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

[Geekhis Khan]

Interview with Alf
The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, 3-532, September 19th, 1986

Interior – Studio

Host Johnny Carson sits at a small table. A fuzzy, big nosed puppet (Alf) “sits” in a chair next to him. On the couch beside him are David Letterman[1] and Ed McMahon.

JC: Welcome back, everyone, my next guest has travelled to us all the way from the planet Melmac to star in NBC’s newest comedy. Everyone, I’d like to introduce you to Alf.

Audience applauds.

Alf: Thank you, thank you, Mr. Carson it is such an honor to be here.

Not Exactly this Interview (Image source “noiselesschatter.com”)

JC: So, Alf, your new show, simply titled “Alf”, is playing Monday nights at 8 Eastern right here on NBC, starting this coming Monday.

Alf: That’s right, big guy!

JC: So, Alf…may I call you Alf?

Alf: Sure thing, Johnny! May I call you Johnny?

JC: Ah, no.

Audience laughs.

Alf: (obnoxious laugh) Ha, the classics! Slays ‘em every time!

JC: Now Alf, tell us a little about yourself.

Alf: Well, Johnny, I’m just a simple guy from the planet Melmac looking to make my way in entertainment. You see, television on Melmac is terrible. We’re talking “Leave it to Bleergmarrl” and “All my Saucers”. So, I left. I wanted to visit somewhere with class. Somewhere with culture. Somewhere with that (gestures) je ne cais quoi. So…Burbank!

Audience laughs.

JC: And how has Burbank treated you so far?

Alf: Well, the food could be better.

JC: How so?

Alf: Not a decent cat grill in the city!

Uncomfortable mix of laughs and groans.

JC: You eat cats?!?

Alf: Yea. Don’t you?

JC: Um, not quite.

David Letterman (interrupting): I’d make a pointed comment here, but I’m sure the, um, censors would have me thrown out.

Audience laughs.

Alf: Ok, so. I get to the cosmopolitan jewel that is Burbank where I’m introduced to Producer Bernie Brillstein with MGM Studios. It was my big break!

JC: He was the man who discovered Jim Henson and the Muppets, if I remember correctly.

Alf: Yes. I met Jim, actually.

JC: Really? How did that go?

Alf: At first, he didn’t want to hire me. He thought I was too much like the Muppets[2]. I mean, come on! Muppets are from Earth. I’m from Melmac! Whole different planet!

JC: What about Gonzo…any relation?

Audience laughs.

Alf: Are you kidding? With that schnozz?

Audience laughs.

Alf: (laughing at own joke, slapping knee) Ha! I kill me! Look, Jim and I get along great now. I even met Kermit. I’m a big fan. He was a real inspiration. He was a little frog from a swamp with a big dream to make millions of people happy. I was a little Melmacian with a big dream too: to make millions…

Audience laughs.

JC: …of people happy?

Alf: Just “millions”.

Audience laughs.

JC: Now, Alf, tell us about your new series.

Alf: Ok, it’s kind of autobiographical. It’s about an alien named Alf played by me, only “A-L-F” in this case stands for “Alien Life Form”, so it’s like a joke since Alf is my given name[3].

JC: Is Alf short for anything? Alfonso? Alfredo?

DL: Al Fresco?

Audience laughs.

Alf: Yea, it’s short for (long gesture with hand) “Aaaallllllffffffff”.

Audience laughs haltingly.

Alf: Ha! I kill me! So, in the show I get adopted by the suburban Tanner family, and they keep me hidden from the authorities who would want to run experiments on me.

JC: That sounds horrifying.

Alf: Well, it’s a SITCOM, so really, it’s funny stuff. Alien dissection. Great for the kids!

Audience laughs.

JC: But in reality, you, the real Alf, are out in the open, not hiding.

DL: (interrupting) Out of the closet.

Audience laughs. Johnny and Alf laugh too.

Alf: Yea, after all that controversy with E.T. the government decided that alien testing wasn’t publicly acceptable. Good friend of mine, E.T. He really needs to lay off the candy, though.

Audience laughs.

JC: I guess cats would be better?

Alf: More protein!

Audience groans.

Alf: (pretending to pull at a non-existent collar) Yeesh…tough audience.

JC: So, are you romantically involved at the moment?

Alf: Well, I was hoping to ask out Janet of the Muppets band, but she’s totally involved with Floyd Pepper. And I’m not going to cross a man whose best friend is Animal!

Audience and Johnny laugh.

JC: And with that, we need to take a commercial break. Alf, thank you for visiting us tonight!

Alf: It was my pleasure, Johnny!

JC: That’s “Mr. Carson.”

Audience laughs. Alf laughs and slaps knee.

JC: Make sure to see “Alf”, Monday nights at 8 Eastern, 7 Central, here on NBC!

[The Tonight Show theme plays as they cut to commercial]

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[1] Strangely enough, David Letterman was on this episode in our timeline too!

[2] Brillstein recounts Henson being initially upset about him taking on Alf creator Paul Fusco as a client, afraid that there’d be brand confusion with the Muppets.

[3] Alf’s “real name” name “Gordon Shumway” doesn’t appear until later in the series.

 

[Geekhis Khan]

Chapter 3: Rebuilding the Kingdom (Cont’d)
Excerpt from The Visionary and the Vizier, Jim Henson and Frank Wells at Disney, by Derek N. Dedominos, MBA.

Visiting the creative workspaces of the Walt Disney Entertainment Company was always a new and visceral experience for Frank Wells. Jim Henson, Roy Disney, and Ron Miller considered them sacred places to be treated with respect, if not full-on reverence. Certainly, every visit to a creative space, be that the chaos of the animation studio, the madcap of the Muppet Workshop, the unceasing scramble of the studio sound stages, the cold and humming computer labs of 3D, or the loud and sparking I-Works engineering spaces, offered a new and unique thing to see. Some days this meant getting the opportunity to see the prestidigitation behind the magic that would soon be wowing the world. Other days it meant pretending not to see things, like the results of juvenile pranks, or the circulating clandestine cartoons mocking management[1] or, that one time, pretending not to see Paul Reubens walk by in a black bra.

From a business standpoint, however, the creative spaces remained a frustrating mystery. It was where, as they say, “the assets leave the studio at 5 pm.” And how does one generate the return on investment for an hour’s work? You can grade in feet of film per day, but some scenes were more intensive than others. An inbetweener sketching someone walking across a room can crank out feet of film quickly compared to the detailed work of a critical scene, where framing and object overlapping must be carefully managed. And how do you commoditize a thought or idea? As Henson liked to say, “that five minutes in the shower when inspiration strikes can be more important than the three hours of brainstorming beforehand, and it was done off the clock.”

The metrics were by nature indirect: movie returns vs. movie investments, TV remittances vs. series operating costs, marketing budgets versus changes in viewership, though this latter aspect was exceedingly amorphous. Sometimes the payback was obvious. Where the Wild Things Are grossed $114.3 million against a $24 million budget plus another $150 million from home video sales in 1986. Even counting distribution costs, the $3 million marketing campaign, and overhead costs, or the $5 million invested in the Lucasfilm Graphics Group buy, it was a huge victory. But why did audiences adore Wild Things, but not care for The Black Cauldron? Was it the tone? The animation style?

Either way, the success was being hailed as the beginning of an "animation renaissance". Fortune asked Wells and Ron Miller to pose for the cover. Miller and Wells insisted on Jim Henson joining them, given his central role in turning around the studios.

And the studios were doing well, no question. Short Circuit, distributed in partnership with Tri-Star, made $40 million against a $9 million budget, with effects done in-house by the Creatureworks and earning awards nominations. The Song of the South remake made a good $35 million against an $8 million budget, which more than made up for the controversy surrounding Henson's changes in Well’s mind. Hell, Wells wondered if the movie did so well because of the controversy, the old adage about “no such thing as bad press” holding true. He started to wonder whether there were other opportunities in controversy. Puppet-effects movie Labyrinth grossed $102 million and The Neverending Story: The Next Chapter grossed around $64 million with budgets of $25 million and $27 million, respectively. The success of the two fantasy movies convinced shareholder George Lucas to distribute his upcoming film Willow under the MGM label. Lucas and friend and fellow shareholder Steven Spielberg, meanwhile, were working with Jim and Lisa Henson to produce a collaborative animatronic project with the working title “The Natural History Project”, with scriptwriter William Stout on board to draft a screenplay.

For other films, however, the return was less obvious. The Journey of Natty Gann was released in September of ’85 and made $14 million against a roughly $5 million budget[2]. The Hyperion Sports/Nostalgia film The Best of Times with Kurt Russel and Robin Williams[3] made a fair $9 million, roughly breaking even. Similarly, Flight of the Navigator made $18.6 million on a $9 million budget when released in August of ’86. Little Shop of Horrors, directed by Frank Oz, made $39 million against a $25 million budget. Studio Ghibli’s Castle in the Sky earned $4.7 million in the US, but was made on another studio’s funding and only required a couple of million invested in re-dubbing, distribution, and marketing. Similarly, the EMI produced John Cleese comedy Clockwise was distributed in the fall of ’86 under Hyperion, where its dry British humor had trouble finding a broad audience (Jim Henson found it hilarious, but few other executives did) and it made a mere $5.3 million, though, like Castle in the Sky, it cost Disney nothing to produce and thus netted Disney (but not EMI) a modest profit[4]. None of these made for a significant return by itself, but Henson and Wilhite insisted that keeping the studio name in the theaters was essential for brand development and that you never knew what movies would strike gold with the audiences. As a longtime studio man, Wells agreed with this assessment.

Even so, Wells forwarded them Michael Eisner’s manifesto of “high concept, low budget, solid script, overlooked actors”. Wilhite said that he’d look over the Eisner manifesto, but Henson dismissed it immediately. “There’s no magic formula for making art,” he insisted, surprising Wells with the intensity of his rejection.

Television was the most amorphous of all. Money came from a combination of network licensing fees, advertising residuals, and merchandising, but it was all in a large part based upon ratings, which at the time were primarily determined through Nielsen surveys and voluntary reporting, and therefore highly suspect. TV shows like the Golden Girls, Production!, Alf, Muppet Babies, Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends, The Three Musketeers, Benny Bunny, and The Rescuers, were doing well by this metric, allowing for the company to renegotiate licensing and budgets, but also allowed for the talent to renegotiate salary. By contrast, shows like Buffalo Bill, Hughie in St. Louie[5], Little Monster Muppets, and Starjammers quickly faced cancellation.

Any return on investment on any of these successes or failures had to be determined indirectly, and, most confoundingly of all, the rules changed on whether it was shown on network TV or Cable. Shows like Buffalo Bill, that were loved by critics and a select audience, but which failed so badly on the networks, could be moved to the Hyperion Channel and limp along for a couple of more seasons while shows like Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends that did well on the Disney Channel could then get moved up to the networks for a larger return on investment.

Video games, meanwhile, were quickly returning to the Disney portfolio. Gunpei Yokoi and Shigeru Miyamoto of the Japanese Nintendo Corporation came visiting in early 1985 to announce plans to release a new US version of their Famicon console, now redubbed the Nintendo Entertainment System, or NES. Henson and Kinsey were amazed at the quality of the graphics. “With this system you can match or even exceed anything a cabinet [arcade game] can do!” said Henson, who was notoriously picky when it came to the quality of licensed products. A quick deal was struck: new Nintendo cartridges would be created for a new Dark Crystal game and a new Mickey and Donald game. The former would be a walkaround adventure game in the vein of The Legend of Zelda and the latter a scrolling adventure game in the vein of Super Mario Brothers with the big hook being that Player 1 (Mickey) and Player 2 (Donald) could play simultaneously rather than just take turns. The NES would be a smash hit and reinvigorate the foundering home video game industry. Both Disney games and others to follow would be a continuous source of revenue and spawn a long working relationship between Disney and Nintendo. Similar deals would be struck with a resurgent Atari as well when the 1400X system appeared, with players debating which port of the popular Dark Crystal game was the best.

The other departments of the company were easier to manage. Wells could work with Dick Nunis and Marty Sklar to devise ways to optimize visitor wait times without sacrificing user experience. He could work with Al Checchi to optimize hotel rates and with Jack Lindquist to manage promotional efforts. The Knights Errant campaign had even proven a boon in this regard: small shareholders coming to claim their free room or entry fees would then spend significantly more than the price of the room or ticket on concessions and gifts. Up to 45% stayed extra days.

The new park in Spain could likewise be managed. Negotiations with the Spanish government continued for tax incentives and infrastructure improvements, all with tangible benefits. The construction costs could, to some degree, be estimated and managed. Room sales and ticket prices could be estimated and balanced against lending rates. The partnership with Dragados y Construcciones could be negotiated and planned. And as a publicly-owned company, Dragados even brought with it an implicit risk mitigation: by nature, the Spanish government would be absorbing some of the risk, potentially limiting the damage to Disney should the park prove a failure.

He could also manage the costs and compensation within the company. While most of the rest of the company management had inherited Walt’s inbuilt dislike for the union, Wells, a Democrat, albeit a tech friendly, pro-capitalist “Atari Democrat”, saw certain business advantages in having one. First off, collective bargaining was a two-way street. He could negotiate with a handful of representatives and thereby negotiate a single contract for hundreds of employees, rather than need to negotiate each employee contract individually, often with an agent and a manager present to push for more. Furthermore, the union covered things like health and life insurance, paid for with union dues, meaning that Wells and Disney didn’t need to worry about those costs, which could be prohibitive and a potential flashpoint for strikes.

Compensation in general was a balancing act between CFO Mike Bagnall, who wanted to minimize employee compensation to boost revenue, and CCO Jim Henson, who pushed for better compensation across the board. Jim’s old Henson Associates employees, for example, maintained jealousy-inducing premium contracts that reflected his earlier generosity as CEO of his own company, while their always-were-Disney compatriots often worked for scale. Wells threaded the needle with performance-based compensation tied to the earned income of the properties that they created. While the levels were generally insignificant from a global standpoint, plenty of zeroes after the decimal point, they amounted to hundreds to thousands of dollars in bonuses for individuals who otherwise barely made above scale. From a balance sheet standpoint, it saved money and satisfied both Bagnall and Henson while also leading to ecstatic employees as they held their dividend-boosted paychecks.

Ironically, his biggest challenge vis-à-vis the union and management was over Jim Henson’s blistering operational tempo. Employees were wearing out trying to keep up with him and the union was pitching a fit about the uncompensated overtime. Frank Wells maintained that the hardest thing he ever had to do as President of Walt Disney Entertainment was asking Jim Henson to stop working so hard.

---

[1] A time-honored tradition at Disney Animation. One good cartoon from 1985 in this timeline, obviously drawn by Tim Burton, had the upper management as the Addams Family: Ray Watson as Gomez, Frank Wells as Morticia, Ron Miller as Lurch, Jim Henson as Cousin It (his hair and beard filling in for the omnipresent hair), Dick Nunis as Uncle Fester, Carl Bongirno as Pugsley, and Tom Wilhite as Wednesday.

[2] This is an international return including the ~$9.7 million made in the US and Canada per our timeline. Here, the studio sent the film internationally as well, where it was a modest success. I’m estimating on the $5 million cost as I can’t find the true numbers.

[3] King’s Road went to Universal in our timeline.

[4] Distributed only to arthouse theaters by Universal in our timeline and made an international gross of under $2 million.

[5] Fictional production of Hyperion Television. Standard “young guy moves to the big city” plot starring comedian Louis Anderson.

 

[Geekhis Khan]

Part 6: Sam Subverts Slasher Sequel Syndrome! (Cont’d)
Excerpt from Slash! A History of Horror Films, by Ima Fuller Bludengore

The success of Friday the 13th Part 5: Jason’s Legacy immediately spurred the greenlighting of a 6th part to follow on from the events of the prior film. However, the producers were in a bit of a quandary: while the crossover success had been spectacular, the core Friday the 13th fandom was divided over the “Tommy is the new Jason” angle. Some fans liked the new direction and the possibility that “Jason” could become a heritable position, while others were saying “we want the real Jason back”.

Complicating things further for producer Don Behrns, who had taken over from Tim Silver, was the fact that director Sam Raimi had no desire to direct another Friday the 13th and was instead entertaining multiple offers from multiple studios. Behrns brought in director Tom McLoughlin to take over, but also insisted that McLoughlin try to “quote” the cinematography and tone of the Raimi film. McLoughlin was somewhat nonplussed by this “interference”, but with only the Indy horror film One Dark Night under his belt he was in no position to argue.

Not this, but it has reflections of it

McLoughlin liked Raimi’s take, but he also wanted to stand out on his own and resented being pressured. “Honestly, I would have been happy to follow in Sam’s footsteps, and yet getting forced to do so rankled me, so I became determined to make the picture my own as well.” McLoughlin wanted to bring in pieces of the old Universal Pictures monsters of old, making Tommy-as-Jason into a lumbering, nigh-unstoppable force. He penned a draft that saw Tommy escape from the Pinehurst asylum, dig up Jason’s corpse, and worship it as a god, taking demonic strength from it.

And then Behrns threw him another curveball just days before principal photography was to begin. After a tumultuous panel discussion at Fangoria's Weekend of Horrors where the divided fandom made their opinions known, he gave McLoughlin the incongruous request “could you find a way to bring back Jason without, you know, bringing back Jason?”

“It was an impossible task,” said McLoughlin, “two contradictory states existing at the same time, like Schrodinger’s Cat. And anyone up on their quantum physics knows that it’ll ‘collapse’ when observed.”

What could possibly go wrong digging up the corpse of a killer on a dark and stormy night? (Image source “ameba.jp”)

So, McLoughlin hastily rewrote the script to have Tommy escape and dig up Jason’s body, but with the intent to destroy it in order to make the “nightmares and impulses” end. He digs up the corpse, smashes it, and burns it, but the voices still talk to him. Finally, impulsively, he takes the ashes, mixes them with water, and drinks them, certain in his manifest delusions that this will somehow destroy Jason once and for all. Instead, Tommy becomes Jason, transformed into a larger-than-life corpselike killing machine where the mask becomes the man. It’s thus ambiguous whether Tommy has become Jason, or Jason has become Tommy, or whether this is some demonic force that’s been possessing them both.

Jason, Tommy, or both? (Image source “wifflegif.com”)

Like its predecessor, Friday the 13th Part 6: In the Blood would lean heavily on the fourth wall. Jason/Tommy would return to the Pinehurst asylum and take revenge, egged on by the voice of his mother in what’s been called a salute to Psycho. Jason/Tommy under McLoughlin’s hand became a lumbering Killing Machine, a Frankenstein’s Monster or Mummy style unstoppable force. As Jason’s mother’s disembodied voice narrates (all the while nodding to the fourth wall; “your [demonic] audience is waiting!”), Jason/Tommy kills Pam, Reggie, and Dr. Letter in the Pinehurst asylum. From this point, Jason/Tommy returns to Camp Crystal Lake, now renamed Forest Green in an attempted rebranding, and goes on a killing spree, the naïve teens vacationing there blissfully unaware that they’re walking into a death trap.

