Hello 👁👁 I like toon lore, and if you dont mind, I'd like to add to this.
So toon lore kinda differs on a studio-by-studio/creator-by-creator basis in that each one's treatment of toons. They do have similarities sometimes across studios, like toons being created by humans. And the base concepts are the same. Some have asked "what happens to toons who are forgotten?" And have given wildly different answers from each other in a way thats super interesting to me!
Like on the topic of "What happens to a toon who is forgotten?", Disney and Warner Bros gives wildly different answers.
For Warner Bros, when a toon is forgotten, what happens is that they begin to age, as shown in Tiny Toon Adventures episode 25: Fields of Honey
On the left, the old woman is a forgotten toon from the early 30s, on the right is her restored, original form once the audience sees her cartoons and remembers her.
For Disney, when a toon is forgotten, they lose their hearts (which is a physical representation of their remembrance and love from their audience) and fall into Wasteland, which is even by the meta treated as The Disney Afterlife
Both of these are reversible too. You can age backwards into your original design. You can get your heart back and leave Wasteland. However, to do that by yourself (especially with Disney's fate) is nigh impossible. Your fate is quite literally in someone else's hands, and those hands are more often than not, human
So now on the basis of "do several versions of a toon exist"? Yes, but again, its on a studio-by-studio basis.
Disney leans heavily on multiple versions of the same toon existing, especially with Mickey.
But he's not the only one of course. Epic Mickey also has several different versions of Pete coexisting simultaneously.
And the graphic novel has different versions of Horace Horsecollar (though I dont have a picture of that) and several Disney characters have scrapped versions of themselves who live in Wasteland like Mr Smee. So safe to say, Disney does make multiple versions of the same toon, and they all coexist and have different, individual lives. I have like a whole separate post on how toons have lives outside of their characters and how that affects them.
However, at Warner, its usually just the one toon thats a composite of different eras. So left Daffy and right Daffy...
Now the human-toon relationship is something that doesn't always get touched on, but when it does, half the time, its a racism allegory. This is very apparent in the Roger Rabbit franchise, both the book and the movie. The racism is extremely blatant in especially the book what with toons and humans seated in different areas of the bar, humans protesting toons moving into their neighbourhoods, having whole slurs for animal toons. The book is a wild ride. The movie isn't nearly as blatant but you can still tell its there if you know basic history of 20th Century USA. So there is that allergory, but I think it can be open to other allegories. Who Censored Roger Rabbit had a moment that felt to me like an echo of modern day transphobia and the constant debate of "Should transwomen be allowed to participate in cis women's sports?". So besides racial coding, there's possibilty for queer coding, disability coding and other kinds of coding and allegories.
I have the beginnings of an original toon story in my brain, different from my current AUs, that I would like to make into a book or a film one day that explores the other allegories, particularly Ableism and the relationship toons would have with black people, considering how intrinsically tied caricatures and blackface are to early cartoons. I feel like the two groups would have a lot of feelings about each other and I think about it a lot.
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