When you Wish Upon a Frog (Book II of the Jim Henson at Disney saga)

Geekhis Khan · Jan 27, 2022

Interview with Joss Whedon
From Comics Craze Magazine, May 1993 Edition

Joss Whedon is Hollywood Scriptwriting royalty, a third-generation screenwriter with numerous awards, including Emmys and Annies, to show for it. He has written extensively for television and films both as a script doctor and a lead writer. He joined us at Comics Craze to talk about his numerous upcoming comics, television, and even silver screen efforts, many of which will be right up the alley of our readers.

CC: So, you got your start with Disney, as many have.

JW: Yea, specifically my dad hooked me up with Jim Henson, whom he’d worked with on PBS stuff and the Muppets.

CC: He and your mother wrote the original Muppets “Hey Cinderella!” Special in 1974.

JW: Yea, so I kind of grew up with the Muppets. Maybe he was throwing me a bone, but still, I started writing for Inner Tube, this experimental Muppets variety show in the late ‘80s that saw the guests launched inside the TV, where they interacted with commercials and skits. Lots of early green-screen stuff. Emmy loved us, but audiences didn’t, so the show died early. But it resulted in the birth of a lot of the Muppets that ultimately ended up on Digit’s World and the like and, hey, guess what, it got me my foot in the door!

CC: Gotta’ focus on the important things. This also got you hooked up with Marvel.

JW: Yea, perfect, right? I was and am a total comics geek, so when Stan Lee and Jim Shooter and Margie Loesch recruited me to write for the X-Men cartoon I was in total heaven! I worked my way up from a staff writer to a lead writer, eventually getting to do Dark Phoenix, which won me my second Emmy after Inner Tube.

CC: The Dark Phoenix Saga, which aired in 1992 on the X-Men animated series. Our readers still recall that one as a winner and we counted it as the #3 Comics Moment Outside of Comics.

JW: Thanks.

CC: X-Men then translated into a Spider-Man animated show, and of course this led to the Spider-Man films, the latest of which, Spider-Man 2, is releasing this summer. We got to see a sneak peek, and we’re sure that audiences and comics fans alike will approve.

JW: Yea, Doc Ock is the villain, with Alfred Molina returning. I mean, he’s just perfect. He even looks like Otto Octavius, no makeup required! Well, not much. Doc Ock tries out the new mentally-controlled arms rather than his old remote ones, and they take over his brain. He runs amok. Spidey has to stop him, all while trying to date Mary Jane and graduate High School. For Peter, it’s another necessary growth step, taking the puberty metaphor from the first movie and expanding it into a “becoming a mature adult” metaphor. Doc Ock is, in many ways, Peter’s cold and calculating ambitious side that we got introduced to at the start of the first film made manifest, and Mary Jane and Aunt May have to shake him from his singular focus and remind him of his humanity. “Be a good man, Peter, not just a successful one,” as Aunt May says.

CC: Spider-Man 3, featuring Norman Osborn’s Green Goblin it is assumed considering given the obvious cameo set up with Joe Morton, is entering production now. Rumor has it that you will be directing it. What can we expect there?

JW: (laughs) Already milking for spoilers? Ok, very quickly without spoiling either film: Norman as the seemingly benign sponsor and mentor and Peter in college. Trouble with Mary Jane, Gwen Stacy enters his life. Big “welcome to adulthood” metaphor. That’s as much as you get, you savage bastards!

CC: But Spider-Man is just the start of the Marvel movie universe, officially Earth #307165 by Marvel Lore[1].

JW: Yea, The Incredible Hulk will screen next summer, and we’re in pre-production on a Fantastic Four film, likely to show up in ’96 or ’97. But I know you’re fishing for X-Men. Yes, an X-Men film is in production. I’m writing the screenplay. You nerds will love it. I’ll be assisting in production and will even do some second-unit direction.

CC: In preparation to direct Spider-Man 3, we assume?

JW: Nice try, you manipulative bastards, you’ll never pry it out of me! (laughs)

CC: And what can you tell us about The Incredible Hulk?

JW: Well, he’s big, and green, and has some…weeee minor anger management issues, and…yea, you obviously mean the movie, and that schtick only goes so far. Well, I didn’t write it, but I did [script] doctor it some. Pretty straight forward origin story, really. Tim Robbins plays Bruce Banner, Creatureworks did the Hulk, which they modelled after Lou Ferrigno, who also does the voice, naturally, and, well, go see the film when it comes out, you cheap bastards!

CC: Can you speak to the rumors on the antagonist? Is it the Abomination? Whom does he fight? Can you at least share that?

JW: He fights his own internal demons and angst, mostly. You’ll get the press release on the rest later.

CC: And following on from that, what can you tell us about X-Men the movie?

JW: Well, it follows the Chris Claremont Era characters like in the animated [TV] show and you can put away the thumb screws, because that’s all that you’re getting! We hope to screen Summer of ’96.

CC: Rumor has it that you’re writing some comics for Marvel yourself, such as a new X-Men line.

JW: You people don’t quit, do you? (laughs) Yea, I’m working with Tom [DeFalco] and Chris [Claremont] and some of the usual suspects to make a new series. Of course, I’m also getting pulled in a lot of directions, so how long the run goes I can’t say.

CC: And yet you’re not staying strictly loyal to Marvel or Disney. You’ve recently written several episodes for DC’s Wonder Woman animated feature, with your recent take on George Perez’s “Gods & Mortals” gaining a lot of Emmy buzz.

JW: I’ve always loved Wonder Woman. I know it’s not cool anymore to call yourself a feminist, but I like to think of myself as one, and Diana is the comics avatar for female empowerment. I fought hard to get a gig on that franchise and bugged Cheryl [Henson] to bug Lisa to bug Mira [Velimirovic] to give me a shot.

CC: Some have pushed back on the claims of “feminism” in your writing for Wonder Woman, it should be said. Gloria Steinem called your take on “Gods & Mortals” “fetishistic” it its portrayal of the Amazons. Others cited the time Diana got bound and gagged by Darkseid, which it should be noted was a call back to her early Golden Age appearances under Charles Moulton.

JW: (sighs) Look, Gloria’s great, but she’s wrong here. Just because I acknowledge the power and beauty of the Amazons doesn’t mean that I’m sexualizing them! And yea, read your comics history! She escapes and wins the day, right? Empowering.

CC: Hey, we’re with you. “Gods & Mortals” is #24 on the list.

JW: If you really want to see my feminist cred, check out Final Girl, the new series we’re producing with PFN through Fantasia TV and Fox TV. We take Buffy Summers whom you may remember as the immortal Rhonda’s apprentice from the 1989 film and follow her as she trains a team of fellow high school rejects to battle the demonic forces that emanate or gain power from the Hell Mouth that exists under their school. It’s all an empowering story of women taking back their own power while also addressing the social pressures of high school and growing up.

CC: Part family and teen drama, part monster slaying battle, it sounds like.

JW: Absolutely! I’ve even spun up my own Mutant Enemy Productions so I and my team will be better situated to collaborate across studios and franchises. I also plan to direct some episodes of Final Girl myself.

CC: In preparation for directing Spider-Man 3?

JW: Oh, do shut up! (laughs)

CC: You’ve also reportedly written and directed episodes of Tim Burton’s upcoming series Nocturns.

JW: Yea, can’t speak about it too much, but I’m partnering with Tim’s Skeleton Crew to make a few episodes. I have one involving a teenage female vampire, with the amazing Jude Barsi set to star. And yea, it has a really empowering message.

CC: Barsi’s a teenager now? Wow, they grow up fast.

JW: Yea. Try not to think about how old that makes you, folks.

CC: Now, changing gears, you faced some challenges at Disney with the new behavior standards.

JW: Geez, is this a comics magazine or Geraldo? (laughs) OK, so, yes, we had a bit of a “come to Jesus” meeting within the studio a couple of years’ back. It started with acknowledging sexual harassment and ending it, which I totally supported the whole time, but it expanded to treating people right in general. And well…I… (long pause) I wasn’t the best there. I used to get in arguments with Pete Docter and Glen Keane on religion, or I should say I gave them hell about their beliefs while they turned the other cheek. Me and the “sky bully” as I call him haven’t seen eye-to-eye, and I…made the mistake of taking my frustrations out on them.

CC: You attacked their beliefs.

JW: Yea, and that was a dick move on my part. I’ve always been the one that got picked on and harassed, including by some in the religious establishment, and I felt like the victim, so it’s hard to come to terms with the fact that I was externalizing. As a comics fan I should be the first to get the whole “He who fights monsters” thing, right? So Jim [Henson] and I had some long talks. Counselling helped there too. I pulled my head out of my *** and I stopped the bull****.

CC: And how do you and Pete and Glen get along now?

JW: Very well, thank you. I turn to them whenever I have questions on how to portray a person of faith and not make them a strawman. I hope to collaborate with them in the future.

CC: In an interview with White Dwarf last year, you told them that your time script-doctoring Hulk was, and we quote, “just the self-therapy that I needed at the time.” I assume that this fits into that issue?

JW: Geez, I didn’t expect the Spanish Inquisition. Should I pause and wait for them to burst in? No? OK, yes, when Stan [Lee] asked me to write the screenplay for Hulk I demurred and came up with excuses like being too busy or not really feeling like it, but in truth I think I subconsciously realized that I’d be having to deal with emotions that I didn’t feel ready to address. So he handed it to Frank [Darabont] and then Ernie [Dickerson] took a spin with it when he signed on to direct, but Bernie [Brillstein, MGM Vice Chairman] thought that something wasn’t working, so Jim [Henson] asked me to doctor it…and you just can’t refuse Jim. It’s like resisting a cute kid asking for candy or a puppy wanting a treat, you feel like a heartless grinch if you say no. And yea, I buried myself in it, and rewrote the whole Bruce Banner character, really. Frank and Ernest, to be frank and earnest, had him as a quiet introvert with some anger management issues, but I basically took all of my demons and dumped them into Bruce, gave him some of my cruelest passive aggressive lines and inclinations, a real repressed-anger case of which I am all too familiar, and I basically had to work the dialog through several times before I found the right balance between making him too weak and passive and making him an unlikeable dick. And yea, it was uncomfortable and I probably drank too much while I wrote it like I was channeling Hemmingway, but it was strangely liberating to bleed all over the paper like that, not that they gave me a writing credit because of Union rules, but **** it. My therapist told me that she thought I had a real breakthrough after writing it. There, you got it out of me, you bastards! (laughs) You can put away the pliers now.

CC: What advice do you have for young creatives out there hoping to make their way in comics or TV or film?

JW: You mean besides “don’t be a total ****?” (laughs) Learn to shut your mouth and open your ears. Stick to your guns when it matters and don’t sell out your core values, but be willing to listen and accept the truth, no matter how hard, and admit when you’re wrong. Work hard, but know that it might not be enough, so look for opportunities and be ready to jump on them when they appear. The truth is no one is likely to come out of the sky on a golden unicorn and carry you to success. Make your own opportunities if you have to. And remember: like Professor X taught us, appreciate differences and be there for each other.

CC: Joss Whedon, thank you again for taking the time to talk to Comics Craze.

JW: Hey, any time. Ask me anything that you want, and I’ll be happy to dodge the question!

Spider-Man 2 by Marvel Productions and released by MGM Studios, starring Seth Green as Peter Parker and Alfred Molina as Doctor Octopus, is coming to theaters soon. Joss Whedon’s Final Girl: The Series starring Reece Witherspoon debuts on PFN stations this fall.

[1] 307165 sort of spells out “MOVIES” if you flip and rotate the numbers appropriately, as an added in-joke.

Geekhis Khan · Jan 29, 2022

Chapter 23: Disney Rules the Sea
From Theme Park Confidential: The Corporate Machinations and Machiavellian Intrigue behind your Favorite Parks, by E. Z. Ryder

In the spring of 1993 Phase II of Port Disney opened to great fanfare. In particular, the actual Port itself opened, five large berths capable of handling what were the largest cruise liners at the time with room for the hypothetical next generation[1] and a score of smaller boat docks.

Port Disney and DisneySea (Under Construction) (Image modified by @Denliner based on original from Wikipedia)

The port alone was a big addition. The landfill had been completed after years of careful, minimal-impact dredging, and the foundations of what was to become DisneySea were lain. The breakwater was up and the channels clear. They dredged the channel and harbor for reclaimed land, building modern port facilities capable of servicing up to five of the largest cruise ships at the time, along with passenger ferry services and a plethora of smaller charter and tour boat berths, adding to those at the already established WorldPort. Disney established a working port with a Port Authority (including Customs), longshoremen, and other ship handlers, and were soon collecting valuable docking fees and service charges, including fuel and waste and water and food. Disney contracted out the handling of the port rather than try and run it themselves given the complexities and specialized experience needed in such an undertaking.

The new facilities included new hotels, new attractions, and a museum. Partnering with shareholder Marriott, several hotels including the Venice-themed Disney Canal, the beach-themed Disney Shoreline, wetlands-themed Disney Tideland, the nautical-themed Disney Marina, and the transportation-themed Port Hotel, were all built following an eclectic postmodern design mix of Spanish Colonial, Victorian, and Art Deco inspired architecture; a retro-futuristic idealized “LA in 1928” look that Imagineers were calling the “Hyperion Style”. They built a small monorail which CCO Jim Henson allegedly wanted to run all the way to Disneyland, though this latter aspect proved highly impractical due to cost and easement rights[2], so they instead developed a bus-based shuttle service to and from Disneyland. They built additional stages and movie theaters within the hotel buildings, including the free Jack Wrather Memorial Theater that played old Disney, Wrather, and MGM classics. They expanded shopping areas including the obligatory Disney Store, restaurants, gardens, museums, and even a few Disney rides, shows, and attractions. Partner Pearson built a Madame Tussaud’s wax museum.

Close up of DisneySea plans (under construction) with American Boardwalk and Kermit’s Swamp complete; hatched area is parking and pedestrian shops and walkways (Image by @Denliner)

Along the waterfront was the RMS Queen Mary, which per Jim Henson’s wishes was fully restored to its original glory and converted into a floating luxury hotel, conference center, and resort, along with a “Haunted Cruise” walkthrough attraction. “An old-time cruise from a bygone era without leaving port” as the advertisements said. At the far end by the pier there was a boardwalk reminiscent of the Long Beach oceanfront during the glory days of The Pike, complete with old timey rides like a Ferris Wheel and a wooden roller coaster and “Midway” style games with exclusive retro Disney toy designs as prizes. Howard Hughes’ giant H-4 Hercules, aka the “Spruce Goose”, was painstakingly restored and housed along with dozens of other vintage aircraft, boats, trains, and automobiles in a special hangar and transportation museum conjoined to the transportation-themed Disney Port Hotel. The Disney Transportation and Technology Museum was run in partnership with the Smithsonian and proved a popular and profitable attraction in its own right, attracting school and summer camp outings in particular. Also, the new Kermit’s Swamp waterpark attraction was opened next to the American Boardwalk, offering a fun escape from the LA heat for all ages, with both child friendly shallow pools and twisting, thrilling water slides, even a small flume ride.

Phase II greatly increased the revenues earned by the Port Disney land, which were now able to not just cover the taxes, overhead, and operating expenses, but helped fund the ongoing construction on the “crown jewel” of Port Disney: the DisneySea Resort, on schedule for completion in 1995 as “Phase III”.

Vintage 1989 Premier Ad (Image source “disneycruiselineblog.com”)

And with the growth of the Port Disney resort and their inevitable cruise ship facilities, Cruise Lines were once again on Disney’s mind. The partnership with Premier Cruise Lines established in 1985 was proving mutually beneficial, but further expansion was needed to accommodate the global growth. Furthermore, the aging, non-handicapped-accessible vessels were an impediment to many families and their dated design and rusting bodies were not in keeping with Disney’s increasingly premium brand. Stan Kinsey arranged to acquire Premier in whole from Dial Corporation for $65 million in cash[3] in 1994 and immediately set out to expand and modernize the fleet with newly made custom cruise liners. The original three Big Red Ships would be used for the time being, the SS Oceanic transferred to California in a special one-time Panama transit cruise to serve the Pacific coast (technically using the home port of Cabo St. Lucas in Baja California to reduce operating costs) and the SS Atlantic sent in a one-time transatlantic voyage to the Mediterranean and housed in Denia, Spain. Kinsey planned to expand and replace the aging ships, but CCO Jim Henson had other, grander, and frankly crazier plans.

In 1991, Disney had been working with the US Military on the Wonderful World of Disney’s “Salute to the Troops” Memorial Day Special when Imagineer Jim Cora met with a Navy Admiral. The Admiral joked about having Disney build a theme park on top of an aircraft carrier. While meant in jest, Cora began to seriously consider the plan. Thus, the S.S. Disney concept was born.

Concept Model for the S.S. Disney (Image source “allears.net”)

Cora recruited Imagineer Mark Hickman, who had nautical experience, to make the concept work. Years later, Hickman recalled the plan: “[Cora] called me about the aircraft carrier idea. I told him that it would be more feasible to build it on another kind of ship, like a cruise liner, cargo ship, or oil tanker. If I remember correctly, he then met with Jim Henson, and they agreed to ask Marty Sklar at the I-Works to do a study [on the] feasibility on this unique idea. That’s how everything started. Since I was the only one that had extensive shipbuilding experience, I was charged to be the project manager and technical director for the project. I worked with some really fantastic concept architects, show designers, script writers, concept artists and model makers and over the course of nine months we put together the floating theme park concept[4].”

The S.S. Disney was to be built from a converted 250,000 dry-weight-ton oil tanker and would feature up to 18 attractions, including a Ferris wheel, water slides, a teacup ride, the Small World attraction (though done with tracks rather than boats), and even a Disney Castle (Ariel’s Castle, naturally). Cora and Hickman built a 3-D model and made some concept sketches and presented it to Jim Henson and the Resorts & Recreation board. Jim Henson loved it, as did Chairman Frank Wells. The idea was grand, visionary, and even revolutionary. It would be a monumental engineering achievement and able to bring Disney “to the world”, which appealed to Henson’s worldly egalitarianism.

They initiated a study to determine the feasibility of the plan. The results were not promising. The I-Works, working in collaboration with CFO Richard Nanula (who took over for the recently retired Mike Bagnall), estimated that it would cost about $500-750M to build, costing ~$90M for the tanker alone. Less optimistic estimates placed the cost at over $1B when one considered the cramped building conditions, which would greatly complicate construction. They also estimated that it would cost at least $2-5M per day to operate, not counting the cost of the "supporting" cruise ship to house the permanent travelling crew and the “fireworks barge” to do the nightly fireworks shows. Then one had to consider docking fees for the extended port stays and the limited number of deep-water ports where it could dock in the 1990s. Transport shock and vibration as well as the ship's rocking in port and underway would need to be factored in to the ride and attraction designs and maintenance inspection schedules. Maintenance and corrosion-prevention alone would be a costly addition to overhead.

And with a maximum of 10,000 daily visitors (two “shifts” of 5,000) the ticket prices would need to be prohibitively high to justify the cost, particularly given that any time spent travelling between ports or setting up for (or breaking down from) port visits would be “idle” and generate no revenue while still costing overhead. And staying for a long time in a single port to reduce this downtime would defeat the purpose of a travelling park. Why not just build a Disneytown? And speaking of the Disneytowns, it would also potentially distract from the many Disneytowns that were springing up or planned, many of them at or within a few hours’ drive from the very port locations where the S.S. Disney would dock!

Certainly, docking at Port Disney or Dénia would be self-defeating.

The bottom line was obvious: as incredible and bold of an idea as it was, it was totally impractical. Early attendance could be high with the initial excitement, but the novelty of a floating theme park would wear off quickly. Stan Kinsey’s plan of just expanding the ex-Premier fleet with purpose-built Disney Cruise Line ships was by far the more practical and profitable idea.

Jim Henson, who took to the S.S. Disney idea with childlike enthusiasm, was particularly disappointed. “Jim,” said Roy Disney, “You know that I’m all for the Dream, but this is a hallucination!”

With cooler heads winning out, the Big Red Ships would continue to provide Disney’s fleet while the new Disney Magic and Disney Wonder were commissioned in Germany. These new vessels would be all-original designs from Wing Chao’s team following the retro-futuristic Hyperion Style, the old Premier ships sold off in turn as the new custom Disney ships were developed and christened.

And thus, Quixotic dreams of floating theme parks aside, Disney entered into a new phase of growth which some have likened to literal “empire building”.

[1] Captain’s Hat tip to @Denliner and @El Pip as always for parks and engineering help!

[2] The 30–35-mile monorail track alone would cost over a billion dollars to build in the 1990s assuming that you could get the easement rights. You’d need to build within existing urban sprawl, requiring lots of such easement rights buys or public-private ownership, which would cost probably another billion in easement buys and legal maneuvering and badly disrupt traffic while being built. Awesome but Impractical to say the least. By comparison, a short monorail within the park itself would be a few million dollars and have no easement rights or construction issues.

[3] The lines made around $20 million annually in the 1980s.

[4] Modified from an actual 2011 quote by Hickman, available here along with more S.S. Disney concept art.

Geekhis Khan · Jan 30, 2022

Chapter 14, In the Swing of Things
Excerpt from Where Did I Go Right? (or: You’re No One in Hollywood Unless Someone Wants You Dead), by Bernie Brillstein (with Cheryl Henson)

So, the early ‘90s were a strange time. On the surface everything seemed to be going swimmingly. The Iron Curtain was down. New Disney Parks were opening up. MGM, Hyperion, and Fantasia were all making a splash on the big screen and small alike.

And yet the flash and sizzle of the 1980s was gone and now it seemed like, despite the fact that the economy was recovering, that we’d won the Cold War, and that all seemed hunky dory, Americans were ready to give up on it all and were starting to dress and act like Tim Burton. Music was getting all dark and sad with songs about suicide and depression.

Even comic books were full of black-clad killers now! They even turned friendly neighborhood Spider-Man into an all-black monster with huge teeth and a lolling tongue! [SIC]

So, how do we go forward? Ride the “goth” wave, or trend against it? A Little of both?

These were the things facing Disney and MGM. I was glad that we had Tim’s Skeleton Crew to help reap the rewards of the cultural darkness that they, in my opinion, likely helped sew. But on the Disney side in particular, we still had to have lightness to balance the dark.

And Jim, who’d been ahead of the game as usual with The Dark Crystal a decade earlier, was now past the whole dark and existential stuff that consumed him in the ‘80s just as it was going mainstream, and was swinging back over to the bright colors and frivolity of the Muppets years. He now wanted bright colors and Capra-like sincerity. He asked if we could do an old-style Hollywood Musical.

I was like, “Are you shitting me?”

Sure, in the 1990s you could get away with that kind of thing when mermaids and Muppets were involved, but live action Fred Astaire stuff? Visions of One From the Heart were flashing through my head like a warning siren.

“Trust me, Bernie, I have a feeling about this.”

“Great. You said the same thing about Toys.”

And then Sam Fuller shows up with a Jonathan Marc Feldman script called “Swing Youth” about teenagers in Nazi Germany. He was dying to direct it. It followed the so-called “Swingjugend”, German teens who loved Jazz Music and did the Jitterbug in underground clubs. It was like a bloody sequel to Cabaret, but without songs.

Hmmm…could I get Alan Menken to write some? Nah.

“Swing Youth” had potential as a drama, though. The concept was brilliant, but the screenplay was clichéd, corny, and predictable, and hit all of the obligatory story beats when prescribed, but seemed not to know why to hit them. The dialog was pedestrian and the “heartbreaking” final scene was bathos personified: “Swing Heil!! Swing Heil!!”

I suggested that Sam run it by Carrie Fisher.

This directed by Sam Fuller

He did. She worked her magic. The new screenplay was a perfect balance of darkness and hope. The perfect story of the ultimate teenage rebellion.

Sam hired character actor Wil Wheaton of Stand by Me fame as the lead Peter and Christian Bale of Empire of the Sun fame as the friend-turned-enemy Thomas. He ran them through a German Accent and Mannerisms Bootcamp. He put together a swinging Jazz Age soundtrack with some original music by Winton and Branford Marsalis. It became 1993’s Swing Youth.

And it worked!! Hitler Youth by day, Swing Youth by night! What could go wrong? Sam, taking Carrie’s reworked script, gave it a careful balance, playing the life-affirming freedom and revelry of the jitterbug scenes against the appalling brutality and murderous evil of the Nazi regime. The acting was spot on, with Wil giving the lead a deep mix of innocent pathos and sincere horror. Christian was just chilling as the former swing youth seduced to Naziism.

The film managed to pull in $56 million against its $16 million budget and got lots of Oscar buzz. Sam won a well-deserved and long overdue Oscar for Best Direction, but Best Picture went to Red Tails. Even so, Sam managed to piss off the Academy by dragging Spike to the stage and publicly handing his Oscar to Spike!

“Well, that’s the last damned Oscar you’re ever getting, Sam,” said Spike.

“Like I could give a shit,” said Sam.

Sam had suffered his first mini-stroke on the set of Red Tails by that point and clearly had no shits left to give about what any Hollywood Moguls thought of him. God bless the bastard!

With Sam doing Swing Youth, we handed A Red Death, the next Easy Rawlins mystery following Devil in a Blue Dress, to Nick Gomez at the recommendation of Spike. Nick proved he had the chops, bringing a Scorsese-like cinema verité to the production that was an excellent follow-up to Sam’s vision. A Red Death didn’t do quite as well as its predecessor, but Wesley Snipes and Giancarlo Esposito still shined in their roles, the swinging Marsalis soundtrack was great, and it drew in a good $52 million against a $23 million budget and more on home video, so it turned a profit.

A similar story happened with Ethan and Joel Cohen, who came to us with an old script that never took off called Relentless. It was a crime caper with some over-the-top elements that they’d originally pitched to Sam Raimi[1] before he got pulled into Friday the 13th Part Whatever. They directed it themselves. It was a brilliantly understated murder-comedy and got great reviews when it came out in the fall of ‘93, but sadly only broke even, though gained a huge cult following and made bank on home video.

But things were about to swing in another direction entirely when I was sent an 8mm Camcorder cassette from a contact in Disney World. It was a recording of a kid doing standup at the Laugh it Up Club on Pleasure Island. The audience would throw him the name of a famous musician, be it Elvis, Little Richard, or Ringo Starr along with some random subject like “peanut butter sandwiches” and he’d just off-the-cuff belt out a song in the style and mannerisms and voice of the musician, improvising the lyrics about peanut butter sandwiches or whatever as he sang!

His name was Wayne Brady and he was variously working at Disney World as a walkaround, a Ghostbuster, and an occasional backup dancer or singer[2].

“Get me that kid,” I told my assistant.

We flew him out and ran him through the gauntlet. He stumbled a bit, being nervous and still a green twenty-something, but the video wasn’t a fluke or a set-up. The kid was good, really good! He was an old-school triple threat. He could act, he could sing, he could dance!

And it hit me…here’s Jim’s damned Musical.

Wayne Brady (R) in the early 1990s playing Winston Zeddemore (Image source Reddit)

Wayne is famous now, but back then he was nobody, the kid who played Tigger. He needed a partner.

I paired him with the one man that I knew could keep up on the manic energy front: Robin Williams. It was a match made in heaven. Wayne was still a bit starstruck and was struggling a bit to keep up, but he soon got into the groove and Magic Happened. They did this soft-shoe number about Rubber Duckies in a Hope-Crosby way. I had to leave the room just to breathe I was laughing so hard.

Robin immediately took Wayne under his wing. It was one of those Hollywood Apprenticeships made in heaven. A lesser man than Robin might have tried to sabotage the kid out of jealousy or perceived threat. Instead, it was the beginning of a brilliant Hollywood partnership. We just needed a vehicle for them.

And while we kicked around ideas, Wayne ran into Kevin Clash, who recruited him for the Muppets! He turned out to be a natural there too. Go figure. He does The Boogie Man and Ella Fantgerald.

So, a Big Hollywood Musical. In 1990-something.

Yea. It was an insane idea. I needed an insane producer.

I called up Mel Brooks.

The idea became The Road to Ruin. Robin would play washed-up Broadway theater producer Sydney Devereaux, an openly gay man struggling Bialystok-like to stay afloat when (in a bit of self-critical humor) “Every damned show on Broadway is owned by Disney now.” His life gets turned upside-down when he meets a young Brooklyn man named Tariq Brown, played by Wayne, who it turns out is the son that he never knew that he had.

You see, it turns out that Sydney had an affair with Tariq’s mother, a showgirl in one of his productions, “back before I was ready to admit the truth, even to myself,” as he put it.

Sydney then discovers by accident that his son is a natural talent and recruits him on a harebrained scheme to make an old-fashioned over-the-top Broadway extravaganza, with Busby Berkley numbers and the works.

As Tariq sings: “Unless there’s a way to make bread on a flop, then I think that you’re really screwed there, pop.”

It would be a “Road to…” film, quoting Hope and Crosby, borderline self-aware, Meta as hell, with the songs that Sydney and Tariq are writing together in reality subconsciously more about their lives together and their evolving relationship as estranged father and son from two totally different worlds. They take their big (and hilariously bad) show on the road through all the worst venues like Reno and Fresno and Newark before ending up in a rundown theater in Branson, Missouri, where they are chased off the stage by an irate Honkey Tonk audience, only for Big Broadway Agent Bernie Bigelow (Mel) to see a Super-8 tape of the performance and hear about their personal story, which then becomes the plot of a new breakout Broadway production by them that he produces.

Meta enough for you?

Mel worked with Alan Menken and Robin and Wayne to develop the songs. He pulled in Alan Johnson and the incomparable Savion Glover for choreography (Savion would even cameo as “Asininely Talented Dancer” in a show-stealing second act encounter). Mel found Francis Ford Coppola and asked him to direct. His winemaking partner Ron Miller was pushing for him too. I recommended that they talk to the legendary Roger Deakins for cinematography, and they did.

