Disneyology

Yup. Was going to say that about Tarzan. And, yeah, Hercules movies have been very frequent as you pointed out. Although, I think a live action adaptation of Disney's Hercules would be more compelling than a live action adaptation of Disney's Tarzan.

Yeah, Hulu has four of the five movies in the era I'm covering now which is part of why I'm jumping right into it instead of doing my customary one month wait between installments.  

Going back to the topic of Hercules movies, one thing that I've noted is that the vast majority of them are from Italy (Steve Reeves, Lou Ferrigno, ect), and the ones from here in the States are surprisingly few. The Disney one is actually pretty much the first "straight" (but veeeeeeeeeery loose) Hercules movie that's an American production. Before that there was The Three Stooges Meet Hercules and Hercules in New York. That's about it. Except for a supporting role in Jason and the Argonauts or TV shows like The Legendary Journeys, but meh. Then in 2014 all of a sudden Hollywood made two Hercules movies for whatever reason.

None of this matters, I just found it somewhat interesting.

Doomsday thebtskink EdReedFan20 1godzillafan

Ya'll remember the Disney Singalong tape from music class?

The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996)



Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame was the second straight Disney movie that I didn’t see in the theaters “back in the day.” In the case of the first of these, Pocahontas that was largely my parents’ doing. My mother had heard (correctly) that that movie was offensive to Native Americans and wasn’t too jazzed to take me to that one. I’m sure that if I had begged a bit more forcefully to see it she would have relented, but it looked like a movie for girls anyway which was enough for seven year old me to be cool with skipping it. My reasons for not seeing The Hunchback of Notre Dame was a big closer to what would become my usual attitude towards children’s movies. At the time I was very into reading these abridged and essentially re-written editions of “classic literature” and among the ones I’d read was Victor Hugo’s “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” which I was pretty fond of. When I heard that Disney had made this classic literature into a cartoon which gave it a happy ending I was downright offended and every time I heard any of my friends talking about it I was happy to give them a lecture about it (I wish I was making that up). This is a level of pretentiousness that… well I can’t say I disagree with it but I don’t think eight year old me had really earned that yet: I was getting angry about a movie I hadn’t seen failing to live up to a book the real version of which I hadn’t read yet.

That said, as much as I want to slap my younger self, he kind of did have a point, this was a really weird source text to turn into family entertainment at least on the surface. Hugo’s 600+ page novel was actually called “Notre-Dame de Paris” in France and only took on the title which emphasized the hunchback in its English translation. The book is actually more of an ensemble piece than most of its adaptations would have you think. It also dealt with all sorts of historical, religious, and intellectual themes that would not be of a whole lot of interest to children and some of it was decidedly not G-rated. The financial motivations behind the movie make a lot more sense when you consider that Disney was branching out to Broadway around this time with “Beauty and the Beast: The Musical” having opened in 1994 and “The Lion King: The Musical” on the way . With that in mind you remember that the two most successful musicals in Broadway history were “Les Misérables” (which was based on a Victor Hugo novel) and “The Phantom of the Opera” (which was about a deformed quasi-horror figure who hides out in a Parisian landmark who pines after a woman who may or may not be into him) and when you consider that you begin to wonder why it took someone as long as it did to try to turn this thing into a musical.

To Disney’s credit, they did maintain more of the book’s themes than I thought they would. In particular they seem to have been awfully faithful to the fact that the villain Frollo is in many ways driven by the fact that his sexual lust for Esmerelda conflicts with his religious celibacy. They soften this a little by making him a judge here rather than an Archdeacon and also try to distract from it by also making him a bigot who despises the Romani people (a sub-plot absent from the novel which sort of injects it with modern concerns) but at its heart it’s still a pretty dark idea for a Disney movie. In fact the whole movie seems to have a pretty healthy suspicion of authority and religion and is even at its heart a story about someone lashing out a rebelling against a father figure, which I have to assume isn’t necessarily something parents are super thrilled to teach their kids about. Frollo is actually in many ways more of a prick here than his is in the book (where he does have his redeeming qualities) and to some extent that does put him at risk of becoming one of these cartoonishly evil Disney villains, but unlike Ratcliffe in Pocahontas the film actually explores him and tried to find motivations and roots to why he is the way he is.

It also doesn’t hurt that Disney was able to make Esmerelda into a total dime. I don’t just mean that she’s hot (which she is) but she’s also tantalizing. She’s feisty, she’s rebellious, she’s virtuous, but also has a way of moving and carrying herself that is about as sexual as a lady is going to be in a Disney movie. This all matters because the movie needs to convince the audience that Quasimodo, Phoebus, and Frollo would all fall head over heels for her despite many reasons not to for all involved, and I think they pull this off pretty believably. Phoebus is also pretty well expanded and changed from his book counterpart, who is an asshole horndog who seduces Esmerelda, gets stabbed by a jealous Frollo, then does nothing when she is accused of the attack and eventually executed. Here is made into more of a heroic character actually deserving of her affections, which would seem to be the more conventional approach but they make it work. He’s made into someone who ostensibly works for the government/church but eventually follows his conscious and rebels making his arc an interesting parallel to Quasimodo’s and it’s also a sign of maturity that the film doesn’t take it’s whole ugly duckling “it’s what’s on the inside that counts” theme and simplistically makes all the pretty people into Gaston-like villains to drive the point home.

