Oh, I missed that sentence about Orlando. Oops. Anyway, hopefully we get another update soon
American Magic: A Different History of Disney
- Thread starter OldNavy1988
- Start date
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That implies that Orlando is actually a real city. It's not, it desperately wants to be, but it's not. And it never will be.Good thing too. Take away Disney World, you effectively take away Orlando as a major city!
It could've been if EPCoT had been the city it was supposed to be, instead of the theme park it became, but that ship has long since sailed IOTL.
ITTL is a whole other story though; I have hope for the Experimental Prototype Community/City of Tomorrow to take shape at least close to what was originally intended.
I am not 100% sure, but I think if the St Louis park were built in OTL, the baseball Cardinals, plus the Blues, would've generated more interest from tourists than the football Cardinals or even the Rams at the turn of the millennium.
The Florida Project
The Florida Project
While construction was taking place in St. Louis, the eccentric Walt Disney was already working in secret to create what he hoped would be the ultimate utopia. Using dummy corporations with names like Ayefour, Latin American Development and Reedy Creek Ranch Corporation, Walt bought up more than 27,400 acres of swamp, double the size of Manhattan, and left the press guessing as to who exactly bought up such an extraordinary amount of real estate.
In a film presentation laying out the project, Walt famously proclaimed: "There's enough land here to hold all the ideas and plans we can possibly imagine."
The initial plans would indeed include a theme park similar to Disneyland, flanked by multiple themed resorts at the northwestern extreme of the property. To the southwest was to be an airport and a welcome center that would include a campground, motels and a trailer park. Up the road from the welcome center was to be an industrial park, where Walt hoped General Electric, Monsanto and other corporations who had sponsored his previous theme park (and World's Fair) efforts could lease the space to roll out future advances in technology.
But the granddaddy of Walt's initial Florida Project was the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, otherwise known as EPCOT, or Progress City. Plans for the Progress City called for a center hub with everything else spread outward, similar to the layout of the Disneyland park in California. At the center of the complex was to be a 50 acre downtown center with office space, shops, restaurants, and in the very middle, a hotel towering the entire EPCOT facility. The residential zones called for 20,000 occupants, with Wedway Peoplemovers linking the residential zones to the commercial core. Automobile access would still be possible, albeit with roads designated specifically for cars, and special roads for big rigs delivering goods to the complex.
The theme park, soon to be dubbed the Magic Kingdom, along with EPCOT, the industrial park, the welcome center and the airport were to be linked together via monorail.
After Riverfront Square opened, Walt would have little time to celebrate the success of his St. Louis indoor park. He returned to his Burbank office where his brother Roy would be the bearer of bad news. Roy and the board of directors warned that if Walt were to proceed with his EPCOT plans, the company which stood for 43 years, would find itself in financial ruin. The proposed industrial park would be unable to attract enough tenants to make it worthwhile due to significant economic sea changes that hampered many blue collar industries. Of course, Walt defied the naysayers many times before. His version of Snow White, mocked during production as "Disney's Folly" by rival studios, bucked the odds to become the #1 movie in America for 1937 and 1938. Skeptics tried to dismiss Disneyland as a touch and go proposition, but its 1955 opening proved Walt right again. Gussie Busch once remarked that Walt couldn't succeed in St. Louis without a little thing called "Budweiser," but Riverfront Square was a home run for both Walt and all of Cardinal Nation. This time, it seemed as though the 64 year old showbiz tycoon's luck was finally starting to run out. Some on the board were secretly convinced Walt had gone completely insane with his EPCOT concept.
At a tense board meeting mere days after his sixty fifth birthday, Walt was given a counter offer: A dramatically stripped down version of EPCOT, a "permanent World's Fair" of sorts dubbed the "World Showcase," which consisted of twin horseshoe shaped buildings, with enough space to represent 20 nations, next door to the Ticket and Transportation Center. Walt, ever the fighter, was strongly apprehensive towards the counteroffer at first, but he slowly realized deep down Roy was right about the potential collapse the initial EPCOT/Progress City would bring to the entire Disney organization. The following week, after careful consideration, Walt agreed to the board's counteroffer.