The film stood out not only for the hybridization of Jason with Tommy, but for being the first Friday the 13th film to feature no nudity or post-coital slayings, with McLoughlin refusing to keep playing the old “death by sex” canard. It was also the first in the franchise to make things overtly supernatural in nature as opposed to the ambiguous and possibly purely psychological nature of things in the earlier installments. Religious themes were added, with “mother” speaking of Jason’s “infernal audience” suggesting hell and with Jason not killing a praying girl, suggesting divine protections. The cast was a mix of old and new. For the Pinehurst scenes, Melanie Kinnaman returned as Pam Roberts, Shavar Ross returned as Reggie Winter, and Michael Swan is introduced as the coldly clinical Dr. Jim Polk and Whitney Rydbeck is introduced as the Ratched-like Nurse Carver. Meanwhile at Crystal Lake/Forest Green, Kerry Noonan is introduced as head councilor and final girl Paula Mott, Jennifer Cooke as her best friend Megan Garris, and David Kagen as Sheriff Mike Garris, along with friends “Sissy” Baker (Renée Jones) and “Cort” Andrews (Tom Fridley)[1]. And once again Betsy Palmer appeared as and voiced the possibly-a-ghost, possibly-a-hallucination “mother” Pam Vorhees.

Friday the 13th Part 6: In the Blood debuted in the late summer of 1986 where it managed to bring in $26 million against its $3 million budget. Reviews were mostly middling to positive and your average moviegoer enjoyed it, but if Behrns was hoping to heal the rift in the fandom by his ambiguous “Jason, but also Tommy” approach, then he failed miserably, irritating the more passionate fans on both sides of the fandom divide by trying to placate both.

Taking a stab at mending a divided fandom (Image source “nofilmschool.com”)

“You can’t have it both ways,” McLoughlin stated in a later interview. “but I was asked to try, and I think that I came up with a good way to do it.”

The short-term financial success of the film led immediately to the greenlighting of Part 7, of course. In the middle term, the increasingly divided “Real Jason” vs. “Tommy-Jason” fan factions would almost naturally begin to blur into the developing rift in the fandom over the “smart slasher” trend in general. In the long term, time has been kind to the film, which remains a fan favorite in the franchise thanks to McLoughlin’s direction and is generally liked by all but a few stubborn holdouts on the far extremes of the fan divide. McLoughlin’s Jason, with his glacier-like sense of inevitability and power, would become the character default going forward, as would the Raimi-inspired camera work and semi-self-awareness.

“You can’t have it both ways,” said McLoughlin, “But you can have a synthesis of the two if you do it right.”

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[1] Another hokey-mask tip to @Unknown for help in casting.

 

[Geekhis Khan]

New York Times Short Movie Reviews, November/December, 1986

Whales in Space

Fans of Star Trek know exactly what to expect from a “Trek” film, right? Giant space battles, cosmic voyages, dastardly Klingons, Eddie Murphy as a nerd who talks to whales…wait, what? Yes, you heard me: Eddie Murphy as a nerd who talks to whales. And if that doesn’t make it abundantly clear that Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home isn’t your typical Trek flick, then nothing will. Directed by Leonard “Spock” Nimoy, the latest Trek outing comes “home” to Earth in the 20th century to find and rescue some humpback whales so that they can take them into the future to save the world from alien space whales. It makes sense in context; try not to think too hard about it.

In fact, Trek IV is a film best just enjoyed, a fun popcorn romp that doesn’t so much insult your intelligence as it politely asks you to leave it at the door. It’s a film where the screamingly Russian Lt. Chekov is casually asking everyone (in the middle of the Cold War) where to find the American Navy “nuclear wessels”, where Spock is trying to learn how to curse to fit in, and where, yes, Eddie Murphy plays a hippie-like nerd, specifically Marine Biologist and UFO believer Dr. Gilbert N. Taylor, who tries to talk to the whales under his care. And Murphy seems to be having a blast filing away his usual charm and playing an awkward spacy nebbish[1]. Half of the fun of the film is watching the Trek crew as fish out of temporal water in 1980s San Francisco. The other half is watching William Shatner and Eddie Murphy clearly vying for screen supremacy (rumors abound[2] of rivalry on the set!). The result is that the two of them maintain a sort of “buddy cop” tension dynamic that sells the awkward forced relationship, with Spock’s Zen-like child-mind thrown in as the mediating straight man and foil for both.

Star Trek IV also makes huge stars of its two whales, George and Gracie, and manages to pass along its environmental message in a way that gets its point across without being preachy or self-righteous. Leonard Nimoy demonstrates that he has the chops to be a director. The editing is fast and energetic, the dialog fun and naturalistic, even despite the inherent silliness of it at times, and the acting good. Eddie Murphy’s stunt casting plays well, particularly when he’s onscreen with Shatner.

In the end, Star Trek IV is fun, just plain fun. It’s not Shakespeare and it makes no pretentions to be. It’s simply an enjoyable, family-friendly film and a great way to spend a couple of hours this Christmas season.

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, Rated PG for action, some violence, and some mild adult language, ⭐⭐⭐



Mystic Noir

It’s a trope as old as Hollywood: a grizzled, jaded detective sits in his office when a beautiful young woman walks in and offers him a case. But what’s different in The Golden Rose of Tibet is that in this case there’s a special, mystical child at risk and the enemies are not mobsters or femmes fatale, but demons from the underworld. And detective Chandler Jarrell (Mel Gibson) has to face both his cynical desire to stay out of things and his inherent skepticism about the supernatural. Guided by his mysterious and beautiful (but amazingly powerful) client Kee Nang (Charlotte Lewis), Jarrell must find the eponymous “Golden Rose”, a mystical child of great power and important purpose (J. L. Reate), and rescue him from the literally diabolical Sardo Numspa (Amrish Puri) and his dangerous henchman Khan (Bolo Yeung).

The first feature film by Associated Pictures, formerly CBS Theatrical Films[3], The Golden Rose of Tibet is at its heart a film noir fantasy that takes us from the dirty streets of late 1940s San Francisco to the mountains of Tibet, a film filled with chiaroscuro contrasts and sweeping vistas that seems to visually quote Mask of the Monkey King. It is a period piece with subtle messages about colonialism and themes about innocence and idealism versus selfishness and cynicism that get somewhat lost in the rather disjointed narrative. The noir realism runs smack into the acrobatic martial arts action, and the handful of awkward attempts at comedy generally fall flat. The special effects are good, if obvious at times. Still, though, the action is fast and exciting, Amrish Puri is a delightfully wicked villain, and Mel Gibson is as charismatic as always, maintaining good chemistry with Charlotte Lewis.

The Golden Rose of Tibet is unlikely to be a blockbuster[4], but as winter escapism it works. It clips along and carries the audience to fun places.

In this case Mel Gibson is the Chosen One…

The Golden Rose of Tibet, Rated T for violence, adult language, and adult situations, ⭐⭐½



Who Wants to Live Forever?

Immortality. It has been a long-standing human wish. The chance to live forever. But is this really the blessing one thinks it would be? To stay forever young as those whom you love grow old and die? To watch as the world that you know crumbles and is replaced by something new and alien? Such are the questions asked in the latest 20th Century film Highlander. This is a sweeping epic across the ages which follows Scottish Highlander Conner MacLeod (Peter Weller) as he learns of his immortal status, falls in love, watches his love and everything he knows grow old and fade away, and lives on into the present day. But behind it all comes the price of immortality: an eternal “contest” whose origins are mysterious and whose unfathomable end goal pits immortal against immortal. And when MacLeod ends up on the wrong side of the dark immortal Kurgan (Rutger Hauer), an ancient and troubled warrior who has lived so long and lost so much that he stoically longs for death and now lives only for “the eternal fight”, he and the Kurgan end up in an eternal running duel that can only end in one of their deaths[5].

Along the way, MacLeod is aided by the foppish but powerful immortal Don Ramirez (Sean Connery), a mentor figure and teacher who takes MacLeod under his wing. He warns MacLeod not to fall in love with the beautiful Heather (Catherine Mary Stewart), but MacLeod does, and is powerless to stop her eventual aging and death. And in the present day when MacLeod finds a new possible love with forensic expert Brenda Wyatt (Linda Hamilton), he is instead torn and tormented by the impossible choice.

Highlander and its eternal “game” of immortals is ultimately the backdrop for the larger questions and themes of transience, loss, purpose, and mortality, all brought into emotional resonance by director Jerry London of Shōgun miniseries fame in his feature film debut, under whose careful direction the film unfolds into a romantic epic of the sort not seen on the big screen since the Golden Age of Hollywood. Featuring a soundtrack by Queen that varies from excitement to sentimentality punctuated by a meaningful score by Michael Kamen, Highlander explores deep concepts amid a backdrop of fantasy adventure. The sweeping landscapes and intimate alleyways complement the tortured longing of the characters and highlight the adventure and romance. It could so easily have degenerated into camp, mindless action, or melodrama, but London has walked the line and produced a story for the ages.

Not exactly this…

Highlander, Rated R for violence, sexuality, and language, ⭐⭐⭐½



The Harsh Realities of War

Platoon was a long time coming. First conceived by director Oliver Stone as Break following his own experiences in Vietnam, the unpopularity of the war and, conversely, the cultural impact from The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now on the popular conceptions of the war, left little room for an intimate picture of a single soldier’s struggles. So, it is somewhat ironic that Deer Hunter director Michael Cimino was the one to ultimately get this deeply personal film produced. Fresh off of the success of The Pope of Greenwich Village, Cimino convinced United Artists to greenlight Stone’s picture[6], albeit with a shoestring budget. Nonetheless, the film shines as a deep and cerebral war drama, a personal narrative that explores the humanity behind both the noble and the despicable acts done in America’s forays into Vietnam. Charlie Sheen, perhaps in a salute to his father’s iconic role in Apocalypse Now, shines as the protagonist Chris, a man trying to keep his bearing in the face of it all. Willem Dafoe serves as the more free-spirited Sgt. Elias while Mickey Roarke is triumphant as the hardnosed, merciless Sgt. Barnes. Whether the film reaches a larger audience or not, it will certainly resonate with actual Vietnam veterans as a more nuanced war film than those which came before, a story of innocence lost, the better angels of our nature dueling with the harsher demons.

Platoon, Rated R for violence, drug use, adult situations, and adult language, ⭐⭐⭐⭐



Jumpin’ Up the Big Screen

The directorial partnership of Zucker-Abrams-Zucker, or ZAZ, is not known for subtlety. But they remain the masters of comedic timing, visual and wordplay gags, and farcical situations. Whether silly (Airplane!) or surreal (Pee Wee’s Big Adventure), ZAZ will certainly deliver the laughs. And they certainly deliver with 20th Century Films’ Jumpin’ Jack Flash starring the amazing Whoopi Goldberg. Reportedly taking over a troubled production of a script by David H. Franzoni, ZAZ took the script, rewrote it with their usual over-the-top sensibilities, and produced what amounts to an old-fashioned French Farce, where bank teller Terry Doolittle (Goldberg) gets inadvertently pulled into an international spy caper. While subtle and naturalistic by the standards of ZAZ (there are none of the silly fourth wall breaking gags and visual puns from Airplane! or Top Secret), Jack Flash remains a spiraling, non-stop roller coaster of increasingly ludicrous set pieces in the spirit of The Pink Panther. Goldberg’s expert comic timing holds together a cast of similarly fantastic actors such as Robert Stack as “Marty Phillips”, cover identity of CIA agent Peter Caen, and Rowan Atkinson as Jeremy Talbot, a KGB sleeper agent working undercover at the British Consulate in New York City. This stellar cast plays exceedingly well off of one another, managing to elevate a muddled script into cinematic gold. While not without flaws (not all the jokes land and the plot remains an excuse to travel between silly set pieces) Jumpin’ Jack Flash is exactly the Christmas excess adults are looking for[7].

Not exactly this and by the makers of Airplane!

Jumpin' Jack Flash, Rated R for excessive profanity, comedic violence, and adult situations, ⭐⭐⭐



Return of the Hustler

Paul Newman is one of the princes of Hollywood, but one whom we’ve seen far too little from in recent years, so it is indeed a pleasure to see the classic New Hollywood actor return to the big screen, even if it’s in a sequel that doesn’t quite live up to the original. Released by Hollywood Pictures, The Color of Money is a fun and occasionally meaningful sequel to the 1961 film The Hustler. Paul Newman himself directs[8] and reprises his role as “Fast” Eddie Felson, who is now the mentor to the brash young Vincent Lauria (Tom Cruise), teaching him the subtle art of pool hustling much as he learned from his own mentor in the original. The film takes on a two-pronged approach, following Lauria’s growth from a brash young up-and-comer to a worthy successor for Felson, and simultaneously following Felson as he comes to terms with his own advancing age. Ultimately, it serves as a passing-of-the-torch moment not just from Felton to Lauria, but from Newman to Cruise, the older generation of stars making way for the next.

One might fear that the combination of “starring and directed by” Paul Newman would indicate that this was a shallow vanity project, but thankfully the film stands on its own. Buoyed by fast paced editing, a lively soundtrack, some impressive pool playing, and Newman and Cruise’s screen chemistry, the film manages to somewhat recapture the fun of the first film while updating the setting for the modern day and simultaneously connecting it meaningfully to the original. Newman’s directing is competent and professional. The acting is fantastic. And while not the classic that its predecessor The Hustler was, The Color of Money in the end offers viewers a fun popcorn film that touches on deeper stakes while refusing to dwell on them.

The Color of Money, Rated R for violence, adult language, and adult situations, ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

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[1] Basically, he’s playing a cross between The Nutty Professor (fat nerd version) and the awkward, nerdy Jif Ramsey in Bowfinger. In our timeline they couldn’t find a compromise between the role Murphy (a major Trek fan) wanted to play (rumor has it a Vulcan) and the role they wanted for him (an astrophysicist who was more along the “typical” Murphy of Beverly Hills Cop fame). Here they found a compromise by letting Murphy simply go all-out on the character.

[2] Rumors are true. Shatner felt inherently threatened by being placed up against the popular and charismatic star. Sensing Shatner’s unease, Murphy had fun screwing with him at every opportunity. The tensions on the set carry over very well into the film where they create an excellent comedic vitriol.

[3] Associated Pictures wins the script bidding war with Paramount and Lorimar that went to Paramount in our timeline. With this change, Eddie Murphy has another reason to take the job in Star Trek IV. Recall that CBS Feature Films was claimed by ACC in the CBS buyout in 1985. The film will be distributed through Tri-Star Pictures, also part-owned by ACC.

[4] Will make a modest profit. Without Eddie Murphy’s star power, it will not be a blockbuster. But in hindsight it’s considered a fun if forgettable film.

[5] This version of Highlander skews much closer to the original Gregory Widen screenplay in that it’s notably more emotional and cerebral, with characters who are troubled shades of gray and not black-and-white noble hero vs. scenery-devouring villain (as much as I love Clancy Brown). This is more like Barry Lyndon than the film we got in our timeline and spends its budget on location shots rather than shining, sparking effects (the beheadings are just beheadings, no exploding neon signs). Like the film from our timeline it will underperform at the box office in the US since its mix of romance and action has a hard time finding an audience outside of “date night” (too sappy for the guys, too violent for the kids, too macho for the gals), but will be a critical darling and get some awards nominations. It will be very popular in Europe and Asia and will become a cult classic. Peter Weller will refuse to return for any sequels and so they will reboot it as a BBC series (featuring Conner, not a parallel universe Duncan) in the 1990s. A reboot in the 2010s will actually do quite well, spawning a trilogy.

[6] In our timeline it went to Orion Pictures. Here, UA takes it up, and it will be a critical and box office success for them as per our timeline. Orion still has Hoosiers, Hannah and her Sisters, and Back to School to keep it afloat for the time being, despite losing this film.

[7] Compared to our timeline’s muddled mess, ZAZ turns this sow’s ear into a silk purse. It will perform well at the box office and bolster Goldberg’s career at a critical milestone. And wait until you see what Penny Marshall, who directed this in our timeline, is up to!

[8] In our timeline this film was picked up by Touchstone and Newman enlisted his friend Martin Scorsese to direct. But here Scorsese is directing Rhapsody for Hyperion, so Newman chooses to direct himself.

 

[Geekhis Khan]

Ron, Frank, and Jim: The Three Mouseketeers
Excerpt from Fortune Magazine, November 1st, 1986

Your kids might be watching Mickey, Donald, and Goofy on Saturday Mornings, but the Entertainment Industry is watching its own Three Mouseketeers: Ron Miller, Frank Wells, and Jim Henson. This winning triumvirate is guiding the venerable Walt Disney Entertainment Company into a new renaissance of filmmaking, parks, and attractions.

CEO Ron Miller has steered a bold new strategic path for Disney, expanding the business into new markets and moving beyond its child friendly roots with Oscar-winning dramas and once-taboo subjects. Chairman and President Frank Wells has restructured the company, streamlining management and drastically reducing overhead while simultaneously increasing the profitability of the parks and attractions. Chief Creative Officer Jim Henson has been a creative shot in the arm for the studios and parks alike, bringing bold new visions and creative decisions to Disney that are piling up the statuettes and filling the theaters and couches of America. Together, this Disney triumvirate is demonstrating the advantages of a diversified leadership capable of working in concert and counterbalancing each other’s strengths and weaknesses.

Modest and a bit camera shy despite towering over everyone, the broad-shouldered 6’ 5” Ron Miller stands in sharp contrast to the Big Name, Big Ego corporate leaders one expects to find at the helm of a Fortune 500 company. Miller, in reflection of his sporting roots, is big on teamwork and consensus. While modern Celebrity CEOs are working hard to put their name out front and seize credit for any successes, Miller is quick to shine the spotlight on his underlings and focus on the accomplishments of the team. All for one and one for all.

Miller almost literally inherited the helm of Disney after marrying Walt Disney’s daughter Dianne and then joining the company after a brief career in professional football. Walt and former CEO E. Cardon Walker groomed Miller to lead the company from an early point in time. During this extended apprenticeship, Miller came to see the side of Walt that few others did, namely his secret desire to expand beyond children’s entertainment. “After seeing To Kill a Mockingbird together,” said Miller, “my father-in-law told me and Dianne that he wished that he could make films like that. Now he can. And if that’s all I can claim at the end of my time at Disney, then I’ll be ok with that.”

Such self-effacing modesty seems ironic from the man who created Hyperion Pictures, now a rising juggernaut in live action film, including The Ballad of Edward Ford, which won the Palm d’Or and nearly swept the Oscars in 1986. Greenlighting such a picture with its definitively un-Disney-like subject matter took guts and trust in your subordinates. And yet when asked about it, Miller points to Jim Henson, Tom Wilhite, and Bernie Brillstein, and also to his father-in-law. “This was Walt’s To Kill A Mockingbird.”

Miller’s firm but gentle right hand is Chairman, President, and COO Frank Wells. Another soft-spoken and considerate man, Wells has an aura of quiet strength and confidence. He’s a man who has climbed mountains both literal and metaphorical, and whose steady hand has produced tangible results, seeing profits increase 500% and stock prices soar since he joined the team in late 1984, peaking at over $200 per share this year. Analysts predict that Disney stocks will split three or even four ways at the end of the year. Wells is a man who has every right to pride, and yet the urbane and considerate Wells displays the same sense of self-effacing modesty as his CEO, reportedly carrying a slip of paper in his pocket saying “Humility is the final achievement[1].”

Wells first joined the Disney team as an advisor and coordinator during the chaotic months of the ACC hostile takeover bid, where he quickly caught the attention of the Board of Directors with his confidence and composure under pressure. When the White Knight campaign succeeded, he was soon asked to join the company, assuming the roles of President and COO from Miller and, more recently, the Chair from Ray Watson. Wells has earned a reputation as a tough but fair arbiter of disputes, an open ear for ideas and complaints alike, and a laser-focused leader with an attention to detail that has let him navigate the rapids and rocks of show business timelines and egos and keep the ship running at peak efficiency. His “Mickey’s Glove” organizational structure has even been the study of numerous graduate theses at business and management schools alike.

