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

[Geekhis Khan]

Chapter 11: A Literal Small World…and a Figurative One
Post from the Riding with the Mouse Net-log by animator Terrell Little

We all knew that Mistress Masham’s Repose was going to get renamed. If Basil of Baker Street is too esoteric a name for modern audiences then surely that weird old school title was dead on arrival. We had a pool going for what we expected the ultimate title to be. Many went with the one-word thing, “Lilliputians!” or whatever. Andreas Deja, the main art director, was the only one to take the long-shot bet that the name wouldn’t change. I guessed “Maria’s World” and got close. I forget who ultimately guessed “A Small World,” which was, of course, the title Jim chose for the meta-joke. Could have been worse, I guess.

Original Andreas Deja concept art (source for all images in this post)

A Small World was a bit of a return to the Disney Classic Formula for us after The Black Cauldron’s terror, Elementary’s lack of original songs, and Where the Wild Things Are’s rock & roll stylings. We not only had Deja’s very classic art style as the guiding light, but we had original music by Alan Menken and Howard Ashman, who’d done Little Shop of Horrors. Ron Clements and John Musker took the lead on direction while John and Howard did the production.

It was Alan and Howard’s first animated feature and a bit of a learning curve for them. As it turned out, the whole event would be a huge learning curve for me too, for reasons that I will elaborate on later. In the meantime, I got pulled into animating sequences for Maria’s big “I Want” song “A World of My Own”. It got awards. I’m proud that my animation could accompany it. What you didn’t know about it is that Howard in particular wryly admitted to us all just how much his earlier “Somewhere That’s Green” from Little Shop had influenced it. He and Alan jokingly called it “Somewhere That’s Small” in reference to the similarities[1].

Now, the big challenge for A Small World was that for a kid’s story it was actually pretty deep. Not only was it inspired by Jonathan Swift, it was going for that same kind of satire about colonialism. It all involved Maria, an orphaned heiress in the “care” of two awful caretakers that were conspiring to steal her fortune. And when she discovers a secret world of Lilliputians living on an island called Mistress Masham’s Repose on her family estate, well, that’s where things get crazy and deep.

So, Maria sets out to be the new lord and master of these small people and gets to be a bit of a petty tyrant. See what I mean about the colonialism thing? However, just as she’s learning about the limits and consequences of wielding power, she soon has to face not only her own sense of superiority, but has to stand up for what’s right and protect her newfound world from those who plan to exploit it in far more horrible ways.

Yea, it was a lesson I could get behind!

And yet it was ultimately a lesson that I had to learn myself. You see, well, there’s really no easy way to put this. I came from a strongly socially conservative place down in the Bible Belt, and while you’d think that being Black in Alabama would make you immediately open to seeing the humanity in others no matter what, the sad thing is that I grew up with plenty of prejudices of my own. And people who loved those of the same gender were, well, something that was not an easy thing for me and more than a few others at Disney to just accept. Now, it was foolish of me to think that no one I worked with was anything other than straight-as-an-arrow, but it was even more foolish to assume that they all shared my opinions, even if quite a few of them did.

I started talking with a few other artists who’d been working around Howard Ashman, who was openly gay, which was still controversial back then even in Hollywood. I ain’t proud of what we said and how we acted. I won’t share it here. I’ve done enough damage with those careless words. But Andreas overheard us. He’d never said anything up to that point that made me suspect anything, but when I saw the look on his face, I felt a knot in my stomach that wouldn’t go away. It was the exact same look I’d made a thousand times after overhearing the things some of the white folks I grew up around used to say.

Few people truly understand the bravery it can take just to be who you are in the face of a world that doesn’t value people like you. All my life I’d been an open opponent to such hate, and yet there I was failing to live up to my own standards. I worked hard to make amends, not just to Andreas, but in general. It wasn’t easy. You can’t unsay what was said and you don’t just shed twenty years of built-in bias overnight. But little by little I confronted and started to banish my own demons.

Who’s really the small person, the one who fails to meet others’ expectations on who to be and how to live, or the one who expects their own expectations to be universally met? If there’s one big lesson from Mistress Masham/A Small World that I want everyone to remember, it’s that the bravest, strongest, and indeed biggest people out there are sometimes the ones that everyone else looks down on.

When I was ultimately asked to help design the movie poster, this was the lesson I took to heart. The image would not be from Maria’s perspective looking down on the Lilliputians, but from the perspective of the Lilliputians looking out at the great big glasses-framed eyes of Maria, in turn looking down on them through the hole in the wall.

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[1] A similar thing happened in our timeline with “Part of Your World”, which Ashman jokingly called “Somewhere That’s Dry.”

 

[Geekhis Khan]

Part IV: Where One Show Had Gone Before
Excerpt from Star Trek: An Insider’s Guide by Tek No Babel

Star Trek: The Next Generation launched on PFN to great excitement in September of 1987. It was the triumphant return of Star Trek to television and the culmination of two decades of attempts to relaunch the franchise, from the Animated Series to Phase II to the film series. It was also the first major change in cast and setting for the classic franchise, and the first time someone other than Kirk, Spock, and McCoy would lead the audience to where no man…or no one…had gone before.

(Image source “gifer.com”)

And “TNG” as the fans came to call it had a lot to offer audiences: near cinema quality special effects and futuristic (for the time) sets, props, and ship designs, with an updated social consciousness, particularly in the portrayal of women, which was rather outdated in the original series even by the standards of its time. The set and technology designs still largely hold up today and don’t seem quite as dated as the original 1960s look, though they do frequently betray their late ‘80s/early ‘90s origins. The sleek Enterprise D, for example, is as iconic of a starship as the original while still looking timeless.

But it was the now-iconic characters that held the show together: stoic, stalwart Captain Jean-Luc Picard, ambitious, adventurous Commander William Riker, flirtatious but wickedly clever and intelligent Dr. Beverly Crusher, curious Data, argumentative Worf, tough Tasha Yar, and the reliable Geordi La Forge. And who can forget the villains? The mischievous Q. The manipulative Ferengi. The plotting Romulans. The machine-like Borg. To look at it today it’s hard to imagine TNG as anything but a born classic. But behind the scenes, particularly in the beginning, disagreements and internal fighting nearly killed the now classic show in the cradle.

The mid-eighties were an odd time for Star Trek, after all. Star Trek Phase II had been abandoned after years of development hell, but the film franchise was going strong, though it was getting increasingly bizarre in the eyes of some fans. After all, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home had featured “Space Whales”, time travel, and Eddie Murphy as a nerdy biologist. From the standpoint of Paramount Executives, it was all a huge success, though. The franchise still maintained a strong and loyal fan base after 20 years and syndicated Star Trek episodes were an ongoing source of profits. Similarly, the films were highly successful. It all led to a consistent 30-40% return on investment for the studio.

With Trek a certified cash cow, Paramount executive Frank Mancuso Sr. was once again contemplating a new Trek series, both for the potential profits from the show itself and as a chance to draw in new fans. Furthermore, with the cost of the films growing with each iteration (William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, and Eddie Murphy had all demanded huge salaries to star in Star Trek IV), the chance to continue the franchise with newer (and presumably cheaper) actors was appealing to Mancuso. He assigned the task of building a new series to original Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, who in turn recruited Rick Berman.

Roddenberry jumped into the new series with enthusiasm and was contemplating some truly revolutionary changes. At one point he considered eliminating starships all together, where the crew presumably “might travel by some [other] means.” However, the iconic nature of the USS Enterprise led to a more evolutionary follow up and the development of the Enterprise D. He contemplated having the series set shortly after the films with the original crew as “elder statesmen” before deciding to have it set a century in the future.

But one change mandated by Roddenberry was despised by the writers (and, reportedly, by Berman as well): the crew of the new Enterprise were forbidden from arguing or disagreeing. Influenced by the linear evolutionary humanism of his friend Isaac Asimov, Roddenberry felt that the humans of a century in Star Trek’s future would have long ago evolved beyond interpersonal conflict. And while this might ring well from a philosophical standpoint, from a dramatic standpoint it was asking the writers to figuratively tie one hand behind their back. Classic Star Trek scribes like D. C. Fontana, Bob Justman, Eddie Milkis and David Gerrold fought back against the “no conflict” mandate, and Rick Berman was caught up in the middle.

“Conflict is drama,” said D. C. Fontana. “Without interpersonal conflict you inevitably limit your possibilities. All drama will have to come from the outside, and as a writer or even a viewer that can quickly get frustrating. There’s only so many times you can have the crew battle a giant glowing thing from space and make it interesting.”

“Gene didn’t want humans,” said Gerrold, “He wanted angel-robots.”

“I had no idea what to do,” said Berman in a later interview. “On one hand it was Gene’s show. On the other hand, the writers were right. One of the driving factors in the original Star Trek was the acrimonious relationships between its crew members, in particular Spock and McCoy. D. C. in particular wanted to turn the charismatic Commander Riker into a foil for the dour Captain Picard and build up a Spock/McCoy relationship between the choleric Worf and the melancholic Data. By Gene’s mandate none of this was possible.”

“It was actually Eddie Murphy who broke the stalemate,” said Justman. “He’d swung by to hang out with the crew one day, who he’d befriended while working on Trek IV, and injected himself into the debate. ‘D. C.’s right, Gene,’ he said. ‘Besides, disagreement doesn’t mean everybody’s fighting and hating on one another. You can show them having strong differences of opinion and when they still work together as one…that’s powerful stuff.’”

Eventually a compromise was made where the crew could have disagreements, even strong ones, but come together as a team to execute the plans. Picard could find Riker’s genteel cockiness frustrating, but still value him as a team member. Worf could lose his patience with the well-meaning but naïve Data. Feelings could be hurt, but enlightened respect would win out every day. And Councilor Troi would have her work cut out for her trying to sort through it all.

And yet, limits remained. Disagreements were permitted. Flat out fights, arguments, raised voices, and lingering angst were not. “You could have the crew disagree as long as there was ‘no acrimony or hurt feelings,’” said Fontana. Furthermore, Roddenberry’s micromanagement of the production didn’t end with the conflict moratorium. “Sometimes he completely rewrote entire scripts,” recalled Justman. By the end of Season 1, writer turnover was so bad that Roddenberry was “kicked upstairs” to an Executive Producer billet and all but blocked from day-to-day operations.

“We all loved Gene, of course,” said Fontana, “but at some point, you have to be allowed to just do your job.”

Casting also proved a thorny issue. Roddenberry wanted the Kirk-like William Riker[1] to be the Captain, but Paramount, afraid that audiences wouldn’t connect to an “ersatz Kirk”, was pushing for the dour, by-the-book Jean-Luc Picard. The studio, who held the purse strings, won out. But casting the role proved a point of contention as well. British actor Patrick Stewart was strongly considered, but Roddenberry reportedly exercised his “creator’s veto” on Stewart, reportedly due to the actor’s baldness. They ultimately settled on Belgian actor Patrick Bauchau[2], who had a long and distinguished career beginning with the French New Wave, but in the United States he was best known for playing the villainous Scarpine in the James Bond film A View to a Kill. Bauchau gave the role a “Gallic gravitas” in the words of Trekkin’ Magazine and was well accepted by the fandom. Today he is widely considered one of the “top Captains” if not the top Captain.

Patrick Bauchau as Captain Jean Luc Picard (Image by @nick_crenshaw82)

For the First Officer Commander William Riker, American character actor Jonathan Frakes was chosen. His self-assured charisma and aggressive, sanguine nature offered a great foil for Bauchau’s cold stoicism as well as a counter to the more phlegmatic and empathetic Councilor Deanna Troi (Denise Crosby[3]), an empathic “Betazoid”. The role of the caring but coquettish Dr. Beverly Crusher went to Jenny Agutter after considering Gates McFadden, and the role of her child prodigy daughter Leslie[4] went to Samantha Smith of The Littlest Diplomat fame. Over time the writers took advantage of Agutter’s flirtatious nature and hinted at a possible love triangle between Dr. Crusher, Captain Picard, and Commander Riker, typically with her pursuing the standoffish Picard and Riker pursuing her. Slash writers went nuts.

Jenny Agutter and Samantha Smith c1986 (Image sources “themoviedb.org” and “youtube.com”)

The crew was rounded out with Michael Dorn as the argumentative Klingon navigator Worf, Robert Englund of Freddy Krueger fame as the naïve and curious but emotionless android Data[5], LeVar Burton of Reading Rainbow and Roots fame as the blind helmsman-turned-engineer Geordi La Forge (baseball player Reggie Jackson was reportedly considered), and Rosalind Chao as the tough-as-nails security officer Tasha Yar[6].

Rosalind Chao c1986 (Image source “aveleyman.com”)

The crew gelled well, but the early writing is largely considered stilted and overly philosophical and the first season suffered for it. Roddenberry continued to hold a tight rein on production, overly careful of his utopian vision. Writers left and even many of the cast were starting to lose faith. Crosby in particular found her character of Deanna Troi to be shallow and melodramatic and constantly pushed to make her more of a serious professional therapist[7]. She also reportedly hated the lycra mini-dress that she had to wear. By the end of the season, she had enough and announced that she was quitting the show. Her character was unceremoniously killed off by an alien anomaly. She would be replaced in the role of “ship’s heart” and “shoulder to cry on” in season 2 by the ancient and mysterious Guinan (Whoopi Goldberg). Deanna Troi’s mother Lwaxana Troi (Majel Barrett), who first appeared midway through season 1, would remain a recurring character due to the comic relief that she provided, particularly in her romantic pursuit of the disinterested Picard, though her later appearances always came with a bittersweet ring since Deanna’s death hung over each episode in which she appeared.

By season 2 Roddenberry was removed from direct control of the show in favor of Maurice Hurley (later replaced by Michael Pillar) and the writers were given room to breathe. Jonathan Frakes grew a beard in what fans would later note as the symbolic “maturity” that the season had achieved and he, Bauchau, and Agutter became the show’s “power trio” for much of seasons 2-3. Worf and Data were repeatedly thrown together as a comedic duo with Yar thrown into the mix on occasion to stir things up (the writers would eventually pair Worf and Yar as a couple with Yar being the first human woman “tough enough to handle a Klingon man”). Georgi took over in engineering and grew to be a fan favorite as a man ever in futile search of love, much as Data was ever in search of humanity and Worf ever in search of his Klingon-ness.

Smith’s Leslie Crusher, meanwhile, initially ran into a wall of fan hate for being “too perfect”. Early writers relied too much on “Leslie ex machina” to overcome the Threat of the Week and soon Smith herself was pushing for changes, eventually gaining a humanizing disobedient streak and a foil in the form of an insufferable young Vulcan named T’lon (Lukas Haas) that made her look likeable by comparison. Unexpectedly for the writers and producers, T’Lon’s coldness and unintentional cruelty soon made him a fan favorite[8]. By the end of the third season, Leslie had shed much of the fan hatred as she and T’lon went through character growth and emerged as budding young Federation cadets.

Lukas Haas in 1988 (Image source “IMDB.com”)

Leslie’s young actress Samantha Smith, meanwhile, gained attention of a different type when an obsessive fan named Robert John Bardo was arrested while attempting to break onto the set to see her in 1991. He was in possession of a handgun and was enraged about a scene where she kissed a young Star Fleet officer played by Alfonso Ribeiro, with an ongoing relationship suggested. Bardo was ultimately committed for schizophrenia where he continues to receive medical treatment and counselling[9].

Your typical episode in those early seasons was stand-alone, with the crew travelling to a new planet, encountering a new threat or obstacle, typically in the form of an alien anomaly or plot by the Romulans, Ferengi, or Borg, and solving the problem through clever use of technology and inspiration[10]. The rascally Q would make occasional appearances to mix things up, and was responsible for humanity’s “early” encountering of the Borg, who would grow in threat and menace as the series progressed, culminating in the Season 3 cliffhanger. By comparison, the Ferengi, originally intended as a representation of human mercantile colonialism and intended to be the Federation’s primary external threat, diminished into comic relief in part because of their short statures and in part because of their absurd appearance. Some fans would ultimately dismiss them as “space Jew” stereotypes by the time their new characteristics were cemented, but in general the Ferengi grew to be beloved additions to the Trek universe. With the Klingons now at peace with the Federation, the Ferengi diminished, and the Borg best used in moderation, the Romulans stepped up to become the primary enemies for the Federation.

Romulans, Ferengi, and Borg, oh my! (Image source Wikimedia)

Despite its slow and awkward start, TNG took off with fans, becoming a huge success and gaining an audience beyond the core Trekkie/Trekker fandom by the pivotal season 3. “Kirk vs. Picard” became the new Trek fan debate as Bauchau’s stoic professionalism inevitably got compared to Kirk’s swashbuckling swagger. Dr. Crusher inevitably got measured against Dr. McCoy, who appeared as a very old man in Season 1, and Geordi La Forge compared to Scotty, whom he’d eventually meet thanks to transporter tricks. The Worf-Data comedic pairing would be compared to the Spock-McCoy pairing, though with the stoic one being the emotional one and the loquacious one being the emotionless one in this case. And finally, the tough and masculine Tasha Yar would become a feminist and queer icon and a fan favorite, with writers ultimately giving her a quippy, borderline action star persona, occasionally softened (depending on the writer) with a hidden softer more feminine side. Fans (save for an angry, largely racist minority) ultimately saw her romantic pairing with Worf as natural, even as slash writers continued to pair her or Worf with Data or her with Dr. Crusher, Guinan, or even Leslie.

TNG would spawn follow-on Star Trek series as well as competing science fiction series from both Disney and ABC. Eventually it would spawn its own film series as well. Star Trek: The Next Generation would go on to become a beloved Trek series and is considered by many fans to the “the best”. While individual rankings may vary, it and its characters remain a cornerstone of the Star Trek franchise.

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[1] Cracked Magazine called him “Commander Re-Kirk” for a reason.

[2] Strongly considered for Picard in our timeline too (your intense lobbying campaign has paid off, @nick_crenshaw82, congrats!)

[3] Yes, you read that right! Crosby was originally considered for Troi before they gave that role to Marina Sirtis. Sirtis will still make a good career as a character and voice actor.

[4] Originally supposed to be “Leslie Crusher” in our timeline too. Changed to “Wesley” in our timeline as a not-too-subtle tribute to Eugene Wesley Roddenberry.

[5] Where’s Brent Spiner? Find out soon!

[6] Considered for the role in our timeline. Eventually went on to play Keiko O’Brian.

[7] If she hated playing Tasha you know she’d hate playing Troi.

[8] Think of it like how you’d never really want to meet Jim Parsons’ Sheldon Cooper in real life, but you love to watch him on TV.

[9] In our timeline after Smith was tragically killed in a plane crash returning from the set of Lime Street, Bardo shifted his obsessions to Rebecca Schaeffer and in 1989 murdered her at her home in California in a delusional attempt to “punish” her for becoming “another Hollywood whore” after she performed a sex scene in the risqué Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills. A butterfly of this whole affair is that Schaeffer is never shot and killed in this timeline.

[10] And lots of technobabble. It’s amazing what one can accomplish by repolarizing the phase inverters.

 

[Geekhis Khan]

Five Great ‘80s SITCOMS that you Forgot Existed
From Five Alive! Netsite, posted November 14th, 2017

Ah, those classic ‘80s SITCOMS we all know and love: three cameras, canned laughter, and jokes that straddled the line between Clever and Corny! Shows like Cheers, Night Court, Perfect Strangers, Golden Girls, Production!, Alf, Newhart, The Facts of Life, Full House, Family Ties, The Cosby Show…legendary names and legendary shows. But what about those now-forgotten but once beloved shows? The ones that you may have forgotten that you used to love? Well, here are five of the great forgotten SITCOMS of the late 1980s!

#5 – Growing Pains

Growing Pains (1985-1989) is a show that was beloved by its cast, crew, and fans alike…for about three years. And then scandal after scandal and an increasingly hostile working environment ripped the show apart at the height of its popularity. The show followed father Dr. Jason Seaver (Alan Thicke), wife Maggie (Joanna Kerns), son Mike (Kirk Cameron), daughter Carol (Tracy Gold), and youngest son Ben (Jeremy Miller). In many ways it was your standard DOMCOM and was buoyed by good cast chemistry and the popularity of Cameron with young female audiences. But the fun was not to last. In 1988 actress Tracey Gold had gained some weight over the break. The writers made her weigh a source of constant jokes. Gold developed an eating disorder as a result was rushed to a hospital after passing out on the set in 1989[1]. She got counseling, but on the advice of her doctor quit the show and began the long road to recovery. The writers had the character “join the Peace Corps”. Actor Jeremy Miller started receiving creepy letters from a stalker and became increasingly withdrawn. The event reportedly contributed to his later substance abuse issues[2].

In the late ‘80s actor Kirk Cameron found fame, found influence, and found God, which is all well and good. We at Five Alive fully support a person following their own faith. Unfortunately for the sake of the show, his faith was such that he found the rest of the cast and crew wanting in the moral and spiritual sense and openly and constantly criticized the writers, the crew, and his fellow actors for their failure to live up to his increasingly exacting moral standards. Those who read science books or practiced other religions were greeted with contempt or threats of damnation. He revolted when Julie McCullough, a former Playboy model, joined the cast in ’89 and reportedly had her fired. And he used his Tiger Beat gravitas to force the writers and show runners to do things his way[3]. This all came to a head when he reportedly verbally attacked actor Alan Thicke for dating the 19 year old Kristy Swanson, then attacked him for being divorced, and, most critically, allegedly suggested that by extension Thicke’s sons were bastards, or at least that’s how Thicke interpreted it. Thicke gave the producers an ultimatum: Cameron or him. They chose Cameron and Thicke quit on the spot. Joanna Kerns followed him out the door. Miller took the opportunity to leave as well, hoping to escape the spotlight and the eyes of his stalker. A lot of the writers and crew left with them.

