Jim Henson Buys Disney? So Crazy It COULD'VE HAPPENED

There's a new scenario on the alternate history forum called "A Hippie In The House of Mouse (Jim Henson at Disney, 1980)." The thread's creator Geekhis Khan made the argument that Disney in the early 1980s was in such bad shape that none other than Jim Henson, made wealthy by the success of the Muppets, could have potentially bought out the company if he wanted.

Preposterous you say? The mighty Disney bought up by a shaggy hippie and some singing puppets? Not really. The author posted a lengthy bibliography that includes a lot of history of Disney, biographies of Henson himself, etc. to show that it could've been done if it was handled carefully by Henson and in this case some more grounded Hollywood allies to handle the less-than-straightforward things (shell companies, company politics) Henson might not be comfortable with. This is also the period where Disney is at its weakest, with Walt dead and the company stagnating under his unimaginative, bean-counting successors.

(This is when Don Bluth left Disney to create The Secret of NIMH, An American Tail, and The Land Before Time. Here's one interview I did with Bluth and Gary Goldman that goes deep into the history there and here's another.)

Disney's situation got so bad, especially after the failure of The Black Cauldron, that it was subject to a "corporate raid" that could have sold the company for parts. It was defeated and new management brought in that revived the company, but it shows how bad of shape they were in despite their appearance of great power and wealth.

Although the scenario is still in its early stages, there's a lot of potential for serious changes to some very well-known properties:

*The Black Cauldron might not have bombed so badly. As was discussed in the Myopia podcast episode about it, TBC throws together bits and bobs of several books in the Chronicles of Prydain fantasy series and it comes out a mess. Several people in the thread were convinced Henson could save the project, although something not involving puppets might be a bit out of his wheelhouse.

*Something really interesting is what might happen with The Dark Crystal, which at one point got shelved due to some corporate mergers and skeptical money-types. To get it released Henson had to buy it from the new owners and release it with his own money. With Disney's resources behind it hopefully it'll be something more lively than our history's version--we did a Myopia podcast episode on that one too and although it was beautiful, it was very dull. And hopefully more successful too. The Netflix show Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance is set in the same world and is very fun and entertaining. Disney was capable of producing darker fare in this period (see The Black Hole), so it's possible this could be the return of the old magic.

*Hopefully nothing bad will happen to Labyrinth, which was a pretty good film as-is. Maybe with Disney behind it, the film could be even better, but things could also be worse, or at least different. At least we could have Sarah (hopefully still played by Connelly) as a Disney Princess. And ye gods, Jareth as a Disney Prince.

(Also we did a Myopia podcast episode on that one too.)

*Henson apparently had a vision for making puppetry a lot more than something for little-little kids. And puppetry can be used to that effect--The Dark Crystal, especially once you factor in Age of Resistance and hopefully sequels, is something like the Lord of the Rings. And the original Pumpkinhead shows just how scary puppets can be.

I'm definitely looking forward to more. So to paraphrase Epic Rap Battles of History, let's hop on Walt's steamboat with a puppet-loving hippie at the helm and see where it takes us.

On Halle Bailey's Ariel and the Egyptian 25th Dynasty

Disney recently announced that Halle Bailey, an African-American singer and actress from Atlanta (represent!), has been cast as Ariel in a live-action version of the Disney animated classic The Little Mermaid. Although I haven't seen any ugly commentary on social media about it myself, I have heard some people are getting upset and I can easily imagine this being true, either due to authenticity concerns about the source material, straight-up racism, or other issues.

Firstly, although The Little Mermaid is based on a Danish story (by author Hans Christian Anderson), the mermaid civilization is not connected to my knowledge to Danish society in any significant way. If it turns out they're descended from Vikings mutated by some kind of magic let me know, but it's my understanding that's not the case. The mermaids could easily be migrants from somewhere else who settled in the vicinity of Denmark, perhaps due to the Medieval Warm Period making their original homeland in the Mediterranean or even West Africa inhospitable. Therefore, even though the landlubbers nearby are white, the mermaids could be Semitic or even black. Although I'm generally not a fan of "if it's fantasy it doesn't have to be 'realistic'" attitude, the above explanation is a plausible one for a large Middle Eastern or black (mermaid) population in an otherwise European setting. After all, the Gypies (whose actual name for themselves is Roma or Romany) are originally from India and the Hungarians are a Turkic or Finnic people originally from Russia.

