Last night I was looking through my DVD collection and I discovered that my copy of the Disney movie “Candleshoe” (starring Helen Hayes, David Niven and Jodie Foster) was produced and marketed by Anchor Bay Entertainment, which is located right here in Troy, Michigan. The DVD packaging makes absolutely no mention that it is a Disney picture, other than a very small “C Disney Enterprises”. I went to the Anchor Bay website and discovered that they seem to have a huge chunk of the catalog of Disney Live-Action movies, including:
Return to Oz
The Happiest Millionaire
The Cat From Outer Space
The North Avenue Irregulars
The Great Locomotive Chase
The Unidentified Flying Oddball
Never Cry Wolf
Napoleon and Samantha
Nikki Wild Dog of the North
One of our Dinosaurs is Missing
Tex
One Little Indian
The Littlest Horse Thieves
The Legend of Lobo
The Last Flight of Noah’s Ark
Condorman
Charlie the Lonesome Cougar
The Castaway Cowboy
Big Red
The Bears and I
Amy
The Black Hole
The rest of Anchor Bay’s catalog is a who’s who of B and C grade stuff (Like Supergirl and The Stunt Man and Attack of the Killer Tomatos). How did a small time operation like Anchor bay get control of so many Disney movies? Not that these are the best (although Locomotive Chase and Candleshoe are quite good), but I thought Disney never released control of ANYTHING!
It looks like Anchor Bay is releasing the film under a contract with Disney. The films listed are all Disney flops, and Disney live action films of the era have a bad reputation. (See http://www.imagesjournal.com/issue08/reviews/blackhole/text.htm). So Disney licensed the rights to Anchor Bay so they could get some money out of them, without the low quality of the films affecting Disney’s reputation.
Hey, Never Cry Wolf is a good movie. Ok maybe not big box office but still a good movie. And The Cat from Outer Space? Is that the original or the re-make? I guess Disney had to throw in a couple of films there were not totally without merit (Black Hole) to get them to take the deal.
RealityChuck is right - follow his link for more information. Some of these movies ARE terrible '70s junk but “The Great Locomotive Chase” (which stars Fess Parker and Jeffrey Hunter) is actually from the 1950’s, and is really a very good movie based on historical events, and if you never saw it its is a very tense drama. And I have always had a thing for Jodie Foster so I guess that tempers my evaluation of “Candleshoe”, and the best thing about “North Avenue Irregulars” is watching Cloris Leachman destroy a (then) new Lincoln Mark in a quasi-demolition derby at the end. Funny thing, for being second rate, these movies sure have Disney price tags - all over $22!
I actually sat through Condorman in a theater as a sneak preview. I had some hopes for it – the Robert Sheckley novel it was based on was a pretty good premise (sort of a lighthearted “North by Northwest” – a man is mistaken for a spy and ends up becomong a spy himself), but it was pretty dismal.
Interesting point: at a Lunacon in the early 80s, Roger Elwood (working for Disney at the time) was running a Disney trivia contest. When he seemed to be running short of questions, I mentioned “Condorman.”
Perhaps it was a flop (I don’t remember) but I liked Candleshoe when I was a kid - I think it was the whole treasure-hunt aspect that appealed to me. That and the happy ending. I was always a sucker for happy endings.
I wonder why Disney didn’t just release them as “classics” and sell them for a limited time only. They seem to do that with a lot of things to boost sales.
The merit of The Black Hole is two fold. One it is the first PG film the studio released. And that’s about it really. I rented the DVD a while back and it was much much worse then I remembered.
(actually I was trying to imply that The Black Hole was totally without merit but I’m a bad writer)
What was that Disney live action film…
I remember that a boy in it wanted to be a movie director and he had a home movie camera. I remember him shooting film of a teen girl and she was in a bikini. I’m pretty sure a lighthouse stood rather phallically in the background.
**
The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, And Her Lover
Halloween
Heathers
The Kentucky Fried Movie
Monty Python’s Life of Brian
Nosferatu the Vampyre
The Stepford Wives
Tender Mercies
Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!
Time Bandits
**
Some of those were VERY popular and big money makers. And some of them are either respected art films or cult classics.
Anchor Bay often does great transfers and has a very low price as well.
