Roger's role in the Disney company is equal to Jiminy's but he has a personality much closer to the March Hare's in terms of zaniness.
The Shuffled Disneyverse 2.0: Another Alternate Disney Canon Timeline
- Thread starter PGSBHurricane
- Start date
Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1946)
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
- 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
[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.
As for TTL's Song of the South and Brother Bear: Neither film will have anything to do with Who Framed Roger Rabbit and at least one of them will be produced after the Disney Golden Age ends in 1959.
Do the Brer characters only make cameos or do they play into the plotline?
Interesting to see Roger Rabbit having an alter-ego, having two voice actors could be confusing but I'm interested to see how it'll work. Since Who Framed Roger Rabbit is somewhat an original story here, what happens to the 1981 book IOTL?
They do play a role in the plot in what’s basically the setting of OTL’s Song of The South but nothing outside of it. Speaking of Song of The South, a couple of the moral lessons from the film that carry over from OTL (in spite of all its other faults) is that you can’t run away from your problems and that you should never needlessly poke your nose into other people’s business without reason. The two voice actors thing was something of a compromise out of universe but in universe it’s due to the number of letters fans sent to the studio requesting to see more of his wacky and downright insane side. The book Who Censored Roger Rabbit probably doesn’t exist ITTL or if it does then the characters are probably renamed and plot points changed so that it’s unrecognizable from OTL’s counterpart.
For the next two titles, they will be titles that have been released IOTL up to this point.
Honestly, I'm not sure what will happen with him at the moment. I'll do some more research into the matter.
I know I originally said this would be a side project. It turns out I'm focusing on this timeline a lot and considering making it one of my two primary TLs. Stay tuned for more soon.
On another note, I'm standing by my decision not to include The Nightmare Before Christmas because I don't associate it with Disney at all but rather as a Tim Burton film. Not helping is that it was released under Touchstone Pictures and even though it's Disney with a different label, I've seen enough Touchstone films that it feels more like its own things instead of being part of Disney.
Alright, I should be back soon. I'm now refocusing much of my attention to this TL and my other main timeline now that I'm done with another side project IRL for the time being. I've also been thinking about The Nightmare Before Christmas and I might decide to include it in the re-shuffling of the films post-1959 (the end of the Golden Age/Silver Age IMO).
Good to see you back and I'm looking forward to whatever the next title may be.
I think you should include it, TNBC was planned to be included in the main WDAC umbrella after all.
There’s also other films to consider such as The Wild (replacing Dinosaur in the European WDAC), Planes and its sequel, a couple more Winnie The Pooh movies (all made by the same studio as A Goofy Movie), and other films such as A Christmas Carol, Mars Needs Moms, Gnomeo and Juliet, Frankenweenie, and Strange Magic (all of which fall under the same category as TNBC and The Wild). The Ducktales movie is also possible albeit less likely.
I feel like only the Wild, DuckTales: Treasure of the Lost Lamp and the Tigger Movie could work, maybe the Planes duology. Everything else is a bit of a stretch.
If we’re including Gnomeo and Juliet, then its sequel Sherlock Gnomes should be added as well.
I’m not even referring to The Tigger Movie. I’m referring to Piglet’s Big Movie and the Heffalump Movie. I’ll do some further research and see which of those makes sense to include.