Secondly, even if the mermaid population generally is of European in appearance, ruling elites don't necessarily match up with the local population. Much of northern England was ruled by Vikings for awhile, the whole of England was ruled by different French dynasties from the Norman conquest of 1066 until the Welsh Henry Tudor took power in 1485, parts of or all of China were ruled by non-Chinese steppe peoples on many different occasions, etc. More appropos would be the 25th Dynasty of Egypt--although the Egyptians were a Semitic people, the 25th Dynasty was originally from Nubia, much farther south.

So here's where it gets Game of Thrones. Triton is originally from somewhere else and is the founder of a new dynasty, either elected by other members of the mermaid elite after the previous king dies without an heir or who seizes power in some kind of civil war. As king he exiles Ursula, ostensibly for practicing witchcraft and other sorts of bad behavior but really because she's a member of the previous dynasty. However, not only is Triton foreign, but Triton is a widower with no interest in remarrying and has only daughters, no sons. This makes his regime vulnerable and Ursula plays on Ariel's interest in human culture as part of some kind of scheme to seize power.

Yes, that's needlessly complicated for a kids movie, but they did elaborate on the original Aladdin to make the new live-action version more elaborate (Jasmine seeks to become the next ruler of Agrabah in the vein of Razia Sultan, the only female ruler of the Muslim Delhi Sultanate, Jafar is a "street rat" himself who rose to become the grand vizier). If this is too much and if Disney wants to keep Triton as a white Zeus-alike, they can always depict his late wife as being black and Ariel takes after her mother rather than her father in looks.

Movie Review: Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001)

I hesitate to call this a "blast from the past" movie review even though it's for the film podcast Myopia: Defend Your Childhood because I never saw Atlantis: The Lost Empire in theaters even though it came out the summer between my sophomore and junior years of high school. Perhaps I should have, since it wasn't long historically speaking (less than a decade) until The Princess and the Frog and Disney abandoning old-school 2D animation in favor of 3D stuff like Tangled and Wreck-It Ralph. Let the record state I generally like the 2D look better, especially in the hands of a master like Disney alumnus Don Bluth when he did things like The Secret of the NIMH and Titan A.E., both of which, incidentally, I previously reviewed for Myopia.

Oh well. Too late now. Here's the podcast. And now for the review...

The Plot

It turns out Atlantis was real, but sank beneath the ocean in a cataclysm that killed many of its citizens but left a few survivors hidden in force-fielded disaster shelters. Flash forward thousands of years and we meet Milo Thatch (Michael J. Fox), a boiler-room worker and sometimes academic at a museum whose board of directors is tired of hearing about his theories on Atlantis. Recruited by a friend of his late grandfather, he sets off on an undersea voyage in search of a lost city and its legendary advanced technology. Unfortunately some members of his crew have ulterior motives, and trouble ensues.

No wonder we did this as the last film in a month ostensibly dedicated to Indiana Jones films...

The Good

*The movie starts out with a bang with the destruction of Atlantis (well, most of it) and then we cut straight to Milo's misadventures. Those happen to be hilarious, by the way, especially when the board of trustees are running away from him in a desperate attempt to avoid listening to his theories about Atlantis. Then we meet Whitmore and the submarine and off we go.

*The animation is well-done, meshing traditional drawings with CGI.

*The supporting cast of ethnic stereotypes was kind of amusing, plus they did put some effort into developing them as characters. African-American Dr. Joshua Sweet (Phil Morris) is actually half-Native American and raised in both cultures, while Puerto Rican Audrey Ramirez's (Jacqueline Obradors) more typically masculine interests were encouraged by a father who wanted sons. And given how exaggeratedly macho she can get, one can infer this didn't make her family particularly popular back home and perhaps she had to fight. The one who got the least development is the lecherous and filthy Frenchman "Mole" (Corey Burton).