While construction was taking place in St. Louis, the eccentric Walt Disney was already working in secret to create what he hoped would be the ultimate utopia. Using dummy corporations with names like Ayefour, Latin American Development and Reedy Creek Ranch Corporation, Walt bought up more than 27,400 acres of swamp, double the size of Manhattan, and left the press guessing as to who exactly bought up such an extraordinary amount of real estate.
In a film presentation laying out the project, Walt famously proclaimed: "There's enough land here to hold all the ideas and plans we can possibly imagine."
The initial plans would indeed include a theme park similar to Disneyland, flanked by multiple themed resorts at the northwestern extreme of the property. To the southwest was to be an airport and a welcome center that would include a campground, motels and a trailer park. Up the road from the welcome center was to be an industrial park, where Walt hoped General Electric, Monsanto and other corporations who had sponsored his previous theme park (and World's Fair) efforts could lease the space to roll out future advances in technology.
But the granddaddy of Walt's initial Florida Project was the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, otherwise known as EPCOT, or Progress City. Plans for the Progress City called for a center hub with everything else spread outward, similar to the layout of the Disneyland park in California. At the center of the complex was to be a 50 acre downtown center with office space, shops, restaurants, and in the very middle, a hotel towering the entire EPCOT facility. The residential zones called for 20,000 occupants, with Wedway Peoplemovers linking the residential zones to the commercial core. Automobile access would still be possible, albeit with roads designated specifically for cars, and special roads for big rigs delivering goods to the complex.
The theme park, soon to be dubbed the Magic Kingdom, along with EPCOT, the industrial park, the welcome center and the airport were to be linked together via monorail.
After Riverfront Square opened, Walt would have little time to celebrate the success of his St. Louis indoor park. He returned to his Burbank office where his brother Roy would be the bearer of bad news. Roy and the board of directors warned that if Walt were to proceed with his EPCOT plans, the company which stood for 43 years, would find itself in financial ruin. The proposed industrial park would be unable to attract enough tenants to make it worthwhile due to significant economic sea changes that hampered many blue collar industries. Of course, Walt defied the naysayers many times before. His version of Snow White, mocked during production as "Disney's Folly" by rival studios, bucked the odds to become the #1 movie in America for 1937 and 1938. Skeptics tried to dismiss Disneyland as a touch and go proposition, but its 1955 opening proved Walt right again. Gussie Busch once remarked that Walt couldn't succeed in St. Louis without a little thing called "Budweiser," but Riverfront Square was a home run for both Walt and all of Cardinal Nation. This time, it seemed as though the 64 year old showbiz tycoon's luck was finally starting to run out. Some on the board were secretly convinced Walt had gone completely insane with his EPCOT concept.
At a tense board meeting mere days after his sixty fifth birthday, Walt was given a counter offer: A dramatically stripped down version of EPCOT, a "permanent World's Fair" of sorts dubbed the "World Showcase," which consisted of twin horseshoe shaped buildings, with enough space to represent 20 nations, next door to the Ticket and Transportation Center. Walt, ever the fighter, was strongly apprehensive towards the counteroffer at first, but he slowly realized deep down Roy was right about the potential collapse the initial EPCOT/Progress City would bring to the entire Disney organization. The following week, after careful consideration, Walt agreed to the board's counteroffer.
So far it doesn't seem all that AH. OK, the Disneyland show airs on a different network, and there's already a second Disney park in St. Louis--which sort of takes a little bit of drive out of what is ATL the third, in Florida since people who OTL would flock to DisneyWorld are diverted a bit. The St. Louis park is not like Disneyland of course, which helps a bit.
But by and large, it is much the same as OTL.
Interesting that what kills Epcot, as the grand planned living community as opposed to a part of a resort, ITTL is probably what killed it OTL--Disney had a vision of how America works that was becoming obsolete due to what in retrospect appears as globalization, with US based factories and labor producing less while the corporations that Disney presumed would invest in Epcot's productive enterprises invest overseas instead.
Now the process of globalization OTL had an earlier phase, in which factories in the traditional industrial core areas--the Northeast and Midwest--shifted first, before going overseas, to the less developed South and West--called, by "southern strategy" mastermind for Richard Nixon "The Sunbelt." This dovetailed, ironically perhaps, with Lyndon Johnson's extended New Deal vision of vitalizing the South that NASA, along with military base expansion, did much to promote.