The producers tried to launch a new Cameron-helmed show Closer to Thee following Cameron’s character Mike Seaver going to divinity school, but the show tanked after a half a season, showing fairly good numbers in the Bible Belt but losing ground with families elsewhere. I guess the “Growing Pains” were too much for the show.

#4 – Police Squad!

Police Squad! (1982, 1986-88) was a show ahead of its time, an absurdist slapstick from the team of Zucker Abrahams Zucker who brought you Airplane! and Top Secret! Starring once-dramatic actor Leslie Nielsen as Lieutenant Frank Drebin, the show was a nonstop set of absurd sight gags, puns, and wordplay jokes. I'd describe the show, but it defies description. You just have to see it! Despite lots of Emmy buzz, it lasted half a season in ’82 before getting cancelled for the obscene reason of “the viewer had to watch it in order to appreciate it”[4]. However, producer Paramount TV replayed the episodes on their new PFN channel, where they were successful enough to spawn two new seasons in 1986-88 and a film, The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad, in 1988, spawning a trilogy. Police Squad is celebrated today, even though it was largely ignored back in ’82. It is absolutely worth your time if you liked the popular films.

#3 – Wheelers and Dealers

The Wheelers on Night Court (Image source “imnotstalkingyou.wordpress.com”)

In 1986, Night Court was one of the highest rated shows on television, and two of its most popular recurring characters were the hard-luck Wheelers, husband Bob (Brent Spiner) and wife June Wheeler (Annie O'Donnell). The Wheelers inevitably ended up in front of Judge Harry with some amazingly bizarre set of bad luck circumstances that led them there. And show creator Reinhold Weege saw potential for a spinoff. Thus, Wheelers and Dealers (1987-1992) was born[5]. The Wheelers moved from New York City to suburban New Jersey where Bob launched a shady used car dealership in partnership with his old high school friend Remington “Rocky” Rogers (Chris Rock in his breakout role).

The comedy came from Bob’s mopey hard luck pessimism running smack into Rocky’s charismatic pie-in-the-sky hustle. Rocky, a self-styled “ladies man and master salesman” who was anything but in either respect, would hatch some insane scheme to “put Rocky Wheels Auto Sales on the map” or otherwise get rich quick. Inevitably, Rocky’s overconfidence would get the better of him or Bob’s disaster magnetism would strike, dooming things back to the perpetual status quo of always just squeaking by on the margins. Buoyed by good writing, Night Court cameos (Dan Fielding became a frequent “legal advisor” and “investor”), and a great chemistry between Spiner and Rock, the show was a successful follow-up to Night Court. While it never broke the Top Ten, it made five good seasons, helped launch Brent Spiner’s career as a character actor (you probably know him as “that guy who was in that movie”), and catapulted Chris Rock into the limelight. Wheelers and Dealers was a popular if largely forgotten ‘80s treat, and well worth finding on your direct viewing service.

#2 – Just Duckie

Effectively this, but actually played in order and backed by Disney Animation’s behind the scenes stories

In 1984 Mary Tyler Moore (MTM) Productions producer Allan Burns partnered with Buffalo Bill producer Jay Tarses and classic animator Herbert Klynn to produce a new show, tentatively titled “The Duck Factory”. Tarses was producing Buffalo Bill, which was a critical darling but struggling with audiences, and wanted a fallback. When NBC finally decided to pull the plug on Buffalo Bill, Hyperion TV Producer Bernie Brillstein moved the show to Disney’s Hyperion Channel, where it established a small but loyal following. Tarses and Burns and took their Duck Factory idea to Bernstein, who liked the idea, but wanted to add some verisimilitude by bringing in some actual Disney animators to share their crazy behind-the-scenes stories with the writers. After a bit of revamping, Just Duckie (1984-1988) was born. Comedian Jim Carey was cast as cartoonist Skip Tarkenton, a well-meaning but naïve young cartoonist thrown in the middle of the craziness of producing the animated “The Dippy Duck Show”. He faced bizarre coworkers Wally Wooster (Don Messick), cynical and lazy writer Marty Fenneman (Jay Tarses); old school animator Brooks Carmichael (Jack Gilford), young storyboard artist Roland Culp (Clarence Gilyard, Jr.), sarcastic editor Andrea Lewin (Nancy Lane), and cheapskate business manager Aggie Aylesworth (Julie Payne). Complicating matters was the fact that the studio was now owned by the Dippy Duck creator and original owner’s widow, Mrs. Sheree Winkler (Teresa Ganzel), a former topless ice dancer.

The show briefly replaced Buffalo Bill on NBC before getting moved to Hyperion itself, where it built a cult following. Carey’s strange, surreal mix of childish immaturity and childlike sincerity won him a following and likely launched his 1990s film career. To this day animators call it “a documentary disguised as a SITCOM”.

#1 – Honey, I’m Home!

More or less this, but with Sam Kinison and Rosanne Barr

When producers Michael Moye and Ron Leavitt watched TV in the 1980s, they saw nothing much to write home about. Chief among the targets of their ire was The Cosby Show, with its impossibly well-off upper-class family and easily resolved family conflicts. Where, they thought, were the “normal Americans?” They decided to remedy this with what they called, simply, “Not the Cosbys”. And they knew just who they wanted in the lead roles as the unhappily-married Al and Peggy Bundy: comedians Sam Kinison and Rosanne Barr. Honey, I’m Home! (1987-1991) was born[6].

The show was everything that your typical 1980s SITCOM was not: the interfamily conflicts were never solved. The husband and wife hated and disrespected each other but were codependently unable to divorce. The son was a pathetic loser. The teenage daughter was a slut. The family did not come together in a loving embrace at the end of each episode. Al’s job sucked. Peggy’s life as a housewife sucked. The neighbors were obnoxious Yuppies, not quirky oddballs. And Kinison and Barr’s mutual dislike for each other manifested in a beautifully acrimonious screen chemistry. The show’s misanthropic, deconstructive nature, lifted by the obnoxious comedy of Kinison and Barr, captured a huge audience share. Early success led the show runners to push, at Barr’s insistence, for deeper context and better writing and addressed real world issues of life for working class families. The show and cast were nominated for and even won Emmys.

But at the height of its popularity, Kinison and Barr, who frequently sparred on the set, quit to pursue their own projects. Kinison went on to produce his own SITCOM Sam (1992-1995) before the show’s increasingly overt misogyny and homophobia led to protests and cancellation. Kinison would, sadly, die of a drug overdose in 1997. Barr, meanwhile, turned to drama, where her dark comedy-tinged primetime drama Blue Collar (1992-1996), co-starring John Goodman in parallel to his breakout film career, would gain a good following and critical acclaim, netting many Emmys and Golden Globes over its short run. Barr’s attempts to break into film never quite paid off, though. Honey, I’m Home! represents an interesting time capsule of comedy in transition, capturing two comedians at the height of their fame. The show influenced scores of shows to come afterwards and is often credited with killing the “eighties SITCOM formula”.

And that brings our list to the end. What other forgotten ‘80s SITCOMS did we miss? Let us know in the Comments!

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[1] The only thing that didn’t happen in our timeline is the “passed out and rushed to the hospital”. Otherwise yes, the writers contributed to her body image issues.

[2] Also true. This show was cursed!

[3] All allegedly happened in our timeline too. Cameron ultimately apologized to the rest of the cast for his “immaturity”, but not to McCullough, who has attacked him on social media, and with whom he still has never spoken. In our timeline Growing Pains continued on into the early ‘90s and is considered an ‘80s classic.

[4] As OTL. I can’t come up with a good butterfly to save it on its first run.

[5] Battered fedora tip to @nick_crenshaw82 for reminding me about this role. In our timeline the writers tried to integrate the characters into the regular cast by having them buy the news stand, but it went nowhere.

[6] In our timeline they missed getting Kinison and Barr and ended up with Ed O’Neill and Katey Sagal, and a long-running Classic was born. O’Neill and Sagal are talented enough that they will find alternate jobs, don’t worry.

 

[Geekhis Khan]

Siskel & Ebert Vs. The Movies
Red Ball Express (1987), first aired September 1987

Title Card: “Siskel & Ebert vs. The Movies”

Theme song plays as the Title Card and Screen display. Fade to…

Interior – Movie Theater Set
Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, in the dark, watch a screen, which plays a clip from Red Ball Express (1987):

Clip – Exterior – Bridge Over River, France, December 1944
Corporal Kaminsky (Michael Richards) wires up explosives to a beam on the bridge high above the snowy river below. The scene is both intimate and precarious.

Kaminsky
(sings as he wires) It’ll be a hot time, in the town of Berlin…when the Yanks come marchin’…

Sergeant
(V.O.) Kaminsky! Hurry the hell up with that charge! The Krauts’ll be here any damn minute!

Kaminsky
Ghaa-ee-aa! (fumbles, almost drops the charge) Just a minute, Sarge! (quietly) It’s not as easy as… (fumbles) Gha! (catches charge)

Sergeant
(V.O.) We’re not paying you by the hour, Kaminsky! And don’t be so stingy with the Comp C this time! I know your people like a bargain, but Jesus Christ, now is not the time!

Kaminsky
(wires, mumbles) I’ll stick a generous block of Comp C up your…

Sergeant
(V.O.) Are you saying something, Kaminsky?

Kaminsky
(fumbles, almost drops wire) Nothing, Sarge! Almost done! (mumbles) You putz. (sings) When the yanks come marchin’ in…​

Interior – Movie Theater Set
Clip ends. Lights come up. Siskel and Ebert turn around to face the camera.

Something like this… (Image source “muppet.fandom.com”)

Siskel
Mel Brooks does World War II in the first new MGM release since its acquisition by Disney, the T-rated Red Ball Express. The film is a semiautobiographical account of Brooks’ own experiences during the war and follows Corporal Kaminsky, played by comedian Michael Richards, from just after D-Day through the Battle of the Bulge and to the end of the war. While comedic at times, it is a dramatic film at its heart and not the absurdist slapstick fare which we usually associate with Brooks’ work.

Ebert
It’s certainly the first dramatic film of his to bear his own name, since he produced, among other things, The Elephant Man.

Siskel
Yes, but it still bears mentioning that this is not Blazing Saddles or The Producers. There are no zany puns or slapstick. No Busby Berkeley numbers. It’s a war drama, even if Michael Richards does deliver a fair share of physical comedy.

Ebert
And there are certainly plenty of scenes with violence and tragedy here. The actual battle scenes play out with the usual noise and violence you expect while Kaminsky’s terror feels very real as the bombs fall. Richards does an excellent job in portraying the fear and unsteadiness of a real person in a helpless, deadly situation and the portrayal stands in sharp contrast to the stoic bravado you normally see in a war movie hero.

Siskel
Although I would argue that Richards’ goofiness partly undermines the drama.

Ebert
I’m sure you would argue that. Still, what I think sets this movie apart is that it doesn’t try to make Kaminsky heroic and neither does it make him a fool. He comes across as a living, breathing man placed into impossible circumstances.

Siskel
Yes, by tripping over his feet and making goofy faces. Anyway, one area where I think that we can both agree is that the cinematography is beautiful, reminiscent of the sweeping war epics of the past.

Ebert
This is where Mel Brooks’ ability to mimic the cinema of the past serves him well, only where he normally evokes Hitchcock or John Ford satirically, here he captures the sweeping, epic empty spaces and contrasting intimate close-ups of David Lean, Franklin Schaffner, Samuel Fuller, or Sir Richard Attenborough. It manages to invoke these classic films while lending a sort of ironic context to it all.

Siskel
He also manages, regardless of your thoughts on Richards’ performance, to capture the horrors of the war. The scene where Kaminski is trading stories and cigarettes with the Black Red Ball Express driver, played by Richard Pryor in a rare dramatic role, succinctly captures the inherent irony and injustice of the ingrained racism and antisemitism in the US Army at the time, even as they battle the racially hierarchical Third Reich in the name of freedom and equality.

Ebert
And it’s not an exaggeration to say that there’s an absolute gut punch in the end when Kaminsky and his unit pass by the starving, recently liberated concentration camp prisoners, all filing past them on the highway, an event Brooks recounts from his own war experiences.

Siskel
Even I was moved by Richards’ performance for that scene. For Brooks, Kaminsky, Richards, or really any Jewish man it’s an overwhelming moment.

Ebert
Moving for any right-thinking human, I’d say.

Siskel
The story is well told, from Kaminsky’s eager, early, and naïve self as he steps ashore on Utah Beach past the destruction of the earlier battle there, through the trials of the Battle of the Bulge where he faces the elephant himself, up until a humbler, war-weary man emerges after VE day. It’s a story that reflects the larger context.

Ebert
Fully agreed. If Mel Brooks doesn’t get Academy attention for this, there is no justice in Hollywood.

Siskel
For me, Red Ball Express is a moving if sometimes too self-aware war drama which, while it suffers for its attempts at dark comedy, none the less demonstrates that Mel Brooks has dramatic potential. I give it a qualified Thumbs Up.

Ebert
And for me it’s a masterpiece of modern cinema that quotes the language of the past, but offers a new voice, bringing together the cinematic scope of Old Hollywood with the character-driven drama and modern sensibilities of New Hollywood. There are no qualifications here: enthusiastic Thumbs Up!

Siskel
Red Ball Express, starring Michael Richards and written and directed by Mel Brooks, is in theaters now. Coming up next after the break, Empire of the Sun, a haunting world war 2 drama directed by Harold Becker[1] and starring child actor Christian Bale. We’ll see you soon.​

Fade to Title Card and Screen. Theme music plays. Fade to commercial.

---

[1] With Spielberg busy producing The Land Before Time and other things for Disney in this timeline, Warner Brothers stuck with their first choice of Harold Becker to direct. The film will be notably darker and less overtly sentimental than the Spielberg version, and will perform about the same as the version from our timeline.

 

[Geekhis Khan]

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

When The Nightmare Before Christmas was released in October of 1987, it was the culmination of years of Tim Burton’s signature style and a triumph for him and his growing team of likeminded artists like Henry Selick, Rick Heinrichs, and Stephen Chiodo, a group increasingly referred to among the Disney artists and management alike as the “Skeleton Crew”. Even more so than Jonathan Scissorhands, Nightmare was a movie that represented the apex of the Tim Burton aesthetic. Years after he first started working at Walt Disney Animation, Tim Burton had produced his first animated feature and, in doing so, not only ensured his place in popular culture, but ensured his place in animation history as the man who resurrected stop motion feature animation.

“The power of Tim Burton’s ‘Skeleton Crew’ is their ability to make you sympathize with, or even root for, the maligned, the feared, and the ugly by seeing the beauty underneath.” – Glen Keane

By the time The Nightmare Before Christmas screened in theaters, it no longer held the shock factor that it might have held a few years earlier. Audiences were already familiar with Burton’s style by this point, from The Black Cauldron to the Emmy winning Short Vincent through the original The Nightmare Before Christmas holiday special, to Uncle Deadly’s Nightmares, to, of course, Jonathan Scissorhands. Burton had succeeded in redefining what American audiences would accept, and in doing so expanded American pop culture while tapping into the emerging zeitgeist of a growing “Goth” subculture.

(Image source “USA Today”)

Of course, while Tim is inexorably associated with The Nightmare Before Christmas as its writer, creator, and producer, it was directed by the great Henry Selick and animated with Selick and Burton’s longstanding partner Stephen Chiodo. And what is The Nightmare Before Christmas without its iconic songs? This wasn’t the first collaboration between Burton and Danny Elfman, they’d worked together on Uncle Deadly’s Nightmares, but it is their first feature collaboration and is perhaps their most iconic. The songs are as well known today as they were in 1987. Selick and Chiodo’s brilliant stop-motion animation blended with Burton’s dark aesthetic and Elfman’s brilliant score to make one of the most impossibly original and memorable animated musical features in history.

The film was a hit, lasting 13 weeks in the theaters and making $79 million against its $16 million budget[1]. Even so, there are those who maintain that had the movie come out a few years later, once the Neo-gothic subculture was starting to hit the mainstream, then it would have been a $100 million+ blockbuster. While we can never know for sure, VHS sales were strong from the start and later VCD and Direct Play sales have remained strong the entire time, as have sales of clothing and other merchandise, Jack Skellington becoming a cultural icon and touchstone.

Nightmare was nominated for numerous Oscars, Golden Globes, and other awards for original music and visual effects and won the Saturn Award for Best Fantasy Film. It is certainly one of Tim Burton’s most famous and popular productions to this day, and a testament to the Disney team that they took a chance on a young man out of the California suburbs with a macabre vision that didn’t quite align to the typical Disney look.

But there would be no rest for the wicked. He’d immediately return to live action direction the next year, working with Steven Spielberg on Hocus Pocus[2] and then on the Michael McDowell written supernatural comedy Beetlejuice[3] produced in partnership with The Geffen Film Company, all the while producing and providing art direction for a new Disney animated feature, the supernatural love story Mort, based upon the 1987 Terry Pratchett Discworld novel.

---

[1] Costs slightly less than our timeline due to 5 years of inflation, made less due to being slightly ahead of its time.

[2] @TheMolluskLingers called it!

[3] Seriously, who else is Geffen going to come to for this?

 

[Geekhis Khan]

Happy Valentine's Day, everyone! Let's celebrate with some feel good stories about love and relationships.

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The Strange Gender Assumptions of Movies, 1987 Edition (Excerpt)
From Sex and Gender in the Cinema Netlog by Katie Bar Zedor, September 16th, 2017

1987 marked a strange and transient time for gender representation in cinema. Hollywood was outwardly portraying itself as “feminist” while simultaneously maintaining the strict gender hierarchy both on-camera and behind the scenes. Feminist themes could be explored, but typically from a male point of view, and any particular lessons were often watered down or glossed over.

Paramount’s Fatal Attraction, for example, introduced the world to a female killer and tried to make her sympathetic and borderline relatable. But it also pushed a normative domestic relationship, made Glen Close’s spurned woman an unhinged lunatic, and suggested that it was Michael Douglas’s infidelity to his adoring wife that was the bigger sin, not the fact that he used and abandoned an emotionally vulnerable woman. Douglas’s character even gets welcomed back into the family without comment after his wife kills the psychotic adulteress. The lesson seemed to be “don’t cheat on your wife, because women who sleep with married men are psychos” rather than “manipulating and using vulnerable people for sexual gratification is bad.”

Furthermore, Glen Close’s Alex (the name notably masculine) was demonized, a murderous femme fatale and “bitch” who even some analysts of the time saw as a grossly antifeminist strawman. The New Yorker said of the film at the time, “The film is about men seeing feminists as witches, and the way the facts are presented here, the woman is a witch.”

Sadly, in the original cut Alex was a more relatable character and Douglas’s Dan Gallagher gets his comeuppance for his use and abuse of her when Alex commits suicide, framing Gallagher for her death, with him convicted and jailed for murder in the end. Test audiences, however, despised this twist and thus the home invasion and killing of Alex by the “proper” woman were added in later. Screenwriter James Dearden “wrote it under duress and hated the [new] ending” and said that persuading Close to come back to re-shoot it was “one of [his] most shame-inducing recollections.”[1] Even when Hollywood at the time tried to add feminist complexity, however minor and mixed, audiences weren’t having it.

Outrageous Fortune from Hollywood Pictures, meanwhile, gives us a “buddy flick with chicks”. Feminist themes are there: the manipulation of Bette Midler’s Sandy and Shelley Long’s Lauren by the men in their lives, the women acting out of keeping with expectations, the “sisters come together” moments, and the “you go girl” leap of faith in the end that defeats the psychotic ex. However, the film is essentially a formulaic buddy spy caper and fish out of water tale. It never really probes the gender issues that it teases. Writer Leslie Dixon tried her best with the screenplay, but in the hands of Katzenberg and director Arthur Hiller the results were lukewarm at best, with some of the “feminine concerns” of the main characters being rather quaint and stereotypical even for the time. The “girls”, for example, dress up as teen boys to hide out in a whore house and portray rather puerile ideas of how a man thinks a woman thinks that a man would act, while also serving as a great gratuitous opportunity for underdressed, sexually-objectified women to appear[2].

It’s summer popcorn fair, another “High Concept” piece surgically targeted for a desired viewing audience to market to, which is fine on its own, of course, but Outrageous Fortune’s wafer-thin feminist veneer was the norm rather than the exception, indicative of the male-dominant industry and its values. In many ways it’s a standard male “buddy film” with characters who happen to be women, a gender-flip on a male trope rather than anything amazingly groundbreaking in the world of gender portrayal.

And the strange and reductive 1987 assumptions of how people of a gender should act are certainly not limited to the women. Hollywood Pictures also brought us the breakout blockbuster hit Three Men and a Baby, based on a French play, and directed by “Spock” himself, Leonard Nimoy. It’s three bachelors, forced by circumstance to raise a baby, and demonstrating how utterly clueless they are in the face of domestic care. The central concept/joke should offend anyone, really: “ha-ha, they’re men, and they’re raising a baby!” The comedy derives from the “natural” cluelessness of the single men in the face of simple domestic caretaking chores, an assumption which should be taken as an insult by any worthy father or older male sibling who knows how to change a diaper. Furthermore, the underlying sexism goes deeper, with a tacit implication that raising a child is “a woman’s job”, an assumption that insults all caregivers regardless of gender.