And thus was born a Big Old Hollywood Musical that was borderline self-aware produced by the guy behind Spaceballs and directed by the man who bombed for us with Tucker and who bankrupted his own studio doing the Big Old Hollywood Musical One From the Heart.

Oy.

The Road to Ruin indeed. Maybe we were externalizing our fears?

But the script by Brooks and Fisher and Whedon was tight. The songs were brilliant. We had two great actors with great chemistry together. We had a visionary director. I dragged in Tom Schumacher (who was struggling to find a purpose after getting passed over for Glen in Feature Animation) to co-produce with Mel. Little did I know just how far he’d run with that ball! We went into production with a $40 million budget. It was a huge gamble, a swing for the fences, and would come out in ’96.

But until then, it was time to introduce the world to Wayne Brady and hopefully make him a household name too, lest he disappear behind Williams.

We put him on Wonderful World of Disney. We slipped him into some Sitcoms. We put him on Leno and Letterman. We got him some commercial gigs. He even sang “Sing” with Elmo on Sesame Street.

Brady was quickly making a name for himself. Middle America loved his free-spirited comedy. He was fun and manic like Robin, but he was “safe” and non-threatening, which was sadly still really important with a black actor going mainstream back then. His humor could be PG and push T on occasion, but we generally didn’t worry about him saying something truly offensive or spinning wildly off into Neverland like Robin occasionally did.

But not everyone liked him. One of Spike’s crew got in his face one day, accusing him of selling out, questioning his “Blackness”.

“What,” said Wayne, “Do I have to choke a bitch to be Black enough for you?”

“You wanna come try and choke me, bitch?”

Security had to break things up.

Wayne took it hard, but after I had a talk with Spike, Spike had a word with him. He got him a supporting role on Clockers to help with his “cred”.

But he was swinging dangerously between what plays in Brooklyn and what plays in Peoria, and he knew it. It was a lot of ups and downs for a new kid.

Fun times.

[1] Raimi directed it as Crimewave in the mid-1980s. It went wildly off the rails and was a disastrous flop that almost sunk his career.

[2] In our timeline he was fired from playing Tigger at Disney World after some questionable accusations by a Disney manager, who he claims wanted line cutting privileges for her kid. He went on to work at Universal Studios Florida as Winston Zeddemore (per the above image) and did a couple of small TV roles before moving to LA in 1996 and getting onto the improv competition show Kwik Witz, which ultimately led to Whose Line is it Anyway? and his breakout.

Geekhis Khan · Feb 1, 2022

Chapter 20: A Sporting Chance
Excerpt from The King is Dead: The Walt Disney Company After Walt Disney, an Unauthorized History by Sue Donym and Arman N. Said

A Guest Post by @jpj1421

While Ron Miller was thrilled to get the ball rolling on the Disney Good Sports Resort in Florida, there was still an itch he wanted to scratch: Disney expanding into actual professional sports. Fortunately for Miller, an opportunity to do exactly that would start to take root in Anaheim in 1987, the very same year the Sports Resort would be greenlit. Entertainment lawyer Neil Papiano would successfully convince the Anaheim government to move forward on an indoor arena that could be used for hockey or basketball. This was met with skepticism and derision by many in the community as the NHL and NBA were skeptical themselves about moving into the area.

Despite the opposition, plans moved forward with groundbreaking in 1990. For much of its time in development, the project was considered a boondoggle and Anaheim had to fend off legal battles and objections from other Southern California cities, all while there was no team set to play and no potential buyers. But for those who worked in Disney at the time, there was one prominent figure who could not stop talking about the potential of the arena: CEO Ron Miller. Many who worked with Miller on the Disney Good Sports Resort at the time recall Miller expressing optimism over the Anaheim Arena and wishing for the chance to build a team from the ground up. Within the halls of Disney, Miller’s enthusiasm was seen as quaint at the time, with the concession given of possibly buying up the naming rights to the property and hosting a team looking for a new home.

Miller’s quaint idea suddenly gained traction in 1991 as the NHL had for the second year in a row expanded the league, with the indication that more teams would be added in the years to come. Perhaps Anaheim was in the running after all for getting a new team? This would be the year that Miller himself greenlit The Mighty Ducks, a movie about a plucky team of misfit kids playing hockey. And now Bo Boyd at Consumer Products was wondering if some synergistic marketing could be arranged. And it certainly didn’t hurt that Wayne Gretzky had just made his move to the LA Kings, with the ensuing excitement from their division title in the 1990-1991 season, which showed that there was indeed a market for ice hockey in Southern California.

The stars seemed to be aligning to match up with Miller’s vision. The clincher for the move was when The Mighty Ducks released in the fall of 1992, proving to be a huge hit just as the Anaheim Arena was almost complete and the NHL open to continual expansion. The time was right and Disney was awarded an expansion franchise in December 1992 for a $50 million franchise fee, half of which went to the LA Kings as an indemnity for expanding into their territorial region (normally an organization would have had to pay an indemnity on top of the franchise fee for such a move, but the NHL was willing to split the fee with the Kings because of Disney’s reputation). The Kings owner, and Chairman of the NHL Board of Governors said at the time, “It was not economically wise for Disney to pay both an indemnity fee and a franchise fee, so the league was prepared to split that. After all, it is Disney.”

Disney immediately began to negotiate with the management company of the new Anaheim arena for sponsorship rights to go along with the expansion. Ron Miller was going to get his Disney backed professional sports team. Public opinion in Anaheim immediately turned favorable on the arena project, which was small comfort to the mayor and council members who were narrowly voted out of office the month before the expansion bid, in part for supporting the project despite being publicly supported by Ron Miller.

In the NHL, however, the expansion was widely mocked. Would Disney be just sending in the kids from the movie to play? Would Goofy make a good goalie? How long before this whole endeavor imploded? Disney wasn’t joking and put together a respectable team, with Tony Tavares, an arena management specialist from Philadelphia, picked to be team president, Jack Ferreira of the San Jose Sharks to be general manager, and Ron Wilson of the Vancouver Canucks to be coach. And while a connection to The Mighty Ducks was desirable, it was felt that using the same name might feed into the mockery. Instead, Disney looked to the recently imported Papernik aka The Duck Avenger, the Batman-like superhero alter-ego of Donald Duck, for inspiration.

Thus, the Anaheim Avengers (who doesn’t love a little alliteration?) would hit the ice in the newly opened Walt Disney Arena[1] for the 1993-1994 hockey season. The uniform colors would be red, black and yellow to invoke the of The Duck Avenger's costume, with a logo consisting of The Duck Avenger's mask in front of his cape and The Duck Avenger himself becoming the mascot, of course (with eventual Marvel tie-ins). By the end of their first season, the laughing stopped. With a W-L-T of 38-41-10 (86 points)[2] they set a record for most wins in an inaugural season for an expansion team and ranked 7th in the Western Conference, securing a playoff berth. They lost to Calgary in the quarterfinals, but Disney had made their point.

And they ended up raking in cash from merchandising, with Avengers merchandise being the most popular in the NHL by a huge margin…aided of course by Disney properties and stores throughout the country. And furthermore, any remaining naysayers who might have considered that first season a fluke would be forced to keep silent as the Avengers were a regular contender in the playoffs throughout the nineties.

Like this, but on ice! (Image source Bustle.com)

Quite simply, the team was a success and Miller was vindicated. Furthermore, there was now a model that Disney could follow for future forays into sports. Disney would further capitalize on the Avengers’ young audience by expanding into youth sports, with the official Disney-backed Youth Hockey franchise getting The Mighty Ducks moniker, of course. And, this model would prove incredibly helpful not too long after the Avengers first season as another opportunity came around the corner.

[1] Rather than direct ownership, per our timeline, Disney has purchased the sponsorship and naming rights to the arena.

[2] With Ron Miller overseeing the development of the team, rather than Michael Eisner, it seemed appropriate to have a little bit more focus on the actual gameplay and not just see the team for its marketing value. There were 5 OT ties and 5 OT losses in the Ducks first season, so those ties became wins and the losses became ties in this timeline. Supporting sources: OC Register; LA Times; CBC

Geekhis Khan · Feb 3, 2022

Gaming in the 1990s: Expansion and Differentiation
From On a Role: A History Tabletop Roleplaying Games by A. White-Gazebo

As the 1980s moved into the 1990s, Tabletop Roleplaying had passed its Golden Age and was entering into its Silver Age. Gone were the days where everyone was playing Dungeons & Dragons, but also increasingly less pronounced were the voices that decried Roleplaying as a gateway to Satanism, though notable and loud voices continued from some sectors. It was an era where Mazes and Monsters was fading from the public memory while Dragonlance, spearheaded by a novel series and popular TV animated series, had gained a noteworthy following outside of gaming circles, and where the games themselves were moving beyond High Fantasy and into worlds where you could play anything from Mickey Mouse to a Jedi Knight to a monstrous Kaiju.

More or less these (Image sources Amazon & Wikipedia)

Leading the charge was, as before, TSR, which was now a subsidiary of Marvel Publishing, which was itself a subsidiary of Walt Disney Entertainment. The venerable Dungeons & Dragons, be it Basic or Advanced, was still the most popular and iconic brand. AD&D would soon receive an overhaul into a Second Edition that clarified rules and streamlined gameplay[1] thanks in part to a team of statistical and mathematics consultants and in part to a series of “simple but efficient” mechanics developed for the youth-oriented Mickey Quest.

“AD&D2E” would integrate numerous new character classes and expand rules on skills and other non-combat actions, which was welcomed by veteran roleplayers as a way to expand gaming and advancement opportunities beyond “Hack & Slash”. The Edition also came with expanding Game Worlds from the popular Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms settings to the cult-hits Spelljammer, Ravenloft[2], and Dark Sun. Neil Gaiman even teamed up with Gary Gygax to develop the surreal, mystical Eterias setting where magic was so common as to be mundane in a mystical reflection of the postindustrial world that some have likened to a “mystical cyberpunk dream world”.

But by this point TSR was as well known for its non-original settings, with the super-popular Star Wars RPG and Indiana Jones RPG and moderately successful Willow D&D Campaign World all derived from the Disney partnership with Lucasfilm. Likewise, Ghostbusters, Back to the Future, Jurassic Park, War of the Worlds, and even Super Mario Brothers received the RPG treatment to varying levels of success.

The Marvel Heroes RPG was a natural, with numerous expansions, including the controversial Hellspawn supplement, which along with White Wolf’s World of Darkness reawakened the cries of Moral Guardians.

Mickey Quest in turn expanded, with Muppets-based supplements, TaleSpin, Out of the Vault, Duck World, Duck Avenger, and other Disney Kids franchises, where it is credited with bringing a whole new generation of gamers into the fold and was recognized by many educational advocates for teaching practical math skills to children. The game even proved popular with adult gamers, who liked the hyper-simplicity of the mechanics, which some say allowed them to focus on the game, not the dice.

And yet while TSR soared, smaller publishers struggled. West End Games, makers of the cult hit Paranoia, managed to score the rights for an Aliens RPG and Predator RPG, which were naturally later merged in an Aliens vs. Predator supplement. Later games based on Tales from the Crypt, Tank Girl, and other franchise licenses managed to pull in some funds. Their other titles, almost inevitably license games, struggled, however, and eventually the tiny company was acquired by Dark Horse Comics, becoming Dark Horse Games[3].

Iron Crown Enterprises, or I.C.E., carved out a niche by scoring the license for J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth setting. The resulting Middle Earth Roleplaying, or MERP, would maintain a following based upon its Tolkien link alone, but even this didn’t prevent a major Hollywood studio from snatching it up with an eye on the setting for theatrical purposes.

Such was sadly the norm in the 1990s, where small startup companies like Leading Edge Games and Wizards of the Coast generally failed to survive[4].

The small Detroit-based Palladium Books, however, became one of the major exceptions to the “small company struggles and dies” rule. Previously best known for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Robotech license RPGs, they struck gold with their hyper-popular Rifts campaign world, which combined, well, everything into a mélange of genres. It was a post-apocalyptic setting that blended magic, mecha, Lovecraftian horrors, the supernatural, gods, cyberpunk, and science fiction into a “Megaverse” with literally no possible limits. Alternately loved and derided for its “kitchen sink” approach and the “power gaming” potential of its “mega damage” system, Rifts set up Palladium for a massive success in the 1990s, though that success would nearly bring disaster.

The success of Rifts and its dozens of sourcebooks and expansion books paid for a massive expansion of lines, including a Second Edition of their Palladium Fantasy RPG, Beyond the Supernatural RPG, and Heroes Unlimited RPG along with original titles like Nightspawn. It would be this latter title that would lead to trouble, followed, ironically, by salvation.

“Todd [McFarlane] saw the Nightspawn RPG and freaked out[5],” said then-employee of Marvel Lana Wachowski, known at the time as Larry. “He was sure that they were ripping off his Hellspawn comic and was ready to march into the Legal Weasels’ office, but I managed to talk him off the ledge. ‘Todd,’ I said, ‘I know for a fact that they’re not ripping off Hellspawn.’ ‘How?’ he asked. ‘Because,” I replied, “they’re clearly ripping off Clive Barker’s Nightbreed!’”

Surely all a coincidence...

The Wachowskis would know, as they at the time had been working with Barker on a comics adaption of his books and films for the Epic line, including Cabal and Nightbreed. After showing the game book to Barker, he was mostly amused, and rather enjoyed the whole “Ba’al” conspiracy mythology (“I wish I’d thought of that”). But he still had his lawyer contact Palladium. And yet rather than demand that they cease and desist, he simply asked Palladium’s President Kevin Siembieda why not just license Nightbreed? Siembieda, who’d accepted the manuscript on spec from freelance writer C.J. Carella and claimed ignorance of the film, did so, giving Barker his share of the earlier sales and rebranding the second printing as the official Nightbreed RPG, the first of many Palladium collaborations with Barker in what became known as the Barkerverse.

Eventually, this partnership would be the small company’s salvation when the twin-challenges of a nasty divorce for Siembieda and embezzlement by a trusted employee, compounded by a massive corporate overreach in the 1990s and internal inefficiencies, led the company to the verge of bankruptcy in the early 2000s. Barker simply bought up a 45% stake and paid down the debts, then sent in a team of management consultants to turn the company, which still largely ran like a living room startup manned primarily by Siembieda’s gaming buddies, into a more professional organization, with properly trained editors and a CFO. Siembieda maintained creative control, but somewhat grudgingly handed operational control over to an experienced business manager recommended by Barker’s team.

(Image source RPG Geek and Amazon)

Similarly successful was Steve Jackson Games, an Austin-based company famed for its Generic Universal Roleplaying System, or GURPS, which allowed for an unlimited number of genres and settings under the exact same game system. GURPS held its own. Other games outside of the GURPS system did well too. Their popular Toon RPG would spur the TSR creation of a competing Roger Rabbit’s Toon Town RPG, for example. The 1980’s had been a successful time for the company, and yet they began the decade, awkwardly enough, with an FBI raid[6] when the agency mistook their GURPS Cyberpunk supplement as a “manual for computer hacking”.

Steve Jackson Games succeeded through diversification, publishing board games, card games, dice games, books, miniatures, and computer games, which allowed them to weather the ups-and-downs of an individual industry like tabletop roleplaying. Card games such as Illuminati were popular even beyond the RPG fandom. And yet it would be another card game that would make them into a powerhouse.

(Image sources Wikipedia and TV Tropes)

FASA, who had been best known for their Star Trek RPG, Dr. Who RPG, and the popular Mech Warrior and BattleTech series, scored a boost when Dr. Who gained a new youth following in the US. With a new, simpler system for the younger US Whovians and a new edition of their original rules for the “orthodox” fans, the Dr. Who franchise managed to feed the small company from two ends. And yet 1989 and the creation of the magical cyberpunk Shadowrun would be FASA’s biggest hit to date, soon to be followed by the related Earthdawn prequel. FASA also partnered with Universal Pictures and Toho on the popular Monster Mayhem RPG, based on the eponymous animated series. The game, which allowed the player to create and play an actual Kaiju to destroy cities and fight other Kaiju, took Power Gaming to a new and popular extreme.

FASA had even expanded widely into computer games and even Virtual Reality with their popular BattleTech Centers, made in collaboration with Apple and Midway. Kaiju Attack simulators made in partnership with Universal and Toho, where the players played Godzilla or Kong or the like, soon followed. Yet as the 1990s came to a close, the owners Jordan Weisman and L. Ross Babcock III decided to “quit while they were ahead” and sold the company to Bally/Midway and retired comfortably.

Games Workshop, meanwhile, continued to dominate the miniatures world with their venerable Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 lines and continued with their popular White Dwarf periodical. Like Steve Jackson, they had diversified their portfolio, getting into magazine publishing, videogames, tabletop roleplaying games, and even paints and brushes. Games Workshop remained in good financial footing built upon its solid fan base and some good licensing deals.

The 1990s would also see the birth of new companies, most notably White Wolf Publishing, whose Vampire: The Embrace and its various spinoffs would resonate with the increasingly Goth-tinged zeitgeist of the 1990s. In addition to playing well with existing RPG audiences, the World of Darkness setting would bring in new audiences, particularly female audiences, to what had been an insular, shrinking, and overwhelmingly male fandom. It also led to a surge in Live Action Roleplaying, becoming as common a setting for LARP as for tabletop. Numerous spinoff books and games that explored magic, lycanthropes, ghosts, and other supernatural fare expanded out from the vampiric core, and even led to medieval and other temporal settings. Its popularity would even lead to a television series and a series of novels.

But tabletop gaming was about to enter into an all-new era when Steve Jackson Games made a deal with novice game designer Richard Garfield. He first sold them his RoboRalley game, which proved moderately popular. But this early partnership led, in turn, to the creation of the breakout hit Five Magics[7], an innovative Collectable Card Game based in part on an earlier roleplaying game that he created. The new collectable card game format, which allowed gamers to build their own custom decks, thus encouraging them to buy lots of supplemental and expansion card packs in a hunt for the best cards, would make Garfield and Steve Jackson millionaires and spawn the creation of a hundred imitators. Five Magics became a smash success and cash cow and soon Garfield, now a full partner with Jackson in what was soon renamed Discordia Games, created a variety of new “CCGs” sometimes based upon existing Steve Jackson games IP (such as the Cyberpunk-based Net Runner and a CCG version of Illuminati), other game companies’ products (such as Vampire and Battletech games), or built upon all-new ideas, like the suddenly apropos for its creators Filthy Rich.

And thus the “CCG Craze” struck, leading other companies such as TSR and Dark Horse to create their own games, typically based upon existing IP, each to varying degrees of success. Traditional tabletop roleplayers were mixed on this, with some finding the new games an exciting new opportunity while other found them a threat to the more interactive games that they loved.

And yet soon some new CCGs would appear out of Japan that would set the world on fire.

[1] Essentially worked to make the math more intuitive and faster to determine a success or fail. No awkward THAC0 system, for one.

[2] Which was expanded from an adventure module and made in partnership with Tim Burton’s Skeleton Crew

[3] Without either Star Wars D6 or Ghostbusters to prop them up, West End is in even worse shape than our timeline.

[4] Leading Edge lost Aliens to West End, and thus dies sooner. More on why WotC failed in this very post.

[5] In our timeline McFarlane sued Palladium and forced them to rename the game as Nightbane.

[6] True in our timeline. Too weird to butterfly!

[7] Sold to the then-small company Wizards of the Coast in our timeline, where it became Magic: The Gathering, creating a powerhouse that eventually acquired TSR before being themselves acquired by Hasbro. In this timeline without MtG Wizards of the Coast will stagnate and go out of business.

Geekhis Khan · Feb 5, 2022

Whoopass Girls
Excerpt from Tech Grrls: The Rise of the Female Technologists 1990-2015 by Dr. Marina Sparks, PE

While Jeri Ellsworth struggled with the not-so-subtle misogyny of Technical High School, Heather Henson struggled with the engrained sexism of the Entertainment Industry as she attended classes at CalArts. “As things went on it became increasingly clear that they wanted me to go into costuming or editing or some other female-acceptable field,” she said. “Direction wasn’t really an option they encouraged in females. Maybe art direction, but even then, picking color pallets for set design would be more appropriate in their mind. If it hadn’t been for Leslie [Iwerks] I might have dropped out and gone to design school[1].”

Leslie Iwerks was an entertainment legacy herself, the daughter of Creatureworks head Don Iwerks and granddaughter of Disney Legend Ub Iwerks, who drew the first Mickey Mouse. Like Heather, she was looking to get into direction and production and had been encouraged to attend the Disney-linked CalArts by her family[2]. Like Heather, she was sick of the celluloid ceiling. “Heather and I had the shared experience of being the daughter of a Big Name, so on top of our second X chromosome it added to the difficulty in being taken seriously since they assumed that daddy had networked our way in.”

“That used to bug me,” Heather added. “I began to doubt myself. Maybe I really was only there because of Dad! Les proverbially smacked me in the face and got me out of that mindset.”

“We had to be there for each other,” added Leslie. “We hung up a picture of Ida Lupino in the apartment we shared and we made sure that we had each other to lean on or complain to about sexist asshole professors.”

By the time they completed their two-year programs at CalArts, both had job offers with both Disney and Amblin. Their friend Craig McCracken, meanwhile, had a job offer from Hanna-Barbera to do art direction on 2 Dum Mutts. But Heather had bigger plans. “She’d claimed a trust fund of around seven figures on her 18th birthday,” said Leslie, “and she said, ‘hey, what if we started our own studio?’”

“This was the early 1990s,” said Craig McCracken. “All the networks wanted shows that cloned Hoerk & Gatty, but they increasingly didn’t want to work with Fun Unlimited[3], who were being revealed in the press at the time to be a bunch of misogynistic jerks and sexual predators. 2 Dum Mutts was in that Hoerk & Gatty vein: gross-out lowest-common-denominator stuff. I guess I could have made it smarter than the concept suggested, but what I really wanted to work on was something completely different, in particular Whoopass Stew.”

The cartoon starred three almost painfully cute little girls who’d been produced when Professor Utonium accidentally added a “Can of Whoopass” to his mixture of “sugar, spice, and everything nice” in an attempt to create the perfect little girl, resulting in the Whoopass Girls. Craig had developed the three adorable little ass kickers at CalArts and produced a short animation with Genndy Tartakovsky. The violent and deliberately bathos-filled Whoopass Stew short was a hit among the other students and impressed the faculty. Craig knew he had a potential hit on his hands. “‘Hey,’ I thought, ‘if Heather can fund us, why waste time on Hoerk & Gatty rip-offs when we can complete the series of Whoopass shorts? Or Genndy’s Dexter’s Laboratory? Or Rob’s Drac and Mina?’”

After Heather and Leslie brought Craig and Genndy into the plan, they in turn invited their friend, animator Rob Renzetti. The five partners incorporated as “Whoopass Studios” and rented out an old garage and warehouse in Van Nuys, California. Heather recruited her brother John to help convert it into offices. Genndy found a trio of old DIS Mark IIIs and an old MINIBOG Compiler for sale from Disney’s 3D discard sale. The only problem was that none of the five knew enough about computers to get the old machines working smoothly.

“We hired a local computer geek to help set us up, but he was a real condescending prick who couldn’t admit that he had no idea what he was doing,” recalled Leslie. “So, Heather says, ‘hey, I know someone who might be able to help!’”

“I did some digging,” said Heather, “And I eventually got ahold of Jeri [Ellsworth]. She had graduated from Benson and was working at Nintendo by that point, but she wasn’t really happy with it.”

“I was a code monkey,” said Jeri. “Seriously, it was entry level stuff. And yea, I was entry level, I get it, but damned if I wasn’t bored and restless. Suddenly I get a call from Heather and she says, ‘how would you like to move to a shitty industrial park in Orange County and manage a handful of old-ass computers for an animation startup that’s probably doomed to fail?’ – I may be paraphrasing there – and I was like ‘oh fuck yea, when do I start?’”

Jeri came to Whoopass Studios, a name that she loved, and saw the computers. “I’d never worked with a DIS or MINIBOG,” she said, “But I cracked ‘em open and saw that it was mostly Atari chips plus a few odd Moog sound chips and the like. By the end of my first week, I had all three and the compiler not only humming along, but added in some LAN cards and networked them all together, tossed on a SQL server for backup, and was like ‘now what?’ I got bored with watching the boys animate, though I loved the Whoopass Girls, so I made my own work. I found a bunch of old C1280s available from a small company’s bankruptcy sale and restored and upgraded them, maxed out the RAM options, overclocked the processors a bit, and loaded some pirated copies of Lotus, Word Perfect, and Fox Pro for everyone at the office plus a couple of spares. That left me with another dozen or so, so I souped them up and sold them for a couple hundred bucks a piece.”

This little side hustle would expand into an ongoing computer repair, upgrade, and sales business that would prove profitable and help pad the startup with fresh income. “At Whoopass Studios we had no real set business model,” Leslie admitted. “The boys were doing Whoopass Stew shorts, Jeri was dumpster diving for old computers to soup up and flip, Heather was spinning up a puppet workshop, and I was veering between managing it all, taking MBA night classes, and recording the whole damned thing for a potential documentary.”

Soon Jeri’s side hustle was the company’s main source of income. It spun up into Kickass Computers, later renamed to Kickin’ Computers to help attract a family market (there was a real need at the time for cheap, reliable computers for students in the poor neighborhoods of LA). “We did it all,” said Jeri, “PCs, Macs, Virgins, Tandys, Toshibas, and my beloved Commodores. I even revamped a bunch of old MICKEYs for the Van Nuys elementary schools, my first RAT HACK.”

Kickin’ Computers would expand to a half dozen locations throughout the LA Basin by 2000, when they would sell the chain for a substantial profit and be able to outright buy the restored building they had been leasing. The new owners of the franchise, lacking Jeri’s skill and facing diminishing profit margins, would run it into the ground by 2005. “The margins [for computers] were down from, like, two-hundred bucks a computer to about forty [bucks] by that point,” said Jeri, “so the writing was on the wall.”

But computers were just the start. “The garage had an old lift, so I restored it. I found some greasers and motorheads, mostly non-violent ex-cons looking for a second chance, and so we spun up a small legal chop shop. We had to drop one guy for dealing on the side and a chick who started shooting up again, but most of them were glad for the second chance, loved what they were doing, and were model employees.” Kickass Customs likewise became a Van Nuys institution and eventually the subject of a Leslie Iwerks documentary that got recognition at Sundance and later a Docu-Series.

It even got an early customer by way of the Skeleton Crew’s Lead for Computer Graphics Spaz Williams, who worked with them and Jeri to restore an old Harley he found. Spaz would even briefly date Jeri, but before they broke up, she enlisted him to help spin up a small CG team among the Hackers. “I managed to score a few second-hand Barneys [Silicon Graphics stations] from Triad, apparently old Trek effects computers, and got them running with Wavefront software. We did the effects for a bunch of commercials,” said Jeri, “and many of our folks went on to careers in the I-Works or ILM or wherever. We were never going to compete with the Big Boys or do a movie, but when you needed a smart-assed talking mattress or an elephant driving a Volkswagen to push product on Primetime, then Kickin’ Graphics was the number you called.”

The studios grew in unexpected ways. “I was spraying one of my ‘Street Rats’ up on their wall one Saturday night,” recalled street artist “Rat Phynk”, “and like five of them caught me in the act. I thought they’d yell at me and threaten to call the cops, but instead they, like, complemented my proportions and color choices. (laughs) One, Craig, asked me if I’d like to paint the whole damn wall. I thought he was joking. ‘No, man, we serious. I’m getting the paints! Got any friends who paint?’ It was a dirty-ass old wall, covered in tags, most of them shit middle school marker stuff or old gang sign from the ‘80s. We spent the whole damn weekend covering that wall with characters. I did my whole Street Rat family, they did they Whoopass Girls and Gangrene Gang and Amoebas and shit, my homies did they characters. ‘No profanity, no drugs’ was the only rule, ‘cause they was gonna’ be having kids come visit someday, they said.

“Soon the whole damn wall was covered in cartoon characters all whoopin’ each other’s asses. The landlord, he was pissed. But then [Craig and Genndy] pointed out to him how ain’t nobody was tagging where we painted. The old bastard hired us to paint some of his other properties! A version of my Street Rats ended up in their cartoons at one point, and I got money for any appearance on screen or in merch. My homies and I went and joined the studio after that, doing design work and professional street art and murals for companies and cities since almost nobody dares tag our shit. We did the Whoopass Bridge over in North Hollywood, for one. That’s, like, a tourist attraction now!” he laughed.

Sort of like this (Image source Reddit)

Graffiti artists were just the beginning. “We soon brought in other tenants to share the costs and co-sponsor each other’s work, like a sort of co-op,” said Leslie, checking off the tenants with her fingers. “Jeri spun up what she called a ‘Hacker Space’ for folks who hacked together electronics and computers in innovative ways. There was an art collective and some musicians. A drum maker. Rat and his street artists. We put in a small sound booth for audio recording and captured some early Reggaeton artists before that popped. The local gamers hung out to play D&D. Jeri set up some pinball games and arcade consoles that she’d repair and upgrade herself. We had a couple of tattoo shops, some hair stylists, and a body piercing place set up in some of the stalls John [Henson] built us. Eventually Jeri and Genndy set up an internet café in ‘96.

“We became sort of an oddball mecca in Van Nuys. If you didn’t fit in anywhere else then you’d fit in here. Jeri even dug up an old Beacon Cube and turned it into a Net Server, got us some modems, and suddenly we had a netsite; www.whoopass-studios.net, and a kid-friendly www.kickin-studios.net. Jeri taught Heather HTML and Heather designed the netsites, which won awards for some interactive features and animations that were really advanced for the time.”