Thus despite the naysayers on his own board--who are pretty farsighted in terms of foreseeing the general trends though of course not the sort of parochial Utopian Walt Disney was--in fact, in the middle to short run, say from 1960-1980, Walt Disney may have a point these calculating geniuses overlook. Insofar as the USA will continue to expand and develop internally, as opposed to US corporations expanding assets they own overseas instead, the places that will be built up will be in the southern tier--the eastern part traditionally called "the South" and the Southwest, with some "Sunbelt" growth actually happening in the Pacific Northwest too. But Disney is dead on in thinking that if there is going to be any next wave of US based industrialization, it will be on the southern tier. And of course Epcot/Disneyworld is not in fact very far from the "Space Coast" around Cape Canaveral--although at this time it would take some guesswork and betting to correctly anticipate that there will be a big space complex there. Hitherto, in the 1940s and early '50s, the action of rocketry was mainly in the Southwest, near White Sands, New Mexico. And while the Cape Canaveral area was chosen early on as one rocket launch sites it had a competitor much farther north at Wallops Island. Whereas American space visionaries were considering looking much farther afield, at one of the "Christmas Islands" in the equatorial Pacific, and I'd guess Hawaii might have been in the speculative running too. It was only late in the 50s that White Sands was deemphasized (due to a stray rocket crashing near a town in Mexico, technically an international incident and it could have been much worse if it landed actually in the town) and the focus was shifted to the most southerly site in the Continental USA, on the East coast--that is, Canaveral.
So someone could predict Canaveral would be it, if they discounted the importance of launching from a site as equatorial as possible and correctly judged the cost/benefit analysis that ruled out not only distant Christmas Island but even Hawaii as too distant from industrial centers and too expensive to operate out of, and didn't swing the other way to back the longest established site (White Sands should be out, IMHO, just because all trajectories out of it pass over land, and much of that fairly densely inhabited, but after all being stuck with an inland site did not stop the Soviets, and lots of people still tout advantages of over land launches) or a site more central to established US industry and transport like Wallops. In retrospect Cape Canaveral has some really big advantages--it is pretty far south, not down to the Tropic of Cancer but close; it has good harbor potential which was developed; it has good ranges of launch trajectories eastward and more or less south that are free of inhabited islands in the fire path. And although Florida was somewhat peripheral to US industrial development in the 1950s, still its transport and infrastructure was well developed particularly on the Atlantic coast due to heavy traffic for vacationers going to resorts and already a certain expatriate northern population of retirees. Basically the development of consumer-affordable air conditioning allowed Florida to be massively colonized.
So really, aside from the arguably peripheral and minor "space boom" that Disney certainly did want to be involved in, on the whole the day of the Sun Belt was coming. It might prove somewhat fleeting in terms of major industrial development, but for the next generation or so Walt's instinct seems sound despite what the eyeshade-wearing analysts were saying. Florida in particular could expect a boom due to its pre-established reputation as a desirable destination (offset to be sure by the infamous "Florida Land Deal" scandals of the 1920s) and if the USA did commit to some sort of space program, Cape Canaveral was quite likely to be a big part of it. Even if the US government absolutely refused to commit to glamorous stuff like "Man in Space," (but even Eisenhower, despite his "go slow" approach, was already backing that--slowly) still the US military would surely be developing a lot of rocketry and Cape Canaveral would be where they would test most of it, or even deploy some of it.
What I'm getting at here that while Epcot surely would tend to "Rust Belt" status by the 1990s, during the Sixties and Seventies, just such industries as Walt Disney hoped to attract to anchor the Town of the Future would indeed be interested in setting up shop somewhere in the Sun Belt, and perhaps if space travel really took off, something Disney was keen to promote, specifically space service industries might benefit from being located quite near Canaveral.
At this point I wonder if the properties Disney acquired included or bordered on any established transport canals running across the peninsula--because those canals would be how some really large components would get to Canaveral. However, even if not there would be plenty of other items that could go over roads or railroads, and benefit from being just a few hundred miles away from the launch site.
So--given that for now Disney has agreed to downsize "Epcot" to something kind of like OTL, is there any way he can design it so that it still can be expanded in accordance with his vision later? Because by 1963 or so, the opportunity might seem to be there after all for the whole visionary thing, with Disney tapping into Space Race funds to leverage building it up ASAP to house NASA-connected production.
