footing much of the bill for the critical infrastructure improvements, this was a non-starter. Wells began to suspect too that Dragados was deliberately doing things the wrong way the first time so that they could charge Disney more later to fix it, but he couldn’t prove it. Still, he and Jim rushed out to meet with Dragados and Spanish politicians in an effort to smooth ruffled feathers and get the plan back on track. All said, though, what had begun as a project budgeted at $1.3 billion would ultimately swell to $3.8 billion[4], with 30% of that covered by the Spanish government. At least labor costs were lower in Spain!

Then there was the politics of it all. From the beginning, Spanish Communists and anarchists had protested the park specifically and Disney in general. Wells himself had once had to duck a thrown egg at a press briefing. Spanish labor unions were extracting every cent and benefit-concession they could get during the construction, knowing that the pressure to open the park on schedule gave any threat of a strike that much more force behind it. There were government officials in places like Galicia and Grenada that were angry to see their tax dollars going to big infrastructure projects in Alicante to support an American park when the roads in their cities were crumbling. François Mitterrand in France was still facing pressure from businessmen in Paris over his “failure” to bring the park to Paris and was deflecting the criticism by blaming it on “les Américains perfides”. The ETA was rumored to be planning an attack, though his contacts in the US and Spanish government assured him that there was no intelligence to support any immediate threat.

But recession or not, Wells was moving forward. He took a seat in his new chair in his newly refurbished office in the newly renovated Walter Elias Disney Building[5]. The restored building was an encapsulation of the business philosophy at Disney today: putting the Dream ahead of the Scheme. Following the trends of Silicon Valley (at least as Steve Jobs explained them) the focus was on inspiring the employees with new open-bay plans with private common offices and collaboration rooms available as needed. Common use areas would increase the opportunities for chance encounters and encourage ad hoc brainstorming, and thus innovation. The old paradigm of small, closed-off offices was gone, even for executives. Wells’ office, like that of Ron Miller’s and Jim Henson’s nearby, was accessible, open, and suggested availability and transparency. The Round Table of the Board of Directors had a central location and glass on all sides, even as the glass was soundproofed and had curtains for when privacy was needed. New buildings and building expansions were completed for the growing animation and 3D groups, the effects group, and the Advanced R&D group. New multifunction sound stages and studios were going up where the lazy-day ball fields and underutilized 1940s/50’s-era sets had once been. Deals were being made with studios and sound stages in other countries, including, ironically, Robert Holmes à Court’s Elstree Studios where The Muppet Show had once been produced[6].

The Typhoon Lagoon water park had been a big hit and the Entertainment Pavilion had brought in huge numbers prior to the gas price hike. Universal Studios in Orlando was coming soon, but the same oil price hike and impending recession that was threatening Valencia would surely affect Universal as well, which had more to lose from a few tight years. Even so, it rankled Frank that his plans for a larger MGM Studios park had been rejected so far. They would have beaten Universal to the punch. The Disneytown in Philadelphia had performed under expectations, but not by much. The somewhat-similar Pratt Street Power Plant complex in the Baltimore Inner Harbor was having financial difficulties and had been abandoned by Six Flags, offering a worrying omen. So far, the Philadelphia Disneytown was performing better than the Power Plant, perhaps because of the Disney name, perhaps due to the existing Sesame Place customer base, or perhaps because the Disneytown was in a quiet suburb and not right downtown in the country’s murder capital like the Power Plant complex. They decided to launch a second Disneytown near Denver, Colorado, and third in San Antonio, Texas, as a “sink or swim” moment for the project.

Where would the next seven years take Disney? And did Wells want to be a part of it for another seven years? He wasn’t planning on leaving anytime soon, he loved every day he worked here, but he knew that he’d eventually start looking for the next summit to climb. Maybe it would be corporate (his own start-up?), or maybe it would be political. A growing “Atari Democrat” faction of fiscally conservative pro-technology Democrats appealed to both his conservative economic and progressive social beliefs. 1992 and the next Presidential election was just a couple of years away. Perhaps there was an Atari Democrat able to take on Bush that he could support? With the war in Iraq, President Bush was shockingly popular, even despite the economic downturn. But the idea of helping to remake the world in the same way he’d helped remake Disney held a strange temptation. Perhaps in a few years he’d revisit that line of thought.

In the meantime, though, a new era in Walt Disney awaited him. And he and Ron and Jim had some interesting new ideas.

---

[1] The standing assumption in the fandom and industry has been that Michael Eisner was the bold risk taker and Frank Wells the conservative “steady hand”, but in reality, Wells, who never met a mountain he didn’t want to climb, was a very bold and risk-taking executive who was willing to spare no expense when needed and often dragged Eisner kicking and screaming into the higher-risk, higher-reward pathway.

[2] What did you expect to find here…a running gag? “Rule of Three”, bizzlenitches.

[3] [insert Don Quixote joke of your choice here]

[4] Disneyland Valencia has a mix of advantages and disadvantages with respect to our timeline's Euro Disney. The construction is more difficult than Euro Disney and more infrastructure is needed. Labor costs are far lower and delays fewer, and the Disney team hasn’t constantly changed their minds on designs as badly. Also, since they’re not assuming that half of Paris is going to visit, they haven’t built nearly as many hotels. Altogether the costs will amount to roughly $3.8 billion compared to out timeline’s $5 billion for Euro Disney. Note that infrastructure-wise, it’s difficult to determine what was done as part of the larger infrastructure plans for the Barcelona Olympics, making a precise determination cloudier.