*Surprisingly edgy for a Disney film on multiple levels--one action sequence is set off by Milo setting off for a midnight crap (complete with a shovel, toilet paper, and him taking his pants off), cars with screaming soldiers exploding, on-screen bleeding wounds, etc. No wonder this one was rated PG.

*Some of the historical detail works, like WWI-style uniforms for the soldiers and one character's angsting about the dangers of the Kaiser.

*There are no contrived ways for the heroes to win without killing bad guys, or at least it's kept to a minimum. You want to stop a bunch of violent thugs from destroying an ancient culture? Prepare to get your hands dirty. I've pointed out the problems with that before. And even though our hero isn't the mightiest man by any stretch of the imagination, he gets in on it too.

The Bad

*During the leviathan attack scene, it was awfully dark and hard to tell what was going on. To be fair I watching that part on my Kindle Fire HDX while on the apartment elliptical rather than on my laptop or a television, but I don't recall having the same issues with the rest of the movie. Considering how much I liked the film's animation, this was somewhat disappointing.

*This is something I didn't notice until Nic pointed it out on the podcast, but Kida, the Atlantean princess, is either unable to or has difficulty reading the old-school Atlantean language, as do apparently many other Atlanteans. Thing is, Kida and her father at least and probably much more of the population have been around since the collapse of Atlantis itself, their aging process dramatically slowed by their supernatural/super-science crystals. It's not like Milo found a group of descendants of ancient Romans who over the course of generations have gradually forgotten most of their language--one can infer that the Atlantean king never actually taught his daughter to read.

Granted, the Atlantean king doesn't seem to be the type (he does, after all, tell Kida she will be queen after him), so I doubt that's actually the case. However, the fact it can even be read that way is a bit of a problem. I could imagine a modern Latin scholar finding a lost Roman colony and re-teaching them stuff they'd lost (remember, most people in ancient times would be illiterate anyway), but given how long-lived the Atlanteans are, it seems very unlikely they'd just forget. If it was made clear that the language used on the technology is something akin to hieroglyphics or Latin and the Atlanteans typically use only a "lower" script/language as was the case in ancient Egypt that might be one thing, but it's NOT. Also, Kida is the heir to the throne and part of the upper class. Realistically she at least would know how to read it even if the Atlantean commoners wouldn't, and given the prevalence of their technology before the collapse, I would expect more of the Atlanteans to know it too.

*The Atlanteans' ability to speak all the different languages doesn't really make a lot of sense. Even thought the Atlanteans look Polynesian, their original language seems to be some kind of Indo-European dialect (the young Kida calls her mother something resembling "Ma"), but despite living underwater for thousands of years they can speak modern English and French? Maybe if it was made clear they'd rescued survivors of ships destroyed by the guardian monster Leviathan over the centuries, that would make more sense.

(It might also replenish their gene pool--considering how they're descended from a relatively small number of survivors and all seem to look generally the same, they're probably getting more and more inbred as the generations pass.)

*It's established early on that Sweet is an Indian medicine man as well as a modern-style doctor, but we never see him trying any Native American medical techniques when things go wrong. It's like a gun on the mantelpiece that's never fired.

*And the Atlanteans initially seem awfully welcoming to people who'd barreled into their homeland uninvited, armed, and in such large numbers. It's even lampshaded by the Atlantean king. Some more mixed reactions by the rank-and-file Atlantean soldiers to their commander's sociability with the strangers might be in order. And the villains' plot could be triggered by an attack by some overzealous Atlantean (think Kocoum attacking John Smith in Pocahontas)--if some idiot gave them a pretext and it isn't initially clear who attacked whom on whose orders, that could keep some of the good people on the bad side longer.

The Verdict

Generally an entertaining film, but there are some logic issues. 8.0 out of 10.