Wells was up front about his achievements, and yet humble. “We’ve accomplished big things,” he said, matter-of-factly, “and each day offers a unique set of challenges for the Disney team.” Asked about where he goes from here, Wells was to the point. “Why would I want to go anywhere else?”

Finally, Miller’s creative and agile left hand is Jim Henson, who shares Miller’s height, Well’s gentleness, and both of their humility. Henson is a living creative legend and a man who has managed to do impossible things, like get adults to tune in to watch puppet shows and cartoons. With a keen eye for talent and a willingness to take real creative risks, Henson has more than achieved Miller’s dream of expanding the limits of what a Walt Disney production can mean. His films have broken box office records and raked in the awards, and he is credited with saving Walt Disney’s animation studio in particular and feature animation in general. He has produced or greenlit everything from Oscar winning dramas to fun-filled children’s animation and helped develop truly mesmerizing rides and attractions for the Disney theme parks. He’s even had a hand in hotels, being a driving force in the creation of the new Grand Floridian Resort and Villa Romana Hotel, both set to open next year.

Henson, for all of his great success, remains almost childlike in his sincerity and playful optimism. If asked, he will gladly bring out any number of felt alter egos and bring them to such uncanny life that it’s hard for even the most jaded of men to not think, even for only a second, that a felt frog is indeed a living, breathing being. Kind, gentle, colloquial, and even sweet, it’s easy to overlook just what a force of nature the “Gentle Giant” is. A man who leads by example and inspires inspiration in others, his soft smile hides one of the industry’s great leaders. Productivity at the studios has soared under Henson to a level not seen since the passing of Walt Disney himself, and no threats or hardball tactics were required. Some have credited him with having the “Magic Touch”, but Henson demurs.

“I feel that it is a fundamental truth that most people want to do great things,” said Henson. “Every person has a great imagination in them and if given the right environment to grow in, then they will amaze even themselves with what they are willing and able to accomplish.” He added, “There’s nothing magical about it, at least not in the literal sense.”

These Three Mouseketeers of Disney may be quiet and modest, but there’s no hiding that they are a highly effective team with productivity, profitability, and morale all soaring along with the stock price. We sat down with all three men for an in-depth look into their business and management philosophies and how they see the “Disney Model” as a new way forward for creative endeavors. Ron Miller for one… Article continues on Page 21.

* * *​

The Board of Directors for the Walt Disney Entertainment Company, January 1987:
Ronald “Ron” Miller, CEO
Frank Wells, Chairman, President, and 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, President and COO
James M. “Jim” Henson, CCO and President, Walt Disney Studios
Richard “Dick” Nunis, President, Disney Recreation
Thomas “Tom” Wilhite, President, MGM Studios
Carl Bongirno, President, Walt Disney Imagineering Workshop
Roy E. Disney, Vice President, Walt Disney Animation Studios

* * *​

Stocks at a Glance: Walt Disney Entertainment (DIS)
January 12th, 1987
Stock price: $49.44 [following 4:1 Stock Split Jan 1st, 1987]
Major Shareholders: Henson family (19.4%), Roy E. Disney (13.4%), Disney-Miller family (12.3%), Sid Bass (9.6%), Bill Marriott (6.3%), Amblin Entertainment (1.3%), Apple Comp. (0.7%), Lucasfilm Ltd. (0.42%), Suspected “Knights Errant” (4.6%), Others (31.8%)
Outstanding shares: 150.4 million

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[1] True!

 

[Geekhis Khan]

The Littlest Diplomat (1984-1986)
From The TV Obsessive, by Hanmii Dahri-Mote, a regular column in TV Guide and other publications

There are some old ‘80s family shows that are too saccharine for words. Shows like Growing Pains that are so artificially sweet that they hurt your teeth. On the other hand, other shows of the time like Who’s the Boss were so casually cruel and cynical that they bordered on the misanthropic. Most shows of the time were also extremely vapid and formulaic. You’ve seen these characters and plots and tropes a hundred times already. Finding the right balance between original and familiar and idealistic and cynical, particularly for a show aimed at family audiences, could be a particular challenge. So, when you see it done right, it is glorious to behold.

And perhaps the best show of the era in this regard is, in my opinion, The Littlest Diplomat, which ran for two glorious seasons on CBS from 1984 to 1986. It starred a young Samantha Smith.

The show was born out of the amazing childhood of Smith herself, who gained fame as a child in the early ‘80s when her letter to Soviet Premier Yuri Andropov, asking him if he really wanted a nuclear war as some were saying, led to her being invited to visit the USSR, where she became America’s youngest goodwill ambassador. The visit gained her audiences with many powerful world leaders and she served as a young but charismatic spokesperson for the cause of peace.

Still from Samantha Smith Goes to Washington (Image source “youtube.com”; see the full show here)

The visit also gained the attention of Disney, who sent her to Washington DC to cover the 1984 Presidential Election. Samantha Smith Goes to Washington played on The Disney Channel where it was highly regarded. Disney creative head Jim Henson was particularly impressed with the intelligent young woman and suggested that they create a TV show around her. At first Henson imagined a documentary series where Smith would visit various places and people and interview them, but producer Bernie Brillstein convinced him that it would never sell as a standalone series. The idea instead led to a short series of such interviews for Sesame Street. Brillstein had a different idea for Smith’s standalone series: a semiautobiographical situational comedy about a young girl who becomes an actual American diplomat working at the United Nations building in New York. The Littlest Diplomat was born[1].

Smith played the fictional Samantha Samuels, whose achievements at pursuing peace as a child got her appointed to the UN by fictional US President R. Robert Rogers (Robert Guillaume). Her single father Bill Samuels (Robert Mandan) struggles to raise her and her sister Sadie (Maia Brewton) while simultaneously dealing with all of Samantha’s “work related” stuff (as represented by the sarcastic Secret Service agent John Adam Smith, played by Ted Wass). “Sam”, meanwhile, struggles to balance work, school, her relationship with her father, and her relationships with other kids, such as school rival Kim (Melissa Joan Hart) and friend Bobby (Joey Lawrence), who has a secret crush on her.

It was all the stuff of a standard mindless sitcom of the era, but the geniuses at Witt/Thomas/Harris Productions gave the series an intelligence and heart that elevated it into a work of pure sentimental optimism tempered with a bittersweet realism. While the ultimate lesson of the series was that being willing to put your heart out and stand up for what’s right always wins out over cynicism and selfishness in the end, Sam’s world was not an easy one, full of struggles, setbacks, and disappointments. Each episode presented Sam and her family with challenges on both the “professional” and personal side, with the twin challenges always mutually reinforcing the same theme or lesson. For example, in Season 1, Episode 5, “It’s a Date”, Sam has to balance a date with a boy she likes with an important diplomatic meeting with the gruff and demanding Japanese Ambassador (Pat Morita), with both meetings reinforcing the themes of trust vs. suspicion and empty charm vs. real meaningful connection.

TLD was and episodic three-camera comedy with a laugh track, as was the standard of the era, and was filmed almost entirely at a sound stage at Disney in Burbank with a handful of location-shoots or stock footage from New York or a New York City Set. It was remarkable for the time in how it made each of its characters a fully rounded human being rather than a simplistic archetype or stereotype, even the supporting roles, though the quirks of the supporting cast started to exaggerate in the second season hinting that full-on character decay may have set in had the show progressed. The young characters, even “cute but annoying little sister Sadie”, were given a wide range of emotions rather than reduced to types, which was somewhat uncommon for the time. Emotional conflicts or disagreements could last beyond one episode and episodes occasionally referenced “earlier” issues, providing hints at a larger continuity even as each episode was stand-alone enough to be seen and appreciated in isolation.

TLD was one of those “loved by the critics, ignored by the viewers” shows that won awards but failed to make its mark in the Nielsens. Smith was sublime and the supporting cast great, the writing was some of the best of the era, and the lessons meaningful and relevant without being preachy or easy to misconstrue. It’d be easy to snidely call it “too smart for your average viewer”, but this was not the kind of show that would make such assumptions about people, so I won’t either. Instead, let’s appreciate it as a rare mid-‘80s sitcom that assumed that its audience wasn’t a bunch of morons.

TLD is now a beloved cult classic, of course, though even today it doesn’t get the recognition that many of its lesser contemporaries have achieved. It never made the 100-episode threshold for broad syndication but did eventually see airplay in the 1990s on CBS Family on basic cable, where it gained an appreciative audience, eventually seeing home media release. Though not a long runner, TLD influenced many other TV creators and helped launch Samantha Smith’s career.

If you haven’t seen it, I recommend that you do so, and soon.

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[1] In our timeline Smith was instead cast in the forgettable domestic sitcom Lime Street. She was tragically killed in a plane crash returning from the set of Lime Street in 1985. Here, that event is butterflied. And yes, @nick_crenshaw82, it means that Robert John Bardo will not stalk and kill Rebecca Schaeffer, but will instead stay focused on Smith…more to come on that chilling regard!

 

[Geekhis Khan]

Talkin’ Mid-Eighties Cartoon Renaissance
From Talkin’ Geek with Nerdicus and Dorkimax Vidcast, February 3rd, 2006, Upload

Theme song plays; Title Card: “Talkin’ Geek”.

Interior – Basement Sound Stage
Two young men in geeky pop culture clothes sit in front of microphones at a desk in front of a shelf full of geeky toys, books, and other merch. The two hosts laugh constantly at their own jokes and references, making the viewer wonder if they’re on too much sugar and caffeine or Something Else.

Nerdicus
Hello once again, geeks, nerds, dorks, spazzes, and assorted rejects and losers we love…

Dorkimax
We love you, dorks!

Nerdicus
Yea, and welcome again to Talkin’ Geek. I’m Nerdicus, once again rising up against the Mundane Empire to push all things dorky…

Dorkimax
And I’m Dorkimax, Ruler of the Great Spazztastic Net Empire of the Alternate Universe where all is Nerd!

Nerdicus
And we’re glad to have you and hope that you’ll comment below…

Dorkimax
Hit that “Like” and “Track” button!

Nerdicus
Yea…so today we’re talking the Mid-Eighties Animation Renaissance!

Dorkimax
Yaaaayyy!!!! Cymbal crash! (hits button, causing cymbal sound effect)

Nerdicus
Thanks, D-max! So we’re going to look at all of those animated features and TV shows that resurrected the lost art…

Dorkimax
Let’s talk Disney!!!

Nerdicus
Let’s not talk Disney, we all know all about that. No, let’ talk the resurrection of the lost art of animation!

Dorkimax
Yaaaayyyy!!!! (another cymbal crash)

Nerdicus
Thanks, D-max.

Dorkimax
You’re welcome!

Nerdicus
So…The Thief and the Cobbler. Legendary.

Dorkimax
Legendary!

Nerdicus
Legendary. So, The Thief and the Cobbler was the decades-long passion project of Richard Williams and, thanks to Steven Spielberg…

Dorkimax
Spielberg!!

Nerdicus
…and Don Bluth. And when it screened in 1987, it was breathtaking…

Dorkimax
Breathtaking!

Nerdicus
…and it kind of flopped. I mean, not bad-bad-bad, but like $21 million against the over $30 million it ultimately cost, so a flop…

Dorkimax
Flop!! (hits button, making “Wah-waaahh” sound)

Nerdicus
…but, like, won a bunch of awards and amazed people with its amazing animation and is seen by those in the industry as like the greatest hand-drawn animated feature ever.

Dorkimax
Ever!!

Nerdicus
Shut up, D-max.

Dorkimax
Sorry!!

Nerdicus
So, The Thief and the Cobbler is considered the greatest hand-drawn…

Dorkimax
Hand-job!

Nerdicus
…hand-drawn animation ever. It’s a cult classic and is shown in universities like CalArts and shit. So, like a real winner on the artistic front, but the silent protagonists and the long, dreamlike pace and lack of any real central narrative didn’t really connect with Peter and Patty Popcorn, so low box office. Still, the prestige was immense.

Dorkimax
Epic!

Nerdicus
And it jump-started Don Bluth’s flagging career, with all that came with that! Now, then you have Yutaka Fujioka’s Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland, which was another long production, and so many amazing animators from Disney Old Men to Brad Bird to Hayao Miyazaki and many, many more worked on it, but it was like 1989 before it premiered, and, well, it didn’t do much better, like $11.5 million on a $35 million budget. So, no wonder we remember Disney, right?

Dorkimax
Right! (gong sound effect)

Nerdicus
So, then, speaking of Disney and Miyazaki, Disney also brought the amazing animation of Studio Ghibli to America, and for that alone the Mouse gets my love…

Dorkimax
Lots of love! Show this channel “Love” below!! (points down)

Nerdicus
Right, and Disney also made a VHS and later VCD distro deal with “Japan’s Disney”, Osamu Tezuka and his Tezuka Productions to distribute Astro Boy, Princess Knight, and of course Kimba the White Lion[1]!

Dorkimax
PeeeeennnnnsylVAIN-yaaaaa!!!

Nerdicus
I don’t think that’s the line, D-max.

Dorkimax
Sorry!!

Nerdicus
So, the success of Disney animation in general and the buzz around Bugs & Daffy’s appearance in Roger Rabbit in particular led to the return of Warner Brothers animation, who’d scooped up AAP during the breakup of MGM in ‘86. The studio had reacquired most of their classic cartoons and had begun replaying them on Nickelodeon[2] and later acquired Rankin-Bass as part of their takeover of Lorimar in ’89. They soon started producing new Bugs and Daffy cartoons both for Saturday Mornings and for Shorts to play in front of Warner movies.

Dorkimax
Yaaayyy! Bugs Bunny rules!! (hits button and plays opening of Looney Toons theme)

Nerdicus
And when AAP and R-B went to W-B, they rebooted Popeye along with Betty Boop and Mighty Mouse and played them all on Nickelodeon along with the Looney Tunes and R-B classics, helping to shore up the struggling network. Meanwhile, Ted Turner’s CBS, who’d bought up the struggling Hanna-Barbera from Taft in ’87, launched Cartoon TV in ’89, mostly playing the old H-B titles at first. This led Triad to scoop up Filmation from Westinghouse in 1988 and, in turn, Hollywood Pictures Chairman Michael Eisner and Studio Head Jeffrey Katzenberg approached DIC…

Dorkimax
Ha-ha-ha! DIC!!

Nerdicus
Yea…approached them about a partnership to produce another animated feature based upon The Littles, hoping to compete directly with the upcoming Disney movie based upon Mistress Masham’s Repose. But soon after, DIC ran into financial trouble after a buyout of their parent company, and that led the leadership talent to leave, so DIC was having trouble staying afloat…

Dorkimax
Couldn’t keep their DIC up!

Nerdicus
Seriously, shut up!

Dorkimax
Sorry!!

Nerdicus
So…where was I? Oh…so ABC/Hollywood Studios just flat out buys DIC – (points at Dorkimax) don’t! – and they spin up their own ABC animation division, Hollywood Animation Studios.

Dorkimax
(in a funny voice) There’s a buy for everyone!!

Nerdicus
Nice reference, D-max[3].

Dorkimax
Not aaaaaa problem!

Nerdicus
And with that, the New Animation War was set in motion!

Dorkimax
Cry “Havok!” And let slip the Nerds of War!! (hits button, causing the Conan the Barbarian score to play)

Nerdicus
So that’s all for now, nerds, geeks, dorks, spazzes, and assorted rejects and losers we love! Join us next week where we discuss Sailor Moon: Great Anime or Fetish Fuel? And until next week, goodbye!!

Dorkimax
Like, track, and comment, fools!​

Theme song plays, Title Card: “Talkin’ Geek”, credits roll.

[video ends]

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[1]

[2] The return of WB animation has led to a butterfly whereby Warner does not sell Nickelodeon to Viacom in 1986.

[3] Reference from something made in this timeline, not ours! A joke so inside even I don’t get it.

 

[Geekhis Khan]

Pictures Released by Walt Disney Studios, 1985-1986

Release date	Title	Studio label	Co-production with
January 18, 1985	Pinocchio (re-release) [w/ Short A Day in the Park]	Walt Disney Productions
February 20, 1985	The Valley of the Wind	Toei Company	Distributed by Buena Vista under the Fantasia Films label
March 22, 1985	Baby: Secret of the Lost Legend	Fantasia films	Silver Screen Partners II
April 12, 1985	The Three Caballeros [w/ classic Short The Three Caballeros]	Walt Disney Productions	Silver Screen Partners II
May 3, 1985	101 Dalmatians (re-release) [w/ Short Gonzo & Goofy’s Galactic Golf]	Walt Disney Productions
June 7, 1985	The Ballad of Edward Ford	Hyperion Pictures	Silver Screen Partners II
June 21, 1985	Return to Oz	Fantasia Films	Silver Screen Partners II
August 30, 1985	Spies Like Us	Hyperion Pictures	Silver Screen Partners II
September 27, 1985	The Journey of Natty Gann [w/ Short Man’s Best Friend with Mickey & Pluto]	Walt Disney Productions	Silver Screen Partners II
October 4, 1985	Dreamchild	Fantasia Films	EMI Productions
November 22, 1985	Elementary! [w/ Short First Contact]	Walt Disney Productions	Silver Screen Partners II
December 18, 1985	The Bureau	Fantasia Films	HandMade Films, Silver Screen Partners II
January 31, 1986	The Best of Times	King’s Road Productions	Distributed by Buena Vista under the Hyperion Pictures label
March 7, 1986	Sleeping Beauty (re-release) [w/ Short The Bunny Picnic]	Walt Disney Productions
May 9, 1986	Short Circuit	Fantasia Films	Tri-Star Pictures, Silver Screen Partners II
May 23, 1986	Where the Wild Things Are [w/ Short Little Luxi]	Walt Disney Productions	Silver Screen Partners II
June 27, 1986	Labyrinth	Fantasia Films	Silver Screen Partners II
July 9, 1986	The Neverending Story: The Next Chapter	Fantasia Films	Constantin Films AG, Silver Screen Partners II
July 26, 1986	Flight of the Navigator [w/ Short A Wish for Whales]	Walt Disney Productions	Silver Screen Partners II
August 6, 1986	Transformers, the Movie	Marvel Productions	Sunbow Entertainment (Distributed by Buena Vista under the Marvel name due to contractual obligations)
August 13, 1986	Rhapsody	Hyperion Pictures	Silver Screen Partners II
September 26, 1986	Lady and the Tramp (re-release) [w/ Short Foo Foo’s Big Adventure]	Walt Disney Productions	Silver Screen Partners II
October 10, 1986	Clockwise	Thorn EMI Screen Entertainment	Distributed by Buena Vista under the Fantasia Films label
November 12, 1986	Castle in the Sky	Studio Ghibli	Distributed by Buena Vista under the Fantasia Films label
November 21, 1986	Song of the South (modernization) [w/ Short By the Bayou (from Musicana)]	Walt Disney Productions	Silver Screen Partners II
December 19, 1986	Little Shop of Horrors	Fantasia Films	Silver Screen Partners II

 

[Geekhis Khan]

Part 5: Black Leather and Silver Screens
Excerpt from Dark Funhouse, the Art and Work of Tim Burton, an Illustrated Compendium

1987 saw Burton’s live action directorial debut with the teenage drama Jonathan Scissorhands, a film starring River Phoenix as the titular Jonathan and Winona Ryder[1] as Alicia, his love interest. It was based upon a screenplay written by Caroline Thompson, who’d impressed Burton with her debut novel, the bizarre and macabre First Born.

