Disney Classics (was Rosa interview)

deckerd@agcs.com deckerd at agcs.com
Fri Jul 7 01:17:52 CEST 1995


Quoth Mark Mayerson:
> 
> Changing the subject, the official list of Disney animated feature
> releases is a joke.  Saludos Amigos is less than an hour and includes
> live action.  The Three Caballeros contains lots of live action.
> Fantasia, Saludos Amigos, The Three Caballeros, Make Mine Music, Melody
> Time, Fun and Fancy Free, and Ichabod and Mr. Toad all contain shorts,
> not a continuous story.  The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh was
> made into a feature as an afterthought years after the three shorts
> were produced.  If you collect 10 Donald cartoons, do you call that a
> Donald feature?

The latest issue of the Laser Disc Newsletter (July 1995) has a full-page
ad funded by "concerned Disney laserdisc enthusiasts" (though it reads
like the work of one bent-out-of-shape fan, probably British to judge
by some of his turns of phrase) that includes a "Complete List of Walt
Disney Full Length Animated Features." I guess the idea is to make the
point that several are conspicuously absent from the laserdisc catalog.

"Despite what Disney claim, 'Pocahontas' wasn't their 33rd, they've
miscounted three of them."  This list includes Duck Tales - The Movie,
The Return of Jafar, and A Goofy Movie. My understanding was that Disney
was maintaining a roster of officially designated "Classics" in the grand
tradition of Snow White et al, and slapddash commercial quickies like
the Duck Tales movie or the Return of Jafar just didn't cut it (which
begs the question of how earlier cut-and-paste jobs like Saludos Amigos
and The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh did make the list). If I were
compiling a list of Disney Classics, I'd omit the six compilations
between Bambi and Cinderella as well as Winnie the Pooh and any direct-to-
video or TV episode collections. And what about hybrid titles like Song
of the South and So Dear to My Heart? So Dear to My Heart probably doesn't
have enough animation to make the list, but Song of the South has a _lot_
and it introduced some important characters -- Brer Rabbit and Brer Bear --
who are staples of European Disney comics.

For that matter, wasn't the first Duck Tales episode three regular episodes
strung together, amounting to something long enough that it could have been
packaged and sold as a "movie" a la Return of Jafar if Disney had thought
of it back then? I remember thinking at the time that this was the first
Duck movie in the Carl Barks vein, and it was too bad Disney had never
mined this particular ore before when it had been sitting on it for 
decades.

--Dwight Decker



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