Mr. Alt Disney

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
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Meet Walt Kidney -- absolutely no relation to that other Walt guy.

A No Celebrities Were Harmed version of Walt Disney; expect him to be the animator of a world-famous cartoon character and/or the founder of Souvenir Land. Also expect an exaggerated interest in planned communities and/or creating a utopia, possibly with sinister undertones. Oh, and Human Popsicle or Brain In a Jar jokes, many of them.

Examples of Mr. Alt Disney include:

Anime and Manga

  • An episode of Kirby: Right Back at Ya! has King Dedede start his own animation company, hiring a famous animator named "Owalt Desney" (or "Dis Walney" in the dub) who turns out to be a monster in disguise to help him.
  • Mi-chan and Fancy Yankeeland in the Papuwa anime. The author skates a lot closer visually in the manga but censors any actual names in dialog bubbles.
  • A truly heartbreaking version of this appears in Ergo Proxy. He just wants to be left alone, and not killed like all the other Proxies.
  • The unseen person/people who took over Billy Bat and gave him some major Badass Decay after original author/artist Kevin Yamagata disappears.
  • William Borise in the second volume of Genkaku Picasso.

Comic Books

  • Wade Dazzle, a billionaire cartoon and amusement park mogul who sought the secret of Amazon immortality in the Wonder Woman comics.
  • Mitch Wacky in The DCU.
  • Yet another DCU version; Winston Keever Sr., creator of Winky Blink And Friends and founder of the Winkyworld theme park chain in Chuck Dixon's Batman and Green Arrow comics. He briefly appears in Green Arrow as a dying old man, horrified by how ruthlessly his son runs the company.
  • And one more; the Elseworld Batman: Dark Allegiances reinvents the Dark Knight's villains as parodies of real people from the 1930s suspected of Nazi sympathies. So Oswald Cobblepot becomes Milt Biggsley, the creator of Peter Penguin, and founder of the Biggstown amusement park (allowing a Mythology Gag with a giant prop typewriter).
  • Elias McFadden in the middle story of the comic anthology The Eternal Smile.
  • One story in the Fantastic Four had a crazy Disney-alike try to use the Human Torch's powers to 'reignite the Earth's core'. The reason his employees went along with such a blatantly insane plan (Lampshaded as such, even by comic-book science standards,) was that they were all Ridiculously-Human Robots he'd built.
  • Fission Chicken once had to beat the cryogenically-preserved brain of "Walt Ditsey".
  • In the black-and-white Howard the Duck magazine, Wally Sidney was a failed animator turned wealthy haberdasher. He imposed a new code of decency on the title character, forcing him to wear pants. Hilariously, this story saw print decades before the real Disney Corp took over Marvel Comics.
  • Lobo in Vol 2 #19 had a security gig at a theme park — Cheezworld of Mr. Walt Dizzle. Obviously, this couldn't be long, or end well.

Film

  • Abel Edwards from the sci-fi movie Able Edwards, with the twist that Abel is awakened cloned in the future to help to bring the joy from his old cartoons.
  • Roy Walley on National Lampoon's Vacation, with Marty Moose and Walley World.
    • In the original magazine story it really was Walt Disney, who was (nonfatally) shot by a pushed-over-the-edge Pop.
  • Howard Stark in Iron Man 2 is very much based on the futurist side of Walt. The film of Stark showing off the model of the park very deliberately copies Disney's "EPCOT" presentation film.
  • Uncle Dave from Beverly Hills Cop III is Mister Rogers as Walt Disney.
  • Mooby the Golden Calf from the View Askewniverse (Primarily Dogma and Clerks II) is this combined with a Biblical allusion.

Literature

  • Raymond Dieterling, founder of Dream-a-Dream Land, in the James Ellroy novel L.A. Confidential. (This character doesn't appear in the film version).
  • Ralph Mimsey in several novels by Dave Stone, including the Judge Dredd tie-in novel Wetworks and the Doctor Who Virgin Missing Adventures novel Burning Heart. Burning Heart has Mimsey's cryogenically-preserved head as a minor character.
  • Uncle Sam Beasley from a few of the Destroyer books tried to conquer Cuba and turn it into an amusement park. His first book features the song, "It's a Short Life After All."
  • The unnamed creator of the Happy Mouse Kingdom theme park in Orlando, Florida, as featured in The True Meaning of Smekday.

Live-Action TV

Radio

  • The Big Finish Doctor Who audio drama Zagreus, featuring the Eighth Doctor, has several characters played by the actors who play earlier incarnations of the Doctor. Sylvester McCoy's character is a futuristic Walt Disney analogue named Uncle Winky.