Most films of the year, however, were not so cut and dry in their gender representation, and sometimes the gender politics is only visible under the surface during production.

Take Wall Street from 20th Century Films. It’s a film that takes the greed and excesses of the 1980s Corporate Culture to task, and does so very well. If the portrayal and objectification of the women involved is bothersome, then it can be taken as part of the larger polemic against the 1980s culture of use. One could certainly see a misogynistic message in the portrayal of Sean Young’s Darien Taylor or Daryl Hannah’s Kate Gekko[3], two shallow and materialistic women who are used as objects, but such a view misses the bigger picture: these women are themselves victims of an objectifying system.

No, the real misogyny came behind the scenes, where Sean Young and Charlie Sheen repeatedly fought. Young in particular didn’t care for her treatment by the cast and crew, and rebelled. Sheen at one point placed a sign on her back saying “I am a c**t” and nobody told her. She was ultimately the one who was labelled “difficult to work with” to the detriment of her career, not Sheen, a man whose alleged treatment of people has gone beyond use and into abuse. By itself this incident could be dismissed as a “diva being difficult”, but when such events are the norm rather than the exception, it gets increasingly difficult to deny that systemic misogyny in Hollywood was and to some degree still is a “thing”[4].

Finally, there’s a film that manages to capture the gender politics and assumptions of 1987 both on screen and behind the camera: Warner’s The Witches of Eastwick. On one hand it’s a feminist milestone directed by a woman that is overtly about female empowerment. That’s certainly how Warner Brothers continues to market it. On the other…well, let’s peel back the layers of this onion.

The Witches of Eastwick is based on a John Updike novel about three repressed women finding empowerment through witchcraft, which is itself controversial, being called both “feminist” and “misogynistic” depending upon whom you ask. And the exact same contradictory labels can be unironically applied to the 1987 theatrical cut as well.

What, me steal the film? (Image source “quotesgram.com”)

The film went through a troubled production, largely, it is alleged, driven by producer Jon Peters, who was reportedly so verbally abusive that the original director George Miller left just days into principal photography[5]. To replace him they eventually found former Lavern & Shirley star Penny Marshall to direct, reportedly at the request of Sarandon. It was Marshall’s first big film[6]. By this point the casting had been done, with Cher, Susan Sarandon, and Michelle Pfeiffer as the titular witches and Jack Nicholson as the literally diabolic Daryl Van Horne. And this casting created the very first instance of the film’s contradictory signaling, right there in the poster: Jack Nicholson got top billing and central presentation even though he was technically playing the supporting part. Now, one can fully understand why the studio would give Nicholson the limelight in advertising. He was the huge star at the peak of his career. His agent undoubtedly insisted on it as well. But the elevated billing, combined with Nicholson’s undeniable feral charisma and tendency to steal every scene that he’s in, combined to make the film seem overtly about him, “Jack and the Witches”, pushing the titular witches into the supporting role.

Plenty of other mixed messages abound. In the original Updike novel, the witches gain their powers after their husbands die or leave them, which works well enough as an emancipation and empowerment narrative, but in the Michael Cristofer screenplay the women only gain their powers once they sleep with Nicholson, their powers suddenly a product of the man they sleep with, giving the film the exact opposite meaning from the book (Marshall reportedly hated this and tried to have it changed). Another mixed message is the storyline surrounding their empowerment. If one is generous, one could see it as a liberation and empowerment story. These women, who in the beginning of the film are clearly powerless, and in the case of Pfeiffer’s Sukie openly sexually harassed and assaulted, are in the end powerful and self-reliant, having defeated and cast out Van Horne. If one is less generous one could see their eventual roles as mothers to Van Horne’s presumably demonic sons as a return to a traditional domestic role.

(Image source “hollywoodreporter.com”)

The film is famously full of gratuitous male gaze as well, though Marshall surreptitiously gave these scenes an ironic cast, with critical comments to the man on the scene made to the camera, as if chastising the audience itself for enjoying this exploitation. It was one of several small rebellions by Marshall. And behind the scenes, these gender battles and others were in full display. Cher reportedly poached the lead role from Sarandon, using the power of her own stardom. Such little backstabs between female actors were an unfortunate biproduct of the industry where “good” female roles were rare and female actors regularly played against one another, possibly in a “divide and conquer” strategy by an industry that still pays female actors less on average than their respective male counterparts.

Jon Peters with ex-wife Barbara Streisand and Penny Marshall (Image sources “vanityfair.com” & “eastbaytimes.com”)

But the biggest behind the scenes drama was clearly between Marshall and Peters. The bombastic Peters has a reputation in Hollywood for being domineering and opinionated and Marshall has a well-earned reputation for not suffering fools. It was like mixing nitro and glycerin. Marshall, for her part, saw through the faux feminism of the original Cristofer script, in particular how the women’s lives seem to revolve around men (even when alone they never had a conversation about anything other than men[7]) and set about to change things. She encouraged the three women actors to ad lib (some of Cher’s most memorable take-downs of the men in the film are reportedly a result of these ad libs), which angered Cristofer, who went to Peters. Peters, in addition to trying to keep Marshall on-script, kept injecting his own ideas into the film (I guess that we’re lucky it doesn’t include a giant spider).

Peters would reportedly scream at Marshall, much as he had with Miller. If he hoped to intimidate her, he was wasting his time. “Penny has this acerbic personality that gets more intense and sarcastic the harder you push her,” said Cher. “She stood up for us, and against [Jon]. But she also knew when to pick her battles.”

Most of the women of the production sided with Marshall. Some of the men sided with Peters, but many stayed neutral. Jack Nicholson, despite some early fights with Marshall over his direction, ultimately found the whole thing amusing and backed up Marshall. “What can I say? [Behind the scenes] was a hell of a show!” he told a later interviewer. “I’d sign up for a film with Penny any day. She’s got spunk.”

Peters changed track, trying to butter up Marshall. But comparing her favorably to his ex-wife and “love of his life” Barbara Streisand appears to have backfired. “All broads love getting compared to the ex, right?” Marshall reportedly told a staffer.

The battle went beyond principal photography and into editing, where Peters reportedly conspired with editors Hubert C. de la Bouillerie and Richard Francis-Bruce to keep Marshall out of the editing room. “They butchered it,” Marshall told Entertainment Weekly in 1997. “They took out all of the feminist messaging and made it a flick about three desperate chicks who bang a horny Satan.” The film got good reviews from critics and performed well at the box office, but the mixed feminist messaging and contradictory signaling was wryly noted by more than one critic at the time.

In 1997 for the film’s 10th anniversary, Marshall’s Director’s Cut of the film was released on Special Edition VCD to huge acclaim from filmmakers and feminist scholars alike, being a much more overt female empowerment tale. Most viewers and critics today prefer it to the ’87 theatrical cut not only because of the less mixed message, but also because more of the pithy adlibbed dialog was included. Even Nicholson admitted to Howard Stern that he liked the Marshall Cut better despite losing focus to the Witches.

The Witches of Eastwick, with its competing cuts and behind-the-scenes drama, is thus practically a time capsule for gender relations in the mid-1980s. We can see in miniature the relationships between men and women in person and on camera and the relationships and expectations between the filmmakers and the audience then and now. It was a time when male filmmakers openly sought to tell “feminist” stories while simultaneously repeating all of the sexist assumptions and reinforcing the male supremacy of the time. It was a time when women could direct a film, but were expected to do what the male producers wanted. And it was a time where contradictory signaling was the norm.

Altogether, 1987 marks a strange transition from the open sexism of Hollywood past and through the hidden sexism of Hollywood today. With luck, perhaps this trend will continue into a Hollywood of the near future that just isn’t sexist.

What a concept.

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[1] Quote from our timeline as well.

[2] Mini-meta commentary: the irony that I’m a man attempting to write from the perspective of a female feminist scholar writing about men writing about how they think women would think and behave is not lost on me. Can someone hold this lampshade for me?

[3] Roles swapped from our timeline. Stone later confessed in our timeline that he wished he’d cast Young as Darien and Daryl Hannah hated the role since it was such an antithesis to her values.

[4] Hat tip to @Unknown for the casting cues and anecdote on the sign on Young’s back.

[5] Miller reportedly quit twice in our timeline, but always got lured back.

[6] In our timeline her first film was Jumpin’ Jack Flash, but the Coens direct that in this timeline.

[7] The Witches of Eastwick from our timeline does not pass the Bechdel Test despite the three main characters being women and having multiple scenes together.

 

[Geekhis Khan]

The 6 Best Non-Franchise (at the time) Action Films 1987
From Six in Violence! Netlog, November 13th, 1998

Yea, we all know and love the big franchise films like Star Wars, Indiana Jones, James Bond, or Batman, or whatever. But what I really like is an original story. Of course, most of the successful one-offs get turned into franchises, including many of these, but still I love looking back at those first-out-of-the-gate films that had a blank slate to work with and see the great truly original things the producers did with them. So, with that said, here are The 6 Best Non-Franchise…ok, if you’ve read this far then you can read the damned title too.

This from the maker of Repo Man!

#6 Robocop: It’s the “bloodiest movie of ‘87”, a film so violent and gory that it barely escaped the dreaded “X” rating. Robocop follows Officer Murphy (Emilio Estevez), the “last good cop in Detroit” in the dystopic, crime ridden “near future”, who is brutally gunned down by criminals and brought back from the dead as a cyborg. He then goes on a bloody Judge Dredd worthy Crusade for Justice where he discovers that the true criminals aren’t the street gangs, but the evil OCP Corporation that secretly rules the city. It’s one-part Christ allegory, one-part spaghetti western, one-part Cyberpunk crime thriller, and twenty-parts Bloody Awesome. Directed by Alex Cox of Repo Man fame, Robocop has a lot of Cox’s signature sensibilities from the Sergio Leone style camera angles and western themes, to the endless criticism of consumerism, to the punk rock urban aesthetic, to the deliberate “B Movie” sensibilities. Stephanie Zimbalist, meanwhile, does a great supporting role as Annie Lewis[1], a role that would kickstart a moderately successful career as a character actor. Rumor has it that Cox initially turned it down, so they went to Paul Verhoeven, who threw the bloody screenplay in the trash[2], as did Kenneth Johnson. So, Cox relented and took the picture, and it’s hard to imagine anyone but him making this movie. The Rob Bottin effects are great for their day and the punk-inspired soundtrack sets the tone of the film well. The film got mixed to poor reviews, with most reviewers being appalled by the graphic violence. Only Roger Ebert saw past the gore to the core and gave it a thumbs-up. Still, the sheer audacity of the picture and the press buzz surrounding it brought in viewers, who gave it a $45 million box office against its $14 million budget[3]. It lives on today as a Cult Classic.

This, but by Richard Donner and with actual teens

#5 The Lost Boys: It’s been called “The Gooneys with Vampires” and “Peter Pan as written by Bram Stoker”. I see it as “that once scene from the Salem’s Lot 1979 miniseries with the little boy’s now-vamp friend hovering outside of his window that scared the crap out of you as a little kid but looks so cheesy now” the movie. It’s got all the standard ‘80s players of that age group: the Coreys, Sean Astin, Kerri Green, Martha Plympton, Jonathan Quan, Jamison Newlander, and the like, all now in their early teens. And yea, it’s pretty creepy at times, sickly funny at times, and really not like anything else you ever saw. The effects, unlike Salem’s Lot, still largely hold up today, even if it’s not nearly as scary-cool as it was back then. Director Richard Donner really knocks it out of the park. Rumor has it they also approached Spielberg, but the Peter Pan concept struck too close to home given his association with Pan 4D and the late Michael Jackson. The T-rated film grossed about $45 mil against a modest $8.5 mil budget and remains a late ‘80s classic. Its creepy-cool late ‘80s soundtrack is still selling today[4]. Any rumors you hear about a direct-to-video sequel in 1989 or a Saturday Morning Cartoon on ABC from ’88 to ’90 are foul, demonic lies. Pay them no attention.

#4 No Way Out: No Way Out, based upon Kenneth Fearing's 1946 noir novel The Big Clock, is neo-noir the way it should be: sleek, sexy, sensual, shocking, and deadly. It is chock-full of action, sex, espionage, intrigue, nudity, adventure, betrayal, murder, sex, and a shocking twist ending that surprisingly does not include sex or nudity. Starring Kevin Costner, Gene Hackman, and Sean Young, the Orion film resonated with Cold War weary audiences and claimed the number one slot when released on July 24th of 1987[5]. It reminds me of the Tom Clancy thrillers that started showing up in the 1990s, only with more overt sex. Did I mention the sex? The film made $74 million domestically on word of mouth and was one of the major hits of the year. It might have done even better had Fatal Attraction not debuted a month later and kicked it out of the theaters by managing to slip in even more nudity and sex with its violence.

This with Jeff Bridges and Rick Moranis…and wait until you see where this is going!

#3 Innerspace: It’s Fantastic Voyage (1966), the comedy! It’s Tron invades Dark Helmet! It’s the movie that briefly (and hilariously) made Rick Moranis into a suave action movie star! It’s EPCOT’s second movie-ride-tie-in after Britain: Above and Below. It’s what happens when the Creatureworks thinks small. It began as a spec script by Chip Proser who himself admitted it was a blatant rip-off of Fantastic Voyage, the schtick being that the “patient” was awake and alert throughout the whole ordeal. Other than some tepid interest by WB[6], ultimately Diana Birkenfield optioned it for Disney in 1984, knowing that the film would be a great tie-in to the upcoming tentatively-titled Body Wars ride at the upcoming Living Body pavilion at EPCOT. Ultimately, new “associate” board director Steven Spielberg made some suggestions, handed the script and the director’s chair to Lawrence Kasdan, and set things on their way. The results are pure crazy-awesome: an experimentally shrunk vessel piloted by disgraced hotshot former fighter jock Lt. Tuck Pendleton (Jeff Bridges) is accidentally injected into the spastic nebbish Jack Putter (Moranis). Soon the nerdy Putter is being pursued by international spies and criminals eager to capture the technology while Pendleton occasionally uses the innerspace probe to control Putter like a puppet through his nervous system, turning the clumsy nebbish into an ass-kicking action star, all while the proverbial clock is ticking before the probe grows big again and rips Putter apart. It’s one-part Fantastic Voyage, one-part buddy action flick, one-part slapstick comedy, and one-part “believe in yourself” empowerment film. The ride was pretty fucking cool too. And making $63 mil against a $26 mil budget ain’t bad either.

This, but with Bruce Willis and Richard Dreyfus!

#2 Lethal Weapon: It’s the movie that let Bruce Willis[7] be taken seriously! Hollywood Pictures picked up the Shane Black script in ’86 and moved forward with it. Rather than go with the Big Names in action, Katzenberg went after the virtually unknown names that could be scooped up on the cheap. That meant Bruce Willis (Riggs), who was mostly known at the time for the TV Comedy Moonlighting. Audiences laughed when he showed up in the trailers. They weren’t laughing soon. Paired with Richard Dreyfus (Murtaugh), it’s the classic Buddy Comedy with a dark twist as suicidal maverick Riggs ends up partnered with the jaded veteran by-the-book Murtaugh. Rather than take people out of the film, Willis’ natural charisma and working-class grit lent a verisimilitude to a genre largely associated with over-the-top bravado and camp. The results, mixing the action and bravado of a Buddy Cop film with the gritty realism of a neo-noir, exploded, making over $120 mil at the box office. Needless to say, the Lethal Weapon series would form a franchise of its own as well as rewrite the book on Buddy Cop films and turn Bruce Willis into an action star.

You’ll never guess who plays the Predator!

#1 Predator: It’s a horror film for action stars! It’s an all-star Sci-Fi Smart Slasher! It’s what happens when the biggest bad-asses of ‘80s action films, the ‘roid-raged-ravagers of the silver screen, are the ones being stalked by an unstoppable killer rather than horny idiot teens! It's Predator! Arnold Schwarzenegger plays the Final Girl of the film along with other buff bad-asses like Carl Weathers, Jessie Ventura, Sonny Landham, and other future US politicians. Stalking them is a nigh-invisible, heat-seeking, ninja-like alien played by Bolo Yeung of Mask of the Monkey King fame[8]. While some in the studio expressed concern that the tall, buff action stars were towering over Yeung, director Sean S. Cunningham insisted that “that is the point. A human hunter is tiny compared to a grizzly bear, but his technology and his mind give him the advantage.” Well said. Yeung’s sheer athleticism and ability to be not just an awesome martial artist but a beast-mode monster running at lightning speed, make you truly believe that the big, burly Schwarzenegger doesn’t stand a chance. The hella-scary Stan Winston prosthetic effects help a lot too. Fun fact: the idea was born of a joke circulating Hollywood at the time: after singlehandedly ending the Cold War in Rocky IV, there was no one left on earth for Rocky to battle, so surely in Rocky V he’d have to battle an alien. Ultimately, the franchise mixed with the tangentially thematically similar Alien franchise to produce something that’s either pure awesome or shitty camp depending on whom you ask. Still, though, the original Predator remains the gold standard in ‘80s sci-fi action/horror.

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[1] Since San Neill plays James Bond and Pierce Brosnan isn’t considered, Remington Steele isn’t extended, so she get to take this role, which she was offered but had to turn down in our timeline.

[2] Happened in our timeline too. His wife fished it back out and convinced him there was more to the film.

[3] Worse than OTL as many viewers don’t “get” Cox’s deliberate B Movie sensibilities and think it’s just “hack” work and cliché. The blood and gore and controversy draws in viewers there to “see how bad it gets”, but in the end it’ll not connect with mass-market audiences as well as the Verhoeven version did, and is destined for cult status. There will be no cheesy sequels or awkward kids shows in this timeline.

[4] Originally planned as a Donner film staring 12-13-year-old vamps. Morphed in our timeline to older teenage vamps. Kiefer Sutherland will need to find a new breakout hit in this timeline.

[5] Released on August 14th shortly after Stakeout and slightly before Fatal Attraction in our timeline, opened at #2, and is largely forgotten today despite great reviews across the board. I made it a hit in this timeline just because.

[6] Warner Bros. picked it up in our timeline.

[7] Considered for the role in our timeline, where he instead filmed Blind Date, which would allo-ironically finally knock LW off the #1 slot in our timeline.

[8] In our timeline they originally went with Jean-Claude Van Damme, who hated the cheesy costume and didn’t really seem a threat to Arnold. Here, Yeung isn’t just doing roundhouse kicks, he’s flipping off of trees, leaping straight up, and otherwise looking like a spinning ball of death. There's even a now-classic lampshade where Schwarzenegger, towering over the 5'6" Yeung, jokes "You're what all the fuss is about?" just before Yeung goes berserker and he's left screaming and fighting for his life.

 

[Geekhis Khan]

Coppola: A Man and His Dream
From Cinematastic Netsite, July 4th, 2012

Francis Ford Coppola. The enigmatic multiple Oscar-winning director has been compared to Orson Wells both for his cinematography and for how he managed to bite the Big Hollywood hands that fed him and slip into obscurity. Some have even noted their similarity in physical appearance. And just as Wells languished throughout the latter half of the 20th Century, so did Coppola languish through the 1980s following the disastrous failure of One from the Heart.

The ‘80s marked a time of experimentation for the director, with borderline arthouse films like The Outsiders and Rumblefish or critically beloved but poorly performing films like The Cotton Club. While the major studios kept him at arm’s length, one successful Hollywood mogul had his back: his old friend George Lucas. When Michael Jackson approached Disney about a multimedia attraction based upon Peter Pan, Lucas pushed for Coppola, who was still deeply in personal debt, to direct the 17 minute “4D” film, but mutual friend Steven Spielberg, who, like Jackson, had a Peter Pan complex, insisted on directing it himself.

So, Lucas took another tack with Disney: he pushed them to greenlight Coppola’s Preston Tucker biopic. Coppola had been kicking around plans for such a film since the 1970s and Lucas had long been a fan of the plan. As a major shareholder and “associate director of the board” at Disney he exerted a certain amount of influence and, dangling his upcoming fantasy flick Willow as a carrot, convinced MGM Chairman Tom Wilhite to greenlight the Tucker biopic as the second film released under the MGM label after Mel Brooks’ Red Ball Express and before his own Willow.

Coppola would write the screenplay himself[1]. Lucasfilm would collaborate with MGM, specifically Bernie Brillstein, to produce. Taking Lucas’ advice, Coppola dropped his earlier plans for an experimental musical and instead pursued a straight biopic. The underperformance of The Cotton Club likely aided in this decision. Principal filming would begin in 1987 and Tucker: A Man and his Dream with Jeff Bridges playing the titular role would see wide release in the spring of 1988. The plot follows the rise and fall of the eponymous Preston Tucker, Jr., who dared to try and revolutionize automobiles in the late 1940s, at least until the Big Three US automakers abused the system to crush him. And yet the story is really one of family, and purity of vision, and a willingness to take the big, bold risks. While the outcome sees the antagonistic corporate interests victorious and Tucker’s dreams crushed, the story ultimately remains a hopeful, Capra-esque tale full of bright colors and Old Hollywood sensibilities.

There is little doubt that this biopic has a strong bit of the autobiographical to it. Once can’t watch this film without seeing more than a touch of Coppola’s own story in the rise and fall of the eponymous Tucker. One might also see a bit of old Walt Disney in there too, specifically his struggles in Hollywood in the 1920s and 1930s when Oswald the Lucky Rabbit was taken from him and all predicted that Snow White and the Seven Dwarves would be a disaster. Heck, one can imagine that George Lucas himself saw in Preston Tucker and his friend Frank Coppola alike the road that he himself had not taken: that of the man who stuck to his individual vision at personal cost rather than buy into the larger corporate system.