[5] No dwarf-held postmodern eyesore “Team Disney” building to piss off Roy. Instead the original buildings have been restored, upgraded, and modernized.

[6] A photograph of Jim Henson shaking hands with Robert Holmes à Court appeared in Entertainment and in posterity became iconic of the transition from the 1980s to the 1990s.

 

[Geekhis Khan]

Setting the Stage 6: Can’t Touch This

1990, a brand-new decade full of promise and change! The neon 1980s are all but gone, but their lingering culture holds on, even as a new black lace and red flannel ennui starts to set in. Goth and Grunge are still underground scenes while Rap and Hip Hop have begun their unstoppable climb into the mainstream culture. The manic wealth-seeking capitalist boom time of the 1980s is settling into a slow, lingering recession.

Music in general is in the midst of a major transition, and at the moment it is all over the map. The sensual dance of the Lambada threatens to singlehandedly destroy American morality. MC Hammer vies with the B-52s, Sinead O’Conner, and New Kids on the Block for Billboard slots. Glam Rock is holding on for its dear life with Bon Jovi’s oddly apropos “Blaze of Glory” clinging to the charts.

Meanwhile, in another world, The Simpsons debuts on Fox as a primetime cartoon. Along with The Simpsons, Tiny Toon Adventures will debut and mark a new and exciting era in TV animation (one already underway in this timeline). Married with Children will appear as an anathema to The Cosby Show while the wacky world of the wealthy will be revealed to the unwashed masses via Beverly Hills 90210 and (in a more comedic vein) Fresh Prince of Bel Air. Many of the lingering hits of the ‘80s, like Miami Vice, Alf, and Pee Wee’s Playhouse, will end. Meanwhile, the surreal David Lynch series Twin Peaks will have the world asking “Who Killed Laura Palmer?” much as they asked “Who Shot JR?” ten years earlier. They will quickly get their answer – an answer that according to Lynch didn’t matter because that wasn’t the point – and with that revelation they will tune out and the show will die on a cliffhanger.

Makes just as much sense in context (Image source “gifer.com”)

The silver screen in that other world will be dominated by the “high concept” films that Michael Eisner so loved. Ghost, Home Alone, and Pretty Woman will rule the box office, as will Western Epic Dances with Wolves, borderline-campy Sci-Fi adventure Total Recall, and (in another hit for Schwarzenegger) the comedy Kindergarten Cop, which I have personally dubbed “the last ‘80s movie” (it begins with a shootout in a shopping mall wearing Members Only jackets for one). Jim Henson’s Creature Shop will amaze audiences by bringing the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to life. And despite a mind-numbing blitz of saturation-marketing, the horror/comedy Arachnophobia, advertised as a “Thrillomedy”, underperforms[1].

Sure to be a big hit

In the world, East and West Germany, divided since the end of World War II, will reunite following the fall of the Berlin Wall the year before, a joyous symbolic end to the Cold War that had dominated the world order for decades. The world breathes a huge sigh of relief with the possibility that Humanity just might not drive itself extinct any time soon. We celebrate by consuming more products, energy, and fossil fuels, knowing that nothing bad can possibly happen to us now.

The dominoes start to fall at amazing speed in the Soviet Bloc. Lech Walesa becomes president of Poland after his Solidarity movement stands up to the Soviets. Free elections are held in Romania and former premier Nicolae Ceaușescu will face trial and execution for his actions in the prior decades. Before long, the Soviet Union itself will fall.

In the west, Margaret Thatcher resigns as Prime Minister. British and French workers shake hands deep under the English Channel symbolically marking a milestone in the creation of the Chunnel and a symbolic milestone for European Unity.

I’m sure this sense of continental brotherhood will last forever (Image source “tunneltalk.com”)

In Switzerland, Tim Berners-Lee publishes his formal proposal for the World Wide Web to CERN. The Hubble Space Telescope launches to much celebration, only to quickly discover that it needs glasses.

In South Africa great hope arises when Nelson Mandela is released from prison.

The UN launches a formal ban on the Ivory Trade.

Iraq under Saddam Hussein invades Kuwait, setting the stage for a perfect little war that will convince America that wars in the Middle East are quick, simple, and largely bloodless things thanks to smart weapons. Shirts for “Iraqnophobia” hit the malls of America.

“War? What is it Good For? Selling lots of T-Shirts (say it again!)” (Image source “pintrest.com”)

And in the biggest scandal of the year (and in the tradition of ending these damned things on a silly note), musicians Milli Vanilli are exposed as lip-syncers. The press will redub them “Phony Baloney”. Betrayed America will never be the same again.

Just as real as a live performance

---

[1] It combined the spine-tingling terror of Caddyshack with the endless laughs of The Exorcist.

 

[Geekhis Khan]

A Show About Nothing! Jerry (1989-1996)
From The TV Obsessive, by Hanmii Dahri-Mote, a regular column in TV Guide and other publications

Chances are that if you talk to someone in their 40s today about television you will hear them talk about Jerry, the 6-season show that failed, moved to cable, and returned to network TV where it became a minor hit whose influence far outlasted its success.

