The Shuffled Disneyverse 2.0: Another Alternate Disney Canon Timeline

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Cinderella (1937)​

The Cinderella story had existed for nearly 2,000 years, even though the fairy tale by Charles Perrault did not exist until 1697. The classic rags to riches tale was also something personal to Walt himself. He grew up in a relatively poor family on a farm in northern Missouri. He helped his family out monetarily by doing the local newspaper route his father owned. Even in his early 20s, he endured financial hardship through the bankruptcy of his Laugh-O-Gram Company. This was why Walt, by the end of his life, would recall Cinderella, his very first film, to be the film he was the most fond of and Cinderella herself as his favorite princess. It certainly helped that it was always at the back of his mind since he had produced a Laugh-O-Gram cartoon based on the fairytale in 1922 and was interested in producing another version of Cinderella by 1933.

Despite being the first animated feature released, Cinderella was not the first to be greenlit. That honor would go to Alice in Wonderland as Walt Disney purchased the rights to the Alice books in 1933, beating out Paramount. Originally intended to be a mixture of animation and live-action, Walt realized the story wasn’t working and that he could only do the source material justice in strictly animated form, so it was shelved in 1934. In its place, the fairy tale of Snow White by the Brothers Grimm was considered alongside the story of Bambi based on a novel by Felix Salten. With the former, Walt could not find a suitable treatment for it at the time. As for Bambi, the main issues were animating animals realistically animating animals and the novel itself being too adult for children. They would later be produced by Walt Disney Studios in the 1960s and the 2000s respectively, however. In the meantime, Walt confirmed that the proposed Cinderella Silly Symphony would become a full-length film at a staff meeting in October 1934.

Of course, this announcement came with much ridicule when it became public. The film industry in Hollywood referred to Cinderella as Disney’s Folly during production. His brother Roy and his wife Lillian even tried talking Walt out of making this film. Cinderella’s budget ended up at nearly $1.5 million, more than six times the originally planned budget of $250,000. Disney and his staff spent a good chunk of this budget on animating human characters realistically for the first time. Due to the drastic increase in the budget, Disney eventually mortgaged his house to help finance production. Midway through development, Disney attempted to get another loan from the Bank of America to finish it and only got it after showing a rough demo of the film. While not the first animated feature film, Cinderella would be one of the first full-length cel animated features ever made.

Cinderella follows a simple story. A young nobleman's wife dies; he then remarries a woman with two daughters (named Wanda and Ginette) about the same age as his daughter, Ella. After his own death, the new step-family cruelly abuses her and forces her to work as a servant, from which they give her the mocking nickname of Cinderella (as she usually slept by the fireplace at night and was covered in cinders). When the King calls for a royal ball, her stepmother, Lady Grimhilde, refuses to let her attend. A fairy godmother notices her plea of despair and grants her an outfit to attend the ball in, but with the caveat that the spell would break at midnight. At the ball, Cinderella wins the Prince's heart (unbeknownst to her at the time), but midnight looms and she loses one of her glass slippers running away from the palace. Now, the Prince must find the girl whom the slipper belongs to.

Cinderella opened at the Carthay Circle Theatre in Los Angeles on December 21, 1937. After the film’s conclusion, the audience, which included Judy Garland (who would later lend her voice to another Disney film) and Charles Laughton, among other celebrities, gave Disney a wild round of applause. This landed Disney on the cover page of Time Magazine. In January 1938, it premiered at theaters in New York City and Miami before being distributed nationwide on February 4. It earned $4.3 million in box office rentals in North America alone, earning $8 million in rentals by the end of its initial worldwide theatrical run. Critics praised Cinderella as a work of art unlike anything else before it, more specifically across the board for its voice acting, music, dialogue, animation, and characterization. Eventually, Disney would receive an honorary Academy Award for Cinderella. "Disney's Folly" would be remembered for years and decades to come.

Voice Cast:

• Adriana Caselotti as Cinderella
• Lucille LaVerne as Lady Grimhilde
• Deanna Durbin as Cinderella’s stepsisters Wanda and Ginette [1]
• Mel Blanc and Eddie Collins as Cinderella’s animal friends
• Harry Stockwell as Prince Charming
• Roy Atwell as the King
• Stuart Buchannan as the Grand Duke
• Moroni Olsen as the Narrator

[1] Deanna Durbin was actually one of over 150 girls who auditioned for Snow White IOTL. Assuming Adriana Caselotti still gets the lead role here, I can imagine Walt Disney offering her the role of one or both stepsisters.

 

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Alice in Wonderland (1940)​

Alice in Wonderland was always part of Walt’s ambition. He had read the original Alice books by Lewis Carroll as a boy. He produced a short film loosely inspired by the books called Alice’s Wonderland while working at the Laugh-O-Gram Studio. It featured child actor Virginia Davis as a live-action Alice interacting with an animated world. Between 1923 and 1927, the Alice Comedies series was in production, with Davis reprising her role in much of the run. Serious efforts to produce a feature film based on Lewis Carroll’s books began as early as 1931 when he bought the rights to John Tenniel’s illustrations. They heated up further in the spring of 1933 when Walt Disney officially bought the film rights to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Alice Through The Looking Glass. He was inspired by America’s Sweetheart and famed actress Mary Pickford who approached him with a proposal for the film. They got to work almost immediately.

The proposed pitch would combine Mary Pickford as a live-action Alice with an animated Wonderland created by the Disney studio. As soon as development began, Walt ran into a major problem. He had no idea how the story would work, considering the number of different directions the story could travel, nor did he know how Pickford as Alice would fit in. By 1934, he announced that Alice in Wonderland (the title being registered with the MPAA soon after) would be completely animated. It would also be shelved while production of Cinderella would start and supplant it as Disney’s first feature film. In the meantime, Pickford offered to stay on with the project, and Disney himself would develop a Mickey Mouse short based on the concept titled Thru the Mirror. After its release, Walt would resume development on the Alice feature, but it would not go into full swing until 1938 following Cinderella’s wide release.

Casting would be a major issue. Mary Pickford envisioned herself in the title role while the film was conceptualized as an animated/live-action hybrid. When Walt Disney decided to make the feature entirely animated, Pickford still wanted to remain involved, so she offered to portray Alice as a live-action reference to the character. Disney agreed. So she got her wish after all, but her version of the film was only for the animators and other staff at Disney’s studio, not audiences. Another issue was the story. In 1938, Al Perkins developed a version over 160 pages long, and Disney personally found it too dark. He also didn’t want it to be too literal of an adaptation of the story or else Americans would probably think of the final product as too British. Even the characters were considered too unlikeable. Finally, there was the issue of animation. Disney personally bought the rights to John Tenniel’s illustrations in 1931, but concept art based on these illustrations proved to be very grotesque in places. There was a lot to sort out before the film would premiere.

The story of Alice in Wonderland begins with Alice lying on a riverbank while her sister gives a history lesson. She notices the White Rabbit and follows him down a rabbit hole, with a group of butterflies lowering her to safety. At the bottom of the hole, she sees the White Rabbit again and attempts to follow him to a door. She drinks from a talking bottle labeled “Drink Me” and subsequently shrinks. Her sudden change in height causes Alice to cry a massive pool of her tears and swims through the door before washing ashore in Wonderland. Alice then continues to follow the White Rabbit and encounters a variety of creatures along the way, climaxing with the Mad Hatter and the March Hare at the iconic Mad Tea Party. Throughout her journey, Alice battles with the trickster Cheshire Cat, who routinely mocks her and tricks her into going the wrong way. He ultimately sends her on a path to the villainous Queen of Hearts, with whom Alice ends up facing far more than what she bargained for.