Whatever the larger background story, Coppola and Disney both had a lot riding on this film. For Disney, it was a chance to further buff their newly reminted MGM brand. Red Ball Express had proven a moderate success and critical (and ultimately awards) darling, but having a modern classic from the great Francis Ford Coppola to their name would in theory cement the classic studio as a modern powerhouse. For Coppola, still saddled with debt following the collapse of Zoetrope Studios, the film offered the chance for financial recovery and the long-desired freedom to pursue his own creative pathways, ideally without having to take Paramount up on their longstanding offer to make a third Godfather film, something he had little desire to do.

Alas, while Tucker the film was a critical and awards darling, audiences failed to come out in large numbers and the film failed to make back its $25 million budget, marking the new Disney-owned MGM’s first flop on only its second try. Not the most auspicious start. The box office failure of Tucker threw even more pressure onto Willow and George Lucas, who had himself pressured the newly reborn studio into taking a chance on a director that many considered a risky has-been at that point. Video sales would ultimately make up for the losses and the film is recognized as a modern masterpiece today, but that was little consolation for either Coppola, who was left with little choice but to do Godfather III, or MGM President Tom Wilhite.

Coppola and Ron and Diane Disney Miller enjoying the fruit of their vineyards (Image sources “vanityfair.com” and “disneydreamer.com”)

And yet a strange silver lining came out of this for Wilhite in the form of several gold statuettes to help buff the MGM brand despite the financial disappointment. And another silver lining – a Silverado lining, as it were – came to Coppola in the form of Disney CEO and Walt Disney’s son-in-law Ron Miller. Like Coppola, Miller was a fan of wine. He and his wife Diane had founded their own vineyard, Silverado Vineyards, in 1981. Coppola had purchased the old Niebaum Vineyards in the late 1970s and was selling wine under the Niebaum-Coppola label. With California wines just starting to emerge as World Class at the time, the two found common cause and arranged an all-stock partial merger of their respective vineyards, each claiming a 40% stake in each other’s wineries. Together they were able absorb and buffer each other’s risk and pool marketing resources and distribution.

The arrangement proved a success and in 1995 they split the costs of acquiring the Inglenook Winery and merged their companies under the umbrella corporation Artifice Wines, LLC, which today markets the Inglenook, Silverado, Coppola, Zoetrope, Pigskin, Chateau Fantastique, Chateau Nazca, Chateau St. Wagga Wagga, Silver Mills, Opal Mills, Hyperion, and Criterion labels. They have expanded production into South America, Europe, Australia, and even Africa with vineyards and vintners worldwide. Several of the wines have won international awards and medals. They also have a profitable sweetheart contract to provide wines for the Disney theme parks and Marriott Hotels.

The partnership also proved fortuitous for Coppola’s daughter Sophia, an aspiring director herself at the time, who met and was impressed by producers Lisa Henson and Diana Birkenfield while assisting on set, but that’s a tale for another day. Salude!

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[1] In our timeline Lucas got Coppola to direct Captain EO for Disney. In this timeline Jackson got to do his Pan idea and Spielberg was more than happy to direct as he too had a desire to do a Peter Pan film (in our timeline it became Hook). Here, Lucas instead pushes Disney to greenlight Tucker in ’86, so Coppola will go immediately into production on it the second he’s done with Peggy Sue Got Married and will not go on to direct Gardens of Stone and thus not be too busy to write the Tucker biopic himself.

 

[Geekhis Khan]

Kung Fu: The New Generation (1987-1991)
From The TV Obsessive, by Hanmii Dahri-Mote, a regular column in TV Guide and other publications

Take a classic TV western, bring back its main character and original actor, bump it up a generation, and add to the mix the son of the man who many believe should have starred in the original, and what do you get?

Something old, something new, something borrowed, something Bruce!

The original Kung Fu TV series (ABC 1972-1975), which I discussed in an article last year, was originally conceived by actor and martial artist Bruce Lee, for whom the lead role was originally intended. It instead starred Caucasian actor David Carradine, who many believe did a great job even if he “Whitewashed” what would have been a groundbreaking lead role for an Asian actor. Perhaps Carradine and casting director Lynn Stalmaster had this controversy in mind when they approached Bruce’s son Brandon Lee for the sequel series. And while Lee was hesitant to take on a martial arts role, hoping to branch out as an actor in his own right and not just as “Bruce’s son”, he appreciated the symmetry and justice of him taking the part.

And with that, Kung Fu: The Movie was born[1], a made-for-TV film and pilot for a new series. ABC studio executive Michael Eisner had little interest in relaunching a long-cancelled series, however, as TV westerns were long since passe. CBS CEO Ted Turner, on the other hand, eagerly jumped on the series, which appealed to his nostalgic love of Old Americana. CBS would play both the film and, at the insistence of Turner, who overruled his studio heads[2], launched the new series Kung Fu: The New Generation. Interestingly, the series was originally called The Next Generation before it was changed to avoid comparison to the new Star Trek series debuting that same year on PFN.

(Image source “IMDB.com”)

Kung Fu: The Movie saw original series hero Kwai Chang Caine (Carradine) battle an evil opium smuggling ring, only to do battle with a mysterious young man (Lee), who turns out to be his estranged son Lee Jun Caine. They mend their estrangement and fight to free the town from the opium ring. The series then takes over from the end of the film and sees Kwai Chang now the master and mentor and Lee Jun as the “grasshopper”, with Carradine even playing the iconic flute from the original series.

It’s also noteworthy that Carradine gladly passed the torch to Lee, who took the lead role while Carradine played the supporting mentor character and literal father figure. This was not only a pragmatic change (Carradine’s age was limiting his ability to perform some of the martial arts and his professional pride prevented the heavy use of body doubles) but was also a purposeful statement that this was a new series for a new generation that reflected changing societal values with respect to race and representation.

(Image source New York Times)

Kung Fu: The New Generation plays as a mix of nostalgic reminiscence for the original series and a modern update for a new generation of viewers. The mix of western action and martial arts athleticism managed to grab a modest but serviceable (and profitably young) fandom, keeping the series alive through four seasons, though the last two seasons would move to TNT on cable. It also found a large Asian audience, particularly in Hong Kong and the emerging Shanghai market. Cameos from other famous martial artists throughout its run, including Chuck Norris, Bolo Yeung, Jean Claude Van Damme, and Jackie Chan, added to the fun.

Since the series was now set a generation later than the original, the setting was thus now the early 20th century, so themes of change and modernity vs. tradition and industry vs. nature were a natural. Starting in 1990 the series began to increasingly address environmental and conservationist themes and the existing themes of race and culture that were subtly addressed in the first two seasons were now overtly explored. Many suggest that Turner’s recent marriage to Jane Fonda and his resulting political evolution played a part in the change, but others suggest that star Brandon Lee insisted on the changes.

Whatever the case, KF:TNG is a delightful mix of the old and the new both in the literal sense and the metatextual sense. Brandon Lee takes the role seriously and manages to capture the fun borderline camp of the original while also paying respectful honor to his father’s Hong Kong film legacy. Unlike the largely silent Carradine, Lee makes no attempts to suppress his vocal kiais, bringing a taste of the Hong Kong films to the role. As such, the film and series manage to capture a nostalgia for fans of both the original ‘70s series and the Hong Kong martial arts films of the era.

KF:TNG has long since achieved a cult status. It lives on in syndication and home video alike. In the 1990s Carradine and Lee would reunite for a made-for-TV follow-up film (and failed series pilot) Kung Fu: The Legend Continues. There is talk of spinning up a “Third Generation” series set in the Depression era with a Film Noir feel, though with the tragic passing of one of the two “Caines” there’s some speculation that this will never happen.

Either way, whether you’re a fan of westerns, martial arts, nostalgia, or all of the above, Kung Fu: The New Generation is a fun way to spend some quality couch surfing time. It’s fun, family friendly, and willing to address big questions in an approachable and non-preachy way.

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[1] Qing Guanmao tip to @nick_crenshaw82 for alerting me to this!

[2] CBS aired the movie in our timeline but the numbers didn’t justify continuing with the series. Here Turner is a fan and actively worked to promote it.

 

[Geekhis Khan]

Chapter 12: New Beginnings and Long Anticipated Returns
From In the Shadow of the Mouse, Non-Disney Animation 1960-2000, by Joshua Ben Jordan

As the 1980s came to an end, the Golden Age of merchandise-driven TV animation began to wane. Audiences for franchises like He Man, Care Bears, GI Joe, Transformers, and My Little Pony began to grow up and move on. Only the brand new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were building an audience. Meanwhile, “lock-out” of new fans to the old franchises due to market saturation of toys began to set in, leaving potential second wave fans feeling “left behind” and not willing to commit[1]. This came right on the heels of a massive shift in the economics of animation.

In 1985 only Disney made near exclusive use of in-house animation, putting them at a financial disadvantage compared to the cheaper largely Asian-made “runaway production” used by the competing studios. Several studios predicted that Disney TV animation would collapse upon itself. By 1988, however, the situation had reversed. The Yen had increased in value 40% against the dollar since 1984 and the cost of living and wages in Japan were increasing steadily. Companies like Sunbow scrambled to find newer, cheaper studios willing to accept US dollars directly, often in Taiwan or South Korea. While these upstart studios would eventually master the craft, the early learning curves were steep and the quality suffered. Suddenly, the costs to produce an episode of Muppet Babies and an episode of My Little Pony were on par, but the quality of the latter was even worse than before. And despite the assumptions of most studios, quality mattered, even to children, who would get upset when Duke’s hair color inexplicably changed from scene to scene. Meanwhile, even a small but growing number of adults were watching some of the Disney cartoons, whose clever writing and multidimensional characters resonated beyond the target audience.

And Disney had an ace up its sleeve: computers. For most of the 1980s computer animation remained an expensive novelty. But by 1988 Disney’s investments, beginning with the DATA machines and then perfected through the Disney Imagination Station and CHERNABOG mainframe during the production of Where the Wild Things Are, were bearing fruit. Using computer-mapped layouts and computer-generated backgrounds had all but eliminated the need for hand-drawing new backgrounds and layering cels on a multiplane frame. All of the upfront costs of building up the library of digital backgrounds was now resulting in drastically lower per-frame costs as animators tapped that library. Combined with the sudden reversal in the economics of runaway production, Disney was now producing animation at near equivalent costs to their lower quality competitors. Disney TV Animation was here to stay.

Furthermore, consumer trends were changing. Complaints were increasing from parents’ groups and educators about the violence and lack of meaningful educational or social value in many of the merch-driven shows. More and more parents and teachers were being more and more deliberate about what their children watched and were selecting products for their kids that had more “redeeming value”. You knew an episode of Muppet Babies or Duck, Duck, Goof would have very few if any weapons, but would have lots of valuable life’s lessons on forgiveness and emotional connection embedded into the plot. You couldn’t say the same about GI Joe, whose problems were inevitably solved through an explosion or punch to the face and whose “educational content” rarely exceeded a 20-second PSA-clip before the final credits[2].

But even as the merch-driven cartoons slowly waned on TV, they still maintained a strong position on the big screen. For most of the 1980s, non-Disney feature animation in the US consisted largely of feature length versions of TV animation aimed exclusively at an existing audience. Animated movie versions of The Care Bears, The Littles, The Smurfs, Alvin and the Chipmunks, Transformers, GI Joe, My Little Pony, He Man/She Ra, and Thundercats[3], all featuring the limited animation and simplistic plots of their television incarnations, appeared on the big screen from 1983 to 1989. They cost very little to produce, underwhelmed anyone outside of their target audience, and generally made marginal profits, if any (The Care Bears Movie of 1985 was a notable exception, making a surprising $34 million against a paltry $2 million budget). The movies thus served more and more as expensive advertising than as any real attempt to turn an immediate theatrical profit.

But the low quality was catching up to them and parent’s groups protested the shameless consumerism and serious violence of the movies, which was often worse than on the TV series. Transformers: The Movie was particularly egregious, with dozens of characters dying, including the beloved hero Optimus Prime. Even the emerging favorites were eschewing the “90-minute commercial” approach. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, for example, decided to pursue a live action film, marking the end of an era.

The major exceptions to the TV-driven rule on the US big screen were the aforementioned Howard the Duck and The Thief and the Cobbler, as well as Japanese anime features, which, following the example of Disney’s partnership with Studio Ghibli, were starting to see distribution in the US. These latter movies included the neo-noir Wicked City, the ludicrously violent Fist of the North Star, and the cyberpunk thriller Akira, all distributed from 1987 to 1989 in the US by Image Entertainment[4] in partnership with Universal. This also included Yutaka Fujioka’s decades-long project Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland, released in 1989. The Japanese releases each generally made a few million dollars in the US, providing Image in particular with a modest profit. They also sold well on VHS to a growing niche audience. The visually stunning Akira would find an appreciative American audience, making a good $19 million in wide release in theaters, built on strong word of mouth, and more than $40 million in video sales and rentals, becoming a beloved cult classic[5].

The modest success of anime in America even encouraged Henry G. Saperstein of United Productions of America (UPA) to finalize a deal with Japan’s Toho for a fully animated Godzilla movie[6]. The classic animation studio partnered with Toho to produce a 90-minute animated film, released in 1988. The film was distributed through Universal, which in addition to its Anime forays was testing the waters on kaiju with the hope of potentially resurrecting King Kong in animated form as a possible tie-in to their King Kong Encounter ride in Universal Studios in Hollywood, with a second secretly being planned for Universal Studios, Orlando. The film garnered good reviews and made a modest profit thanks to a modest US attendance, and it played well in Japan and Asia. VHS sales in America distributed via UPA and Universal managed to build on the cult Godzilla brand in the US.

With the completion of The Thief and the Cobbler, meanwhile, Don Bluth was free to pursue his own projects again. Word got around that he and his team had played a critical role in keeping the ambitious picture on schedule and to some degree within budget. As such, finding willing investors for his new project, the Burt Reynolds and Judith Barsi helmed All Dogs Go to Heaven, a concept which he’d been mulling over since the days of The Secret of NIMH, became easier than it might have otherwise. Bluth and his team stayed in Ireland, setting up shop in Dublin where costs were low but talent high (many of Williams’s former animators stayed on with Bluth after Williams went into semi-retirement). UK-based Goldcrest Films and ACC teamed up to provide funds for the film. With studio backing and an experienced team, who had learned quite a lot from their days working on The Thief and the Cobbler, Bluth was confident that he’d soon be in position to challenge his former bosses at Disney itself.

Bakshi-Kricfalusi Productions[7], meanwhile, had begun production on Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, with animation aping the style of the original Ralph Steadman drawings. Steadman himself served as a consultant, as did Hunter S. Thompson to a degree. “Thompson was either the most fun guy in the room or an absolute lunatic nightmare depending on what combination of substances he was on at the time,” recalled Bakshi. “But either way you couldn’t trust in the accuracy of a single thing that he said, which honestly worked fine for the production.” Getting off the ground proved problematic, as the ex-girlfriend that Thompson had gifted with the movie rights wanted to do a live action version of the book, having a low opinion of animation. “It took the combined lobbying of George Lucas, Martin Scorsese, and Hunter himself, plus all but forcing her to watch Coonskin and Howard the Duck in its uncut form, to get her to relent,” recalled Kricfalusi. The film was executive-produced by Martin Scorsese[8] and distributed by Universal, with voice work by Bill Murray reprising his Where the Buffalo Roam role as the Thompson-expy “Raoul Duke” and Cheech Marin as the Oscar Acosta-expy “Dr. Gonzo”. It would ultimately premier in 1989[9].

As a rule, though, feature animation belonged to Disney throughout the 1980s. While it seems amazing in hindsight, none of the major studios were willing to get involved in feature animation save for Disney. Even the breakout success of Where the Wild Things Are did little to persuade the studio heads to “gamble” on animation. Most analysts of the time concluded that Wild Things was a one-time fluke built out of the general zeitgeist of the mid-1980s and the Boomers sharing nostalgia with their kids. Most predicted that Disney’s upcoming A Small World with its girl protagonist and basis in a 40-year-old children’s novel would be dead-on-arrival. Some studios like Warner Brothers, long since having abandoned even its “composite features”, decided to take a wait-and-see approach with the upcoming Who Framed Roger Rabbit, which was about to return Bugs & Daffy to the big screen, albeit only in cameos. Assuming the movie did well, perhaps they’d revisit the issue.

The past…but what is the future? (Image sources Wikimedia and Amazon)

One major exception in this regard was ABC, or more specifically their Hollywood Pictures subsidiary led by Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg. Eisner made a deal with DIC Entertainment to return The Littles to the big screen. While their original big screen venture, We Are the Littles, had performed poorly and the sequel Liberty and the Littles had gone straight to television, Eisner let them know that he had faith in the franchise. In reality, he had Disney in his sights. After missing the opportunity to take over Disney in 1984, Eisner saw The Littles as exactly the weapon to wield against the perfidious Mouse. Specifically, he saw a new Littles movie as a way to undercut A Small World since the 1960s-era Littles franchise bore a more than passing resemblance in concept to the secret Lilliputian world in Mistress Masham’s Repose.

It wouldn’t be the last dualling, or indeed dueling, movie in the works.

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[1] When there’s no real hope of ever collecting the full set (“gotta get ‘em all!”), then it’s harder for a new potential customer to get into a toy line.

[2] And knowing is half the battle.

[3] Disney has demonstrated that there’s a market for feature animation. As such, the Sunbows of the world have more enthusiastically jumped on the “feature length TV episode” format. If you’re wondering what the Thundercats movie is like, well, watch the original cartoon and expand that to 90 minutes.

[4] In our timeline most went straight to video in the ‘80s or didn’t appear in the US until the 1990s.

[5] In our timeline Akira like almost all 1980’s anime came late to the US and received only a limited release. Here Disney’s example with Studio Ghibli has gotten it a wider release, making a roughly equivalent gross to the earlier Studio Ghibli releases.

[6] Yet another hat-tip to @nick_crenshaw82. I’d forgotten that UPA was still in business at this point!

[7] Known to its fans and detractors alike as “Bat-Shit Productions”.

[8] Scorsese tried unsuccessfully to produce Fear and Loathing in our timeline too.

[9] With BKP busy making this movie they will not have the chance to bamboozle CBS into thinking that they have the rights to Mighty Mouse (which belong to WB in this timeline but ironically belonged to CBS in ours), meaning that Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures is effectively butterflied in this timeline, at least as we know it. WB will relaunch a Mighty Mouse series in the late ‘80s, but it will be animated inhouse. This also means no “cocaine snorting scene” controversy with the American Family Association (MM was actually sniffing shattered flower petals) causing the series to get cancelled early.

 

[Geekhis Khan]

Disclaimer: the following post is very politically incorrect. It indulges in the use of stereotypes for comedic purposes in the vein of Mel Brooks or South Park. In this case it plays with the irony of how often the hyper-masculine and homo-sexual can overlap, be it intentionally on the creator's part or not. And while I sincerely hope that I've established my bona fides as an LGBTQ Ally by this point, I can understand how someone could misinterpret the intent of this post. I can see how someone might be offended by the text as presented. I can also see how He Man fans could misinterpret what I' going for here too and think that I'm trying to insult the beloved '80s franchise. Neither is my intent.

So to be clear, the intent of today's post is a celebration of the way in which the same art can be beloved by different people in different communities for different reasons, and how that's a good thing. It's intended as a celebration of both He Man and gay culture and a celebration of the fact that in recent years adults are increasingly empowered to express their love for things once considered taboo or looked down upon, be it their entertainment or their sexuality.

So with that in mind, I hope that you enjoy today's post. For the record, I would love to see this movie.

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He Man (1987), Manly or Gay?
From the Manly or Gay? With Dirk and Donny Netcast, June 1st, 1997

[Theme Music for Manly or Gay plays, an instrumental disco-like song quite similar to (but legally distinct from) “Macho Man” by The Village People.]

Dirk: Welcome everybody, to the inaugural post of the Manly or Gay? With Dirk and Donny Netcast! My name is Dirk Bigler, and I’m manly, but not gay. I like guns, sports, weightlifting, fast cars, hanging with men and “being with” women.

Donny: And I’m Donny Majors, and I’m gay, but not particularly manly. I like music, art, a properly made espresso, a Broadway show, hanging with women and “being with” men.

Dirk: And if there’s one thing that we can both agree on, it’s that we love playing with manly things…

Donny: …ah, phrasing…

Dirk: …and the manlier the better! As best friends growing up, we both loved the big macho things like Rocky, Conan, and today’s subject, He Man. It just seems that what originally attracted us to these franchises was…something slightly different.

Donny: You see, the ironic thing about manliness is that the farther you plunge into it…

Dirk: …phrasing…

Donny: …the gayer it becomes. Take bodybuilding: you get so big and strong and masculine that you sometimes come full circle into gay. Cowboys? Yea, sorry, Mr. John Wayne, totally gay.

Dirk: Big, tough, hairy chested, leather-clad biker? Manly. Magnum PI? Manly.

Donny: Big, tough, hairy chested, leather-clad biker with a Magnum PI mustache? Totally gay.

Dirk: So, this brings us to today’s subject, He Man, specifically the 1987 Fox Pictures live action film. Even the name “He Man” is one of those things that walks that manly/gay line.

Donny: I guess it’s bi-curious?