And it all began with a single sketch that Burton drew as a teenager, one which reflected his sense of isolation.

Burton’s original sketch (Image source: “zoomoncontemporaryart.com”)

“Every teenager feels like Jonathan at some point.” – River Phoenix

Ryder was the very first name attached to the script and Burton had been greatly impressed by her performance in 1986’s Lucas. Phoenix, meanwhile, was suggested by Steven Spielberg, who had been impressed by Phoenix’s performance in Stand by Me[2]. Rounding out the cast was the legendary Vincent Price, who plays Jonathan’s creator/father, the mad scientist simply called “The Inventor”.

Tim meets Jonathan behind the scenes (Image source “bookshelfcinema.blogspot.com”)

The film is, at its heart, a coming-of-age story. The movie’s themes of isolation, alienation, and the mercenary and fickle nature of popularity struck a chord with people of all ages and backgrounds, but particularly with teenagers. Similarly, Burton’s direction managed to portray the brightly-colored suburbia as the strange and alien world and the abandoned gothic mansion where Jonathan lived as the safe and normal world. Although his first feature direction, Burton’s signature German Expressionist inspired style can already be seen in the lighting and framing and use of Dutch angles and shadows.

Finally, the original score and soundtrack by The Cure’s Robert Smith lends a strange, ethereal, and alien quality to it all.

Essentially this…

Jonathan Scissorhands was released in the spring of 1987 where it became a sleeper hit, slowly gaining momentum based upon word of mouth and critical acclaim (The Daily Telegraph would call it “a modern-day fairy tale”). It would go on to make over $70 million against its $19 million budget and do brisk business in video sales and rentals. It remains a beloved classic to this day. Phoenix’s acting was given a lot of acclaim, with Roger Ebert, who was otherwise not fond of the movie, making special note of Phoenix’s portrayal, calling out his “gentle pathos” and “visceral humanity”. Phoenix would cite the role as one of his favorites. “There was such a truth to the role,” said Phoenix in a later interview. “I mean, the concept is so bizarre that it would have been easy to make Jonathan into something alien rather than someone alienated. Every teenager feels like Jonathan at some point.”

Jonathan Scissorhands is regarded by some as Burton’s magnum opus, though others would cite other works. Regardless of where you place it in his filmography, however, few would deny that it is one of his greatest and an incredible debut.

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[1] Both actors will be actual teenagers for this movie (Phoenix would be 16 and Ryder 15 at the time of filming) lending this film a level of authenticity often lost when using 20-somethings to play teens. This was a serious creative risk for Burton to take and had he used actors of lower caliber than Phoenix and Ryder it might have sunk the show. Normally a studio would push back on this. It reflects on the culture Henson has imposed at Disney that Burton was given free rein in casting. Also, Spielberg is a fan of casting age-appropriate actors as witnessed by his many productions.

[2] Follow the Butterflies: Mickey Roarke was in Beverly Hills Cop and thus (due to butterflies) not in Year of the Dragon. However, he will be in 9½ Weeks anyway as he was Adrian Lyne’s choice alongside Kim Bassinger from the beginning. Lyne will thus still be taking a break after 9½ Weeks and thus Rob Reiner will still ultimately be handed Stand by Me (a logical 2nd-order butterfly!) and cast Phoenix et al. as per our timeline. I can’t find any direct butterflies to make any definitive changes to Stand by Me. I could bring in random butterflies and shake things up, but that would drive things into the Fiction Zone far too quickly.

 

[Geekhis Khan]

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

By 1986 Sam Raimi’s Friday the 13th Part 5: Jason’s Legacy had initiated the era of the so-called “smart slasher”, though few had taken notice. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 had appeared in 1986, now with a black comedy vibe, though it is unknown whether producer-director Tobe Hooper or screenwriter L. M. Kit Carson were consciously following the new trend or not.

But there is little doubt that the success of Jason’s Legacy had influenced the rise of A Nightmare on Elm Street III: The Waking Nightmare. The underperformance of and fan hatred for A Nightmare on Elm Street II: Freddy’s Revenge had nearly sunk the franchise barely out of the gate. And when Wes Craven first delivered New Line a meta-cinematic tale that brought Freddy into the real world[1], with the actors going by their real names, the producers were at first nonplused. But with fan magazines still abuzz about Sam Raimi’s “smart slasher”, producer Robert Shaye decided to take a risk on the untraditional idea and the “second smart slasher” (at least by most accounts) was born.

+

= This timeline’s A Nightmare on Elm Street III: The Waking Nightmare

The film would see the cast and crew working on a film titled “A Nightmare on Elm Street III: Pleasant Dreams”, only to find that strange accidents kept happening to the cast and crew. Eventually, Patricia Arquette, while having a nap on the set between takes, actually encounters Freddy in a dream and awakes to find that the cut that she received was real. No one believes her at first, of course, but ultimately when actress Penelope Sudrow is killed by a Freddy-possessed television, a death impossible to rule an accident or suicide when her corpse is found hanging by the head from the screen in the break room, the realization that some “demonic entity” was feeding off of the stories and making them real becomes unavoidable. The surviving cast and crew, including, ironically, Robert Englund, team up to fight and kill the “Freddy” entity in the dream world before he can expand his reach beyond the film’s set.

“Wanna’ make your ‘big break’ into television? Well, welcome to prime time, bitch!” (Image source “dinosaurdracula.com”)

Wes Craven and Bruce Wagner’s original script was dark, with actors committing suicide or even cutting off their own eyelids with a razorblade. It was also “a $20 million film” according to director Chuck Russell, who took over the director’s chair since Craven was busy filming Deadly Friend. Craven even suggested hiring actors to “invade” the actual movie theaters during screenings dressed as Freddy and “kill a moviegoer” (another actor), but this was rejected due to logistical challenges and audience panic worries. Frank Darabont was brought in to script doctor, turning it, per Russell’s request, into something more darkly comedic in tone. Freddy became a snarky, sarcastic wise-ass and willing on occasion to lean even further on the fourth wall than the meta-cinematic concept was doing already.

“Coming soon to a nightmare near you, fat kid in the front row!” (Image source “denofgeek.com”)

Fans were mixed on the whole “Freddy in the real world” thing, but they loved this new wise-ass Freddy. The film’s quippy dialog and self-awareness played well with audiences, as did the fact that the real-world actors reacted realistically and intelligently to the threat rather than devolve into the “idiot horny teen” stereotypes common to the genre. Most memorably, when actor Craig Wasson starts hitting on actress Heather Langenkamp she replies, “seriously? There’s a murdering psychopathic demon killing people and you want to take a break to screw?” Cameos by Zsa Zsa Gabor and other famous actors only added to the self-aware insanity.

“Zsa Zsa, dahling, the surest path to an ovation at the Oscars is an ‘in memoriam’ reel” (Image source “decider.com”)

The film screened in February of 1987, New Line’s first wide release. It opened at #1 in the box office, making $8.9 million over the opening weekend and setting records for an Indy production. As with Raimi’s Friday the 13th, Waking Nightmare attracted traditional slasher fans and non-traditional viewers alike. Critics generally enjoyed the meta-cinematic approach and clever dialog, though some saw it as a cheap gimmick. Ticket sales were brisk, making over $44 million against a $4.4 million budget. The bigger question thus became what to do with the inevitable A Nightmare on Elm Street IV?

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[1] This happened in our timeline as well, where the idea was rejected outright. Craven ultimately acted on the idea in 1994, creating Wes Craven’s New Nightmare. Oh, and Freddy fedora tip to @Unknown for the Slashers help!

 

[Geekhis Khan]

Part II: Transforming under Disney
Excerpt from “More than Meets the Eye: The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of the Transformers” by Sy Bortron, Atlantic Monthly August 2010 Issue

In 1986 Walt Disney Studios released Transformers: The Movie under its Fantasia Films label. Few at the time appreciated just how much irony was packed into this seemingly innocent distribution partnership.

Just a year earlier Disney had been openly mocking the numerous toy-driven animated TV series that predominated on network TV in the mid-1980s with the “Merchenaries” sketch from Disney’s World of Magic. The skit brutally satirized the underlying manipulation and questionable lessons of the various series, in particular GI Joe: A Real American Hero, another show that, like The Transformers, was based on a Hasbro toy line produced in partnership with Sunbow Entertainment, which was a subsidiary of Griffin-Bacal Advertising.

And then, less than a year later, Disney acquired Marvel, Inc. There was nothing very noteworthy about this acquisition. The two companies had an established business relationship going back to 1984, with Marvel publishing various Disney IP under its Marvel and Star comics lines. The deal brought with it all of the creative IP of Marvel Comics, in particular popular superheroes like Spiderman, Captain America, and The Incredible Hulk. But the deal also included Marvel Productions, and Marvel Productions brought with it the TV and film production and distribution rights for the various Sunbow-Hasbro series.

In short, Disney now owned the production rights to several of the very toy-driven franchises that they’d openly mocked just a few months earlier. And more than that, they were legally bound to complete and distribute all contractually obligated productions in work at the time of the sale. Suddenly, Disney found itself obliged to finish television production on GI Joe, My Little Pony, The Inhumanoids, Jem and the Holograms, and, yes, Transformers. Not only that, but they had three animated films in production, GI Joe: The Movie, Inhumanoids: The Movie, and Transformers: The Movie.

Transformers: The Movie would be the first one released, and big things were expected. They had a celebrity voice cast with Orson Welles, Eric Idle, and Leonard Nimoy, among others. It promised big and shocking changes to the status quo. It felt like the culmination of a story that had been established over the course of two television seasons. The hope at Hasbro was that the film would rejuvenate excitement in the Transformers brand, whose sales had begun to plateau.

But there were danger signs, principal among them being the box office bomb of My Little Pony: The Movie, a franchise that, like the other Hasbro toy lines, had been seeing a dip in sales as the kids who loved them at ages 6-9 were now turning 10-14 and the new generation of kids ages 6-9 were on to other toys like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Benny Bunny, and Bio-Force Five. Another danger sign was the fact that Disney Studios Chairman Jim Henson was not a fan of the Sunbow/Hasbro shows, which he considered shallow, violent, and manipulative attempts to sell toys to susceptible children. By contrast, he would say, Muppet Babies, Benny Bunny, or Bio-Force Five were shows that were built around redeeming values of teamwork, tolerance, and acceptance. If Bio-Force was violent, then it was violent in a very abstract and stylistic way compared to, say, the open jingoistic warmongering of GI Joe, the show that drew the most ire from him[1].

Sunbow executives naturally considered this to be hypocrisy and special pleading. Besides, they thought, a contract is a contract whether Henson originally signed it or not.

Of course, here’s where things get interesting: anyone who knows Hollywood knows that the average producer that mocks a rival franchise one day rarely hesitates to take it over himself and pursue it to his fullest extent when given the opportunity, assuming it’s profitable. Such mercenary attitude is practically the norm. And if a new producer or executive doesn’t like a production, or more typically wants to poison the well of the previous executive’s work out of corporate politics or spite, then they have several tools at their discretion for letting a production die on the vine. And some at Sunbow feared that Henson would pursue the latter course, failing to properly promote the movies and thereby ensure failure.

And yet Henson tried to be a man of honor in his own right. Killing a production that he didn’t like wasn’t just an attack against the original producer, he felt, it was an attack against all of the men and women who’d worked for years to make it happen. He’d experienced the disappointment himself of working for untold hours on a production just to see it go nowhere. He felt he owed it to the actual artists to let them have their day in the sun.

He also had to admit that he’d never actually watched the Transformers. He’d occasionally seen it on a TV screen and it had seemed loud and violent and poorly animated. He’d prejudged them based on their toy-driven nature and tangential association with GI Joe, which, as an old “peace and love” Hippie type who’d lost friends and family to war, struck a raw nerve with him. He figured that he at least owed Transformers a real look before he made up his mind, so he watched some of the cartoons.

They weren’t as bad as he’d thought. They were hardly much worse than Bio-Force Five in the violence. The Autobots were noble and tried to protect life while the villainous Decepticons were greedy and power hungry and didn’t care how much destruction they wrought. The show tried to slip in real lessons on, yes, teamwork, tolerance, and acceptance! While it had begun as a toy line first (like Bio-Force 5 it was a rebranding of existing Japanese toys), the show had, Henson felt, transcended its mercenary roots[2]. The writing wasn’t too bad. Besides, the toys, with their ability to change forms, were actually very clever and had some inherently educational advantage in visual and tactile problem solving (just figuring out how to turn the car into a robot and back was like a 3-D puzzle!).

Henson gave the Executive Committee his blessing to go forward with a wide release of the upcoming movie. He even made sure to attend the initial pre-screening at the Dopey Drive theater. On this latter point, he’d wish that he hadn’t.

Just 0.4% of the carnage in Transformers: The Movie (Image sources “ap2hyc.com” & “tfw2005.com”)

Transformers: The Movie was a massacre. The body count was a staggering 47 dead, including many fan favorites, including in particular the central hero Optimus Prime and central villain Megatron. With toy sales plateauing and Hasbro hoping to relaunch an all-new line of toys, the decision had been made to just kill them all and start from a blank slate.

Jim Henson was appalled. So was Disney Animation VP Roy E. Disney. Killing a main character was a major thing, particularly in a kids’ movie. And while some would argue that they’re “just robots, not people,” children were going to be upset, even traumatized to see their beloved characters, who were as real as any person to them, die horribly. And while the deaths of Megatron and Star Scream could be seen as the just consequences of their tyrannical actions, and the death of Optimus Prime seen as an honorable sacrifice, most of the other 44 deaths were casual, random, senseless, and even meaningless, as if they were jacking up the body count just for the shock value.

Henson and Roy Disney allegedly tried to kill the deal, but the distribution and promotion contracts were already in place. Transformers: The Movie debuted as planned on August 6th, 1986. It barely broke even against its $5.5 million budget and was a net loss once distribution and promotion costs were considered[3]. Some Sunbow execs accused Henson or Roy Disney of somehow sabotaging the film, but Disney Studios had more than met their contractual obligations and the promotion was on par with what had been done for My Little Pony: The Movie and The Care Bears Movie.

VHS sales would bring a small profit, but the cinematic failure, having come back-to-back with the failure of My Little Pony: The Movie, was essentially a death knell for the toy-driven TV Animation to Film trend of the 1980s. In fact, only the 1983 US dub of 1976’s The Smurfs and the Magic Flute and 1985’s The Care Bears Movie had made any real profits on the big screen. All others had underperformed or flopped outright. Put together, it made it really easy for Disney to justify releasing Inhumanoids: The Movie and GI Joe: The Movie straight to TV and home video in 1987, where both were met with an underwhelming response from fans. GI Joe: The Movie in particular annoyed fans of the franchise, who were confused and often angered by the bizarre “Cobra-La” angle and irked at the sidelining of fan favorite characters like Snake Eyes, Roadblock, and Flint in favor of new characters like Lt. Falcon, Jinx, and Tunnel Rat[4]. Originally, Duke died at the end of the film, but fan outrage over the death of Optimus Prime resulted in the death being changed via voiceover exposition to a temporary coma.

And Jim Henson noted, wryly, that while Transformers: The Movie had been a slaughterhouse, no one had actually died in GI Joe: The Movie, the “violent” series that he’d been so viscerally opposed to.

The poor reception to GI Joe: The Movie led directly to the end of GI Joe: A Real American Hero, which was not renewed for a third season. The Transformers, meanwhile, would limp along through a third season set in the then-future world of 2005 with Rodimus Prime as the new leader of the Autobots. Sagging ratings and angry fan mail led to the Hail Mary resurrection of Optimus Prime at the end of the season, but even with Optimus back, the fourth season would struggle right out of the gate and be cancelled after a mere seven episodes[5]. Old fans had either moved on or failed to connect to the new post-movie changes, while a new younger audience had failed to materialize.

The cancellation of The Transformers can be seen in hindsight as the symbolic death rattle of the 1980s “Golden Age” of toy-driven animation. The Kaiju-based Inhumanoids had died after a single season, with the show and movie getting mediocre Nielsen numbers and the toys failing to sell to projected levels. My Little Pony was cancelled after two seasons (despite the popularity of the toys) following the flop of the movie and sagging Nielsen ratings. The popular Jem and the Holograms about a female rock group that has international adventures held on the longest, getting cancelled midway through season 3 in 1988. Competing toy-driven series from other companies like The Care Bears and He Man and its spinoff She-Ra had been cancelled by this point. Only ThunderCats remained, and held out only until 1989.

With the cancellation of the various series, Disney’s contractual obligations via Marvel Productions came to an end. Sunbow had no immediate plans to reboot any of them. It was a perfect place to cut ties. Marvel retained all of the comics rights, as the GI Joe and Transformers lines were still selling well enough (even Jim Henson admitted that the GI Joe comics managed to have real emotional stakes and addressed important issues like the physical and emotional costs of war).

However, Jim Henson surprised nearly everyone when he suggested that they retain the film and TV rights to The Transformers, My Little Pony, The Visionaries, The Inhumanoids, and Jem and the Holograms. The rest of the Sunbow coproduction rights would be sold back to Hasbro. Henson saw potential in the clever transforming robots and figured that there could be potential in having a Kaiju franchise, particularly one that lent itself to an environmentalist interpretation. VP of Children’s Entertainment Margaret Loesch had a soft spot for Jem, a show that she’d executive produced, and lobbied to keep the rights. Head of Marvel’s TSR division Gary Gygax had likewise lobbied to keep The Visionaries, a less successful franchise about mystical knights and wizards, seeing them as a potential youth-friendly Dungeons & Dragons supplement. Henson consulted with his daughter Cheryl on My Little Pony, a franchise that he didn’t quite get (“they’re all the same toy, just with different spots on their butt!”). She said that while the toys were “really cute” she considered the series to be somewhat vapid and demeaning and surprisingly scary and violent at times[7]. Still, she felt that the franchise had potential as a positive force for little girls and felt that they had “an obligation” to give them a series that lived up to that potential[8].

Disney would largely sit on those rights for the foreseeable future. However, once they decided to take them off the shelf, the results would change everything.

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[1] Before any GI Joe fans “@” me, remember, I’m a GI Joe fan myself. I still have several of the original toys in my mom’s basement. I liked the TV show (Flint was my favorite). I loved the Marvel comics, which were surprisingly (almost shockingly) willing to address complex issues of moral ambiguity and the cost of war. They even addressed post traumatic stress! The Movie on the other hand (“COBRALALALALALALAAAA!!”) was too stupid and campy and way TF out of left field even for 12-year-old me, though.

[2] Hat tip to @woweed for making a great case on the redeeming value of The Transformers. I always did like the show, even if I was a “GI Joe man”, and loved playing with my friends’ transformers toys. My parents made me choose only one toy line, though.

[3] Does roughly equivalent to our timeline and for much the same reasons, e.g. competition and a shrinking fanbase.

[4] What, me projecting?

[5] Three more than in our timeline.

[6] You know who largely agrees with this sentiment? Lauren Faust, creator of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, which was essentially a canonization of her childhood adventures with her own My Little Pony toys. Her Ponies had way better adventures and more complex relationships than the ditzy ones in the original cartoon, after all.

[7] You know who largely agrees with this sentiment? Lauren Faust, creator of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, which was essentially a canonization of her childhood adventures with her own My Little Pony toys. Her Ponies had way better adventures and more complex relationships than the ones in the original cartoon, after all, she felt. Your mileage may vary.