Not quite this…

Jerry was the brain child of its two stars, Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David (the now legendary producers “Jerry & Larry”). The concept was simple and today seems cliché, but it was revolutionary when it came out: a mix of stand-up bits interspersed with Jerry and his shallow, self-absorbed friends complaining about the most trivial things in life. It was naturalistic, postmodern, and ingenious, and in another world probably became one of the greatest shows in television history.

Jerry Seinfeld played the titular Jerry, a phlegmatic flawed everyman whose fixation on the shallowest of personal shortcomings in his partners dooms all of his romantic relationships. Larry David played his neighbor Kramer, an unpleasant natural-born schemer always coming up with the most outlandish of get-rich-quick schemes and allegedly based upon a mutual friend of theirs. Rumor has it that they wanted comedic actor Michael Richards to play the role, but he was already ensconced in a career in Hollywood. Julia Louis-Dreyfus played Elaine, a conniving and manipulative ex-girlfriend of Jerry’s whose chain of eccentric boyfriends and bosses provided regular comedic input. And Jason Alexander played George, a lazy underachiever and worrywart always devising ever more complicated ways to avoid making any actual effort, and that inevitably ended up taking more time and effort than the original task he hoped to avoid. Several other guest stars came in as friends, family, coworkers, or passing antagonists with names like “The Soup Nazi”, “Man Hands”, “The Soft Talker”, “The Face Painter”, or any other number of dehumanizing titles.

It was, in the words of its modest but rabid fanbase, a show about nothing. A given episode may be about a disagreement between characters over what actor was in that TV show, or whether a jacket was worth the price, or whether or not to dump a significant other because of one minor little trait like the look of their hands or the fact that they paint their face for sports games. The daily low stakes challenges of its characters were then exaggerated by their overreactive neuroses into insurmountable crises. The title of the old Shakespearian play of “Much Ado About Nothing” comes instantly to mind. The sheer audacity of the character’s overreactions to such mundane issues added to the perceived realism of the show. Very few people have to deal with the common sitcom tropes of dating two people on the same night, having a wacky cousin from Albuquerque come to visit, or living with an alien, but who hasn’t been in a relationship with someone who has that one annoying habit or tick? Who hasn’t argued with a friend about a movie or got in a fight with a stranger at the laundromat over a dryer? It was infinitely relatable and thus seemed inherently real. It won several Emmys and influenced a generation of comedy producers, but it nearly didn’t come to pass.

The idea was born from ideas kicked around between Jerry and Larry based on their personal experiences living in New York City. They put together a basic pitch and got attention from NBC executive Rick Ludwin, the As You Wish production company, and MGM producers Bernie Brillstein and Diana Birkenfield, whose parent company Disney also owned a minority stake in As You Wish. Jerry & Larry put together a pilot, showed it to test audiences, and…it tanked. Hard[1]. They did some retooling and eventually got the pilot on NBC in the summer of 1989 where it performed well enough to get greenlit for a half season. But the ratings refused to materialize and the show soon got cancelled.

However, the show had one thing going for it: it played well in the lucrative young adult demographic. NBC’s loss was, to Brillstein and Birkenfield, Hyperion’s gain and the show was moved to the Hyperion Channel on Basic Cable, where it grabbed and maintained a good and lucrative younger viewing audience, who loved its cynical, sometimes surreal, and borderline misanthropic humor. After finishing Season 1 and working through Season 2 with steady if not revolutionary numbers, NBC called back and agreed to put Jerry back into their primetime lineup. It managed to pull in steady and growing numbers, but never broke out into the Top Five, even while it continued to be an awards-darling[2].

By the time Season 5 rolled around, star Jason Alexander was receiving more and more character roles in Hollywood, Julia Louis-Dreyfus was getting offers from other TV producers, and Jerry and Larry were starting to see the writing on the wall. They agreed to a Season 6, this time without “George” and with Wayne Knight’s melodramatic Newman filling in the gap, but even MGM and As You Wish knew that time had run out. The show ended with a modest finale in the fall of 1995, but its influence lived on.

Jerry is cited by dozens of other writers, producers, and comedians as an inspiration. The concept of the long-running show Friends Like Us, for example, showed a direct influence from Jerry: it was six neurotic young people living in New York City and experiencing the trials of daily life, with many Jerry fans referring to it (generally sympathetically) as “Jerry Lite” or (more dismissively) as “Jerry for Dummies”.

Jerry and Larry would go on to found J&L Productions, working closely with As You Wish, Witt/Thomas/Harris, BrooksTV, MGM-Hyperion, and other producers, and are behind some of TV’s most famous and beloved shows of the ‘90s, ‘00s, and present day. Jerry’s supporting actors have gone on to good post-Jerry careers and the show has gained a new following in recent years through direct viewing, where its genius has been belatedly recognized, even as some ironically call it cliched since so many of the tropes and premises it created have gone on to become industry standards.

Not bad for a show about nothing.

---

[1] True in our timeline too!