Things got even stranger. “Heather got some of the motorheads from Kickass Customs to help her clean out the warehouse in the back,” recalled Rob Renzetti. “She turned the whole space into this weird interactive art zone. ‘Phantomia’ she called it. It was this guided walk-through maze with various puppet-driven creatures and physical effects along with lights and sounds and even smells. Guests would pay the entry fee and a guide in costume would take them through this world, where each stop along the way held some sort of riddle or physical puzzle or pattern or thought experiment that had to be solved in order to advance to the next stage, with various puppet creatures offering hints. Like Labyrinth in real life, but without MJ. It was a minor local hit. Jeri and her hackers eventually turned it into a video game. Between that and the impromptu music shows and games the locals started calling us ‘Ghetto Disneyland’.”

And that “ghetto” angle became a source of internal pride and external concern. “Dad was worried about me,” said Heather, “since Van Nuys was still a little shady back then. But we always stayed in groups, Jerry’s Motorheads were like a built-in security force, and Rob set up a good security system, mostly for the computers since we never kept or carried much cash and used a courier company to take any serious cash to the bank every evening. And frankly, the potential payoff wasn’t worth the effort of the crime. We had a couple attempted break-ins and had to fire someone for skimming out of the register, but for the most part we were left alone. Just the ‘weird kids that made the cartoons.’”

“It was a wild time,” said Skynz, one of the resident tattoo artists. “Jeri was always zipping around the place on her roller skates, even when she was playing pinball or rebuilding the engine on an old Harley. Heather had her puppets. Some of them were these cute little things with big puppy dog eyes and others were these freaky, acid-trip nightmares. Les was either busy in her office trying to keep the whole damned thing running, or else going everywhere with that camera, filming everything. And ‘The Boys’ were always at their drawing boards or computers, making violent cartoons with these huge-headed little girls who were obviously based on Les, Heather, and Jeri.”

“The wildest part was when the FBI showed up,” laughed Jeri. “They saw we had a ‘Hacker Space’ and confused ‘hackers’ with ‘crackers’ and raided us, expecting to find servers full of social security numbers or something. They found nothing, of course, save that one of the guys had cracked his high school LAN back when he was 14 and one of Rat’s boys had a blunt in his pocket, but we changed the name to the ‘Maker Space’ to avoid such things in the future.”

And behind it all, the all-seeing eye of Leslie’s camera captured everything, including the FBI raid. In 1997 she carefully edited the hours of footage into her breakout documentary Whoopass!, a human-interest tale of community, acceptance, second chances, and believing in your dreams. It got honorable mention at Sundance and Cannes and a Golden Globe nomination, but got snubbed by Oscar.

On top of everything else, Jeri even got into the animation software game. “Around about ’95 Craig and Genndy were complaining about lag in the old Pixar, Luxo, and Beaker programs they used for their animation and asked me if there was a way to improve things. At first, I threw together a simple C-based GUI that called on the three programs and integrated them into a single screen, but that made the lag worse. I tried moving the base programs to their own computers and accessed them through the LAN and that helped, but the baud rate was limiting. So, I cracked the software for Pixar, Luxo, and Beaker and, sure enough, hundreds of lines of poorly-documented spaghetti code. The Imagine, Inc., folks had just added new subroutines on top of the old stuff with each version upgrade and I strongly suspected that some old programmer had deliberately made it a mess that only he could figure out for job security.

“So, I decided to rebuild it all from scratch using C and an object-oriented strategy. I found a girl named Mingh Tran[4] who was a math major from CalTech and could do vector math in her head, and we spent about a month with the Hackers and consumed about 100 gallons of Jolt each and created an integrated sound, lighting, and video production and editing program.”

The software ran using Mingh’s super-efficient vector algebra and an efficient system of pointers and object calls and did what the pro software did at twice the speed and at a quarter of the hard drive space.

“Craig called it ‘Animatrix’ since it ‘matrixed’ animation software, though I suspect he had dominatrix on his mind when he named it, so Les came up with ‘Animatriarch’. We shopped Animatriarch around at the software cons and managed to get Microsoft, GeoSoft, Apple, Wavefront [Technologies], and Imagine [Inc.] into a bidding war that Imagine eventually won. That was a seven-figure check, I don’t mind saying, and it set us up for the long haul. Heather even got to claim a profit from her ‘investment’ in Whoopass.”

Not bad for a little ‘90s Tech Grrl power.

[1] This is what she did in our timeline, attending the Rhode Island School of Design. Why she did so in our timeline I can’t say, but the notorious systemic sexism of CalArts, particularly at the time (as documented by those who went through it here) may very well have been the impetus for a woman raised to be confident and self-reliant. Oh, and Hat Tip to @Kalvan for noting to me how Heather was at CalArts at the same time as Craig and Genndy, and also for proposing that Heather and Jeri Ellsworth could meet at some point.

[2] In our timeline she attended USC. Her father had left Disney with Stan Kinsey by this point in our timeline to found Iwerks Entertainment. I’m assuming that was part of the motivation for not going to CalArts.

[3] Recall that Fun Unlimited Cartoons is a “kids entertainment” label for Bakshi-Kricfalusi Productions

[4] Fictional.

Whoopass Weekend continues tomorrow with Whoopass Stew!

Geekhis Khan · Feb 6, 2022

Whoopass Girls (Cont'd)
Excerpt from Tech Grrls: The Rise of the Female Technologists 1990-2015 by Dr. Marina Sparks, PE

Despite all of the achievements of Whoopass Studios, it would be their eponymous Whoopass Girls who would be the studio’s most lasting achievement in the eyes of many of its fans. Craig, Genndy, and Rob worked long hours and produced five high quality “episodes” of Whoopass Stew. They used whatever Whoopass Studios members or visitors were on hand to do the voices, which is why the early Whoopass Girls sound different than their eventual Television incarnations. Typically, Les voiced Blossom, Heather voiced Bubbles, and tattoo artist “Skynz” voiced Buttercup.

The shows debuted to the public to high acclaim at Spike and Mike's Sick and Twisted Festival of Animation in 1993[1], though they’d previously held numerous private showings of the shorts as they developed them, particularly at Whoopass Studios. “Even the punks, the homies, the motorheads, the Goths, and the pinheads went apeshit when Bubbles whooped on Fuzzy Lumpkins,” said Craig.

Whoopass Stew and its Whoopass Girls were an immediate cult sensation in LA, with underground screenings all through the LA basin and midnight theatrical releases on the Sunset Strip, with copies making their way throughout the West Coast underground scene. Riot Grrrl punk band Bikini Kill ran an article on them in their Zine Girl Power. Young and outgoing women in LA started to call themselves “Whoopass Girls” as a descriptor, and “are you Blossom, Bubbles, or Buttercup?” became a much more personally satisfying question to ask each other than “are you a Betty or a Veronica?”

“People were getting Whoopass Girls tattoos, particularly the ladies, who saw them as feminist icons,” recalled Craig. “Skynz even came up with versions of the girls in the classic Rosie the Riveter pose. I didn’t have to do so since they were my creations, but I still paid Skynz for her design and we sold it on merch.”[2]

Real life began to creep in to the fiction. “By this point, working with Heather, Les, and Jeri week after week, it was only natural that the Whoopass Girls started to take on aspects of their personalities,” said Genndy.

“You could see it most clearly in the big things,” said Craig. “Like how Blossom was always using a calculator or annoying her sisters by recording everything with her camcorder. Or how Bubbles was always drawing or sewing or making little puppets out of discarded juice boxes. Or how Buttercup would always be fixing things and went everywhere on skates even though she could literally fly. Of course, those that know them can see the real girls in the little things, like facial expressions or ways of talking or standing that only those of us who know them will understand.”

(L-R) Heather, Leslie, and Jeri?

“People assumed I was Blossom because of the red hair,” said Jeri, “but no, Les was Blossom and Heather was Bubbles. I was Buttercup,” she added with a wry smirk, referring to the most crass and violent of the trio.

Craig attempted to shop Whoopass Stew around to the animation networks, but they all agreed that it was too violent and drastically needed a softer name. “Cartoon City and Neptune both thought that ‘Whoopass’ was too crude,” said Craig. “A couple of people suggested various names like ‘The Kickin’ Chicks’ and ‘The Powerpuff Girls’, which was cool, but anything other than ‘Whoopass’ just seemed like we were betraying our fans[3].”

They finally got their big break when the Whoopass Stew episodes started appearing on MTV’s Liquid Television in 1994, generating quite a bit of buzz[4]. MTV greenlit the show to play alongside Aeon Flux and Daria in 1995. The tiny Whoopass Studios had yet to produce a weekly show, so they partnered with Wayward Entertainment, who had the resources, writing team, and production experience, and Wayward in turn hired veteran voice actors Judith Barsi[5], Tara Freeman[6] (née Charendoff), and E. G. Daily to voice the eponymous girls. It became a fruitful partnership.

“Vanessa [Coffey] loved the Girls, but she thought that we could do better with the writing,” said Craig. “Admittedly, our early shorts were pretty much ‘the girls encounter a villain and kick his ass’, though she confessed that ‘Monkey See, Doggie Do’ was great. Vanessa hooked us in with some of the writers that worked on The Bunyans and Nuclear Family and even Rugrats – admittedly they were usually the same people – and now we were able to increasingly address issues beyond kicking ass and playing with puppies, like going to school, dealing with their father and his dysfunctional love life, and having sisterly arguments. Frankly we’re thankful for that. It turned it from a fun bit of escapism and into a something transformative.”

The show took off on MTV to a degree that surprised even the channel heads. “The Whoopass Girls took off with audiences of all ages and backgrounds. Little girls and boys and their parents, teens, college kids, working adults, you name it,” said MTV executive Japhet Asher. “They were dynamite, a true crossover hit. The animation was simple but gorgeous, the characters were awesome and memorable. The writing was superb. It mixed things considered hyper-girly like kittens and flowers with things considered hyper-masculine like tooth-loosening fistfights and explosions. To this day it’s one of MTV’s most beloved cartoons.”

It also got the attention of critics and even academics.

“It was one of the first truly postmodern cartoons,” said Dr. David Lavery of Middle Tennessee State University. “It took the mid-century animation and tropes of the old UPA cartoons and gave them the scale and kinetics of Japanese Anime when the latter was at the bleeding edge of the American animation avant garde. The Whoopass Girls took third-wave feminist values and overlaid them on a simulacrum of the 1950s nuclear family relationships, all filtered through the eyes of 5-year-old girls who love puppies and hate icky bugs. Super-strong 5-year-old girls who can also fly like Superman and shoot lasers from their eyes, mind you.”

As the show progressed, they continued to push the boundaries. “From the start we’d had lots of adult content, even beyond the violence,” said Craig, “We had Sara Bellum and Sedussa right from the start, of course, and The Devil[7] was queer-coded literally to hell. We never had anything obscene, as funny as it would have been to have Bubbles cussing out Buttercup in that high-pitched squeak, but we also veered lightly into politics, and heavily into social satire. Race, bigotry, gender, sex, sexual identity…we even skirted drugs and religion on occasion. It got us in trouble with the censors and parents’ groups even though we were a PG-rated and occasionally T-rated cartoon on a teen-focused channel, but you know? Screw them, we were having a blast and so were audiences.”

The criticism led in turn to creativity. Recalling one of the proposed alternate names, all of the complaints about the violence and adult content, as well as some complaints from socially conservative groups about the girls not acting properly “feminine”, led them to produce the popular S3:E6, “The Powerpuff Girls”, where the mayor of the City of Townsville, facing complaints from various moral activists about the levels of violence and other “unbecoming behaviors” taken by the destructive and often argumentative Whoopass Girls, hires an outside science firm to develop the eponymous Powerpuffs as a “proper, family friendly” alternative to the Whoopass Girls. Said Powerpuff Girls (Kitten, Cuddles, and Candytuft) are, of course, saccharine-sweet, ridiculously wholesome, perfectly behaved, never argue with each other, always follow the rules, and never do anything objectionable at all…including acts of violence. “What Mojo needs is a really good talking-to!” This naturally allows the villains to take over the city, forcing the mayor to relent and rehire the Whoopass Girls to save the day. The Powerpuffs would “retire”, but occasionally made appearances in later episodes, often as look-alike decoys, as the source of mistaken identity plots, as non-violent assistance on missions, or just for a playdate with the Whoopass Girls, slowly becoming more rounded and helpful allies and soon gaining a fandom in their own right.

4f1e5caf-4461-450f-a323-40ce793cedc2-jpeg.716771

[8]

The Whoopass Girls have remained a cultural touchstone since their 1990s release, becoming iconographic for the Girl/Grrrl Power and Third Wave Feminist movements of the era. They managed to capture the zeitgeist of the age while also being a damned fun and clever cartoon in their own right. Whoopass Stew lasted for six seasons on MTV, remaining a hit even after the popular Daria had run out of steam, and even spawned a movie in the early 2000s. They have been rebooted a few times, though fans argue about whether the reboots truly capture the soul of the original.

And yet the real Grrl Power moments were behind the scenes, with the true-life inspirations for the evolving characters at Whoopass Studios continuing to push the limits of the Possible.

“Blossom, Bubbles, and Buttercup are awesome, of course,” said Bikini Kill front woman Kathleen Hanna, “But once you’ve met Les, Heather, and Jeri – the real Whoopass Girls – you know what real Girl Power is.”

[1] A year ahead of our timeline and with multiple shorts. The five Shorts include “A Sticky Situation”, “Whoopass A GoGo” (both posted above; “GoGo” never left the storyboard stage in our timeline, but elements of “GoGo” ended up in the final episode of PPG), “Monkey See, Doggie Do” (which in our timeline became S1:E1 of The Powerpuff Girls), “Monster Trouble” (which in our timeline became S1:E13 “Uh Oh…Dynamo”), and “Meat Fuzzy Lumpkins” (shown above in our timeline’s Cartoon Cartoon Powerpuff Girls version).

[2] Appearing five years earlier has resulted in them dovetailing into the West Coast “Girl Power/Riot Grrrl” underground movements of the early 1990s, meaning that rather than catching the back-end of the established third wave feminist zeitgeist of the late 1990s they’re catching the wave right at the very start and indeed helping to shape it.

[3] Sorry to those who wanted the name Powerpuff to stay (it is a great name) but there’s no way that Craig and Genndy could face their OG fans if they “sold out” like that. Craig still occasionally lets slip in interviews in our timeline that he still thinks of them as the Whoopass Girls.

[4] Yet again, @Igeo654 called it (are you freakin’ psychic?). Needless to say, in our timeline, since Craig and Genndy went to Hanna-Barbera, Cartoon Network eventually picked up the characters in the late ‘90s, but wanted them renamed. Eventually, the name The Powerpuff Girls was chosen and a classic was born.

[5] All love to Cathy Cavadini, of course! That said, Barsi was the master of voicing the “bossy little girl”.

[6] Tara Strong in our timeline.

[7] In the PPGs on Cartoon Network, The Devil was renamed to just “Him”.

[8] Hat tip to @Nerdman3000 and @nick_crenshaw82 for these images and Hat tip to @Sunflare2k5 for the name "Candytuft".

Geekhis Khan · Feb 8, 2022

Part 9: Bringing Things Back from the Dead (Con’t)
Excerpt from Dark Funhouse, the Art and Work of Tim Burton, an Illustrated Compendium

Throughout 1990-1992 Skeleton Crew Productions had increasingly been diversifying their focus and managing multiple productions, with each of the many members of the Skeleton Crew pursuing parallel small to medium-sized films and productions. But the Skeleton Crew’s most famous production from the early 1990s was undoubtedly Jurassic Park, done in collaboration with Amblin Entertainment. Jurassic Park was an “all hands on deck” production that brought Burton, Selick, Heinrichs, Cheryl Henson, and the Chiodo Brothers together with Amblin, the Creatureworks, and the Softworks to create the Skeleton Crew’s first big budget MGM feature.

“Jurassic Park is the perfect 1950s monster matinee, but with a blockbuster budget.” – Tim Burton.

Writer Michael Crichton had been working on a story idea featuring a scientist bringing a dinosaur back from the dead since his college days, and when Steven Spielberg first heard about his then in-progress novel in 1990 he almost immediately jumped on the film rights, which he took to MGM.[1] After strongly considering doing the film himself, Spielberg decided to hand the reigns to Burton once MGM Vice Chairman Bernie Brillstein greenlighted his passion project, the holocaust drama Schindler’s List.

But while Burton productions had been heavy in the realm of special effects, none had been as big and expensive as Jurassic Park, which commanded an incredible for the time $60 million budget. From the start Crichton demanded $1.5 million for the film rights. Also, while Burton wanted to do the effects in a deliberately dated way, planning to turn the film into a homage to the old Ed Wood and Ray Harryhausen films of the midcentury and give the film deliberate B-movie sensibilities, the MGM board overwhelmingly wanted the movie to push the bleeding edge in effects, recognizing from the start that this was going to be a summer tentpole blockbuster. The novel had been a New York Times best seller and audience anticipation for the movie was running high.

“This has to be way bigger than Land Before Time,” insisted MGM Chairman Tom Wilhite, referring to the 1987 animatronics film.

As a prank, Burton, assisted by co-conspirators Brian Henson and Marty Sklar, revealed a bait-and-switch “Effects Test Reel” that demonstrated exactly the B Movie look and sensibilities that Burton had originally wanted, only for a fully rendered computerized Tyrannosaurus to rip through the screen in a moment that shocked the board and then shocked audiences when the prank reel was turned into a trailer for the theaters. The trailer is still played at universities as an example of effective visual storytelling and the power of properly done effects.

But even if he couldn’t make an Ed Wood style film, he was able to make the film a subtle homage to the monster matinee films of the midcentury. Once again, he tapped Cheryl Henson for costuming, who chose a deliberate 1950s/1960s look in the cut of the outfits, and tapped Rick Heinrichs as set designer, who gave the sets a midcentury modern aesthetic. Danny Elfman’s classical score, with its subtle theremin and occasional blasting brass, gave the soundscape a subtle midcentury science fiction feel. He and Heinrichs chose camera angles and color pallets and color saturation techniques that subconsciously hinted at something more 1950s[2]. And he and his script doctors took the Crichton screenplay and gave the dialog and its cadence a similar midcentury feel, even as it kept the spirit of the original Crichton conversations.

Much as Steven Spielberg and George Lucas had made modern-day films with 1930s and ‘40s tropes and sensibilities, so was Tim Burton making a modern-day film with 1950s and ‘60s tropes and sensibilities, even as both were geared to appeal to contemporary audiences.

Essentially like this role from Mars Attacks (Image source “piercebrosnan.com”)

The casting reflected things as well. Rather than seeking a rugged outdoorsman type for the lead role of paleontologist Dr. Ian Grant, such as Spielberg’s first choice of Harrison Ford, Burton decided to give Grant the veneer of the 1950s “Science Hero”, complete with pipe and note pad. Thus, Burton chose Remington Steele lead Pierce Brosnan, an actor with a Cary Grant like sense of refined old-fashioned masculinity who was once considered a favorite for playing James Bond[3]. For his partner and love interest paleobotanist Dr. Ellie Marcus, a bit of a snarky dirt-under-the-fingernails tomboy, he chose Geena Davis. Despite some strong lobbying by Amblin casting director Janet Hirshenson for Jeff Goldblum[4], character actor Johnny Depp was chosen for the role of detached and borderline-misanthropic chaos mathematician Dr. Malcom Morrison, who served as a sort of superego for the show. Malcolm provided quirky exposition on why reanimating dinosaurs through genetic engineering was (duh) a bad idea. He served as a foil for Dr. Grant, but also served as a foil for the architect of the eponymous Jurassic Park, CEO and billionaire Timothy Harmon, played by Hammer Horror alumni Christopher Lee[5].

The stakes were raised further by the addition of Hammond’s grandchildren, the nerdy “dino-freak” grandson Tim (Aaron Schwartz) and the athletic and sports-loving tomboy Lex (Cristina Ricci, who learned how to throw a softball for the film), who serve as reflections of Grant and Marcus “in miniature”. Grant, who is at first uncomfortable around the kids, grows to love and appreciate them as he’s forced by the events of the film to help them escape the marauding dinosaurs. Rounding out the cast, Benicio Del Toro was cast as the Australian game keeper James Mulroney, Jeffrey Jones was brought in as lawyer Tony Gennaro, Samuel L. Jackson was chosen as chief engineer Arnold Ray, and Chris Elliott[6] as the disgruntled IT specialist Donald Nedry, whose attempted corporate espionage sets the dinosaurs loose and unleashes the events of the film.

Burton’s direction and dialog quotes the old “rubber monster matinee” films, giving Lee’s Harmon a rather amicable exterior even as his greed clouds his ability to foresee the consequences of his action. Burton and Lee make him a somewhat sympathetic character, a Dr. Frankenstein whose hopes to conquer death instead unleash it. Depp’s Malcolm, on the other hand, is the voice of reason whose concerns get ignored until it is too late largely because he is also thoroughly dislikable, a prickly and persnickety man who can’t stand to get his hands or clothes dirty. Del Toro’s Mulroney is borderline sadistic in how he treats the “animals”, even as he respects them for their “vicious cunning”.

What unfolds is like a classic monster movie where unchecked, ill-considered science unleashes terror. This terror takes the form of an unstoppable killing machine in the form of the Tyrannosaurus Rex, the terrifyingly smart and devious velociraptors, and the poison-spitting dilophosaurus[7]. All of the human’s weapons and intelligence fail to protect them as Nedry’s betrayal causes all of their technological safeguards, like electric fences and barriers, to fail one by one.

(Image source Digital Trends)

Driven by a huge popular buzz thanks to the jaw-dropping technical effects and the popularity of the book, Jurassic Park opened at #1 in the box office and stayed there for several straight weeks. It would go on to gross more than $770 million at the international box office[8], with audiences enthralled by the revolutionary special effects. The critics and audiences alike hailed the film as a modern masterpiece. Siskel and Ebert cited it’s “masterful” blending of old and new cinema techniques and gave it two enthusiastic thumbs up. The largest complaints came from parents’ groups, who decried the violence and horror tropes of the T-rated film, particularly given that children naturally flocked to the film despite the rating. This latter aspect was exacerbated when MGM and Amblin merchandised the film to almost Star Wars like levels, with an emphasis on toys and tie-ins to child-targeted merchandise. The later appearance of a Jurassic Park animated series marketed to kids only exacerbated this[9].

The backlash caught a lot of the Disney/MGM executives by surprise, and they naturally decided that the next dinosaur film needed to be more child friendly. This led associate board member George Lucas to approach Jim Henson and Tom Wilhite with plans for a Lucasfilm collaboration on a film based on the recently released illustrated novel Dinotopia, which was a particular favorite of his daughters[10]. They greenlit the project, intended for release in the mid-1990s. But Dinotopia wasn’t the only film spurred by Jurassic Park’s success, with Universal soon looking into the potential of CG for remakes for some of their old monster franchises, including King Kong, and Toho exploring options for Godzilla[11].

Jurassic Park is seen by many as the commercial peak of Burton’s directorial career, a colossal blockbuster and a modern classic. With its immense global success, grumblings ceased among the Skeleton Crew shareholders about the underperformance of James and the Giant Peach and the cost of the arthouse vanity project Ed Wood. The Skeleton Crew had shattered records and proven that they were capable of more than just “weird, macabre stuff”. With Jurassic Park, Burton had cemented his and the Skeleton Crew’s legacy.

Of course, how does one follow up a film as groundbreaking as Jurassic Park?

[1] One of the fun flourishes of this timeline’s Jurassic Park is that the MGM Lion will be replaced by roaring T-Rex (hat tip to @Plateosaurus).

[2] Eventually, digital coloring techniques were used to create a special Black & White “Drive-In Matinee Edition” on VCD and limited Arthouse release that some fans call “better than the original”. A “Harrywood Edition” (the name a portmanteau of Harryhausen and Ed Wood) was similarly created in the late 1990s that replaced the CG and animatronic effects with midcentury-style stop-mo and forced perspective like Burton always wanted, which also gained a small but fanatical fandom.

[3] I swear I did not deliberately actor-swap James Bond and Alan/Ian Grant. It just came out that way!

[4] Yes, sadly this world loses the memetic glory of torn-shirt Jeff Goldblum kicked back on the bench. Alas, truly a dystopia I have created!!

[5] Note that Christopher Lee’s Timothy Harmon, despite Lee working to humanize him, will be way closer to the rather cold, greedy, and manipulative Harmon (John Hammond in our timeline) of the original book than Richard Attenborough’s likeable grandfatherly version, so Burton felt little hesitation in having him devoured in the end by a swarm of Procompsognathus (“Compies”) as per the book. As a related note, much of the reason for the “Hammond as everybody’s friendly uncle, but also a greedy corporate type” persona Spielberg went for – as well as turning the exposition scene describing how they cloned the dinosaurs into a Disney-like carrousel ride and giving the voiceover on the park tour SUV rides a very “Disneyesque” voice temper right out of the original EPCOT rides – was almost certainly a deliberate poke at rival Disney. Needless to say, this will be harder to get away with in this timeline. Burton will slip in a few small biting-the-hand pokes at the company, but they will be played far more subtly.

[6] Burton really liked Elliott in Get a Life (as in our timeline) and thus hired him for Nedry in this timeline. Since Burton was not involved with Pee Wee’s Big Adventure in this timeline, he has no nostalgic need to produce a similar film, meaning that there will be no Cabin Boy in this timeline. Future Elliott collaborations may be forthcoming. See the wacky set of very specific circumstances that led to the surreal cult flop Cabin Boy here. DisneyWar even outright states that Katzenberg and the rest of Touchstone wanted to kill Cabin Boy, but Michael Eisner himself stood by it, probably because it was really cheap to make. For the record, as a fan of Dada Comedy I kind of liked Cabin Boy just for the sheer mindfuck of it all. Q: How many Dadaists does it take to change a lightbulb? A: the requisite salmon.

[7] And no, the dinosaurs will not have feathers, but an expository line will be thrown in that the JP geneticists deliberately edited out the feather-growth genes when “test audiences” reacted unfavorably to seeing feathers on a young T-Rex in a bit of meta-humor.

[8] Notably less than the almost ludicrous for the time $912 million initial gross in our timeline since Burton’s “weird” sensibilities and muted color pallets have alienated some compared to Spielberg’s brighter and more sentimental take. Still, much like other films that revolutionized effects, such as Star Wars and Terminator 2 and The Matrix and Avatar, the sheer power of the eye candy will put butts in seats all by itself.

[9] Slouch cap tip to @Plateosaurus for the reminder about the JP cartoon.

[10] True. Lucas reportedly considered a film in our timeline. There’s a reason why the Naboo City of Theed in The Phantom Menace looks so much like the waterfall city in Dinotopia.

[11] Dilophosaurus taco-shaped frill tip to @Nathanoraptor for some ideas and butterflies for Jurassic Park.

Geekhis Khan · Feb 10, 2022

Episode XXVII: JurassiChat!
From the MonsterChat Video Series

A Guest Post by @Nathanoraptor

Interior - Study
NATHAN and HOLLY sit in chairs in front of a shelf full of various monster figurines and toys. Jurassic Park toys are front and center.

Nathan
From the depths of the darkest corners of Crosby on a tiny little island called the UK, comes MonsterChat! I am Doctor Nathanstein, your creepy guide through this dark realm and this is my dwarfish, somewhat stunted assistant (and sister) Holly!

Holly
Enough with the dwarf crap! I’m 5’5! That isn’t short!

Nathan
We’ll discuss that and why you’re wrong and I’m right later. Now, if you grew up at any point past the ‘90s, you will remember Jurassic Park – if you don’t, then what planet have you been living on or what freaky cult were you raised in? We decided to do a bit of a retrospective of it, just to remind people what you fell in love with.

Holly
I mean, yeah, it’s been part of so many people’s childhoods, it’s hard to imagine a film in the past three decades that’s had more of an impact.

Nathan
Yeah, and you have to realize how… ambitious JP was at the time. Basically, it was a $60 million film in a genre that many people thought was dead. Monster movies were trashy, low-budget affairs with no mainstream appeal.

Holly
Nobody thought JP would catch on?

Nathan
Nope. Pretty much everyone in the movie industry thought Disney/MGM were mad to embark on it – Michael Eisner infamously said, when Jeff Katzenberg expressed concern about him pitting Another Stakeout against Jurassic Park, “How many people subscribe to Fangoria annually? Because that’s everyone who’s going to see Jurassic Park.”

Holly
And that film bombed and JP succeeded. Wow, if there were a more spectacular way to eat your words.

Nathan
Oh, yes – never since Irving Thalberg said talking pictures were “just a phase” has somebody ever expressed such a titanic error of judgement.

Holly
Anyway, you’re more au fait with the story on how this film was made… Care to tell us?

Nathan
Basically, when he was working with Crichton on what would become ER, Spielberg found out about the novel before its publication and found the premise very interesting. After the book came out, he recommended the book to Jim Henson, who read it and was immediately fascinated by the premise and its themes. Spielberg went back and began convincing Crichton to see about making it into a film.

Holly
Uh-huh.

Nathan
The book was a New York Times bestseller, so pretty much every major studio wanted to make a movie of it, and Crichton was demanding $1.5 million for the film rights. Warner was bidding for Joe Dante, Fox was bidding for James Cameron, and Columbia was bidding for Richard Donner. However, the general consensus seems to be that whichever studio was bidding on Spielberg’s behalf would have gotten the rights… and that ended up being Disney/MGM. Universal stayed out of it; they’d talked to Toho about doing an American remake of Godzilla and they’d been batting around a new Kong film ever since the late 1980s, so they were watching and waiting to see if there was a market for this sort of thing before progressing with those ideas.

Holly
But Spielberg didn’t end up directing it himself?