Tabletop Games

  • Walter Rand in the Halt Evil Doer setting for Mutants and Masterminds. His "Rand Utopias" are parodies of Disney's "planned community" Celebration combined with the comicbook concept of the Mad Scientist having a hidden community as his own sociology experiment. (The real Disney also existed in the HED! setting, and got irritated at Rand constantly stealing his ideas. The last straw was when he started "poaching" Mouseketeers to join Sneckles the Snake's Young Pioneers.)

Video Games

  • Cave Johnson from Portal 2 seems to have a lot of this to his character; especially with regards to his plans to cheat death.
  • Mr. House in Fallout: New Vegas is this mixed with a Howard Hughes-type paranoiac. His goal is to run New Vegas as The Theme Park Version: safe, clean, secure, and under his totalitarian control, aided by an army of robots. His portrait bears more than a little resemblance to Disney, and his actual body is effectively somewhere between Human Popsicle and Brain In a Jar.
  • Much like Mr. House, Andrew Ryan from BioShock drew parallels with Walt Disney: Ryan bore at least some passing resemblance to the animation mogul, both envisioned a utopia of some kind (in Walt's case, the aborted EPCOT concept), and there is even a statue of Ryan holding a young boy's hand which bore a striking resemblance to the "Partners" statue of Disney and Mickey Mouse.

Web Comics

  • An early Schlock Mercenary arc featured Newt Sidney, owner of Sidneyland. Very obvious - they even mentioned that he started his career with a talking mouse. Interestingly enough, he's the villain of the piece, enforcing "a near-monopoly" through underhanded dealings, threats, criminal connections, and similar - all of it impossible to trace back to him, meaning that he winds up as a Karma Houdini. The arc is started when one of his competitors hires the titular mercenaries to safeguard the opening of his new 'Magic Dream-Land' (next door to Sidneyland), after Sidney threatened to prevent the opening even if he had to commandeer a Kill Sat and nuke them from orbit.
  • Waldo Frizzy from Seventy Seas, creator of Toby Terrier and Toby Town.

Web Original

Western Animation

  • Roy Brisby from The Venture Bros, creator of Bizzy Bee and Brisbyland.
  • Roger Meyers Sr. from The Simpsons, creator thief of Itchy and Scratchy that spawned Itchy and Scratchy Land
  • The Fairly OddParents provides the above image, from a Fantastic Voyage episode. The mogul pictured above is Mr. Walt Kidney, whose theme park, Kidneyland happens to reside within the Kidney of Vicky.

"Hey, look Wanda! It's Walt Kidney! And his guide, Tinklebell!"

  • Grant Walker from Batman: The Animated Series: The focus is less on him as a cartoon mogul and more on the animatronics part and his design of an underwater utopia with no crime (wait ...). His attempt to work with Mr. Freeze to gain immortality results in a Human Popsicle combined with And I Must Scream.
  • Lemuel Stewartson on the Atom.Com cartoons about The Golden Age of Animation, his creation was a raccoon called Mortimer Koon (in a universe of Animated Actors). Alas, the ill-fated theme park Koonland was ruined by Unfortunate Implications.
  • Walt Fleishman in The Real Ghostbusters is probably an amalgam of Disney and one or two of his contemporaries.
  • Uncle Wizzly of My Life as a Teenage Robot has an animatronic theme park that runs amok.
  • The Sleeping Beauty parody on the Rocky and Bullwinkle Show (one of the "Fractured Fairy Tales" segments) portrayed the prince as an obvious parody of Walt Disney who, rather than wake her with a kiss, builds a theme park ("Sleeping Beauty Land") around her. Walt was reportedly not amused. (Possibly explaining a reference during one of a handful of shows where NBC experimentally had a live-action Bullwinkle puppet, also voiced by Bill Scott, hosting. At the end of one show, the puppet explains that they have to go because "Mr. Disney just came into the studio with a baseball bat.")
    • At around the same time, Beany and Cecil had an episode "Beanyland", where they build a theme park on the moon—Dishonest John, mining green cheese at the time, sabotages their work and christens it "Meanyland". Standards and Practices suits raised objections to the 'unflattering caricature of Disney', apparently unaware that was Dishonest John, as he usually looked.
  • Dalt Wisney in Henry's Cat
  • In an episode of Garfield and Friends, Garfield goes to an amusement park called Wonderful World and meets it's founder Wilson Wonder who lives behind a Fun House mirror.