[2] Like our timeline’s 30 Rock, Jerry will be one of those highly influential, award-winning comedies with a modest but fanatical following that inspires a hundred shows to follow, rather than a legendary “Greatest Show of All Time” breakout hit. This is largely because of the lack of Michael Richards’ Kramer, whose physicality and over-the-top humor made the show more immediately appreciable to larger audiences while this one, with Kramer being a more comedically dislikable character, will be “ahead of its time” and have a more niche audience.

 

[Geekhis Khan]

A Show About…What, Exactly? Salem Falls (1990-1994)
From The TV Obsessive, by Hanmii Dahri-Mote, a regular column in TV Guide and other publications

Last issue I talked about 1989’s Jerry, the “show about nothing.” By contrast, today’s article is about David Lynch’s seminal surreal series Salem Falls, a show about…what, exactly? A murder mystery? Demonic possession? Supernatural dream dwarves? Psychic logs? Apple pie and coffee?

Oh, where to begin?

Not exactly this…

I guess we can start at “the top”, when Lynch's agent, Tony Krantz, suggested that he should do a TV show. Lynch was at first not interested, but Krantz talked up the idea of a small town where Lynch’s particular views of American life could be explored. “You should do a show about real life in America,” Krantz said, “your vision of America the same way you demonstrated it in Blue Velvet and Less than Zero.”[1]

Lynch, who had gained critical renown with Ronnie Rocket but failed to get any follow-up offers given the outrageously non-mainstream, non-commercial nature of his films, was running out of options. He decided to humor Krantz’s “small town” idea, reviewing the 1957 film Peyton Place as a suggestion. After exploring settings such as North Dakota (the show nearly got named “Brainard”), with the idea of the mystery and romance of the frontier west, the nostalgia of small-town America, and the dark and seedy underbelly of the American counterculture scene all coming together in a comedic and bathos-filled clash.

Dun-DUN (deee...deee...deee) Dun-Dun...

Not expecting much to come from it, Lynch brought up the idea to Diana Birkenfield at MGM Television while in production on Ronnie Rocket. She and Mel Brooks got him in touch with the production team of Joshua Brand & John Falsey, who loved the idea, having been kicking around ideas for a show set in Alaska[2]. The ideas merged and the show was ultimately drawn to Lynch’s childhood home in the Pacific Northwest, specifically a rural community in an old Cascades logging town called Salem Falls. The name was inspired by the magnificent Snoqualmie Falls, which ultimately ended up in the opening credits. The series would follow a combination of murder mystery, soap opera, and dark, character-driven comedy with the murder of the beautiful teenage Virginia Dare (Sheryl Lee, who also plays her cousin Maddy Ferguson) as a “hook” and McGuffin to draw in viewers, and where ultimately the oddball characters and their quirks and relationships and secrets would, in theory, hold on to them.

They took the idea to ABC where producer Chad Hoffman and ABC Entertainment Vice President Bob Iger loved the idea and ordered a pilot. The executives were mixed when they saw the pilot, in particular Michael Eisner, who thought that it was “too strange, too complicated, and too confusing” and lobbied to reject the pilot out of hand. His burgeoning rivalry with Iger may have played a part in the decision. Ultimately ABC turned down the show, which was taken to PFN, who’d gained a reputation at this point for being willing to gamble on the bizarre and non-mainstream. PFN greenlit the pilot, which did well with the profitable 18-25 demographic, and a half season was greenlit at $1.1 million an episode.

Salem Falls first aired in the fall of 1990 amid a massive media campaign that played up the mystery. And from the second that the moody resonance of the minimalist bass guitar notes of the theme rang amid pictures of industrial saws and sublime waterfalls, audiences knew that they were in for something unlike anything else that they had seen before. And indeed, the overt mystery of “who killed Virginia Dare?” became a public mantra of “who shot JR?” level. However, Lynch, Brand, and Falsey knew that the overt mystery could never hold the show forever, so instead the hope was to draw viewers into the “sublime mystery” of the spiritual, human, and dreamlike magical realism that underlie everything.

If Virginia Dare’s murder was the bait, the hook was the characters and the sinker the oddball writing. When Sheriff Harold Tubman (Michael Ontkean) and Deputy Sheriff Jim "Hawkeye" Chigliak (Michael Horse) proved unable to solve the mystery, they brought in FBI Special Agent Curt Darby (Kyle MacLachlan) to help solve the case. Agent Darby served as the show’s focus, relaying his observations and suspicions to his assistant back at headquarters through a miniature tape recorder in a noir-inspired pseudo-narration. Each episode would see him interview another strange and suspicious townsperson like Dare’s parents (Ray Wise and Grace Zabriskie), who seemed to be hiding something, Virginia’s bad boy boyfriend Bobby (Dana Ashbrook), manipulative businessman Jack Horne (Richard Beymer), his rival the lumber magnate Maurice Minnifield (Barry Corbin), abused diner waitress Shelley (Mädchen Amick), tomboy Bush Pilot (and Jack’s daughter and Virginia’s friend) Audrey Horne (Janine Turner), mill owner Jocelyn "Josie" Packard (Joan Chen), and level headed and gruff general store owner (but who’s hiding a dark secret) Ruth-Anne Miller (Peg Phillips).