Dirk: But before we start, let’s define what “manliness” is. Specifically, let’s grade it by five associations: things that are big are manly. Things that are fast are manly. Things that are loud are manly. Things that are sharp are manly. And fire is manly. This all goes back to the original caveman days when a good fire and a big, sharp spear quickly thrust…

Donny: …phrasing…

Dirk: …was the difference between life and death for the tribe. And things that mix these five things are the manliest of all. Swords? Big and sharp…

Donny: …and phallic…

Dirk: Motorcycles? Fast and loud and run on fire. Assault rifles? A big, loud thing that launches sharp objects quickly using fire. Pure manly.

Donny: …and also very phallic.

Dirk: So, in the case of He Man, the hyper-masculine, sword-wielding, tiger-riding, sky-cycle flying, laser shooting icon of all things manly…

Donny: …and his alter-ego, the effeminate, pink-clad Prince Adam…

Dirk: …you have the perfect mix of the gay and the manly.

Donny: And Prince Adam only gains his manly powers by grasping a big, long sword, thrusting it in the air, and declaring he “has the power”. Seriously, only Lion-O with his sword-that-literally-grows-longer-before-he-fights-other-burly-half-naked-men can pack this much homoerotic inuendo into a single sweaty package.

Dirk: So, with that said…phrasing, by the way…is 1987’s He Man live action movie manly, or is it gay?

Donny: So, to start, let’s look at the film itself, which was groundbreaking in that it took a popular toy line and made it into a movie instead of vice versa, which had been the norm since Star Wars. It was produced by Triad Entertainment under the Fox Pictures label. Rumor has it a Fox exec’s son loved the toys, so it got picked up. Produced by Walter F. Parkes and directed by John G. Avildsen of Rocky and Karate Kid fame and based on a screenplay by Jack Epps Jr. and Jim Cash, the movie was mostly filmed on location or soundstages in Australia and New Zealand, which was a new thing at the time. It had a $29 million budget and had special effects by Industrial Light and Magic and ultimately made a cool $51 million at the box office. Frank Langella was selected as Skeletor, a role he fought for given that his son was a huge Skeletor fan, and after a long and exhausting search that included such names as Sylvester Stallone, Dolph Lundgren, Mickey Roarke, and Lorenzo Llamas, little-known character actor and professional bodybuilder Brian Thompson was chosen as He Man-slash-Prince Adam. It also starred Hulk Hogan as Man-at-Arms, Linda Fiorentino as Evil-Lyn, Mr. T as Beast Man, Elisabeth Shue as Teela, and Billy Barty as the voice of Orko.

Dirk: And the story sees the athletic but underachieving Prince Adam living in luxury, surrounded by hot girls, while his parents attempt to get him to grow up and learn how to lead. But when Skeletor’s armies start ravaging the land, the Sorceress, played by Eartha Kitt, challenges him to stand up and meet his destiny. He is given the Sword of Power, transforming him into He Man, and is tasked with capturing Castle Greyskull from Skeletor. He sets out with his companions Teela, Man-at-Arms, and Orko and they battle Skeletor’s armies and his minions Beast Man and Evil-Lyn, along with cameo appearances by other popular characters from the toy line, and Adam-slash-He Man must learn to be a leader and take responsibility for his decisions. They eventually end up in the final showdown at Castle Greyskull where He Man’s newfound sense of responsibility and humility allows him to defeat Skeletor and win the day. It was just the right mix of action, humor, scary, and child-friendly. And while it was clearly the manliest thing in the universe when I first saw it as a kid, looking at it today even I can see the screaming camp.

Donny: Seriously, the scene where Hogan-as-Man-at-Arms is face to face with Mr. T-as-Beast-Man exchanging masculine quips is so charged with manly tension that whether they intended it or not it’s like pure UST, with a capital “L”.

[audio clip starts]

Man-at-Arms: Listen here, Beast Man, you messed with the wrong warrior today! I’m about to take…you…down! Ya’ hear me?

Beast Man: You can try it, chump! I’m gonna’ rip your ugly face off.

Man-at-Arms: (grunts) Oh yea?

Beast Man: Yeeeaaaaaahhhh… (growls)

Teela: Put your blades away, you two! We’re here to negotiate!

Beast Man: This ain’t over, Man-at-Arms. When this is over, your butt is mine…

[audio clip ends]

Dirk: Well, one point for “gay.”

[“Ca-ching” sound effect plays]

Donny: Oh, yea…definitely. Seriously, are we sure Joel Schumacher didn’t ghostwrite this?

Dirk: But what about He Man himself? Brian Thompson played the part with all the red-blooded manliness of American ‘80s action stars. Even as Prince Adam he played the part as more “lazy, entitled underachiever” than borderline camp gay like in the cartoon. He was the street-smart everyman of Bruce Willis with all the muscle-bound manliness of Schwarzenegger.

[audio clip starts]

He Man: Warriors of Eternia, hear me! For too long Skeletor’s evil has plagued this land! For too long our children have lived in fear! By the power of Greyskull, the tyranny of Skeletor ends now!

[audio clip ends]

Donny: So arousing…

Dirk: You mean “rousing,” right?

Donny: That too.

Dirk: Sure, you can look for unintentional homoeroticism, but it’s harder to find.

Donny: If you’re not looking deep enough…

Dirk: …phrasing. Sure, some have made a joke about Cringer-slash-Battle Cat and gay men with felines, but seriously, he literally rides a freakin’ green tiger into battle, with awesome effects by ILM. And picking up and throwing Trap Jaw across the room really never struck me as anything more than what it was: He Man throwing Trap Jaw across the room. And sure, there’s the standard Freudian jokes about “crossing swords” with Skeletor. But in general, these try to push it too hard…

Donny: …phrasing…

Dirk: …meaning that any perceived gayness is largely a matter of selective interpretation.

Donny: (sighs) Yea, score one for “manly”.

[“Ca-ching” sound effect plays]

Dirk: And then there’s the ladies of the film. They’re both super-hot, as revealingly dressed as a PG rating will allow, and helped many of us straight boys navigate our way into puberty. “Cat fight” scenes were a must. In fact, “Teela or Evil-Lyn” became the “Betty or Veronica” of the late ‘80s.

Donny: They’re also rather manly gals and I can assure you many a young lesbian was asking the same “Teela or Evil-Lyn” question.

[audio clip starts]

[sound of magic zapping, Teela screams while Evil-Lyn laughs]

Evil-Lyn: Having a hard time? My, my…you’ve really let yourself go, girl!

[more magical zapping, no screams]

Teela: Your foul magic has no power over me, Evil-Lyn! Prepare to taste the power of the Light!

[music rises, sound of magical effects, Teela and Evil-Lynn both scream and groan]

[audio clip ends]

Dirk & Donny Together: Draw.

Dirk: And what about our – quote – “Comic Relief” – unquote – Orko?

Donny: Ah yes. The great Billy Barty voicing the ILM puppet, ILM clearly having learned a few tricks from the Disney Creatureworks by that point, and having even enlisted some ex-Henson performers like Toby Philpott. The effects were just delightful in ’87, but they show their age like a Disco Diva at a Grunge fest.

[audio clip starts]

Orko: You don’t scare me, Beast Man! Prepare to face the might of my sorcery!

[sound of rising, crackling lightning, music crescendos…sound of a little static zap, music stops]

Beast Man: That all you got, little troll?

Orko: Ah, well, um, perhaps a bit of my mighty…

[sound of a roar like from some ogre-bear mix, followed by sound of Orko’s screams fading into the distance]

[audio clip ends]

Donny: (sighs) Not even manly enough to be gay.

[“wah-waah” sound effect plays]

Dirk: Which finally brings us to the Bonehead himself: Skeletor.

Donny: Oh, yes, this one’s a challenge. Frank Langella is a respected man from both stage and screen, and brings a bit of the West End thespianism to the role of Skeletor, both in the drama and the melodrama, but mostly he brings the camp. He delights in devouring the scenery at every opportunity, like he was the only one who really got what kind of film that they were making.

Dirk: And yet clearly his athleticism and projection of power made him an honest foe and a credible threat.

Donny: Frank Langella was clearly having the time of his life, and unlike the muscle-bound, sweaty and oiled He Man, he maintains a level of sophisticated Old World masculinity, even as he sweeps across the set like a diva.

[audio clip begins]

Skeletor: He Man, you fool! I am the master of Castle Grey Skull now! Soon my armies shall crush your pitiful soldiers, and all of Eternia shall be MINE! (laughs maniacally)

He Man: Not if I have anything to do with it, Bonehead!

Skeletor: Oooo…such insolence! I shall have such joy tearing you apart!

[dramatic music plays]

[audio clip ends]

Donny: Ooooh…manly!

[“Ka-ching!” sound effect]

Dirk: And gay!

[double “ka-ching!”]

Donny: So, what’s the consensus? Is the He Man movie manly…or gay?

Dirk: Well, I guess that I’d have to say…

Dirk & Donny Together: Manly and gay!!

[celebratory music plays; cheering crowd sound effect]

Dirk: Yes, 1987’s He Man is one of the most unabashedly manly and gay movies of the 1980s. It has all the over-the-top testosterone-driven machismo of Commando, and all of the queer camp of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Donny: Oh, yes. It’s a film that pairs well with both Rambo II and Mommie Dearest. Have it with a glass of French pinot noir or Budweiser straight out of the can.

Dirk: Sweat pants or ascot, this film is a fun and nostalgic way to waste 110 perfectly good minutes.

Donny: And with that, here’s some bonus trivia facts…yaaayyyy! Number one, Frank Langella absolutely loved playing Skeletor and Linda Fiorentino said she had a fun time hamming it up as Evil-Lyn. But Mr. T hated his role as Beast Man and regretted taking it. The prosthetics were uncomfortable and time-consuming to put on, and it made it hard for him to see or speak. Worse yet, after the premier, his character received backlash from the Reverend Al Sharpton, who famously called it – quote – “a black man reduced to a half-beast simpleton like some throwback to Jim Crow stereotypes” – unquote.

Dirk: Yeouch!

Donny: Number two, on the good guy side, Elisabeth Shue and Billy Barty both treated the role as a simple job. Shue was annoyed with the dialog and costume, but was glad for the paycheck while Barty at least appreciated not having to put on makeup or prosthetics!

Dirk: But as to Brian Thompson, well, the poor bastard really believed that this would be his big breakout role, and had it come five years earlier it might have been. Unfortunately for him, Lethal Weapon had premiered that same year, and introduced the world to a grittier, more relatable hero in Bruce Willis and Nothing Can Last would follow the next year. Alas the hyper-masculine man-as-Greek-God bodybuilder look was already on the way out. Thompson would go on to play a few more roles including reprising He Man in the direct-to-video sequel He Man and She Ra: The Curse of Skeletor, in 1989, and would play The Cockroach in The Sword of Cerebus in 1991, but Stallone and Schwarzenegger level success was not coming for him.

Donny: And number three, the film was a modest success. It made back its budget plus ten million in the states and made a good twenty million in profit overseas. Thus, it was a disappointment, but did well enough for Paramount to greenlight Conan the Conqueror the next year, which had been languishing in production hell since Conan the Destroyer underperformed and Red Sonja bombed.

Dirk: Not to mention it led to Cerebus!

Donny: Oh, gods, who can forget that?

Dirk: So, until next time, thank you for tuning in to Manly or Gay? I’m Dirk Bigler…

Donny: …and I’m Donny Majors…

Dirk: …and we’re hoping that you’ll come with us again next week…

Donny: Um…phrasing!

Dirk: …on a journey into the two faces of manliness.

[audio clip begins]

Skeletor: I’ll see you next time, He Man! (laughs maniacally)

[audio clip ends]

[Theme Music plays, fades out; netcast ends]

 

[Geekhis Khan]

Regenerating the 7th Doctor!
From Regenerating Who Netlog, October 21st, 2006

We all have our favorite Old Skool Doctors. Tom Baker’s 4th? Jon Pertwee’s 3rd? Peter Davidson’s 5th? Maybe all the way back to William Hartnell’s 1st or Patrick Troughton’s 2nd?

Well, chances are that you didn’t say Colin Baker’s 6th, though he’s getting a lot more love and respect today than he did at the time, but just maybe you’re one of those loud and proud few who liked Richard Griffiths’ 7th?

Richard Griffiths (R) in Withnail and I, 1987 (Image source “Irishtimes.com”)

Griffiths was, like Colin Baker before him, a deliberate change on what had come before. Where the black clad, Byronic 6th Doctor was dark and cunning, the 7th was a near-literal clown in the Shakespearian sense and with an outfit to match. The so-called “Technicolor Nightmare Coat” worn by Griffiths was originally developed for Colin Baker’s 6th Doctor, but reportedly BBC 1 boss Michael Grade took one look at it and said “no”, and thus Baker got his wish and wore the black velvet jacket that he wanted, which honestly was a more appropriate look for his darker take on the Doctor.

By this point in the show’s run, Dr. Who had been on the air continuously for over a quarter century and was having a hard time retaining audiences as tastes changed. Each of the two late ‘80s Doctors can be seen as a sort of “Hail Mary” to reinvigorate flagging viewership, and which in turn alienated parts of that viewership in what in hindsight can be seen as a vicious circle. The BBC had already largely given up on the show and was arguably subtly sabotaging it. Fan theories abound and supporting evidence is limited and often contradictory. But whatever your thoughts, the 6th and 7th Doctors were clearly products of this volatile time in franchise history.

Fan take on the 6th Doctor a’ la Noir (Image posted by Anthony Redgrave on “pinterest.com”)

Colin Baker had played a supporting role in Dr. Who before, and reportedly was given the job of replacing the outgoing Davidson without an audition. Show runner John Nathan-Turner deliberately wanted a completely different Doctor to what had come before. A darker take on the venerable character was in order, he felt, and this did not please the fans, who found Colin Baker’s Doctor unlikable, borderline evil, and, thanks to the black coat (much as Nathan-Turner feared would happen), inevitably compared him to the Master. “He traded in his Doctorate for a Master’s Degree,” as Michael Palin wryly observed.

Baker left the show after three incomplete seasons on poor terms with the management. Nathan-Turner left the show around the same time, irritated with executive interference and in a growing dispute with scriptwriter Eric Saward. Nathan-Turner took an opportunity with ITV, which had been expanding its programming and was rebroadcasting several US shows and classic films on the new BSB satellite channel in a three-way partnership with ACC’s Robert Holmes-à-Court and CBS’s Ted Turner[1].

The 7th Doctor’s Infamous Technicolor Nightmare Coat (Image source “pinterest.com”)

Saward took over as show runner and, struggling in the midst of the chaos, went back to Nathan-Turner’s original choice for the 5th Doctor, character actor Richard Griffiths, who had a lot of support from management. In keeping with the “complete change in direction” philosophy, and in direct response to the fan anger over the darker take of the 6th Doctor, Griffiths’ Doctor would be much lighter and more comedic. The Technicolor Nightmare Coat, intended originally for Baker as mentioned, was brought back out and refitted for Griffiths. Taking a cue from Patrick Troughton’s 2nd Doctor, Griffiths gave the Doctor a more befuddled, whimsical quality, slightly effeminate in contrast to Baker’s harsh masculinity, and a bit of a hedonist when it came to food and sweets. He famously curled up his prodigious mustache with wax, carried a campy cane shaped like a question mark, and on occasion wore a battered, equally garish top hat to match the coat. A rumpled take on a Victorian fop.

And yet, reportedly influenced by Peter Falk’s Columbo, Griffiths’ Doctor’s clownishness concealed a truly cunning mind, allowing his enemies to underestimate him and then perpetually outfoxing them, seemingly by accident at times. “I thought of him as a carnival barker,” Griffiths said of the character. “He’s sort-of this friendly, likable character, but secretly a bit manipulative and dishonest, only here the Doctor is dishonest only in proportion to the dishonesty of the person that he is reacting to. Play fair with him and he’ll play fair with you. But try and manipulate him, and watch out!”

Companion Mel Bush’s cheery disposition clashed somewhat with the clownishness of Griffiths’ 7th Doctor, so she left at the end of Season 24 to be replaced with the punkish Fen played by comedian Rik Mayall, who may or may not have the blood of the werewolf-like Fenrics in his veins. The comedically rude and obnoxious Fen played a better counterpoint to the 7th Doctor while maintaining the lighter, more comedic take of the 7th Doctor’s run. At the time, some moral guardians (particularly the American Family Association and Televangelist Jerry Falwell) accused the two of being homosexual lovers and accused the show of attempting to “sell a gay lifestyle to children”. While this accused gayness was objectively not the intent of the show runners, the characters did ultimately get accepted as “gay icons” by the LGBTQ community.

Once again, the choices made divided the fans. Many saw the 7th Doctor as a return to the show’s earlier whimsey after the increasing seriousness of the 5th and 6th Doctors’ runs while others felt they’d overcorrected, turning the Doctor into “a clown and a joke”. In hindsight, many started to appreciate the dark seriousness that Colin Baker had brought to the role, and the fandom divided into factions, some at first refusing to recognize the 7th Doctor. Complicating things further for the dedicated fans, Griffiths’ take, particularly when combined with Mayall’s chaotic obnoxiousness, attracted a younger fandom and, more nefariously, a much younger American fandom! The young Yanks, it seemed, liked the silliness and camp of it all and PBS stations moved the show to a Sunday Afternoon slot, where the Age 8-12 Nielsen Ratings started to increase. Soon K-9 was brought back, now with a neon ‘80s makeover, and the TARDIS began to make more frequent visits to places in the States, much to the chagrin of the older British fans[2].

Love him or hate him, Richard Griffiths’ 7th Doctor remains an interesting turn in the history of the long running series. His “Technicolor Nightmare Coat” remains as iconic as Tom Baker’s scarf or Jon Pertwee’s ruffled shirts. His child-friendly and Yank-friendly appearance marked a watershed moment in the show, with long running consequences.

Richard Griffiths left his role in 1989 after a 3-season run. Fen stayed on another half season, now partnered with the even more divisive 8th Doctor, but that’s a story for another time.

---

[1] In our timeline Saward was the one who left, leaving Nathan-Turner with a show he was tired of producing. He went with Sylvester McCoy as the 7th Doctor, who in turn became the last Doctor for several years, with an attempted reboot in the 1990s with Paul McGann that never went beyond the pilot, an abortive attempt at a Nelvana animation, and, finally, the 2003 reboot.

[2] How does one “save” a very quirky long-running show with flagging ratings and an exhausted audience? You find a new audience and hope that more new audience members appear than old audience members leave. Looking at the options that the BBC had in the late 1980s for something as idiosyncratic as Dr. Who, the options were few. Geek Culture barely existed outside of a few Con Circuits and certainly lacked the massive purchasing power it has now. Dr. Who was too campy to be cool even with a Bad Boy Doctor who Played By His Own Rules, and Ironic Camp Cool didn’t yet exist beyond a small audience (only enough to sustain MST3K in an unfavorable Basic Cable time slot). So, who’s left that could possibly like a show as unrepentantly campy as Dr. Who when the old audience was going extinct? The one group that still unironically likes camp: kids! Love it, hate it…it’s what I had so I went there.

Just wait until you see the 8th Doctor!

No, not him (Image source “tribulationsofthera.tumbler.com”)

 

[Geekhis Khan]

The End of the Sunbow Era
Nostalgia was Way Better when I was a Kid Netsite, November 14th, 2002

So, for those of us who grew up in the ‘80s there was one company whose animation resonated with us. A company so ubiquitous that if you saw a cartoon that you loved, then they were probably behind it.

No, not Disney…Sunbow.

For those of you too young to know who Sunbow Entertainment was, they were a subsidiary of Griffin-Bacal Advertising and they were the ones who, along with Marvel Productions (yea, that Marvel), brought you most of the toy-based TV animated shows that were all the rage at the time. Specifically, they brought you the Hasbro-based franchises: GI Joe, Transformers, My Little Pony, Jem and the Holograms, etc. They weren’t alone in this. Filmation brought us He Man and She-Ra. Rankin-Bass brought us Thundercats. Tonka delivered the Go Bots.

Now, I know that it’s popular on the Net to shit all over these shows today. Yea, they lack the sleek, fluid vector animation and deeper characterization and plotlines of today’s versions. Yea, the production values were low even by the standards of the time. They animated on the 27’s and recycled the same sequences ad nauseum. Hair color or uniforms could change from scene to scene. The writing could be pretty hack. Whatever. The same can be said of The Flintstones and Scooby Doo, but those are “beloved classics”. Even the hallowed Looney Tunes were getting pretty cheap and limited in the ‘60s before getting abandoned entirely.

So why do we crap on GI Joe and give The Flintstones a pass? Why do we cringe at the word “Cobrala” but laugh adoringly at the camp of “The Great Gazoo?”. Probably because it all aligned to a changing time in both western culture and our own developing lives.

The truth is that the economics of animation are a bitch. The economics of TV animation from the ‘50s to the ‘90s frankly didn’t allow every show to be animated to Richard Williams levels of fluid realism. It wasn’t until the late ‘80s and early ‘90s that computer advances and improving skills allowed for cost-competitive animation, and even then, not every studio was able to buy a $20 million CHERNABOG. By ‘82 and the disastrous Animators’ Strike, most animation had left the US for cheaper studios offshore. By 1988 they’d gotten increasingly good. Some, like Ghibli, were outdoing even the Americans and Europeans. Half of the quality issues in the ‘80s were from Sunbow trying desperately to keep ahead of the ever-increasing costs of Asian animation by going to newer and less experienced studios. It was a “race to the bottom” and a death spiral, and it undoubtedly soured people’s perceptions.