Disney originally contemplated Alice to be released on Christmas 1938, but gave it a more realistic tentative date for the spring of 1939. Additional work on the story and animation proved to be very timely, so it was pushed back to Christmas 1939 and finally to 1940. Alice in Wonderland premiered on February 7, 1940, in London and March 18, 1940, in New York City at the Centre Theater.[1] In the USA, it was paired with the Mickey Mouse short The Sorcerer’s Apprentice and would gross $720,000 in domestic rentals during its initial theatrical run, far short of its $2.3 million budget. Its run in the UK, the British Commonwealth, and Latin America somewhat made up for this, but it still was not nearly enough to allow the film to make a profit because World War II cut off the market to much of mainland Europe and Asia, the former comprising as much as 45% of the income that Disney generated on average. It received mixed reviews from critics, receiving praise for the animation, music, and voice acting (particularly Alice herself, the Mad Hatter, and the Queen of Hearts) but got criticized for lacking the warmth of Cinderella and its lack of faithfulness to Lewis Caroll’s works. The next film would not help Disney financially either.

Voice Cast:

• Hazel Ascot as Alice [2]
• Mary Pickford as the live-action reference for Alice
• Virginia Davis as Alice’s sister [3]
• Frank Morgan as the White Rabit and the King of Hearts
• Cliff Edwards as the Drinking Bottle
• C. Aubrey Smith as the Dodo
• J Pat O’Malley as Bill the Lizard
• Owen Coll as the Gryphon
• Richard Haydn as the Mock Turtle
• W.C. Fields as the Caterpillar
• Reginald Gardiner as the Cheshire Cat
• Mel Blanc as Tweedledee and Tweedledum
• Ed Wynn as the Mad Hatter [4]
• Groucho Marx as the March Hare
• Joseph Shildkraut as the Queen of Hearts [5]

[1] These are the premieres of Pinocchio IOTL in the USA and the UK by the are switched ITTL because OTL's Alice premiered first in Britain IOTL.
[2] Was dubbed as the British Shirley Temple at the time
[3] Kept as a mythology gag from the Laugh-O-Gram Alice cartoons
[4] The transcript of the 1939 draft IOTL had Wynn as the March Hare but I can't see anyone else playing the Hatter so I switched Groucho Marx to the March Hare
[5] One suggestion in the 1939 transcription was to have a man play the Queen of Hearts

A/N: So, this version is basically a mashup of the 1933 Paramount version, the 1939 Disney draft of the film, and the final 1951 Disney version from IOTL. And if Cinderella was TTL’s Snow White then Alice is like TTL’s Fantasia reputation-wise.

 

[PGSBHurricane]

The Jungle Book (1940)​

For Walt’s third endeavor, he considered the following stories: Bambi, Pinocchio, and Peter Pan. Difficulties in acquiring the rights to the former two canceled these plans, and he found the titular character of the latter far too unlikeable. None of these stories would become a reality until at least the 1990s. Another film entitled The Concert Feature was also in early development to allow the Mickey Mouse short The Sorcerer’s Apprentice to earn back its budget, but Walt Disney and conductor Leopold Stokowski were at odds with what musical piece to use for the classical mythology segment. Needless to say, Disney and Stokowski could not find a compromise by the time Stokowski’s contract expired. Many of the planned stories for the musical segments were incorporated into Make Mine Music. So, the third entry in the Walt Disney animated canon would be inspired by a 1937 live-action movie that caught Walt’s attention entitled Elephant Boy, based on Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book. Walt beat Alexander Korda for the film rights to The Jungle Book in the spring of 1938, and production began immediately.

This would be easy for Disney in some ways and a challenge in others. On one hand, the number of human characters was far more limited compared to Cinderella and even Alice in Wonderland. On the other hand, difficulties in animating realistic animals would become apparent, but it would not be as bad as with the proposed Bambi feature. Next was the setting. The writers considered moving the story to Africa at one point due to the myriad of Tarzan films released over the past 20 years which made American audiences more familiar with it than the British Raj setting of The Jungle Book novels. This was rejected because it would alter the plot, and the film was set in British India as planned (Disney would try their hand at a Tarzan film in the 1960s, however). While not as controversial as with the planned Pinocchio film, there were several questions on how to write Mowgli as the main protagonist.

Story work for The Jungle Book began in the summer of 1938 and was completed by January 1939. Animation started in September 1938. There were numerous similarities to Alice in Wonderland before it from a production perspective. Like with Alice, this motion picture was experimental in its special effects animation. Three-dimensional clay models of the characters, also known as maquettes, were built to let animators observe how to draw the characters. Additionally, the staff used the multiplane camera to full effect and shot the animation in successive cyan, magenta, and yellow-exposed frames. Casting for The Jungle Book took place in January 1939, and most of the dialogue recording took place in April and May, extending to August 1940 when necessary. The cast recorded their dialogue, and the musicians their score, using a multichannel stereophonic system conceived during the production of Alice in Wonderland and perfected by 1939, hence the name Wondersound. [1] Disney cast child star Dickie Jones as Mowgli, the main protagonist.

Sometime in the late 19th century in British India, a wolf couple finds an abandoned baby boy in the middle of the jungle and names the “man-cub” Mowgli. He is raised by the wolfpack by Akela and assisted by Baloo, a sloth bear, and Bagheera, a melanistic Indian leopard. Mowgli is educated about the "Law of the Jungle" as he grows older. By the time he turns 11 years old, the evil tiger Shere Khan threatens the pack, particularly Mowgli himself, and he learns that the only way to ward him off is through fire. He steals a pot of coals from a nearby human village and makes fire, much to the delight of the wolves, Baloo, and Bagheera. But this causes a group of Bandar-log monkeys to kidnap him, take him to their abandoned city, and name Mowgli their king. Only with the help of their feared predator, Kaa the python, are Baloo and Bagheera able to free him. Shere Khan once again is lurking around and encounters Mowgli, threatening him with a sadistic choice that must force him to confront the fact that he is a man, not a “man-cub” and must leave the jungle for good.

With hundreds of personnel and a budget of $2.4 million, The Jungle Book premiered on November 13, 1940, at the Broadway Theater in New York, complete with Wondersound installed. It later received a wide release nationwide on January 29, 1941. It earned about $1.6 million in domestic box office rentals. Beyond its high budget, what caused it to not earn it back in its initial run was the fact that each Wondersound system cost $85,000 to install, which meant only 16 cities nationwide had one. Outside the USA, it earned $1.3 in rentals by the end of its initial run thanks to World War 2 cutting off mainland Europe and Asia. While it wasn't an outright failure at the box office like its predecessor, it was a notable underperformance. Critic reviews at the time were generally more positive than its predecessor due to the improved animation and characters, some criticized the film for its episodic plot, a tone believed to be too dark in a time of international war [2], and a divisive protagonist. Its fortunes would later improve in the post-war era; but in the meantime, Disney faced an uncertain future.

Voice Cast:

• Dickie Jones as Mowgli
• Cliff Edwards as Baloo
• Clarence Nash as Bagheera
• Walter Catlett as Kaa
• Charles Judels as Shere Khan
• Thurl Ravenscroft as Colonel Hathi
• Evelyn Venable as Mrs. Hathi, Mama Wolf
• Stuart Buchanan as Papa Wolf, Akela
• Christian Rub as Monkey #1
• Frankie Darro as Monkey #2
• Mel Blanc as Monkey #3

[1] Wondersound is the analogue to Fantasound ITTL.
[2] The plot is a mix of the original books and OTL’s 1967 animated version and the tone is closer to the 2016 re-make as well as OTL’s Pinocchio.

