Introduction: The Birth of Two (Technically Three) Stars
The year is 1940.
The field of animation was in the midst of a revolutionary period in America, with the nation's two biggest names in animation at the time having moved up from merely producing short subjects to making fully animated feature films late into the previous decade: Walt Disney Productions with Snow White and the Seven Dwarves in 1937, and Fleischer Studios with Gulliver's Travels two years later. The critical and financial success that these films would garner proved that animation could maintain the audience's investment beyond seven or eight minutes (at least in America - there had been quite a few feature-length animated films produced across a number of other countries before Disney made their mark with Snow White) and seemed to set Disney and Fleischer up to be the biggest rivals in the American animation industry. But this year, though hardly anyone knew or believed it at the time, would see the premiere of two short films that would kickstart the true major rivalry in the field of American animation...
On February 10th, Metro-Golden-Mayer (MGM) would premiere the short Puss Gets the Boot, directed by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera. The cartoon's plot is simple - A cat chasing a mouse while trying to avoid messing up the house (and thus, as hinted in the title, getting the boot), with the mouse taking advantage of the latter detail - yet it makes the most of said plot with its heavy emphasis on slapstick humor. While the management at MGM (who didn't have much interest in the cat-and-mouse chase concept to begin with) were initially content with just leaving this cartoon as a one-shot, the popularity of the cat-and-mouse duo soon convinced them to commission a full series of shorts starring the pair. A naming contest was held among MGM's animation staff to determine the official names of the duo (in the original short, the cat was named Jasper while the mouse was unnamed), with animator John Carr providing the winning suggestion - Tom (the cat) and Jerry (the mouse).
On July 27th, Warner Bros. would premiere the Merrie Melodies short A Wild Hare, directed by Frederick "Tex" Avery. In it, a hunter (Elmer Fudd in his 12th appearance) is repeatedly outwitted by his quarry: a wise-cracking, smart-aleck rabbit with a New York accent. Said rabbit had appeared in prototype form in a few previous shorts (including another that paired him with Elmer Fudd), yet this cartoon would mark the first "true" appearance of the rabbit that, by the time of his next appearance, would be officially known as Bugs Bunny (named after Ben "Bugs" Hardaway, who co-directed the first and third appearances of the rabbit's prototype).
The positive reception of these two shorts was made evident when they were nominated for the Academy Award (also known as the Oscar) for Best Animated Short Subject at the 13th Academy Awards ceremony - while Disney, normally the expected winner of that category, wouldn't have any of their shorts from that same year nominated (though their second animated feature, Pinocchio, would win the Academy Awards for Best Original Song and Best Original Score - not that it alleviated the poor box-office returns that it and its fellow 1940 Disney animated feature Fantasia received). Ultimately, neither short would win (though MGM would still claim that award for The Milky Way, directed by Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising), but their popularity was enough to propel their respective starring characters to the headliners of their own series, and not long afterwards to the position of mascots for their respective animation divisions.
And the plot thickens from there...
--------------------------------------------------------
Hello, and welcome to my first alternate history timeline! This was inspired by the following alternate media history timelines:
King Krazy Tries To Make A Pop Culture Timeline And Fails Horribly by King Krazy
Smarter Than The Average Studio by @More Than A Feeling
As Dreamers Do by @OldNavy1988
TL-2K23 by @Otakuninja2006
Restarted With A Mouse by @redben12
Merrily We Roll Along by @Tacomaster
Man's Best Friend by @THE KINGFISH
Tom and Jerry... and Scooby? by @TheFaultsofAlts
Special credit to @Otakuninja2006 and @TheFaultsofAlts for helping me come up with and refine ideas for my timeline!