[8] Twilight Sparkle Crown-tip to @woweed , @CountDVB , and @TheFaultsofAlts for convincing me about the redeeming value of the old skool My Little Pony cartoon. You can thank them for Disney retaining the rights. And Magic Helm Tip to @Ogrebear for reminding me about The Visionaries.

 

[Geekhis Khan]

Chapter 4: Herding Cats
Excerpt from The Visionary and the Vizier, Jim Henson and Frank Wells at Disney, by Derek N. Dedominos, MBA.

The go-to description of Jim Henson as a creative leader has been to call him the “eye of a creative hurricane”. The secondary go-to description of Henson is as a “champion wrangler of cats.” These are useful shorthand descriptions, but they represent only the tip of the iceberg that is Henson’s managerial style.

Looking back over his creative career, the words that emerge are “emotional intelligence”, or the ability to interpret and react constructively to another person’s mental and emotional state. Time and time again Henson demonstrated his ability as a leader to listen to others and understand their needs and wants with empathy and compassion. And despite what many type-A leaders would assume, this is a critical managerial skill, particularly in the emotionally-driven entertainment industry. He has shown an ability to discuss projects with others in an open and non-confrontational manner, keeping egos in check and minimizing the likelihood of conflict. Over the years he developed tools for managing and resolving conflict where he once worked studiously to avoid it (the product of his time at Disney where interpersonal conflict was unavoidable). And he demonstrated an ability to gain buy-in with his employees, even his most creative and egocentric ones, by showing that he has heard them and understands them. He fostered a sense of teamwork while leaving room for individual creative visions. And he did so in ways so subtle that Henson often got his way in a disagreement while the other person walked away thinking that the final plan was their idea all along!

And when it became necessary to turn people down or reject an idea, he did so in an empathetic and constructive way, often with a simple well-placed grunt, that encouraged the person to accept the disappointment and to come back another time with an even better idea. He also encouraged folks to experiment, and if an employee went their own way to try something different, and if that employee’s way worked, Henson not only let it slide but thanked the employee for their insight.

“You can’t stay mad at him,” said animator Brad Bird in 1989. “You can’t even get mad at him most days! He has this genteel way of smiling and showing genuine interest in your ideas. He has a knack for digging through the details and finding the ones that worked and artfully letting you know which ones do not. You’ll walk in with a clear idea of what you want to happen, have a few words and inevitably a few laughs, and then walk out with a different clear idea, suddenly wondering what happened!”

I certainly doubt that I will shock any of my readers when I say that creative people can be stubborn, arrogant, and confrontational. It’s typically a combination of a big ego with a fragile sense of self-worth, which makes someone arrogant enough to assume that they’re a creative genius while simultaneously subconsciously terrified that they’re a fraud. Compounding this is the fact that many entertainment executives have the exact same pathologies (large but fragile egos), but have entirely conflicting goals compared to the artist. Where the creative artist wants the creative freedom and resources to enact their “singular vision”, the studio execs want things done as quickly, cheaply, and as mass-market as possible. This creates the eternal conflict between the creative artist and the profit-minded executive that is at the heart of nearly every creative dispute in Hollywood. And when such conflicts come to a head, particularly when big, fragile egos are involved, the results get stormy.

Henson, however, managed to avoid this cycle of confrontation. Rather than argue over points with the creative artist, he’ll put himself in their shoes, which as a long-running creative person himself was like second nature to him. He’ll listen more than he’d talk, and gather all of the facts. Only then did he determine what the needs of the creative artist were, and then align them to his overall creative strategy and to the fiscal needs and strategic vision of the Disney company.

“It’s like Aikido Management,” said Imagineer and designer Joe Rhode, a frequent collaborator, in a interview. “He talks with you about creative projects and he listens and he asks questions, and soon you’re answering his questions and getting new ideas and the two of you brainstorm something together that not only captures what you wanted to accomplish, but [accomplishes] other things that you hadn’t thought about until that very moment! It’s only days later that you realize that the other stuff was his ideas all along. If he hadn’t been so willing to let you bring your vision to life, and if you weren’t having so damned much fun with it all, then you’d almost feel manipulated!”

One instructive example of this management in action involves his longstanding relationship with writer, producer, director, and animator Terry Gilliam. Gilliam has a reputation in Hollywood as “difficult to work with”. He demands big budgets and then endeavors to spend what he originally asked for regardless of what he actually received, as if to prove a point. He demands creative control over the final cuts and makes his dissatisfaction with “studio cuts” well known in the press. He pushes back against any perceived management interference. And as a result, most studios loathe to work with him. Disney Studios under Jim Henson was the major exception. Henson and Gilliam had what the latter called “a creative understanding.” Gilliam was given a lot of free creative reign up front, and when Henson picked his battles with Gilliam, he did so in an understated way, approaching it as a “creative collaboration” rather than a boss-employee relationship.

On budgetary issues, rather than just give Gilliam the typical executive blanket statement of “you have this much, figure it out,” he worked up front and during production with Gilliam to balance creative need with the budget allocated by COO Frank Wells, who was himself happy to play the “bad guy” in the arrangement. Henson would then collaborate directly or through dedicated creative agents with Gilliam and the effects and cinematography team, coming up with creative ways to accomplish Gilliam’s “vision” within Wells’ budget constraints.

But most of all, he listened to Gilliam, allowing him to express his wants and frustrations without showing frustration or impatience himself, and then worked with him to plot a course. This not only let Gilliam know that his creative vision was appreciated, but that Henson and the rest of the creative leadership will willingly work with him to see it through. Thus, when irreconcilable conflicts did arise, they could be negotiated from a position of solidarity and not come preloaded with the stress and antagonism of past conflict, thus making the possibility for finding a mutually beneficial solution for the impasse far more likely.

Employees and collaborators have expressed their love for working with Jim Henson. Henson “made the work fun,” as many employees described it. The productive hours at the Disney studios improved significantly over where they’d been in the 1970s. Henson also encouraged individual creativity in his employees, encouraging them to develop, nurture, and share their unique creative artistry and pursue their own creative projects, even if they were for other studios. This resulted in a strong sense of loyalty that avoided long running feuds.

“Jim always makes you want to be more than what you currently are,” said longtime collaborator Frank Oz. “He not only recognized my desire to direct and gave me the encouragement and opportunity to do so, but he helped me to see my own limitations, particularly in dealing with other people, and did so in constructive ways that let me grow and excel as an artist. I had some opportunities with other studios and I took them, but I always come back to Jim and Disney.”

Henson also demonstrated an eye for talent and a talent for connecting talented people together, from seeing the potential of Frank Oz in Star Wars to his recognition of Tim Burton’s dark genius. He found ways to pair up mutually-reinforcing talent, such as linking Burton and Brian Froud together for The Black Cauldron. And showed an ability to find teams that can work together and avoid the type of ego clashes all too common in the creative arts.

Henson’s reputation for “being good with talent” became well known within the industry and creative artists that might have thought twice about working for Disney, whose reputation with talent had been frankly rather poor prior to Henson’s ascension, clamored for a chance to work with them.

“I doubt I ever would have worked with Disney if it hadn’t been for Jim,” said director and producer Steven Spielberg. “To be honest, in the early ‘80s following E.T. when I was thinking about expanding further children’s entertainment, I saw them as a potential rival. And then Lisa [Henson] guilted me into becoming a White Knight [in the 1984 ACC hostile takeover attempt]. Suddenly I’m a shareholder and an Associate Director! I’d never worked with Jim but knew many like George [Lucas] who had, and they always had great things to say. And they were right: he’s a sweet and engaging man, full of brilliant ideas and a childlike enthusiasm. We’d spend hours talking over ideas and things we’d like to see, like dinosaurs, and the ideas would just flow. Suddenly instead of Disney being the rivals, they were the go-to partners!”

“The biggest problem with Jim,” said then Disney Animation Vice President Roy Disney in a 1987 interview, “Is that there’s only one of him. He can’t be everywhere at once no matter how hard that he tries.”

Such stories became common, and Henson’s reputation reflected positively in the share price. Chairman, President, and COO Frank Wells began to openly advertise Henson’s contributions to the press and investors as a sign that the company was on as good of a creative footing as it was a fiscal one, highlighting their partnership that balanced the fiscal and creative forces and their mutual respect for one another. The Disney stock price continued its steep climb through the 1980s and proved less volatile than other creative stocks during the period.

“Disney is a solid investment,” Warren Buffet told the Wall Street Journal in 1989, “Despite the inherent volatility of the entertainment industry, Disney’s diversified mix of media, merchandise, and physical parks and hotels, each integrated in mutually-supporting ways, helps smooth out the peaks and valleys and creates a reliable long-term growth stock. Disney’s solid creative arm is continually coming up with good and marketable IP. If a single major project sputters, there will be three more to take its place.”

And it’s that last statement that is the true testament to Henson’s contribution as The Visionary to Wells’ Vizier. There’s a “culture of creativity” in place that keeps so many innovative projects in work on the big screen, small screen, and in the parks that the creative risk is defrayed.

This “diversified creative portfolio” did as much to position Disney for the future as Frank Wells’ solid fiscal and managerial plans. And creative managers across the entertainment industry and others would do well to pay attention to the Henson style of management, and by extension pay attention to the wants and needs of their creative employees.

 

[Geekhis Khan]

Chapter 10, The Highs of Hyperion (Cont’d)
Excerpt from Where Did I Go Right? (or: You’re No One in Hollywood Unless Someone Wants You Dead), by Bernie Brillstein (with Cheryl Henson)

1986 was definitely a good year. It was like I had the Midas Touch! Every project I touched was turning gold, or at least to silver or copper. The Three Caballeros turned a good profit and Spies Like Us was a hit. The Ghostbusters cartoon was rivalling the still popular Muppet Babies for king of Saturday Morning. Labyrinth? Forget it. Platinum!! It’s just such a shame that we lost Michael.

1987 was just as golden. The Princess Bride was pure heartfelt beauty, and it made a good profit. It’d go on to sell millions of VHS tapes and eventually VCD disks too. Even Haunted Honeymoon, which I figured was doomed and threw to Mel Brooks as a Hail Mary, came out relatively hot. Post Edward Ford buzz for Gene and Gilda mixed with some snappy dialog and scenes from Mel Brooks ultimately took the sow’s ear and made it a silk purse. It made a reasonable profit and gained some decent reviews.

As for Mel Brooks, well, Red Ball Express was pure gold. Critics and audiences loved it. We would have done better but John Landis and Eddie Murphy’s King for a Day[1] pulled in a lot of butts for Paramount (hell, even I admit it was a great flick!). The Academy gave us some attention. It made Michael Richard’s career. It resurrected Mel’s. Mel personally thanked me. I still wasn’t interested in his Star Wars spoof, though, so he took it to UA where it predictably underperformed[2]. Timing is everything. Had he made it in ’84 it would have killed. Still, though, I left the door open for other ideas he might have.

I greenlit some great stuff too. George Lucas had an idea for a fantasy flick called Willow. I was hesitant. It’s not like High Fantasy flicks were doing all that well. Just look at Dragonslayer and Ladyhawke! Sure, The Princess Bride did well enough, but that was more fantasy romance and had a small budget. George was asking for over $30 million! Had anyone but George Lucas come along, particularly with Ron Howard set to direct, I would have flat out refused. But Ron had just scored big with Cocoon, and they had both Jim and Tom Wilhite in their corner. ILM and the I-Werks would split the effects work. I took the plunge and was glad that I did.

Heck, I even dabbled my toes in videogames, helping produce Gonzo and Goofy's Galactic Golf[3] for the NES and Atari. That was an experience to say the least! Once we had a name, which some designer just threw out at the brainstorming session, the game practically wrote itself! I can’t say I’ve ever helped design a par 4 on an asteroid before that job. It actually won awards due to the variable gravity between holes. The whole Jupiter par 4 was only the size of a putting green since the ball couldn’t travel more than three feet on a drive!

So, yes, ’86 through ’87 was a glorious time but it was also a bittersweet time, because Gilda was diagnosed with cancer that same year. It would be her last movie. Like with Blues Brothers, which always reminds me of John Belushi, and Labyrinth, which I will always associate with Michael, Haunted Honeymoon always carries a bittersweet memory for me, all the more so because Gilda was always so sweet and loving and innocent.

And while I can talk about John, Mikey, and Gilda all day, or, on a happier note, talk about all of my big production wins all day – I mean, the pictures you produce are how you’re judged by the public and in the industry alike – it doesn’t get to the heart of what it means to be a Producer. Honestly, it’s not for everyone. Your time is no longer your own, but belongs to all of your clients and contacts. Your phone and pager are ringing or beeping constantly. Every mile you drive in LA you have a car phone to your ear, and let me tell you, those old ‘80s phones got heavy fast. For most people, the constant chatter, the constant way you’re answering calls, calling people back, or ignoring someone you don’t have the time for, would drive them nuts. But for me, it was like a heady new drug. Who needs Heroin when you have Hollywood? All of my life I’d strived to be the center of attention at the center of the action. Because you see, while your time belongs to everyone else, conversely their time belongs to you now, too.

And I was talking to the biggest stars, the biggest directors, the biggest producers, the biggest studios and corporations. They were taking some of their valuable time and giving it to me. Mike Ovitz had me on his speed dial, and I conversely had him on mine. I was Mr. Hollywood, which of course was a title Ovitz wanted for himself. Our relationship was complicated. For Ovitz, money was the end that justified the means, while for me money was simply a means to an end, which was living life on my terms. It dawned on me that he saw me as a rival. He made increasingly overt suggestions that he could buy up The Brillstein Company, which would leave his Creative Artists Agency the undisputed King of Hollywood agency and management. However, we had a symbiotic relationship that benefitted us both – he had the talent, I had the pictures to put them in – so we stayed close and kept playing the game.

The Brillstein Agency itself needed a lift, though, and not just because of competition from CAA. My daughter Leigh had taken over management of the agency when I went to Hyperion, but she wasn’t getting the respect that I felt she deserved. Maybe it was her young age or her gender, or maybe it was just being the daughter of the owner. Either way, employees would occasionally call me and try to go over her head. I got tired of wasting my time and theirs. “What did Leigh tell you? Do that,” became my mantra. She was smart and talented, but she needed someone to help run the company. We found that person in Brad Grey, a young talent agent working for Ovitz[4] and hating it. He had serious talent. He had a good number of good clients, including Gary Shandling, who was shopping around a new TV series, a self-aware comedy called It’s Gary Shandling’s Show. We greenlit it for the Hyperion Channel and later moved it to PFN. Grey and I had worked together several times over the past couple of years, and we just hit it off. He was wasting his talents working for Ovitz. He wanted a new job, and Leigh needed an assistant, so the three of us cut a deal. It was a match made in heaven. Ovitz was outranged, of course, but if it hadn’t been over Brad Grey, he would have found some other reason to hate me, I’m sure.

Anyway, all of my hits were getting me a reputation in the industry. I was making magazine covers. And Tom Wilhite, now President and Chairman of MGM Studios with Hyperion Productions now a label and department[5] underneath it, took notice of what I was pulling off. In just four years I’d bagged Mel Brooks, Rob Reiner, Terry Gilliam, John Cleese, George Lucas, Ron Howard, Harold Ramis, and a two-picture deal with John Landis at his peak! Tom took me to lunch and didn’t waste time on pleasantries. He wanted me to be the Vice President of the Hyperion Productions department and Vice Chairman of MGM Studios! It came with a big raise and increased responsibilities. More money and more of that shared time. Though, when you get down to it, aren’t time and money the same thing?

No, I don’t mean the old’ “time is money” schtick. It’s more the other way around. Money is time. Every dollar in your wallet got there because you invested your time into something, or because someone who works for you invested their time. Paychecks are tied to clocks and calendars for a reason. That money in your wallet or bank account can in turn be spent for someone’s time, like the mechanic’s time fixing your car or the farmer’s time growing your food. Every dollar invested into a movie represents someone’s time somewhere, be that the actors’, director’s, set builders’, or producer’s time. But what about money spent on materials? Those raw materials had to be harvested and transported by someone on their time! Every movie ticket sold represents someone out there feeling that 90-120 minutes of their limited time is worth spending watching what you produced. It’s humbling when you think of it. And while I’m not going to get into the briar patch of whose time is worth more and why, it’s an inalienable fact of nature that money is ultimately time, or, well, space-time as Einstein tells us, which I guess is why real estate and office space are so coveted, particularly when you think of the return on the time you invest into them, but I digress. I’m certainly not going to add a Nobel Prize in Physics to my mantle anytime soon.

With all that said, since coming to Hyperion, now MGM, I’d skyrocketed to the top and my time was fuller and running faster than ever.

And I was having the time of my life!

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[1] With Eddie Murphy not doing Beverly Hills Cop 2 he’s available to do the Art Buchwald film that allegedly got turned into Coming to America (1988). There is no lawsuit in this timeline.

[2] Spaceballs gets made a year later than our timeline, follows a similar plot, and has a similar lukewarm box office, only to become a cult classic. What, you actually believed that I was going to butterfly Spaceballs? I find yer lack of faith distoibing.

[3] Gaudy golf Tam O’Shanter tip to @TheFaultsofAlts for this crazy idea!

[4] Butterflies prevented Grey and Brillstein from meeting in 1984. Here, Grey takes a job with Ovitz.

[5] MGM Studios includes Hyperion Productions (which includes the Hyperion Pictures, Disney/Hyperion Music, and Disney/Hyperion Television divisions), Buena Vista Distribution, and Walt Disney Promotions & Consumer Products. Walt Disney Studios (co-equal to MGM), for reference, includes Walt Disney Motion Pictures (to include Fantasia Films and Marvel Studios), Walt Disney Animation (to include the Disney Digital Division), and Walt Disney Publishing.

 

[Geekhis Khan]

Chapter 15: Complete Freedom (Cont’d)
Excerpt from Jim Henson: Storyteller, an authorized biography by Jay O’Brian.

By the spring of 1987 Jim Henson’s creative time was increasingly his own, and yet that time was increasingly spent cut off from others. He was working non-stop. The Land Before Time, an animatronic dinosaur feature done in partnership with Amblin[1], and a reason to work directly with his daughter Lisa, was set for release that summer. A sequel was in the works for The Dark Crystal, which was seeing a sudden video renaissance thanks to the video games, theme park rides, and TV showings. While it had received mixed reactions upon its release, in large part due to audience expectations of something more like the Muppets, The Dark Crystal was now being reevaluated by critics and audiences alike. The sequel film, The Dark Crystal: Return to Thra, would enter production that year, directed by Frank Oz, who had just found moderate success with Little Shop of Horrors. Jim’s daughter Cheryl, the “original Dark Crystal fan” in her own words, was working with him as Art Director. To kick it all off, a 1988 re-release of the original was planned, making the original now unofficially a Disney Classic.

On the Classics themselves, Ron, Frank, and Jim had finally secured the periodic release of the Holy Trinity from the vault, so now Snow White, Cinderella, and even Fantasia would be added to the “opening of the Vaults” release schedule 6 months after their theatrical re-releases. As it was working out, the periodic “limited release” schedule aligned very well to the way in which VHS tapes broke down over time, meaning that even those who already owned copies of the tapes were often buying new ones. Furthermore, Jim was able to greenlight Musicana, a long-planned sequel to Fantasia, with production starting on the sidelines with small teams guided by some of the remaining 9 Old Men, in particular Mel Shaw and Woolie Reitherman[2]. He’d already stealthily produced the “In the Bayou” sequence as a Short for the film in 1986 and screened it along with Song of the South. In the meantime, other Musicana sequences would appear on World of Magic and before Disney releases[3] as they were made, allowing the sequences to work as promotional vehicles while reintroducing audiences to what Jack Lindquist was marketing as “the original music videos”.