Songs include Heigh-Ho (song by the Elephants in place of Colonel Hathi's March), Give A Little Whistle, a modified version of Hi-Diddle-Dee-Dee, and Pinocchio's verse of I've Got No Strings from OTL.

 

[PGSBHurricane]

Tangled (1941)​

This next film isn’t so much a feature as it is a behind-the-scenes look at Walt Disney’s animation studio in Burbank, California, intermixed with a handful of animated sequences. Development began in May 1940, just months after Alice in Wonderland was released, and was a box office failure on top of being decried as avant-garde and unfaithful to its source material. With 40-45% of Disney’s revenue cut off thanks to a growing international war, he found himself in a desperate situation. With most other studios, they could easily take standing sets, enlist some B-list or C-list actors and a semi-decent director, and spin up a quick, low-budget feature with a generic and familiar plot for easy cash. Disney, on the other hand, did not have any standing sets or famous movie stars available. Still, this did not stop Walt. He decided to create a low-budget film of his own to be released in the summer of 1941 to help with the studio’s revenue streams and to allow more time to develop new features.

Walt met with actor-comedian Robert Benchley, and, from there, conceived the idea of a tour of Walt Disney Studios featuring animated sequences. When asked during a story conference, Walt noted that while his staff took their duties for granted, the inside operations of the studio were unknown to the public. It helped that Disney just invested in upgrading production facilities and opened a brand new Burbank studio in February. It also had been an idea Disney had toyed with since 1937 while promoting Cinderella. Writing was complete by August 1940, and filming of the live-action segments began in October. As for the main animated segment, the story of Rapunzel was proposed throughout the 1930s for a full-length film [1]. It did, though, have two problems. First, it was a much shorter story than Cinderella. Second, the character of Rapunzel herself was even more passive than the character of Cinderella, who became one of Disney’s most divisive characters. As a full-length feature, this would’ve struggled. As a featurette, this worked perfectly to Walt’s advantage.

The film starts with Robert Benchley contemplating how to pitch a version of the fairy tale Rapunzel to Walt Disney Studios. His wife pushes him into it, and the two drive to the studio. Once there, Robert sneaks inside and initially observes a live drawing session of an elephant and listens to a voice recording session with the voice actor for Donald Duck, Clarence Nash. Benchley then meets a studio employee named Doris. She then demonstrates sound effects with a sonovox, the multiplane camera, and the general mechanics of animation and photography, the ink-and-paint department (presenting a completed cell for an upcoming Disney feature), and the maquette department (showing small statues of characters from films released as late as the 1950s). From there, Benchley journeys into the storyboard department where an idea for a new short entitled Baby Weems is shown using a story reel with limited animation. He then stumbles upon a group of animators animating a Goofy short entitled How to Ride a Horse. Finally, Benchley meets Walt Disney and starts playing a reel for his 20-minute version of Rapunzel.

The featurette begins with a girl named Clara and a boy named Victor in 1940s America being struck by lightning and transported into a strange fairy tale world. Clara finds herself as the princess Rapunzel and Victor as a charming prince named Bastion. Before they can escape, Clara (aka Rapunzel) is kidnapped and trapped in a tower by the wicked witch Dame Gothel. Years pass, and Rapunzel is in the tower, with her blond hair now as long as the tower itself. Bored out of her mind with nothing to do but paint and talk to a rabbit named Roger, her sole companion, she sings one day from the tower window, and Bastion arrives on the scene. Once he says, "Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair,” her hair magically picks him up and into the tower with the princess. Reunited, they plan their escape back into the real world, but Gothel catches them and threatens to kill them. The two outwit the witch, cutting Rapunzel’s hair in the process, and ride off into the sunset before being transported back to the real world, leaving Gothel caught in the vines of the princess’s hair. Disappointed that his pitch is rejected, Benchley says that he is all tangled up, ending the film.

Tangled was planned for release on June 6, 1941 [2], but the animators' strike, which had origins tracing back to the box office disappointments of Alice in Wonderland and The Jungle Book, pushed this back by three weeks. Things grew more complicated as 500-700 employees associated with the Screen Cartoonist's Guild walked out from the Disney Studio on May 28, the same day Tangled was initially previewed. Critic reviews were favorable, albeit some dismissed it as propaganda amidst the Disney strike. On the other hand, audiences felt confused and even cheated that this was not a single-story film or a proper feature, period. Audiences also sympathized with the strikers during that summer. This money-making scheme backfired, only earning $860,000 in box office rentals in North America off a budget of $900,000. The film was never re-released as a whole, but Disney re-released the animated segments individually. There was one thing about Tangled, however, that everyone appreciated: Roger the Rabbit.

Live-Action Cast:

• Robert Benchley as himself
• Nana Bryant as Mrs. Benchley
• Frances Gifford as Doris
• Alan Ladd as himself
• Norm Ferguson as himself
• Ward Kimball as himself
• Fred Moore as himself
• Walt Disney as himself

Voice Cast:

• Clarence Nash as Donald Duck
• Florence Gill as Clara Cluck
• Pinto Colvig as Goofy
• Raymond Severn as Baby Weems
• Dinah Shore as Clara/Rapunzel
• Danny Kaye as Victor/Baston
• Cliff Edwards as Roger the Rabbit
• Noreen Gammill as Dame Gothel

[1] Per an interview with OTL's Tangled directors Nathan Greno & Byron Howard
[2] Per the May-June 1941 issue of the Motion Picture Herald

 

[PGSBHurricane]

The Lion King (1941)​

The initial planning for this film dates back to the production of Cinderella in 1937 when Walt expressed interest in developing another tale from France (emphasizing that France was where the tale Cendrillon was initially published in 1697 and Reynard’s popularity in France caused the French word for "fox" to change from "goupil" to "renard"). Walt immediately assigned this story to Dorothy Blank (who previously worked on Cinderella) and Al Perkins to develop a suitable treatment for the myth. There was one problem, though. How on earth do you make a character so unrepentantly awful into someone sympathetic enough for the audience to root for? Unlike Robin Hood, who at least limits his thievery to a corrupt, oppressive government, Reynard has a rap sheet 1,000 miles long and is willing to commit any crime, even mass murder, to get what he wants.

Walt expressed such concerns during a story meeting for Reynard The Fox on February 12, 1938. He emphasized that the main character was a crook and there was no hope for a Robin Hood angle for Reynard. With the core audience comprising adults and kids alike, having him as a sympathetic protagonist of the story would be very difficult to pull off. [1] Someone suggested making Reynard more heroic by having him be a good guy pretending to be evil or simply be a victim of his past. Disney noted the fox that maybe, just maybe, could be more than just the sly fox stereotype but someone who started on the right path and lost his way, and his personal circumstances would force him to rely on his wits.[2] Someone else suggested another idea: that Disney make Reynard the main antagonist and tell it through the eyes of the royal lion King Nobel. The writers generally agreed that the king was more sympathetic in the original stories than Reynard himself, even though he was very spiteful and avaricious in the initial proposed treatment. Granted, he was originally the villain in the story as Reynard was the protagonist and point of view character. From a different perspective, King Noble the Lion might be more noble than one might predict.