I might go so far as to tie it to a couple other ATLs out there. It was in reading Nixonhead's Kolyma's Shadow, which is premised on Soviet rocket guru Sergei Korolev having died during his Siberian exile and being unknown, with effects on the Soviet and hence American space programs, that I learned of Werner Von Braun's relationship with Chrysler Corporation. It seemed bizarre that a car company would be responsible for building the Saturn 1 first stages (Aka "Cluster's Last Stand," but actually it is a pretty good stage design) but it makes more sense when one remembers that Von Braun's group were recruited by the US Army, and that Chrysler might seem bizarre as an aerospace contractor but makes perfect sense as a contractor for trucks, jeeps, tanks and so forth--in short--an Army contractor! So via the Army von Braun formed a relationship with Chrysler whereby they made the structure of Redstone and Jupiter missiles. The Saturn 1 first stage design was a brilliant kludge of wrapping 8 of the former around one of the latter, to form a 9-tank tube structure that, when one filled 4 of the outer smaller Redstone legacy tubes with RP-1 rocket fuel (basically highly refined kerosene) and the remaining 5 tanks with liquid oxygen, held the right balance of fluids to power a rocket engine. Attach 8 H-1 engines and there is the stage, and a number of recent space travel threads have touted the virtues of the design. Despite being bolted together out of legacy parts, the overall weight is competitive with apparently more elegant designs, whereas it is quite strong compared to these clean slate designs, being made of a cluster of tubes. It is claimed that one can do various modifications, such as bolting on side boosters or drop tanks, or even install wings for a fly-back design, and that it might be made reusable pretty easily. Meanwhile, Chrysler was able to go on using the same jigs they used for the Redstone and Jupiter missiles.
So--what if Epcot can among other things, house Chrysler's first stage assembly shop? and it can be barged down a canal to Cape Canaveral? And instead of OTL's headlong commitment to land a man on the Moon by the end of 1969 (which forced development of a huge powerful launcher, the Saturn V) we have a more plodding space program that settles on the Saturn 1 first stage, with or without additions, as the maximum sized launcher and core unit of all launches above a certain size, so there is a steady, ongoing demand for Saturn 1 type stages?
This involves stretch after stretch of course. Even if NASA chooses to adopt such a strategy and content itself with Saturn 1 cores for the next two decades to come, and the Air Force (reluctantly, probably) accepts that the Saturn 1 core is what they are getting instead of Titan III and later Titan derivatives, and buys more and launches with them too, sooner or later the design will be deemed obsolete and moved on from, for good reasons or otherwise. Then the factory is of course stranded, with no other customer likely to take up the slack and would have to be repurposed or shut down completely. If NASA is successful in recovering and reusing Saturn 1 first stages, obviously that slashes the demand for new ones. Surely some would be ordered as replacements for worn out many-times-reused old ones, but the pace of production must slow down, one way or another.
I believe OTL Chrysler leased the facility at Michoud, Louisiana, and probably will do the same here.
But by and large, it is much the same as OTL.
Interesting that what kills Epcot, as the grand planned living community as opposed to a part of a resort, ITTL is probably what killed it OTL--Disney had a vision of how America works that was becoming obsolete due to what in retrospect appears as globalization, with US based factories and labor producing less while the corporations that Disney presumed would invest in Epcot's productive enterprises invest overseas instead.
Now the process of globalization OTL had an earlier phase, in which factories in the traditional industrial core areas--the Northeast and Midwest--shifted first, before going overseas, to the less developed South and West--called, by "southern strategy" mastermind for Richard Nixon "The Sunbelt." This dovetailed, ironically perhaps, with Lyndon Johnson's extended New Deal vision of vitalizing the South that NASA, along with military base expansion, did much to promote.