Nathan
No – he wanted to, but then Bernie Brillstein greenlit Schindler’s List, which was Spielberg’s passion project. Spielberg didn’t want to be balancing both films, so he passed JP to Burton, remained as producer, and the film became a co-production with Burton’s Skeleton Crew Productions…

Holly
Burton was Henson and Spielberg’s protégé, so that’s unsurprising. However, I’m guessing that was a bit of a surprise, because Burton and crew had never done anything that big and high budget before. I mean, yeah, these guys were good at effects filming, but…

Nathan
Yeah, there was some anxiety about that, apparently. The Skeleton Crew had never done a film on that scale before and there was a fear that they might fuck it up. Of course, Dracula helped allay some fears, but there was still that worry…

Holly
I remember someone (can’t remember who) who privately said that some at Disney thought it was like giving the Manhattan Project to a bunch of twelve-year-olds with a chemistry kit….

Nathan
Yeah. What’s really interesting is that Burton had to be convinced to have the dinosaurs done in CGI. He wanted to use stop-motion for the dinosaurs to create that sort of classic Harryhausen feel, and had begun working with Phil Tippett. However, a guy named Steve Williams, who was suspended from ILM for telling George Lucas where to stick his Light Saber, and was swearing up and down (literally swearing – the man was and still is quite foul-mouthed… we really should see if we can get him for an appearance one day) swearing that he could do the dinosaurs in CGI… well, he joined the Skeleton Crew…

Holly
Takes all kinds, don’t it?

Nathan
Yup – he and a guy named Mark Dippe put together a reel of an animated T-rex skeleton and showed to Burton and Kathleen Kennedy. They were both rather impressed – it was enough to convince Burton to concede, if reluctantly, and, when Kathleen Kennedy told Spielberg about it, Spielberg was convinced too… and the rest is history.

Holly
Burton eventually got his wish, though: the Special Editions.

Nathan
Yes, a B&W “Matinee” version and an old fashioned “Harrywood” version that did it all in stop-mo and forced perspective. But speaking of the then-groundbreaking CG effects, there’s a very infamous story behind the film’s teaser trailer. Tim Burton, Brian Henson and Marty Sklar put together an “Effects Test” as a prank for the board, which had the dinosaurs done in deliberately crappy stop-motion (like really, really crappy stop motion…like The Lost Continent 1951 bad) and when the board was good and panicked (except for, according to Sklar, Jim Henson, who cottoned on a bit earlier than everyone else) … a fully rendered, CGI T-rex ripped through the screen. Allegedly, the board found it so good they used it as the teaser – it still gets shown in film studies classes, I hear.

Holly
But, of course, a lot of the dinosaurs are animatronics…

Nathan
Yeah, people point to JP as the first big CGI film when it’s Spider-Man that earns that credit, but less of a deal was made about the effects there since they weren’t so in your face. For JP, the CreatureWorks did quite a lot of prop dinosaurs and dinosaur puppets – JP was, apparently, the project that all the CreatureWorks staff wanted to be on. It was a huge effort. I think JP had the most animatronics of any CreatureWorks film at that point. You can still see some of them in CreatureWorks Corner. Basically, all the dinosaur close-up stuff is animatronics or puppetry (the compy that attacks the little girl in the opening, the dilo that kills Nedry, the close-ups of the T-rex’s head and feet in the Jeep attack scene); however, all the stuff with the herds of dinosaurs, the T-rex hunting the herbivores and getting the Gallimimus (which, interestingly, is a homage to the Valley of Gwangi)… that’s all CGI.

Holly
Yee-haw. Anyway, onto the story!

(Image source Stan Winston School)

Nathan
Yup. To understand why adapting it was so difficult, one of the things you have to realize is that Jurassic Park, the book, has two pretty big false starts – we don’t meet any of the main characters for the first third of it. The novel begins like one of the medical thrillers for which Crichton was best-known for at the time, with Roberta “Bobbie” Carter, a young doctor, receiving an exceedingly unusual case in which a man has been mauled by an unknown creature (later revealed to have been a Velociraptor), despite the fact the company employing him insist it was a construction accident. However, she disappears after the prologue, and Marty Gutierrez, a biologist, becomes the point-of-view character, investigating incidents where mysterious reptiles (which we later find out are compys) have been attacking young children. However, once the compy remains that kick off the plot are analyzed, he disappears for the majority of the novel, reappearing at the end.

Holly
So they cut it down for the film?

Nathan
Yeah – instead, they have the prologue where the raptor breaks out of its pen and kills someone… and then we get straight to the compys attacking kids on the mainland. Unlike in the book, we only see the attack on Tina Bowman… which is for the best, given the other one we see in the book is eating a baby alive. The way the compy remains reach Grant is also much simpler: it simply jumps from the attacks to Gutierrez delivering the remains to Grant directly, rather than the rather more convoluted means in the novel. There’s a deleted scene where Gutierrez is nosing into the InGen thing a bit more, and finding Grant’s name on a list of InGen consultants. And then that kicks off the plot.

Holly
So, anyway, we get to meeting Grant, Marcus, Harmon…

Nathan
First off, for Grant, Brosnan was an inspired casting choice – allegedly, he was Burton’s only choice. He’s got that sort of 50’s “Science Hero” quality, only updated for a modern audience (he even has the pipe, only we don’t see him smoking it). Burton cited his “Cary Grant like” sense of old skool masculinity.

Holly
He did a hell of a lot of research for the role, as I recall.

Nathan
Oh yeah. In fact, he would frequently ask the paleontological consultants on set if the paleo-exposition he was giving was correct – and, if it wasn’t, he’d request to have the script edited accordingly, because he wanted his dialogue to be as accurate as possible. He got super-invested in the role. He reportedly joined Jack Horner on a dig in Wyoming. Doing JP was rather cathartic for Brosnan; it was his first big project after his wife had died, so JP was something for him to focus on and get him out of that depressive state. You can see Brosnan’s recent loss seeping into the acting with some of the scenes Grant has with the kids.

Holly
Wow – kudos to him for that. And, of course, we need to get to Geena Davis, who is pretty good…

Nathan
Of course, of course. Her character, Elaine “Ellie” Marcus is actually younger in the books – she’s a grad student – but Burton aged her up for the film (with Crichton’s permission) and made her this snarky dirt-under-the-nails tomboy who pretty much bluntly tells Harmon he done fucked up. It also allows for some romantic subtext with Grant that might have been ooky if she was half his age and under his power. And… let’s not forget Malcolm Morrison.

Holly
Oh, yes…

Nathan
Now, it’s weird as to how popular the deliberately dislikable character ended up becoming, since he doesn’t make it past the first film – allegedly, Crichton toyed with the idea of resurrecting him for the sequel, but Depp said he would be busy doing The Colour Out of Space with Richard Stanley.

Holly
I think it’s because he’s the ironic commentator – he’s the mouthpiece for the film’s themes. That and Johnny Depp makes the insufferable git hilarious to watch, particularly in the second half, where he’s just high on morphine and somehow manages to intersperse deep philosophical monologues with amazedly staring at his own fingers.

Nathan
And, of course, we end up with Tony Gennaro, who’s sort of the everyman character. He’s just a family man lawyer who ends up embroiled in all this; he has to have the science explained to him (along with the audience). He has the most satisfying character arc, in my mind.

Holly
Yeah – he goes from a sort of cowardly guy to actually taking responsibility. And I suppose we should get to the kids…

Nathan
Yeah – Burton inverted their ages, making the girl the older one, partly because he thought the character in the book was superfluous and partly because he’d promised Christina Ricci a part. And Lex gets to throw a softball at a raptor’s head to distract it when it’s about to eat her little brother, so what’s not to love?

Holly
Girl power!

Nathan
Yes, girl power – funny thing is Ms. Ricci had to learn how to do that. Moving on to Tim, in the book, he’s arguably the main character. We see most of the park tour from his perspective and there’s a very important scene where he corrects Wu when Wu gets a dinosaur’s name wrong. Having an eleven-year-old boy correct an adult scientist (who has created Jurassic Park) makes Wu come off as an idiot, though I suppose it was intended to show how careless that Wu was being, not paying attention to the details. Anyway, we see the dinosaur attacks from Tim’s perspective, for the most part – and seeing the dinosaurs from a child’s perspective somehow makes them scarier, as we are forced to imagine these disasters as if they were a kid his age. Whilst Tim is less prominent here, both the kids are crucial to Grant’s character arc. Their parents have divorced and their dad’s implied to not be the best. Basically, Grant, who does not initially like the kids very much, has to become a paternal figure for them, protecting them from the dinosaurs and sort of acting as the father that their actual father wasn’t.

Holly
Anyway, since we’ve only got an hour and we still have a lot to get through, let’s move through the cast…

Nathan
All the men responsible for Jurassic Park are deeply flawed. It’s most obvious with Regis, the public relations manager, who’s basically Harmon’s sycophant, and Donald Nedry, who pretty much sells everyone out in the most obnoxious Chris Elliott way possible, but Samuel L. Jackson’s Arnold Ray and B.D. Wong’s Victor Wu are both deeply flawed, and it’s their failings that, at least in part, lead to the park’s downfall. Wu is obsessed with improving on what he’s created, and that obsession, combined with a reconstruction process that is deeply unreliable and bound to create mutations, leads to disaster, when a mutation from African reed frog DNA (based on an idea that’s now considered dubious) allows the dinosaurs to reproduce. Arnold’s rather arrogant belief that he has everything under control in the park led to him becoming careless and dismissing serious problems – and that had disastrous consequences. They both accuse Harmon of ignoring the park’s problems but deny their own fault in them. Even Mulroney, who’s the closest to understanding the true capabilities of the animals, is erratic, drunken and paranoid. These are men who should not be given responsibility of the greatest technology in human history – and why said greatest undertaking in human history should not be commercialized.

Holly
Uh-huh… and we’re gonna get into the science-y bits, aren’t we? Can we do the thing?

Nathan
If you wish.

The sound of a klaxon being blown plays as ComicSans text appears on the screen saying, “NATHAN’S SIENCE BIT”

Nathan
I know I've said this a thousand times, but you are aware science is spelt wrong? Again? Pay attention this time, please.

Holly rolls her eyes

Nathan
Now, some of the science in the story hasn’t quite aged well – which is honestly a shame as the bits that haven’t aged well are quite key to the plot. The big one is the mechanism that enables the dinosaurs to reproduce, which is based on an idea that’s now considered dubious. Basically, in 1989, an all-female captive colony of African reed frogs was observed to have some of the individuals change sex from female to male. However, this was only observed once in a captive colony – it has not been recorded since then in either captivity or the wild. However, a more scientifically valid option has emerged in the quarter-century since then.

Holly
Which is?

Nathan
Parthenogenesis. It’s since been reported in Komodo dragons, among others, that females can duplicate the chromosomes in their ova if not fertilized normally, laying eggs that produce male offspring (because males have homozygous chromosomes in most reptiles). And, perhaps interestingly, it’s triggered by being in an environment where, you guessed it, all the animals are females. Basically, it’d only need to happen in one female once, and then you have a breeding population.

Holly
Well, you know what they say, if you can't find a good man (or in this case, any man), raise one. And… you are aware that this is a film about cloning dinosaurs from amberized mosquitoes? Maybe leave the science at the door. I swear, you are super critical – next you’ll be complaining the dinos aren’t accurate and how they don’t have feathers.

Nathan
Actually, no, because the film (and the franchise as a whole) has always been explicit that the dinosaurs have had the gaps in their DNA filled in with DNA from other animals… indeed, that’s how the whole mess starts in the first place. They even explain the reason for the lack of feathers in the film—a deliberate choice by the JP scientists based on focus group research, which is actually kind of Meta. Here’s a clip:

[Clip starts]

WU
Of course, since we're only working with DNA fragments, we are occasionally forced to fill the sequence gaps with DNA from other species. Mostly we use DNA from birds and reptiles - crocodilian DNA was particularly useful in this regard.

GRANT
I can see. (points with pipe) Their scales in particular show crocodilian characteristics in the keratin structure.

WU
We specifically chose it for that reason, actually, along with amphibian DNA. This is why some of our dinosaurs don't have a protofeather coating, as we had seen on our earliest specimens.

GRANT
(beat) You edited out the feathers?

WU
(shrugs) Harmon's orders. Test audiences reacted poorly to feathered dinosaurs.

[Clip ends]

Nathan
As irritatingly Meta as the “Test audiences” line is, it does speak to how flippantly the JP team is behaving here, driven not by legitimate scientific inquiry but by superficial appearances and expectations. Ironically, this was also the mutation that would lead to the gender change, with Harmon’s superficial concerns on “marketability” leading to the park’s ultimate downfall.

Holly
Here’s to irony.

Nathan
Also, despite common misconceptions, the dilo is not inaccurately sized; the one that killed Nedry was a juvenile. There’s a cut scene where we see an adult and this discussion between Grant and Mulroney which would have foreshadowed Nedry’s death. Both of these were restored for the 15th anniversary re-release in 2008. Here’s the latter:

[Clip starts]

d53a4b677585f8c02fc8864b50314bd8b4-27-babydino.w710.jpg

(Image source Halloweencostumes.com)

GRANT
So, what is their metabolism like? What’s their development like?

MULRONEY
Toothless when they hatch – they can use their pointed snouts to make a hole, but from then on, the nursery staff have to break open the egg for ‘em. Teeth don’t come in for the first coupla months – everything has to be mashed up for ‘em. For the first couple of months, the little nippers can walk, but not very far. At about two years old, they reach adult size.

GRANT
Interesting. So there’s a prolonged period of infancy, which would facilitate a complex brain with complex behaviours…

MULRONEY
(glowers dramatically) Not the dilos, mate. The dilos are lethal from birth – they’re venomous, you know, like snakes. It’s more dangerous if a youngster gives you a bite – they haven’t learned how to control the dosage. Every dose is a full dose.

[Clip ends]

Holly
Anyway, how about we get to performances before you go further down the rabbit hole? Who’s your favourite?

Nathan
Whilst all the performances are great, though del Toro's Mulroney can be distracting at times with his funny little grunts and hisses, the real heavyweight in the film is Christopher Lee as Timothy Harmon, which is one of the best performances in a film I’ve ever seen. He should’ve won an Oscar for that. Ironically, Lee was the second choice – Vincent Price turned it down because of ill health.

Holly
What I like about Lee’s performance is that, even though Harmon is responsible for all the death and destruction that happens, directly or indirectly, in the story, we can’t help but feel sorry for him. This is a man who had a dream, but through his own hubris, destroyed it. In fact, I think we have a clip…

[Clip starts]

HARMON
Did you ever see a flea circus? (Marcus shakes her head) Too young, I suppose. I did – I saw one when I was a child... on Petticoat Lane. (beat) I thought it was quite spectacular. There was a miniature merry-go-round and a wee trapeze and a car-carousel... and a seesaw. (long pause) They all moved and I thought I could see the fleas. (beat) Clown fleas and high-wire fleas and fleas on parade. (long pause) There weren’t any, you know – it was all motorized. Common trick of the trade, apparently. You just thought you could see the fleas – you expected them to be there… so that’s what you saw. I vowed to never make the flea circus. I wanted to make miracles people could see… things that were real.

MARCUS
Uh-huh.

HARMON
And, in that quest, we came upon a greater thing still: the power to overcome that great destroyer of things… time. To clone the DNA of an extinct animal and bring it back to life. That seemed like such a wonderful idea. Time’s power over nature, its ability to extinguish and erase would be gone… And when we regain control…

MARCUS
No. You still made the flea circus. You still made an illusion. An illusion so great it fooled even yourself: the illusion of control. You thought you had control… so that’s what you saw. But you didn’t lose it, you never had it. And surely you see the consequences of that now…

HARMON
(scowls) Perhaps. Perhaps.

[Clip ends]

Nathan
This was all Lee, I should point out. Allegedly, Harmon was originally a far nastier character, like he was in the Michael Crichton book; however, Lee asked Burton to make Harmon more sympathetic, principally because he was uncomfortable playing so many villainous characters. After re-reading the novel, Burton realized that Harmon was a tragic figure, in a way, a modern-day Victor Frankenstein, and had the script reworked to fit that.

Holly
Right, right.

Nathan
The other thing that got reworked was the ending. In the book, the (non-existent in real life) Costa Rican military bombs the island with napalm, killing all the dinosaurs. However, apparently, the Disney/MGM board were vehemently opposed to this ending – for most, it was a desire to create a roughly open end in case the film does well enough for a sequel. However, Henson and Spielberg, who were much less money-orientated than the others, stated that it felt like too sad an ending – they didn’t want kids, having spent the whole film marveling at these dinosaurs, to have to watch them all die.

Holly
Burton was quite uncomfortable about that ending as well, if I recall correctly…

Nathan
Yeah – Burton was also quite uncertain about the ending; principally because he felt that it was portraying the dinosaurs’ existences as “wrong” and that they needed to be destroyed. So he and Crichton came up with a new ending where the island is turned over to the dinosaurs, with the implication that they’re going to get off the island and reclaim the world… pity the sequels forgot that, of course.

Holly
Yeah.

Nathan
That aside, however, it’s remarkably faithful to the book – yes, a lot of it is condensed and some of it is switched around but mostly it’s pretty good. Some of the species are changed round: the sauropod was changed from Apatosaurus to Brachiosaurus simply because, at the time, Brachiosaurus was the biggest ever dinosaur, and Spielberg like the “shape of their necks”.

Holly
And now, before you spiral off again, we’re moving on to impact.

Nathan
The film’s impact on dinosaur media is pretty powerful. Most obviously, “raptors” became a mainstay in dinosaur media (combined with, of course, Land Before Time) and the aviary scene made Cearadactylus a stock pterosaur – it joined Pteranodon and Quetzalcoatlus as one of the stock big pterosaurs. Renny Harlan stated that its appearance in Jurassic Park was one of the reasons he put it in Carnosaur. As well as that, Jurassic Park made it more acceptable for dinosaurs to start appearing in “serious” fiction again. Prior to that, they were just kids’ stuff. A lot of stuff in dinosaur media wouldn’t have been possible without Jurassic Park.

Holly
So, impact on film as a whole…

Nathan
Where to begin? It sent shockwaves through the film industry. Not only did this film revolutionize digital effects, it also proved that the monster movie wasn’t just for Fangoria readers, but could be effective for general audiences. It led to a renaissance in the genre; however, it wasn’t all good news…

Holly
Oh yeah…

Nathan
Quite a few parents’ groups complained about the violence in the film – it wasn’t a sizeable backlash, but it was quite vocal… However, parents took their kids to see it – because, well… dinosaurs – and kids loved the hell out of it. And Disney/MGM and Amblin merchandised the living shit out of it: toy dinosaurs, the Jurassic Park cartoon… There’s a common misconception was this was what led to Dinotopia being greenlit; however, that wasn’t the case. The truth is far simpler: Disney was just looking for another dinosaur property to adapt after JP became a smash hit and dinosaurs became the “next big thing”. This was, in part, so they could coincide with Land Before Time’s tenth anniversary in ’97 – the “Dinosaur Summer”, allegedly, it was called – and the plan was that they were gonna have Lost World, Dinotopia and a LBT re-release. Now, it was meant to be marketed at least partially to a younger target demographic (as opposed to JP, which was sort of for 10-and-ups), but that was it. However, they pushed it forward to ’98 to avoid competition with Godzilla and their very own Lost World.

Holly
And that might have been the best choice – the only competition it had was Creature from the Black Lagoon… which turned out to be poor competition! Even so, it still underperformed to expectations because not everyone is as Dino-obsessed as my brother. And, anyway, if those people complaining about the violence had their way, they’d bring back the bloody Hays Code. The really weird thing is that, today, JP would be a PG film – and it’s been rated PG whenever it’s been re-released. I mean it – seriously, the gore is pretty tame – Marvel today gets away with worse.

Nathan
I mean… yeah – and that’s what makes it work. The raptors aren’t scary because we see them claw people’s guts out, it’s because we know they can and the imagination fills in the gaps. The compys attacking kids on the mainland, and that kill Harmon at the end, aren’t scary because we see the results of their attacks – we can imagine it. Gore is cheap; what you can show often pales to what the imagination can come up with. As well as this, the film retains that Burton dark quirkiness – there’s something darkly humorous about the deaths of Regis and Nedry in particular. You can’t help but snigger when the T-rex just finds him hiding in the bush and just snaps him up like he’s an afterthought. You’re scared at first, but after you can’t help but snigger.

Holly
And I think that’s our time up – thanks for watching my brother blabber on for an hour and see y’all again next week!

Nathan
Yup – we hopefully aren’t going anywhere any time soon. But… don’t tempt fate. And remember, subscribe to stay notified.

[Video ends]

Geekhis Khan · Feb 12, 2022

Chapter 7: I’m Bat-Shemp! (Cont’d)
Excerpt from All You Need is a Chin: Confessions of a B-Movie Actor by Bruce Campbell

So needless to say, Batman 2 was such a success that Batman 3 became inevitable. Sam named it The Killing Joke and based it off of the comic of the same name plus a bit of “Death in the Family”. And I once again got to Bat-Shemp…and Nightwing-Shemp and Riddler-Shemp for that matter…and return as the obnoxious reporter Jimmy Scupe, who this time gets his head smashed in by a giant circus mallet, though in shadow since this was a T-rated film.

I also got to work with Jim Carrey just as he was breaking out into the big time[1]. He was, of course, there to play Edward Nigma, The Riddler, who becomes a protégé of The Joker, who in turn was still played by Robin Williams…well, sort of. We’ll get to that.

So not this…

Now, I’m rather proud of this one, because I got to work on the story with Sam and Ted. My biggest contribution was that I convinced them to add in that prologue at the very opening of the film where The Riddler, in Psychotic Kindergarten Storytime mode, tells the Clownz disciples the story of how The Joker came to be, relating the whole Red Hood thing from “The Killing Joke”, complete with the whole “but that’s one story, because The Joker likes to keep his past multiple choice!” to keep things ambiguous.

By that point in my career, I knew that you nerds would flip out if a movie called “The Killing Joke” didn’t include it. It was Ted who convinced Sam to let WB Animation do it, which they did with that crazy, shaky-line kindergarten-fridge-art animation that’s so iconic nowadays and became the go-to style for anything in the mind of The Joker on the TV cartoon, with a sunnier, hearts-and-rainbows version for the mind of Harley. Jim Carrey, who, yes, is as fun and crazy in person as he is on screen, just ate up that narration, part Kindergarten Storytime, part cult leader indoctrinating his cultists.

But I’m repeating myself.

A bit more subdued and psychotic than this, as contradictory as that sounds; sort of a cross between our timeline’s Riddler and his role in our timeline’s Cable Guy (Image source “christopherpierznik.wordpress.com”)

We decided to begin the story where Batman, still played by Willem Dafoe, who demanded one hell of a paycheck for that, has basically all but ended serious crime in Gotham and has essentially retired, with Nightwing, still played by Brandon Lee, taking over the nightly patrol duties. We introduced Commissioner Gordon’s daughter Barbara, played by Julia Roberts[2], who has discovered Bruce and Dick’s secret and is being trained to assist Nightwing as Bat Girl. Bruce, meanwhile, is engaged to Silver St. Cloud and is preparing to sell Wayne Industries to a wealthy financier named Oswald Cobblepot, played by Danny DeVito, so he can retire fully to a life of philanthropy. All is just peachy-keen, hunky-dory, ducky-wucky…so needless to say the guano is about to hit the bat-fan.

A bit less Goth than this, and with normal hands (Image source Amazon)

Soon enough, the Clownz are back, and more violent and insane than ever. And The Joker, who remains shrouded in shadow on his throne of chaos, has a new disciple, Edward Nigma, a.k.a. The Riddler. We knew we wanted to bring back The Joker and Robin Williams was chomping at the bit to play him again, but we’d left him pretty apparently dead. So we found a way. And said Riddler, as he tends to do, is committing acts of terrorism and crime, alluded to beforehand with arcane riddles, all done in the holy name of The Joker. Old Ed Nigma, meanwhile, is taking advice from the seated, shadow-shrouded Joker, who speaks and laughs to him from his throne, guiding and inspiring the madness.

Nightwing and Bat Girl trace The Joker to an abandoned oil refinery based on The Riddler’s clues and go to investigate, but it’s a trap. The two try to battle their way out in a mad multi-level dash-and-bash through the shadowy and claustrophobic corridors and catwalks. Despite his martial prowess, Nightwing is overwhelmed by the sheer mass of Clownz while Bat Girl just barely escapes. She rushes to Bruce, and he, as Batman, rushes with her to the scene in the Bat Jet (get your own, kids! Batteries not included), but the place is now empty.

Instead, The Riddler has Nightwing chained up in The Joker’s throne room and is brutally interrogating him to no avail. So, he heads off camera to get The Joker, who emerges, face hidden in the shadows but purple jacket and green hair very much visible. The Joker then proceeds to beat Nightwing to death with a crowbar, in shadow, laughing the whole time.

This, but hidden in shadows to keep the T rating (Image source DC Comics)

Hilarious. I’m sure the kids in the audience had a blast.

Needless to say, Batman and Batgirl find the body, and declare revenge. He dispatches Bat Girl to research and find The Riddler and The Joker, since he’s distracted by the ongoing negotiations with the mercurial Cobblepot, who keeps changing the terms of the deal and refuses to negotiate with anyone but Wayne himself. We see Cobblepot take a phone call, and then change his demands yet again and keep arguing with Wayne.

Then we see The Joker, face mostly hidden by a floppy straw tourist hat, arrive at Barbara’s apartment and casually shoot Barbara in the gut. Kids loved it, I'm sure.

Silver finds her in time to save her, and Barb relays to Silver that the calls to the Gotham police from The Riddler were all done using location spoofing software technology developed by Cobblepot Industries. Long story short, the Clownz have been coordinating with Cobblepot, who knows Wayne’s secret and is hoping to use the chaos of the crime wave to enrich himself further and destroy Batman as a threat to his rising dominance. He naïvely thinks that he can control the Clownz.

And if The Penguin feels a little extraneous and tacked-on to this story, then, well, he is. The studio, in particular every nerd’s best friend Tom Rothman, made us do it. More villains = more toys, after all. Tom’s also the reason for the many new vehicles like Nightwing’s and Bat Girl’s motorcycles and the Bat Jet and the Clown Cars and the rest of “toyetic” crap we had to shoehorn in there (each sold separately! Collect them all, you nerds! From Galoob!). If Mira Velimirovic, our former Exec and at the time head on the animation side, hadn’t pushed back, we’d have been completely turned into a damned toy commercial. So, three cheers for Mira!

Anyway, Batman and a now-paralyzed Barb figure it all out and Bats and the cops confront The Penguin, who fires a smoke screen from his umbrella (don’t forget the special Gas Blasting Penguin figure! At participating McDonald’s locations!) and escapes so that the next director could use him for the hypothetical next film.

This, of course, all leads to the final showdown with the Clownz, where we discover, in a shocking twist that you fanboys still complain about, that The Joker was dead all along and The Riddler was hallucinating his voice and dressing up like him in a big Psycho reference (Sam even quoted the cinematography). The Joker on the throne is a desiccated corpse, his face still twisted in his final mortal laugh from his Nestea Plunge into the Smilex in the first film.

Hey, I thought it was a clever twist. Robin Williams loved it too.

And yea, I just spoiled the whole plot of a movie you probably already saw. Hey, I helped write it, so I’m a bit proud of it.

Kiss my Bat-Ass.

Well, let me say that Jim was just spot-on as The Riddler. Like Robin, he can do silly, but he can do crazy too. Sure, it got a little campy at times, but hey, so did all the damned toy-fodder. And yea, tonally it can be a mess, jumping from shoehorned toy tie-in to bloody murder and back again so fast your head will spin like that one funhouse corpse in the early second act (Tom’s insistence on trimming the run-time down to 94 minutes made the jarring transitions worse; seriously, watch the Director’s Cut [3] next time).

And gee, I have no idea why the parents’ groups were so upset. I’m sure that Little Timmy’s screaming nightmares about clown zombies had nothing to do with that tight zoom on the desiccated death-rictus of The Joker with Robin’s superimposed uncanny laughter.

After all of that, Sam had had it with Warner Bros. He first went to Hollywood Pictures where Michael Eisner was offering him a sweetheart deal to produce and direct The Crow, but needless to say the micromanagement there was just as bad if not worse, plus we were caught in the middle of the whole Eisner-Katzenberg thing. Sam swore that we’d look for something else next time, and somewhere he’d have less executive micromanagement.

I patiently reminded him that his Ex now ran a major studio.

[1] Recall that he’s been in a longer-running Just Ducky series and was a side character in the 1990 hit Crazy People, and per our timeline In Living Color, so he and his “living cartoon” level of humor have been discovered by wider audiences a few years earlier.

[2] Recall that since Pretty Woman never materialized in that form in this timeline to give Roberts her breakout role, instead playing a supporting role in Hooked!, she’s still a talented character actor who has done some lead roles at this point in this timeline, but isn’t the “It” girl yet.

[3] The Unrated Director’s Cut will restore about 11 minutes of footage, reducing (but not entirely eliminating) the sudden swerves in tone, patching some plot holes, and adding back in some of the darker scenes that were cut to keep the T rating, such as a recently-shot Barbara dragging herself to a phone, grimacing in pain, leaving a trail of blood. It will be almost unanimously considered the better cut.