Untold Stories Behind Other Stories

Sometimes when you see a movie, read a book, etc., there's something that indicates there's another interesting story in this world waiting to be told. Think Obi-Wan's reminiscing about how Darth Vader "had been a pupil of mine before he turned to evil" and "was seduced by the Dark Side of the Force." Although the Star Wars prequels weren't all they could have been to say the least (I left Revenge of the Sith straight-up laughing after "NOOOOO!"), it's my understanding the Clone Wars cartoon (the various versions of them) is well-done and the fall of Anakin Skywalker could have been a great tragedy in the Greek sense. He has his tragic flaws...fear of loss, anger...and between the negative influence that drawing on the Force using these emotions has and the fact a dark lord has been grooming him since the age of ten, things don't end well for Anakin, Obi-Wan, Padme, the Jedi Order, etc.

Well, that can be applied to some other stories, ones much less well-known than Star Wars.

*I saw a high-school stage version of The Wedding Singer with a former girlfriend and there's a line where Julia reminisces that her young-Trump boyfriend Glenn used to be much sweeter before he got so much money. There might be a story there...Glenn could have entered the New York business world a much better person (perhaps emulating or working for a relative...there's a line in one of the songs "don't cry uncle unless your uncle's the CEO") and got seduced by the money, power, sex, perhaps drugs, etc. that this world offered and turned into a massive jerk. The Glenn we see in TWS is a selfish, controlling, narcissistic jerk, but the murderous warlord Darth Vader was once a pleasant little boy who loved his mother, had lots of friends, and wanted to free the slaves.

*Although I've never seen the Australian Western film The Man From Snowy River (at least in its entirety), I did become curious about it and found there was actually actually a live musical "arena spectacular." It tells broadly the same story as the original film--a penniless young cowboy proves his worth as a man and woos the daughter of a wealthy station owner--but look closely at the cast. One of the side characters is named "Harrison" and is a young cowboy who made a fortune betting on horse racing. The disapproving (until the sequel) father of the spirited young Jessica is named Harrison and he made the money he used to build his ranch betting on horses. The musical is actually a prequel to the film.

(Given how zealous he seems to be about keeping his daughter away from protagonist Jim Craig in the films, the love story from the "arena spectacular" might have ended badly and soured him on the whole "redneck cowboys wooing ranch heiresses" thing. Yes, Harrison is a controlling ass whose behavior alienated his brother, his dead wife, and his daughter, but if it turns out there's some actual wisdom hidden in the class prejudice, sexism, and narcissism it takes the events of both films to at least mitigate, it would make him more interesting.)

*In the Sharpe television series, there's a soldier named Harris who the other characters say should write a book. He's based on a real soldier, who wrote an enlisted man's account of the Napoleonic Wars entitled The Recollections of Rifleman Harris. How Harris "wrote" that book--an illiterate man, he dictated it to an officer friend who eventually got it published--could be an interesting story too.

(The fictional Harris is literate and dies at Waterloo in the TV series, but if Michael Crichton can do the "mostly dead" thing for Ian Malcolm in The Lost World--he dies in Jurassic Park but shows up in the sequel--so could Cornwell and friends if there's any interest.)

And there are plenty of other examples. The TVTropes "Hero of Another Story" and "Villain of Another Story" have plenty. The Avengers depicts Hawkeye and Black Widow bantering about something that went down in Budapest that I think could make a good basis for a prequel movie. In my Wastelands world (the first of many planned novels is under consideration by a major publisher, so fingers crossed), I have the villain Grendel's son Falki reference events I later turned into the novella "Son of Grendel. I also have another planned novella explaining just why Sergeant Ezekiel Thaxton fears the Blood Alchemy Host (an army of mutants bred in the shadow of an abandoned nuclear reactor) so much.

Movie Review: Rogue One (2016)

The other night I saw the new Star Wars movie Rogue One, the first of the "Anthology" films set in the Star Wars universe now that it's owned by Disney.

How was it? Here goes...

The Plot

The opening crawl of Star Wars: A New Hope describes how the Rebel Alliance has won its first victory over the evil Empire and how the plans for the new Imperial weapon--the Death Star--have been stolen.