But I, for one, am not going to pile on the Hate[1]. The truth is that I loved the Transformers and I still fucking love them. Yea, there’s a tinge of irony to the enjoyment (I can see the camp now) and I admit to my own nostalgia glasses, but I like them none the less. I don’t care that Starscream is a whiny bitch. I love that about him. As a foil for Megatron, he’s brilliant. Megatron comes across as that much more of a threat because of it. And it makes Starscream’s assassination of Megatron in the Movie that much more impactful. “Holy shit…he actually did it!”

So, the Sunbow and Filmation productions (etc.) all hold a special place in my heart. They were great shows for what they were: entertainment that knew their audience. Yea, they got me to buy their toys directly rather than pawning that role off on the Commercial Sponsors (My Little Pony advertised during “wholesome” Muppet Babies too). But I loved and I still love the characters: Optimus Prime, Megatron, the Dinobots, Duke, Flint, Destro, Snake Eyes…these were and are great characters. I’d put Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow alongside Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader as the founding characters of my childhood. And thanks to Hasbro and Kenner I literally could have Luke and Snake Eyes team up to battle Darth Vader and Cobra Commander’s evil trans-dimensional alliance.

Sunbow and Lucasfilm can sell me that level of awesome any day.

(Image source “jdtoonart.blogspot.com”)

So, what happened to Sunbow? Well, frankly Disney happened to it. And yea, blaming Disney for everything is as cliché as blaming Sunbow or heavy metal or D&D for youth violence. But in this case Disney actually is partly responsible. Disney bought Marvel, and the leadership, in particular CCO Jim Henson, wasn’t interested in keeping the Sunbow lines going. Now, some like to blame Henson’s peacenik nature, and yea, that was definitely a factor. But to be honest, it was primarily a financial decision. Simply put, kids like me just weren’t tuning in to GI Joe and Transformers or My Little Pony any more. “Bronies” weren’t a thing, and any male regardless of age who watched My Little Pony would be referred for psychiatric evaluation. We were “growing up” and moving on, often at the point of a gun. Neurotic Teenage Dick Me wouldn’t be caught dead watching a “kid’s show” like Transformers. And in the late 1980s yea, there totally was a stigma to watching cartoons as an adult, especially as an adult male. Nerds, Geeks, and Otaku were the targets of harassment and even assault back then. If you wanted to see A Small World or even Akira in the theaters you’d better be on a date. Nowadays everyone watches cartoons thanks to people like Matt Groening and, yes, Jim Henson. But the 1980s were a very different time[2].

So, as we grew up, we did our best to deny to everyone, especially ourselves, that the old Sunbow or Filmation toy-driven classics were anything more than “juvenile crap that we outgrew.” It pains me to say those words today just as it did back then. Thank the Maker of SSRIs that I can talk about it now. So rather than admit that we were fickle little shits driven by popular opinion, it was convenient for us know-it-all teens and twenty-somethings to cite their toy-driven nature and low production values as the reason why we abandoned them, not us succumbing to peer pressure to “grow up and conform”.

We frankly did the same thing with Star Wars in the late ‘80s. No one wanted to be the guy in 10th grade with a Han Solo shirt even as we unironically wore Batman shirts because Warner Brothers and JC Penny’s assured us that it was cool. It was only the later Star Wars novels that allowed us to justify continued interest in the Galaxy Far, Far Away in our 20s. Maybe had Hasbro thought to produce an adult novel series for GI Joe, maybe something like the Marvel comics that willingly addressed adult issues like PTSD, then we’d be holding Sunbow up as a worthy maker of art, not just an amoral bunch of greedy Ad Men who sold valueless schlock to stupid kids.

So, yea, I can look back at the old shows and see their limitations, but rather than pile on the snark like everybody else on the Net I choose to remember what I loved about these series. They were cool. They were full of adventure. Snake Eyes was badass. Grimlock rocked. Lion-O was awesome. They even taught me that girls could kick ass, like Scarlet and Teela.

Even the cheesy PSAs, clearly just there to check the “redeeming value” block, came in handy. To this day I know just what to do when my friend gets a nose bleed (pinch your nose and lean your head forward!). Knowing really is half the battle.

So honestly, looking back at the end of the Sunbow Years is a bittersweet moment for me. It was like my own childhood had faded away with that cheery yellow sun on a blue background logo.

---

[1] Flint-style Beret tip @Kaiser Chris for reminding me to make sure that the aspects of the old Toy-Driven ‘80s cartoons that we loved get mention as well. I liked GI Joe and Transformers best of all.

[2] I’m only slightly exaggerating here. Seriously, the ‘80s were a rough time to be a nerd or geek.

 

[Geekhis Khan]

Mediocre “Ishtar” Underperforms
The Hollywood Reporter, May 25th, 1987

Columbia Pictures’s new epic comedy Isthar, starring Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman and directed by Elaine May, has badly underperformed at the box office[1]. Designed in the vein of the old “Road to…” films of Hope and Crosby, but without the charming musical numbers or self-aware plot that made those films work, the bloated but dull story of two inept musicians getting pulled into intrigue in North Africa has failed to connect with audiences. Stories abound of a troubled production with costs, driven by May and Beatty’s perfectionism, soaring to above $50 million, and it is unexpected to come close to making back its budget. The flop comes at a rough time for Columbia, a subsidiary of Coca-Cola, which has been facing increasing shareholder opposition due to the volatility of its market share, particularly given the recent fiasco of New Coke. Analysts predict that the film will become a talking point on the board of… [Cont’d on pg. 28]

* * *​

Warner Brothers Acquires Six Flags
Wall Street Journal, June 9th, 1987
Warner Brothers Studios and Bally Entertainment recently announced the purchase by Warner of a controlling 51% stake in the Six Flags Theme Park chain for a reported $150 million in cash and an undisclosed assumption of debt. The struggling theme park has a working relationship with Warner Brothers, having licensed the Looney Tunes and DC Comics characters. However, still burdened by debt following the unsuccessful 1984 takeover attempt of Disney and without an appreciable increase in profits, Bally made the decision to divest themselves of the parks and concentrate on their core businesses of gaming equipment and their expanding hotel and casino concerns. Warner Brothers is expected to leverage the parks synergistically with their studio releases, much as Walt Disney Entertainment has famously done, but is otherwise expected to treat the new subsidiary as a turnkey operation. Analysts expect that Warner will leave much of the current middle management in place even as it revamps the struggling finance department, which has struggled under earlier management, who largely used the subsidiary as a place to park debt. For example, in fiscal year… [Cont’d on A14]

* * *​

Shafer, Reiner, Scheinman, Padnik, and Horn launch New Studio
Hollywood Reporter, June 21st, 1987
Martin Shafer, Rob Reiner, Andrew Scheinman, Glenn Padnick and Alan Horn announced the launch of As You Wish Entertainment, a new independent production company. The name is derived from the arc phrase of Reiner’s recent hit The Princess Bride[2], and Reiner in particular sees the name as indicative of their mission. “Hollywood has always been pulled between the poles of art and profit,” said Reiner, “but with all of the mergers and buyouts it has been pulled too far towards the profit side. As You Wish will produce art with the needs and desires of the audience in mind, but without sacrificing artistic integrity. In short, entertainment ‘as you wish’ it to be.” While Reiner didn’t mention any specific companies when he spoke of “sacrificing artistic integrity”, some insiders have cited the recent buyout of his friend and mentor Norman Leer’s Embassy Communications by Columbia Pictures, now a subsidiary of Coca-Cola Corporation, as the motive force. The five partners cited a growing dislike in general for the increasingly corporate-owned major studios. “20th Century Fox had gone to Triad and gotten increasingly bureaucratic and ego-driven,” said Horn, “and Martin & Rob were offering a chance to focus wholly on the production. I recruited Glenn, who was losing his mind over at Embassy [Pictures]. This is going to be a great thing!” Coca-Cola, via Columbia, has agreed to underwrite the company and maintains a 40% stake.

* * *​

Orion Expands Video Market through I’VE, Lieberman Acquisitions
The Hollywood Reporter, October 16th, 1987
Orion Pictures made a big step into the video distribution field with the acquisition of the troubled video distributor International Video Entertainment (I’VE) and Lieberman Enterprises. Flush with cash following several highly successful films in 1986 and 1987, Orion Chairman Arthur Krim and CEO Mario Kassar[3] made the decision to make the double-acquisition, rechristening the merged video distributers into Lieberman International Video Entertainment, or LIVE. The acquisitions mark an aggressive new expansion for the independent studio. “Orion Pictures has been at the forefront of theater entertainment,” said COO Andrew Vajna, “With LIVE we can now better bring our many beloved films right to your living rooms.”

* * *​

Dawn Steel selected as Columbia President
The Hollywood Reporter, October 30th, 1987
Paramount producer Dawn Steel has been selected by Columbia Pictures as their new Studio President, replacing the outgoing David Putnam[4]. She is only the second woman to head a major production studio after Sherry Lansing (20th Century Fox in 1980). Columbia’s board is hoping that the motivated Steel will be able to turn around Columbia’s sagging fortunes under Putnam, whose tenure included the disastrous $50 million flop Ishtar. Steel brings to Columbia experience in the production, merchandising, and advertising spheres. She began her career as a sportswriter for Major League Baseball Digest in 1968 and went on to… [Cont’d on Pg. 19]

(Image source "youtube.com")

* * *​

Coke Refreshes, but No Longer Entertains
Hollywood Reporter, December 21st, 1987
You can blame it on Ishtar if you want, but it was a long time coming. Since first acquiring Columbia Pictures in 1982, Coca-Cola’s shareholders have expressed reservations with the volatile nature of the entertainment industry, which has been reflected in Coke’s fluctuating stock prices. And the recent underperformance of the massively over-budget Elaine May and Warren Beatty comedy (some estimates say the costs broke the $50 million mark) was the straw that broke the blind camel’s back. Coca-Cola, possibly under threat of a shareholder revolt, announced this week that it would break up and sell off its Columbia Pictures assets in a series of small deals[5]. Ted Turner’s CBS has agreed to purchase the lion’s share of the company, in particular the Columbia Pictures name and library. Robert Holmes à Court’s Associated Communications Corporation[6] has acquired Columbia’s shares of Tri-Star Pictures, giving ACC a dominant stake in the studio and leading ACC to rebrand as Atlantic Communications Corporation. Disney, meanwhile, has agreed to buy out Coke’s 40% stake in As You Wish Entertainment.

* * *​

Turner to take Columbia Name
Hollywood Reporter, January 7th, 1988
Entertainment mogul Robert Edward "Ted" Turner III, whose holdings include CBS, Columbia Pictures, and the Turner Entertainment Group, announced a corporate restructuring and rebranding under the venerable Columbia name. The Columbia Entertainment Group, which will include the originally unrelated Columbia Broadcasting Service (CBS) and the Turner Group, becomes the fourth largest entertainment company after Triad, Universal, and Warner Brothers, with Robert Holmes à Court’s Associated Communications Corporation as number five, Walt Disney Entertainment as number six and Capital Cities/ABC as number seven. “Columbia: she’s the symbol of the American nation, the American continent, and the American spirit,” said Turner in the press release. “As such, Columbia Entertainment shall be a showcase for American culture.” The acquisition of the Columbia name last month by Turner marked a noteworthy shift in business model for the company, expanding beyond the television marketplace and into film production. Columbia President Dawn Steel will remain as President of the Columbia Pictures subsidiary while… [Cont’d on Pg. 29]

* * *​

There Can Be Only One Atlantic
Hollywood Reporter, February 1st, 1988
Robert Holmes à Court’s Atlantic Communications Corporation (ACC) announced last Friday that they will be acquiring the Atlantic Entertainment Group (AEG), an independent production and distribution company, in an all-stock purchase. The merger helps to settle a copywrite infringement lawsuit brought against ACC by AEG over alleged brand confusion following ACC’s recent rebranding using the Atlantic name. With this acquisition, ACC enlarges its international production and distribution assets and tightens their toehold in Australia. The deal also brings with it several contacts in the motion picture and television animation industries.

* * *​

The Board of Directors for the Walt Disney Entertainment Company, January 1988:
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 10th, 1988
Stock price: $63.87
Major Shareholders: Henson family (19.8%), Roy E. Disney (13.4%), Disney-Miller family (12.6%), Sid Bass (9.6%), Bill Marriott (6.3%), Amblin Entertainment (1.3%), Apple Comp. (0.7%), Lucasfilm Ltd. (0.42%), Suspected “Knights Errant” (5.2%), Others (30.8%)
Outstanding shares: 150.4 million

* * *​

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

Year​	Revenues​	Expenses*​	Net Income​
1985​	$2,102 M​	$1,728 M​	$374 M​
1986​	$2,746 M​	$2,359 M​	$287 M​
1987​	$3,376 M​	$2,134 M​	$1,242 M​

* Includes Acquisitions of Marvel and MGM and park construction

---

[1] Ishtar will, due to minor random butterflies, not be a legendary flop (much of the massive flopitude of our timeline was driven by a feedback network built upon the growing legend of the troubled production), but it will make around $30 million as a mediocre and forgettable summer comedy. Still, it will lose nearly $20 million in what will still be seen as a massive runaway production. Without the Ghostbusters income Columbia is in worse shape than our timeline at this point and thus more vulnerable.

[2] Named Castle Rock Entertainment after the fictional town in Stand By Me/The Body and other Steven King stories in our timeline.

[3] Recall that Carolco successfully bought Orion in 1986 this timeline and assumed the Orion name.

[4] As happened in our timeline. And is that the coolest name, or what? “Dawn Steel, Private Eye! By day she’s a Fighter Pilot Brain Surgeon, but by night, she’s Ninja Spy Assassin Private Investigator. She fights crime.”

[5] In our timeline Columbia first got spun off with Coke retaining an 80% share before Sony bought up the whole thing.

[6] Holmes à Court is flush with cash ($340 million) following the sale of his majority stake in The Bell Group to Alan Bond and SGIC, as per OTL. This sale was necessitated by the damage he received from the October 1987 international stock market crash.

 

[Geekhis Khan]

Hangin’ with Roger Rabbit
From The Today Show, January 11th, 1988.

Title Card: “The Today Show”

Theme song plays as the Title Card displays. Title card fades to…

Interior – Today Show Set
Jane Pauley and Bryant Gumbel sit alongside Jim Henson, Terry Gilliam, and a Roger Rabbit walkaround. Paul Reubens is off camera, providing voiceover for Roger Rabbit.

The Jessica Rabbit Walkaround is not nearly this creepy in this timeline (Image source “imnotbad.com”)

Jane
Welcome back, everyone, today we have some very special guests, visiting us from Toon Town and Disneyland.

Bryant
Yes, it’s the creators and star of the new hit movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit, in theaters now. Please say hello to Disney Chief Creative Officer and Studio President Jim Henson, director Terry Gilliam, and, of course, the star of the show, Roger Rabbit!

Roger (Paul Reubens V.O.)
Th-th-th-thanks, Bryant! (laughs[1]) It’s an honor to be here!

Jane
So, Roger, tell us about your new movie.

Roger
W-well, Jane, it’s one-part mystery, one-part comedy, one-part live action adventure, and one-part cartoon all shaken over pure fun! (laughs) I had a b-b-blast working on it along with my lovely wife Jessica, my friend Huey, and of course my new friend Ed Harris, who plays Eddie Valiant! I also had a great time with Mr. Tim Curry, who plays the reaaaaalllly scary Judge Doom!

Bryant
So, Tim Curry[2]…not as scary in person, I assume?

Roger
Are you kidding? Thp-p-p-p- He’s a teddy bear! But don’t tell him I told you so! (laughs)

Bryant
And what about Paul Reubens of Pee Wee Herman fame? I hear that he plays a role in this movie.

Roger
R-Reubens? Never met him, W-w-w-which is all the better. That guy c-c-creeps me out! (all laugh)

Jane
Who Framed Roger Rabbit has been a big hit, selling out theaters for three straight weeks[3]. And we also have with us the man who brought us Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Jim Henson.

Jim
Well, thank you, Jane, but I’d be remiss not to give credit where credit is due. The real champion behind Roger Rabbit is my friend CEO Ron Miller, who alas couldn’t[4] be here today. When the original book got published years ago, Ron had the foresight to secure the movie rights. The success of the picture is a credit to his vision.

Jane
As humble as ever, Mr. Henson. Of course, bringing Ron Miller’s original vision to life is director Terry Gilliam. Mr. Gilliam, can you tell us about making Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

Terry
I’ll tell you up front that without Jim I wouldn’t be here! (laughs) When he and Tom Wilhite approached me about directing this I said “no…expletive deleted way!” (all laugh) Directing live action and animation together? No way. Pure laziness on my part. But Jim kept hounding me. And after giving me a chance to make The Bureau and later Munchausen I was hardly going to say no.

Jim
I sent Sweetums to his house to make an offer he couldn’t refuse! (all laugh)

Bryant
So, in addition to the classic Disney cartoon characters like Mickey and Donald, you managed to bring in other beloved characters, from the Warner Brothers Loony Toons characters like Bugs & Daffy to Betty Boop and the Tex Avery classics.

Jane
There are also cameo appearances by classic puppets like Charlie McCarthy and Mortimer Sneed, and not to forget and Kukla, Fran, and Ollie.

Bryant
There’s even an appearance by a young Statler and Waldorf! (laughs)

Jim
Um, yes, we wanted to make this a salute to the Golden Age of Animation, and rather than hog the spotlight for ourselves we invited our sister studios to join us. Writers Jeff Price and Pete Seaman had that idea and Ron and I thought it was excellent. Steve Spielberg helped us convince[5] the other studios to go along.

Jane
And the audiences are loving it.

Roger
It was certainly a d-d-dream come true for me! Mickey and Bugs are my p-p-p-personal heroes, you know!

Jane
Mr. Gilliam, what can you tell us about the experience working with ‘Toons like Roger?

Terry
It was a real challenge to be sure. I’d of course worked a lot with various effects and animations in the past, including my own. I literally die drawing the effects in Search for the Holy Grail. (laughs) Mixing the live with the animated requires a lot of careful preparation. Keeping the eyelines is critical. If Eddie is looking Roger right in the eyes then you need to make sure that when the animators and effects team draw and edit in Roger that he and Eddie are making eye contact in a realistic way the whole time. Keeping the eye lines going was very frustrating at times and we often had to resort to computerized framing[6]. Part of me wishes I’d told Jim ‘no’! (laughs)

Bryant
(close up on Bryant) Now, other than Statler and Waldorf, there were no Muppet appearances. However, we asked one of the Muppets to join us today to talk about it. (cuts back to show everyone; now with Kermit on Jim Henson’s arm) Everyone please welcome Kermit the Frog (applause) So, Kermit, what did you think of the movie?

(Image source “nydailynews.com”)

Jim (as Kermit)
Well, um, Bryant, I rather enjoyed it, you see. As a young tadpole growing up in the swamp, I watched Mickey and Bugs like everyone else, so, um, it was a real joy for me to see them both together.

Bryant
Certainly. But you didn’t make an appearance.

Jim/Kermit
Gosh, Bryant, how old do you think I am? (audience laughs) (close up on Kermit) The movie is set in the late 1940s, and I really didn’t lose my tail until the ‘50s. But a couple of my usual Muppet Show guests were there. (cuts back to wide shot to reveal Statler and Waldorf sitting on the back of the couch; audience applauds)

Jim/Waldorf
Yes, I remember those days like they were yesterday…[7]

Richard Hunt/Statler
For you they were, you forgetful old fool! (laughs, Waldorf makes a face)

Roger
Gosh, yes, I r-r-remember you two! You didn’t t-t-treat my friends Donald and Daffy very nice!

Jim/Waldorf
What can I say, we weren’t very nice in our younger days.

Richard/Statler
And we aren’t very nice now! (both laugh)

Jim/Kermit
Good Grief.

Jane
Mr. Statler, Mr. Waldorf, what did you think of the movie?

Jim/Waldorf
Terrible!

Richard/Statler
Awful!

Jim/Waldorf
Miserable!

Richard/Statler
Dreadful!

Jim/Waldorf
Except for those two handsome young hecklers in the early second act!

Richard/Statler
Yes! More of those guys! (Statler and Waldorf laugh)

Bryant
(close up; laughing) Ladies and gentlemen, Statler and Waldorf! (applause)

Jim/Kermit
(cuts back to wide shot, only Kermit is there, Muppet-wise) Good grief, I have no idea why I keep letting those guys into the theater. They don’t even pay for their seats!

Jane
So, Mr. Gilliam, you have a new feature entering production with Fantasia Films, correct?

Terry
Yes, it’s called the Adventures of Baron von Munchhausen and it’s the third movie of my Trilogy of the Imagination along with Time Bandits, which was about childhood, and The Bureau, which is about adulthood. Baron von Munchausen is about old age. It’s produced by Bernie Brillstein, which, it turns out, has a special connection to the title character. His Uncle Jack, who inspired him to go into entertainment, used to play Baron von Munchausen on the radio[8].

Jim
Bernie was very excited to hear about the movie. He practically begged us to let him produce it.

Roger
Are there any p-p-p-parts for me?

Terry
Not for you, Harvey. (laughter)

Jane
(laughing) Well, with that we need to take a quick commercial break.