Geekhis Khan · Feb 13, 2022

New York Times Short Movie Reviews, 1993

The Action Movie, Deconstructed

Director Paul Verhoeven may have officially killed the Summer Action Blockbuster in Last Action Hero, an affectionate but biting satire on the genre that ruled the 1980s. Austen O’Brien stars as Danny, an abused boy who seeks refuge in action films only to be literally pulled into one, soon teaming up with the action hero Jack Slater, who doesn’t realize that he’s played by Arnold Schwarzenegger. With over-the-top tropes and a blistering critique on the futility of violence in the films it playfully deconstructs, Verhoeven mercilessly skewers the Action Movie genre, from John McTiernan to Shane Black to Jerry Bruckheimer. And Schwarzenegger is obviously having a blast as he self-parodies his most iconic roles. It’s funny, it’s poignant, and at times it’s absolutely, brilliantly on the nose. Whether this will mark the official end of the Action Film as we know it, as some have already claimed, or simply be an inflection point towards the more naturalistic remains to be seen[1].

Last Action Hero, Rated T for violence, action, adult language, and adult situations, ⭐⭐⭐

Tex Avery meets The Terminator

Chaos reigns in this insane mashup of Looney Tunes action and splatterhouse horror. Based upon the Dark Horse Comic, The Mask is almost shockingly over-the-top, and yet if rumors are true, the gory original Mark Verheiden version would have been a hard-R film. Even so, director Joe Dante makes this film a zany but brutal affair that was, in his words, “Tex Avery meets The Terminator”. It’s most certainly inspired by both Loony Tunes and John Carpenter’s Halloween with a mix of horror and cartoon tropes that in the hands of anyone but Joe Dante would have been a tonally disjointed mess. And yet Nicholas Cage’s manic acting and Joe Dante’s manic direction blend into this story of Stanley Ipkiss, an emasculated husband turned into a bringer of chaos and petty revenge. Eventually, Ipkiss must face a bigger threat in terms of organized crime. ILM’s effects bring a deliberately cartoony feel to everything, as does Cage’s occasional fourth-wall breaks. The comedy is hit-and-miss and the mania of Dante’s direction and Cage’s ad-libs can make for some confusing moments. And yet while hardly Oscar material, Dante’s insane popcorn fest is an absolute blast both in spite of, and because of, all of its madcap insanity[2].

The Mask, Rated T for violence, action, adult language, and adult situations, ⭐⭐⭐

A Puerile, Mean-Spirited Mess

Morgan Creek Productions isn’t exactly the company you look to for comedy, typically being a studio for historical epics and adventures. And Ace Ventura: Pet Detective is good evidence for why it is not a comedy powerhouse. Starring the snide and snarky Chris Elliott as the titular “pet dick”, it follows a plot involving a kidnapped football mascot and slips in as much LCD humor and homophobic and misogynistic jokes as it can. While likely to appeal to the immature, this is hardly the film for anyone of taste[3].

Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, Rated T for comedic violence, profanity, adult language and adult situations, ⭐½

Don’t Fear the Reaper, Love It!

Batman returns to the big screen for a second time this summer, but this time in animated form in this Warner Brothers Animation film made in partnership with Bird Brain Productions. Spinning off from the popular Batman Animated Series, Batman: Fear of the Reaper is a surprisingly mature and complex film that is a step above most other TV Animation based Film Animation projects, with only Bird Brain’s The Spirit film in 1991 matching it in caliber. The film not only extends the runtime and improves the effects over the TV version, but it ups the stakes both physical and emotional with the introduction of a new villain, The Reaper, who is, in the way of many of the best antagonists, a dark reflection on the hero himself. In this case, The Reaper is The Batman unrestrained by any moral code, and this allows Bird and Timm to ask some deep and pointed questions on vigilantism and privatized justice that make for a more complex arc than one might expect from a “TV Cartoon Movie”. It’s also full of the exciting, stylized action that has won the series viewer love and Emmy attention, so fun and adventure abounds as well. Whether you’ve seen the TV series or not, Batman: Fear of the Reaper is a film worth your time[4].

Batman: Fear of the Reaper, Rated PG for action, mild adult situations, ⭐⭐⭐

Midway…in Space

Star Trek reaches a whole new scale in this effects-heavy war movie that cost over $83 million to make. Following on from the impressive success of the crossover Star Trek VI, which saw a time-travelling Next Generation crew partner with Kirk and Spock, Producer Rick Berman was undoubtedly keeping the “even-odd” rule in mind when he strove to take no chances and give the fans what he believes they’ve been asking for: Trek made BIG. Following on from the ongoing Borg War plotline in the Next Generation TV series, this film serves as a culmination of two seasons of Borg War action and intrigue, with events of the TV series (and this November’s big cliffhanger) leading directly into this Holiday Season film. This is both this film’s greatest asset, and its greatest liability, since much of the first act gets bogged down in exposition to catch moviegoers who don’t watch the TV series back up. But what this does set up is, effectively, a Midway plot, as Riker and crew, enlisting the newly-de-assimilated Picard as their intelligence source, arrange a massive trap for the fearsome Borg alongside their allies-of-convenience, the Klingons, Romulans, Cardassians, and even Ferengi. They even toss in some “forgotten species” like the Orions, Andorians, Gorn, Tellerites, and even Tholians as the Galaxy unites for the battle that will either see the Borg defeated, or see the galaxy assimilated.

While the Midway plot sets up lots of action and suspense, particularly as The Plan relies heavily on the actions of often duplicitous allies, the plot is essentially there to set up the Big Battle. The symbolic themes of “points of no return” in the literal and figurative sense are played so on the nose as to be in your face. Fans of the new action-heavy Trek will love this battle royale, but fans of the older, more Roddenberry-inspired intellectual stories and morality tales may find it a disappointment as character and story fall by the wayside in favor of spectacle and action. Still, dramatic scenes as Picard and Commander Shelby clash and humorous scenes with Data now using his new Emotion Chip do give us a reminder of who these characters are and why we love them.

In all, the film is ambitious in scope even if rather derivative and uninspired in plot. The ILM effects and visuals are spectacular, the acting good enough for the action-heavy plot, and the relevance to the ongoing drama on the TV series makes it a must-see for fans of the series. Did Berman break the even-odd cycle? You be the judge. I give it a solid middling[5].

(Image source StarTrek.com)

Star Trek: Point of No Return, Rated PG for action, adult situations, and mild profanity, ⭐⭐½

An Alien Invasion in Reverse

This time, we’re taking the fight to the Xenomorphs in this action-packed big-budget effects extravaganza directed by Luc Besson. Now-Captain Hicks (Michael Biehn) is on hand as a principal advisor for Admiral Cunningham (Jeremy Irons) as the Space Navy and Marines team up to destroy the Xenomorphs on their own home world. But things don’t go according to plan as Cunningham ignores Hicks and looks instead for glory rather than just “nuking it all from orbit” and the shady Weyland-Yutani representative (Steve Buscemi) has nefarious plans of his own. While lacking the heart of some of the earlier films (I found myself severely missing Sigourney Weaver), practical and computer effects courtesy of the Disney Creatureworks help elevate a rather predictable script and rather flat and archetypical characters into a fun summer popcorn feature[6].

(Image source “avpcentral.com”)

Alien Homeworld, Rated R for graphic violence, horror, adult language, adult situations, ⭐⭐½

A Fractured Fairytale

Macauley Culkin is back, this time in Fox’s Wicked Stepfather, the story of Emmett, a boy whose wealthy widowed mother Emily (Catharine O’Hara) marries the smarmy personal injury lawyer Dante (Joe Pesci), whose affections are play-acted and whose real interest is in Emily’s fortune and who may be looking to arrange an “accident” for his new bride. Playing with fairy tale tropes in fun and innovative ways, with a healthy dose of slapstick, the story follows the wise-for-his-age Emmett as he uses all sorts of tricks and pranks and diversions to expose and defeat the psychopathic Dante. But it is the sheer chemistry of Culkin, Pesci, and O’Hara that makes this film work as a fun holiday family comedy.

Wicked Stepfather, Rated PG for slapstick action, mild adult language, and adult situations, ⭐⭐⭐

Romance and Crime

Director Quentin Tarantino made a literal splash with his debut film Reservoir Dogs, and then made a figurative one when he bit the hands that fed him at Miramax, going after Harvey Weinstein. And he returns for this Orion release, True Romance, which he wrote and directed[7], starring Christian Slater and Patricia Arquette. And Miramax’s loss was Orion’s gain as Tarantino again shows us a brutal and savage yet strangely alluring and naturalistic world, presenting the darkest, most violent underbelly of American crime in an almost familiar, pedestrian manner. His nonlinear direction and idiosyncratic dialog evoke Fuller and Scorsese and the occasional addition of seemingly fantastic elements, such as the apparent ghost of Elvis, make you question everything that you just saw. True Romance is an intriguing and captivating take on crime, love, and relationships, and coming back-to-back with Reservoir Dogs, some are already calling Tarantino the “Next Scorsese”. And while it is hyperbolic to make such a claim based on a sample size of two, I’ll go a bit out on a limb and say that while Tarantino is probably not the “Next Scorsese”, he may very well be the “First Tarantino”.

True Romance, Rated R for graphic violence, frequent profanity, and adult situations, ⭐⭐⭐½

Pride, Prejudice and Patronization

Simon Langton’s masterful adaption of Austen’s masterpiece uses language and editing to gore contemporary chauvinism and highlight Austen’s cutting social and political sensibilities. In this masterfully economical miniseries, the wit and humour of Austen’s writing is preserved with the scalpel-sharp Jennifer Ehle playing Elizabeth and the dark and brooding Ewan McGregor as Darcy.

This adaption goes for the jugular in its portrayal of the men who make up patriarchal institutions in Austen’s work with audiences sure to be quick to make connections between the situations then and their lives today. Mr. Collins (played by Colin Firth) is the most standout example of this with him portrayed less as a mostly good-hearted buffoon as an incompetent, predatory, bootlicking, irritating, bitchy, judgmental, uncharitable and hypocritical priest who nonetheless has a good life and is rewarded by his patron for his family and manners. The mindset he displays of assuming no means yes, diminishing Elizabeth's intelligence, taking Mr. Bennet more seriously than Elizabeth and informing them that he’s sorry Lydia ran away rather than died because of the inherited shame of her running off with someone would be sure to get many a tooth to grind.

Conversely the discomfort Elizabeth faces for rejecting his advances: from the difficulty of doing so in the first place, a dearth of sympathy towards the discomfort he caused her from her family (aside from Jane), and blame from a parental figure for hurting his feelings and reducing her economic prospects is sure to elicit sympathy from the audience. The film deftly sidesteps accusations of misandry by showing the positive masculinity of Darcy and Mr. Gardner and the toxicity, queen bee-ism and snobbery of Charlotte Bingley and Lady Catherine de Bourgh[8].

Pride and Prejudice, Rated T/MA-15+ for mild violence and adult situation, ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Twain for the Tech Generation

John Hughes brings Huckleberry Finn to the late 20th century in this modernized Disney retelling of the Mark Twain classic[9]. Starring Elijah Woods and Tiny Lister as Huck and Jim, Black Cat Bone: The Return of Huckleberry Finn gives a modern twist on the classic American story that explores how race, technology, and the modern world affect our relationships and our spirits, and manages to demonstrate how for as much as things have changed since the 19th Century, they’ve changed less that we like to think. Woods and Lister maintain excellent chemistry together and the tight script delivers biting satire of the modern world, even as it maintains a sentimental love for the original and urges us to follow the better angels of our nature.

Black Cat Bone: The Return of Huckleberry Finn, rated PG for mild violence, mild profanity, and mild adult situations, ⭐⭐⭐

So Stupid that it’s Practically Brilliant

There’s a subtle art to the “stupid” film. You can rely on lowest common denominator humor, or you can, like animator Mike Judge has done with his Bevis and Butthead, elevate it into something so ironically self-aware of its stupidity that it becomes genius. And debut production Three Times Stupid by Peter and Bobby Farrelly is quite nearly there. Originally known as “Dust to Dust” and then “The Three Pendejos” and then “Los Tres Estúpidos” before settling on its current title, the Farrelly Brothers reportedly spent years looking for a studio willing to take on what began as a story of two dumb funeral home workers. They then reframed it as a modern-day telling of the 1986 Disney comedy The Three Caballeros to pitch to MGM. The reframing worked and Bernie Brillstein took it on as a Hyperion comedy.

Starring the frenetic comedy stylings of Jim Carrey, Michael Richards, and Chris Elliott, the film is essentially The Three Caballeros in reverse, where Jim Carrey’s Tom Butts falls in love with Telenovela character Eva Deseo (Salma Hayek) and leads his two toxic friends Dick Short (Richards) and Harry Paranoughts (Elliott) to Mexico on a mission to save her from her evil Uncle Julio (Raul Julia), who kidnapped her in the Telenovela. Needless to say, the two actors playing the roles, Hayek’s Rosa Elena and Julia’s Fernando del Mar, are confused as all hell. However, the organized crime syndicate who owns the studio that runs the Telenovela has evil plans of their own, and in the end only the “tres gringos estúpidos” can save them from the evil plot. The ensuing comedy of errors, liberally loaded with self-aware gross-out humor and LCD comedy, is heavily influenced by The Three Stooges with buddy cop elements and some deliberate cinematography quotes to parody Spielberg and other famous action directors.

The biggest flaw is that with having three lead protagonists – Carrey’s emotional and romantic Tom, Richard’s clueless and uptight Dick, and Elliot’s self-absorbed jerk Harry – the three sometimes compete for air, whereas a “two times stupid” approach that allowed more time with each player may have been a better bet, giving the actors more room to shine. Still, the three actors play well off of each other both verbally and physically: Richards the “Larry”, Carrey the “Curly”, and Elliot the “Moe”. With a mix of “dumb” jokes and some subtly clever self-awareness, the film manages to be funny for a variety of reasons, and altogether, Three Times Stupid is far smarter than it has any business being[10].

Three Times Stupid, Rated T for comedic violence, adult language, and adult situations, ⭐⭐⭐

In Brief:

Pluto Nash: Peter Faiman of Crocodile Dundee fame directs this Universal Sci-Fi noir comedy starring Bruce Willis. While not Willis’s best, it’s none the less a fun summer adventure full of action, quips, and passible special effects[11]; ⭐⭐½
Meteor Man: Eddie Murphy becomes a superhero in this occasionally funny but uneven UA comedy written and directed by Robert Townsend[12]. Murphy’s performance manages to elevate it slightly even as his heart appears to not be fully in it; ⭐⭐
Ice Jammin’: John Candy is a disgraced Olympic bobsled coach who recruits an improbable bobsled team from the tropical island nation of Jamaica in this funny if forgettable T-rated[13] Columbia underdog sports comedy; ⭐⭐½
Blue Streak: Westly Snipes and Martin Lawrence team up for this fun, if formulaic 20th Century Buddy Cop film, directed by Ernest Dickerson, that appears to be a breakout hit[14]; ⭐⭐½
The Lawnmower Man: Fantasia Films and As You Wish team up to produce this Stephen King fantasy-horror about a devious puck who does odd jobs like mowing the lawn, all the while plotting evil. A well-executed horror with brilliant Froud-inspired makeup and effects[15]; ⭐⭐⭐
Alive: Kennedy/Marshall and MGM team up for this true story of a soccer team who crashes in the mountains in this tale of survival; ⭐⭐⭐
Candyman: Lawrence Fishburne stars in this Clive Barker Smart Slasher that deals with issues of race, racial profiling, and systemic racism, all in the guise of a murderous spirit summoned by a childhood dare; ⭐⭐⭐
Extreme Aspen: What’s better than a ski movie? An EXTREME one, apparently[16]. Gorgeous scenery and incredible athleticism do not quite make up for a by-the-numbers plot; ⭐½
Homeward: An Incredible Journey: Disney recreates The Incredible Journey for a new generation. Enough said; ⭐⭐½
Four Weddings and a Funeral: Hyperion[17] distributes this occasionally dark British comedy about a circle of friends dealing with the ups and downs of life; ⭐⭐⭐½
The Joy Luck Club: Wayne Wang directs this heartwarming tale of Chinese American women and their Chinese mothers based on the Amy Tan novel; ⭐⭐⭐⭐
A Very Good Year: Sean Penn and Penelope Ann Miller star in this well-acted but forgettable crime farce[18] surrounding a rare bottle of wine; ⭐⭐
Malice Aforethought: This sexy Hyperion crime thriller written by Aaron Sorkin and directed by Lizzie Borden is a thrilling and sexy tale, though a far cry from Sorkin’s earlier A Few Good Men; ⭐⭐⭐
Geronimo: John Milius directs this violent MGM biopic of the famous Apache warrior with his usual affection for the “noble savage”; ⭐ ⭐ ½

[1] Will perform slightly better than in our timeline. Will not spell the end of the Action Film, but an inflection point as Schwarzenegger and the like move away from the action genre and increasingly into comedy and even drama.

[2] Hat tip to @Plateosaurus for suggesting Nick Cage. The slightly-darker, less-linear, and more violent take with Cage instead of Carrey will none-the-less perform very well, breaking $190 million at the box office (compare to $350 million in our timeline).

[3] Will indeed appeal to…let’s say young male audiences in particular, earning $69 million against its $15 million budget. Helmed by Elliott, it will be much snarkier and more inherently mean spirited than the Carrey-helmed manic madness of our timeline’s film, and thus will not be a $100+ million breakout hit. Note that our timeline’s version was similarly critically loathed and audience loved. Also note that Elliott’s Ventura will react to the Einhorn-Finkle reveal at first as shocked, but then will act confused, and then even a bit turned on as a subtle misdirection joke, somewhat muting the crass transphobia of it all. Carrey’s ridiculously over-the-top reaction from our timeline (a parody of Steven Rea’s reaction to the trans reveal in The Crying Game) was intended to be so ridiculous that “nobody would take it seriously”, but it still managed to highlight the transphobic humor rather than diffuse it, and remains an “old shame” for Carrey.

[4] Unlike in our timeline, Warner, having noticed the success of The Spirit: The Long Reach of the Octopus, will actually promote it, leading to a modest $26 million return against its $6 million budget as opposed to our timeline’s $5.6 million flop with Mask of the Phantasm.

[5] Will make a good $155 million in the box office and much more on home video, but given the massive production budget will be considered a disappointment by Paramount. The film piggybacks out of the middle of the two-part “A Hard-Fought Peace” and is seen by some fans as somewhat redundant to that story, particularly as some of the battle scenes from the film play in Part II, leading to the joke that the film is an “extended cut” of that episode. Fan reactions to the film will be mixed with the young male “Borg War” fans finding it to be the “best Trek film ever!!” and older and more feminine audiences considering it a betrayal of Trek’s “core values”.

[6] Will make a reasonable profit against a very high budget and is seen as a disappointment financially. Still, fans will be happy with how the Alien Quadrilogy concludes, ending as it does in a literal bang when Hicks succeeds in defying orders and (finally) just nuking it all from orbit. But a sequel hook will suggest that “something survived”.

[7] Gangster hat tip to @TheMolluskLingers. The film will perform well, making $32 million against its $12 million budget thanks to word of mouth.

[8] Guest review by @Curtin99

[9] Straw hat tip to @kirbopher15. The film will make $53 million against its $14 million budget and be seen as a worthy addition to the Hughes canon.

[10] Per our timeline will break $240 million built upon the “dumb” humor and the power of its stars and remains a cult classic due to the subtle brilliance of it all.

[11] Will make a good profit and be a middling success, keeping Willis as a go-to action actor. Faiman was attached to it via Universal in 1989 in our timeline before it went to Castle Rock and was given to Ron Underwood with Eddie Murphy already attached, leading to one of the most disastrous flops in history.

[12] Will make a modest profit in this timeline thanks to Murphy’s star power. Dark Horse will do the comics.

[13] Will be closer to the original script than the Disney version in our timeline, with some adult situations, pot references, and cursing.

[14] Will break $100 million. Essentially this timeline’s Bad Boys equivalent. What happens to Bad Boys? Stay tuned.

[15] Will underperform, but end up highly influential in the long run (more on this later).

[16] The first movie Executive Produced by Frank Wells!

[17] Was produced, as per our timeline, by Duncan Kenworthy, who’d worked for Jim Henson Productions. In our timeline it was delayed a year as they sought production assistance, with Working Title eventually taking it forward. Here Kenworthy calls on his old friends in Hyperion. Will be a breakout hit per our timeline.

[18] Became Year of the Comet in our timeline.

Geekhis Khan · Feb 15, 2022

Mad About The Muppets do Shakespeare (1993)
From Mad About Muppets with Mad Molly Moolah Netsite, April 21st, 2004

Hi, I’m Molly and I’m mad for Muppets. And so are you, or why would you be here?

And as anyone who read last week’s post will have already suspected, today I’ll talk about how much I LOVE LOVE LOVE 1993’s The Muppets do Shakespeare a.k.a. The Muppets Present: King ~~Leer~~ Lear.

So, like I mentioned last time, it all began when Gene Shalit (thanks for the spelling help!) said in his review of Muppets: Impossible, “While nobody expects The Muppets to be producing Shakespeare, you usually expect better than this by-the-numbers spy parody.” It seems that Frank Oz took both offense and inspiration from this and went on to produce and direct this film the very next year.

Yea, challenge accepted, beyotch!

Oops! I said a bad word. Sue me!

The closest thing I can find… (Image source “Henson.com”)

Anywhoo…Frank Oz took up the director’s chair and I’m soooo glad for this even though I like Ken Kwapis [who directed the last few Muppet features] and all, but Frank is special, right? The plot was that like Sam the Eagle finally gets tired of the Muppets being not cultured enough, so he gets a grant from the elite Société Littéraire du Snobisme and gets Kermit’s permission to produce Shakespeare’s King Lear[1]. So this is his dream come true, “finally, a proper, cultured production!”

“And Ol’ Shakey’s been dead so long that we don't even have to pay him!” adds Rizzo[2].

And then as they leave the Ghost of Shakespeare himself fades in and says, “Now waitest Thou just one minute!”

But Sam pays them all little attention, because he needs a “proper British Shakespearean actor,” so he finds none other than Patrick Stewart[3]!

Not Two B’s...only One (Image source “muppet.fandom.com”)

And Sam is sooo happy to have such a highly respected Shakespearean actor, but Patrick Stewart is actually just as weird and silly as the rest of the Muppets backstage!! And he’s busy cutting up with the cast, flirting with Piggy, talking “theatre” with Uncle Deadly, or learning how to throw boomerang fish with Lew Zealand. Sam tries to direct, but it’s too crazy so he lets Gonzo convince him to let him (Gonzo) direct, because remember how Gonzo directed a disastrous B movie in The Cheapest Muppet Movie Ever Made? “I am an experienced Hollywood director, you know!”

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

And Gonzo also plays the villain of the piece, Edmund, the illegitimate son of the Earl of Gloucester, who is played by Link Hogthrob. And there’s a running joke where people think that Edmund is part fish because people say, “you know, he’s a Bas…” but get cut off before they can say the bad word. Fozzie plays the Fool, of course, and Miss Piggy plays the eldest daughter Goneril who like is married to the Duke of Albany, played by Uncle Deadly, and has a loyal steward named Oswald, played by Benny Bunny and the name/species becomes a meta-joke (“Oswald, you’re one lucky…” “Can it! We don’t have the rights to that name anymore!” – which soon became ironic for a different reason, of course!).

Piggy also deliberately tries to hog the spotlight (pun like totally intended ‘cause they make it in the show), even stealing other player’s lines so that she can remain the focus. And when expected to act like she’s in love with Edmund (Gonzo) in the fourth act, she’s not having it and delivers her lines scowling and deadpan.

Camilla plays the middle daughter Regan, who has a crush on Edmund even though she’s married to the Duke of Cornwall, played by Rizzo the Rat. But since this is the Muppets, every time Regan’s name is mentioned a puppet version of President Ronald Reagan (borrowed from Spittin’ Image) shows up as a running gag.

Finally, the fair and proper youngest daughter Cordelia is played by Janice (like fer surely?) and she’s disinherited for not, like, kissing daddy’s butt (“Like, nothing, my Lord?”). She’s defended by the Earl of Kent, played by Animal, who’s totally not very Shakespearian as you can guess (“No fair! No fair!”)! So he gets banished, and, like returns in a really poor disguise as Casius (“No Kent! Me Cas-us!”). Edmund meanwhile plots to take down his older brother Edward, played by Lew Zealand so naturally the “Bas…” jokes keep flying (like no pun intended this time I swear)!

And of course Cordelia ends up with the King of France, who is played by Beaker(!!!) with Dr. Honeydew there to translate his “French”, which is all “mee-mee-mee” of course. There’s a joke about Kermit getting offered the role but backing out because “don’t you think that might send the wrong message?”

(Image source “muppet.fandom.com”)

And the movie is abridged for time, but covers what happens in the play, even with the original Shakespearean language even though they keep breaking in with modern jokes or ad-libs. Fozzie keeps trying to ad-lib jokes since he’s the Fool, and Sam stage whispers to him to stick to the actual words of the play (Fozzie as Fool: “Dost thou know the difference, my boy, between a bitter fool and a sweet fool? You’d ‘bitter’! Ahhh…wakka wakka!” Sam: “Stick…to…the…script!!”).

And like, everything keeps going wrong with missed lines, actors falling off the stage, and sets crashing down. And Statler and Waldorf are heckling everything, and are soon joined in the heckling by the exasperated Ghost of Shakespeare[4] himself!! (“Mountebank, thou treateth thy lines like a carbuncle treateth the face of a maiden fair!”)

And there’s all kinds of jokes when things get all Shakespeare-dark, like when Gloucester gets his eyes gouged out and Cornwall gets killed (even though the actual violence is comedic). For example, a servant (Pig) just like physically pulls the Velcro eyes off of the Link Muppet and Link is like “Who turned out the lights?”

“Wow, this is some dark stuff! Are you sure this is a PG film?” asks Rizzo/Cornwall just before he dies (and of course we see them all alive backstage so no kids get too scared or anything).

So, well, spoilers for a 400-year-old play, I guess?

But what really makes it all funny is that, no matter how insane things get, when “on stage” Patrick Stewart never breaks character and is like the perfect straight man…but backstage he is like crazier and sillier than the Muppets!

And Uncle Deadly is delightful as the melodramatic and ultimately honorable Albany, especially in the end when he and Edgar (Lew Zealand) get in a tug-of-war and slappy fight over the crown, each loudly arguing about whether they’re doing the quarto version or the folio version of the play (“We’re…doing…the...quatro!” “Folio!” “Quarto!” “Folio!”).

And of course, Rowlf is the narrator and Jim Henson himself manages to voice him, even though he lets Steve Witmer voice Kermit.

Even Gene Shalit shows up as a cameo in the audience and starts to give it all a bad revue before Animal eats his pen-and-paper, so he backs away, both thumbs up, “Four stars! Greatest version of King Lear ever! Deserves a Tony and an Oscar! Please don’t eat me!” so he was like an awesome sport about it!

And Sam is constantly putting his hands (wings?) over his eyes as everything goes wrong, and by the end he’s whimpering and talking with Kermit and he’s all “Now I know what you go through every single day with these weirdos, Kermit.”

“So, you’ll quit giving me a hard time about the weirdness next time then, right?” asks Kermit.

“Are you kidding?” says Sam, unrepentant. “These weirdos can’t even do Shakespeare with dignity! If anything, I must redouble my efforts to hold you strange, sickos to task! I’m quitting this show and joining the MPAA!”

Aaaand I’m totally rambling, sorry!

What’s next, perhaps? (Image source “muppet.fandom.com”)

So, like the film cost next to nothing to make since they could recycle Muppet Show sets and stock costumes and all the Muppet Performers were under contract. It like only made about $45 million but like only cost $12 million and they spent little on advertising and it was released in a dump month in the spring anyway, but sold well on home video and is a classic today. In fact, I hear one of the main reasons to make the movie was to keep the Muppets brand in the public memory so no real expectations, right?

And it got good reviews and all, and even Gene Shalit liked it even as he joked that Animal would eat him if he gave it less than 3 stars and all.

But we all love it today. I mean, the Muppets did Shakespeare, right? I hear they got some educational and cultural credits for it, so that’s great, even though some Shakespeare snobs cried foul (or fowl in Camilla/Regan’s case, right?). I mean, I love it, but I love all things Muppets and yes I’m biased so kiss my butt.

If you haven’t seen it, well, what are you waiting for? Go to the video store and pick up a copy, already!

Why are you still here?

[1] Elizabethan befeathered hat tip to @El Pip for the crazy idea and some help with casting and running gags. And a hat tip to many of you for all of the clever but incorrect guesses of what Shakespeare play they would do.

[2] Hat tip to @Pesterfield!

[3] Thank/blame Ms. Khan again!

[4] And Hat Tip to @TheFaultsofAlts!

Geekhis Khan · Feb 17, 2022

The Truth is Out There…on Television!
Archived from I Want to Believe Netlog by Con Spirossi and Tim Phoilatt, November 22nd, 2013

20 years ago, Chris Carter and Richard Belzer brought us The Truth. And they cleverly disguised it as an innocent TV show. The show was The X-Files and They don’t want you to know just how true it is!

If you read about the production history of the program, then you’ve probably heard how Chris Carter was a surfer working at Surfing Magazine, when his then-girlfriend and now-wife Dori Pierson got him a writing job with Disney[1]. They will tell you that he did some various writing jobs for silly TV shows for kids to some more interesting stuff through Disney’s World of Magic. And they will tell you how, inspired by Kolchak: The Night Stalker and various “conspiracy theories”, he launched a popular PFN show (after NBC rejected it) through Fantasia Television Productions about two FBI agents, the “believer” Fox Mulder and “skeptic” Dana Scully, played by Richard Belzer and Mariska Hartigay[2], who investigate paranormal cases.

Agents Mulder and Scully on the case (Image by @WhovianHolmesianChap)

They will tell you that the show began as a series of “monster of the week” plots, but that a writer’s strike drove it towards a mix of MotW and “metaplot” related to a massive government conspiracy to Hide the Truth, as represented by “the smoking man” played by William B. Davis and corrupt FBI assistant director Alexa Kersh portrayed by Gillian Anderson, whom they will tell you was Carter’s original choice for Scully before the network pushed him to the more established Hartigay[3].