Thus despite the naysayers on his own board--who are pretty farsighted in terms of foreseeing the general trends though of course not the sort of parochial Utopian Walt Disney was--in fact, in the middle to short run, say from 1960-1980, Walt Disney may have a point these calculating geniuses overlook. Insofar as the USA will continue to expand and develop internally, as opposed to US corporations expanding assets they own overseas instead, the places that will be built up will be in the southern tier--the eastern part traditionally called "the South" and the Southwest, with some "Sunbelt" growth actually happening in the Pacific Northwest too. But Disney is dead on in thinking that if there is going to be any next wave of US based industrialization, it will be on the southern tier. And of course Epcot/Disneyworld is not in fact very far from the "Space Coast" around Cape Canaveral--although at this time it would take some guesswork and betting to correctly anticipate that there will be a big space complex there. Hitherto, in the 1940s and early '50s, the action of rocketry was mainly in the Southwest, near White Sands, New Mexico. And while the Cape Canaveral area was chosen early on as one rocket launch sites it had a competitor much farther north at Wallops Island. Whereas American space visionaries were considering looking much farther afield, at one of the "Christmas Islands" in the equatorial Pacific, and I'd guess Hawaii might have been in the speculative running too. It was only late in the 50s that White Sands was deemphasized (due to a stray rocket crashing near a town in Mexico, technically an international incident and it could have been much worse if it landed actually in the town) and the focus was shifted to the most southerly site in the Continental USA, on the East coast--that is, Canaveral.
So someone could predict Canaveral would be it, if they discounted the importance of launching from a site as equatorial as possible and correctly judged the cost/benefit analysis that ruled out not only distant Christmas Island but even Hawaii as too distant from industrial centers and too expensive to operate out of, and didn't swing the other way to back the longest established site (White Sands should be out, IMHO, just because all trajectories out of it pass over land, and much of that fairly densely inhabited, but after all being stuck with an inland site did not stop the Soviets, and lots of people still tout advantages of over land launches) or a site more central to established US industry and transport like Wallops. In retrospect Cape Canaveral has some really big advantages--it is pretty far south, not down to the Tropic of Cancer but close; it has good harbor potential which was developed; it has good ranges of launch trajectories eastward and more or less south that are free of inhabited islands in the fire path. And although Florida was somewhat peripheral to US industrial development in the 1950s, still its transport and infrastructure was well developed particularly on the Atlantic coast due to heavy traffic for vacationers going to resorts and already a certain expatriate northern population of retirees. Basically the development of consumer-affordable air conditioning allowed Florida to be massively colonized.
So really, aside from the arguably peripheral and minor "space boom" that Disney certainly did want to be involved in, on the whole the day of the Sun Belt was coming. It might prove somewhat fleeting in terms of major industrial development, but for the next generation or so Walt's instinct seems sound despite what the eyeshade-wearing analysts were saying. Florida in particular could expect a boom due to its pre-established reputation as a desirable destination (offset to be sure by the infamous "Florida Land Deal" scandals of the 1920s) and if the USA did commit to some sort of space program, Cape Canaveral was quite likely to be a big part of it. Even if the US government absolutely refused to commit to glamorous stuff like "Man in Space," (but even Eisenhower, despite his "go slow" approach, was already backing that--slowly) still the US military would surely be developing a lot of rocketry and Cape Canaveral would be where they would test most of it, or even deploy some of it.
What I'm getting at here that while Epcot surely would tend to "Rust Belt" status by the 1990s, during the Sixties and Seventies, just such industries as Walt Disney hoped to attract to anchor the Town of the Future would indeed be interested in setting up shop somewhere in the Sun Belt, and perhaps if space travel really took off, something Disney was keen to promote, specifically space service industries might benefit from being located quite near Canaveral.
At this point I wonder if the properties Disney acquired included or bordered on any established transport canals running across the peninsula--because those canals would be how some really large components would get to Canaveral. However, even if not there would be plenty of other items that could go over roads or railroads, and benefit from being just a few hundred miles away from the launch site.
So--given that for now Disney has agreed to downsize "Epcot" to something kind of like OTL, is there any way he can design it so that it still can be expanded in accordance with his vision later? Because by 1963 or so, the opportunity might seem to be there after all for the whole visionary thing, with Disney tapping into Space Race funds to leverage building it up ASAP to house NASA-connected production.