Makes just as much sense in this timeline (Image source “vulture.com”)

The cast is padded out by recurring but quirky townspeople like Deputy Hill’s eccentric son Ed Chigliak (Darren E. Burrows) who wants to be a director, Major Garland Briggs (Don Davis) who is Bobby's father (and the former subject of military experiments), Canadian crime boss (and Jack Horne’s and Maurice Minnifield’s sometimes business associate) Jean Renault (Michael Parks), and the mysterious and bizarre “Log Lady” (Catherine E. Coulson), whose “psychic log” acts as a fortune teller. And then there are the denizens of a dreamlike Red Room, Michael J. Anderson and Carel Struycken, who offer surreal advice and confounding pseudo-revelations, often said backwards.

And then there’s “B.O.B.” (Frank Silva), a demonic entity who may be the true villain.

And if any of this makes sense to you, then you can explain it to me, over coffee and blueberry pie.

But “sense” is not in Lynch’s repertoire. The mystery of Virginia Dare is not really the point. Instead, Salem Falls is like an extended surrealist soap opera, a dreamlike exploration of American small-town life. All of the characters approach things through a mixture of logic, suspicion, and magical thinking with the supernatural just on the other side of a thin, invisible wall all around. On one hand it’s pure mind-screw, on the other hand it’s a surreal satire of American society, and on the third hand it’s a quirky, character-driven oddball comedy. The series itself seems constantly pulled between the competing poles of Lynch’s dreamlike vision and Brand and Falsey’s quirky character comedy. And indeed, the network was constantly pushing for more of the latter and less of the former. The show attempts to balance these competing poles. It doesn’t always succeed, but when it does it’s as sublime as Snoqualmie Falls

Shown: a surprising percentage of the show's runtime (Image source “time.com”)

The network, due to fan demand, was also pressing for Lynch, Brand, and Falsey to reveal Dare’s killer, which, as Lynch astutely put it, “was missing the point”. They relented at the end of Season 2, with a huge, 2-hour special event, “Fire Walk with Me”, that drew record viewership. I won’t reveal the “killer” here just in case you care about decades-old spoilers – and remember that the “answer” is really missing the point – but needless to say once the “answer” was revealed, Season 3 saw viewership drop precipitously. However, with the quirky characters and some increasing interpersonal drama thanks to Brand and Falsey, the show held on to a reasonable viewership and saw another season before Lynch pulled out to return to film, and then squeaked out another season and a half under Brand and Falsey, the magical realism slowly leaking away in favor of quirky character studies. But without the balance between the strange and familiar, it became just another oddball ‘90s series with quirky characters among many, ironically increasingly indistinguishable from its many imitators.

Salem Falls would win multiple Emmys and Golden Globes and would become an icon of the 1990s. It was an immediate breakout in the US and Canada and became popular in Europe, particularly France and Italy, and in Japan, which would later relaunch the series as a Manga and Anime. It would spawn a direct-view “where are they now” miniseries in the 2010s. It would also become the target of constant and merciless satire and parody, which amused Lynch to no end.

The series would also spawn some attempted copycat series. The most famous and immediate of these was Sandy Veith’s[3] Southern Exposure on CBS, which saw a New York City doctor (Rob Morrow) open up a practice in the small Northern Georgia town of Pine Hill as a condition of his medical school scholarship, encountering many quirky “hillbilly” locals. It was reportedly Columbia CEO Ted Turner’s favorite show. But plenty of other shows followed at least some aspect over the years from the X-Files, which took the supernatural mystery and ran with it, to Picket Fences, which went for the weird and quirky.

Salem Falls, for all of its surrealist absurdism, has gone on to influence many more series since, and can largely be seen in hindsight as a truly transitional piece. It was in some ways a product of its time, and yet it was also a transformative show, marking a clear television watershed between the 1980s and 1990s. It was a show that probably never should have become as popular as it was given just how far out of the mainstream it was, and yet for a brief period of time it was the show to watch on American television.

---

[1] Krantz made the same quote in our timeline, but without reference to Less than Zero, obviously.

[2] In our timeline this became Northern Exposure.

[3] In our timeline Veith approached Universal with the idea of a NY doctor moving to the rural south around the same time Brand and Falsey approached Universal with their “Alaska” idea. In a later lawsuit the jury found Universal (but not Brand and Falsey, who were “fed” the specifics of the idea by Universal) guilty of plagiarism and awarded Veith $10 million in damages and legal fees. Here he went to Columbia and explicitly made the southern setting Georgia knowing that he’d appeal to the new “Y’allywood” based CBS.

 

[Geekhis Khan]

Kinsey to become Disney Operation Chief
Wall Street Journal, January 5th, 1990

Stan Kinsey c1990 (Image source “topionetwork.com”)

Burbank – Walt Disney Entertainment Chairman Frank B. Wells announced today that Executive Vice President of Operations Stanley Kinsey will be taking over as Chief Operations Officer for the company. He will also have the opportunity to name his own successor as Executive VP for Operations. Long suspected to be Wells’ heir apparent, the ascension was met with little surprise by Wall Street, who none the less reacted positively, sending stocks up a half a percent by closing. Kinsey has been a motivated and influential force at the company since the days of CEO E. Cardon Walker and has helped steer Disney through the storm of a hostile takeover attempt and helped spearhead efforts at advanced computer technology development in the animation, attraction controls, and special effects arenas, having originally launched the Disney Advanced Technology Animation (DATA) Project in 1982. Wells and CEO Ron Miller cite Kinsey’s talents, motivation, and foresight as qualities that will allow him to hit the ground running as COO while CCO Jim Henson lauded Kinsey as a “visionary” whose technology investments have helped Disney revolutionize the animation and special effects industries. Kinsey will also ascend to the Disney Board of Directors