For over a year, most of the focus for the film lay in writing the final script, fleshing out the different characters from the Reynard myths, and animating animals more realistic than in Cinderella but not quite as realistic as what would've been required in the proposed Bambi feature since they are more anthropomorphized. The last story meeting for the film, retitled The Lion King by then, took place on June 27, 1939, as the script neared completion. Animation began on August 29 but did not go into full swing until the following June as animation for The Jungle Book was at its height in 1939, and most of the voice recording took place between January and March 1940. By early 1941, the animation process launched into crunch time as The Jungle Book disappointed at the box office, and Disney needed a box office hit to turn things around. Its tentative release date was August 15, 1941. However, the Disney animators' strike began on May 29 and delayed its release as most of Disney’s animation staff were striking. Hence, production on The Lion King was not complete until September 11, when Disney handed the finished product to RKO Radio Pictures for distribution.

The Lion King begins with Reynard the fox in the countryside planning out a series of deceptions and disguises, which he only got away with in the past due to witty last-minute escapes. Undesratbaly frustrated with all the devious escapades that wreaked havoc across the kingdom, King Noble, the great lion, orders Reynard’s capture and that he brought to the royal court to be tried for his crimes ranging from larceny to arson to murder. During the trial, Reynard disguises himself as a goat and laughs throughout the proceedings. When Noble discovers his disguise, he immediately sentences Reynard to be hanged on the gallows. Before his execution, Reynard confesses, much to the horror of King Noble, that he and his father tried overthrowing the monarch, spinning up a tale that it was payback for the monarchy stealing his father’s wealth and hiding it in a volcano. Reynard leads the King and all of the kingdom’s subjects to the volcano and pushes Noble into it. The King only barely manages to climb out when it explodes, killing many people. Deciding that the fox is now the most wanted fugitive in all the realms, the titular lion king escapes and releases notorious criminal Ysegrim the Wolf, Reynard’s cousin [3], to pursue the fox once and for all.

The Lion King premiered on October 23, 1941, in New York City before its wide release through the rest of the nation only eight days later. With a budget of $1.1 million, it was far more modest than the two movies that came before it. Fortunately, it earned $1.9 million in domestic box office rentals, earning Disney a profit and making it the most successful Disney film in North America since Cinderella. It was also the only Disney film from the 1940s that audiences at the time connected with. Like in The Jungle Book, there were plenty of dark elements, but much of it was played for laughs here. Critics praised The Lion King for its plot, characters, music, and voice acting, with special praise given to Reynard the Fox for his effective villainy and King Noble as a surprisingly sympathetic protagonist. While there weren’t many songs, two musical numbers, Pink Elephants on Parade (played while King Noble gets drunk) and Casey Jr. (played when Reynard stows away on a train) are two of the most remembered. Overall, while The Lion King is not considered the objectively best Disney movie of the 1940s, The Lion King is one of the most fondly remembered today.

Voice Cast:

• Herman Bing as King Noble
• Walter Catlett as Reynard The Fox
• Verna Felton as Queen Noble
• Sterling Holloway as Bruin The Bear
• Edward Brophy as Tibert the Cat
• Billy Bletcher as Ysegrim the Wolf
• Cliff Edwards as Grimbard the Badger
• Margaret Wright as Casey Jr.

[1] Paraphrased from American Classic Screen Features as edited by John C. Tibbetts and James M. Welsh when Disney attempted to adapt Reynard IOTL.
[2] See above note.
[3] Combining the roles of Grimbard and Ysegrim in the myths.

 

[PGSBHurricane]

The Snow Queen (1942)​

Walt Disney had considered Hans Christen Andersen's The Snow Queen for his first feature, but the studio struggled to develop the titular character in a way audiences at the time could relate to. As a result, it got pushed back to be the third Disney film following Cinderella and Alice in Wonderland. This was solidified when Disney rejected MGM’s offer in April 1937 of the film rights to Bambi: A Life in the Woods, as he had too much on his plate, and animating realistic animals was notoriously challenging. In the meantime, pre-production on The Snow Queen began in the summer of 1936, but it mostly took a backseat to Cinderella. Just before Cinderella premiered, Walt Disney Productions began exploring a possible film centering around the life of author and poet Hans Christian Andersen alongside featuring animated featurettes with his stories. One idea for a segment was making The Snow Queen into a short. The Little Mermaid (which would be made nearly 50 years later), was also discussed as a possible short, but Disney opted to produce The Ugly Duckling instead.

Disney released The Ugly Duckling in April 1939 as part of its Silly Symphony Series to nearly universal critical acclaim. In the meantime, in August 1938, Disney was holding character workshop sessions for the Snow Queen herself, and there was simultaneous work on storyboards assigned to Perce Pearce and Carl Fallberg. Their attention soon became drawn to other projects like Alice and The Jungle Book, so things were initially slow. Finally, on August 17, 1939, production of The Snow Queen officially began in earnest, with workshops mostly wrapped up by that point. Progress remained slow due to personnel changes, moving to Burbank, and improvements in handling animation. There were still talks about making The Snow Queen part of a Hans Christian Andersen biographical film, but Disney dispelled this once and for all in March 1940 when he publically announced that the studio would not pursue the proposed biographical film about Andersen (MGM would later pursue this concept separately without animation) and that The Snow Queen would be a full-length feature.

There were many interpretations of the story, and thus much room for experimentation, as writer and animator Mel Shaw recalled once. Writing was completed by July 1940, with much of the religious references from the original fairy tale removed. Animation was also a tricky process. Even though the story was generally human-centric, animals were still featured so Disney brought some in from the Los Angeles Zoo to animate them more realistically compared to Cinderella. Marc Davis created the titular Snow Queen’s final design. The studio used actress Jane Randolph and star skater Donna Atwood as live-action references for the scenes where Greta and Kai skate as kids and where Greata needs to run across an ice pond to rescue Kai after being kidnapped. The backgrounds for the film were inspired by real-life Scandinavian locations in which the terrain varied from mountains to woodlands. A rough cut of the film was complete by April 1942, and Disney showed it to his friends who thought it was too long. With that, Disney cut 1,000 feet of animation, adding to the 1,800 feet previously cut following the box office failure of The Jungle Book. [1]

The Snow Queen starts with the titular character having just created a mirror that seeks out the places with the most hate and ugliness in the world so that she can create calm and happiness via a gentle snowfall. However, a group of trolls sneaks into the snow palace one night and shatters the mirror into a million pieces that disperse in the cold wind. Unluckily, a couple of those shards end up in the eyes and heart of the Snow Queen herself, who acquires a bitter cold disposition. Her powers are corrupted by the shards, turning her gentle snowfalls into intense blizzards and avalanches wherever she goes. Several years later, two siblings named Greta and Kai listen to a story about the Snow Queen from their grandma. On a summer day, a few scattered mirror shards end up in Kai’s heart and eyes, causing him to be needlessly cruel and aggressive towards everyone, including Greta and his grandmother. The Snow Queen soon arrives in the village, signified by the dropping temperatures and howling snow squalls. She seeks out a Snow Prince, and when she sees Kai, she kidnaps him and brings him back to her kingdom with her. Only Greta can venture to the Snow Kingdom and save her brother from an uncertain fate.

