Originally Posted By LindsayC [I think of all the amazing work Ken Duncan, for example, put into Megara, Jane Porter, and Captain Amelia.] You’ll be pleased to know Jim that Rhett’s interview for the next issue of Tales is with Ken Duncan on his Disney career and primarily on the development of Jane Porter.
Originally Posted By basil fan I said when TP premiered that I thought the dialogue too intelligent to interest a large segment of the movie-going population. Disney Villains <a href="http://www.whatsitsgalore.com/disney/villain.html" target="_blank">http://www.whatsitsgalore.com/ disney/villain.html</a>
Originally Posted By actingforanimators As someone who earns a living working in film (primarily struggling to push through quality stories by good screenwriters, and picking ones fights very carefully with producers and distributors – and not winning 60% of the time) I have a belief that audiences - much like children - grow according to how they're fed. If you give someone a steady diet of junk then they crave junk, and there are deleterious effects as a result (such as vital functions being jeopardized, etc.) You learn compromise, and you aren’t always happy with the result. But that’s why it’s called show "business.†It’s a very simple fact that film, like any other industry, is largely driven by market response. Studios go where the money is, and junk outsells quality much the same way McDonald's beats the pants off of the green grocers. Still, I think it is the responsibility of film makers to feed audiences a balanced diet(and yes even junk is fine once in a while.) I don't think audiences are stupid or lazy or incapable of appreciating and supporting something better than junk, it's just that there's an addiction that I believe the industry is responsible for having enabled and supported here. The first thing audiences have been conditioned to do is reach for the twinkies when there are apples and grapes right next to them. So studios make more twinkies because they’re easy money, and “good food†is harder and more costly to sell. It also doesn’t help when a marketing team pitches quality the same way it sells junk. Some marketing teams have been less than stellar or creative when asked to actually do their job. It goes back, in part, to my point about the absence of recognizable characters in the parades in the parks – they’re not absent because we don’t know them; it’s in large part that we don’t know them because they’re made absent. Disney has not known what to do with their own product, and it’s rather embarrassing. I believe that smart market watchers can see trends as to how audiences find quality in spite of the industry’s ineptitude. “The Emperor’s New Groove†and “The Iron Giant†are outstanding examples of this. My own personal belief is that “Treasure Planet†suffers from being actively buried rather than dismissed or overlooked. By and large, I believe it will survive the stupidity of the Studio the more its merits can be offered up to the far more intelligent general public.
Originally Posted By Jim In watching the bonus features on LADY AND THE TRAMP last night, I thought that was a great example of how Disney should be keeping these films and characters in the spotlight. In the storyboard feature, they do have one brief inclusion of ATLANTIS, but they could have included snippets from, say, TREASURE PLANET or FANTASIA 2000. Very rarely, from what I've seen, does Disney promote these more recent films in those montage sort of features. It's a lost opportunity for people to say, "Oh yeah, that looks cool. We should rent that."
