So the Tails 30th comic has me thinking. From one of the devs talking about it on twitter, we know Tails Skypatrol was hastily repurposed from a basically completed game belonging to an unrelated IP. And this Sega Video Magazine betrays that the IP was disney - Pete is there in place of Bearenger. From there, its becomes pretty obvious that Witchcart is a seemingly unedited evil queen/witch from Snow White. The other wiki thinks Hoke-Wulf is the big bad wolf from disney's 3 little pigs adaption etc, which looks right to me. That just leaves Carrottia! The bow, lidded eyes and orange muzzle make me think of Daisy Duck, but it also feels like a bit of a stretch since Daisy's not a villain, and Carrottia would be a much bigger divergence from the original design than the others if she is indeed the source. Anyone happen to be versed in 30s/40s disney stuff enough that they can pick out a better fit? I don't even know where to start lol.
she's likely to be the most heavily redrawn one, or even have been created wholesale after the project shift, because there IS no good parallel to her. Magica would fit the best, but Magica would not be a character allowed in this game- unless the main character were Donald, not Mickey, which would still work with Pete as a villain, but would throw Witchcart and Hocke-Wulf into doubt instead. There's no way to know, but there's also no decent guess to be made, I don't think
It’s gotta be Minnie Mouse. Minnie Mouse in merch often has a small plane. She has a bow, she’s about the right size, and the Tails Sky Patrol version blows kisses. It might not have meant to have been a serious fight, or the story could have worked witchcraft into it. Who knows?
I don't think Disney would have approved Mickey fighting Minnie. It would also have required some in-game context, which the Tails version of the game doesn't have. If the Disney version of the game had a "Minnie is mind-controlled" cutscene, then the path of least resistance would have been to keep such a scene in the Tails version, but with Carrottia as Tails' brainwashed friend.
I'm not entirely sold on the idea that Mickey Mouse was the intended player character. It's more than plausible, yes. However, the hooking mechanic with the ring would have been a feather in the cancelled Boon Boon Kabun retooling, evokes Dumbo to me. Possessing a magical feather and the ability to fly are things Dumbo is famous for. Further, I can easily envision the mint candies being peanuts originally (even if they could just as likely be, I dunno, fuel canisters?). I'm open to being wrong, though. Has anyone looked into Dumbo's popularity in Japan? I seriously doubt Carrota was originally Minnie though. My original inference is that she is a retooled Leena the Hyena from Roger Rabbit, a character that Disney evidently retained as she reappeared in their comics. The whole "abhorrent admirer" schtick is totally within Leena's character, moreso than Madam Mim. However, looking through Disney licenses from that general era, I think an argument could be made for the March Hare from Alice in Wonderland being the original Carrota. Wonderland characters filled out boss roles in Mickey's Mousecapades before being swapped out for international release, and I think they were villain filler in other titles back when those were evidently in short supply.
Perhaps it was Lena Hyena, then. They both have similar crazy expressions, the eyes are very similar (even down to the colour eyelids), the mouth shape matches, and both have love themed “attacks”, and the bow and ears could have been her crazy hair. The only thing I can’t figure out is the vehicle. I can’t see it being the March Hair, the only design match is the carrots, the rest doesn’t add up. All of the other characters are similar in design to their Disney counterparts. I hadn’t really considered Lena Hyena, I didn’t know she was in any other properties.
Would not have been Lena Hyena, she's absolutely irrelevant and the whole game would forcefully be a Roger Rabbit game in that case. Disney Licensing limits use of characters like that, especially for movies after about the 70s- you might get away with something licensed using characters from Alice in Wonderland and Snow White together, but bringing in Roger Rabbit and Ducktales would never happen.
March Hare looks spot on to me - face shape is all there, they would've just needed to rework the eyes and replace the toupee with the bow.
The only thing we know for certain is that the second boss was Pete. Why would a Dumbo game have Pete as a boss? As you said, there's precedent for using Disney movie villains in Mickey & Friends games (Mickey Mousecepade, Castle of Illusion's Mizrabel essentially being the Queen from Snow White), but I don't think there's any precedent for Mickey & Friends villains in Disney movie games?
Mostly just the lack of any real viable villains from his own film. Moreover Dumbo interacted with other Disney characters within official not-even-roger rabbit-relevant comics. I concede the murky rights to Roger Rabbit make her unlikely, albeit not impossible. More to the point, I cannot think of any other Disney or Disney-adjacent character who gives projectile kisses like Lena does. If it was in fact the March Hare, what could the kiss have possibly been? Possibly a tea bubble such the Mad Hatter spews during the Unbirthday segment?
It's not so much a matter of murky rights as it is of how Disney licenses franchises. There's basically no crossover of IPs unless it's specifically a crossover thing, and in the 90s that was unlikely. If Pete's there the most likely scenarios are simply that it's either a Mickey or Donald game. Of course, there's also just the option that we're wrong in the whole thing. Maybe Pete was the only villain created before the license change. Maybe they were pitching ideas still and thus DID break licensing habits and had like Jafar or whatever, because the screenshot predates the point where Disney would've gone "don't do that". No idea
Alice Kagamino said that the pre-Tails/pre-Game Gear version of the game was completed: https://web.archive.org/web/2022112....com/alice_kagamino/status/668528545119911936 https://web.archive.org/web/2022112....com/alice_kagamino/status/668529880494026753 So they would have had all four bosses in place, and I imagine they would have had characters approved before completing the game. The game itself was only cancelled because the handheld system it was going to be a launch title for was cancelled before ever being announced. Kagamino said that the team porting the game to Game Gear had to redraw character graphics, add demos and a training stage, and make adjustments for the Game Gear hardware: https://web.archive.org/web/2022112....com/alice_kagamino/status/668528989737062400 The footage we have with Pete in it is from an early build of the Tails/Game Gear version, where they hadn't redrawn Pete yet (28:56): https://retrocdn.net/images/7/78/SegaVideoMagazine199504_VHS_JP.mp4 It's kind of nuts that Sega included it in the promotional footage. From that footage we can see that most of the changes had already been implemented: * Full color graphics * Training stage added * Tails' Sky Patrol title screen * Tails as the main character * Emerald Hill Zone inspired stage art * Hill Top Zone trees * Casino Night Zone city skyline * Mint candy items * Whisp and Turtloids inspired enemies None of the other bosses are shown in this footage. Assuming this is all from one build, then it looks like the bosses might have been the LAST thing to get changed. Which makes a degree of sense, since most of the visible-to-us Sonic-ifying pulls from pre-existing material (even the title screen uses pre-existing art from 1992), whereas the bosses didn't have any pre-existing Sonic thing to draw from.
With all that in mind then we have to assume the change was late in the deal. With that said, even just comparing how different the faces are for Pete and Bearenger, we're back at the fact that Carrottia is surely a fairly drastic design reworking- I think Witchcart looking so much like Mizrabel is acting almost like a red herring, creating the expectation the other designs are also as similar to the original concepts.