Originally, The Snow Queen was intended for release in the fall of 1941, but the animator’s strike delayed the conclusion of production by several months, not to mention it fell behind The Lion King, which took its fall 1941 slot. [2] The bombing of Pearl Harbor ruined any chances of a Christmas release. RKO Radio Pictures scheduled the world premiere for July 30, 1942, at the Radio City Music Hall in New York, but the long run of Mrs. Miniver delayed this further. [3] Finally, it premiered in London on August 9, 1942, then in New York City on August 13 before being released in the United States on August 21. Critics at the time gave it mixed-to-positive reviews, with most of the detractors taking issue with the movie’s pacing and being more dramatic than Disney’s previous efforts. On the other hand, critics widely praised the animation and the titular character for their complexity. On a $1.5 million budget, The Snow Queen earned $1.3 million in domestic rentals and could not access most foreign markets due to World War 2. Fortunately, it earned back its losses upon re-releases following the War. It would go on to become one of Disney’s most famous classics.

Voice Cast:

• Paula Winslowe as The Snow Queen
• Ann Gillis as Greta
• Cammie King as Young Greta
• John Sutherland as Kai
• Donnie Dunnigan as Young Kai
• Verna Felton as Greta and Kai’s Grandmother
• Sam Edwards as Troll #1
• Sterling Holloway as Troll #2
• Will Wright as Troll #3
• Fred Shields as Troll #4
• Mel Blanc as various animal voices

[1] Happened with Bambi IOTL according to a Los Angeles Daily News article from April 30, 1942, and a 1990 Los Angeles magazine article.
[2] Analogous to IOTL with Bambi expected to be released in fall 1941 and Dumbo taking its slot per The Disney Revolt: The Great Labor War of Animation's Golden Age by Jake S. Friedman
[3] Based on a Hollywood Reporter news item from OTL.

All of the songs from Bambi are included here plus Baby Mine from Dumbo (which is sung to Greta and Kai by the grandmother as little kids)

 

[PGSBHurricane]

Saludos Amigos (1943)​

The year 1941 was notoriously tough for Disney. He was still recovering from the box office failures of Alice in Wonderland and The Jungle Book the prior year. He was especially heartbroken about Alice since the original stories by Lewis Carroll were part of his childhood, and critics ripped it apart for lacking the warmth and sympathy inspired by Cinderella and Americanizing a great piece of British literature. Not helping matters was how expensive they were to make and the fact that World War II had cut off most of the European and Asian markets, drastically decimating Disney’s revenue which he very much depended on to make his animated shorts and films. Unlike other film studios, Walt could not merely engage in budget cuts to make ends meet while expecting to turn out colorful, stunning animated fantasies. Audiences did not quite receive warmly his experiment to recoup some money with Tangled. Sure, The Lion King was a modest hit and restored critical and audience faith in Disney, but the studio still needed to earn back millions of dollars in debt.

Suddenly, Walt Disney saw a new challenge. Nelson Rockefeller, who was the State Department Coordinator of InterAmerican Affairs (CIAA), wanted to create new economic opportunities by attempting to open up Latin America to replace the ones lost in Asia and especially Europe. There was also the matter of German and Italian immigrants in Latin America allegedly developing ethnic allegiances towards the Axis Powers and many Latin American governments themselves developing strong ties to them, which America disliked. So, this was something of a dual mission to Rockefeller. In early 1941, his personal representative, John Hay Whitney, urged Disney to take a goodwill tour of Latin America since his characters were beloved there, with special attention given to Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Mexico, Peru, and Uruguay. Walt initially refused, stating he could not go around gallivanting across Central America and South America. But Whitney promised to pay $70,000 worth of travel expenses and advance payments of $50,000 per short (up to five shorts) if he made short films inspired by the tour. They had a deal.

In August 1941, Disney, his wife, and a team of artists arrived in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and enjoyed a lengthy stay there before splintering off into smaller groups to visit Argentina (excluding Buenos Aires), Bolivia, Chile, Peru, and Uruguay where the artists made numerous sketches and paintings. Two party members, Lee Blair and Larry Lansburgh, brought 16mm cameras with them to record their impressions of South America, some of which they later blew up to 35mm for exhibition. While he was there, the group returned to the Disney studio in California in late October 1941 and began producing their series of short films. A separate team would go to Mexico in late 1941 and stay there through early 1942. The original plan was to produce up to 12 one-reel cartoons based on the trip and release them in groups of four, but by June 1942 (per the Hollywood Reporter) the studio decided in correspondence with film mogul David O. Selznick to combine six of them into a single feature (which he called Saludos Amigos) because features always made more money than shorts and Disney needed the money.

Donald Duck and Goofy are among a group of live-action tourists (played by various Disney artists) touring Latin America, with each segment representing a different country. Their first stop is Lake Titicaca on the border of Bolivia and Peru, where they learn about the traditions of the people who live there and attempt to sail across it before hiking through the Andes Mountains with a stubborn llama. They then travel to Chile and meet Pedro the airplane, who recalls a story about how he delivered mail for his parents as they could not do so because of technical defects. Pedro then flies out from Santiago to receive mail from Mendoza. He nearly dies on his flight back but gets home alive and retains a lone Chilean postcard. Donald and Goofy cross the Andes into Argentina, where Goofy gets lost in the Pampas, with locals mistaking him for a gaucho. He inadvertently learns of their ways while getting into hijinks and confrontations with a trickster horse. Goofy later reunites with his friend and the two travel into the Brazilian jungle. They emerge to meet a parrot named José Carioca. José takes them to Rio de Janeiro, where he gives the cachaças to drink and teaches them to dance the samba. He then joins them on their sight-seeing journey to Uruguay, where they encounter an old man who tells them about his childhood adventures with a winged donkey named Burrito. Lastly, Donald, Goofy, and José fly to Mexico and meet a roster named Panchito Pistoles, who gives them a tour of the country on a sarape and teaches them a few Mexican dances and songs.

The shorts focusing on Argentina, Brazil, and Chile were initially released as standalone entities in their respective countries in August and September 1942. Saludos Amigos did not premiere worldwide until February 6, 1943, in Boston, Massachusetts, because the animators still needed to work on the Uruguay and Mexico segments. It was released in the United States on February 19 before its wide release in Latin America and the rest of the world starting in March. It initially grossed $2.25 million worldwide [1] and received mixed to positive reviews from critics. They praised it for the characterization of Donald, Goofy, José, and Panchito and its usefulness as an educational tool in the United States. The art style, on the other hand, was divisive, with some critics deriding it as prioritizing style over substance. It was not an audience favorite at the time because of the war. Westerners disliked that it was not a single-story film, and some Latin American audiences questioned the cultural accuracy of the artists and animators. Nevertheless, Saludos Amigos has garnered attention over the years and is a cult classic in modern times. [2]

Live-Action Cast:

• Lee Blair as himself
• Mary Blair as herself
• Walt Disney as himself
• Norman Ferguson as himself
• Frank Graham as himself
• Larry Lansburgh as himself
• Frank Thomas as himself
• Dora Luz as herself
• Carmen Molina as herself
• Carlos Ramírez as himself
• Trío Calaveras as themselves
• Stuart Buchanan as the flight attendant

Voice Cast :

• Clarence Nash as Donald Duck
• Pinto Colvig as Goofy
• José do Patrocínio Oliveira as José Carioca
• Nestor Amaral as José Carioca's singing voice
• Joaquin Garay as Panchito Pistoles
• José Cuauhtémoc "Bill" Melendez as the boy
• Nestor Amaral as José Carioca's singing voice
• Fred Shields as the narrator and old man

[1] I averaged the grosses of OTL's Saludos Amigos and The Three Caballeros in their initial theatrical runs to get this figure.
[2] Reasons include Donald Duck's flirting with women being toned down from OTL's The Three Caballeros, it being much longer than 45 minutes like OTL as well as having a more coherent storyline, and also Donald, Goofy, José, and Panchito being the highlights of the film with all of them having major roles.