Now, you’ll notice that I’ve gotten pretty deep into this without really talking about the film’s title character and ostensibly protagonist Quasimodo, and that’s because his transition to film is a little more clunky. As I said before, Quasimodo was never really supposed to be the central character of this story so much as he’s this colorful figure on its periphery. In the novel Quasimodo is deaf and I believe mute and is treated as being sort of “simple.” He does love Esmerelda and helps her at times, and while she does have some sympathy for him she’s repulsed just the same and there’s kind of a King Kong thing going on with the way he tries to give her one-sided affection. He does eventually kill Frollo at the end, but this is more of a murder than a heroic act of saving the day and in many ways they the arc they present in the movie is invented and not entirely successfully. I don’t know, when you’ve got a power made judge trying to wipe out the Romani population and Esmerelda fighting off said oppression the self-esteem issues of Quasimodo seems a bit off-topic, the movie doesn’t feel like it should be his because it shouldn’t be.

Then of course we have to get to his gargoyle friends who are your standard trademark Disney comedy relief. Don’t get me wrong I don’t like any of these characters but generally they haven’t been as big of deal breakers for me as I’ve been watching these. I could take or leave the servant antics in Beauty and the Beast but they generally didn’t do obnoxious fourth wall breaks and kept themselves in check, Pumbaa and Timon had their annoying moments but also had kind of a neat Abbot and Costello thing going on, and the silly animal antics in Pocahontas mostly just seemed like a waste of time and were hardly the worst thing about that movie. These gargoyles on the other hand did bug me, partly because the writers were clearly taking notes from Aladdin and made them more prone to fourth wall breaks, but really it has less to do with the fact that they were any more annoying than what came before and more because they feel more out of place here than some of the previous comical characters did. When you try to be more adult and weightier than what you did previously it’s all the more jarring when you have legless stone figures voiced by Jason Alexander anachronistically breaking the fourth wall. The film does introduce the tantalizing, and kind of dark, possibility that these talking gargoyles don’t really exist and are just voices in Quasimodo’s head but it doesn’t really commit to this and by the time they’re comically participating in the battle at the end they seem to have given up on it.

There’s a lot about The Hunchback of Notre Dame I appreciate, but for all it does right I still can’t help but think that Disney bit off a bit more than they could chew here. Of course (to belabor the metaphor) they did more to chew it than the people who made Pocahontas and just swallowed and immediately started choking, but there’s still a sense that adapting this book was a mistake. It was too weighty for the people who just wanted an adorable fairy tale movie and it was too silly for anyone who was that interested in seeing a Victor Hugo adaptation and consequently it didn’t really find an audience. Some critics appreciated it, but it wasn’t really championed and audiences sort of shrugged at it. It made about a hundred million dollars at the box office, which is not much of a success by Disney’s standards at that point. Part of that might be that audiences felt burned by Pocahontas, part of it might be that kids were just baffled by all the medival politics, part of it might have been that parents didn’t think it was appropriate (I’m honestly not sure how they managed to snag the G-rating), but one way or another it failed. I do think the movie deserved better than that and that it’s one of the studio’s best efforts of the era, but I also sort of understand. That Disney magic just wasn’t there despite a lot of good effort.

***1/2 out of Five

... I did see that movie in the theaters.

What did you think of the Heaven's Light/Hellfire scene? Or the heavy use of Latin prayer in the music (apparently the lyrics match up quite well to what is being seen on screen)?

I think Hellfire alone should have warranted a PG rating. I think if the movie came out today, there's no way the MPAA would give it a G rating again.

The PG rating initially meant parents should heed caution on content and attend viewing the film with young children. Then PG-13 happened and that became the more EXTREME "cautioned" rating.

As time went on, the G rating started becoming something of a taboo, because it was seen as being "kiddie," and now PG is the new G and PG-13 became the new PG, defeating the purpose of why PG-13 was created in the first place. Films pretty much just evolved back into the G, PG, and R mentality again, they're just called something different now.

Dracula can't watch Mulan soon enough.

Speaking of SnoBorderZero and Flubber, I remember when McDonald's advertised Flubber by giving out green spoons with the purchase of a Sundae. But... I have zero memory of McDonald's giving their nuggets a Chinese make-over for Mulan. The fact that Rick & Morty remember it is mindblowing, and yet, I'm the guy who remembers a green spoon. I think this goes back to Dracula 's current theme and his nonsense with Pixar. 1997 and 1998 were completely different years for me. It was coming home from school and watching MTV instead of Kids WB (except for Pokemon and Histeria - those shows were fucking great). It's childhood vs teenhood. I watched Mulan in theaters. I enjoyed Mulan. But it didn't have the same effect as, say, Out of Sight. Remember Out of Sight? The George Clooney / Jennifer Lopez movie. I watched that in theaters, around the same time as Mulan, and there's a scene where they take their clothes off. They don't get naked. They just take their tops off. That was porn for me. I didn't even have Internet back then. I had Cinemax After Dark, occasionally the Spice Channel and Jennifer Lopez in lingerie in Out of Sight. Let's also not forget The Mask of Zorro. Remember when Antonio Banderas cuts off Catherine Zeta-Jones' clothes. Instant boner. Point is, my summer 1998 memories having nothing to do with fast food. I'm 100% sure I went to McDonald's. I'm 100% sure I ate that sauce. But I had to make space in my brain for other memories. No room for childish things. Even if they were delicious Chinese sauce with nuggets.