Howdy folks and welcome to another week at Animated Views! We’ve got some pretty cool things cooking for you under the hood here, more of which we’ll let you know about in the coming weeks.
In the meantime, we’ve gone Contest Corner crazy, with two new giveaways. Up for grabs is Disney’s new release of The Many Adventures Of Winnie The Pooh, a “Friendship Edition” which, if you don’t watch out, is sure to start some sort of a relationship with the other Pooh DVDs on your shelf, and The Best Of Casper Volumes 1 and 2. These look to be repackagings of some of the Casper shorts from the muddled Harveytoons Collection that Classic Media put out last year. Once again they seem to have dropped the ball, opting for two releases when a deluxe single box set with all the Caspers would seem to be the way to go. I look forward to reviewing both titles for the site, but don’t miss your chance to grab ’em free right here! And don’t forget that our current Animaniacs giveaway ends tonight, so get your last-minute entries in for that too!
In recent industry news, I’ve found myself bemused, befuddled and bewildered at the treatment Chris Sanders’ American Dog has been getting from the Mouse House. With John Lasseter rumored to be no big fan of Sanders, he didn’t waste much time in removing this original director from his, excuse me, pet project as part of his “director driven” regime, and has overseen a revamp of the entire property that now doesn’t resemble American Dog at all!
Rumored to have been considering a name change to Hollywood Dog, more details emerged about the movie, which had become about a spoiled canine star who must fend for himself when location shooting accidentally leaves him behind and he finds himself having to live up to the action-hero role he has been depicted in.
Wait. Isn’t that, as has been much talked about on the net, the subplot to Disney’s 2003 direct-to-video outing 101 Dalmatians II: Patch’s London Adventure, in which Patch meets Thunderbolt, the action-hero star of the Western cartoon glimpsed at in Walt’s original classic? In Dalmatians II, Thunderbolt isn’t the kind of dog depicted in his show at all…he’s a Hollywood dog. Yep, he has to become a hero for real, too, when Patch gets into danger. Switch the setting and dump the Dalmatians, and Dog starts to sound a little too familiar. Not helping this association is the fact that the new movie has been given a confirmed title change, reflecting our hero’s name. What is it? Bolt.
Adding fuel to this fire, which fans have been flaming since Sanders was let go from Disney’s (only to end up helming his own show at DreamWorks), is that the April 2007 live-action release Firehouse Dog has almost the exact same premise. Not only that, but the recently announced deal between Walt Disney Studios and India’s Yash Raj Films also reveals that the Mouse House already has a feature in development that shares the same themes: first out of the gate will be the animated feature Roadside Romeo, written and directed by Jugal Hansraj and slated for a Summer 2008 release. The story? It’s about a rich dog that has to make his home in garbage bins after being abandoned on a Mumbai street, according to Yash Raj chief exec Sanjeev Kohli.
By the time Bolt (aka 101 Dalmatians II: Patch’s London Adventure…Again, But Set In America. With A Patch Substitute) bounds into theaters (pushed out of its original July 4th 2008 slot by its “story problems” and Disney Animation’s Pixar bosses’ own Wall-E) on November 26, 2008, will there actually have been a point in persisting with the making of this movie? Audiences may well be feeling a strong sense of weariness after sitting through several other similar films up until that point, and even if Bolt does turn out to be something special to emerge from the chaos, that hasn’t really helped Sony’s Surf’s Up which, after the recent rash of penguin movies, is struggling to keep afloat with a gross expected to be under $10m this weekend, for a two week total of less than $35m.
Whatever else, the promise of Chris Sanders’ original vision for American Dog has vanished. Gone are Thomas Hayden Church’s radioactive rabbit sidekick and those wonderful character designs. The title character is now a German Shepard, just like Thunderbolt. Who thinks he’s a Hollywood big-shot, just as in the Dalmatians sequel. And the resulting film will no doubt underperform, just like any other Disney animated movie that doesn’t have “Pixar” in the presenting bracket usually does. While it doesn’t make much sense for Lasseter and company to “abandon” this idiosyncratic feature from the new unit they have to play with, one has to wonder…is that the plan?
– Ben.