However, the film itself would have to take a backseat to the principal animated feature set to be released in 1988, Mistress Masham’s Repose, now named A Small World in a bit of self-aware meta-humor. Andreas Deja’s amazing artwork was merging with Alan Menken’s and Howard Ashman’s incredible musical score into something that was shaping up to be truly magical. Simply seeing the happy look on Roy Disney’s face was proof positive that all was going well.

On TV animation, Muppet Babies was continuing its impressive run while Disney’s Three Musketeers was losing ground, as was Cheryl’s Benny Bunny. However, they were having huge success with Bernie Brillstein’s new animated version of Ghostbusters, done in collaboration with Filmation, which oddly still held the rights to the name for animation purposes based upon an old live action TV show of the same name. Also, a new animated series based upon The Rescuers was spinning up on CBS Saturday mornings.

There was hardly enough time for everything that he had in development or production. A sequel was planned for Ghostbusters once production finished on Spies Like Us. First up was Haunted Honeymoon that January. Spring and Summer promised the release of Harry and the Hendersons, Innerspace, and Benji the Protector[4] and fall would see the release of The Princess Bride. Red Ball Express would be released by Labor Day under the MGM label with production continuing on Willow. The Nightmare Before Christmas would be released in time for Halloween with the hopes that it would carry through Christmas and thereby appropriately span both holidays. Winter would see release of *batteries not included[5]. Production was launched under Hyperion on the new John Cleese comedy A Fish Called Wanda[6]. Finally, Who Framed Roger Rabbit was scheduled for a Thanksgiving Day release with huge hopes riding on it, particularly for Ron Miller.

And on top of that, there were the new attractions being developed at the parks, like the Briar Patch Splash flume ride, the Star Tours and Back to the Future simulator rides, Ghostbusters: The Great Ghost Hunt interactive dark ride, and the new Norway Pavilion. There were also new video games, new books and merchandise, new hotel designs, and the designs for Disneyland Valencia, in particular the retro-futuristic Discoveryland concept intended as a replacement for Tomorrowland, with it hoped that the retro-future aesthetic would avoid the "Tomorrowland Problem". It was by far the most Jim had ever juggled in a single year.

With more and more strategic creative leadership responsibilities, Jim was becoming further and further removed from the day-to-day work. Rather than getting to sit in and watch or participate in the fun, he was reviewing, commenting, delegating, and moving on. Despite wanting to get deeply involved in every project and “get his hands dirty”, he was instead watching the hard hands-on work being done by others as he bolted off to his next meeting or project. It was, ironically, the exact same dilemma that Walt Disney had faced half a century earlier as his studio started to grow.

(Image source “soundcloud.com”)

But Jim insisted on participation in his newest creation for World of Magic, the John Hurt fronted Creatureworks creation Jim Henson’s The Storyteller, the “Jim Henson’s” part added at the insistence of Jack Lindquist, who felt that the branding his name offered would help sell the series. Jim’s son Brian voiced and performed the dog. His daughter Cheryl became the show runner. Jim helped to design the look and feel of the show and produced the first episode. He insisted on being there to place or approve the eyes on all creature effects. But while the Critics and the Emmys and BAFTAs loved the show, its Nielsen numbers weren’t high enough to justify its own spinoff series, so it would remain an occasional World of Magic special, there to allow the Creatureworks to hone its magic[7] and there to give Jim his own little sandbox to play in with his family, even if his direct participation was far less than he wished, another victim of his crowded schedule.

And increasingly, his absence was being felt by others. Even his roles playing beloved Muppet characters were starting to fall victim to this schedule. Increasingly often, his and Frank Oz’s duties in LA prevented them from going to New York to film Sesame Street. At first, they started to do the skits in LA on a recreated stage and then sent the VTR reels to CTW. Eventually, new Muppet Performers, Steve Whitmire and Kevin Clash respectively, began to perform the actual skits and Jim and Frank would do voiceover work. Once, when they missed a voiceover deadline in the midst of post-production reshoots on Little Shop of Horrors, Sesame Street played the sketches using Steve & Kevin’s voices. Jim was heartbroken and felt like he’d let everyone down. Frank was more reticent. “Jim, let the new kids have their turn.”

The symbolic absence of Jim and Frank from the Sesame Street set and the Muppet Workshop in New York was starting to be felt. More and more the New York performers and designers began to feel abandoned. The $4 million Disney grant for Sesame Street didn’t fill the Jim shaped hole. A form of resentment grew for the West Coast crew and the Disney organization in general. They weren’t alone in this jealousy. Even within the seemingly “favored” LA shops, rivalries were brewing. The animators were competing for time with the Muppet makers and the Creatureworks and 3D and the live action studios and the parks and the I-Works. There just wasn’t enough Jim to go around! His time was increasingly divided between all the multitude of tasks that simply taking the time to be a part of the fun was as much a rare treat for Jim as it was for the creative artists themselves.

Shown: Jim Henson with the Muppets from The Christmas Toy; Not shown: the underlying fear, tension, and jealousy (Image source “tv.avclub.com”)

For the most part, the various teams diffused any stress through pranks and sports, but the stress began to appear in the art in subtle ways. Strangely, this manifested most overtly in what was on the surface one of the more innocent projects: A World of Magic Christmas Special called The Christmas Toy. The special and its 3D-produced accompanying computer animated short Tin Toy Troubles[8] are probably best known today for the later CG animated features that they inspired. But the largely-forgotten special reflects many of the underlying tensions on the set with its themes of jealousy, coveted attention, and fears of abandonment[9]. Just as Tugger the toy tiger must come to terms with his own jealousy and need for love from the human girl, so, it can be assumed, the Muppets team was coming to terms with Jim’s absence in favor of the “new toy” (Disney). The fact that Jim was on-hand for some of the filming and even played a few small parts (most notably Kermit as the narrator) likely helped soothe feelings and smooth the production, but just as soon he was flying back to LA to follow up on production of A Small World.

Just as work was taking up an increasing amount of Jim’s time, finding time with loved ones was becoming scarcer. Lisa’s and Cheryl’s work and Brian’s studies kept them busy, and all three were adults building their own lives. John was still somewhere in Asia. No one had seen him in over a year nor received a letter in months and they were growing increasingly worried. His last letter suggested a trip into the Himalayas was forthcoming. The family (save John) reunited briefly for Brian’s graduation from Caltech, an event Jim enthusiastically recorded in his Red Book. He and Jane got to meet Lisa’s new boyfriend, Sam Raimi[10], who was directing the upcoming The Running Man. It was the first time in months that he’d seen Jane and his daughter Heather, who was now 16. He’d missed so much of her life since the separation.

Jim marked the weekend-long graduation party as one of his truly happiest moments in a long time, though one marred by John’s continuing absence. And yet once the grand celebration ended, the Hensons once again went their separate ways.

Time with friends was likewise rare. Lunches with Ron, Roy, or Bernie were an increasingly rare treat. He still got to spend time both on and off the clock with Frank Oz, Jerry Nelson, Richard Hunt, Dave Goelz, and the rest, and worked with Jerry Juhl and Paul Fusco on occasion to get Alf going and make it more comfortable for its human cast, who were unhappy with Paul’s long hours and arch perfectionism. Jim occasionally sponsored a “Muppet Man Reunion” dinner, but actual time together was limited. Jim was more likely to spend a Saturday in the boardroom with Frank Wells and Dick Nunis going over plans for Disneyland Valencia. Occasionally Frank would take him skiing, Stan Kinsey would take him golfing, or Dick would meet him in Laguna or Long Beach to surf, but all three were so far ahead of him at these sports that he felt like he became a drag on their fun.

Meanwhile, his strange and spastic time with Emily Hotchkiss continued. It was a relationship marked by high passions that burned hot and flamed out, only to reignite weeks later. Emily would drag him all around the LA area to concert venues, Venice Beach, winding trails among the California mountains and foothills, kayak trips, and small, dingy underground music scenes. They frequently found themselves crowding into small clubs on the Sunset Strip to see up-and-coming underground bands like Faith No More and the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

Emily remembers the time well. “I’d ask Jim ‘Do you dig this?’ ‘Sure,’ he’d say, ‘they’re like Parliament!’ It’d make me laugh. I mean, he was kind of right. Thelonious Monster was his favorite, probably because it sort of resembled those old Jazz records he’d play me, which were pretty cool but slow. One day I dragged him up to Berkley where we saw Primus back before they broke out[11]. Jim dug the oddball sound. He said the complex time signatures reminded him of Be-Bop, but the rowdiness of the crowds was a little intimidating for him, particularly the mosh pit. ‘Gosh, Emily!’ [he said], ‘They’re going to kill each other!’ He was always so free and energetic, but it was times like that where I could really feel the age difference!”

Jim attempted to keep a low profile when they went out, but eventually he began to be recognized. “We were doing a set at Scream,” said Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist Flea in an interview, “and I notice this bearded old guy in the back with a blonde chick. I’d seen him once or twice before, I mean the occasional ‘cool old guy’ wasn’t unheard of on the Strip back then, but he seemed so familiar. Suddenly I’m like, ‘fuck, is that the Muppet guy?’ On a break I asked Anthony [Kiedis] and he’s like, ‘Yea, that’s Jim Henson. I saw him on that Disney show [World of Magic].’ So, I said, ‘fuck, man, let’s get him back stage!’”

Jim and Emily met with the band and other musicians on the strip. It was an interesting experience for all. “I remember him well,” said Bob Forrest, front man for Thelonious Monster. “I owe him a lot, and it started that night, but I didn’t realize it yet. He was cool and laid back and laughed freely and joyously, and was the only person not on drugs, which was crazy.”

“Yea, we didn’t know what to expect,” said Anthony Kiedis, “Flea and I had a bet going on whether he’d freak out when a joint got passed or if he’d toke up. I figured the cat behind ‘Mahna Mahna’ was totally on drugs. Flea figured he’d be a square. Instead, [Henson] hardly paid any attention. He just passed it along without using, commenting, or even changing his expression.”

“It seems to surprise people that I don’t do drugs,” said Jim. “It just never interested me. I just didn’t want to mess up my mind. There was one time I tried a tab of LSD in the ‘70s since there’d been so much talk about its mind-expanding powers, but it honestly didn’t do anything for me[12]. Jerry Juhl said it was because my mind was already so far out there that the acid couldn’t keep up!” he laughed.

Such moments were a fun bit of time to relax and laugh for Jim, but they were a far cry from the close and intimate relationships he’d always maintained with his biological family and with his Muppets family. “He was a very melancholy man,” Emily remembers. “He was always so free and joyous, but there was something there, like an awareness that it was fleeting. He’d wake up at like 3 am on a Friday and want to go to work and I was like, ‘Jim, forget it, let’s spend the day on the beach,’ but he was like, ‘I have stuff to do,’ and that was that. He’d put on his work clothes and drive off down the PCH.

“He always wanted more time, but the time was taking him.”

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[1] More on this soon!

[2] Woolie’s 1985 traffic accident and death are butterflied in this timeline because Disney has provided a driver.

[3] Hat-tip to @Ogrebear for this idea.

[4] Roughly equivalent to Benji the Hunted in our timeline. Will score a similar box office.

[5] Harry and the Hendersons and *batteries not included were done in partnership with Amblin, who worked with Universal in our timeline. Both are Disney releases in this timeline and will perform similarly to our timeline.

[6] Produced by MGM in our timeline. The demise/division/acquisition of MGM in ’85 and the existing personal and business relationship between Henson and Cleese leads it to Disney, who sees it as an “adult contemporary comedy” in keeping with the Hyperion brand rather than the MGM brand which they reserve for epics, dramas, and other sweeping “prestige” films.

[7] World of Magic and the Creatureworks had an ongoing friendly rivalry with Spielberg’s Amazing Stories and ILM in the mid-‘80s.

[8] This timeline’s equivalents of Jim Henson’s 1986 The Christmas Toy and the 1988 Tin Toy Pixar short, here produced earlier in keeping with the living toys concept of the special.

[9] The A.V. Club wrote an article with similar conclusions regarding jealousies between the Henson NY Muppets Shop and London “Creature Shop” affecting The Christmas Toy.

[10] They dated for a while in our timeline as well. Small world.

[11] I like to think that they were somewhere in the audience when “Suck on This” was recorded.

[12] Recounted in Jim Henson: A Biography, by Brian J. Jones.

 

[Geekhis Khan]

Disney Does Dinosaurs! Part 1: The Land Before Time (1987)
Nostalgia was Way Better when I was a Kid Netsite, August 17th, 2000

In 1986 Jim Henson and associate directors Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, along with Amblin producer and Henson daughter Lisa, were discussing ideas for a new animatronic-based film as a follow up to the hit Labyrinth. Reportedly, Henson and Spielberg said the words “Dinosaurs” at the exact same time.

Spielberg and Lucas were both big fans of the “Rite of Spring” sequence from Fantasia. Spielberg had wanted to do something involving dinosaurs for a while and had considered pitching the idea as an animated feature. But the sheer realism of the animatronic effects coming out of the Disney Creatureworks, which many in the industry still called the Henson Creatureworks, made the idea of an animatronic film a natural. “The Natural History Project” was born[1].

Not this…

At first, they planned to make it silent, without dialog, like an extended nature documentary. However, that idea was quickly scrapped in favor of an original story that would appeal to children. Lucas suggested the name “The Land Before Time Began.” This was shortened to The Land Before Time and a classic film (and a blessing to antipsychotic pharmaceutical manufacturers everywhere) was born.

Frank Oz was called in to direct and screenwriter William Stout was ultimately selected to write the screenplay with some script doctoring by Judy Freiberg. What emerged was the story of a grizzled old Parasaurolophus who leads a group of young herbivores on a quest to find a mythic green valley, all the while stalked by various villainous carnivores. “Rolo” the old Parasaurolophus leads and teaches young Corythosaurus “Cory”, a pair of dim-witted “Tweddle Dee and Tweddle Dum” inspired Pachycephalosaurs named “Seth” and “Packer”, a “woeful” ankylosaur named “Kyle”, and a “haughty” Styracosaur named “Stryker”[2].

They are pursued by comic relief/your worst nightmares come true Ovi, Velo, and Dromeo, a pack of “raptors” determined to catch and eat our protagonists (Oviraptor, Velociraptor, and Dromaeosaur, respectively). Prior to this film, your average viewer had no idea what a “raptor” was, surprisingly enough, and this feature is credited with making Dromaeosaurs and Velociraptors as famous as Tyrannosaurs and Ceratopsians[3]. And they were at once scary AF and rather amusing in a “Shakespearian Clowns” crossed with Three Stooges kind of way. Interestingly, it was the three raptors that would cause the biggest fan controversy, as all three were adorned with feathers! Today it’s “common knowledge” that dinosaurs had feathers, but really only paleontologists and “dino nerds” knew or accepted this in 1987. Spielberg even hesitated about adding the feathers, knowing that audiences would have a hard time accepting them, but Henson won out, and posterity has celebrated the fact that Disney did Dino-feathers two decades before anyone else.

Looming over all of this was the Tyrannosaurus, nicknamed “Sharptooth” by the protagonists, who never spoke or had any overt personality. Rather, he (she?) was a sort of looming menace and symbol of mortality rather than antagonist with any overt goals. Sharptooth and the Raptors (hey, did I just come up with an awesome band name?) stalk our protagonists as they make their way to the fabled green valley, the heroes learning important lessons like teamwork, getting along, and celebrating each other’s differences and talents. The story was largely character driven with the overall plot there to serve as a vehicle for the life’s lessons and fabulous immersive practical effects that drove the story.

Henson’s Creatureworks knocked one out of the park here, making The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth looks quaint by comparison. For the distance shots, particularly with herds of dinosaurs, they enlisted ILM, specifically Phil Tippett, to develop “Go Motion” effects. Paleontologists Jack Horner, Robert T. Bakker, and Phil Currie provided technical consultation on how the dinosaurs should move and act. All of the effects required a staggering for the time $32 million, mostly funded through Silver Screen Tax Shelter Partners XVIII or whatever (I’m sure Dow Pharmaceutical must be one of the “partners” given how many SSRIs these ‘80s Disney movies have sold). Naturally, being about dinosaurs, the International Unit off Obsession in children, it made over $105 million at the box office and was a certified hit[4]. It spawned two sequels that didn’t perform as well but still made a worthwhile profit (1990’s TLBT 2: Cera’s Troop and 1995’s TLBT 3: The Reign of Sharptooth, both of which integrated computer effects in with the animatronics) as well as a few “Shorts” and a four-season TV series using the old animatronics and sets. A spin-off film, 1994’s The Frost Giants, followed a team of animatronic Mammoths, Wooly Rhinos, and other Ice Age critters, this time pursued by predators like “Smiley” the Smilodon.

TLBT would also spawn a dark ride at the Adventure Lands at various Disney parks.

The Land Before Time is considered a watershed moment in animatronic effects. It would win the Oscar and Golden Globe alike for the effects. Although not a musical, the soundtrack, including “We All Stand Together” by Diana Ross, was popular and sold gold. All four films remain good sellers on home media and the original is considered a Disney Classic and can amaze viewers even today when immersive, breathtaking effects are becoming so common as to be blasé. And while I for one wasn’t young enough at that point to see my childhood traumas reinforced, the lifelike effects and frightening visuals with the villainous raptors and Sharptooth did their part to keep the SSRI industry afloat through the next generation of kids.

And yes, since you asked, it sold a gross metric fuk-ton of toys, merch, and tie-in video games, including the classic Nintendo, Atari, and Sega games, and still sells merch both to new generations of young fans and nostalgic twenty-somethings trying to deal with the stress of life as a cubicle drone.

The Land Before Time remains one of the signature triumphs of the Creatureworks and ILM and a classic film. Paleontologists, dino nerds, and average audiences alike marveled at it then and still marvel today.

The Xanax is optional.

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[1] In this timeline Spielberg’s idea for an animated dinosaur feature merges with Jim Henson and William Stout’s The Natural History Project (follow link for art that I couldn't post here) to become a Disney Creatureworks animatronic creation here rather than a Bluth-made movie turned series of movies turned franchise zombie (I personally can’t wait to see The Land Before Time LXIX: The Fun Goes Extinct). In our timeline, Henson abandoned the project when Bluth/Amblin announced the release of The Land Before Time. And a Parasaurolophus crest-tip to @Plateosaurus and @Nathanoraptor for reminding me of this project.

[2] Voiced by Judith Barsi. More on her later.

[3] While us “dinosaur nerds” were fully aware of how undeniably awesome raptors were in the 1980s (I “retired” Tyrannosaurus Rex as my favorite dinosaur in the mid ‘80s in favor of Deinonychus) most wouldn’t come to learn about them in our timeline until Jurassic Park.

[4] Compare to $85 million for the Bluth film of the same name. Here the sheer awe of the for the time revolutionary special effects has driven a larger “novelty” attendance there to see the eye candy, much as Jurassic Park did in our timeline. Otherwise, the same audience that flocked to the Bluth feature in our timeline has flocked to this one for pretty much the same reasons.