How did that happen, you ask? Well, the movie begins with the sinister Imperial weapons developer Orson Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn) coming to take into custody runaway scientist Galen Erso (Mads Mikkelsen), in the process killing wife Lyra Erso. Their young daughter Jyn (played by Felicity Jones as an adult) flees the scene and when we next see her, she's an adult in an Imperial prison. A group of Rebels spring her--without much enthusiasm on her part--and Rebel leader Mon Mothma assigns her and Rebel spy Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) to retrieve information on the Death Star sent by her father, who sufficient to say is not pleased with what the Imperials are making him do.

Although we all know that the Rebels will get their hands on the Death Star plans, just how that happens is where the fun is...

The Good

*I really like the concept of anthology films in general. The Star Wars universe is so gigantic that you can tell lots of different stories that don't ever touch on the main characters like the Skywalkers, Han and Chewbacca, etc. In the case of Rogue One, only Darth Vader, Mon Mothma, Bail Organa, and a couple others are established characters. The rest are new.

*This is basically a war movie in a science fiction universe. The last third or so of it is a gigantic battle sequence that's very well done and makes it far clearer just what this movie is about than, well, "Star Wars."

*Vader only appears in two scenes, but in the second of the two, well, hot damn. It's more like Star Wars Rebels than the original trilogy in terms of Vader's combat ability. Heck, some reviewers describe that scene as being more like a horror movie.

*The movie gets more into the moral ambiguity that fighting a galaxy-wide war will necessitate. We have Rebel groups excommunicated by the Alliance for excessive violence, we have assassinations, etc. Waging war against a ruthless opponent is pretty much impossible to do with clean hands and this is made clear.

*I'm not overly familiar with the cartoons like Clone Wars and Rebels, especially the former, but I know that Saw Gerrera, the rebel too extreme for the Rebellion, was originally from Clone Wars. And I'm told the Ghost, the ship from Rebels, appears during the fleet-action scene. It's good to see Disney integrating all the different Star Wars properties.

*Speaking of the fleet-action scene, my favorite scene from Return of the Jedi was the Battle of Endor. The Battle of Scarif that serves as the climax of the film is a lot smaller-scale, but it's still well-done.

*The ground-combat portion of the Battle of Scarif is well-done as well. We see combined-arms and a much more effective demonstration of the importance of air support than the hovership-looking things used to trip up AT-ATs in The Empire Strikes Back.

*The reprogrammed Imperial enforcer robot K2SO, voiced by Alan Tudyk, is pretty fun. He gets some good lines.

*The movie is really dark. That might not be to everybody's taste, but given how the Emperor is building a superweapon and is on the verge of dissolving the Senate and cementing himself firmly as uber-dictator, these were not good days. Obi-Wan calls them "the dark times" for a reason.

The Bad

*The movie is extremely long and the first parts of it are rather slow. That was my single biggest problem with the movie.

*Owing to the importance of the Death Star, they needed Grand Moff Tarkin, but Peter Cushing (who played him in the original) is dead. They briefly had him at the end of Revenge of the Sith, seen from a distance, but that wouldn't work this time. However, rather than recasting him with a new actor made up to look like Tarkin, they used CGI to paste Cushing's face onto actor Guy Henry's body. It kind of looks funny and I wish they hadn't done that.

*No title crawl. This is petty, but it might provide some good context.

The Verdict

Better than The Force Awakens by far. Hopefully the first of many to come. 9.0 out of 10.

How I Would Have Done STAR WARS: THE FORCE AWAKENS (2015)

It's a philosophy of mine that criticism is easy but suggesting useful alternatives is hard. I've applied that philosophy to my critique of the movie Mortal Kombat and suggested some ways to improve the movie while retaining the basic plot.

So now I'm going to apply this philosophy to the science-fiction film Star Wars: The Force Awakens, which I saw last weekend but thought was mediocre. Here there be spoilers, so be ye warned...

*The non-movie new canon as I understand (I haven't reach much of it, other than Delilah S. Dawson's story "The Perfect Weapon") has the Empire implode relatively quickly after the death of the Emperor and Vader at Endor. Disarmed and forced to pay reparations but otherwise left alone by the New Republic, it reorganizes as the "First Order" like it does in the new canon. That aspect can stay. The Republic, preoccupied with internal issues, writes off the First Order as some kooky non-problem, much like how many people view North Korea.