As you can probably tell by the title, this timeline will primarily focus on a rivalry formed between the film companies Warner Bros. and MGM, specifically regarding their animated properties. As a fan of the works produced by the animators associated with these two companies (and of those produced by the animators that they helped inspire), I couldn't help but notice how intertwined their animation production history is: both of their primary animated mascots debuted the same year (and their debut shorts were nominated for the same Academy Award), animation industry legends Tex Avery and Chuck Jones have produced works for both animation studios (with the latter having a noticeable antipathy toward the work of Tom and Jerry creators Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera, who'd already moved on to television with their own studio by the time Jones joined MGM IOTL), and MGM even had access to Warner Bros.' pre-1950's film library (including the pre-1948 Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies shorts) for a few years thanks to a 1981 merger with United Artists (who'd merged with Associated Artists Productions, the company that Jack Warner sold the library to, back in 1958)... which would set into motion events that would lead to Warner Bros. owning MGM's pre-1986 film library and the entire Hanna-Barbera library and studio (long story short, Ted Turner bought MGM in 1986, selling the production unit not long afterward but keeping their film library, including the films they got from the UA merger. Turner would then buy the entirety of Hanna-Barbera in 1991 to help provide the foundation for Cartoon Network, while Time Warner would go on to merge with Turner Broadcasting in 1996). The question that this timeline seeks to answer is: what if those connections sparked into a full-on rivalry between the two studios, as each competed to be the top dog in the American animation industry?
The timeline's title comes from a scrapped pitch for an animated sketch comedy series that would've involved the Looney Tunes and various Hanna-Barbera characters involved in a variety of scenarios and parodies. Tom Ruegger (notable for his work at both Hanna-Barbera and Warner Bros. Animation, particularly the latter) made this pitch to Warner Bros. in 2008, and it was greenlit for about a month before a management shakeup resulted in it getting un-greenlit (Sam Register, the new executive in charge of Warner Bros. Animation, had his own ideas in mind for a Looney Tunes revival).
This first post is mainly supposed to be the setup for the future rivalry to come. The only real point of divergence so far is that the Gulliver's Travels movie by Fleischer Studios is a financial success rather than the box-office bomb it was IOTL (ITTL, they decided to hold back on the use of rotoscoping in order to save on production costs, a decision that ended up paying off). That in itself is meant to be setup - to put Disney in a more vulnerable position compared to OTL so that both Warner Bros. and MGM will have an easier time surpassing them in the field of animation. I still haven't decided yet if Fleischer will continue to go forward with their second feature film Mr. Bug Goes to Town or if they'll decide to scale it down to merely an animated short after witnessing Disney's two box-office flops of 1940.
If you have any suggestions/ideas/criticisms that you'd like to provide, feel free to do so!
The field of animation was in the midst of a revolutionary period in America, with the nation's two biggest names in animation at the time having moved up from merely producing short subjects to making fully animated feature films late into the previous decade: Walt Disney Productions with Snow White and the Seven Dwarves in 1937, and Fleischer Studios with Gulliver's Travels two years later. The critical and financial success that these films would garner proved that animation could maintain the audience's investment beyond seven or eight minutes (at least in America - there had been quite a few feature-length animated films produced across a number of other countries before Disney made their mark with Snow White) and seemed to set Disney and Fleischer up to be the biggest rivals in the American animation industry. But this year, though hardly anyone knew or believed it at the time, would see the premiere of two short films that would kickstart the true major rivalry in the field of American animation...
On February 10th, Metro-Golden-Mayer (MGM) would premiere the short Puss Gets the Boot, directed by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera. The cartoon's plot is simple - A cat chasing a mouse while trying to avoid messing up the house (and thus, as hinted in the title, getting the boot), with the mouse taking advantage of the latter detail - yet it makes the most of said plot with its heavy emphasis on slapstick humor. While the management at MGM (who didn't have much interest in the cat-and-mouse chase concept to begin with) were initially content with just leaving this cartoon as a one-shot, the popularity of the cat-and-mouse duo soon convinced them to commission a full series of shorts starring the pair. A naming contest was held among MGM's animation staff to determine the official names of the duo (in the original short, the cat was named Jasper while the mouse was unnamed), with animator John Carr providing the winning suggestion - Tom (the cat) and Jerry (the mouse).
On July 27th, Warner Bros. would premiere the Merrie Melodies short A Wild Hare, directed by Frederick "Tex" Avery. In it, a hunter (Elmer Fudd in his 12th appearance) is repeatedly outwitted by his quarry: a wise-cracking, smart-aleck rabbit with a New York accent. Said rabbit had appeared in prototype form in a few previous shorts (including another that paired him with Elmer Fudd), yet this cartoon would mark the first "true" appearance of the rabbit that, by the time of his next appearance, would be officially known as Bugs Bunny (named after Ben "Bugs" Hardaway, who co-directed the first and third appearances of the rabbit's prototype).
