Dracula
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Post by Dracula on Dec 23, 2021 10:55:20 GMT -5
The Rocketeer (1991) So, what ever happened to Joe Johnson? He made Captain America: The First Avenger in 2011, which you would have thought would be his ticket to the A-List in the coming decade but in the years since all he’s made is a direct to VOD movie called Not Safe For Work and extensive reshoots on The Nutcracker and the Four Realms after they fired its original director. That’s a pretty lame output for a guy who seems to have been a legitimate but rather unheralded hitmaker between Jurassic Park III, Jumanji, that phase one MCU movie. He goes pretty far back with Disney as well; his directorial debut was the 1989 film Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, which is certainly considered something of an 80s blockbuster classic even if it’s not quite on the level of something like Back to the Future. I’ve seen that one before as a youth but did consider re-watching it for this series but ultimately decided to instead focus on the Joe Johnson/Disney collaboration I hadn’t seen, the 1991 film The Rocketeer. If The Flight of the Navigator was part of a wave of films Hollywood made to get on the E.T. bandwagon, the 1991 film The Rocketeer was part of a wave of pulp tributes they made as a response to the Indiana Jones trilogy and to some extent the 1989 Batman. It was the same wave that brought us movies like Dick Tracy (also technically a Disney movie), The Shadow, and The Phantom which feel like of like the works of aging studio heads who didn’t get that those characters weren’t really comparable to Batman and Superman, but the resulting movies weren’t necessarily complete whiffs either. As a youngster I actually quite liked that 1994 version of The Shadow though I have my doubts that it would hold up if I watched it today. Unlike a lot of those movies The Rocketeer is not based on an actual comic book or pulp product of the early 20th Century, instead it’s based on an indie comic book from the early 1980s that was always a pastiche of those older cultural artifacts. I don’t think those comic books were ever particularly popular but nonetheless the film rights to them sold pretty quickly and the adaptation was in some level of development for the better part of ten years until it was fast tracked after the success of Batman and Disney specifically got behind it because it “had toyetic potential and appeal for merchandising.” The original plan was to make it a PG-13 film released by Touchstone but eventually it was a bit more kiddie-fied and released by straight up Disney, which might have been a mistake given that actual children did not give a damn about 1940s pastiche and I know that the Disney label was a big part of the reason I never saw it despite seeing similar movies from other studios. That being said, I was probably missing out, because while this isn’t some lost gem it is certainly a solid movie that accomplishes most of what it set out to do. The film’s alternate history 1940s is fun and the Rocketeer himself is a neat looking hero. The film’s special effects certainly seem a bit basic by modern standards but they are mostly within their means and they don’t distract or stand out as bad. It was also cool to see Timothy Dalton here as a villain, always nice to see former James Bonds getting work, and the film manages to incorporate Indiana Jones Nazis and Dick Tracy gangsters into its world as the villains pretty seamlessly. If there’s a problem here it’s probably the protagonist, at least in the scenes where he’s not in costume. As a character Cliff Secord strikes me as a pretty bland secret identity and he’s not done many favors by the actor playing him, a guy named Billy Campbell (no relation to Bruce Campbell). Campbell has quietly established himself as a reasonably successful actor, mainly in television, in the years since this movie came out but this was clearly a test to see if he had the “it” factor to become a star and I don’t think he pulled it off. He’s fine, but he doesn’t leave a big impression. Other than that there’s not a ton to complain about here; it’s a solid comic book action movie for its time period and it inhabits a fun retro world with real life figures. You can totally see why they went to Joe Johnson when the time came to bring Captain America to the screen… shame he hasn’t been a voice in the years since. ***1/2 out of Five
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Post by IanTheCool on Dec 23, 2021 11:20:36 GMT -5
Drac is making the most of his disney+ account.
I adored Flight of the Navigator as a kid, but yeah it doesnt hold up.
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Post by PG Cooper on Dec 23, 2021 11:28:46 GMT -5
I should probably watch The Rocketeer.
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Post by Dracula on Dec 25, 2021 18:40:44 GMT -5
Newsies (1992)
 I had at least heard of most of the Disney movies of this era even if I hadn’t seen a lot of them. I heard about movies like Return to Oz and Flight of the Navigator from the nostalgic Gen Xer who geek out about them while also talking about movies like The Goonies and I heard a decent amount about The Rocketeer for its status of kind of being an early superhero movie and I remember a lot of these other early 90s Disney flicks from the way they were marketed in my youth, but Newsies was a movie I learned about in adulthood. In fact I didn’t hear about it until a handful of years ago when I started interacting with a very different kind of geek: former theater kids. Back in ’92 Newsies was a huge bomb, one of the least successful movies the studio ever released having failed to even gross three million dollars on a fifteen million dollar budget, which probably explains why so few people ever talked about it. However, it seems that the tiny fraction of youngsters who did show up to see it grew up to join drama club and enjoy singing showtunes and shit. In that sense this movie has a lot to answer for, but I must say the future theater kids of America circa 1992 might have been on to something because while this movie is far from perfect it’s way better than its real life fate seems to suggest. This movie was more than likely greenlit almost as an experiment; The Little Mermaid was a big hit, it was a musical, maybe the time was right to try to revive the live action musical as well. It was not. We wouldn’t really see the neo-musical hit with any real success until Moulin Rouge almost ten years later and even then it would be a while before they were being made with any regularity and the world clearly wasn’t interested in 1992. I’m guessing the mandate behind this from the studio was just “see if you can make a musical, any musical, with Alan Menken” because I’m not sure how commercial the subject matter of Newsies would be otherwise. The film is about the 1899 Newsboys’ Strike, which was a real life bit of makeshift union organizing by a bunch of kids and teens in response to an increase in the price newspapers were being sold to distributors (I.E. the kids going “Extra! Extra! Read all about it” on the street) in New York by Pulitzer and Hearst. So… it’s a movie about the importance of unions and organized labor… certainly something that infamous strike buster Walt Disney would love having his name on. There is something nicely subversive about the fact that the people behind this movie managed to get one of the biggest capitalist enterprises on Earth to fund a musical ode to the power of organized labor and the movie is not terribly interested in “both sidesing” this conflict either. The film also sports some decent production values bringing to life an era of history we don’t see on film all that often, and most of the music is… decent. Alan Menken was in the middle of a big winning streak when he composed the music here and I wouldn’t say this broke that streak exactly but this is no Beauty and the Beast. Part of the problem may simply be that this was his first project without his longtime lyricist Howard Ashman, who died of AIDS before he could work on this project, but I think the bigger problem here might just be the performers. The film stars a very young Christian Bale about five years after Empire of the Sun and I must say I’m not sure he was entirely there as an actor yet and he certainly showed his future probably wouldn’t be in singing. He’s not terrible but he’s not great either and I can’t say I was super impressed by any of the singing or dancing here. The more basic acting is also a little questionable. The filmmakers decided to go all-in on giving these kids thick New York accents and I’m not sure that was the greatest idea. But that aside I still think this is a pretty fun movie and I have no idea why the critics were so hostile to it at the time and get why it has a cult following. *** out of Five
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Post by Neverending on Dec 26, 2021 4:04:47 GMT -5
Never fear. Brooklyn is here.
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Post by Dracula on Dec 27, 2021 10:24:59 GMT -5
Hocus Pocus (1993)
 You wouldn’t know it today, but like Newsies, Hocus Pocus was not terribly successful upon its original release. It didn’t flop as hard as Newsies (which was an absolute disaster) but it only made about $30 million and likely didn’t recoup its marketing costs. By comparison, Disney made much more from Cool Runnings and The Three Musketeers that year and even The Nightmare Before Christmas (which is also known to be more of a cult film than an instant success) outgrossed it. Part of the problem may have come down to a bad choice of release date: the movie came out on July 16, 1993 when all logic in the world suggests that the one and only month it should have come out in is October. In fact the main reason the film is well known today is because it’s become something of a go-to film to bring out whenever a they need a “horror” movie to bring out for Halloween when in a kid friendly environment which will fit with the season but won’t actually freak out the kids. That box office fate mostly conforms to my own memories from back in 1993, which was pretty much the first year I remember really having film marketing reach me. It certainly wasn’t as big of a deal as Aladdin but I certainly remember hearing about the movie and seeing its VHS all over the place in Hollywood Video. I didn’t see the movie, because it looked like it was for girls, but I knew of its existence, then it disappeared for about a decade or two before I started to learn that people in my age bracket actually remembered and cared about it. The film is set in Salem Massachusetts and is part of an exceptionally long line of movies about witches to imply that there actually were real witches in Salem worth being afraid of, which kind of misunderstands that the thing that’s interesting about the Salem Witch Trials is that witches aren’t real. I’d long assumed from the marketing and whatnot that the three witches on the film’s poster were the film’s protagonists, but they’re not, they’re villains chasing around these two very bland white teenagers who accidently bring them back to life around town for a while. Bette Midler, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Kathy Najimy are certainly interesting actors to put at the center of a movie for kids like this but I must say, they look kind of ridiculous. They don’t have even the slightest bit of menace or threat to them and they’re not terribly credible villains even though they are theoretically trying to do some legitimately evil stuff. To some extent I think that’s part of the goal; they seem to be working really hard to make sure this won’t actually scare kids too much and make their parents not want to take them to it… though they were oddly willing to let sexual innuendo fly in it. Ultimately I think it’s the general generic-ness of the non-witch characters here that really makes the film feel unexceptional more than anything. It’s really not a movie that’s meant to be “fun for the whole family,” this is a movie for kids and I don’t think there’s much there to look back on. **1/2 out of Five In ConclusionSo, that ends my look at Disney’s live action output in the 80s and 90s and by extension this whole series. This was kind of a bad time for Disney all around; Spielberg and his imitators were clearly eating their lunch when it comes to appealing to young people in the 80s and they clearly seemed to be rushing to catch up. As for the early 90s, they were making some moves but it’s obvious the bulk of their attention was on their animation division. Ultimately it was probably the least rewarding of these installments just because it exposed me to fewer things that felt unique to me and felt like less of a glance into history. And this is where I’m going to leave my “live action greatest hits” series, it doesn’t really seem to make sense to me to look much more deeply into the movies that came out during my own lifetime, which aren’t going to give me the same kind of perspective into film history. And this will also be the end of my whole “Disneyology 201” grab bags of topics. I’ve looked at a lot of the major blindspots I had about this studio and if I were to ever do a Disneyology 301 I’d really have to dig into some deep cuts to do it.
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Post by PG Cooper on Dec 27, 2021 12:24:04 GMT -5
I'm on the same wavelength with Hocus Pocus, though I do take joy in knowing the teenage love interest would go on to play the hooker Tom Cruise almost shacks up with in Eyes Wide Shut.
Anyway, fun series. Very informative and well-written. Fun to sort of tag along with at parts too. Can we expect a massive "Ranking all the crap I watched from Disneyology over the years" list?
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Post by Doomsday on Dec 27, 2021 12:30:23 GMT -5
I've never seen Hocus Pocus, it still kinda boggles my mind that it's become such a cult classic.
The Rocketeer though, man I loved that flick back in the day. My asshole parents never bought it on VHS for some reason so whenever it was on tv I was front and center. It was actually the very first thing I watched when I got Disney+ haha. It still holds up as a good adventure flick that might not be perfect but at least isn't stupid.
Newsies was also in the rotation back in the day. If I remember correctly, they didn't decide to make it a musical until they were already in production. I didn't know until somewhat recently that it was as big of a bomb as it turned out to be since a lot of my childhood friends loved it.
I can't remember if you've done these or not but are you going to launch into the other 90s fare like First Kid, Blank Check, Mighty Ducks and Heavyweights?
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Post by Dracula on Dec 27, 2021 12:32:43 GMT -5
I'm on the same wavelength with Hocus Pocus, though I do take joy in knowing the teenage love interest would go on to play the hooker Tom Cruise almost shacks up with in Eyes Wide Shut. Also that the little sister was Thora Birch Not sure about a ranking, some of this stuff is a bit apples and oranges aside from the fact that I happened to watch it for a series. When I do lists I try to make them a bit more universal. |
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Post by Dracula on Dec 27, 2021 12:36:40 GMT -5
I can't remember if you've done these or not but are you going to launch into the other 90s fare like First Kid, Blank Check, Mighty Ducks and Heavyweights? Not planning to do more any time soon, kind of stopped at my own lifetime on purpose. Have hazy memories from childhood of seeing First Kid, don't remember. I saw The Mighty Ducks as a kid (it was kind of in the air in my area) but not the other two. Around the 90s Disney's live action stuff seems to take a turn for the very disposable and you can kind of tell they viewed them as secondary concerns and direct to video fare. |
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Post by Doomsday on Dec 28, 2021 12:02:54 GMT -5
I can't remember if you've done these or not but are you going to launch into the other 90s fare like First Kid, Blank Check, Mighty Ducks and Heavyweights? Not planning to do more any time soon, kind of stopped at my own lifetime on purpose. Have hazy memories from childhood of seeing First Kid, don't remember. I saw The Mighty Ducks as a kid (it was kind of in the air in my area) but not the other two. Around the 90s Disney's live action stuff seems to take a turn for the very disposable and you can kind of tell they viewed them as secondary concerns and direct to video fare. There is definitely a noticeable decline in quality and not a lot of cinematic merit to draw from them. I don't know if it bottomed out with The Big Green or Man of the House but a couple years after they started to premier a lot of those types of flicks on the Disney channel. Johnny Tsunami, Zenon and so forth. |
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Post by Neverending on Jun 15, 2024 21:23:14 GMT -5
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Post by Doomsday on Jun 15, 2024 22:17:34 GMT -5
Perfect time for Drac to launch into the 90s live action movies. Homeward Bound: Lost In San Francisco ain't gonna watch itself.