 

[Geekhis Khan]

Disney Does Dinosaurs! Part 2: DinoSafari! (1987)
Nostalgia was Way Better when I was a Kid Netsite, August 18th, 2000

In 1987 Disney released The Land Before Time. But before that, as a promotional, there was the TV Miniseries DinoSafari![1] It aired on ABC over three consecutive nights in the spring of 1987, and it was epic! The show featured the Creatureworks animatronics and ILM Go Motion effects from the film, only this time instead of talking anthropomorphic dinos it featured time travelling paleontologists! The show is the spiritual successor to 1985’s Dinosaur! with Christopher Reeves, which also featured Phil Tippet’s Go Motion animation. Paleontologists Jack Horner, Robert T. Bakker, and Phil Currie provided technical consultation, much as they had on The Land Before Time. Unlike Dinosaur!, DinoSafari was both educational and comedic, full of physical humor (the poor, poor Danger Jackson!) as well as witty dialog and was an affectionate parody of the popular Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom and similar nature shows of the time.

One thing that was interesting about DinoSafari was that it eschewed the “big five” (Tyrannosaurus, Triceratops, Stegosaurus, Apatosaurus/Brontosaurus, and Pterodactyl), and instead explored relatively unknown dinosaurs and pterosaurs. They also cleverly saved money by making slight modifications to the existing animatronics and Go Motion models from the movie in order to portray different species. For example, the “Sharptooth” T-rex was repainted a couple of different ways and became a Daspletosaurus and a Megalosaurus.

The full title of the miniseries, DinoSafari! With Jacques Savage (pronounced sa-VAHJ in the French style), reflected the name of the fictional near-future TV show within the TV show. It also captured the essential concept of the miniseries: French paleontologist Jacques Savage (Rene Auberjonois), a clear reference to Jacques Cousteau, and his beleaguered assistant “Danger” Jim Jackson (Bob Einstein), used a flux capacitor equipped Land Rover to explore the Dinosaurs first hand. The story was simple: Savage and Jackson travel to a new time and place in the Mesozoic, and encounter living dinosaurs. Each of the three episodes lasted 90-94 minutes, which accounted for a 2-hour TV time slot with commercials in the US. Each showed five “Encounters” separated by commercial breaks in the US, with each Encounter introducing a new dinosaur or dinosaurs. Savage then narrates safely from a distance, describing the dinosaur’s size, behavior, diet, and other relevant facts. Meanwhile poor, mute, shellshocked Jackson grapples with the dinosaurs in an attempt to take a measurement or attain a blood sample, where he gets thrown, bashed, kicked, stepped on, or otherwise bloodlessly hurt in the form of a comedically obvious dummy body double, a schtick Einstein had previously perfected in his “Super Dave Osborne” sketches.

Episode One introduced the main human characters, the time travelling Land Rover, and the premise, and then took us to Mongolia in the late Cretaceous. Encounter #1 featured a herd of Gallimimus being pursued by a pack of Adasaurus, the latter of which would reuse the raptor animatronics from the film. Jackson would attempt to wrestle an Adasaurus to the ground, but would be dragged off into a rock. Next for Encounter #2 they visited a Saichania, reusing the ankylosaur animatronic, which swatted (dummy) Jackson with its tail club. The battered Jackson looked defeated, but then he smiled as Savage described that their next encounter will be “a small lizard”. So, for Encounter #3 they visited the small reptile Gobiderma, which latched painfully on to Jackson’s right hand with its teeth as he reached down to grab it, causing him to scream loudly and dance, reptile still holding tight, while a herd of bemused Gallimimus looked on in the background and Savage dryly described the “great evolutionary advantages” the reptile displayed. The Gallimimus scattered as a pack of Oviraptors appear for Encounter #4, which reused the Oviraptor animatronic, and which chased Jackson while Savage calmly described its fearsome features. Eventually the Oviraptor got tired of chasing Jackson, so they followed it to Encounter #5, a herd of Protoceratops, which calmly ignored a relieved Jackson…right up until the point where a pack of carnosaurs appeared, causing them to stampede and trample him.

The episode ended following a last commercial break with Savage and Jackson returning to the Land Rover, Jackson bruised and wearing a sling, as Savage told the audience that they’d next be visiting Mesozoic Alberta, where they’d encounter “one of the most aggressive and dangerous therapods in natural history,” causing Danger Jackson to look terrified. They then got in the Land Rover, which converted into a flying car like in the end of Back to the Future and flew off into the credits.

Episode Two took us to Alberta, first through the air as the flying Land Rover cruises through Encounter #1, a flock of flying Quetzalcoatlus. As Savage spoke to their grace and serenity, Jackson leaned precariously out the window to take pictures, where one of the pterosaurs grabbed him with its beak and dropped him, causing him to plummet (obvious dummy again) to the waters below. Jackson was wet and shaking as they followed one Quetzalcoatlus to a dead Lambeosaurus, making Savage excited that the “vicious Daspletosaurus must be close”. But instead of the Daspletosaurus, it’s Encounter #2, a group of Maiasaura, all attending to their nests, their eggs hatching. A reluctant Jackson went closer to draw a blood sample from a newly hatched baby with a syringe, and got brutally kicked through the air by an angry mama Maiasaur. Savage promised “no more blood samples” and drove them to Encounter #3 to see Pachycephalosaurus, animatronics reused from the film, as two males butted heads in contest. Savage ironically warned Jackson not to get too close to the dangerous competitors as he took photos. One emerged victorious and a smiling Jackson bent over to put his camera away. Needless to say, the victorious Pachycephalosaurus charged him from behind, sending the Jackson dummy flying, screaming, through the air. As Jackson recovers Savage notices Encounter #4, a herd of Lambeosaurus and Styracosaurus, reusing the Corythosaurus and Styracosaurus animatronics. Jackson tried to measure the horn length of a Styracosaurus, and got charged by another, getting Jackson’s belt stuck on its horn and running along with a screaming Jackson hanging off of its nose. Finally, Jackson was free after his belt broke, and they noticed that the herbivores were hightailing it out of there, so “the savage killer” must be close. So, this led to Encounter #5, which saw them travelling to find the fierce Daspletosaurus. Jackson grew noticeably more nervous as Savage described the vicious Tyranosaurid. Finally, they encountered the beast…and it was a little chirping thing. Now cocky, Jackson easily subdued it and took a blood sample as is shrieked pitifully. As Savage continued speaking about the dinosaur, ultimately describing how much bigger they got “than this little hatchling”, Jackson’s cocky smirk faded away. Then mama Daspletosaurus, a reuse of the T. rex animatronic, rounded the corner, its massive footsteps thundering. In the background Jackson ran from the angry mama as Savage thanked the audience for their time, and the show ends, Savage reminding the viewers that they’d return tomorrow.

And then Episode Three travelled to Tanzania and the late Jurassic. Encounter #1 explored the horn-nosed therapod Ceratosaurus, who charged Jackson and flung him through the air by the horn again and again before losing interest when (Encounter #2) a herd of Kentrosaurus and Elaphrosaurus appear. Jackson, reluctantly going to measure the Kentrosaurus’s plates, is nearly impaled on its thagomizer, only to escape seemingly unhurt with the measurement…and then got trampled by a running Elaphrosaurus. For Encounter #3 a fierce roar scattered the herbivores and the T. rex animatronic returned once again, this time as a Megalosaurus, who chased Jackson up a tree. He was rescued by Savage in the flying Land Rover and taken to Encounter #4, which was Dicraeosaurus, a diplodocoid sauropod. Jackson ended up clinging to its huge tail, screaming as it swung him back and forth until he was sent flying into a lake. This took us straight to Encounter #5 when a Brachiosaurus (technically a Giraffatitan) emerged from the deep lake, Jackson clinging nervously to its head, as it walked out and browsed from the trees. As Savage finished describing the Brachiosaurus and thanked the audience for watching the show, Jackson slid carefully down the long neck and tail.

Finally, an angry, exhausted, Jackson confronted Savage, yelling at him for endangering him at every turn, and announced that the second they got “back to the future” he was quitting immediately, and that he was considering a lawsuit. Savage expressed his regrets as they got back in the Land Rover as the theme music started and the final credits rolled. As the camera backed away you could hear the sounds of the engine turning over again and again, but failing to start, some Ceratosaurus, Megaloosaurus, and some generic small coelurosaur played by the Adasaur animatronic approaching them menacingly. Just before the show went to black, you heard Savage ask, “Did you remember to fill up the tank like I asked?” Danger Jackson replied, simply, “Um,” as it went to credits.

The series was full of for the time accurate and detailed information on the dinosaurs. The series was also chock full of Disney and Henson Easter Eggs. With the flux capacitor in the Land Rover, for example, fans immediately made the connection that this show existed in the Back to the Future universe, which by extension given the reuse of animatronics and effects, convinced many fans that The Land Before Time existed in this universe as well. Savage described the Dicraeosaurus as “like a bizarre heffalump” at one point. Savage and Jackson listen to Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring while riding in the Land Rover at tone point. The abusive working relationship between Savage and Jackson was deliberately reminiscent of Dr. Bunson Honeydew and Beaker from The Muppet Show. The “Scrap Flyapp” Muppets briefly appear in the Jurassic lake in Episode 3 in a “blink or you’ll miss it” scene. As Jackson slides down the back of the Brachiosaurus the music blasts a brass flair reminiscent of the Flintstones theme. And at one point, Savage proclaims “one day we shall find it…this…paleo connection”.

Dinosafari! earned an impressive 43 share the first night, a 38 share the second, and a 41 share the third. It reappeared in reruns throughout the 1990s, particularly on The Disney Channel, and went on to sell reasonably well on VHS. It has yet to appear on VCD, though. It’s impossible to know for sure how much, if any, it helped spur ticket sales to The Land Before Time, ironically its original purpose, but it probably sold a lot of Folgers crystals, Bugle Boy jeans, and Grey Poupon.

Though somewhat forgotten today, DinoSafari! remains a triumphant ‘80s moment of TV fun. The effects hold up fairly well and the humor holds up pretty well too. If you manage to get ahold of an old copy be sure to check it out.

And with the violence so comically ludicrous, no Xanax is required.

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[1] Pachycephalosaurs domed skull tip to @Plateosaurus and @GrahamB for this idea, and additional thanks to Plateo for developing the Dino Encounters.

 

[Geekhis Khan]

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

Hollywood is a fantasy land, and Disney a fantasy within a fantasy. And yet, reality inevitably finds a way into the picture. The world of children’s entertainment in particular can be an ugly world of callous use and even abuse. From Jackie Coogan’s watershed lawsuit against his own parents up to the present-day substance abuse scandals with former child actors, stories persist of the Hollywood money machine grinding up and spitting out even the most innocent. Other stories see behind-the-scenes drama that spills over onto the set.

Judith Barsi 1987 (Image source “IMDB.com”)

Take the story of child actress Judith Barsi. She’d been a favorite of Steven Spielberg’s and in 1986 was providing voice work for The Land Before Time as Stryker, the “haughty” Styracosaur. The Land Before Time was the story of young, innocent herbivores attempting to escape from predatory carnivores. In a strange sort of meta-resonance, Judith Barsi was in danger from a predator in her own family. One day on the set while Jim Henson and Kermit were talking to her between takes, Henson started to realize that something was off with her. His years of working with kids had lent him a sense of perception with children that even the most seasoned Hollywood producers tended to lack. Over the course of the shoot, it became increasingly obvious that something was amiss. Henson, via Kermit, probed deeper. Barsi asked Kermit repeatedly about his relationship with Piggy, in particular the way that she always hit him. She confessed to Kermit that her daddy hit her and her mommy too.

“She was actually more worried about Kermit than she was about herself,” Henson said in a later interview, clearly still choked up by the event. “I seriously began to rethink the ‘Piggy karate-chops Kermit’ schtick after that.”

Henson brought in child psychologists and therapists, “friends of his and Kermit’s,” to talk to them both. Little by little, the story came out. It had been a long history of abuse. Her father József was an angry alcoholic who verbally threatened and physically abused her mother Maria and her. He had been arrested three times for driving while drunk and had repeatedly assaulted his wife and daughter and threatened suicide should his wife ever leave him. Maria was always on the verge of going to the police, but always hesitated[1].

One day when Judith’s mother Maria was on set (József was in prison for driving drunk at the time), producer Lisa Henson struck up a conversation. The conversations would continue over the course of the shoot. Maria eventually confessed to her that her husband was “drinking again” and was physically and verbally abusive to her and Judith. Lisa eventually convinced Maria to move into a room at the Villa Romana Hotel in Disneyland, which had 24-hour security and was “behind the gate”.

The security was needed. József would be arrested by security in late 1987 while attempting to break into the hotel. He had a pistol on him. Disney pressed full charges and, with his extensive arrest record, he was sent away to Folsom Prison for several years following a conviction on assault, assaulting a minor, trespassing, and breaking and entering with the intent to commit a felony.

Still, life wouldn’t be easy for Judith Barsi, who suffered serious post traumatic distress for years to come[2]. Jim Henson fought the Disney board of directors to put more money into a fund designed to assist child actors on the set of Disney productions, providing far beyond what the laws mandated. When the board hesitated, he offered to fund it out of pocket, which embarrassed the board so much with the potential negative press (“Disney CCO self-funds child actors’ care and education in the face of greedy board’) that they relented. As the Children’s Television Workshop had with Sesame Street, Henson’s designated agents established a core of child psychology and educational experts to assist underage actors. He brushed off complaints like “we’re not an educational company” by retorting, “Then we’re in the wrong line of work.”

“It was a basic moral responsibility to him,” said Roy E. Disney. “If we made money off of children, then we had a moral and ethical obligation to be ‘as positive of an influence on their lives as we could be.’ We had tutors and physical therapists to keep them on track educationally and physically, we had councilors and nurses on hand for their physical and mental health. We had nutritionists to assist catering. We even had resources and training available for the crew. And I personally saw Jim fire a producer on the spot when he caught him buttering up a kid actor with false flattery and playing to their ego behind their parents’ back. That was standard business practice in Hollywood at the time, but not for Jim and not for Disney.”

Over time, Disney child actors started to show significantly lower rates of mental, emotional, and legal troubles when they reached adulthood compared to other studios. There were significantly fewer cases of petty crime, substance abuse, and embarrassing tabloid photos.

“I swore to the board that I wouldn’t rest until not a single headline said ‘former Disney child star arrested,’ or ‘former Disney child actor found dead from overdose,’” said Jim Henson in an interview with Larry King[3]. “The so-called ‘Child Actor Syndrome’ was going to be other studios’ problem, not ours. I was and I still am very adamant about that.”

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[1] She ultimately went to the police in December of 1986 in our timeline, but decided not to press charges when the Police were unable to find signs of physical abuse.

[2] I generally try to keep a light and hopeful tone in this timeline. My characters occasionally joke about trauma and Xanax and the like, but seriously, mental health should be taken as seriously as physical health. There’s no shame in taking SSRIs or other psychotherapeutics. I’ve taken them myself and I feel no shame in admitting that. No different than taking aspirin when you have a headache, in my opinion. Health is health; fuck stigmas, and fuck you if you help propagate them. If you’re having a hard time mentally or emotionally, consult with your primary care doctor, or any doctor, for that matter. Even your dentist or optometrist. They can refer you to someone who can help. In an emotional emergency, call a crisis hotline. Don’t try to go it alone. You wouldn’t try to treat a broken leg by yourself, would you? Furthermore, if you’re in an abusive relationship then there’s help to be had. A variety of abuse hotlines are available in whatever country that you’re in. Search engines will find you the closest one to you. If you know someone suffering abuse, talk to a professional on how you can help them help themselves. This isn’t some damned obligatory PSA, I’d dead serious here. Read what actually happened to Judith Barsi in real life here. It ain’t pretty, and it was, sadly, completely preventable. Don’t wait for things to “get better on their own”, because they won’t. I love you. Please take care of yourself.

[3] Requiem in pace to Larry King, who died just a few days ago from complications of COVID-19. Another light lost to this horrible pandemic.

 

[Geekhis Khan]

The New James Bond Speaks
Interview with Sam Neill from People Magazine, July 1987

He has a license to kill, a duty to Queen and Country, and an ultra-top-secret clearance, but this week James Bond – or actor Sam Neill[1] who plays him in The Living Daylights – sat down with People to talk about the film, which promises to “return James Bond to the original vision of Ian Fleming.” It was a decision not without controversy, particularly for many fans of his predecessor Roger Moore, who had performed the iconic role for over a decade. They were incensed by the replacement, which occurred following the underperformance of A View to a Kill in 1985.

(Image source “express.co.uk”)

People Magazine: Mr. Neill, welcome, or should I say “Mr. Bond?”

Sam Neill: (laughs) Sam is fine.

PM: Martini? Shaken, not stirred?[2]

SN: (laughs) The tea will be fine, thank you.

PM: What is it like to play such an iconic role? Do you feel the weight of the character?

SN: Well, certainly. James Bond is, as you say, iconic, so there are loads of expectations placed upon you. You know that the fans will be watching every move, expression and mannerism. And as an actor you have to make a critical decision on how much of the previous portrayals you want to incorporate into your portrayal, and how much you want to make your own.

PM: It sounds like a balancing act.

SN: Oh, certainly. I took a lot of inspiration from Mr. Connery, of course, but I also spent a good deal of time reading the original novels and trying to discover the character that Ian Fleming created.

PM: And what did you discover about the character?

SN: Well, there was an internal vulnerability to him that was generally lost in film and a reluctance to keep doing these dangerous, dehumanizing missions. He buries himself in hedonistic activities as a defensive measure. Still, though, the pressure manifested in the desire to always be and look in control, no matter how out of control the situation was. And credit to director John Glen and Mr. Broccoli for allowing me the creative freedom to explore these angles.

PM: The plot of The Living Daylights is full of twists and turns[3] as Bond helps a KGB officer defect to the west, but he quickly finds that the story goes far deeper than that, with SMERSH assassins, gun runners, drug runners, possibly-rogue KGB agents, double crosses, heroic Afghan Mujahideen fighters[4], and a cello-playing love interest played by the gorgeous Maryam d’Abo. We won’t reveal the details here, but suffice it to say it’s got lots of action, quips, and the usual James Bond fun, but the story is notably darker and more ambiguous than the last few features in the series.

SN: Yes, the production team made a deliberate attempt to play down the humor and some might say “camp” of the last few instalments, but we didn’t want to skimp on the fun, of course. Maryam is delightful and we have a great cast with Jeroen Krabbé playing General [Georgi] Koskov, Joe Don Baker playing arms dealer Brad Whitaker, John Rhys-Davies as General [Leonid] Pushkin, Art Malik as Kamran Shah, and finally Dolph Lundgren[5] as [KGB assassin] Necross.

PM: And what was it like going toe-to-toe with Mr. Lundgren?

SN: (laughs) It’s pretty intimidating, frankly. He’s absolutely huge! A giant of a man. There are no camera tricks or lifts in his shoes, either. I remember hearing about how he nearly killed [Sylvester] Stallone when making Rocky IV and it was hard to put that out of my head during the fight scenes. With that said, he’s honestly a delightful man and incredibly intelligent. Did you know that he speaks six languages and has a degree in chemical engineering?

PM: We did not.

SN: It’s true. A wonderful man to talk to or watch a game of footie with…soccer to your American readers.

PM: And you had quite the workout to get in shape for the role, we hear.

SN: “Workout” is putting it mildly. Boot Camp comes to mind! There was weight training, calisthenics, gymnastics, and even obstacle courses. After a few intensive weeks I began to feel like James Bond in real life. Thankfully Dolph was there to keep me humble and grounded. One day after I’d been so proud of myself for reaching a new max in the bench press, up comes Dolph, who uses my bench-press weights to do curls! (laughs)

PM: By the time this interview sees print the film should be in theaters. Is there anything that you’d like your viewers to think about when they watch it?