* * *​

The Board of Directors for the Walt Disney Entertainment Company, January 1990:

Ronald “Ron” Miller, CEO
Frank Wells, Chairman and President
Stanley “Stan” Kinsey, COO
James M. “Jim” Henson, CCO, President, Walt Disney Studios
Richard “Dick” Nunis, President, Disney Recreation
Roy E. Disney, Vice President, Walt Disney Animation Studios (head of Shamrock Holdings)
Al Gottesman (President, Henson Arts Holdings)
Dianne Disney Miller (Partner, Retlaw Enterprises)
Peter Dailey (former US ambassador to Ireland and Roy Disney’s brother-in-law)
Charles Cobb (CEO of Arvida Corp.; representing the interests of Bass Brothers)
Alfred Attilio “Al” Checchi (representing Marriott International)


Advisory Board Members (non-voting, ad-hoc attendance):
E. Cardon “Card” Walker, Chairman Emeritus
Donn Tatum, Chairman Emeritus
Sid Bass (CEO of Bass Brothers Enterprises)
Steven Spielberg (Partner, Amblin Entertainment)
John Sculley (CEO & President of Apple Computer, Inc.)
George Lucas (CEO of Lucasfilm, Ltd.)
J. Willard “Bill” Marriott, Jr. (CEO of Marriott International)
Ray Watson, Chairman Emeritus (former head of the Irvine Company)
Caroline Ahmanson (head and founder of Caroline Leonetti Ltd.)
Philip Hawley (Carter Hawley Hale)
Samuel Williamson (senior partner, Hufstedler, Miller, Carson, & Beardsley)
Stan Lee (Chairman of Marvel Entertainment)



The Disney Executive Committee:

Ronald “Ron” Miller, CEO
Frank Wells, Chairman and President
James M. “Jim” Henson, CCO and President, Walt Disney Studios
Richard “Dick” Nunis, President, Disney Recreation
Thomas “Tom” Wilhite, President, MGM Studios
John Hench, President, Walt Disney Imagineering Workshop
Roy E. Disney, Vice President, Walt Disney Animation Studios

* * *​

Stocks at a Glance: Walt Disney Entertainment (DIS)

January 14th, 1990
Stock price: $72.14
Major Shareholders: Henson family (19.9%), Roy E. Disney (13.4%), Disney-Miller family (12.7%), Sid Bass (9.6%), Bill Marriott (6.3%), Amblin Entertainment (1.3%), Apple Comp. (0.7%), Lucasfilm Ltd. (0.42%), Suspected “Knights Errant” (5.3%)
Outstanding shares: 67.9 million (31.4%)



3-Year Financial Data, Walt Disney Entertainment (DIS)

Year​	Revenues​	Expenses*​	Net Income​
1987​	$3,376 M​	$2,334 M​	$1,042 M​
1988​	$4,073 M​	$3,206 M​	$867 M​
1989​	$5,188 M​	$4,129 M​	$1,059 M​

* Includes Acquisition of Wrather and Park Expansions

 

[Geekhis Khan]

Chapter 6: Into the Future’s Past
Excerpt from All You Need is a Chin: Confessions of a B-Movie Actor by Bruce Campbell

You never know when opportunity will strike. Back in ’89 it sure didn’t seem to be striking for me. Sam was basking in the post-Batman glow, but no one was barging through my agent’s door yelling “I need the guy who Shemped for Batman!” Maniac Cop paid the bills, but it wasn’t going to lead to anything beyond more B movies. Christine and I had recently divorced and not much seemed to be going my way. But opportunity was coming, and from the damnedest of places.

With both Batman and Indiana Jones 3 blockbuster successes, Sam [Raimi] and Lisa [Henson] decided to get hitched. It wouldn’t last long, but it was fun for us all while it lasted. Lisa is a trip. She makes Sam’s dry sense of humor look tame by comparison. The wedding was insane. I got to be a groomsman for Sam alongside a Deadite and Robin Williams dressed as the Joker while Lisa’s bride’s maids included Miss Piggy [as a walkaround] and Marion Ravenwood. Elmo (Kevin Clash, really) was the ring bearer for the bride. Sweetums, the big, toothy, “aw shucks” monster Muppet, helped carry the bridal train.

The reception was even nuttier. Lisa danced with Sweetums after her turn with her dad and Elmo sang inappropriate songs.

Out of the mouths of babes.

Now, after a while I needed to just sit somewhere quiet, so I found an open spot at a table next to this guy I had pegged as a surfer. Sun-bleached hair, skin about a decade older than the rest of him, and a laid-back attitude. He and I started to talk. He seemed like he was either on a higher plane of reality, or a “higher” plane of reality, I couldn’t tell which. “I’m John,” he said. But he was a sharp guy, and upon closer inspection not a stoner at all. He didn’t even drink or smoke. We talked about any number of random things while Muppets danced with Deadites around us, and I began to wonder what they’d put in the punch. Eventually, a thin dark-haired woman joined us and joined in the conversation. “I’m Cheryl.” She did production and costuming for MGM, so we talked Hollywood.