And with each episode – all clearly clever fiction They will tell you – we learn of the massive conspiracy that They don’t want Mulder to find out about.

Through Mulder and Scully, we learned about the government attempts to conceal the truth of the UFOs. We learned about the half-human hybrids and the experiments and the mystery of Mulder’s sister. We learned about the Plots involving the oil and the “dark waters”. We learned about the time travel experiments and the role of the Smoking Man in the Kennedy assassination. We learned about the nuclear power lobby and cell phone radiation and NORAD and Project Aurora and the Black Helicopters and the Drug War and the Mugwumps and the circus freaks and the Inbred Redneck Murder Family and the dark truth behind the Chicago Bears. We learned about the TVA and the Philadelphia Experiment and the alternate timelines and the links between D.B. Cooper, Madison Avenue Ad Men, and the Norse God Loki.

We learned about the bees.

They will tell you how this “metaplot” grew bigger and crazier and more complicated as each writer tried to outdo the last. Worse, they will tell you that, as the show progressed, Richard Belzer, a noted “conspiracy theorist” They will say, became increasingly close with Carter, and soon their “crazy ideas” spiraled out of control in what the uninformed like to call an example of a “Briar Patch Plot”. Belzer and Carter’s “lunacy”, they will say, taking a “once-fun” show and warping it into an incomprehensible mess that collapsed under its own weight after 8 seasons[4].

But They won’t tell you The Truth. They won’t tell you that Carter and Belzer aren’t just Hollywood people, but actual Informed Citizens who know the real story. They won’t tell you how Carter and Belzer were using the show to reveal The Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing But the Truth to us. They won’t tell you that PFN and Bernie Brillstein, in league with Tim Burton, the Disney family, and the extradimensional spirit that inhabits the Uncle Deadly Muppet, imposed Hartigay onto the production because she is, in fact, an Agent from the Interzone there to keep a lid on the two of them.

Nor will they tell you how Gillian Anderson (the actress, not the role she played) is the key to everything.

But we’ve already said too much. Copy and share this information quickly, because it won’t be here for long.

Just watch. They will come for this Netlog next. They will close us down before we can help you all learn the Truth that Carter and Belzer wanted us to know.

So, enjoy this Netlog, and the Truth that it brings…while They let you[5].

[1] Per our timeline.

[2] Hat tip to @Pokemon Master.

[3] Fox pushed Carter in our timeline to cast someone either more established or (in his words) “taller, leggier, blonder and breastier”. In this timeline they succeeded on getting the more established Hartigay.

[4] Lasted 11 seasons in our timeline. Here, Belzer’s (in)famous affinity for conspiracy theories will play off of Carter’s, causing the “Chris Carter Effect” to kick in sooner and stronger until even the most dedicated fans reach the point of “WTF is going on?!?” There will be a 1998 theatrical film and three made-for-TV movies.

[5] The I Want to Believe Netlog shut down in the spring of 2014 when the owners were no longer able to pay their monthly fees to the host domain site.

Geekhis Khan · Feb 19, 2022

Regenerating the 9th Doctor
From Regenerating Who Netlog, November 6th, 2007

By 1993 the BBC was in a bit of a conundrum involving the long-running Dr. Who. On one hand, the series as a whole was the most profitable that it had been in its history, boosted by a young American audience. On the other hand, the original British and Commonwealth fandom had abandoned the show in droves, many refusing to acknowledge that the series even still existed. Thousands of letters poured into the BBC, most of them disturbed with the change, many of them angry and incensed, some of them insulting or threatening.

By this point the audience had largely fractured. Older fans largely abandoned the series itself, though an underground fandom lived on. “Orthodox Whovian Associations” began to sprout up, mourning the “death” of The Doctor at the end of “The Lifestealer”. Meanwhile, the series, which was moved to an earlier time slot the less inherently “premier” BBC 2, found a niche audience in the UK from three main sources: the young “K-9 Crew”, who identified with the younger Doctor despite his American accent (or who at least loved K-9 and other campy and colorful elements), the “Contrarians”, who seemed to like the new direction just because others did not, and the “Bile Brigade”, who watched the series out of hate, unable to look away, feeding off of the negative energy. Even so, the UK viewership had plummeted to under 2 million[1], with some episodes pulling in no more than half a million viewers in the UK, even as the US audience, driven by children aged 8-14, regularly exceeded 11 million.

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” said new screenwriter Russell T. Davies[2], quoting Dickens. “It was an era where we were getting the biggest budgets and the best effects that the show had ever seen, and an era where we were getting death threats.” Davies had, despite his personal reservations for the direction taken with the 8th Doctor, jumped at the chance to write for the show. “On one hand, I was living my dream, writing for Dr. Who, a show that I’d loved since childhood. On the other hand, I was afraid to tell anyone I was doing so, lest I get an earful.”

The cast, crew, and production team bore the brunt of the hate. “I got so much bloody hate mail,” said Simon Gregson, who played The Master. “Think about that, will you? Teenagers getting death threats from middle-aged men because we took a bloody job. Neil got it worse than me. Poor Carmen got it worst of all.”

“The letters were just awful, and so many of them were racist,” said Carmen Ejogo, who played the companion Natasha. “I made the mistake once of attending a Con with Neil and Simon, and we got loudly booed. Kids in the front row were crying. The only reason why I didn’t quit was because Nichelle Nichols specifically asked me to stay, just like she said Martin Luther King had asked her to stay with Star Trek. And it helped a lot that I got letters from young Black girls who all told me how much it meant seeing me on the screen.”

Neil also suffered the backlash, occasionally suffering homophobic slurs, which the actor would later admit caused him great difficulties as he came to terms with his own sexuality, which he would only fully come to terms with as an adult after his run as The Doctor. Harris largely dropped out of television to pursue Broadway, becoming a highly respected theatrical and musical theater actor. “It was a complicated time in my life to put it mildly,” said Harris. “Growing up is hard enough. Growing up as a gay man not yet fully aware of your own gayness is harder still. Then you tack on fame and fan anger and it’s not the ideal adolescence. If it hadn’t been for the great folks who make Dr. Who I might have suffered worse trauma than I did.”

Though the majority of the British fandom considers his run a “dark age,” Harris’ fellow cast and crew continue to speak very highly of him. “While as a fan I was initially displeased about the choice of Harris,” Davies said, “the kid’s natural charm rubbed off on me and I found myself delighted to write for him. He was and is a consummate professional, kind, and hard working. To this day we remain friends and I will defend his run to the day I die, even as I understand the anger.”

Joan Ganz Cooney suffered some of the worst of the backlash, and some of the very fans who praised her for the Griffiths run singled her out and condemned her for the Harris run. Being an American, she became a convenient scapegoat with all blame being shifted to her for decisions made by teams of writers and executives. Being a woman, some have suggested that misogyny played a role in the singularity of the blame, though this is speculation.

The backlash was also reverberating in the halls of the BBC. Eric Saward had quit amidst the backlash and Michael Grade was constantly defending the casting, citing it as the “bold move” that the series needed to rebuild itself. “[The series in 1986] was horrible, awful. I thought it was so outdated. It was just a little show for a few pointy-head Doctor Who fans. It was also very violent and it had lost its magic[3]. What Ganz-Cooney did was to reawaken the magic for a new generation and for a new audience, and if a few middle-aged Englishmen couldn’t let go, then that is entirely on them. And to hear complaints from people who admitted in their letters that they stopped watching in the 1970s was the most frustrating of all. You lost your vote when you stopped tuning in.”

Grade received a lot of angry hate mail, but he brushed it off, because from a fiscal standpoint the franchise was more profitable than ever and the leadership at the BBC and rival networks were taking notice. Even so, the backlash reportedly included some very big names, with The Queen herself reportedly expressing displeasure at the “Americanization” of a British staple. Grade and Ganz-Cooney found themselves at a bit of a crossroads between appealing to the new and more profitable American audience and placating the angry, but still too emotionally invested to let go “Orthodox” fandom. This was exacerbated by the fact that focusing on a younger audience can be a “trap”, since tastes change very quickly with age and since the “next generation” of children inevitably move on to something different. Dr. Who remained popular with the “Griffiths Generation”, but Ganz-Cooney knew it might not for long.

Continuing the franchise would be a tightrope walk if they were going to keep the current growing fandom and (hopefully) win back the older fandom. On the latter front, at least, there was arguably nowhere to go but up. And yet by this point (in a move often compared to the “New Coke” controversy[4]) the older fans were consuming whatever vestiges of “Vintage Who” there were, be they the Live Action plays, syndicated re-runs, or the VHS releases of the earlier series. The latter became a generational bridge as “Who parents” tried to interest their young Harris-loving kids in “proper” Who. Underground theaters began to develop the “Lost Episodes” plays featuring former Doctors, which, in turn, caught the attention of Ganz Cooney, who alerted BBC Radio. The “Lost Episodes” fan plays were officially canonized on BBC Radio as Radio Dramas, bringing back original actors to voice their roles where possible, and gained a strong, dedicated listenership.

Nelvana Animation got in on the game too, spinning off a Tales of Doctors Past cartoon that followed the First Seven on new animated adventures. Many of the Orthodox Whovians began to watch the show, despite it being animated, leading to a spike in viewership across the commonwealth and helping to shore up the struggling animation studio. Dr. Who had never been more popular and yet had never been more hated, an irony lost on few.

“The 8th Doctor is largely seen in the entertainment world as ‘the most profitable disaster in the history of entertainment,’” said Ganz-Cooney in a later interview. “To hear the ‘Orthodox’ fandom say it, the years 1990-1993 were an ‘unmitigated disaster’ that ‘practically killed the franchise’ when, ironically, they were some of the franchise’s most objectively profitable and popular years and helped save the series from cancellation. VHS sales, radio plays, syndicated reruns, animated adventures, and record viewership on new episodes thanks to American audiences, even as some of the original fans tuned out. I’ve had numerous TV execs ask me what the secret to such a ‘successful failure’ are. We generally compare it to the love-hate-love again fan attitudes on the 1960s Adam West Batman series.”

And it was amidst this controversy and division that Ganz Cooney and the production team had to choose a 9th Doctor. They decided early on to have a British actor, the experiment with an American Doctor having proven a bridge too far. Simply pretending that the incarnation was all a dream or otherwise retroactively removing Harris from the canon through something “timey-wimey” as Davies would put it would risk alienating the new audience. Trying to appease both factions would likely prove a disaster that would please neither. Instead, they decided to go with their gut and take things in an entirely different direction, one aligning to the emerging 1990s zeitgeist.

So, flush with both success and controversy, the production team, noting how incredibly popular Simon Gregson’s bad boy Master was with the female fandom in particular, decided to take the series once again in a radical direction. In the final part of 1993’s “Singularity”, written by Russell T. Davies, who had gained an early seniority among the writing team since so many writers had quit, The Doctor and The Master are clashing once again, this time over the Quantum Singularity Device, or QSD, an object created (in a nod to Doyle) by the reckless Reichenbach Industries.

It turns out that the incident with the Lifeforce Device in “The Lifestealer” had, in its explosion, created a “quantum lifeforce link” between Doctor and Master that was causing strange flashes and impulses towards evil or good in both (in a silent nod to the confusion of puberty). The Master, hoping to use the QSD to “purge” himself of the Doctor and just possibly kill the Doctor himself as an added bonus, initiates the device. The Doctor and he wrestle atop the QSD as it “goes critical” and suddenly both are gone in a flash. Did they just kill both characters ala Holmes and Moriarty? Jess and K-9 believed that they’d isolated the Doctor’s “Quantum signature”, but they were unsure. They, and the Fandom, would have to wait for the fall!

They almost never find out[5]. Irate with the pressure to somehow “have our cake and eat it too,” Michael Grade, just prior to leaving the BBC and taking a job as the President and CEO of ITV (in what he called a “Reconquista”), attempted to cancel the show entirely, some say out of spite. Joan Ganz Cooney begged Grade to give her “just one more series” swearing that the ideas that Davies had created for the 9th Doctor would be exactly the bridge between the two fandoms. Grade, essentially no longer caring, relented, and Ganz recruited the enthusiastic young Davies as the show runner while she became the Executive Producer and took a position as head of BBC Overseas Programming. There she managed to spin K-9 off into a show in the US and Canada called K-9 and Krewe, starring the previously considered Lark Vorhees, which managed to retain a profitable fanbase among the young, lasting a full four seasons. The original British fandom’s fears that Neil Patrick Harris’ Doctor was going to turn Dr. Who into a “silly kids show for Yanks” thus became to some degree an ironically self-fulfilling prophesy.

Davies, meanwhile, would become Dr. Who’s head writer and show runner, largely because nobody else was willing to take the job. “It was a hard decision and I nearly didn’t take it,” said Davies. “Part of the hesitation was because I was so young and inexperienced, but most of it was due to the fear of the possible backlash. I’d remember Carmen crying because of some racist letter or Neil, a teenage boy who was not yet fully aware of his own sexuality, getting called a f****t, and I’d wonder why I was willingly subjecting myself to this. But the truth is that I just felt a devotion to the franchise that I loved.”

Davies assembled a young and adventurous team of writers. “We had nothing to lose, and the full support of Joan [Ganz Cooney], who despite all of the hate she received from parts of the fandom truly did love and appreciate the franchise. Any time a fan complains about her I tell them about how she stood up for the franchise and prevented its cancellation. Had Mr. Grade killed it in the midst of all of the controversy, I very much doubt that we could have ever brought it back. The Beeb was ready to torch it all.”

It was the start of a successful career for Davies. On the side, between Dr. Who series, he would leverage his newfound connections to produce his first original show, Hecate starring a “crone-like” Deborah Kerr, a “matronly” Judy Dench, and a “virginal” Kate Winslet, the story of three witches from three generations living in a small town in Scotland. It was reasonably popular worldwide and is credited with launching Kate Winslet’s career, and is occasionally cited as the source for the “witch mania” in entertainment in the 1990s.

But as the summer break went on, rumors persisted on what form the 9th Doctor would take, the Whovians, old and new, debating what would, could, or should happen next. Would they keep the teen Doctor? Return to a more traditional Doctor? Or, as many feared, simply turn Jess into a “New Doctor”?

The answer was, it seems, “not quite any of the above.” Instead, Jess and K-9 successfully isolate the Quantum Signature, using a healthy dose of technobabble and K-9 Ex Machina, and reform The Doctor in a wave of Regeneration Energy, and rather sans-clothing save for strategically-placed machinery.

Or did they regenerate The Master instead? The new Doctor, played by a young Jude Law, seemed unsure of who he was.

Jude Law c1993 (Image source “notrecinema.com”)

If young female audiences went crazy for Gregson, they practically fainted on their couches for the 20-year-old Law, revealed au naturale. The new Time Lord, who adopted the moniker of The Doctor despite his “dark dreams and reminiscences”, was a conundrum, possibly a Master-tinted Doctor or a Doctor-influenced Master. Either way, the black-clad Byronic Antihero was the Troubled Bad Boy with a Heart of Gold[6] personified as his dark impulses clashed with his ultimate heroism, always on the cusp of both true altruism and self-serving villainy.

Taking a cue from Colin Baker’s dark 6th Doctor, Law’s Master-ish Doctor (or Doctor-ish Master?) was Dr. Who reimagined for the era of Goth and Industrial Metal, Comics Dark Age Antiheroes, and Tim Burton at his peak. Troubled, brooding, and dangerously pragmatic at times, but a true Romantic at heart, Law and Davies deliberately patterned the 9th Doctor on Lord Byron, in particular on his dangerous and seductive legacy, and gave him a “touch of the Nietzschean” in his attitudes. The 9th Doctor dressed in a black, well-tailored suit that was “sleek and modern, but with a slight Edwardian flair”. His hair was short and severe and his eyes penetrating.

Law’s slick charm and dangerous edge made him a dashing and charismatic figure, but his divided personality constantly pulled him between the poles of Doctor and Master and the schizophrenia of it all led to compulsive urges and flashes of anger. In one scene in the second episode, the increasingly out-of-place K-9, who annoyed the Doctor, was unceremoniously dropped off in Los Angeles with a young American woman named Natasha (Lark Vorhees), setting up K-9 and Krewe. K-9 was replaced, oddly enough, by a new Companion, the square and slightly effeminate Cambridge scholar Nigel, played by Anthony Stewart Head, who joined Jess and The Doctor.

Anthony Stewart Head c1993 (Image sources Pinterest)

According to Davies, each companion represented different aspects of Law’s Doctor. Nigel was emblematic of his logic, compassion, patience, integrity, and empathy, but also of his judgmentalism, uptightness, and inflexibility. Jess represented his independence, freedom, cleverness, creativity, and inventiveness, but also his darker pragmatism, anger, rudeness, and selfishness. And in yet another nod to Lord Byron, the relationship that Davies developed for The Doctor and his two companions was also fully intended by Davies (behind the backs of his producers, who would never have approved) to quietly suggest that the 9th Doctor was bisexual, with Davies on occasion deliberately slipping in subtle homoerotic subtext in the Doctor-Nigel relationship, even as The Doctor remained canonically straight and no actual romantic relationships were shown or overtly hinted at.

Law’s 9th Doctor did the now seemingly obligatory three year run from the fall of 1993 to the spring of 1997. While many of the Orthodoxy refused to accept the 9th Doctor, with many openly upset at the “possibly also The Master” angle, British and Commonwealth viewership did start to trend back upwards, driven largely by Law’s natural charisma and commanding screen presence. “We desperately wanted him back for a fourth series,” said Ganz Cooney, “But by this point Hollywood was increasingly calling. Even with the larger budgets, we couldn’t compete.”

Instead, they would find a more traditional 10th Doctor, seeking stability and a return to normalcy after a tumultuous and nearly disastrous 6-year run. But with Davies still the wunderkind head writer, there would be only so much “normal” to have!

[1] The largest UK viewership was for Series 3’s “A Touch of Magic”, which featured an appearance by Jon Pertwee as the 3rd Doctor, averaging 3.6 million UK viewers per episode. It failed to mend as many fences as hoped.

[2] Surprise! With the series lasting into the 1990s it meant that he got to live out a childhood dream and write for Dr. Who much earlier. In our timeline he had a spec script rejected in 1987. The show was put on hiatus before he built up his resume enough to get a spot on the show in our timeline, but despite his “mixed feelings” on the 8th Doctor in this timeline, he still jumped at the chance to work on the show that he loved, secretly believing that he could “turn the ship around.” And indeed, he won a Nebula for “The Unwindable Clock” which “went quantum”.

[3] Quote per our timeline so far.

[4] Floppy Tom Baker hat tip to @Nathanoraptor.

[5] Nearly succumbing to the negativity myself, I came very close to ending the series here, lost in a perpetual cliffhanger, never to be resolved as no producer, not even Russel T. Davies, would touch the show after what the production team, cast, and crew went through, but I felt that was bad karma. Instead, I gave Hope a chance.

[6] Yet again @Igeo654 called it!

Geekhis Khan · Feb 20, 2022

Chapter 13, Facing the Music
Excerpt from Where Did I Go Right? (or: You’re No One in Hollywood Unless Someone Wants You Dead), by Bernie Brillstein (with Cheryl Henson)

So, after spinning up Hyperion Music and signing on the first round of names, some of whom, like They Might be Giants and Stone Temple Pilots, were becoming breakout hits, I’d largely left music to its own devices.

But as Michael Corleone said, “Every time I try to get out, they pull me back in!”

It was time once again to face the music.

And you can blame me for that pun. Cheryl had nothing to do with it. Working with Jim affects you in strange ways……

Anyway.

As noted, I was mostly busy on the film and TV side and had largely delegated the music stuff down to others. Eventually, after the Big Reorg, it would end up fully in my hands, but that’s a story for later. For now, let’s just talk about the music, and how the Disney/MGM split[1] was creating confusion and management redundancy.

One of the big music-related things we pursued was going after Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince. Bambi Moé, who’d been really working her way up in Disney Music after the success of Halyx, had made it a personal mission to pull them in under the Hyperion label, to which she’d transferred after Halyx broke up. Jive Records had discovered them and both Jeff and Will were sticking with Russell Simmons out of well-placed loyalty. Still, they were the perfect Disney Duo: young and hip, yet still inoffensive. They could play at any Disney Resort and fill the seats yet never cause Roy and Diane any heartache by rapping about sex and drugs or dropping any F-bombs.

Instead of trying to poach them (I respect loyalty), I made numerous collaborations and deals with Russell. Disney Music and Jive would partner to produce special Disney-related albums and Hyperion and Jive would partner for some more street-smart stuff. The deal led to other deals with Jive, including, ultimately, us acquiring a minority stake in the company and underwriting it[2], allowing us to arrange numerous future deals.

The relationship led us to several names in Hip-Hop and R&B who signed or partnered with us.

It also led to a working relationship with R. Kelly that led to some eventual drama and headlines, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

Among the bands that we signed on the R&B side was Hi-Five, a talented quintet out of Waco, Texas. We were alerted to them when they sold out their sets at Disneytown, San Antonio. DTSA would also be where we discovered a young musician named Selena[3], the so-called “Tejano Madonna”. She was good. I mean, really good. We bought up her contract from EMI immediately, and she’s since become a legend, still loyally distributing through Hyperion, collecting Grammys like candy. I like to say that she paid for Disneytown SA all by herself, but that’s pretty ludicrous hyperbole even for me, though she may have paid for a good chunk of Fiesta Stadium.

Selena of course took off big, like, super-big. Her fans are fanatical. Sometimes literally. The head of her original San Antonio fan club[4] ended up getting tazered and jailed for assaulting one of the DTSA security detail. Selena ended up getting a restraining order on her and others after some obsessive and threatening letters. The price of fame in the modern age.

In general, one of the biggest advantages of the Disneytowns seemed to be the well of local talent that they brought in. Disneytown Philly brought us Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince, Disneytown San Antonio found us Hi-Five and Selena (not to mention actor Mathew McConaughey), Disneytown Denver found us The Flatirons, Black Black Ocean, and Catatonic Lydia (though Anne Frank on Crank turned us down when Bambi suggested a name change), Disneytown Seattle was there to catch the tail end of Grunge, and Disneytown Chicago was practically a Grammy Factory.

And music at the time was in a real state of change. Country had a big dance craze thing in the early 1990s and got really pop-sounding. The big hair metal bands of the ‘80s were out and both rap and the new “alternative” sound were increasingly in. On the latter, we’d gotten on board on the ground floor with They Might be Giants, Stone Temple Pilots, and The Liquid Drifters. And Freddie Mercury soon brought a band called Ween to our attention, I assume named for Halloween due to their rather spooky sound [SIC]. The song I heard, something about a cold wind blowing, was like if Pink Floyd did a sea shanty, if that makes any sense. Fred Rogers of all people spoke highly of them. Freddie wanted to produce[5]. Their two leads Aaron Freeman and Mickey Melchiondo had even been doing voice work for us on Japanese animation dubs.

Anyway, Ween soon led us to a local band they liked called Youthless, this strange Dadaist band led by Beck Hansen that opened for them once. Youthless was a performance band. On the surface their music was a sort of deliberately ironic blues/rock/folk/rap crossover, but in the shows, they’d have massive and surreal audience participation, wrapping volunteers up in masking tape or having them recite comic books like it was Shakespeare or something. One time they showered the audience in bread crumbs and joked about releasing a swarm of pigeons, nearly causing a stampede. We signed them and they played a lot of gigs at Cyclia and the like, eventually breaking out with their strange word-salad folk-rap mix “The Losers”.

And speaking of Dada, soon enough a band called Dada appeared in LA, signed with I.R.S. We first heard them on the radio when every station in greater LA started playing this song about Disneyland, or so we thought, but with really dark lyrics. “I just robbed a liquor store/I’m going to Disneyland; I just shot and killed a man/I’m going to Disneyland” or something like that. The Legal Weasels were drafting up a cease & desist, but I had them hold off. We need to watch our IP, of course, but being the company that tried to “snuff out free speech” would not help our public image. And good thing we held off, because they had a rock-solid case of Fair Use under Satire. They’d even crossed their t’s with the name: they weren’t singing “Disneyland”, they were singing “Dizz Knee Land”.

Right.

But as Bambi says, “why sue when you can sign?” She approached them…and was politely shown the door. They told her that if they signed with Disney that they’d lose all of their artistic cred and be a bunch of sell-outs. She noted that they’d be under the Hyperion label alongside The Liquid Drifters and Youthless, but they countered “people will find out. And then our song will just be a fucking advertisement for Disneyland, not a ballad on the insane juxtapositions of everyday life.”

Yea, they had a point. They’d stick with I.R.S.

But Bambi also met with Maynard Keenan of Tool, who’d done some work with Tim Burton on Nocturns and had done some shows at Cyclia. Bambi tried unsuccessfully to lure them from Zoo (probably for the better after seeing the controversy over “Do Unto Others”), but she did score a similarly dark metal/industrial band called The Ultraviolet Catastrophe, apparently founded by a bunch of Astrophysics students at CalTech, who opened for Tool a couple of times. Brian Henson and Leonard Tramiel loved them, which should have been our first clue. Their eponymous song broke the Top 40 and got some good video play. People theorized about the “deep” meaning of the “dark” lyrics. It turns out it was mostly a string of physics jokes. I guess we should have caught on when the lead singer was named Heisenberg and the bassist was named Boatswain Higgs.

And yet Bambi would also work closely with her old partners at Disney Music, which brought in so many of the Teen Pop stars of the 1990s and 2000s that ended up with shows on Teen Disney. The Helium Kids are legendary, of course, but she also discovered Destiny Cyrus, Mackie Mae, and the Lohans. But I’ll get to all of them another day.

Instead, I’ll talk about the trouble that this crossover created within the halls of Disney-MGM.

Questions started to arise among the various VPs on the Disney and MGM sides on who had authority where and over what. What do you do in a case like Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince where the duo had releases under Hyperion in partnership with Jive and also releases under Disney, particularly for soundtracks? Will Smith in particular was slowly building up an acting career, at first as “the poor man’s Jamie Foxx” (which pissed off both him and Jamie), slowly but surely making an independent name for himself. And when you have film and music credits on both sides, soon you have a production VP over in Disney complaining to Stan Kinsey about how Bambi is horning in on his turf. And, well, you can see how confusing it can get.

And by this point Bambi alone was managing a bubblegum teen pop band, a Western trio, a hip-hop duo, an R&B quintet, a Diva Superstar, and a dark industrial metal band, some under Hyperion, some under Disney or Fantasia. She had me and Jim working with our producers and execs to draft up ground rules on management and production across studio lines.

And that was just the music side, don’t get me started on when there was film, animation, and TV involved too.

All in a day’s work, right?

[1] Bernie is refereeing to how they made separate Disney and MGM Studios hierarchies, each a separate “finger” in the Mickey Glove organization, largely to deal with the internal politics of Tom Wilhite seeing Jim Henson as a rival back in the early 1980s when Ron Miller spun up Hyperion Pictures as its own studio independent of the Disney Pictures hierarchy. It eventually became MGM after Frank Wells acquired that label in Ted Turner’s 1986 “fire sale” after biting off more than he could chew. Recall that the Disney side includes the Disney Pictures, Disney Animation, Disney Music, Marvel, Disney TV, and Fantasia Films while MGM side includes MGM Pictures, Hyperion Pictures, Hyperion Music, MGM/Hyperion TV, and Buena Vista Distribution.

[2] They were underwritten in this way by BMG in our timeline, leading eventually to their acquisition in 2002.

[3] Oversized Stetson tip to @Unknown.

[4] That would be one Yolanda Saldívar, who in our timeline ingratiated herself into the family, becoming a business manager. She’d go on to rob them blind in an embezzlement scheme, and then later shot and murdered Selena in a hotel room when Selena confronted her about it all. Here, earlier discovery leaves Saldívar out on the fringe. Selena will live.

[5] Hat tip to @TheMolluskLingers.

Geekhis Khan · Feb 22, 2022

Chapter 13: An Animation Renaissance, 1989-1995 (Cont’d)
From In the Shadow of the Mouse, Non-Disney Animation 1960-2000, by Joshua Ben Jordan

Where the 1980s were a time of consolidation in animation, with large film studios buying up the classic animation studios of old, the 1990s were increasingly a time for small, independent studios to spin up and make their mark. Advances in affordable audio-video computers like the Disney Imagination Station, Apple Gala and Silicon Graphics “Barney” stations, or even Virgin/Atari systems with a good “Video Package”, particularly when these were used alongside affordable vector compiling engines like the MINIBOG and Apple CORE, were making animation increasingly cost-competitive. Even used DIS stations were finding new lives with animation startups.

Suddenly a small production company like Bird Brain, Wayward, Snee-Oosh, or Whoopass could increasingly manage a TV series or even feature film without automatically having to tie themselves to a major studio, though such partnerships remained the norm as distribution remained the bailiwick of the big studios and networks. The increasing rise of inexpensive but very talented animation studios in Japan, Ireland, and South Korea allowed for the outsourcing of “inbetweener” and background work, even as accusations of “sweatshop” conditions arose, particularly among the remaining vestiges of the US Animator’s Union.

With the economics of animation thus shifting once again, suddenly, big studios found themselves in competition to retain partnerships with the small studios! Bird Brain Studios for example had, by this point, maintained a good working relationship with Warner Brothers for several years, but corporate decisions were increasingly alienating the small studio. Brad Bird and Bruce Timm were getting along well with WB’s Jean MacCurdy, Tom Ruegger, and Mira Velimirovic, but Mira would soon follow her old friend Lisa Henson to Fox, where she’d become an executive for Filmation alongside Richard Bazley, who’d in turn been lured over from Bluth Animation. Bazley, it should be noted, brought with him the rights for an animated film based upon the Ted Hughes book The Iron Man, known in the US as The Iron Giant.

