It’s the fall of 1994, The Lion King is
passing the quarter billion mark at the box office and the house of Mouse
has big plans for world conquest. Three animated features a year. The feature
people were working on "Pocahantas," the stop motion people were doing
"James and the Giant Peach," and the TV division, who were calling themselves
Movietoons, was finishing up "A Goofy Movie."
For Movietoons, this was a heady times,
they had all sorts of interesting original projects to follow up "Goofy,"
and among the the more off-beat projects was a video called "Totally Twisted
Fairy Tales."
The idea was to steal the concept
from Cartoon Network’s World Premier Toons. Get some of the best people
writing sitcoms together with the best directors working for Disney TV,
tell ‘em to go wild, and see what happens. In other words, do cartoons
the old fashioned way--have a good time and hope for the best.
After several months of doodling,
a preliminary go-ahead was given for four shorts. "Redux" was the first,
and if it came out okay, the rest would be made. Production began in September
1995 and the film was completed in August of ’96. But there was now a problem.
It didn’t look like Disney, it didn’t sound like Disney, it was fifteen
minutes of full animation that resembled Rocky and Bullwinkle more than
anything else. What’s more is that the second one on the list was only
at the end of preproduction. So what were the movietoons people going to
do about it?
Do what everybody else does.
Put it on the festival circuit. In 1998, Redux went onto the circuit
in the shorts circuit. One was canceled because it was so bad, another,
"Jack in the Beanstalk" is still in the works, and the third, Darrol Rooney’s
"The Three Little Pigs", has just been completed and will also do the festival
circuit. It was submitted to the Oscars too.
Since 1996