I might go so far as to tie it to a couple other ATLs out there. It was in reading Nixonhead's Kolyma's Shadow, which is premised on Soviet rocket guru Sergei Korolev having died during his Siberian exile and being unknown, with effects on the Soviet and hence American space programs, that I learned of Werner Von Braun's relationship with Chrysler Corporation. It seemed bizarre that a car company would be responsible for building the Saturn 1 first stages (Aka "Cluster's Last Stand," but actually it is a pretty good stage design) but it makes more sense when one remembers that Von Braun's group were recruited by the US Army, and that Chrysler might seem bizarre as an aerospace contractor but makes perfect sense as a contractor for trucks, jeeps, tanks and so forth--in short--an Army contractor! So via the Army von Braun formed a relationship with Chrysler whereby they made the structure of Redstone and Jupiter missiles. The Saturn 1 first stage design was a brilliant kludge of wrapping 8 of the former around one of the latter, to form a 9-tank tube structure that, when one filled 4 of the outer smaller Redstone legacy tubes with RP-1 rocket fuel (basically highly refined kerosene) and the remaining 5 tanks with liquid oxygen, held the right balance of fluids to power a rocket engine. Attach 8 H-1 engines and there is the stage, and a number of recent space travel threads have touted the virtues of the design. Despite being bolted together out of legacy parts, the overall weight is competitive with apparently more elegant designs, whereas it is quite strong compared to these clean slate designs, being made of a cluster of tubes. It is claimed that one can do various modifications, such as bolting on side boosters or drop tanks, or even install wings for a fly-back design, and that it might be made reusable pretty easily. Meanwhile, Chrysler was able to go on using the same jigs they used for the Redstone and Jupiter missiles.
So--what if Epcot can among other things, house Chrysler's first stage assembly shop? and it can be barged down a canal to Cape Canaveral? And instead of OTL's headlong commitment to land a man on the Moon by the end of 1969 (which forced development of a huge powerful launcher, the Saturn V) we have a more plodding space program that settles on the Saturn 1 first stage, with or without additions, as the maximum sized launcher and core unit of all launches above a certain size, so there is a steady, ongoing demand for Saturn 1 type stages?
This involves stretch after stretch of course. Even if NASA chooses to adopt such a strategy and content itself with Saturn 1 cores for the next two decades to come, and the Air Force (reluctantly, probably) accepts that the Saturn 1 core is what they are getting instead of Titan III and later Titan derivatives, and buys more and launches with them too, sooner or later the design will be deemed obsolete and moved on from, for good reasons or otherwise. Then the factory is of course stranded, with no other customer likely to take up the slack and would have to be repurposed or shut down completely. If NASA is successful in recovering and reusing Saturn 1 first stages, obviously that slashes the demand for new ones. Surely some would be ordered as replacements for worn out many-times-reused old ones, but the pace of production must slow down, one way or another.
I believe OTL Chrysler leased the facility at Michoud, Louisiana, and probably will do the same here.
What the...How did you...Are you single?
Seriously though, that is what I call analysis!
Disney Animated Films 1955-1963
The animated films so far…
Lady and the Tramp
Released in June of 1955. The romance of two dogs from two different walks of life. Lady, a cocker spaniel from an affluent young couple with a new baby boy, and Tramp, the carefree mutt without a collar. While the spaghetti sequence is a favorite among casual moviegoers, critics seethed with rage over the death of the lovable bloodhound Trusty.
Sleeping Beauty
Walt’s most extravagant and most expensive animated film. Released around Christmas of ’58, its initial box office failure would make it the last to use traditional ink and paint. George Bruns’ adaptation of the Tchaikovsky ballet into the catchy song “Once Upon and Dream,” and Elanor Audley’s performance as the voice of Maleficent weren’t enough to drive ticket sales.
101 Dalmatians
Disney’s first film with the Xerox process, released in the spring of 1961. In the years following its initial release, the psychotic Cruella de Vil has ascended to the top as one of the studio’s most menacing villains. However, the film as a whole proved to be too saccharine for Walt’s liking, and storyman Bill Peet was handed his pink slip shortly thereafter.
Chanticleer
Released in the holiday season of 1963. After firing Bill Peet, Walt brings in Larry Clemmons, Ken Anderson, Ralph Wright and Julius Svendsen, men he hoped would “right the ship” in the animation department. Wolfgang “Woolie” Reitherman was named sole director after co-directing with Hamilton Luske and Gerry Geronimi on the previous feature. Although the original story takes place in pre-WWI France, the casting of country music star Roger Miller as Chanticleer informed a shift in the film’s musical score and songs towards a mostly country-western sound. Somehow, someway, this version of Chanticleer struck a chord with moviegoers and critics alike.