*However, the First Order is secretly in league with a Dark Side cult called the Knights of Ren. Luke Skywalker has revived the Jedi with trainees of his own, possible survivors of Order 66 or those they trained (think Kanan and Ezra from the Rebels television series), but one of his students early in the film horribly betrays Luke and massacres most of the New Jedi Order alongside the Knights of Ren. Luke is married to Mara Jade at this point and they have a daughter Rey--and during the betrayal, Mara is killed and Luke and the young Rey are separated. This could be the prologue to the film. The Knights of Ren are led by a masked "Darth Caedus" and Luke seems to know who he is, but we never get the name or relationship during the prologue. In the aftermath, Luke disappears to seek out the first Jedi temple and learn how he went wrong. Some suspect the First Order was involved, but the First Order denies it and the Republic doesn't pursue the matter.

*In the new canonical Star Wars comics, we meet a character named General Tagge, who Palpatine puts in charge of crushing the Rebellion after the destruction of the Death Star. Tagge believes in more conventional military tactics like an enlarged fleet and army, as opposed to superweapons like the Death Star. With the destruction of the Death Stars in A New Hope and The Return of the Jedi, one would hope Tagge's way of thinking would win out.

To that end, the First Order is conducting a massive military buildup. Mon Mothma or whoever is in charge of the Republic at this point does not take the threat seriously, so Leia (a civilian politician), Han Solo (one of the Republic's generals), and some other heroes of the first story resign from the government and set up their own private military effort against the First Order. Enough people believe that the First Order is in league with the Knights of Ren and their years-ago attack on the Jedi Order that they get a lot of support from within the Republic.

They find that the First Order is seeking the lost Katana Fleet, which would give them a massive advantage over the increasingly-complacent New Republic. Han has to go back into the underworld he'd long abandoned to reactivate old contacts and search for the Katana Fleet. This causes him to run into trouble with old enemies who now know he's not an untouchable military hero anymore. Perhaps we can even bring back Boba Fett?

*As part of Han and Leia's secret war, Poe Dameron finds the location of the Katana Fleet and is forced to hide it within his droid BB-8. We have the whole canonical plot with Poe and Finn escaping the First Order and finding the droid on Jakku...in the custody of Rey, who's grown up into an anti-social scavenger type like in the canonical film. The trio encounter Han and Chewbacca (perhaps they're on some kind of secret mission) and then try to get the droid to Leia per the film. They do--but not before the First Order somehow gets hold of the location of the Katana Fleet. We can still have Captain Phasma, General Hux, etc. Rey can find the old lightsaber and have flashbacks to her past (which she doesn't remember due to PTSD) and "take up the sword" so to speak.

*Instead of the attack on Starkiller Base (far too derivative of A New Hope and Yavin 4 for my tastes), the Resistance races the First Order to the Katana Fleet and starts capturing and/or destroying as much of it as possible before the First Order can take control. The First Order and the Knights of Ren led by "Darth Caedus" arrive and we have the confrontation between Han Solo and what turns out to be his son, Jacen Solo aboard one of the lost ships. I liked how Han reveals Kylo's real name by shouting "BEN!" to get his attention. Have Han shout "JACEN!" and you'd get the same effect. Jacen can then kill Han. Chewbacca wounds Jacen and he fights Finn and Rey. Even wounded he's still a dangerous opponent and stalemates Finn and Rey (possibly incapacitating the former like in the movie), but the arrival of Luke Skywalker and some new Jedi trainees forces Jacen and the Knights of Ren to flee. The Resistance has captured much of the Katana Fleet, but most of it has fallen into the hands of the First Order.

*The movie ends with the First Order, having taken control of much of the Katana Fleet, declaring war against the Republic and the Jedi. The admiral who will command the First Order's enlarged fleet is revealed to be none other than Grand Admiral Thrawn.

This would be the best of both worlds--it would be Disney "starting afresh" after de-canonizing most of the Expanded Universe but would retain enough of the EU to satisfy the EU fans. After all, the new canon includes characters like Quinlan Vos and Depa Billaba from the original canon, so it's not like Disney is averse to including EU elements.