With the amicable Velimirovic, who’d served as a good shield between animation and upper management, now gone, WB leadership began to push for more internal control of their DC-branded cartoons, and balked at Bird Brain’s earlier The Spirit movie deal with arch-rival Disney. When the contract with Bird Brain ended for the DC Animation universe in 1993, WB (over MacCurdy’s and Ruegger’s objections) declined to renew it, and allowed their in-house animators to manage the series going forward (including animating 1996’s Justice League vs. The Legion of Doom movie, which had no input from Bird Brain). While this led to a noticeable dip in the quality of storytelling and the innovativeness of animation, the DC cartoons did manage to continue to perform adequately on both the small screen and big. Internal WB animators, led by Tom Ruegger, began to increasingly run the DC shows while also pressing for more original WB programming, leading to The Animaniacs, among other productions.

WB also continued to keep their classic characters on the big screen, producing 1995’s Too Looney!, a new Looney Tunes animated adventure whose name evolved from the working title of “Looney Tunes Movie 2”. Produced by Joe Dante and directed by Tom Ruegger, Too Looney! would see Bugs and Daffy launching rival movie studios and thus opening the door to all kinds of parody and satire of every major recent film, every major star, and even sent up the film industry itself, gleefully biting the hands at WB that fed them, even parodying the big WB leadership shakeup in 1994. Light on plot and heavy on madcap, the feature underwhelmed critics, but entertained audiences, making a modest profit even in the face of the Disney juggernaut.

Bird and Timm were instead lured by Velimirovic to Filmation, where they’d pitch their idea for an art deco inspired Sci-Fi film noir called Ray Gunn. The Fox board was unsure about the potential for an adult-themed cartoon and pushed for a more child-friendly approach, which Bird rebelled against. In a compromise, Bird Brain would instead be hired to work with Bazley and his new Filmation Feature Animation team to produce The Iron Giant while working on Ray Gunn as a relatively low-budget film on the side. Bazley and Bird would come to loggerheads over the direction of the film, though, with Bazley wanting something closer to the source material (which has a cosmic dragon and some late-60s spiritualist elements) and Bird wanting to make it into a Cold War era film. Eventually, the US setting and Baby Boomer nostalgia potential helped Bird win out, moving the setting to the Cuban Missile Crisis era Pacific Northwest.

This a few years early, and from Fox!

Hopes to make the eponymous Giant fully digital created some problems, as even with a render farm of MINIBOGs there was a lot of vector data to maintain the flowing, three-dimensional look that Bird wanted. Blending hand-drawn, digitally inked and painted elements with the use of fully CG-renders, and taking advantage of cost-saving measures developed during their TV run, the Bird Brain/Filmation team managed to produce the film for about $32.4 million. The film would screen in the summer of 1995 amidst a major advertising blitz by Fox where its blend of heartfelt sincerity, beautiful and sweeping animation, and relatable characters would lead to it earning a surprising $189 million at the box office, the third-highest grossing animated film of the year[1], and more notably it won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, the first non-Disney film to earn that honor. It was the start of a great working relationship between Bird Brain and Filmation.

On the TV front, Filmation continued to support several TV series, including partnering with Craig Bartlett’s Snee-Oosh Productions to produce PFN’s popular Hey Arnold![2] It would be the beginning of a long-running partnership between Bartlett and Fox President Lisa Henson. Filmation also partnered with Lucasfilm to produce a short-lived Young Indiana Jones animated series as a spinoff of the popular live action series of the same name and even managed to poach Star Wars animation from Disney Animation by promising reduced costs but comparable quality. The resulting series, Star Wars: The Mandalorian Chronicles, followed members of Clan Fett, including Boba Fett[3], as they navigated the underworld and backwater planets of the Empire (a premise that enraged Michael Eisner at Hollywood Pictures, who claimed to have pitched a similar series idea to Lucas years earlier). Filmation also continued its forays into Star Trek with Captain Data and Tales from the Borg War, the two friendly rival Sci-Fi franchises (or at least their animated universes) suddenly produced under the same roof, though executive interest in a crossover was consistently rejected by both Richard Berman and George Lucas alike. “The physics don’t even work the same,” Lucas reportedly told Henson as she sheepishly passed on the request from Barry Diller.

Other big studios also continued to try and grab a piece of the Mouse’s animation market share on the big and small screens alike. Columbia’s Hanna-Barbera was continuing to produce low-budget animated films based on television IP, releasing The Flintstones Movie in 1994 to moderate success[4], Scooby Doo: Monsters United in 1995 to a small but disappointing profit, and Captain Planet: Take Back the Planet!, which barely broke even. The Jetsons Movie, released in 1995, would flop hard, but find new life in syndication and home video. Their only attempt at an original IP, 1993’s Once Upon a Forest, Executive Produced by William Hanna himself, ran smack into The Little Mermaid and Ritzy Gal and barely broke even, ultimately gaining a new appreciation in home video. Otherwise, HB remained the Champions of Television, producing numerous new productions for its Cartoon City channel, including the popular 2 Dum Mutts and similar “post Hoerk & Gatty” fare that continued in the shocking footsteps of the late John Kricfalusi, whose 1994 suicide amid accusations of solicitation of sex from an underaged girl shocked the industry.

HB also entered into the Network Animation world in partnership with Steven Bochco, developing the PG (and occasionally T) rated Capitol Critters for CBS. After kicking around ideas involving anthropomorphic mice in a near-standard sitcom format that just happened to be located at the US Capitol, Brandon Tartikoff convinced Bochco to focus on the politics, leading to the concept of an entire “animal government” with animals based by state[5] (such as a bison representing populist Wyoming Senator John Vinich and a large sperm whale for the Ted Kennedy expy). Over its four short but influential seasons, Capitol Critters would gain a reputation for addressing controversial issues and leaving no side unscathed as its writers skewered every politician and political hypocrisy within reach. “I knew that we were on the right track when both Newt Gingrich and Nancy Pelosi separately accused us of bias against their side,” said Bochco.

Universal Pictures dipped its toes back into the animation waters and teamed up once again with UPA to produce Kong and Godzilla vs. Aggraghast in 1992, a relatively low budget animated film that built off of the popular Monster Mayhem TV series, though maintaining the skilled animation of the 1988 Godzilla film. Intended mostly as a way to keep the King Kong IP in the public consciousness while they worked on the live action King Kong film while also drumming up interest in the Kongfrontation attraction at Universal Studios Florida, Kong and Godzilla would only break even and would be the last Universal/UPA feature collaboration for a while. Instead, UPA continued to make animation for Universal on television. The series Monster Force and ExoSquad[6] were launched in first run syndication in 1994 and 1993 respectively, and both featured park tie-ins at Universal Studios. The success of Monster Mayhem in particular would even catch the attention of Disney and lead Marvel Productions to briefly relaunch the Inhumanoids line in a two-season anime-inspired reboot.

Hollywood Animation, still known in the industry as DiC, was working with Don Bluth, producing the hit Ritzy Gal in 1993. Bluth also worked with the in-house DiC animators to help produce Retriever, a jazzy canine-based comedy based loosely on Catcher in the Rye. It was a massive success upon release in the summer of 1994 and the first film to actually beat a Disney animated film at the box office, besting Disney’s innovative all-digital The Brave Little Toaster in a head-to-head lineup. The success would be the crowning achievement of the Bluth-DiC partnership. It would also be their last. Fed up with the drama behind the scenes, Bluth took his business back across the Atlantic to Paris and Luxembourg to partner with Pathé on an animated science fiction adventure based on the French Valerian & Laureline comics[7]. Hollywood Animation/DiC would instead experience a major internal leadership shakeup that would send ripples across the industry.

This from Don Bluth! (Image source Amazon)

For Valerian & Laureline, Bluth partnered with Pathé for production and Eurasian and Oceana distribution. Universal later signed on for North American distribution. The adult-themed space adventure received a T-rating and ultimately underperformed, making $57 million internationally (mostly in Europe and Asia) vs. a $31 million budget. However, the gorgeous visuals and memorable progressive rock soundtrack made it a cult hit with good home video sales and led to the production of a very popular Dragon’s Lair style animated video game[8] that helped pay the bills for Bluth. While overall a setback for Bluth’s independent relaunch, Bluth Animation remained a viable and skilled studio.

Essentially this (Image source Looper)

But while Bluth continued to pursue feature animation, most of the smaller indie companies would stick with the small screen. Matt Groening continued to work closely with Wayward Entertainment and Gracie Films. Rather well occupied with running Nuclear Family and supporting Rugrats, he often served as a consultant on other Wayward products such as Jim Jinkin’s hit semiautobiographical animated series Jinx, following the life of artistic but shy 11-year-old Richmond native Brian “Jinx” Jinkins as he deals with the trials of childhood and a near crippling fear of failure[9]. The series, which showed a great deal of emotional intelligence, was a favorite with critics and audiences alike when it debuted on Neptune in Fall of 1991, and would last through to near the end of the decade, spawning a host of imitators.

Nelvana continued to produce the Dr. Who and the Tales of Doctors Past animated specials, including the Calling All Doctors feature-length 30th anniversary special in 1993, which featured all nine Doctors at the time. But with the decline of Saturday Morning Cartoons in the US, they were increasingly struggling to find markets and increasingly “trapped in the middle” in competition with both the Big Studios and the many new animation startups. They produced series based on the popular Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys book series and other children’s-literature-based works, and produced the popular post-Hoerk & Gatty show Eek! The Cat for PFN, but they continued to suffer solvency issues. A White Knight appeared in 1994 in the form of Penguin Pictures, the newly spun-up film label from Pearson PLC as they continued to grow their film and TV presence. Penguin acquired Nelvana in whole[10] for a reported $400 million and gave the company free creative reign so long as they “maintained independent British and Commonwealth animated programming,” presumably free from American influences, though this last part remained unstated.

A similar fate befell Cosgrove Hall Films, whose popular Danger Mouse and Count Duckula animated series were just reaching their conclusion in 1993[11]. Cosgrove was in production on an animated adaption of Terry Pratchett’s non-Discworld-related Truckers when their production partner Thames was acquired by the growing Penguin Productions media empire. Pearson/Penguin acquired Cosgrove Hall soon after[12], merging them into the larger Nelvana animation group, though they retained their distinct name, logo, and de facto independence. Nelvana ultimately underwrote production on Diggers and Wings, completing the Bromeliad Trilogy. Cosgrove had expressed interest in doing an animated adaption of Terry Pratchett’s Wyrd Sisters, but Fox had beaten them to the rights, so instead they did an animated version of The Colour of Magic in 1997, soon to be followed by The Light Fantastic and other books following the unwanted adventures of the inept “Wizzard” Rincewind[13].

Aardman, meanwhile, continued to produce Wallace and Gromit shorts, with 1993’s The Wrong Trousers and 1995’s A Close Shave. Joined by Terry Brian (who’d produced The Trap Door with Charlie Mills), Nick Park’s clever duo were still giving Disney a run for their money at Awards Ceremonies. Still in talks with Disney over a possible feature animation, Aardman remained a bantamweight player, regularly doing commercial work to pay the bills, and was set to break out in exciting new ways.

But while the established small studios and large studios continued their dance, the 1990s are probably best known as the decade that saw increasing numbers of animated startups. And indeed, while the ‘90s would be largely remembered for the Big Screen Renaissance, it was these smaller studios, empowered by advances in digital animation and freed for pushing boundaries thanks to the 1990 Children’s Entertainment act and the ratings system it brought, who would be the avant garde of a burgeoning animation revolution.

From Frog Baseball (Image source “comedyhistory101.com”)

One of the most successful incubators of these small, revolutionary startup producers was Spike & Mike’s Sick and Twisted Festival of Animation, started in the early 1990s at the University of California, Berkeley, by Craig "Spike" Decker and Mike Gribble. Numerous now-famous animators got their start there, like Craig McCracken, Genndy Tartakovsky, Mike Judge, Joe Murray, Trey Parker, Matt Stone, Danny Antonucci, and others. The Festival was the first place where now popular shows like Whoopass Stew, Inbred Jed, My Dog Zero, and Beavis and Butt-Head[14] got their start, among others.

The first of the Spike and Mike alumnus to break out was, of course, Mike Judge, whose moronic Beavis and Butthead from the “Frog Baseball” short ended up on MTV’s Liquid Television in 1992. Bevis & Butt-Head would famously appear on MTV in their own show in 1993, soon to be followed by Inbred Jed, which would be taken up by Cartoon City’s Adult Swim in 1996. Whoopass Studios, who had the advantage of being financially supported by Heather Henson, soon followed in 1993. Their Whoopass Stew shorts were ultimately shown on Liquid Television and later turned into the popular and revolutionary animated series on MTV.

My Dog Zero, by Joe Murray (Image source The Movie Database)

Creator Joe Murray similarly began with Spike & Mike and Liquid Television, eventually seeing his silly short My Dog Zero expanded into a surreal relationship satire where Joe, a lonely bachelor, tries to make his way through the world, all witnessed and attested through the eyes and mouth of Zero, his flea-bitten mutt of a dog. Zero (voiced by Carlos Alazraqui in a thick vaguely Australian accent) narrates the world to the fourth wall while Joe largely mumbles and pantomimes in the background, speaking unintelligibly save for a handful of worlds that Zero presumably knows, like “Zero”, “Food”, and “good/bad boy”. The end result was a T-rated satire of humanity as seen through the eyes of a dog that was noteworthy for pushing the limits of what was socially acceptable even in an MTV T-rated cartoon, with tons of jokes involving sex, masturbation, substance abuse, and other taboo subjects[15].

Many of these small studios would produce both hard PG- or T-rated adult-themed stuff for MTV or Cartoon City’s Adult Swim while simultaneously producing G-rated or soft PG works for kids, creating an interesting dynamic where the same animators and voice actors were producing something child friendly on Neptune and something child-unfriendly on MTV. Whoopass, for example, would launch the now-iconic Dexter’s Laboratory on Cartoon City in 1997 in partnership with Hanna-Barbera and Drac & Mina on Neptune in partnership with WB, in both cases using their “kid friendly” Kickin’ Studios label. Joe Murray would likewise later produce Trunk’s Modern World, the story of a neurotic Aardvark named Trunk for Neptune.

Not only were these small studios experimenting in themes and pushing the limits on acceptability in violence and sex, but many were experimenting with new animation styles and new styles of writing and pacing. More stylized artwork, often directly evocative of the old UPA midcentury animation or taking cues from Anime, was entering the fray. Some series, like Whoopass Stew, evoked both. Others went in entirely different directions, such as Popular Arts Entertainment, which introduced their unique “Squigglevision” style for The Comedy Channel’s Dr. Katz, Therapist to the Stars.

And as the 1990s continued, animation, led by these small and innovative studios, was about to break out in ways no one had ever seen.

[1] In our timeline, of course, The Iron Giant didn’t screen until 1999 and WB, burned by the flop of Quest for Camelot, failed to promote it (despite incredibly positive test screenings), leading to its spectacular (and undeserved) flop at the box office. While this film isn’t quite as beautiful as the one from our timeline, it will be a beloved success that sets Filmation Feature Films up for success in the future.

[2] To answer your question, @drrockso20.

[3] Boba Fett will canonically be a true Mandalorian in this timeline, and “Fett” will be a clan surname, not a familiar name. Thus, characters like Marr Fett, Chiss Fett, Jey Fett, Mos Fett, and B’luc Fett will appear in the cartoon, which will be relegated to the second-tier “T-Canon”. Originally they planned to go with "Boba" as the surname to imply that "the Clan came first", but test audiences didn't like it.

[4] Seth MacFarlane will be one of the staff writers.

[5] Hat tip to @Pesterfield.

[6] Hat tip to @lukedalton.

[7] Hat Tip @GrahamB.

[8] The “hook” that sets it apart from Space Ace or Dragon’s Lair is that you can play one of two possible adventure storylines: one following Valerian and one following Laureline when they are split up. Those who complete both adventures are treated by getting to experience all the “crossover points” from both perspectives, and learn the whole story. It also allows for you to add another quarter to “continue” when you run out of lives, making it a diabolical quarter-eating machine.

[9] Evolved into Doug in our timeline.

[10] Eventually acquired in our timeline by Corus for $540 million in 2000, which was right after Nelvana bought Klutz Books for $74 million.

[11] Largely went per our timeline, since you asked @Ogrebear. Several later episodes changed since they were parodying different Bond films.

[12] Acquired around the same time by Anglia Television in our timeline.

[13] In our timeline they partnered with Acorn Media to produce animated versions of Wyrd Sisters and Soul Music, but here Fox has the former and Disney the latter.

[14] The names actually came from real kids that he knew while in college. Read all about it.

[15] Eventually Murray found his way to Nicktoon in our timeline, where he produced Rocko’s Modern Life mostly to the developing Nick formula, though he (in)famously slipped in so much adult humor that the show was constantly the source of ire for censors and moral guardians alike.

For an idea of what this timeline’s My Dog Zero show is like, here’s some sample dialog:

INT – Joe’s Living Room – Night
JOE and CYNTHIA awkwardly wrestle and make out on the couch as ZERO looks on, confused.

Zero: I don’t get people. They always bloody overcomplicate things. Look at their mating rituals, right? And believe it or not, that’s mating they’re doing back there, not fighting. I know, confused me too at first. People mating rituals go on for hours, don’t they? Days even. I mean, with us dogs it’s simple: butt-sniff, butt-sniff, here we go…on to other things, right? But people? Forget it. He’s spent weeks trying to get under this one’s tail, mind ya’, and just mark my words, the second his forelegs start to move too far tail-wards on her, she’ll snap at him and run off and he’ll be back in the corner of his bedroom with them mags he keeps hidden under the bed. Hardly makes a lick of sense.

Geekhis Khan · Feb 24, 2022

Chapter 15, The Aggravating Art of Adaption
Excerpt from Where Did I Go Right? (or: You’re No One in Hollywood Unless Someone Wants You Dead), by Bernie Brillstein (with Cheryl Henson)

The 1980s and 1990s were a time period where we saw more and more attempts at adapting things from one medium to another. Comic books, TV shows, plays, musicals, and even videogames. Hell, we even let the Muppets adapt Shakespeare!

Of these, adapting videogames is the biggest challenge. Sure, you’d think that it would be easy. You have an established fandom, established characters, and name recognition. There’s even already a “story” and “plot” that unfolds in the gameplay to build upon. Easy, right?

Yea, not hardly. Take the Mario Brothers. How does one take a fat, running plumber who eats giant mushrooms and assaults turtles and make him into a mainstream action hero?

Well, Wayward kind of pulled it off in animated form, and we considered an animated feature. But no, Nintendo’s Minoru Arakawa was interested in a live action adaption when he was approached by Margie Loesch. He gave us full creative control[1]. Jim loved the idea. He had that twinkle in his eye that I last saw with Toys. Margie was authorized a $45 million budget.

Oy vey. What could go wrong?

Margie approached me about producing this for Fantasia, once again showing the artificial separation that we had between the “MGM/Hyperion” and “Disney/Fantasia” sides, born from internal politics rather than logical organizational management, to be the fiction that it was. I agreed to partner with her to make this work. Since we had an “existing working relationship” with Nintendo, and since Margie had so much success with Japanese imports, it seemed like the “perfect arrangement”.

Still, Margie and I knew that this was a bit of a balancing act. Too faithful of an adaption and you alienated regular audiences with the camp of it all. Too far out into left field and you alienate the franchise fans.

The board was sure that we had a surefire hit on our hands, after all, because Mario was pushing product like nothing else. But I was well aware of the risk that we were taking and I was tempted to find some dull-but-reliable workhorse director and a generic screenplay that tracked the beats of the game in a superficial level, but like a fool I took the task seriously.

I figured that if you’re making a movie about something as bizarre as Mario, then you needed a director who did bizarre and made it work. We approached the Skeleton Crew, and the Chiodos expressed interest in doing the effects, but Tim Burton wasn’t interested and the whole Crew was busy with Jurassic Park, War of the Worlds, and a dozen other little things. I asked Frank Oz, but he was working on Muppets Do Shakespeare and wasn’t all that interested in the film anyway. But he in turn recommended Joe Dante.

Ok, so Dante is always a bit of a gamble. He swings wildly for the fences every time and doesn’t always care what the pitcher is doing. Sometimes he brings you Gremlins and sometimes Gremlins 2 [2]. Well, he’d just done a successful Looney Tunes movie and was working on a little low-budget thing for Tim called Matinee, so if anyone could adapt the madcap world of a bizarre Japanese videogame about two Italian plumbers who rescue princesses from an evil fire-breathing turtle then he was the man for the job. But hiring him for a big-budget, multi-million-dollar film, particularly with only a short window to film before he went on to direct The Mask for New Line, was giving me an ulcer.

Sure, I’d hire Dante. But I had to set a few ground rules. First off, it had to be a sincere adaption. No self-aware Looney Tunes stuff like what happened with Gremlins 2. Second, it had to be PG or at most a very soft T. Kids would be watching this, so having Princess Toadstood in a string bikini was probably not a good choice (not that Joe would likely ever go there, mind you), and having total gore was not the best either. Goombas becoming stomped into purple goo, sure. Blood and guts, probably not (and Joe might have gone there). Third, it had to recognizably be the Mario Brothers franchise, not some weird “in name only” thing. Other than that, I was willing to give him his creative space.

Next, we sat back and prayed.

Margie took the role as Executive Producer while I worked from up on high to monitor progress. Joe suggested his old collaborator Michael Finnell to produce. She introduced Joe and Michael to Brian Henson, who showed him the Blue Box and Christmas Ornament, which Joe fell madly in love with. “With this we’ll be able to replicate all of the bizarre leaping effects for Mario,” Joe said. Joe also worked with Joss Whedon on the script, which they described as a “Wizard of Oz type journey into a colorful but dangerous new world.”

Concept Art (Really from D-MAC on Deviant Art; image source Pintrest)

The creature effects, which the Skeleton Crew helped design, would be the stars of the show as it were, even though casting made some great choices. The Goombas would be bizarre three-foot-high slobbering walking toadstools and the Koopas [SIC] maniacal demonic turtles. King Koopa would be a Creatureworks triumph, a giant, fire-breathing dragon-turtle that surely gave some kids nightmares (they later adapted it for a Disneytown attraction). We hired Christopher Lee to do the voiceover for the King while Steve Whitmire and Bill Baretta would do the waldo and voice work for his comedic henchmen Iggy and Lemmy.

More Concept Art (really from Claire McKay; Image source “artstation.com”)

Casting found character actor Bob Hoskins, who’d played a supporting role in Hooked, to play Mario. He looked the part and had even once been a plumber’s apprentice! Talk about serendipity. Mario would be the older brother and the straight man. For the taller, skinnier, goofier younger brother Luigi they hired Michael Richards, who we hoped wouldn’t overshadow Hoskins. Thankfully, Hoskins could hold his own even in the face of Richards’s mania. It worked like a perfect Abbott and Costello style comedy duo. Robin Wright played the regal Princess Peach while Jennifer Connelly played the more tomboyish Princess Daisy. Shari Weiser donned the Toad animatronic while Kevin Clash manned the Waldo and did the voiceover.

But how do you adapt it, story-wise? Well, you go to the basic concept from the games and work from there. King Koopa has conquered the Mushroom Kingdom and is holding the land’s co-rulers, Princess Peach and Princess Daisy, hostage. Simple. The Mario Brothers stumble into the magic land Oz-style and have to rescue the Princesses and save the day. Basic plot established, but what’s your story? Joss saw it a tale of two brothers with a long and difficult relationship coming to terms with one another and themselves. They’ve failed for most of their life, been looked down on most of their life, but here in the Mushroom Kingdom they are finally given the power and respect that they want, but also the chance to learn to believe in themselves and each other that they need.

(Image by @nick_crenshaw82)

They considered having it begin with King Koopa overthrowing the Kingdom, but Joe wanted to save the Mushroom Kingdom for a colorful Wizard of Oz/Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory style reveal. So the story begins in dirty, dingy Brooklyn, where Mario and Luigi are down on their luck plumbers. Mario blames Luigi’s clumsiness on their failure, particularly after a series of comedic accidents Luigi’s clumsiness initiates while fixing a solid gold toilet for a completely fictional trust us on this real estate guy played by Martin Sheen, which goes awry in spectacular fashion. They get a desperation job with the city, where they’re sent to investigate a massive clog in a Midtown sewer main colloquially called “the devil’s backside” that no other plumber in the city is willing to take on (“Plumbers go in, but they don’t come out!”). But the clog turns out to be a giant, man-eating Audrey II type carnivorous plant! The Creatureworks had a blast on that one, I’ll tell you!

Even more Concept Art (really from Darick Maasen; Image source Trend Hunter)

They defeat Audrey III as the crew called her through luck and clever use of a toilet snake and end up uncovering a secret hidden world, the Mushroom Kingdom, behind the pipe. They go in and meet Toad and the rest of the gang, where they are assumed to be the Prophesied Ones who can defeat the evil Koopa Army and save the Princesses from the evil King Koopa. The rest plays out like a comedic take on The Wizard of Oz as King Koopa sends minions to destroy the “Brothers”, all the while trying to pressure the Princesses to turn over their kingdom to him. The Brothers in turn learn how to use the magical artifacts of the Kingdom, like growth mushrooms, fireball plants, and, when all seems lost, a special star plant that makes them temporarily invincible…until it becomes dramatically appropriate for it to fizzle out just as they confront King Koopa.

But it was ultimately a character-driven story with the two Brothers’ interactions the heart and soul. Joss’s dialog gave a quirky set of interactions, complete with almost ludicrous moments of the two arguing over something petty but important to them while being attacked by a horde of Goombas. Bob and Mike had a blast interacting, as did Robin and Jennifer, who have their own buddy-moments escaping from Koopa’s prison and undermining his operations from the inside and ultimately joining with Mario and Luigi to defeat King Koopa. Joss’s dialog and Joe’s frantic action-comedy direction played well together. Brian’s effects worked their magic, allowing a newly empowered Mario to leap thirty feet into the air and squash a Goomba into gross purple goo or allowing Luigi to blast away a flying Koopa with a fireball.

We burned past our $45 million budget, ultimately putting out a $57.5 million feature with all of those effects. I began to worry.

But the test audiences loved it. Kids aged 6-12 paid attention and laughed or cheered the whole time. Many kids though “the gold toilet scene” was the best part, which is crazy given that it was before they even got to the Mushroom Kingdom with all of the creature effects. Some found the villains, particularly King Koopa, scary, but mostly in “a good way”. The effects wowed. The tykes loved the bright colors even if some parents and critics were overwhelmed (Rex Reed claimed it gave him “Diabetes of the Eyes”). Most of the game fans thought it was a good adaption.

I’ll just say it: it was a good movie.

Was it a Groundbreaking Oscar-Beloved Classic for All Ages Sure to Live On for All Time?

Fuck no, but it was fun.

Minoru Arakawa was a little disappointed that we stuck so close to the videogame rather than really branch out into an all-new story[3], but critics generally found it “fun family entertainment” or “visually stunning” or whatever, Rex Reed’s “eye-abetes” notwithstanding. And most importantly, even despite serious competition from ourselves from Jurassic Park, we made over $160 million internationally, a number one hit in Japan and other parts of Asia, and held our own against Last Action Hero, our most immediate competition. WB shrieked and immediately launched an Astro the Armadillo film while Atari started talks with Columbia about Bentley Bear.

I’d been a bit apprehensive about the sequel hook they threw in at the time, since there’s little more embarrassing than a sequel hook in a box office bomb, but in the end the profits more than justified the suddenly-certain sequel. And since Toad’s introduced hook about “trouble brewing in the Dinosaur Kingdom” also managed to introduce Yoshi the dinosaur, who hatched adorably in Luigi’s hands at the end, well, yea, that alone made some kids and game fans in the test audience cheer.

Yet even more Concept Art (Image source “knowyourmeme.org”)

Margie and I toasted Champaign at that one. We’d have to figure out what to do about the now-inevitable sequel later, particularly with Joe Dante not interested in doing it. Bob Zemeckis? Terry Jones? We’d worry about that later.

And as much as I joke about ulcers, the truth was that I was loving it. Even the nightmare of Toys was still a rush in the roll of the dice. Even if I crapped out entirely and they showed me the door, by that point I’d saved up enough to be independently wealthy for my early retirement.

And for the moment I had another wacky adaption to toss the dice on, with Steve Spielberg approaching us about an animated adaption of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical Cats, a series of disconnected songs based on a bunch of T.S. Eliot poems in a play that was style-over-substance even by 1980s standards.

What could possibly go wrong?

[1] In our timeline he sold the rights and full control to Roland Joffré and Lightmotive, who then at first gave the script to Barry Morrow of Rain Man fame, who wrote a dramatic story of two brothers coming to emotional terms with one another which became playfully known as “Drain Man.” Joffré then handed it to Jim Jennewein and Tom S. Parker, who wrote a comedic Wizard of Oz type script that was ultimately rejected by Harold Ramis when he was attached to it to direct. But still not satisfied, Joffré then got the idea of Max Headroom in his head and handed it to Max Headroom creators Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel, who wanted to do a darker Cyberpunk type story, even though they had no actual major effects film writing or direction experience. And thus, an Epic Disaster was born. Call this another case of “nowhere to go but up.” And apologies to @nick_crenshaw82 and others who hoped to see a Bluth animated adaption, but that wasn’t in the cards as Bluth is busy working with Hollywood/DiC at the moment and Nintendo has an established Disney relationship and specifically wanted a live action film.

[2] While Gremlins 2 has its rabid fanbase, with many considering Dante’s zany, story-free madness to be better than its more straightforward predecessor, from a studio perspective G1 was a beloved blockbuster hit that sold a ton of merch and G2 was a confusing flop that all but killed the valuable Gremlins brand.