The positive reception of these two shorts was made evident when they were nominated for the Academy Award (also known as the Oscar) for Best Animated Short Subject at the 13th Academy Awards ceremony - while Disney, normally the expected winner of that category, wouldn't have any of their shorts from that same year nominated (though their second animated feature, Pinocchio, would win the Academy Awards for Best Original Song and Best Original Score - not that it alleviated the poor box-office returns that it and its fellow 1940 Disney animated feature Fantasia received). Ultimately, neither short would win (though MGM would still claim that award for The Milky Way, directed by Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising), but their popularity was enough to propel their respective starring characters to the headliners of their own series, and not long afterwards to the position of mascots for their respective animation divisions.
And the plot thickens from there...
--------------------------------------------------------
Hello, and welcome to my first alternate history timeline! This was inspired by the following alternate media history timelines:
King Krazy Tries To Make A Pop Culture Timeline And Fails Horribly by King Krazy
Smarter Than The Average Studio by @More Than A Feeling
As Dreamers Do by @OldNavy1988
TL-2K23 by @Otakuninja2006
Restarted With A Mouse by @redben12
Merrily We Roll Along by @Tacomaster
Man's Best Friend by @THE KINGFISH
Tom and Jerry... and Scooby? by @TheFaultsofAlts
Special credit to @Otakuninja2006 and @TheFaultsofAlts for helping me come up with and refine ideas for my timeline!
As you can probably tell by the title, this timeline will primarily focus on a rivalry formed between the film companies Warner Bros. and MGM, specifically regarding their animated properties. As a fan of the works produced by the animators associated with these two companies (and of those produced by the animators that they helped inspire), I couldn't help but notice how intertwined their animation production history is: both of their primary animated mascots debuted the same year (and their debut shorts were nominated for the same Academy Award), animation industry legends Tex Avery and Chuck Jones have produced works for both animation studios (with the latter having a noticeable antipathy toward the work of Tom and Jerry creators Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera, who'd already moved on to television with their own studio by the time Jones joined MGM IOTL), and MGM even had access to Warner Bros.' pre-1950's film library (including the pre-1948 Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies shorts) for a few years thanks to a 1981 merger with United Artists (who'd merged with Associated Artists Productions, the company that Jack Warner sold the library to, back in 1958)... which would set into motion events that would lead to Warner Bros. owning MGM's pre-1986 film library and the entire Hanna-Barbera library and studio (long story short, Ted Turner bought MGM in 1986, selling the production unit not long afterward but keeping their film library, including the films they got from the UA merger. Turner would then buy the entirety of Hanna-Barbera in 1991 to help provide the foundation for Cartoon Network, while Time Warner would go on to merge with Turner Broadcasting in 1996). The question that this timeline seeks to answer is: what if those connections sparked into a full-on rivalry between the two studios, as each competed to be the top dog in the American animation industry?
The timeline's title comes from a scrapped pitch for an animated sketch comedy series that would've involved the Looney Tunes and various Hanna-Barbera characters involved in a variety of scenarios and parodies. Tom Ruegger (notable for his work at both Hanna-Barbera and Warner Bros. Animation, particularly the latter) made this pitch to Warner Bros. in 2008, and it was greenlit for about a month before a management shakeup resulted in it getting un-greenlit (Sam Register, the new executive in charge of Warner Bros. Animation, had his own ideas in mind for a Looney Tunes revival).
This first post is mainly supposed to be the setup for the future rivalry to come. The only real point of divergence so far is that the Gulliver's Travels movie by Fleischer Studios is a financial success rather than the box-office bomb it was IOTL (ITTL, they decided to hold back on the use of rotoscoping in order to save on production costs, a decision that ended up paying off). That in itself is meant to be setup - to put Disney in a more vulnerable position compared to OTL so that both Warner Bros. and MGM will have an easier time surpassing them in the field of animation. I still haven't decided yet if Fleischer will continue to go forward with their second feature film Mr. Bug Goes to Town or if they'll decide to scale it down to merely an animated short after witnessing Disney's two box-office flops of 1940.
If you have any suggestions/ideas/criticisms that you'd like to provide, feel free to do so!
Last edited:
