
The Black Cauldron - tosh
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/dvdextras/2010/10/the_black_cauldron.single.html
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pavlov
I have fond memories of the Sierra adventure game that was licensed from the
Disney movie.

IIRC the game ran on Sierra's original 286/EGA era interpreter (the same as
_Space Quest_ , _Leisure Suit Larry_ and others), but it required less typing
and had less complex language than other Sierra titles so it was much more
approachable.

I was about 9 years old. I and my friends wanted to play adventure games so
bad, but we didn't speak English, so in practice we were dependent on an older
kid or a parent to play _Space Quest_ for us... _The Black Cauldron_ was a
Sierra game that we could learn to play ourselves. I learned so much English
from that game. (I can vividly remember learning the word "cupboard" in a
scene that was set inside the protagonist's home.)

Maybe _The Black Cauldron_ didn't do justice to the original work, but it
certainly made an impact on me, and I'm grateful to Disney and Sierra for
making it.

~~~
tptacek
That game is probably what got me into computers (I was 9 when it was
released). I'm getting a sleeve of it inked onto me next Tuesday. :)

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moomin
Disney's new Snow White may already have been made, but unless you have a
small child you may not have seen Frozen. Great songs, better script extremely
but subtly subversive of the Disney archetypes.

~~~
dansingerman
Reading the part about Disney Animation's lack of success prompted me to check
the date of the article. Sure enough this is from 2010, so pre-dates Frozen,
the biggest grossing animation, and fifth biggest overall grossing film of all
time.

It is also an excellent film that stands up to rewatching.

Which is fortunate as my kids want to watch it over and over and over...

~~~
moomin
Indeed, I've had a lot of opportunity to appreciate each and every nuance of
the film myself. I thank goodness it's a good movie...

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percept
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGsds9s615E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGsds9s615E)

"And despite the cuts that removed its goriest details, the Cauldron-Born
sequence is still a glorious outlier in the Disney canon—loud, gross, and
delightfully scary, with dramatic gouts of green flame and melting fiery
skulls."

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Adlai
"A great deal of the books' power comes from the development of Assistant Pig-
Keeper Taran from callow youth to reluctant hero to lost soul to, in the end
of the series, wise leader of men. But at the time Disney opposed sequels, so
the full, five-volume epic was merely grist for the Disney mill: Joe Hale
plucked story elements from the first two books and discarded the rest. Even
before it flopped, The Black Cauldron would always be the only Prydain movie;
that it fumbled such terrific material just made it worse."

I've always felt, since watching the movie after I finished the novels, that
they would work much better with live actors; filming five movies over the
course of five years could benefit from the natural aging of young actors. It
strikes me as a shame that so much effort in Hollywood goes into creating
shallow imitations of classic tales, rather than retelling the classics for a
new generation.

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redwall_hp
Why the Treasure Planet hate? I really liked that film when it came out. It
was just torpedoed by interdepartmental politics that hurt theatrical sales,
like Emperor's New Groove. IIRC, they weren't allowed to make a trailer for it
until the last minute, so the boring and uninformative one that aired in
theaters came to be.