It was only after the father of the bride, Jim Henson, joined us that I realized that John and Cheryl were Lisa’s younger siblings. We continued the conversation about nothing as if there was nothing amazing about the fact that a major studio executive and living entertainment legend was sitting next to me. I guess when he’s your dad it is nothing amazing. I got up to use the Little Muppet’s Room and by the time I got back John and Cheryl had moved on. Jim offered me a seat.

“Lisa says that you’re Sam’s friend,” he said.

“Yea, um, that’s right, sir” I said. I know, pure eloquence.

He asked me about my acting plans, and I confessed that I mostly just wanted to do more than slashers, soap operas, and Shemping for Sam.

He asked if I’d be interested in playing the title role for a Buck Rogers TV series for PFN[1].

(Image source Will Hoover at “pinterest.com”)

So, if you’re listening to the audio book of this then you just heard the big dramatic pause after that last statement. The creative head of a major studio had just asked me to play the lead on a TV series. I tried not to sputter. “I’d have to check out the scripts,” I said, “but sure, I’d be interested.” Yea, real suavé there, Rico Campbell! I just hoped that they wouldn’t make me wear a lycra unitard!

All I knew of Buck Rogers was the 1979 Gil Gerard series that was like Disco Star Wars. But gift horses and mouths and all that. I auditioned for and ultimately got the job, but you knew that.

Now, usually when an old series gets rebooted, the producers try to update it for modern audiences. That’s what they’d done with the last Buck Rogers series in the ‘70s, hence why it looked like something out of Saturday Night Fever. But Disney, technically Fantasia Television in partnership with Lucasfilm, took things the other way! They went all the way back to the old comics, with Art Deco spaceships and laser guns with rings on them. My costume looked like a cross between The Rocketeer and a B-17 pilot. I had a rocket pack and a space ship called The Searcher.

Production was this sort of three-headed monster between Fantasia, Lucasfilm, and Marvel, which had gained the Buck Rogers rights through one of their former board members[2]. Lucasfilm producer Rick McCallum was brought in as show runner (he’d worked with George Lucas and with Frank Oz on Dreamchild a few years earlier) and he found a young Lucy Liu to play Wilma Deering, my partner and unrequited love interest. Playing opposite from her was Jennifer Tilly as the seductively evil Princess Ardala, who was always trying to get into Buck’s pants. I was trapped in the middle of this Space Betty and Veronica thing, forced to choose between two beautiful women.

I know. Life is hard.

Jennifer stole the show on screen and got the majority of fan letters from horny teenage boys, but she also made a splash behind the scenes too. Some of the crew played poker between takes. She asked to play one day and got the usual condescending male responses like “oh, sure honey, you can play!” and some smarmy offers for strip poker that she coyly turned down. By the end of the shift the boys had lost their figurative shirts as she cleaned them out. They would have lost their literal shirts if she’d taken them up on the strip poker offer, but she told me that she had no desire to see any of them naked.

Robert Guillaume, a real television legend at this point, was cast as Dr. Elias Huer, who was Buck’s mentor figure. Robert also became a sort of mentor for me too, ironically enough. He had lots of good advice, not just on acting, but on dealing with studio politics. On my suggestion they hired Charlie “Professor Tanaka” Kalani as Killer Kane, who like in the TV show (but apparently not in the comics) worked as Ardala’s dragon. Charlie and I had hit it off after he beheaded me on The Running Man.

Actor Brian Blessed even made occasional guest appearances as Emperor Draco, Ardala’s dad. We even got Gil Gerard and Erin Grey to make cameos as various Earth Force admirals and Mel Blanc voiced a snarky computer once in a reference to the original Twiki.

Speaking of Twiki, Jerry Nelson and some of the Muppets guys came in to operate and voice the robots Twiki and Dr. Theopolis, who each looked like something out of Metropolis crossed with the robot from Lost in Space. It was another import from the ’79 series that wasn’t from the comics, or so the comics nerds never get tired of telling me. Twiki was played by Sheri Weiser in a suit and Muppet player Fran Brill worked this mechanical oven mitt that controlled the facial features and lights while providing the voice. Meanwhile, Jerry and a young Muppets intern used green-screened rods to work the Dr. T. robot, which was a sight to behold to say the least. Fans bitched about Twiki even being there while also bitching that they’d made her a girl. They wanted Mel Blanc. Hey, I get it, your childhood and all, but I’ll blacken the eye of anyone who badmouths Sheri and Fran, and if I can’t, then Charlie or Jenni will.

Honestly, the show was a blast to make. The writing was great in a deliberately campy kind of way. Rick wanted the show to be “fun” more than anything else. There was lots of action and martial arts. Charlie got to throw me or my stunt double through breakaway walls and windows on more than one occasion. My whole schtick was being this guy from the modern day who’d been frozen in a NASA cryogenic experiment gone wrong and awoken in the 25th Century where man has spread across the galaxy and fashion seemed to take a cue from science fiction in the 1920s. I provided the sarcastic commentary that leaned on the fourth wall while Lucy played the serious but adventurous one and Robert played the fussy voice of reason. The robots were there for comic relief. Jenni and Charlie dialed up the villainous ham to 11 and Brian cranked that dial past 15 whenever he appeared, and it was beautiful.

