WI: No Walt Disney

The landscape of animation would be almost unrecognizable. Walt Disney's influence is really, really hard to overstate. I once said that anime and manga would be unimaginably different without Osamu Tezuka. Uncle Walt's absence would have had even greater effects.
 
Yeah, pop culture as we know it is going to be vastly different. Disney pretty much defined an entire medium for many people and then there's his other influence throughout his life in movies, theme parks and so on. Taking him away and you have a world that's remarkably different to our own in many ways.
 
Animation would probably be seen as much newer and with a lot less historical backing, limited to shorts and WWII cartoons poking fun at the Nazis. The animation revolution would occur in the 1980s and 1990s because there’s a market for it, but it would be unrecognizable - it doesn’t take much imagination to reboot old fairy tales and 1001 Arabian Nights (though it does take some to turn Hamlet into a battle between lions) but I can’t imagine it would look the same.

That or we can all hail our new loving overlord...

https://images.app.goo.gl/Xu8BZ936Dnc3RHft8
 
Well, you had Walter Lanz at United Artists, Bob Clampett and others. Warner had no trouble jumping into the cartoon business in the early thirties. Talking movies were an emerging art form, so the absence of the Disney characters might have less industrial impact than many would think. You had Hanna and Barbera from the fifties forward into the television era. The biggest difference would be the theme parks. But Disneyland did not open until 1955, so the differences would happen somewhat later. Disney also enlarged the mechanical rides to accommodate whole families, not just kids. These are the places where the changes would be greatest.
 
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