Lady and the Tramp
Released in June of 1955. The romance of two dogs from two different walks of life. Lady, a cocker spaniel from an affluent young couple with a new baby boy, and Tramp, the carefree mutt without a collar. While the spaghetti sequence is a favorite among casual moviegoers, critics seethed with rage over the death of the lovable bloodhound Trusty.
Sleeping Beauty
Walt’s most extravagant and most expensive animated film. Released around Christmas of ’58, its initial box office failure would make it the last to use traditional ink and paint. George Bruns’ adaptation of the Tchaikovsky ballet into the catchy song “Once Upon and Dream,” and Elanor Audley’s performance as the voice of Maleficent weren’t enough to drive ticket sales.
101 Dalmatians
Disney’s first film with the Xerox process, released in the spring of 1961. In the years following its initial release, the psychotic Cruella de Vil has ascended to the top as one of the studio’s most menacing villains. However, the film as a whole proved to be too saccharine for Walt’s liking, and storyman Bill Peet was handed his pink slip shortly thereafter.
Chanticleer
Released in the holiday season of 1963. After firing Bill Peet, Walt brings in Larry Clemmons, Ken Anderson, Ralph Wright and Julius Svendsen, men he hoped would “right the ship” in the animation department. Wolfgang “Woolie” Reitherman was named sole director after co-directing with Hamilton Luske and Gerry Geronimi on the previous feature. Although the original story takes place in pre-WWI France, the casting of country music star Roger Miller as Chanticleer informed a shift in the film’s musical score and songs towards a mostly country-western sound. Somehow, someway, this version of Chanticleer struck a chord with moviegoers and critics alike.
I swear, no matter what universe there will never be a good animated adaption of Chanticleer.
Huh, you know, I never heard of this movie before, let alone of "Chanticleer". Let me just pop over to the Google and see if I can fi- ROCK-A-DOODLE, WHAT?!
You know, looking back I can admit that that was not a good movie, but when I was a kid i loved it. My grandmother took me to see it in the theater when it came out.
Trusty DIES ITTL!!!? NOOOOO!
Was Sleeping Beauty a flop IOTL too or is that new? Hard to believe.
101 Dalmatians...so the same then?
Does this mean Chanticleer is less pseudo-Elvis, and more like the rooster from Robin Hood?
Yeah, Trusty was supposed to be killed off, but in OTL Walt demanded he live for the Christmas scene.
Disney has had several of the films in their Classic canon that lost money the first time they hit theatres, only to gain respect thru reissues and eventually home video releases. Pinocchio, Fantasia, Bambi and Alice lost money initially, only to get the respect they deserved decades later.
Yeah, Dalmatians pretty much turns out the same here.
Chanticleer of this TL is definitely a lot closer to the Robin Hood rooster.
Are they going to go with their original plan and have Cruella De Vil be the villain of the Rescuers film? It'd certainly be better than the half-assed replacement Madame Medusa.
P.S. I still desperately want Walt's death to be butterflied somehow so as to at least delay Disney's Dark Age.
P.S. I still desperately want Walt's death to be butterflied somehow so as to at least delay Disney's Dark Age.
Well, his cancer was actually discovered when we went to the doctor for an old polo injury from several decades prior. Have the cancer discovered a few years earlier than OTL and you may save Walt a few years.
Wait, that was the plan? I never knew that.
How was she supposed to go from being an apparently wealthy fur mogul (in England), to kidnapping orphans & hunting for pirate's treasure in a well in the Bayou?
Yes, that was the original plan, but the question of her role in the Rescuers would probably had to have been answered in the writing of the story.
Maybe she lost her fortune when Roger and Anita sued her for kidnapping their puppies. Or maybe she lost her fortune because the bad reputation caused by the mass Dalmatian kidnappings resulted in nobody wanting to do business with her. Either way, she needs the treasure to rebuild her lost fortune. A lot could've happened in the ten years separating the events of 101 Dalmatians from the events from The Rescuers.
I don't think I realized that there were ten years time between them, though after I posted I realized that she most likely went to prison after 101 Ds; which is never beneficial to one's bank balance.
As for the question of her role...maybe Penny was supposed to Roger and Anita's daughter, and she kidnapped her for revenge?
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