I actually thought Brother Bear was OK. Not a great Disney film, but a respectable one.
The Rescuers was also quite good.
The post-Walt period from the late 60s to the mid 80s was a pretty weak period for Disney. I’m going to say Robin Hood was the worst movie from this era. It was just a big blob of nothing, a totally paint-by-numbers movie where they used the same voices and character types seen in earlier movies and even recycled animation sequences from earlier movie.
Well, most of the sources I’m seeing specifically say it was cancelled during production when the movie underperformed. But I can’t speak for whatever went on with a Cinderella series.
I thought the Roger Miller music was pretty good. I heard someone whistling that opening bit just last week, in fact.
I agree 100% with this statement, but you missed one of the biggest piles of turd in the punchbowl: Aladdin: The Return of Jafar.
Clearly, this was something that Disney threw together by having the janitorial staff carefully preserve all the discarded footage and clips from the making of Aladdin. They hoarded the precious scraps until someone could come up with a script that could make use of all the disjointed snippets.
My youngest daughter was about 8 years old when this stinking mess was released. My wife bought the video and gave it to her as a gift. My daughter took one look at the cover and said, “This is wrong!”
Then she pointed to the bracelets around the Genie’s wrists and wailed, “In the movie, Aladdin frees the Genie with his last wish, and his bracelets fall off!”
I had to admit that my little daughter was, indeed, smarter than the writers.
Of course, Disney made a metric crapton of money from “The Return of Jafar”, so, perhaps, they might actually be on to something.
It’s because Walt died and they had no idea really what to do. Walt died in '66, then his brother Roy died in '71…And if you look, that’s around when the decline started. The Jungle Book was the last film Walt had any part in creating, and The Aristocats was the last he approved for production before he died.
Also, the roots of the decline began before Walt’s death. Films like Sword in the Stone in '63 suffered for two reasons: One, because their last “big” animated feature, Sleeping Beauty, was a huge flop and almost bankrupted Disney and so they cut budgets at the animation department; and in the '60s, Walt became more interested in live action film, television, EPCOT, and new parks than he was in animation.
Also one must too around the 70s the Nine Old Men were now truly old, and either dying or retiring, so you had a crop of new animators and artists who didn’t really have the same level of mastery as the old had.
Aladdin and the King of Thieves was great, and about on par with the original film I’d say.
I was trying to remember the title of this movie. As I recall, it was a direct-to-video release, and so I expected it to be bad … but it was surprisingly good. The fact that they got Robin Williams back to voice Genie was a huge bonus.
I wouldn’t say it was on a par with the original, but it was better than it had any right to be, based on Disney’s track record of direct-to-video sequels.
The song, You’re Only Second Rate is actually quite good.