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Post by Neverending on Jun 24, 2024 16:05:32 GMT -5
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Post by Dracula on Jun 24, 2024 16:12:58 GMT -5
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Post by IanTheCool on Aug 11, 2024 14:23:46 GMT -5
I've been haphazardly rewatching the Disney animated movies, so its been fun revisiting this blog after each watch.
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Post by PG Cooper on Aug 11, 2024 14:37:22 GMT -5
NightmareWorks might be a fun title. |
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Post by Neverending on Aug 12, 2024 0:10:16 GMT -5
NightmareWorks might be a fun title. … I guess… |
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Post by IanTheCool on Sept 7, 2024 13:19:06 GMT -5
I think you're wrong about 101 Dalmations
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Post by Neverending on Sept 7, 2024 13:34:08 GMT -5
I think you're wrong about 101 Dalmations The cartoon or Glen Close? |
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Post by Dracula on Sept 7, 2024 13:48:33 GMT -5
2016 me was clearly pretty grumpy when watching that one.
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Post by IanTheCool on Sept 7, 2024 14:45:31 GMT -5
I think you're wrong about 101 Dalmations The cartoon or Glen Close? The cartoon |
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Post by Neverending on Sept 7, 2024 15:19:43 GMT -5
The cartoon or Glen Close? The cartoon We all disagree with him on that. But where do we stand on Glen Close? |
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Post by IanTheCool on Sept 22, 2024 11:16:12 GMT -5
The Great Mouse Detective (1986)
 Heads rolled over The Black Cauldron and it coincided with a lot of changes to the greater Disney Corporation and the animated film division. Michael Eisner had been brought it from Paramount to be Disney’s CEO and he appointed future Dreamworks mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg to run the motion picture division and by all accounts he hated what he saw of The Black Cauldron and personally cut 12 minutes out of it. Clearly he felt the whole studio needed a big shakeup and different creatives started to take charge of their feature animations. The Great Mouse Detective was the first post-Katzenberg production by the studio and he apparently made demands to it on a script level while also cutting the budget to avoid another overpriced bomb. Whatever he did it seemed to work because The Great Mouse Detective was a very pleasant surprise for me and easily the studio’s best movie since The Jungle Book even if that’s not saying much. Looking back, it’s clear that this movie was something of a trial run for some of the principals that would have been instrumental in the famous Disney Renaissance. Most notably, two of the film’s four directors were a couple of guys named John Musker and Ron Clements who would together direct such movies as The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, The Princess and the Frog, and they’re even directing Moana later this year. The thing is, they were kind of stuck with a stupid concept to work with the first time around. Rather than working on an epic fairy tale they were stuck making a movie that answered the question no one was asking: what if Sherlock Holmes was a mouse? Honestly I’m not sure why this studio is so obsessed with mice, animals which most people hate these rodents but Disney saw it fit to make one its logo and fund two major motion pictures about them within a ten year period and this one really does not do a whole lot with the whole animal angle. Come to think about it, they don’t do a lot with the Sherlock Holmes angle either. We know from moment one that Professor Rattigan is the villain, so this isn’t really a whodunit so much as it’s about figuring out where the villain is and what his evil scheme is. That’s less a Sherlock Holmes formula and more the format of a James Bond movie complete with a scene where the villain leaves the hero tied up to an elaborate machine he can escape from. The movie is also pretty sharp visually. It lacks the show-offy scope of The Black Cauldron but it’s clearly cleaner and more confidently staged than most of the other movies they made in the previous twenty years. They do a good job of animating the London fog and they also use some computer animation and use it pretty well during the film’s rather exciting finale in the gears of Big Ben. In general, the execution here is pretty strong; it’s just that this whole premise is… silly and not very Disney-like. The public sort of seemed to agree because the reception of the movie was strong but nothing great. The movie made about $25 million on a $14 million budget, which would have been considered to be a moderate success except that for the second movie in a row Disney found themselves coming in second to a rival animation studio, in this case Don Bluth’s most successful movie An American Tail (again, what the hell is it with animators and mice), which made $47 million dollars. Disney is not a studio that was used to coming in second on its own turf so I think this thing was ultimately seen as a commercial failure, but clearly they felt like they were going in the right creative direction and they were probably right. ***1/2 out of five
I was also just thinking while watching this that mice as characters is a weird choice (and Disney was not the only one at this time). Mice and dogs: the two go-tos for Disney. |
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Post by Neverending on Sept 22, 2024 15:23:18 GMT -5
mice as characters is a weird choice |
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