Bryant
Thank you, Roger, Jim, Terry, and Kermit! Coming up after the commercial break, we talk as always to my good friend Willard Scott. Hi Willard!​

Exterior – Street Outside of the Today Show Set
Willard Scott stands by a group of excited, cheering fans. He smiles and waves. Statler peeks in from the left side of the screen and frowns. Theme song plays as the Title Card displays. Fade to commercial.

---

[1] Just as Roger’s look is informed by a combination of WB and Disney animation styles, Roger’s laugh in this timeline is a combination of Woody Woodpecker and Goofy.

[2] Tim Curry as Judge Doom will indeed be nightmare fuel, though he’s more like his appearance in Muppet Treasure Island than his appearance in It. This is a family movie.

[3] Will be a hit largely due to the clever characters, witty dialog, and crossover from so many different animation studios, but won’t be quite the massive breakout hit that it was in our timeline due to lacking some of the je ne se quoi of the OTL feature, which was lightning in a bottle, and having some of Gilliam’s quirkiness and pacing problems limit the mass appeal (fewer re-viewings). Eventually this timeline’s version will make over $200 million worldwide against a $50 million budget (even more on video) , which is notably less than in our timeline ($300 million+) but still a certifiable blockbuster.

[4] Or more accurately wouldn’t; Ron Miller wasn’t big on public appearances.

[5] Figuratively had to dispatch Sweetums in some cases.

[6] Unlike our timeline’s Richard Williams-animated characters, which took advantage of his singular genius in making 2D look 3D, the Disney Team has relied on the DATA machines to keep 3D proportions going.

[7] Take time to appreciate the fact that Jim is performing two Muppets right now.

[8] An interesting coincidence!

 

[Geekhis Khan]

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

As 1987 winded down Jim was exhilarated but exhausted. The last four years on one hand had been a breakneck pace of pure imagination, a heady mix of creation and execution. His dream of full creative control that he discussed with Bernie nearly a decade earlier had been largely achieved. But he was feeling further disconnected from his friends and his family. Was this the “lonely at the top” cliché entering his life?

Roger Rabbit had, as Ron Miller long predicted, became a breakout success, topping $200 million. Ron, after years of struggling to leave his unique mark on Disney, had finally done so. Roger Rabbit was the culmination of Ron’s attempts to expand the studio for the late 20th century, a Disney that could bask in the light of Walt’s vision, not simply sit in his shadow. Jim was proud of his part in making the vision happen, but also proud of his own accomplishments. He and his teams made puppetry and animation something to be celebrated as an art form, not just children’s entertainment. They’d pushed the bounds of what animation could be in ways both scary and sweet. Old forms of animation like stop motion were returning to prominence alongside new forms, like the work of 3D and their Pixar Machines.

The World of Magic was tapering off after a good run, and now only played once every few weeks, often as a Special Event release. For example, the December 1987 release of the made-for-TV movie Walt and Roy[1] on World of Magic had been a minor hit. It also created some minor controversy, as it didn’t completely whitewash the two brothers’ contentious relationship, but instead strived to show them as humans rather than flawless geniuses. Popular TV actor John Ritter played Walt while character actor Christopher Lloyd was brought in as Roy. It was a contentious production. Ron, Lilian Disney, and Roy would get into disputes over how to portray a specific scene. The original script had Diane Disney and her father in a dispute that is resolved at her wedding to Ron. Diane didn’t like the subplot. Originally the film was, simply, Walt, but Roy insisted on his father getting “the credit that he was due”, which irritated producer Mike Bonifer, who wanted to know why you’d spend so much time on the “magician’s assistant”, which enraged Roy. Jim suggested that they could make the central conflict of the film the one between Walt and Roy, reducing the Walt-Diane conflict while simultaneously giving Roy O. his due, and ultimately ending on the passing of the Peace Pipe in the late third act, which became the final glue that held the film together. Historians, witnesses, and fan continue to debate the historical accuracy of the film, but all agree that it was a good film in its own right.

But World of Magic was just a fraction of Disney’s TV presence now. Between Saturday Mornings and After School, Disney cartoons like The Rescuers, Muppet Babies, and Duck, Duck, Goof![2] were dominating the airwaves, even despite stiff new competition from Hollywood Animation and a resurgent WB[3]. Meanwhile, Bernie was going full steam ahead on live action TV shows produced by Hyperion, some of which like The Golden Girls and Production! were hits with audiences and critics alike. The Hyperion Channel was a success on basic cable, so much so that they were considering ending the Disney Channel’s subscription status and moving it to basic cable to expand the viewer base.

The parks were expanding as well. New rides and even new parks were on the way. Little Sesame Place had grown up in Philadelphia and now he and Dick Nunis and Frank Wells had new ideas for it and the land it was on. The Grand Floridian Resort had opened and was a smashing success, even more grand and glorious than he’d imagined. The Lapidus-designed Fair Seas Resort was providing a much-needed expansion of and companion to the Contemporary. Villa Romana, with its mix of ancient Roman-inspired cottages and suites, was a fun place for families and couples alike. They’d break ground soon on two new hotels as well. They’d also soon break ground on Disneyland Valencia.

Yet despite all of these successes, the studio was facing a minor internal crisis. The demands for Jim’s time vastly outstretched the supply. Infighting between the various studios and departments for his attentions were reaching a boiling point and pranks were on the verge of becoming less practical and more punitive. Frank Wells, in his typical soft-spoken, polite, but iron clad way of speaking, politely directed Jim to fix it. Roger Rabbit proved to be the way to make it work. With participation in the project by nearly all of the creative departments in one form or another, the production and later runaway success of Who Framed Roger Rabbit proved exactly the opportunity to push a “One Team, One Disney” mindset.

Jim and Ron Miller, sometimes speaking from memorized scripts that Marty Sklar had drafted for them, made sure that every department and team could see and acknowledge the critical contributions of the others. Every scene required the contributions of not only one creative department, but usually all of them. Each hybrid animation scene brought together live action stars, film crews, animators, effects people, and even puppet/Muppet performers and builders (specifically including the New York crew), all mutually dependent upon each other[4]. Each new ride or attraction at the parks brought likewise together the parks performers, studios, animators, and Imagineers. All the while Jim and Ron pushed the One Disney mindset. Jim openly encouraged fraternization between the departments. For once, Jim and Ron were happy to see the ball fields full again.

And finally, Studio 1, once the last scene of Roger Rabbit was wrapped, became the site for a major interdepartmental party that spilled over into Studio 2. The morale boost was well worth the cleanup after the fact. When the movie proved a blockbuster success, there was a second, grander party, ironically called “Ron’s Field Day” in reference to the disastrous “Walt’s Field Day” from 50 years earlier, where the entire company got to party at a fully reserved Villa Romana resort. Only this time alcohol was limited and a curfew gently but resolutely enforced. Incidents were minimal.

Jim also came to understand the fundamental difference between being a creative artist and being a creative executive. The days of being able to get his hands dirty and be a part of the creative process was now a rare treat, not a daily part of his job. He instead needed to be seen and heard more than anything else. He could propose changes and make suggestions and decisions, but in the end, he needed to delegate the workload and day to day tasks and focus on the big creative decisions. Jim spent an increasing amount of time on one of the company jets, often alongside Ron or Frank or Tom, Dick, or Marty, working the whole flight, and making site visits and “showing the flag” to the various regional leaders.

He expanded his executive team. In addition to Tom, Marty, and Bernie, he found likeminded creative and energetic men and women to be his “Creative Associates”, members of a select team of creative and energetic people who would manage creative efforts for Jim and be his eyes, ears, and voice on the ground. Roy E. Disney would be his man in animation, John Lasseter his man in 3D, Bernie Brillstein and Diana Birkenfield would be his man and woman in the studios, Dick Cook his man in Buena Vista Distribution, Marty Sklar his man at Imagineering, Jack Lindquist his man at Disneyland, Tom Fitzgerald his man at Walt Disney World, Orlando Ferrante and Joe Rohde his men in Spain, and as his man in New York for Broadway and the “Philadelphia Experiment”, he tapped a familiar face: David Lazer, now feeling better and anxious for something to do. They were all people with an eye for creative talent, a talent for motivating and encouraging others, and, most critically, the willingness to give Jim nothing but the unvarnished truth. Jim came to rely more and more on this virtual “creative round table” of trusted advisors. Only rarely did his choices pose larger problems, such as when the behavior of one of his trustees on the job led to bigger issues.

Tom Fitzgerald remembered when he was first recruited. “Marty [Sklar] and Jim invited me into Marty’s office where they told me about the job. I had recently worked with George Lucas to complete Star Tours and they’d been impressed with my work and my ability to stay cool in the face of George’s bluntness and particularity. ‘George can be a challenge,’ Jim told me, ‘but you made sure he and Disney both got what we wanted.’ The title was ‘Creative Associate’. I’d be a part of the Imagineering board and report directly to Marty and Jim.”

Tim Fitzgerald discusses the Star Tours attraction with George Lucas, 1987 (Image source “disneyparks.disney.go.com”)

“Diana, Bernie, and David, as Jim’s oldest associates, met with us all and told us how to work with and for Jim,” Fitzgerald continued. “I owe a debt to David and Bernie in particular for teaching me how to manage famous people. We jokingly started calling ourselves ‘Jim’s Spies’, but Roy [Disney] had a different name: ‘The Dream Team’ since we were there to ensure that we were pursuing Walt’s ‘Dream’ rather than the ‘Scheme’ to make a quick buck. We wouldn’t, Roy assured us, win every battle, but we’d win enough. David assured us that both Ron and Tom [Wilhite] would support us while Stan Kinsey assured us that Frank Wells would support the creative management, particularly if we could improve efficiency. I could get behind that.”

The Dream Team became a close-knit group that each built up their own network of likeminded individuals. Jim was able to rely more and more on the group and spread his time across the company, making a conscious effort to spend time with all of his creative children the way he always made a conscious effort to spend time with his actual children, careful to never let any one child feel more or less important to him than another. Jim set out to make sure that each of them adopted his compassionate and fun-loving approach to leadership. “There was no room for egos or aggression,” Tom recalled. “We each took a turn tagging along with Jim, seeing how he worked, seeing how he interacted with people. The goal was to make the creative process fun, encouraging feedback from all levels, seeking spontaneity, leading by example, and avoiding groupthink. It was like a marathon apprenticeship, but we all learned so much.”

For Jim, his regional Dream Team units became a core of work-friends to associate with, both on and off the clock, filling a social as well as professional hole in his life. But even so, the intimate days of HA where the whole Muppets team could carry the laughter all the way from the studio to the pub were gone. Similarly, time spent with his family became fleeting as their own lives and work continued to keep them busy. Lisa was a Hollywood producer and production manager at Amblin. Cheryl had discovered a love for fashion design and, with a letter of recommendation from Caroline Ahmanson, was accepted into the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising in LA[5]. Brian was an Imagineer working with Marty Sklar and David Lazer on the “Philadelphia Experiment”, as they called their plans for the Sesame Place site in Philadelphia. Heather was finishing high school and considering attending Cal Arts.

John was still missing in Asia.

And Jim returned one day in late 1987 to find a note from Emily. She and some friends had decided to join a sailing trip across the Pacific. Such whims were typical of the “free spirited” nature that had first attracted Jim to her and vice versa, and the disappearance was neither totally unexpected nor totally heartbreaking, simply the passing of a brief but memorable time. Jim mostly buried himself in work, but occasionally found time to surf (he was getting better), often with Dick Nunis, or visit the clubs on the Sunset Strip. In part this clubbing was work related, as Bernie had recently signed Thelonious Monster to the new Hyperion Music label. Jim felt a certain responsibility for the troubled young lead singer Bob Forrest, whose passion and pain were apparent to Jim.

And Bob’s pain and self-destructive tendencies were taking a toll on the both of them. One day, not long after they’d signed Thelonious Monster to Hyperion Music, the band was opening for Faith No More when Bob, obviously heavily intoxicated on a combination of substances, went on an angry rant, cursing God and religion and life in general. Some angry men in the audience took umbrage to the rant and a riot erupted, threatening to pull Bob off stage and tear him apart. “I just reacted,” said Jim of the event, matter-of-factly. “I’d always avoided the mosh pits, seeing them as a disturbing but necessary outlet for the teen anger of LA, but I found myself charging in.”

Bassist Billy Gould of Faith No More remembers the event as well. “Jim just jumped in. He somehow weaved his way through the crowd, sliding past people without pushing them, so they paid this old guy no attention. Jim got socked in the eye at one point, but he managed to grab the unconscious Bob and drag him out of the pit. It probably saved Bob’s life.”

“Years of learning to move with a crowd of Muppet performers, jammed in to tight sets, taught me how to move with a crowd,” said Jim of the incident. “Also, maybe the Tai Chi helped!”

Bob later recalled “waking up on a strange bed” at Jim’s house. “The light was bright and I heard noise coming from another room. I walked out, still half on a nod, and there was Jim and Bernie sitting on the fucking couch watching Animal House. I was like ‘what the fuck, this is weird,’ but it was that scene where Belushi is looking through the window at all the topless chicks and, well, ‘tits’, so I joined them. Jim had this huge shiner on his left eye and didn’t pay it any attention. Jim and Bernie were busy talking about John Belushi though. After Animal House they put in a tape of Blues Brothers. I liked the flick and the music and had nowhere else to go, so I kept hanging out. Still, all Jim and Bernie talked about was Belushi. Jim kept laughing about John’s antics with the Muppets both on SNL where he fucking hated them and The Muppet Show where some level of peace was made. Bernie kept talking about how much he missed John. How as awesome as Ghostbusters was that it wasn’t right without John there. Same for Three Caballeros or Spies Like Us.

“I didn’t get what they were doing, at least not consciously, but they were showing me the hole in their lives that John’s fatal OD had left. I wasn’t receptive yet. It went in one ear and out the other. But they never preached or tried to tell me how to live my life. It’d just have refused to listen and walked out the fucking door if they had. Later, Jim got me a cab and paid the guy $100 to drop me off at my current crash pad. It was just a weird moment at the time, but it planted a seed, you know? I wouldn’t fully grasp it for years, but Jim saved my life twice that day.”

“Dad never said anything about what had happened [with the black eye],” said Brian. “He’d just joke ‘you should see the other guy,’ and that was that. But he was clearly at a hard time in his life. I called up Cheryl and Lisa and we made the point to take dad out on a boat trip to Catalina one weekend. He seemed to really enjoy it and it was like old times again to some degree. Even so, he was missing something, some of that old spark. We wondered if it was because of [my brother] John.”

Lisa and Sam Raimi made the point to invite everyone over to her place for Christmas dinner [1987]. Jane and Heather were spending Christmas with Jane’s family and couldn’t make it, but all of the West Coast Hensons were there. It was a joyous moment made all the more joyous with a knock on the door. Lisa answered it and after a brief moment of silence screamed for joy and hugged the thin, bearded man at the door.

It was brother John, reemerged from the far recesses of the Himalayas. He seemed at once both older and younger than they remembered him. Jim, tears in his eyes, gave John a huge bear hug.

“Dad, let go,” John said, laughing.

“What, am I hurting you?”

“No, dad, the tension. I can see it and feel it. You’re holding on to too much. You need to let it go.”

Jim laughed, tears in his eyes, and said, “well, I have the feeling that you can help there, Swami!”

It was a joyous moment; the truly happiest time Jim had recalled in years. Perhaps, Jim thought, time spent best is time spent with the ones you love.

- ∞ - ​

---

[1] Mickey-hat tip to @nick_crenshaw82 for digging this up. Developed and in production in our timeline, but ultimately killed by Michael Eisner. Read about it here.

[2] The Rescuers 1987 cartoon is an expansion of the original 1977 film, but with more supporting characters, sort of like a cross between the movie and Chip and Dale’s Rescue Rangers. Duck, Duck, Goof! is sort of a blend of Duck Tales and Goof Troop, back-to-back half-hours of the extended Duck family adventures and the extended Goofy family hijinks with appearances by Mickey and other characters.

[3] Gummi Bears and Miximals (Wuzzles equivlent) for the former and an earlier Tiny Toons and The New Adventures of Bugs and Daffy for the latter.

[4] Unlike in our timeline where a stuffed Roger was used as a stand-in, here a Roger Rabbit Muppet was developed for the human actors to dynamically interact with. Similar ones existed for other characters (e.g. the Weasels). Paul Reubens etc. received a crash-course in Muppet Performance.

[5] In our timeline Cheryl modelled for some fashion inspired by The Dark Crystal and later earned a degree in textile design from the Fashion Institute of Technology before returning to the Creature Shop.

 

[Geekhis Khan]

Part VII: The View from the Summit​

“It's only lonely at the top if you forget all the people you met along the way and fail to acknowledge their contributions to your success.” – Harvey Mackay

---

Chapter 5: The Symphony of Disney
Excerpt from The Visionary and the Vizier, Jim Henson and Frank Wells at Disney, by Derek N. Dedominos, MBA.

By the late 1980s Frank Wells had reached the top of 6 of the 7 summits. Only the highest, Everest, eluded him. But Everest could wait, because Disney was the most challenging and rewarding summit that he could ever ask for. As Chairman, President, and COO he’d scaled every internal summit except CEO. He knew that there were factions on the board and within the company that he could exploit to gain that seat, but he didn’t want it. Because he knew that there was one summit that he could never reach: no matter what, Disney could never, ever, be his company.

As Marty Sklar often reminded people, “your name will never be on the building.” Only Walt Disney’s name would ever be on the front gate. No one had ever scaled that summit to become Walt Disney. Not even Walter Elias Disney himself! “I’m not Walt Disney anymore,” Walt once told his employees. And Wells knew in his bones that even if he could get his name on the gate it would be an empty victory. Every time Wells reached a summit, literal or metaphorical, there was that elation of accomplishment followed all too quickly by the inevitable “what now?” By contrast, Disney was the unreachable summit, a peak that stretched out forever in front of you. It was a challenge without end, the perfect lesson in that ultimate achievement that Frank Wells coveted: humility.

Instead, the goal would be to perfect and optimize the Disney organization. He was quite proud of the board that he had forged, for example. It was well balanced between the various factions: 3 “Walt people” (Ron Miller, Dianne Disney Miller, and Dick Nunis), 3 “Roy people” (Roy E. Disney, Pete Dailey, and himself), 2 “Jim people” (Jim Henson and Al Gottesman), and 2 neutrals (Al Checchi and Charles Cobb). It was also balanced between inside and outside shareholders: 5 Insiders (Ron, Jim, Dick, Roy, and himself) and 5 Outsiders (Dianne, Pete, Al G., Al C., and Charles). Furthermore, Wells had built a reputation with all factions as a fair arbiter and could readily balance the competing interests and work out mutually beneficial solutions in good faith.

In fact, it was time to stop thinking of Disney as a series of summits. Instead, watching the recording of Leonard Bernstein’s orchestra for Musicana and the way the conductor led the various sections, allowing each its turn to shine, all balanced and in harmony, offered Wells a new metaphor. And so far, the “Symphony of Disney” was playing well. Stan Kinsey remained his right-hand man and, Wells knew, would soon make a good COO. Miller and Henson supported the plan. Dick Nunis however, was coveting the spot and, ultimately, the Presidency. Wells appreciated the drive behind Nunis’ social climbing, but Nunis lacked that critical achievement of humility in Wells’ opinion.

Ron Miller had the humility, but lacked the drive. Miller was fully content as CEO and would likely have been content as a VP or even a producer. Now that he’d succeeded in turning Disney into a new studio that moved beyond the “kids fare” into serious awards-worthy stuff, he was content to let Wells and Henson steer the company while he pointed out the direction to go. The real driving force behind him was his wife Dianne, a woman of purpose who would have surely been groomed for leadership had she grown up in a less sexist time.

Henson had the humility and the drive, but that drive was singularly creative. Henson would make an excellent CEO or Chairman, but he was happy as CCO. His empires were in the imagination. He tried to take on too much by himself and was going to burn out or fail to notice a hypothetical coup if this kept up. Most of the creative heads supported him and had his back, but at Wells’ urging Henson built up his network of Creative Associates to be his eyes and ears on the ground, allowing for Henson to focus on the bigger strategic picture and distribute the load.

Roy Disney had the humility, or seemed to. Most assumed that he lacked the drive. They were wrong. He had a fierce, protective drive for defending the company and the vision of the uncle that he loved, but whose respect he had never gained. Roy Disney was content at the moment guiding Animation and very pleased with the creative directions that Henson was pursuing, but if he ever lost that faith, Wells knew, Roy could be the leader of a revolution in the ranks. Though technically a “Roy man”, Frank Wells kept a close eye and tight rein on his ally.

Wells also needed more people like Stan Kinsey on his team, his own network of “Associates”. Imagineering in particular was struggling with maintaining a budget. Ground was about to be broken in Spain, but already chaos consumed the project with the Spanish government slow to respond on the necessary infrastructure improvements and Dragados y Construcciones constantly arguing with the Imagineers about the designs and manufacturing techniques in a debate that Wells could see was more about ego than engineering. Wells brought in an associate he knew from the John Portman company in Atlanta, Stanley “Mickey” Steinberg[1]. Steinberg had exactly the experience, drive, and force of personality that would be needed to whip the Disneyland Valencia project into shape. And despite his bluster, Steinberg was an ultimately controlled and focused man.

And Mickey had plenty to do. There was Disneyland Valencia, there was a new waterpark in development, and there was the new Entertainment Pavilion at EPCOT based upon movies and movie making. Wells had recently acquired the MGM name and a 20% share of the rights to MGM’s movies from CBS, and they were the perfect foundation for the new attraction[2]. There were new hotels. And then there was the Philadelphia Experiment.

