Beautiful, beautiful film, with super realistic water etc. But the plot? meh.
The Black Cauldron, but there’s a reason why it was crap. It was originally made for an older audience…but the idiots showed it to a theater filled with smalls beforehand, and [del]hilarity[/del]chaos ensued-kiddies crying and families walking out. After some crude editing, it was finally released as the choppy mess it is to this day.
Probably agree on The Black Cauldron—and I can’t even chalk that all up to editing, considering the extended production history, and the stuff we did get onscreen.
A damn pity, too, considering it has one of my favorite Disney villains of all time. Princess Eilonwy’s pretty sharp, too.
Certainly a technically proficient production, of course, including using some sumptuous and even groundbreaking animation techniques…but, on the other hand, Rankin-Bass The Hobbit accomplished a lot more, artistically, using much more basic techniques, eight years earlier, for about $40 million less. And it didn’t shy away from utilizing more “adult” themes—violence, blood, death, scary looking monsters, threatened anthropophagy—yet in a way still palatable for younger audiences. Plus, it had catchy songs.
And it was still acceptable enough for Disney standards that they ran it on the Disney Channel for years.
How many were stinkers if asked of the targeted age group though?
I am sure not too many 3 to 9 year old children work at rotten tomato etc.
Yeah, I was obsessed with Disney when I was little, and some of our collection included movies mentioned in this thread. I didn’t care. It’s not like I could follow plots that well, anyway.
(Pocahontas was my favorite simply because she was the prettiest Disney Princess).
The Rescuers Down Under?
I have not seen either this movie, or The Rescuers. They seem to be almost forgotten among Disney animation fans, so that doesn’t really recommend them. On the other hand, Bob Newhart and Eva Gabor, how could it not be great?
The Rescuers was itself intended to be a sequel, being the return of Cruella DeVille as the villian, but that was scrapped.
Home on the Range is a special film in our house as it was the first movie we took our daughter to. She loved the movie-going experience and I will always remember our 3yo sitting there, popcorn in her lap, grinning for 90+ minutes as this silly cartoon played on the big-screen.
But, yeah, it wasn’t very good. But it was no *Oliver & Co. *
There are a few very popular Disney movies that I do not like at all, and alternatively a lot of derided movies that I enjoy just fine, but I won’t count any of them. I agree that Black Cauldron is a complete misfire and is probably their worst effort.
I remember those! I used to watch them all the time.
Does song of the South count? It’s half animated and wholey boring.
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Really, not bad at all.
Both movies, if not great, are a lot of fun and not mind-numbingly stupid like say, Atlantis: Milo’s Return or Tarzan II.
Well, yeah, some of those direct to DVD sequels were made on the cheap.
You know, I’m old enough to remember when the Rescuers was first released, and I’ve been certain ever since that Bernard was voiced by Mickey Rooney. Enough so that I had to check IMDB to actually believe YOU hadn’t been mistaken! Which also told me Geraldine Page was Madame Medusa!
Only speaking to the Great Disney Feature Revival of the 1990s. (We had a girl baby in 1990 and a boy baby in 1995, so I won’t go past the period during which they went to the movies attended by parents)
After Mermaid, Beauty, Aladdin, and Lion King, I thought there was a terrible drop off in quality with Pocohontas, Hunchback, and Hercules. But we all did love Mulan.
Interesting note about Milo’s Return: it was actually partially cobbled together from a TV series spinoff they were working on, but canned after the movie bombed. They had high hopes for it—plans for attractions in the parks, some of the characters actually making appearances as park characters when the film was released…
Sad, really. I feel for 'em—there was potential there, they had ambition, and a lot of thought and effort went into the project. But in the end, their reach exceeded their grasp. There were flaws and baggage they just couldn’t overcome.
But, in it’s defense, it had at least one characterwho both wasn’t completely obnoxious and didn’t have an ugly character design.
I was gonna say The Black Cauldron but it had been covered pretty well already; your post gives a little insight on what happened. Even though I don’t have kids, I actually buy Disney animation (live-action not so much) if I find them good enough to bear repeating. When Tangled came out it was touted as the 50th Disney theatrical animated feature so, curious, I printed out the list and ticked off the ones in my collection. We had exactly half.
Now, a few of them were because they hadn’t been acquired yet, but mostly it was because I just didn’t wanna and the ones mentioned in this thread are prominent among them. Last year I rented The Black Cauldron through Netflix to check whether it was as ghastly as I remembered from thirty years ago.
It sure was.
I don’t know about “canned after the movie bombed.” Cinderella II: Dreams Come True, like Atlantis: Milo’s Return, was made by putting together three episodes of an aborted TV series.
I loved The Rescuers (don’t think I saw the sequel). Saw it when it first came out. I was already a fan of the book series it was adapted from, which might have helped. Eva Gabor made a wonderful Miss Bianca.
Love The Aristocats, too–that one had a huge impact on my young childhood, along with Willy Wonka. I was 6. My parents bought me the soundtrack album from *Aristocats *and I played that thing till I wore it out (literally–they had to buy me a second copy because my cheap kiddie record player’s needle eventually wore out the first one). I can still sing most of the songs now, over 40 years later.