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.
Since 1996