SN: I’d say “give us a chance.” (laughs) It’s always hard to be the new face of an old, familiar character. I’ve spoken to both Roger Moore and George Lazenby and they assured me that there will always be fans who can’t let go of “the other guy”. This isn’t just about me, either, as we were left with little choice but to retire the memorable recurring antagonist General Gogol since [his actor] Walter Gotell had to retire for health reasons. Still, between John [Rhys-Davies] and Dolph [Lundgren] there are good villains aplenty. And the action scenes are top notch and were a blast to film.

PM: Now, other actors were in the running to play Bond. Our sources cite names like Pierce Brosnan of Remington Steele fame, Timothy Dalton, and Bryan Brown.

SN: Yes, and to be honest I do not believe that I was Cubby’s – Albert Broccoli’s – first choice. In fact, I dare say that if Pierce had been able to get out of his Remington Steele obligations, then he’d be the one sitting across from you today!

PM: But you convinced him?

SN: Well, (laughs) let’s say that Dana and Barbara [Broccoli] convinced him.

PM: As mentioned before, the film veers into some darker and more ambiguous territory than some of its predecessors, highlighting the gray areas with the actions of both the East and the West in the ongoing Cold War. To what do you credit this shift in tone?

SN: Well, these things go in cycles. I have nothing but respect for Mr. Moore, he is a delightful chap. The tone of the movies during his run was notably more humorous than that of Mr. Connery’s by design, as the audience’s expectations were shifting. Now the pendulum is swinging back to the grittier side of things. Perhaps the bloke that replaces me will be given a more comedic script to work with.

PM: And do you expect to stay on as Bond?

SN: If Cubby and the audiences let me, then yes. (laughs) I can’t say for sure how long I will portray the character. I have little desire to stay on as long as Roger [Moore], but perhaps they’ll give me a little bit more time than George [Lazenby].

PM: Thank you for your time, Mr. Sam Neill.

SN: The pleasure was mine!

Not quite this…

Sam Neill stars as Secret Agent 007, James Bond, in the new United Artists release The Living Daylights, in theaters across the nation today!

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[1] You asked for Bond, you get Bond! And it’s “Dr. Alan Grant”! Neill auditioned in our timeline and was a favorite of director John Glen and Dana & Barbara Broccoli. Albert Broccoli was not able to be convinced in our timeline, however. Here is his screen test:

[2] For the record, shaken Martinis are an abomination good only for bruised booze and watered-down drinks (sorry, Mr. Bond). Stir briskly with a bar spoon for a count of 50 over cracked ice and strain. Yes, 50…I was skeptical when I heard it too, but tried it anyway. Try it yourself and thank me later. Also, to do a true per-the-book Bond cocktail you want to mix equal parts gin and vodka with a splash of lillet blanc (not Vermouth), “shaken” per the book, but I recommend stirred as per the previous instructions.

[3] The film will largely follow the beats of the film of the same name from our timeline, though Neill’s take will be compared somewhat favorably to Sean Connery, unlike Dalton, who got mixed reviews from critics and fans alike at the time for his dark and conflicted portrayal in our timeline (he was arguably way ahead of his time!). The film will, like the Dalton version, be a somewhat darker and less humorous take on the character and will ultimately perform on par with the version from our timeline, making just under $200 million worldwide. Neill will be a somewhat controversial pick with some fans considering him a “second rate Connery” while others are just happy with the return to Connery’s less campy take on the character after Moore. Moore fans, of course, treated the casting as a betrayal.

[4] Oh, 1980s, you and your temporal irony!

[5] Lundgren is “Reprising” his brief cameo from A View to a Kill (he was on set visiting his then-girlfriend Grace Jones and stood in for a sick actor. Here a certain lead role to be revealed soon did not go to him, so he took this job instead. He will be so popular in this role (most called him the only memorable villain) that he’ll become a recurring franchise villain reminiscent of Jaws from the ‘70s films (in this film he survives his “fatal fall” and most certainly does not plead for his life but falls to his apparent death “coldly staring at Bond”). There is no “killer Walkman”, just cold, unceasing murder. His character Necross is frequently compared to The Terminator for his cold, merciless inevitability. In our timeline the role went to Andreas Wisniewski.

 

[Geekhis Khan]

Chapter 5: Hurray for Hollywood
Excerpt from All You Need is a Chin: Confessions of a B-Movie Actor by Bruce Campbell

When Paramount offered Sam [Raimi] a chance to direct Friday the 13th 5 I warned him not to do it. “Sam,” I said, “this script is crap. It doesn’t even have Jason in it. And the guy who’s dressing up as Jason is a paramedic that shows up for one scene and just happens to be the father of the guy who got killed by another inmate. I’ve seen better twists on a pretzel.”

But Sam was intent on taking it up. “Trust me, we’ll rewrite it, it’ll be great!”

He was right. He redefined a freaking genre. My bad.

Bruce Campbell (L) and Sam Raimi (R) on the set (Image source “cinemablend.com”)

Besides, it got me a job. I played Eddie. Eddie was an idiot. He made Ash look like a brain surgeon. And I’m not sure what Sam enjoyed more: killing me in the most brutal way possible or my obvious discomfort in doing the obligatory gratuitous sex scene. Debi Sue Voorhees (talk about an appropriate name!) who was playing Tina, lost patience with me. “Just chill out and grab my boobs, Bruce.”

Um, yes ma’am!

Anyway, we got through it, and sure enough, Sam was right, it was a hit. Great, I though, now Sam’s going to be impossible to put up with. Ted [Raimi] and I vowed to fill in for that guy that stands next to the Roman Emperor chanting “Remember thou art mortal.”

As the money rolled in from Friday the 13th 5, so did the studio offers. Paramount wanted Sam to do Friday the 13th 6. Dino DeLaurentis approached him about doing a movie based on the Stephen King story Thinner[1]. Sam discussed directing Hellraiser with Clive Barker and a new Halloween with John Carpenter. But Sam didn’t want to be typecast as a horror guy, like had happened to Wes Craven, who wanted to do a romance movie but was never going to get that opportunity. I suggested that we could do Relentless, the screenplay that Ethan and Joel Coen wrote[2]. It was fantastic, like Hitchcock level good. But Sam ultimately jumped on a different Stephen King story offered to him by George Linder and Tim Zinneman.

It became The Running Man. Maybe you heard of it.

This, but directed by Sam Raimi

And if you haven’t heard of it, well, this is one weird flick. It’s set in the future year of 2019 where the US is ruled by a despotic president, free speech is non-existent, and fictional works have been censored into mediocrity[3]. As such, television, whose role is to distract the people like the colosseum in Ancient Rome, is dominated by shows of real people experiencing real things. And “The Running Man” is the most popular show of all, where convicted criminals are chased and executed by “stalkers” in a cross between American Gladiator and The Most Dangerous Game.

Sam promised that he’d get me the lead role as Ben Richards. He was lying through his teeth and I knew it. The studio first wanted Christopher Reeves and then Arnold Schwarzenegger, and they were going to get him. Instead, I got to play one of the first prisoners killed on screen in the Running Man show, beheaded by Professor Subzero. I still have the prop of my severed head. It has a very surprised look on its face.

“I have vanquished Bruce Campbell!” (Image source “moviestillsdb.com”)

In addition to Arnold, the studio brought in all kinds of these big, muscle-bound pro athletes and wrestlers like Jesse Ventura and Joe Brown. I felt tiny by comparison, though ironically, I’m only an inch shorter than Arnold. Seeing Conan, you’d think he was seven feet tall. Richard Dawson, the Family Feud guy, played the villain Damon Killian who hosted the killer game show, so really, he played an evil version of himself. I told him he needed to grow a goatee like Evil Spock.

“Name something that causes disembowelment in runners” (Image source “basementrejects.com”)

Sam, who was more than a little pissed that the studio was micromanaging the casting, had just about as much fun putting those muscle-bound manly men through hell as he did putting me through hell.

And yea, I like to accentuate the negative in my writing and interviews (it’s funnier that way), but the truth is that I had a blast filming The Running Man. The “guys”, as we liked to call these men who could have broken us in half without breaking a sweat, were fun to work with and a real joy on the set. Arnold has a great sense of humor and was a teddy bear with the crew’s kids. I did some Fake Shemping here and there and took a few minor falls for some of the extras when the stunt men were on break. Jesse Ventura complimented me on my pratfalls, which is high praise from a pro wrestler. Stunt men Peter Kent and Tony Brubaker even tried to recruit me into the field, but after hearing the stunt people talk about all of their surgeries and who had what kind of metal where in their bodies, I figured my talents were better applied in straight-up acting.

Writer Steven E. de Souza wanted the dystopian film to be a holocaust allegory, and Sam was down with that, even if the studio was pushing him to make it a dumb action flick. Sam had to walk the line between the studio and the film he and Steve wanted to make. So, Steve added some cheesy one-liners for Arnold, but left in the prison camps and gestapo stand-ins. Sam did his over-the-top action scenes (raised chainsaws and flying heads and all that) and that seemed to satisfy the suits.

You know that Raimi would kill to direct this scene (Image source “projectionboothpodcast.com”)

Despite the studio interference, the shoot went well. They say that horror directors make the best action directors because they know how and when to build suspense before a big action set piece and can handle effects-direction and action-direction, which isn’t as easy as you’d think. Whatever the case, Sam is generally agreed to have done a great job with The Running Man (he got a Nebula nomination). The critics liked it, calling it a “smart” action film. They praised the action direction, cinematography, and the dramatic themes. It made over forty-eight million against a twenty-five-million-dollar budget (Sam’s biggest budget film yet), so a good return, though not a blockbuster. VHS sales were even better. Sam still thinks it would have done even better if the studio let him have the final cut.

So, yea, The Running Man did great, but Sam’s real dream was to do a superhero movie. He tried to get the rights to Batman, but Warner Brothers had them. He wrote a treatment for a movie called “The Darkman” as a fallback. But in the end, the back-to-back successes of Friday the 13th 5 and The Running Man brought him enough clout that Warner Bros offered him the director’s chair for Batman anyway, set to go into production the very next year.

Once again, he promised me the lead role. “I don’t even need an actor,” he said. “Just a chin.”

Thanks for the vote of confidence, Sam.

But the studio would want someone like Stallone, I was sure.

In the end Sam got to live out his childhood dream of directing Batman and I ultimately did get to play Batman in his film, and in a couple of different ways.

Well, sort of. I’ll explain later.

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[1] This happened in our timeline as well.

[2] He directed this for Embassy Pictutres in 1986 in our timeline. It suffered an infamously troubled production and became the flop Crimewave.

[3] No comments, please. Avoid the Ban-hammer.

 

[Geekhis Khan]

Can Negatives Ever Sum to a Positive?
Post from Cinema Surrealismé Netlog, by Darque Tydd, April 4th, 2007

Drug culture films tend to come in one of two varieties: “drugs are bad” or “drugs are amazing!” Much more infrequent is the film that says “drugs are.” One such film is 1987’s Less than Zero based on the debut novel by Bret Easton Ellis[1], executive produced by Terry Gilliam and directed by David Lynch for Hyperion Pictures.

Not exactly this and executive produced by Terry Gilliam and directed by David Lynch

Less than Zero was Ellis’s bestselling debut novel released in 1985 about the dark, twisting subculture of drugs, sex, use, and abuse among the privileged youth in LA in the 1980s. It doesn’t try to glorify the lifestyle. It doesn’t try to demonize it. It shows it for what it is. It’s lead character and narrator, a cynical, Holden Caulfield type named Clay, simply sees this world as a symptom of the inherent ugliness of all life even as it sucks him deeper into its dark womb. After all, it seems to ask, is the man who prostitutes himself for heroin money really any more despicable than the man who sells out to a studio for fame and wealth or even the man who sells out to a corporate cubicle life for a ranch house in suburbia?

Producer Marvin Worth optioned the book for $7,500 even before it was released to the public. After considering various studios[2], he went to Bernie Brillstein at Hyperion Pictures in late 1985 after being duly impressed by The Ballad of Edward Ford, released earlier that summer. He wanted Gene Wilder to direct. But Wilder was pursuing his passion/vanity project Haunted Honeymoon with his wife Gilda Radner and Brillstein was busy with a hundred projects, so Worth was passed to Diana Birkenfield. Birkenfield, who’d produced The Muppet Show, was hardly Worth’s first choice, but her acerbic wit and unflinching ability to discuss the highly controversial subject matter of the book quickly won him over.

While Worth had requested Wilder, Birkenfield had a different director in mind: Terry Gilliam. Gilliam’s twisted vision was, she felt, ideal for the drug-fueled, misanthropic story. But Gilliam had just committed to filming Who Framed Roger Rabbit. But Terry agreed to help produce, eventually earning an executive producer credit, and had a different name in mind to direct: David Lynch.

Lynch with frequent collaborator Isabella Rossellini c1986 (Image source “mrquick.net”)

Lynch was a controversial choice with Studio Head Tom Wilhite. Lynch’s latest picture had been the big budget Science Fiction flop Dune. While visually stunning, the film’s long, moody cinematography and highly cerebral plot alienated your average suburban mundane, who couldn’t hope to grasp its deeper philosophical underpinnings. Lynch’s current film was the “bizarre and depraved” Blue Velvet, a low budget production for DeLaurentis Pictures. But Gilliam was insistent that Lynch was the right choice. He arranged a rough-cut screening of Blue Velvet for Birkenfield, Worth, and writer Bret Ellis. The film’s bizarre and twisted tone made Wilhite nervous, but Birkenfield felt that it “meshed well” with the source material. Birkenfield, Worth, and Ellis all three tentatively supported Lynch.

Similar in tone to this…

But Lynch came with his own stipulations: in exchange for doing Less than Zero, a film that he was definitely interested in doing, he wanted Hyperion to greenlight his passion project Ronnie Rocket. Wilhite agreed to option the film, but would put it into turnaround if Less than Zero flopped. Lynch reluctantly agreed to the terms and began pre-production on Less than Zero within a month of completing principal photography on Blue Velvet. Blue Velvet would screen just as Less than Zero entered into principal photography itself, and just in time to throw the production into chaos. On the financial front, Blue Velvet turned only an $8.6 million North American profit against its $6 million budget. The film also attracted major controversy. On one hand, people in LA were lining up around the block to see it. It went from a limited release to a wide release. On the other hand, people were walking out en masse, and demanding refunds. The sheer audacity of the surrealisté narrative and portrayal of “perverse lifestyles” was too much for your average mundane’s fragile heart to bear. The fact that Less than Zero bore very similar themes and subject matter to Blue Velvet hung like an albatross over the production, and Wilhite came close to killing the production. Only Birkenfield reminding Wilhite about the smash success of Edward Ford despite similar controversial subject matter saved the project.

Kyle MacLachlan c1986. This could so be a scene from the film… (Image source “pinterest.com”)

Lynch was given a modest $7.5 million budget with the expectation that most of the filming would be on studio lots or local location shoots around the LA Basin. He brought in his “regulars” Kyle MacLachlan as the lead, Clay, and Isabella Rossellini as Blair, the love interest. On the suggestion of producers Birkenfield and Worth, they brought in talented young character actor Robert Downey, Jr., as the friend Julian Wells, who has become a heroin addict and a prostitute. Laura Dern played Kim, Jack Nance played the increasingly absurdist friend Trent Burroughs, and James Spader played the shockingly immoral fedora-wearing drug dealer Rip Millar. The film also introduced Michael J. Anderson as Julian’s abusive pimp, Finn Delaney.

“Pimpin’ ain’t easy…”

The film more or less follows the plot and dialog of the original novel, with Clay’s increasingly misanthropic narration provided via noir-tinged voiceover. The film follows many of the novel’s scenes beat-for-beat. And yet this simple description bellies the deliberately disjointed and increasingly non-linear flow of the piece, as Clay’s plunge into the drugs and depravity of the LA youth scene starts to warp his sense of reality. By the end of the film, Clay’s narration and perceptions are increasingly shown to be unreliable. Is Finn really a little person? Has the LA music scene really adopted a taste for smokey jazz? Are the rich of LA really engaging in cannibalism, or just rare steak? Was that a plate of linguini, or a plate of writhing worms?

On the music front, the very bands who performed in the film, and what they performed and when, helped to tell the story in their own way. It began with then-underground musicians the Red Hot Chili Peppers playing their usual funk-fueled fare, then progressed to the absurdist licks of Primus, and then progressed to Thelonious Monster’s more Bebop-inspired work, before ending in smokey jazz quartets, often performed by Thelonious Monster or Primus members themselves, now increasingly dressed in midcentury inspired suits and hats. Primus front man and lead bass Les Claypool jokingly called it “Dada Noir”.

The rough cut caused outrage in the halls of Hyperion, by this point now called MGM Studios after Disney participated in the jackal-like devouring of the Golden Age studio in 1986. Gilliam gave the film a standing ovation. Worth and Birkenfield sat in stunned silence. “Well, that was something!” said CCO Jim Henson wryly. Tom Wilhite exclaimed “what kind of nonsense is this?” Hyperion VP Bernie Brillstein said, simply, “well, that’s LA for ya’.” Ellis later told an interviewer “I wasn’t sure whether Lynch had elevated my story or ruined it…or possibly both.” But Gilliam had, very cunningly, let Lynch have final edit privileges as part of the contract he negotiated as long as he stayed on schedule and within budget. And Lynch had indeed produced everything on-schedule and under budget, with a final production cost of $6.9 million. Besides, the release had already been announced and industry analysts were openly discussing what the man behind Eraserhead and Blue Velvet would do with the controversial bestseller.

Despite the studio discomfort, Hyperion released Less than Zero in November of 1987 with an R rating. Driven by the media buzz and post-Blue Velvet curiosity to see “how crazy it could be,” the film opened at number 4, drove shock and controversy with its subject matter and surrealisté tone, and remained a slow but steady sleeper, ultimately bringing the bean counters $17 million for their troubles. The cultural gatekeepers were divided. Many loved it, others hated it, most were just trying to figure it out. In a reverse on their opinions for Blue Velvet, Gene Siskel dismissed it as “a lesser follow-up” to the former film that “treads the same path [as Blue Velvet], but in less interesting, more pedestrian ways” while Roger Ebert called it “a haunting and frank look at the moral depravity in elite society that takes the style of Blue Velvet but adds to it that noir-as-a-reflection-of-society substance that was missing from that film.” Less than Zero pulled in Academy and Golden Globe nominations for cinematography, original score, and Best Supporting Actor for Robert Downey, Jr., who won the Golden Globe.

It may come as a shock to my readers that anything as patently bizarre as a David Lynch film would prove as successful as did Less than Zero. Remember that this was Lynch just prior to Salem Falls fame and an America just prior to the ascension of Faith No More and Primus into the national musical collective memory. America had discovered H.R. Giger and was on the verge of discovering Nine Inch Nails, Neil Gaiman, and Tool. And while $17 million was hardly a blockbuster compared to the super hits that Disney and MGM were putting out around the same time, it was respectable enough for Wilhite to reluctantly greenlight Ronnie Rocket.

And that’s where the true madness began.

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[1] Ironic ‘80s drug dealer fedora tip @PNWKing for bringing this to my attention.

[2] In our timeline he partnered with Avnet/Kerner Productions and 20th Century Fox.