 

[PGSBHurricane]

Lady And The Tramp (1944)​

Unlike its predecessors (sans Saludos Amigos), this film was not based on previously published literature but was not quite an original movie either. Its basis was on a true story: that of Disney story artist Joe Grant, whom Disney hired as an artist in 1933, and his English Springer Spaniel named Lady. This idea dates back to 1937, during the production of Cinderella. Grant approached Disney with sketches of his dog, and Disney liked them so much he commissioned Grant to use them to develop a new feature. Lady would follow the antics of the titular dog as she gets shoved aside when her human owners have a baby of their own, much like what happened with Joe Grant’s dog in real life upon the birth of his daughter. Between 1937 and 1941, Joe Grant and other story artists worked on the story diligently. Walt Disney, however, was concerned because he thought Lady was too one-dimensionally sweet and that there were no real stakes in the film for the title character.

In the meantime, Disney sent his animators out to do field research. He wanted the story to not be in a city but in a small town to capture the small-town atmosphere in America during the turn of the twentieth century, which was when Disney grew up. And where else to capture that feeling of nostalgia but the town of Marceline, Missouri, where Disney’s family moved to in 1906 from Chicago? After all, it was where Walt saw his first film and theatrical production, sold his first drawing, and put on his first show. It was also where he developed his life-long passions of art, animals, and nature. Also, the Disney animators needed to observe life extensively, or dog life to be more specific. Disney brought a bunch of dogs into the studio for the artists to study to capture how they moved as realistically as possible. Unlike with The Snow Queen, from which the idea of studying animals originated, this needed to be perfect. They needed to understand how they walked, moved their shoulders, interacted with each other, etc.

Disney and Grant originally intended Lady to be a full-length single-story feature film. Unfortunately, the onset of World War II necessitated that Disney prioritized military and war films, otherwise only being able to work on package films to make money that the studio so desperately needed. Following Saludos Amigos, there needed to be another package film to follow up with it to bring in more money to help eliminate its debt. Disney did not have much faith in Lady succeeding as a single feature film because of the concerns he raised about it before, so he suggested that it be a package film to help address these issues, and the team was able to convert Lady into a package film within three years. Even with this change, there still needed to be some new characters and plotlines. The most notable changes were additional romantic elements [1] and the expansion of Homer the Mongrel. The writers conceived Homer as merely a potential suitor for Lady, but it was decided to elevate his status to deuteragonist of the feature, which was soon renamed Lady and The Tramp.

Lady and The Tramp is divided into four segments framed by a scrapbook with photos containing vignettes of Lady’s life. The first segment opens on a Christmas morning when a married couple named Jim Dear and Darling exchange presents, and Darling is gifted a puppy English Springer Spaniel named Lady. The couple initially devotes all their time to Lady, but as they have a baby the following spring, they begin to push Lady off to the side, and the dog struggles to understand why. The second segment focuses on Jim Dear’s mother-in-law Sarah, who comes to visit the baby with her cats, Si and Am. The cats cause much mischief and property damage around the house. Sarah, who strongly dislikes dogs, blames Lady and sends her to the local dog catcher, where a Mongrel named Homer (nicknamed the Tramp) rescues her. The third segment expands on the newfound friendship between Lady and Homer that becomes threatened when her designated love interest, a boastfully arrogant Russian Wolfhound named Boris, belittles Homer for his homelessness and mongrel status. Despite that, Lady and Homer spend a night in the town, climaxing with a spaghetti kiss between the two. The fourth and final segment is mostly confined to Lady’s house with Sarah and her cats over again, this time with an evil rat sneaking into the house and threatening to hurt Jim Dear and Darling’s baby. Now, Lady must seek help before the rat does irrevocable damage and before Sarah can notice.

Lady And The Tramp premiered in Chicago, Illinois on December 21, 1944, followed by New York City on February 3, 1945, and finally nationwide throughout the United States on February 22 of that year. It received mixed reviews from critics. Some thought that the film was too sentimental and gooey. Others were charmed by it being simultaneously both delightful and haunting The background animation and voice acting were praised, but critics took issue with the relative lack of songs compared to previous Disney works. They were divided over the usage of a big band jazz version of The Lady is A Tramp at the opening credits. Audiences, on the other hand, were more pleased with the final product. While not on par with the first five Disney features, most found it an improvement over Saludos Amigos and especially Tangled, considering that this was more than an hour long, and one could argue it was four smaller stories as part of one bigger story based on the scrapbook. On a budget of just under $1 million, it earned $1.7-1.8 million worldwide on its initial release. Today, this is one of the two Package Era films that most people fondly remember.

Voice Cast:

• Barbara Luddy as Lady
• Frank Graham as The Tramp (Homer)
• Fred Shields as Jim Dear
• Dinah Shore as Darling
• Verna Felton as Sarah
• Sterling Holloway as Si and Am
• Alan Reed as Boris
• Frankie Darro as Herman The Rat [2]

[1] IOTL, Joe Grant hated the romance plot per Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination (Gabler, 2006) and it carries over into TTL. Disney essentially forces this into the script for there to be more action.
[2] Apparently, that was the name of the rat in early versions of the script for Lady and The Tramp IOTL.

 

[PGSBHurricane]

The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad (1946)​

Unlike the other two package films that came before it, there would be much less tying together of the featurettes other than a minor framing device in the form of a library. The reason for this was that the two films in this package film were originally meant to be full-length features in their own right. World War II would put the kibosh on these plans. Plans for the first segment (which would oddly correspond to the second titular character), The Wind In The Willows, went back to April 1938 during Roy Disney’s spree of acquiring several European properties for potential features. Walt had previously received an English copy of the Kenneth Grahame novel in 1934 upon receiving a copy from an English correspondent. But, even after acquiring the rights to the novel four years later, he had no interest in adapting it due to finding the story incredibly corny. It was only through convincing by story artist James Bodrero that The Wind in the Willows began production in 1940.

In September of that year, the first story meetings for The Wind In The Willows took place, and production was confirmed the following month. Six months later, animation for the film started, with writers and animators having come off the nearly-completed Snow Queen, including director James Algar, concept artist Mel Shaw, and story artists James Bodrero and Campbell Grant. In May 1941, the Disney animators' strike put the project on hold until October following the strike's conclusion. Simultaneously, after the box office disasters of The Jungle Book and Alice in Wonderland, the Bank of America issued Disney an absolute loan limit of $3.5 million and restricted Disney to producing animated shorts and finishing gestures already in production but nothing else. Early versions of future films were scaled back significantly. By January 1942, World War II and Disney finding the 3,000 feet of completed animation below feature quality led to The Wind In The Willows being shelved.

Disney revived production on The Wind in the Willows in October 1943 as one of only two feature films approved to proceed following Victory Through Air Power. At that time, Walt considered combining The Wind in the Willows with either Mickey and The Beanstalk (alternately titled The Legend of Happy Valley) or The Gremlins by Roald Dahl. His brother, Roy, initially disapproved of the idea out of fear it wouldn’t be able to earn back its budget, which the war effectively reduced to $523,000. [1] Walt then suggested pairing it with a proposed feature based on Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. During World War II, American Patriotism was at its all-time high, and Disney felt inspired to create various animations based on American legends. And what other way to celebrate American legends than with Sleepy Hollow? Roy said yes, and by February 1944, both The Wind in the Willows and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow underwent significant story treatments, including significantly shortening the latter from 48 minutes. This new feature, entitled The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, was then set for a 1946 release date.