Sesame Place in Philadelphia was always a bit of an outlier in the Disney empire, a small theme park without a Mickey Mouse in sight. The tiny park had grown from its humble 3-acre origins and now featured rides, walkarounds, and simple animatronics such as a push-button Oscar-in-the-trashcan near the gate. There was now a full-sized reproduction of 123 Sesame Street. With a full 14 acres now available, the Philly site would also be the location for a new experiment in regional expansion: the first Disney Outpost, a Disneyland in miniature. Disney Outposts would be small, inexpensive, and limited local attractions that could serve both as a potential revenue source but also as a great teaser for the “real things” in Anaheim and Kissimmee. More families could now afford the time and money to take their kids to a Disney Outpost, but this also set the stage for that “big trip” to come once they’d saved up enough money. If this Philly Outpost proved a success, then more could follow in places like Chicago, Houston, Seattle, London, Paris, Sydney, or, in keeping with a missed opportunity for Walt from the 1960s, St. Louis.

Barton “Bo” Boyd, the VP of Disney Consumer Products, was pushing the idea for a Disney Store retail outlet. In 1987 they opened the first one outside of Disneyland and it was an immediate success. More followed in Orlando and in major cities around the world. A Disney Store would be the perfect addition to the Disney Outposts. Bo was sharp and had big ideas. Wells marked him for grooming along with Jack Lindquist, the VP of Marketing, as more of his own “Operations Associates”.

Disney, Wells had determined by this point, worked best when balanced between three sections: creativity, business, and its outsized personalities, like the sections of an orchestra. Just as the Disney Board was balanced between the Three Families and the Inside and Outside, so would managing Disney require balance between taking creative risks, remaining competitive and profitable, and soothing the egos of its many incredible personalities while simultaneously pushing Roy’s core philosophy of “putting the Dream ahead of the Scheme”, but also Wells’ core philosophy that the "greatest achievement is humility". It was an arrangement that Walt and Roy O. Disney realized instinctively.

Now that the main sections of the orchestra were identified, the Symphony of Disney could play on, Frank Wells as its humble conductor.

---

[1] As he did in our timeline.

[2] In our timeline Michael Eisner, having seen a presentation on Universal’s “Florida Project” (Universal Studios Florida), expanded the Pavilion into a half-day park that was a clone of the original Universal park idea. Frank Wells secured the theme park rights to the MGM classic films and (he thought) the MGM name. The result was Disney-MGM Studios. Here, Eisner isn’t there, so they are still pursuing the original Entertainment Pavilion idea for EPCOT. Sorry @Nerdman3000, but that actually was Disney's original plan. Stay tuned to see how it works out!

 

[Geekhis Khan]

Setting the Stage 5: Oooh, I Wanna’ Take Ya’…

1988. The Beach Boys' “Kokomo”, now fully wormed into your ear whether you clicked on the video or not, charts. The video was filmed on location at Walt Disney World’s fabulous new Grand Floridian Resort. Some consider it the last gasp of Baby Boomer pop culture.

Music in general is entering into a period of transition. Bobby McFerrin tells everyone “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” in a song so seemingly saccharine that many miss its not-so-subtle irony. Poison releases its epic Monster Rock Ballad “Every Rose Has Its Thorn”. Robert Palmer’s “Simply Irresistible” and its army of ‘80s Babe Clones eat up MTV. And Milli Vanilli becomes famous for their music, and then infamous for the lip-synching scandal that follows.

But one song, a song which reaches #8 in the charts, will transcend time and space and become a legend in ways no one at the time could ever have predicted.

Movies are about to change as well, but The Eighties still reign on the Silver Screen. In our timeline Cocktail once again let Tom Cruise be Tom Cruise at his Tom Cruisiest, Coming to America made Eddie Murphy into a king, and Die Hard made Bruce Willis into an A-list star. Big, Beetlejuice, and Good Morning Vietnam we will get to soon enough. The Cosby Show and its spinoff A Different World dominate US TV, but Cheers, The Golden Girls, Growing Pains, Who's the Boss?, Night Court, Murder She Wrote, and Alf are hot on their trail.

Who could be more wholesome than America’s Dad?

It is the last year of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, an extremely popular two terms somewhat marred at the end when the events of the Iran Contra Affair become public. Even so, Saint Ronnie will be the yardstick by which every Republican politician going forward will measure him- or herself. In another world even with the Iran Contra scandal looming, George H. W. Bush, Reagan’s Vice President, would ride his wide coattails to a narrow victory in November over Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts. The Democrats would lick their wounds and plot revenge for 1992.

The Summer Olympics are hosted in Seoul, South Korea, in acknowledgement of how far the so recently dirt-poor nation had come, the newest of the Asian Tigers. India will see the ten-day siege of the Golden Temple, one of many bloody clashes with the Sikh minority that year. The Soviet Army withdraws from Afghanistan after years of costly and senseless war, just as the Greeks, Persians, Mongols, Indians, and British had before them, a costly mistake no nation will ever be so naïve as to repeat, surely[1]. This will be one of many huge changes coming to the Soviet Union under its new premier, Mikhail Gorbachev.

Goodnight, Sweet Prince. And Flights of Angels Sing Thee to Thy Rest

And Sony, meanwhile, tacitly admits defeat in a different war when they start to manufacture and sell VHS video cassettes in addition to their competing Betamax format, which they will continue to manufacture until 2016.

Yes, you read that right. 2016.

---

[1] And stop calling me “Shirley.”

 

[Geekhis Khan]

All, thank you again for the support and the Turtledove win for Best pop Culture Timeline. I'm humbled and thankful. I hope Year 2 can keep up the momentum.

I wish I had something more exciting than a "previously on" for you all!

---

Timeline Summary: 1983 to 1988

By reader request, here is another quick summary of the Timeline events so far, or “Previously, on A Hippie in the House of Mouse”:

As 1984 dawned, Jim Henson had begun turning around the struggling Disney studios even as he struggled with the creative limitations and risk aversion of the conservative faction of Disney executives, in particular Chairman and CEO Emeritus E. Cardon “Card” Walker. With Card’s retirement and replacement with Walt Disney son-in-law Ron Miller as CEO and board member Ray Watson as Chairman, Jim gained some creative freedom, but still grappled with Card, who remained on the Board of Directors and Executive Committee.

Meanwhile, Roy E. Disney, working with his aggressive business manager Stanley Gold, increased his stake in Disney and demanded more board representation. Almost immediately tensions with the Walt side of the family flared. And in the midst of this inner-Disney drama, Associated Communications Corporation (ACC) head Robert Holmes-à-Court initiated a hostile takeover attempt of Disney, whose stock price was undervalued. Holmes-à-Court was soon joined by a coalition of other companies and individuals including Bally/Six Flags and the Tracinda Group. They organized themselves into a shell company called Kingdom Acquisitions, LLC. They planed nothing less than the breakup of Disney, each planning to claim a share of the assets and sell off the rest to pay down the short-term debt incurred in the buy.

This initiated a panic within Disney as Ray Watson attempted to fight off the takeover. In an attempt to dilute Kingdom Acquisitions’ shares (and against Roy Disney’s wishes) Disney initiated an all-stock takeover of Henson Associates (not including the Sesame Street Muppets or Kermit), making Jim Henson the majority shareholder. By this point arbitrageurs had begun taking stakes hoping to turn a quick profit. One of these was Ivan “Piggy” Boesky, whom Frank Oz antagonized in a phone call using his Miss Piggy voice.

But the dilution scheme failed, as the chance to snag the Muppets only further whetted the appetite of Holmes-à-Court. The Disney board then followed Stanley Gold’s plan and organized a White Knight campaign featuring Bass Brothers, Marriott, Apple Computer, Amblin Entertainment, and Lucasfilm, among others, which became known as the Round Table Group. The fight raged for weeks, the stock price soaring as the KA group and RT each bid higher and higher as they tried to scoop up as much stock as possible, each trying to reach the unbreakable 51% that would assure ownership. Stress levers were reaching a breaking point.

The battle came down to the shares held by Boesky, who ultimately sold to Disney as they tendered the higher offer. Miss Piggy and the rest of the Muppet pigs attended his son’s bar mitzva in thanks.

With Disney safe, the repercussions set in. Ron Miller nearly lost his position as CEO. Sid Bass sent Charles Cobb of Arvida to represent his interests and Bill Marriott sent Al Checchi to represent him. Steve Jobs, Steven Spielberg, and George Lucas took ad hoc, non-voting “associate director” positions. In the horse trading after the fact, Card Walker and his faction retired completely from the board and Gold’s friend Frank Wells took over as President and COO of Disney. Ron Miller retained his position as CEO only thanks to the support of Jim Henson.

Frank Wells brought financial discipline to the company that, along with Henson’s creative energy, turned Disney into a powerhouse. The highly profitable Fantasia Films releases of Ghostbusters and Back to the Future combined with the soaring park and hotel profits thanks to Wells’ leadership and helped pay down the short-term White Knight debt, and soon Disney stock was soaring. Disney bought up Marvel, Inc., in 1985 and bought up the name and theme park rights to MGM and a 20% stake in the film library in 1986. Disney soon broke ground on new hotels like the Grand Floridian and Villa Romana and, biggest of all, broke ground on Disneyland Valencia in Pego, Spain.

Meanwhile, the butterflies were reaching other studios. Lisa Henson, Jim's oldest daughter, had interned at Lucasfilm and then gone to work at Amblin, helping lead to Star Wars Episode VI: Legacy of the Jedi and Mask of the Monkey King: An Indiana Jones Adventure. Her boyfriend Sam Raimi redefined horror by introducing the Smart Slasher in his take on Friday the 13th Part 5. He then directed The Running Man and was chosen by Warner Brothers to direct Batman. Gulf+Western bought 20th Century Fox and sold off its industrial assets, rebranding as Triad Entertainment. Michael Eisner, considered for Disney but ultimately passed over in favor of Wells, went to ABC and launched the highly successful Hollywood Pictures with Jeffrey Katzenberg. Their “formula” of “lower budget, undervalued actor, ‘high concept’ film” appears to be working like a charm.

But the biggest changes came to Ted Turner, who partnered with ACC to take over CBS. He then bought up MGM in whole from Tracinda, but it was a bite more than he could chew, facilitating the breakup and sales, including selling the MGM name, theme park rights, and a 20% share of his 51% stake in the film library to Disney as mentioned. ACC, meanwhile, grabbed MGM's 33% stake in Tri-Star and began expanding into the US. ACC and Turner then grabbed up the assets of Coca-Cola’s breakup of Columbia Pictures, Turner taking the Columbia name and studios and ACC claiming their 33% stake in Tri-Star, giving him a commanding 66% and rebranding as Atlantic Communications Corporation.

Technology is changing too. Butterflies from his EPCOT sponsorship led to Jack Tramiel maintaining control of Commodore, Richard Branson buying up Atari and creating Virgin Computers, and the recently-kicked-out-of-Apple Steve Jobs joining the Disney Imagineering “I-Works” board. There, Jobs helped launch Imagine, Inc., leading to such advances in computer graphics systems as the Disney Imagination Station (DIS) and the Cray-2 based CHERNABOG compiler, leading to a near-revolution in computer vector graphics and animation, particularly once paired with the “Pixar machines” of the Disney Digital Division (3D). “Hybrid” hand-drawn and computer animation has found a cost effective “sweet spot” between the two traditions. The Disney “Creatureworks”, formerly Jim Henson’s Creature Shop, has meanwhile revolutionized practical puppetry and animatronic effects with new, organic and lifelike techniques.

Finally, Disney’s smashing success in TV animation and feature animation (Where the Wild Things Are (1986) was a blockbuster success) and hybrid live-action and animation (Who Framed Roger Rabbit), aided by 3D’s advances, inspires other studios to get back into the animation game, with Turner/CBS buying Hanna-Barbera, Warner Brothers buying Rankin-Bass, ABC/Hollywood buying DIC, and Ralph Bakshi and John Kricfalusi partnering as Bakshi-Kricfalusi Productions, known to all as “Bat Shit Productions” for its adult themes and surreal animation. After partnering with Richard Williams to create the visually stunning but financially unsuccessful The Thief and the Cobbler, Don Bluth is starting to look for new opportunities to take a bite out of the Mouse. All look to finally put the resurgent Disney back in its place.

And what could Warner Brothers possibly be doing with their recent purchase of Six Flags from Bally?

So, as 1988 dawns, will Disney be able to continue its upwards trajectory? Will WB and Turner/CBS or ABC/Hollywood be able to push them aside? Will Bluth finally have his revenge on Disney? Will Robert Holmes-à-Court complete his time machine and undue all that was done, making the White Knight campaign all for naught?

[cue dramatic organ music]

Tune in next time for yet more egregious episodes of A Hippie in the House of Mouse.

 

[Geekhis Khan]

Chapter 21: Universal Goes Bananas
From Theme Park Confidential: The Corporate Machinations and Machiavellian Intrigue behind your Favorite Parks, by E. Z. Ryder.

Throughout the ‘80s Disney remained the master of the theme park, or “Disney Resorts” as they were increasingly calling them. Chains like Six Flags, Sea World, Kings, Busch Gardens, and Marriott’s Great America, as well as smaller one-or-two park companies like Knott’s Berry Farm and Hershey Park, tended to produce smaller parks that combined a few rides, some walkaround characters, and a few shows into a fun day out, yet nobody but Disney had mastered the immersive experience with expert audio-animatronics that were the hallmark of Disney.

That was about to change. In the early 1980s a couple of notable things happened that would break Disney’s virtual monopoly on Imagineering. First, veteran Imagineer Bob Gurr, the mind behind such legendary rides as The Haunted Mansion, the Matterhorn Bobsleds, and the iconic Disney Monorail, retired from WED in the early '80s and created Gurr Design, Inc. In 1984 he would astound audiences and viewers of the 1984 Los Angeles Summer Olympics closing ceremonies when a UFO and an alien came to visit earth.

Following or anticipating layoffs after the 1982 opening of EPCOT Center, other Imagineers left Disney and became available to work for other companies. Tom Reidenbach, Dave Schweninger, and Peter Alexander, among others, left Disney and sought employment elsewhere. Alexander’s Totally Fun Company partnered with Gurr, Reidenbach, and Schweninger to produce the King Kong Encounter attraction for Universal Hollywood Studios. It was the first audio-animatronic attraction for the studio, which had previously relied on studio tours to attract guests. Kong was an incredible success. “L.A. Kong [opened] in June, 1986, causing tour attendance to jump to 4.5 million, one million more than had ever visited the tour before,” Alexander said in a later interview. The secret was, as per Disney Imagineering, the immersive storytelling and attention to detail. Rather than simply take the guests past the King Kong animatronic, they were fully inserted into the experience, the guests’ tram attacked by Kong while crossing the Brooklyn Bridge. They got to sit there while Kong swatted a helicopter from the sky and shook the bridge and the guests.

And if that wasn’t enough, you had Kong’s famous “banana breath,” accomplished by an impeller driven banana scented aerosol. “The idea came to me while I was making one of the first presentations on the L.A. show,” said Alexander. “I just sort of tossed in the idea that as the tram passed Kong, the last thing the guests would experience was Kong's ‘banana breath.’ After hearing this, my boss, Jay Stein, lobbied for bad breath, but I kept mentioning ‘banana breath’ in each and every ‘pitch.’ After a while, it became accepted[1].”

Now with Fresh Banana Scent! (Image from “themeparkinsider.com”)

With the success of the King Kong Encounter attraction, Universal began to look again at its shelved “Florida Project”, a full-sized theme park in Orlando intended to compete directly with Walt Disney World. Like the Universal Hollywood tour, the focus of the park would be a chance to tour real, working movie and TV studios, but now with Disney-like attractions such as an even grander “Kongfrontation” ride. Plans had begun in 1982 with concept art by the three-time Academy Award winning art director Henry Bumstead. However, other than the Kong ride and some vague ideas for an E.T. encounter or a show based on Jaws, the Blues Brothers, or Conan the Barbarian, there were no anchoring attractions[2]. Sid Sheinberg talked with Alexander about the plans and was shocked to learn that rides capable of directly competing with Disney would cost $25-30 million each, roughly quadruple the $7 million invested in the Hollywood Kong. The idea was shelved.

This would change in 1987 when two things happened: first was the acquisition of the Six Flags theme park chain by rival studio Warner Brothers[3]. The second was the announcement of the new Entertainment Pavilion at EPCOT Center, which would cover movies and moviemaking and would feature an interactive dark ride based upon classic movies, in particular the MGM Classics recently acquired by Disney. Sid Sheinberg convinced Universal Chairman Lew Wasserman that Universal needed to act now and act big, or get left behind.

However, building a theme park to rival Disney was easier said than done. Delays due to zoning and permitting, something that Disney had avoided through the clever and arguably underhanded “Reedy Creek Improvement District” deal, pushed things back a year. Ground was finally broken in 1988[4] for the new Universal Studios Park and Tour in Orlando, Florida, right in Walt Disney World’s back yard. The park would open late in 1991 after a blitz of development.

In the meantime, the announcement sent shockwaves through Disney, who was already on edge following Warner Brothers’ acquisition of Six Flags in 1987. Worse yet, Associate Director Steven Spielberg made no secret of his plans to work with Universal on new E.T. and Jaws attractions, and as an Outside Director Disney had little direct recourse to stop him. Furthermore, with the promise of attractions based upon Amblin co-productions like Back to the Future, or the risk of him dumping his stock in revenge, they had little incentive to take action against him. Disney hadn’t faced real competition in the theme park area since the 1950s, and the idea of a well-financed park with immersive animatronics right down the street from the crown jewel of Walt Disney World was inconceivable. Suddenly the new Entertainment Pavilion, which was expected to draw lots of visitors new and old to EPCOT, looked quaint. Frank Wells initially hoped to convince Henson and Miller to expand the pavilion into a half-day park, but it was too late. Ground was broken not just at EPCOT, but in Valencia and at the new Disneytown in Philadelphia, and companies were already under contract for Project Poseidon. Disney had only a few years’ time before they could be facing not one, but two serious new competitors in the park business.

* * *​

Entertainment Companies with Major Assets (1988)

Triad Entertainment Group
Chairman/CEO: Martin S. Davis

Major Subsidiaries:

• Paramount Studios
• 20th Century Studios
• Fox Studios (Includes Filmation)
• Paramount-Fox Network Television (PFN)
• Madison Square Garden (Includes the New York Rangers and New York Knicks)
• Simon & Schuster Publishing
• Sega Corp.

MCA/Universal Entertainment Group
Chairman/CEO: Lew Wasserman

Major Subsidiaries:

• Universal City Studios Group
• Universal Television Group
• Universal Studios Parks & Tours (developmental)
• Music Corporation of America (MCA) Records

Warner Brothers Entertainment, Inc.
Chairman/CEO: Robert A. Daly

Major Subsidiaries:

• Warner Bros. Pictures Group
• Warner Bros. Television Studios
• Warner Bros. Home Studios
• Warner Bros. Global Brands and Franchises
• Six Flags Theme Parks
• Warner Bros. Publishing (Includes DC Comics)
• Warner Brothers Animation (Includes Rankin-Bass)

Columbia Entertainment Group
Chairman/CEO: Ted Turner

Major Subsidiaries:

• Columbia Pictures
• Columbia Broadcasting Service (CBS)
• Turner Entertainment Group
• Hanna-Barbera Animation

Atlantic Communications Corporation
Chairman/CEO: Robert Holmes-à-Court

Major Subsidiaries:

• Tri-Star Studios
• Atlantic Productions & Distribution (assembled from CBS Films, CBS distribution, AEG, etc.)
• Independent Television Service (ITV) Broadcasting and Productions (incl. Elstree Studios)
• British Satellite Broadcasting (BSB) (minority stake)
• CBS (minority stake)
• Atlantic Broadcasting Group (Various UK, Australian, and US Local Television Stations)

Walt Disney Entertainment Company
Chairman: Frank Wells; CEO: Ron Miller

Major Subsidiaries:

• Walt Disney Studios (includes Fantasia Films, Walt Disney Animation, and Disney Publishing, including Marvel, Inc.)
• MGM Studios (includes Hyperion Pictures and Buena Vista Distribution)
• Walt Disney Recreation (includes Parks & Hotels)
• Walt Disney Imagineering (includes Imagine, Inc.)

Capital Cities/ABC
Chairman/CEO: Thomas S. Murphy

Major Subsidiaries:

• American Broadcasting Company (ABC) Television Network Group
• Capital Cities/ABC Broadcasting Group (various TV affiliates)
• ABC Cable and International Broadcast Group
• Hollywood Studios (Includes Hollywood Animation/DIC)
• CC/ABC Publishing

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[1] Peter Alexander quotes from a 2013 post on the Totally Fun Company website, available via Wayback Machine here.

[2] Butterflies are flying: in our timeline Steven Spielberg, a former college roommate of Peter Alexander, happened across the Kong animatronic while it was under development in early 1986. Despite George Lucas’s insistence to Spielberg that only Disney Imagineering had the chops to make a proper attraction (he was in production on Star Tours at the time), Spielberg went to Universal that day to explore a ride based on Back to the Future, which was a Universal co-production in our timeline. Suitably impressed with the Kong attraction and fully interested in doing a Back to the Future ride with Universal, the Florida Project was brought back to life. In this timeline, Back to the Future was a Disney production due to direct butterflies and Spielberg is also a major shareholder and Associate Director, and thus the ride will be a Disney ride.

[3] More details on this later.

[4] Two years later than in our timeline.