On a side note, Cheryl Henson led the costuming and through her I met my now-wife Ida, so yea, fond memories of it all.

So, the show is famous now for its sets, with their old-fashioned future aesthetic, and its effects, which used a lot of early computer effects and blue screens, which was a big thing for the day. Sure, they don’t all hold up today, but in 1990-92 it was pure gold. The sets were crazy, like something out of the original comics crossed with something out of the old Buster Crabbe serials. Even the most pedantic comics geeks, the type who bitched about Twiki, still loved the set design and costumes, both of which won Emmys.

But the craziest part was doing the effects. I’d done my share of practical effects and inadvertently consumed my share of red-dyed corn syrup over the years, but digital effects were new for me at the time. That meant lots of time spent in the “green box” and “blue box” as they called the effects studios[3]. And they were exactly what the name implied: wall-to-wall and floor-to-ceiling green and blue cloth, respectively, with practical sets built in. The studio space was in high demand so we had one day to film a season’s worth of rocket pack shots, and that meant getting belted in to all sorts of strange rigs and harnesses, one after another, divorced from the context of where they were script-wise. For some I’d jump and be yanked up by crew on ropes so I could fly straight up. For others I’d be set up to fly straight and level or do flips and spins. The ultimate one was the so-called “Christmas ornament”, which was developed for Spiderman. Brian Henson would supervise as they locked me in and suddenly, I could flip and spin in three axes for when I needed to spiral out of control after a near miss blast, or something.

The craziest take was when I had to fly head first towards this green padded wall and then tuck and roll at the last second before kicking off into the opposite direction. I must have jammed my knee or face planted into the wall twenty times before we got four to five good takes. I ended up with rug burn on my nose. Then there were the closeups and all of the orphaned lines that went with them: “Roger, Star Command!” “Look out!” “I copy.” “On your six!” “A little help?” Lucy and Charlie would go through it all with me, taking turns with the various rigs and stations, always in the same room, rarely on the same scene at the same time. And when the rocket pack work was done it was into the fake cockpits for our space fighter scenes, which they’d shake and bounce while we spouted more orphaned lines: “Going into overdrive.” “Behind you!” “I got you covered, Wilma.” “First drink’s on you, pal!”

It was only months later after the other shots had been done and the computer nerds had done all the digital effects that I got to see the final results of all that crazy work. Remember than flip-and-kick? Well, now I’m rocketing away through the city, Killer Kane chasing me, and I’m dodging laser blasts. I fly straight towards a building, cut to a close up of my face and a shocked “yeeaaaahhh!” shriek, and then tuck, roll, and kick off of the building and rocket away in the opposite direction. Kane then crashes through the window and into the conference table of a business meeting, spits out a fragment of computer screen, and yells “next time, Rogers!” while shaking his fist.

Pure gold. I’ll take the rug burn for a shot like that any day.

With enough episodes in the can, we debuted in the spring of ‘90. We were run on CBS immediately after Star Trek [The Next Generation] on PFN, figuring whoever watched that show could tune in to us next. The former also got its model effects from ILM, and Ringworld over on HPTV got its alien effects from Disney’s Creatureworks, who did the robot and practical effects for us, so different teams of effects geeks in the same studios were trying to outdo one another as well. We struggled to find an audience, to be honest, so we moved to the new Fantasia Channel on basic cable for seasons 2 and 3. We were unfairly compared to the ’79 show, unfairly compared to Star Wars thanks to the Lucasfilm connection, and unfairly compared to our direct competition Star Trek and Ringworld. But all that’s to be expected. You take your licks and keep moving forward.

But we had and still have a fanatical cult following. Sure, maybe the “Buckaroos” don’t fill up as many con seats as the Trekkies and Ringers, but you never saw a group have more fun with costuming or reenactments. The other day I saw a net video of some kids reenacting the flip-and-kick scene. Damn kids did it better than we did!

Lucy Liu of course went on to well-deserved stardom while Jenni Tilly’s career has been a lot like mine: a steady stream of small roles, some of which are beloved. I hear that she’s going into professional poker now. The poor bastards in Vegas won’t stand a chance. Buck Rogers didn’t exactly pave my way to stardom, but it paid the bills and led to other opportunities. I still get some residuals from the replays and VCD sales and it’s always weird seeing the variety of fans that come to my con and bookstore appearances, Deadites and Jason fans mixing with Buckaroos and Bat-fans.

But in the end, I have a soft spot for Buck Rogers. It was one hell of a ride and the Buckaroos are some of the best fans that you could ask for.

---

[1] @cmakk1012 called it!

[2] Lorraine Williams, who by this point has left the Marvel board and become a VP for Disney’s publishing group.

[3] It’s worth noting that Disney was actually an industry leader in chromakey effects in the 1960s, in particular Petro Vlahos’s Sodium Vapor camera, a revolutionary leap in chromakey that won the effects Oscar for Mary Poppins, but alas could never be duplicated. Technical improvements in the cheaper blue screen eventually rendered it obsolete. Here Disney Studios in partnership with Imagineering are retaking the effects mantle. More on this soon.