The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad starts in a library as both segments are based on literature. The first segment, based on The Wind In The Willows despite coming second in the title, is introduced and narrated by Gracie Fields. Starring J. Thaddeus Toad, the owner of the famous Toad Hall, Mr. Toad is shown to be well-meaning but reckless and ultimately succumbs to his numerous obsessions. Consequently, he has a reputation for causing a large amount of property damage and thus acquiring a large amount of debt. This time, he develops an obsession for motorcars (or “motormania” as he calls it), and it drives him to trade Toad Hall for a new shiny car. When his recklessness leads him to jail, his friends must break him out of jail to clear his name. Meanwhile, Bing Crosby narrates The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, which stars a lanky, gluttonous schoolmaster named Ichabod Crane, who is new to the town of Sleepy Hollow, New York. He immediately falls for the wealthiest woman in Sleepy Hollow, Katrina Van Tassel. Ichoabod competes with Abraham “Brom Bones” Van Brunt, a roguish hero and bully, for her affection, but Crane ends up biting more than he can chew and finds himself facing the Headless Horseman on Halloween night.

The premiere for The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad was held in New York on April 20, 1946. It would later be released nationwide on August 15. It earned nearly $1.6 million in box office rentals worldwide, helping that it was the first Disney feature released after World War II. Critics universally praised the narration by Gracie Fields [2] and Bing Crosby alongside the voice acting, music, and animation for The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Critics treated the animation for The Wind In The Willows more harshly because it, unlike Sleepy Hollow, started production as a full-length feature. Also worth noting was that critics and audiences saw the humor in the first segment as kid-oriented compared to the broader appealing humor in the second segment. The two featurettes would be re-released separately in the 1950s, and Disney would not pair them together again until Ichabod and Mr. Toad premiered on home video in 1996 for its 50th anniversary. The Headless Horseman sequence of Ichabod became one of the darkest and most iconic sequences in animation history. The Ichabod segment as a whole eventually grew into a Halloween staple.

Voice Cast:

• Gracie Fields as the Narrator of The Wind in the Willows
• Eric Blore as J. Thaddeus Toad
• J. Pat O'Malley as Cyril Proudbottom
• John McLeish (John Ployardt) as the Prosecuting Attorney
• Colin Campbell as Mole
• Campbell Grant as Angus MacBadger
• Claud Allister as Water Rat
• Oliver Wallace as Mr. Winkle
• Bing Crosby as the Narrator of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Brom Bones.
• Jerry Colona as Ichabod Crane
• Andy Russell as Ichabod Crane’s singing voice and the male villagers
• Dinah Shore as Katrina Van Tassel and the female villagers

[1] As was the case IOTL per Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination by Neal Gabler (2006)
[2] She was actually signed on before dropping out and being replaced with Basil Rathbone IOTL per The Vindicator

 

[PGSBHurricane]

Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1946)​

The film that launched Disney’s rising star into superstardom (only surpassed by Mickey Mouse by the end of the century) had controversial origins. It started life as a film centered around the “Uncle Remus” stories adapted from Joel Chandler Harris that dated back to 1876. In 1938, Walt Disney expressed an interest in adapting the storybook. He claimed to have heard the stories as a child, not just about the titular character himself but other characters like Brother Rabbit, Brother Fox, and Brother Bear. That April, Disney prepared two research reports to determine the plausibility of adapting the stories into film. He succeeded in purchasing the rights to the stories in 1939 and paid the Harris family $10,000 for the rights. By that summer, one of the storyboard artists had drawn up four storyboards worth of story sketches. In November 1940, Disney visited the Harris home in Atlanta to get a better feel for the stories so he could more faithfully adapt them.

Meanwhile, Disney’s brother Roy had his misgivings about the project, doubting it would be worth granting a budget of over $1 million and more than twenty-five minutes of animation. Ultimately, the studio decided that animation would comprise only a third of the film, and the rest would be in live-action. But Walt began having his doubts by 1941 for a couple of reasons. The first was the casting of Remus. In February 1941, Walt reached out to African-American singer-actor Paul Robeson after performing in Porgy and Bess about portraying the character of Remus and suggesting possible script outlines. Robeson declined, later citing his then-controversial politics. The second was the acclaim of Roger the Rabbit. The source material for the character, Tangled, was really just a glorified tour of the studio with a featurette at the end featuring Roger. The movie as a whole was poorly received, but critics and audiences liked Roger so much that Roger the Rabbit merchandise was planned by the end of 1941, and there were letters requesting more of him on screens to top it off.

World War II shelved the project until 1944 when Disney hired southern writer Dalton Reymond to write the script. Reymond delivered a 51-page outline on May 15. Disney was concerned about the widespread racial stereotyping, even by the standards of the time. The overt use of racist stereotypes was so bad that the Hays Office reviewed Reymond's outline and demanded that some terminology be changed. [1] Not helping matters was that after Disney hired African-American performer and writer Clarence Muse as a consultant for the screenplay, Muse quit when Reymond refused suggestions to portray the black characters as anything more dignified than Southern stereotypes. Between this and the rise of Roger Rabbit’s popularity, Walt had a new idea. In June, he fired Reymond and replaced him with Maurice Rapf to temper the slant of the original screenplay. The vision for the script then evolved to have a more modernistic feel. When filming began in December 1944, he changed the title to reflect the elevated role of Roger the Rabbit and a mystery angle to Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

The story begins one day when three kids named Ginny, Johnny, and Toby come to visit the house of a famous local storyteller named Franklin [2] on a cold, rainy day. After letting the children in the house, he sings the iconic song Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah to cheer them up in the face of the weather. Franklin then starts his own story about a rabbit named Roger Rabbit who co-exists in a world with humans and other animated cartoon characters. One day, Roger suspects that his human wife, Betsy [3], is having an affair with a human cartoon producer named Maroon. Roger attempts to confront Maroon about this, but he disappears very mysteriously. The next day, the newspapers show that he not only vanished, but also became the prime suspect for stealing a bunch of cartoon shorts. Now Betsy must team up with a detective named Ed to find her husband and clear his name while traveling to various worlds and encountering new cartoon characters and people along the way.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit premiered on November 12, 1946, in Phoenix, Arizona, and was released nationwide eight days later. Critics gave Roger mixed to positive reviews. Despite the animation being only 30 minutes of the total runtime, most agreed the mixture of animation and live-action was an improvement over Saludos Amigos. Roger Rabbit himself was considered its highlight due to his personality and design. Dalton Reymond and the family of Joel Chandler Harris were outraged at what they saw as a betrayal of the source material. It was a mild box office success despite their outrage, earning $3.5 million at the global box office on a budget of $2.2 million. From a modern perspective, the characters of Brother Rabbit, Brother Fox, and Brother Bear have received criticism as Southern stereotypes were the basis of their characterizations. But many of those criticisms have been moderated since their designs and personalities aren’t nearly as blatantly stereotypical as they were in the original Uncle Remus outline, nor are the characters themselves nearly as prominent as they were originally. Nowadays, while not quite a classic, Who Framed Roger Rabbit has a huge fanbase that fondly remembers it.

