Maybe if Toon Lagoon had been built in EPCOT, but by 1997-99:
- the Fleischer toons were beyond antiquated, known only to animation junkies at that point, and both the live-action and animated attempts to revive Popeye in the 80s had flopped.
- the Cold-War-reference-heavy Jay Ward cartoons had a cult-following among Boomers, who were older parents, but had become pretty niche among Gen X, who were the younger and future parents -- and with the dismantling of morning/afternoon TV blocs for kids in full effect in favor of The Springer Show and its ilk, the animation syndication market was basically dead. (While Bugs and the Loony Tunes would've been the better choice for IoA, mostly because they were always exponentially bigger, even by 1998 you could reasonably have predicted they were on a downward slope as well. The Hanna Barbera ride would shut down in 2002, another casualty of this. And both those IPs had far more market penetration in their respective heydays than the Ward-verse ever did.)
- Comic strips were a dying artform -- Calvin & Hobbes and Outland (the already reduced to once-a-week Bloom County continuation) ended in 1995. To everyone but the Silents and aging Boomers, the writing was on the wall that the remaining comic strip IPs were as doomed as print media. Moreover, Universal didn't secure any of the three most famous, Peanuts, Calvin & Hobbes, or Garfield -- they always had the B team.
Once Looney Tunes were off the table, probably should've scrapped the whole animation idea all together. Maybe could've explored those hot new Nintendo video games, or reached out to New Line about that Lord of the Rings adaptation they were filming. Or wait ... the guys down the hall are developing a
Pointe Break rip-off based on street racing ... can you feel the synergy?