[3] He made the same complaint about our timeline’s batshit version, if you can believe it!

Geekhis Khan · Feb 26, 2022

Viacom, CBS Merger Talks Fall Through
Wall Street Journal, June 4th, 1993

Atlanta – National Amusements’ Viacom television company today announced an end to discussions with Ted Turner’s CBS with no plans for a merger or other business partnership. The two companies cited “strategic incompatibility” as the reason for the failed talks, a reason that seems at odds with CBS and Viacom’s long network television partnership and former status as parts of the same company. Instead, WSJ analysts suggest that the reasons for the failed talks were based on personality. “Even combined, Columbia and Viacom aren’t big enough for both Turner and Redstone,” said WSJ analyst… Cont’d on Pg. A3.

ABC, Viacom announce Merger
Wall Street Journal, September 14th, 1993

New York – National Amusements/Viacom and Capital Cities/ABC today announced an all-stock merger of their two companies, bringing a definitive conclusion to ongoing talks between the two companies begun in the wake of failed merger talks between Viacom and CBS earlier this year. The move brings with it a major increase in the shared network and cable television holdings for ABC, with several cable channels including the Showtime Network as well as numerous movie theater chains and network broadcast channels, many of which are CBS affiliates and likely to either realign to become ABC affiliates or be sold to Columbia/CBS or a third party to avoid possible disputes with FCC regulators.

The deal, orchestrated by ABC Entertainment President Michael Eisner, will see Viacom merged into the ABC Network Television group, forming the new ABC Television Group. The National Amusements theatrical chain will be absorbed by Hollywood Pictures, a subsidiary of Eisner’s ABC Feature Entertainment Group. Viacom CEO Sumner Redstone, now a major shareholder, will ascend to the Board of Directors and is expected to take over as the Chairman and CEO of the new combined TV group while current ABC Network Television President Bob Iger will remain as President and COO[1] and report to Redstone. WSJ Analysts say… Cont’d on A2.

Littlefield Steps Down as NBC President amid Cosby Controversy
The Hollywood Reporter, October 5th, 1993

New York – NBC President Warren Littlefield has stepped down amid growing controversy surrounding the Bill Cosby sexual assault allegations. As Cosby’s “trial of the century” continues to dominate the news cycle, NBC continues to face questions about how much that they knew, when they knew it, and whether they actively participated in suppressing news or covering up events. While no evidence has surfaced to support these accusations, NBC stocks have lost ground in recent months, down 10% from their 1992 high[2], which has in turn had a negative impact on the stocks for NBC’s owner, General Electric. As such, industry insiders see Littlefield’s removal as “sacrificing a lion” to salve shareholder angst and restore public relations, with few specifically blaming Littlefield himself for the events at hand. NBC Chairman Bob Wright announced that CBS Executive VP Garth Ancier will be replacing Littlefield as President. Ancier brings with him years of experience at a variety of networks, including NBC, having greenlit such hit shows as Cheers, Family Ties, The Golden Girls, and (ironically, given the circumstances) The Cosby Show for NBC. Stocks reacted favorably with the announcement.

Charlie Sheen: “I Have AIDS”
National Enquirer, 1st October 1993 Edition

Hollywood – Actor Charlie Sheen, son of Martin Sheen and brother of Emilio Estevez, announced today that he has contracted AIDS. “I didn’t know that I was HIV positive until the symptoms started. I didn’t bother to check,” he said at a press conference on the 4th, looking weak and pale. “Maybe if I’d known earlier, I…I could have done something about it. Instead, now I’ll be dead in less than a year[3]. Use protection. Get yourself tested. It’s your life and the lives of those you love on the line.”

The announcement, much like 1991’s announcement by Magic Johnson, marks the latest in a series of purportedly straight stars to come out as HIV positive.

“I’m not gay,” Sheen insists. “I’ve never had a homosexual encounter. I have used drugs, but never shared needles. This is something that can happen to you too. Being clean, straight, and sober won’t protect you.”

The announcement is sending shockwaves through Hollywood and Middle America alike, where the star of the Hot Shots and Major League franchises remains popular. It undoubtedly also sent shockwaves through the minds of the many young starlets and groupies that he’s hooked up with over the years.

The Enquirer has been diligently working since the announcement to determine which of his former superstar girlfriends may also be HIV positive. Winona Ryder has already publicly declared herself HIV negative. Former girlfriend Charlotte Lewis has so far avoided our inquiries. We are looking into past relationships[4], and fear not, readers, we will continue to keep you abreast of the situation as… Cont’d on Pg. 2.

[1] Eisner personal goals accomplished: 1) Strategic Merger, 2) Marginalize Rival, 3) Grow Personal Portfolio. CC/ABC will reorg into three Divisions: the Hollywood Studios Group lead by Eisner (Includes Hollywood Pictures, Miramax, National Amusements, & Hollywood Animation), the ABC Television Group lead by Redstone (includes ABC Television Network, Capital Cities/ABC Broadcasting, ABC Cable and International Broadcasting, and Viacom), and CC/ABC Publishing. Redstone likewise has grown his personal portfolio, has a seat on the board, and reports to the board, not directly to Chairman Thomas Murphy. What happens from here? Stay Tuned.

[2] Hat tip to @Nerdman3000 for noting this possibility given the Cosby Trial.

[3] With his immune system severely weakened already due to excessive drug and alcohol use, the undiagnosed virus will spread quickly, leaving him immunodeficient very quickly and result in him contracting a severe case of AIDS faster than average. He will die of AIDS-related pneumonia in May of 1994.

[4] It will be determined that he likely contracted HIV in the mid-1980s. His relationship with Robin Wright predates this. His time with Ryder was while the HIV virus was still in the incubation phase and not yet contagious, allowing her to dodge that bullet. But Lewis, along with Heidi Fleiss and several porn actresses and high-dollar prostitutes, will blame their HIV infection on Sheen. All will be able to live relatively normal lives thanks to HAART and other combined therapies that become widely available in the mid-to-late 1990s.

Geekhis Khan · Feb 27, 2022

Barton Edges out Perot in Texas Senate Election
The San Antonio Express, June 7th, 1993

Republican Representative Joe Barton[1] has narrowly defeated Independent candidate Ross Perot in the run-off for US Senate. The conservative Republican will serve the remainder of Treasury Secretary’s Lloyd Bentsen’s term, set to expire January 1995, after narrowly securing the second spot in last month’s blanket primary. Perot fell just short of being elected after coming in first in the primary with a 25% of the vote.

Both candidates had to deal with rocky coalitions going into the special election. Perot had to win over Democratic voters after incumbent Senator Bob Kreuger, who was appointed by Governor Richards, placed fourth in the runoff. This outreach was complicated by the fact that he joined the fray specifically as a repudiation of President Al Gore’s decision to join NAFTA. For his part, Barton had to deal with third place finisher Jack Fields refusing to concede until the middle of May due to the closeness of the results, costing him valuable campaign time.

The failure of Krueger to make the special election is seen as a repudiation of President Gore and Governor Richards... Cont’d on A3.

The 1993 Elections: Mayor; Dinkins Wins in Divided Field; Whitman an Upset Winner Over Florio
The New York Times, November 3rd, 1993

David Dinkins, a former marine and the first African American to hold the office of mayor of New York City, has secured re-election as the opposition split evenly between the Republican-Liberal Rudolph Giuliani and the Conservative Herbert London.

While Mayor Dinkins is on track to lose some support from his narrow win over Giuliani four years previously, the final tally is expected to be just below 50%[2], which makes for an easy re-election as anti-Dinkins forces battled amongst themselves. The Conservative Party once again demonstrated their independence from their usual allies the Republicans by endorsing Herbert London, the man who placed second in the 1990 Governor’s race securing the Conservatives major party status[3]. The Conservatives were unwilling to back Giuliani as he secured, as in his 1989 campaign, he had the backing of the rival Liberal Party. This sparked a nasty three-way campaign that devolved into bickering between the Conservative and Republican-Liberal camp, allowing Dinkins to pull way ahead in the polls. This divide would enable Dinkins to win every borough except Staten Island.

With Dinkins below a majority, there has already been finger pointing and incriminations between the Conservative and Republican camps, especially as Republicans make gains in other elections across the nation. The old school liberal Dinkins faces… Cont’d on A2.

Gore Signs NAFTA Bill into Law

Multinational Agreement to take effect Jan. 1st, 1994

Washington Post, December 6th, 1993

Washington, DC – President Al Gore today signed into law the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, which was signed by representatives of the US, Mexico, and Canada in December of 1992 and ratified by the US Congress this November despite growing opposition among Union leaders and populist politicians on both sides of the aisle. The treaty creates a multinational zone with reduced or eliminated tariffs on many consumer goods, food products, and raw materials, such as…Cont’d on A2.

Perot Lambasts Gore over NAFTA
Washington Post, December 8th, 1993

Dallas – Former Independent Presidential and Senate Candidate H. Ross Perot attacked President Al Gore over his signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, which creates a free-trade zone with Canada and Mexico. Claiming that the bill will lead to a massive loss of American manufacturing jobs, which he likened to a “giant sucking sound”, Perot frequently attacked the planned deal while on the campaign trail whereas Gore had only promised to “investigate the plans thoroughly” before making a decision. Perot likened the signature to a “stab in the back” for the American people and expressed regret for his earlier endorsement of Gore in 1992. Whether Perot will return to active politics after his narrow loss in the Texas Senate race or simply jeer from the sidelines remains to be seen, but already “Draft Perot ‘96” movements have begun in several states, such as in Ohio, where…Cont’d on A-5.

Moldova, Moscow Reach Agreement
Washington Post, September 19th, 1993

Chișinău – Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev and Moldovan Prime Minister Valeriu Muravschi signed an accord yesterday ending the long and intense standoff between the USR and the former Moldovan Soviet Socialist Republic, which declared independence from Moscow in 1990 in the wake of the dissolution of the USSR and formation of the USR[4]. Ethnic tensions simmered in the breakaway Republic following the rise of the Popular Front for Moldova to power in 1990, who advocated for unification with Romania. This led in turn to the heavily Slavic and pro-Moscow region of Transnistria and Gagauz-majority region of Gagauzia to declare their intent to leave Moldova and repatriate with the USR, leading to violent clashes between Moldovan and Transnistrian forces in late 1990 and ongoing protests in Gagauzia.

The USR responded by moving forces into Western Ukraine in anticipation of continued conflict. The interim government of Moldova, under then-Prime Minister Mircea Druc, pulled back forces from Transnistria, resulting in a prolonged standoff, with Chișinău unwilling to risk open conflict and with the USR and Moscow, beset by ongoing unrest in the Baltic and Caucuses, unwilling to open up another potential zone of conflict[5]. Negotiations between Moscow and Chișinău, and the ongoing stalemate, persisted for years, with Romania and the UN both attempting to interject themselves into the negotiations.

Following the Vilnius Accords of earlier this year, renewed pressure to resolve the crisis led to this summer’s ongoing summit in Geneva, which ultimately broke the stalemate and led to the current accord. The deal will see Moscow fully recognize the independence of Moldova and withdraw its forces from Western Ukraine. Transnistria and Gagauzia will formally secede from Moldova and merge with the Ukrainian region of Budjak to form the Bessarabian Autonomous Oblast, which will be an autonomous multiethnic region within the Sovereign State of The Ukraine. In exchange, border adjustments will be made, bringing heavily ethnically Romanian territories surrounding Moldova, such as those in North Bessarabia and northern Bukovina, into Moldova, in an attempt to make up the land mass lost from the departing regions. Voluntary ethnic resettlements will be authorized, allowing civilians to move to the nation of their choice.

Moldovan Prime Minister Muravschi has also announced a plebiscite to determine whether to enter formal unification talks with Romania, though current polls suggest that the Moldovan public, including the ethnically Romanian majority, largely oppose unification, with 65% opposed and 7% unsure[6].

US President Gore has called the accords “another promising step towards a future of European peace” and congratulated… Cont’d on A7.

Peace Talks resume in Somalia
Washington Post, October 20th, 1993

Mogadishu – Somali warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid, head of the Somali National Alliance, returned to peace talks in the capital of Mogadishu, the last major southern warlord holding out after the Somali Patriotic Movement agreed to come to the table earlier this year. Following sporadic clashes with UN and US and UN forces, Aidid, who was becoming increasingly isolated as the other factions continued ongoing UN-mediated peace talks protected by US forces, relented to talks after receiving safety assurances from UNOSOM Commander General Robert Johnson[7].

This return to the table follows on from this summer’s Mudug Ceasefire agreement between Aidid and his rival Somali Salvation Democratic Front (SSDF), which are tied respectively to the Aber Gedir and Majeerteen clans, along with ongoing discussion between the rival clans of Abgal and Haber Gedir[8]. Numerous meetings by tribal elders[9], their security guaranteed by the UN, have been ongoing through the summer. The UN-mediated talks will attempt to expand upon this momentum.

Whether these multilateral peace talks can bring an actual end to the years of disunion and civil war following the collapse of the regime of Mohamed Siad Barre remains to be seen, with famine and sporadic fighting continuing. Distrust remains high, exacerbated by long-running tribal and clan divisions and interpersonal rivalries, in particular that between Aidid and Ali Mahdi Muhammad of the United Somali Congress. Things are further compounded by the northern Somali National Movement, who have proclaimed the independence of the oil-rich northern “Somaliland” provinces and seek recognition for their independence from Mogadishu.

“We have bought the people of Somalia some time,” said General Johnson. “Ultimately, it is up to the Somali people and their leaders to rebuild their shattered nation. Until that happens, we will be here to keep the peace and assure that humanitarian aid reaches those who need it most.”

US President Al Gore called the events “promising” and reiterated his support for the mission, named Operation Restore Hope by his predecessor President George Bush, who initiated the operation.

A European Union is Born
Washington Post, November 1st, 1993

At the stroke of midnight, the member nations of the European Economic Community, or EEC, officially enacted the provisions of the 1992 Maastricht Treaty and became member nations of the European Union, or EU. Building upon the earlier EEC, the EU creates and economic and monetary union for most member states under a single currency (the “Euro” – the United Kingdom will retain the British Pound). The EU retains the earlier customs union, establishes a European system of central banks, and balances interest rates through exchange and inflationary mechanisms. Though primarily an economic union, cooperation on foreign policy, military, and judicial issues are listed as “pillars” of the Union, though no mandates exist to enforce this.

The Union, which can at best be considered a loose confederation rather than a true transnational union, still marks a noteworthy shift towards greater European integration in the post-Cold War era. Former Easter Bloc nations are already clamoring to join the Union, with the member nations of the Central European Free Trade Agreement already making overtures to Brussels. Within the EU, however, nationalist politicians in many nations are already fighting against the Union, with many fearing that the Germans and/or French will come to dominate their smaller, poorer neighbors. In the UK, skepticism remains within many parts of the country, which has often remained aloof of continental involvement.

According to analysts, the EU will mean…Cont’d on A3.

[1] Kay Bailey Hutchison was one of the casualties of the Hartache, failing to win the election of State Treasurer. And hat tip to @jpj1421 for this article.

[2] The Final Result will be:
Dinkins - 49.39
London - 25.47
Giuliani - 25.14
And another hat tip to @jpj1421 for this article.

[3] As mentioned in earlier political posts, under New York state law the number 1 and 2 finishers in Governor elections get major party status through the next Governor elections. In this timeline the Conservatives edged out the Republicans in 1990 and guaranteed themselves the 2nd ballot spot as well as election board oversights.

[4] Note that I wrote this article months ago and it's just a darkly ironic coincidence that sees it show up in the midst of the current Ukraine Invasion. Hat tip to @Damian0358 for the help. And if there are any actual Moldova experts out there who can tell me I’m utterly full of it in this outcome, by all means please PM me and I can edit to something more plausible.

[5] In our timeline, with an independent Ukraine between them and Russia, Moldovan forces fully committed to retaking Transnistria, leading to the Transnistria War.

[6] A 1992 poll in our timeline showed 70% opposed to unification. In this timeline with the USR right on their border and some additional ethnic Slavs, Gagauz, Bulgars, and other groups repatriated with the USR, that number has slid more towards unification, but the majority still overwhelmingly oppose it. In 1994 Moldovist parties like the Democratic Agrarian Party will take over from the Popular Front-based Christian Democrats per our timeline.

[7] With hard won experience on the ground and a good council of honest advisors, Johnson has avoided the mistakes of ADM Howe in our timeline, who personally blamed Aidid for a deadly attack on UN forces from Pakistan and declared him Enemy Number One, initiating a series of raids and attacks against his faction that many have called “obsessive”, leading ultimately to the “Bloody Monday” raid targeting Aidid, that seems to have instead killed the members of a highly-publicized Somali peace meeting. The raid, considered a massacre by the Somalis, almost immediately ended any good will for the US and UN, nearly ground the ongoing peace talks to a halt, and led directly to the “Black Hawk Down” incident and the subsequent (and humiliating) US and UN withdrawal that led in turn to decades of ongoing sectarian conflict and a failed state. While it’s usually highly problematic to blame major world events on a single person and a single incident, there are definitely lots of independent evaluators who say that Howe’s ill-considered actions took a bad situation and made it untenable. Even under Howe, 1991-1995 was seen as a period of relative hope with promising negotiations that fell apart once the UN withdrew. Stay tuned on whether peace can happen, or if they’re just hitting the snooze alarm.

[8] All of this happened in 1993-1994 in our timeline.

[9] Allegedly one such meeting was attacked in our timeline by US forces in July of 1993, who falsely believed that Aidid would be there, resulting in “Bloody Monday”.

Geekhis Khan · Mar 1, 2022

Part 10: Nocturns & Aliens
Excerpt from Dark Funhouse, the Art and Work of Tim Burton, an Illustrated Compendium

The Friday Night Death Slot. It’s the last place most TV shows want to be. With the highly coveted 18-25 demographic generally out on the town, Friday night programming slots are typically where the networks send underperforming shows to die.

But where most producers studiously avoided the slot, Skeleton Crew Productions head Tim Burton saw it as an opportunity. Because one group that was notably not out on the town on Friday night were the alone, the dejected, the rejected, and the powerless. Teens, introverts, rejects…a group of people with whom Burton related all too well.

They were, it can be said, his core audience.

“You look at that man in the white makeup and the long, black hair and the black leather clothes and you see a loser and a freak and a reject. But I see a Romantic, a beautiful soul in search of love and meaning.” – Tim Burton

Disney Acting Chairman Jim Henson was once again pushing to expand Disney and Fantasia’s presence in the teenage and young adult market, not only for monetary purposes, but for philanthropic ones as well. Youth violence was an increasing problem in American cities in general and the greater LA basin in particular. Henson felt that Disney had a role to play in giving teens safe alternatives to the street gangs and narcotics that were killing far too many young men & women. He asked the combined Disney Studios and MGM boards for ideas. Burton was the first to raise his hand.

Tim Burton’s Nocturns was born.

The late 1980s and early 1990s had seen a boom in late-night horror anthology shows, from HBOs Tales from the Crypt (to which the Skeleton Crew occasionally contributed) to PFN’s Freddy’s Nightmares to the low-budget Monsters. All of these series were typically very violent and as gory and sexy as the censors would allow. Henson hoped to produce a series that was “spine tingling and exciting, but subtly educational and with socially redeeming value.” Burton knew just what to do.

Nocturns would be dark, but it would also be smart. Where other shows aped the formula of The Outer Limits, Tales from the Dark Side, or Amazing Stories and then added as much gratuitous blood and skin as they could in a flagrant, fan-service way, often completely divorced from the plot or themes of the episode, Nocturns would engage its core audience by speaking directly to their concerns and fears and dreams and nightmares. Burton would “Serling” (a.k.a. host) each episode, sometimes accompanied by Uncle Deadly or another equally macabre Muppet or Creatureworks creation, introducing the characters and their stories like a dark gothic twist on The Wonderful World of Disney. Rick Heinrichs would act as the Show Runner. The stories themselves would vary in format, from live action with Creatureworks makeup and effects to various, often experimental forms of animation.

Stuff like this for a start (Image sources “swordandsandles.blogspot.com”, “ticklebooth.com”, “boingboing.net”, “denofgeek.com”, & “awn.com”)

Like most anthology series, Nocturns generally made each 1-hour timeslot episode a stand-alone story or a series of stand-alone or loosely-linked vignettes. Live action, animation, animatronics, and puppetry were employed to tell the stories in a variety of ways. They usually had a dark, spooky, gothic, arcane, supernatural, or existential themes, and often dealt with perceptions, irony, and horror tropes. Situations were often dark, cerebral, and emotional, and there was always a push to have some central lesson or theme, but played subtly and never preachy. Protagonists were often loners, the downtrodden, the desperate, and the dispossessed and lessons warned of the dark sides of selfishness, narcissism, misanthropy, misogyny, bigotry, and displaced anger or resentment. Those who stood up for themselves or others or who helped the helpless tended to come out ahead. Those who used or abused others…well, bad things tended to happen to them. A tale of two friends, for example, might see the one who helped the drunk girl at the party get to a cab bestowed with mystical gifts while the one who abused or tried to take advantage of her might, say, have his eyes pecked out by ravens.

While the show didn’t shy away from sex and violence where appropriate to the story, there was an almost unspoken challenge for the artists to limit their use, not out of a fear to offend, but out of an acknowledgement that they were “the crutches of the uncreative” as occasional contributor Harlan Ellison put it. If you could scare the living hell out of your audiences without a drop of blood or gore, then you were held in high regard by the Nocturns team. Psychological terror, foreboding shadows, tension, foreshadowing, and dark surrealism were the preferred paths[1]. “I want R-rated scares with PG-rated scenes,” Burton told his producers. “I want the 25-year-old viewer to be as scared as the 9-year-old who snuck out past her bedtime, and I want both of them to want to see more.”

Even then, it pushed boundaries, with subtle explorations of gender identity and sexuality, the dangers and allure of drugs, the lingering traumatic effects of violence and abuse, various surreal body horror scenarios, and the terror of rape. The first and last of these areas were typically explored indirectly through metaphor. And like its friendly R-rated rival Tales from the Crypt, Nocturns became a place where big name stars could make guest appearances or even direct an episode without fear of damaging their “serious” movie career. Early guests came from the usual “Burton stable”, such as River Phoenix, Johnny Depp, Winona Ryder, Helena Bonham Carter, Christopher Lee, and Danny DeVito, but soon, would-be guest stars started to approach Skeleton Crew hoping to appear on, voice in, or even direct an episode. George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and Francis Ford Coppola each directed an episode as did Disney Chairman Jim Henson (who directed an episode of The Storyteller based on the Grimm Brothers’ Snow White). Judith Barsi, now a teenager and increasingly into Goth, hung out on set so much that she was hired by the Skeleton Crew as a designer, writer, and live/voice actor. Tool front man Maynard James Keenan designed, wrote, and directed the Emmy-winning “Fibbonacci’s Shadow” (S3:E5), featuring disturbing stop-motion animation by Tool guitarist Adam Jones, who later accepted a part-time design and animation job with the Skeleton Crew between tours.

Big names of the 1990s made appearances, like Jim Carrey (who voiced an evil Leprechaun in “End of the Rainbow”), River Phoenix (who directed and starred in the darkly comedic “Cthulhu Calling…”), Eddie Murphy (the affectionate parody “Tales from the Crib”), Jamie Foxx (“Booty and the Beast”), and Helen Mirren (who directed and starred in the Creatureworks-supported feminist horror tale “The Hag, the Whore, and the Harpy”, which won Emmys). Jack Nicholson directed and starred as Roderick Usher in a feature length update of Edgar Allan Poe's “The Fall of the House of Usher” set in Burbank, California, and written for Tim Burton by Jonathan Gems[2]. Burton himself would direct the Season 6 episode “Famous Monsters”, also by Gems, about a surviving Martian from H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds who becomes a Hollywood star in what was an unofficial sequel of 1994’s War of the Worlds.

Quality writing was paramount. In addition to his Skeleton Crew regulars, Burton’s production team recruited the finest guest writers, directors, and creative artists to work on episodes for the series. Frequent collaborators included Harlan Ellison, Neil Gaiman, Peter Chung, Genndy Tartakovsky, Todd MacFarlane, Dean Motter, Mike Mignola, Frank Miller, George Miller, Brian Froud, the Wachowskis, Junji Ito, H.R. Giger, John Korty, J. O’Barr, and David Lynch. Others such as Anne Rice, Anne McCaffrey, Douglas Adams, Terry Jones, Terry Gilliam, Terry Pratchett, Ursula K. Le Guin, R.A. Salvatore, Daniel “Lemony Snicket” Handler, Sam Raimi, the Coens, Clive Barker, Wes Craven, Guillermo del Toro, and even Stephen King made contributions. And in addition to SKP’s own skills in puppetry and animation, guest animators and guest puppeteers (including the dark and surreal puppetry of Hystopolis Productions and the marionettes of Phillip Huber) made frequent appearances. Some of these creators were already famous and established artists while others were largely unknown at the time, but would go on to fame later.

Just a sampling of the horror that is Junji Ito; his…tamer stuff will appear here, so still high-octane nightmare fuel (Image source Japan Objects)

As a result of this mix of the established and the up and coming, Nocturns became a “breeding ground” for experimental new artists and a “mentor space” where established artists could meet and inspire them. The show is credited by some with launching the careers of the Wachowskis, Daniel Handler, Todd MacFarlane, Mike Mignola, Maxwell Atoms, and Peter Chung. It became a place where deep, philosophical and existential questions could be asked and discussed. It became a place where experimental animation techniques and styles could be explored, and where the constrained budgets but high expectations would lead to innovative new ways to achieve jaw dropping effects on the cheap.

In addition to the ethereal theme music by Danny Elfman, episodic guest music was provided by Robert Smith, Trent Reznor, Ministry, Tool, Skinny Puppy, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Bauhaus, Type O Negative, Black Black Ocean, The Ultraviolet Catastrophe, and other musicians associated with the Goth and Industrial subcultures, who provided soundtracks for various episodes, giving the series “cred” with the youthful target audience. Other musical artists like David Bowie, Devo, the B-52s, Sonic Youth, The Violent Femmes, Butthole Surfers, Primus, Thelonious Monster, and even Ringo Starr contributed on occasion as well.

When Mathematics meets Mindscrew (Image source “pintrest.com”)

The anthology series would fill in occasional schedule gaps between original content with reruns of classic Burton shorts, dark or surreal Anime like Ghost in the Shell, JoJo's Bizarre Adventure[3], or Midori, or old episodes of The Storyteller. Newer episodes of The Storyteller were even produced for the series, often exploring the original, truly “grim” stories of The Brothers Grimm, including the original, bloody versions of some of the very fairytales that inspired Disney Classics like Snow White[4]. Darker sequences from Disney animation history, such as Fantasia’s “Night on Bald Mountain/Ave Maria”, Musicana’s Finlandia, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”, and 1929’s “The Skeleton Dance” made it in as well, often to pad out a vignette episode. One time in 1996 they even replayed in full Uncle Deadly’s Nightmares from Disney’s World of Magic as a 10th anniversary special.

Nocturns debuted in the fall of 1993 on the Fantasia Channel at 9 pm on Friday, generally with a PG or T rating, but it became so popular with its core audience that Jeff Katzenberg called Jim Henson directly, asking to move it to ABC, where it began airing halfway through its first season and where it would remain for a full four seasons before returning to Fantasia for seasons 6 & 7. It was well regarded by critics and received numerous awards (including Emmys and Golden Globes) over the course of its run, and not just for artistic merit, but from educational, psychological, and philosophical organizations. The “core audience” of alienated teens and youth followed it religiously and heavily promoted it via word-of-mouth across the new Internet, which exploded with fan sites. The audience soon grew and ABC was tempted to move it to a more favorable time slot, but Burton resisted. The Friday Night Death Slot was perfect, as far as he was concerned. If someone wanted to see it but still wanted to go out on Friday night, then they could set their VCRs to record it. And indeed, VHS releases sold well, a trend that continued with VCD and direct view home media. The show lives on to this day in syndication.

When Lovecraft meets Mandelbrot (Image source Generative Art by Matt Pearson, available here)

Over the course of its run, Nocturns introduced its audiences to philosophers like Nietzsche, Derrida, Baudrillard, and Foucault, psychologists like Freud, Jung, Festinger, and Riezler, artist like Freida Kahlo, H.R. Giger, Rene Magritte, Junji Ito, Masamune Shirow, Mike Mignola, Brom, Ramon Perez, and J. O’Barr, and writers like Franz Kafka, George Orwell, Thomas Pynchon, H.P. Lovecraft, Koji Suzuki, Edgar Allen Poe, Charles Baudelaire, and Lord Byron. It explored the mathematics of Pythagoras, Fibonacci, and Mandelbrot and tied them into philosophy, psychology, and the occult. It is as highly regarded today as it was in 1993, and became one of those rare moments in popular art when the cult, the high-brow, the low-brow, the educational, the meaningful, and the mass-market managed to align with the zeitgeist and create the sublime.

But while Burton and the Skeleton Crew used Nocturns to explore the dark depths of the human psyche, it would be the dark spaces between the stars, and a cold red light among them, which would pull in Burton next.

[1] Less Friday the 13th and more Jacob’s Ladder, in other words.

[2] Gems wrote a script for this in our timeline too. It was never produced.

[3] Fancy Victorian Hat-tip to @cmakk1012 for introducing me to this.

[4] And the little birdies gaily sing, “Hoo-hoo, hoo-hoo, there’s blood on the shoe! That’s not the real Snow White!” Medieval cap tip to @vizzer for reminding me of the Brothers Grimm and their “original & quite grisly material”.

When you Wish Upon a Frog (Book II of the Jim Henson at Disney saga)

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