Live-Action Cast:

• James Baskett as Franklin
• Bobby Driscoll as Johnny
• Luana Patten as Ginny
• Glenn Leedy as Toby
• Erik Rolf as Ed
• Hattie McDaniel as Woman #1
• Mary Field as Woman #2

Voice Cast:

• Cliff Edwards as Roger Rabbit
• Jerry Colonna as Roger Rabbit’s alter ego
• Ruth Warrick as Betsy Rabbit
• The Hall Johnson Choir as Brother Rabbit, Brother Fox, and Brother Bear
• Walt Disney as Mickey Mouse (cameo)
• Clarence Nash as Donald Duck (cameo)
• Pinto Colvig as Goofy (cameo)
• Billy Bletcher as Maroon

[1] Per Gabler, 2006
[2] James Baskett's middle name IRL
[3] Since Jessica is too contemporary, I changed her name to Betsy based on her IOTL performance model, Betsy Brantley.

A/N: Essentially, this is a hybrid of OTL's Song of The South and Who Framed Roger Rabbit, more so the latter. The only remaining stereotypically Southern characters from Song of The South are Brother Rabbit, Fox, and Bear but their characterizations are more akin to the Crows from Dumbo than their OTL counterparts (hence their voice actors) so it's more forgivable ITTL even if they're still divisive characters. As for Roger Rabbit's voice actor, I know Cliff Edwards was widely suggested since he's supposed to play the same role that Jiminy Cricket did for Disney at this point in time. For other reasons, I had Sterling Holloway or Jerry Colonna as him under the Tangled section but I will change it. The decision for him to have two voice actors for this film comes from the fact that I couldn't decide on my own so I decided to have Cliff Edwards voice his soft-spoken serious self while Jerry Colonna voices his eccentric, wild, and nutty alter ego that he transforms into depending on his mood starting in this film.

 

[PGSBHurricane]

The Reluctant Dragon and Other Tales (1947)​

British author Kenneth Grahame first published The Reluctant Dragon in 1898 as part of a collection of stories. A new separate edition was published in 1939, just as Disney had just come off his spree to Europe to seek more stories to make films out of, including another story by Grahame called The Wind In the Willows. By early 1940, just after the release and subsequent box office failure of Alice In Wonderland, Walt had started considering the story of The Reluctant Dragon for the “tour of the studio” film that would later become Tangled and creating a featurette based on Graham’s work instead of the Rapunzel fairytale, but Disney ultimately settled on the latter by May. At the same time, work was beginning on a new feature, which Walt intended to have his most iconic star lead. Disney shelved The Reluctant Dragon until the release of Victory Through Air Power in which it was determined the animation quality would not be suitable for a feature film but rather a package film.

Planning for Mickey and The Beanstalk began in early 1940 following the cancellation of The Concert Feature. Animators Bill Cottrell and T. Hee pitched the idea of a feature based on Jack and the Beanstalk starring Mickey Mouse. As much as Walt enjoyed the pitch, he was concerned about how they would use his characters, but they succeeded in assuring him that everything would be okay, and Disney green-lighted the project. Story development and production officially began on May 2. One year later, after the rough animation for The Lion King was complete, the Mickey feature, known at the time as The Legend of Happy Valley, began production in earnest. Since it was a low-budget film, 50 minutes of animation had been completed within six months. RKO, though, still doubted it would be a hit. The Disney animators’ strike delayed production long enough to cancel its proposed Christmas 1941 release date, and World War II (which cut off Disney’s access to foreign markets) put this on hold indefinitely until the war ended.

Ironically, World War II brought a new opportunity out of left field. In July 1942, Royal Air Force Assistant air attache Roald Dahl, then in Washington DC, connected with Walt, having written Gremlin Lore. He sent it to the British Information Services for approval, who then passed it along to Disney. In November, the RAF gave Dahl consent to help develop the story into a film after months of corresponding with Disney. While at the Studio, Disney partnered with Random House to publish The Gremlins in April 1943, selling 50,000 copies in the United States. There was one major problem, though. Aside from the fact that the RAF retained copyrights to the gremlins and demanded final script approval, Disney failed to get exclusive rights to the subject of “gremlins,” as other studios were making gremlin-based cartoons. One creative solution was to retitle The Gremlins to The Widgets for the film [1], and a financial solution was to develop it alongside The Reluctant Dragon and The Legend of Happy Valley as part of a package feature.

The Reluctant Dragon and Other Tales predictably begins with The Reluctant Dragon. A father tells his boy a story by father about a dragon living in a nearby Oxfordshire cave. The two decide to investigate if there is a real dragon, and lo and behold, there is. But this dragon, named Giles [2], is peaceful, friendly, and well-versed in poetry. Giles befriends the duo, but the townsfolk soon discover Giles’ existence and assume he is a fearsome beast, sending for Saint George to slay him. Now it’s a race against the clock to save Giles’ from the wrath of angry villagers. The next and shortest segment is based on Roald Dah’s gremlin story, titled The Widgets. The titular widgets are known for sabotaging British aircraft (via their small size) by causing numerous mechanical troubles and mishaps as revenge for the British destroying their forest home. Now, with a far greater threat arising, everyone must join forces to fight for the safety of their homeland. Thirdly, and lastly, is the most famous segment of the bunch, Mickey and The Beanstalk. After years of prosperity, Happy Valley has devolved into an impoverished wasteland, and Mickey, Donald, and Goofy are desperate for food. Mickey agrees to sell their cow in exchange for food but ends up trading it for magic beans. They sprout overnight into a cloud-high beanstalk, and Mickey and his pals venture into the clouds, ending up at the castle of Willie the Giant, who they must avoid at all costs.

The Reluctant Dragon and Other Tales premiered in New York City on September 27, 1947, before debuting nationwide on March 12, 1948. The package feature received mixed reviews from film critics at the time. Reviewers praised the plots of all three segments, alongside the voice performances, but the animation was criticized for being cheap-looking, many noting that Disney made the correct decision not to release these three films as individual feature-length films. The use of Edgar Bergen, Charlie McCarthy, and Mortimer Snerd was seen as not necessarily bad but took up too much screen time. It was successful enough at the box office, earning approximately $1.9 million on a $1.1 million budget. Audiences found themselves bored with the first segment, with each succeeding segment being more entertaining than the last. In the present, while none of the segments are outright hated, the only one with a large fanbase is Mickey and The Beanstalk, thanks to this being Disney’s last voice role as Mickey and its humor being among the best of all package film segments.

Live-Action Cast:

• Edgar Bergen as himself, Charlie McCarthy, and Mortimer Snerd
• Luana Patten as herself
• Glenn Leedy as himself

Voice Cast:

• Bobby Driscoll as The Boy
• Ernie Alexander as The Father
• Sterling Holloway as Giles
• Claud Allister as St. George
• The King's Men as The Villagers
• Cliff Edwards as Gus
• Jimmy McDonald as Widgets Gus, Jamface, and Prescott
• Dinah Shore as Fifi and Nella [3]
• Walt Disney as Mickey Mouse
• Clarence Nash as Donald Duck
• Pinto Colvig as Goofy
• Ruth Clifford as Queen Minnie
• Billy Gilbert as Willie the Giant
• Anita Gordon as the Golden Harp

[1] Widgets were the name of the Baby Gremlins in the book but with rights to the gremlins denied, I decided to rename the Gremlins as a whole to the Widgets
[2] St. George retains his name from the original story and thus I decided to give the name Giles to the dragon instead of being unnamed like OTL
[3] Fifinellas were apparently female Gremlins in the book so I split it into Fifi and Nella and gave them two two individual characters