Disneyology

What it looks like when you fix Picasso.

My dad had a porn movie stash hidden in his closet that I stumbled upon when I was 10.

You guys had brief glimpses of boobies in R rated movies and watching through static. I was experiencing the real deal, baby.

Sneaky!

You should complain and tell her that's one of the most vital sex scenes to a plot ever conceived.

Nice word choice.

I blame Ian.

What a random movie to jack off to, but I then remembered that Doomsday used to jerk off to Doc Hollywood.

Glad you noticed.

Hercules actually, there's a reason you forgot it. Will probably post when I get home from work.

Hercules (1997)



While politics and snobbery conspired to make sure I didn’t see Pocahontas and The Hunchback of Notre Dame when they first came out, I didn’t really need a reason to skip Hercules, I had quite simply grown out of the demo. By 1997 was had pretty firmly graduated from PG movies to PG-13 movies and was having all kinds of fun seeing the likes of Men in Black and Austin Powers during the summer of 1997 and never even gave a thought to seeing the latest Disney flick. What little I did remember of the film’s marketing campaign (which was massive and extensive) made it look even stupider and more immature than usual. The movie was actually coming at a pretty strange time for Disney. Pocahontas and The Hunchback of Notre Dame were both clear disappointments for the company, they weren’t total disasters and they actually made decent bank overseas, but it was clear that they were losing a lot of momentum and by the time Hercules came along it was clear they needed a hit. It’s almost analogues to where the studio was back in the 40s when they spent too much on Pinocchio and went too highbrow with Fantasia and proceeded to make Dumbo to be a pared down audience pleaser that would earn a profit.

Hercules was directed by John Musker and Ron Clements, the team behind The Little Mermaid and Aladdin and the movie clearly takes after the latter more than the former. More specifically it takes after the parts of Aladdin with the genie. Out of all the movies Disney made in the 90s this (and I guess The Rescuers Down Under) is the only one that more or less ignores everything about the Disney Renaissance style and kind of just does its own thing. This is pretty much a full on mad-cap comedy and rather than just having a couple of comic relief side characters pretty much everyone in this movie with the possible exception of Hercules himself is a fourth wall breaking jokers. The Greek gods are goofballs, the villain is a comical figure who talks like an agent rather than a menacing force, the hero has a sidekick who is basically an extended parody of a character from the Rocky movies, and the love interest spends the entire movie doing a Rosalind Russell impression. The movie opts for irreverence and mirth at pretty much every turn right down to the decision to have the film be narrated by a gospel group for no particularly clear reason. They also change up the art style and the movie doesn’t really have the look or feel of the other Disney movies from this period.

The resulting film kind of feels like a strange hodgepodge at times. The film seems to view Hercules as a super hero of sorts and borrows liberally from the Superman story (and specifically the 1978 Richard Donner Superman film) to build up Hercules’ origin story, which is very different from the mythological version. Then the film also has this odd idea of making successful heroes into Ancient Greek celebrities akin to Michael Jordan with endorsement deals and whatnot and the film occasionally frames itself as a sports movie with a coach much talk about “going the distance,” which is odd given that Hercules was born with superhuman powers and doesn’t really need to work that hard to become a success. Then the movie throws in a gospel choir for some random reason. All of these ideas have some merit but there’s no coherence to the vision and I’m not sure they even wanted there to be. It’s in some ways a movie defined by chaos and irreverence, something at almost feels more like a descendant of the old Warner Brothers cartoons rather than classic Disney.

Given how much distaste I had for the Genie in Aladdin you’d think every moment of this would grate on me, did it? Well, sort of but not exactly. What made the Genie so annoying is that he felt out of place in that movie, which was otherwise a pretty straightforward adventure movie and that was also the problem with the gargoyles in The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Here the tone is pretty consistently comedic if nothing else and that makes it less of a flaw and more a matter of taste. Do I like the humor here? Not really, but it wasn’t painful to watch exactly. Some of the gags were kind of clever but it wasn’t laugh out loud funny to me or anything ultimately the whole thing just feels completely disposable. It’s certainly not a movie made for me or even for ten year old me but I would have thought all the pandering would have made it work for its target audience, but it actually didn’t. The movie made a hundred million domestic, which isn’t any more than The Hunchback of Notre Dame made and certainly didn’t make it the comeback the studio was hoping for. I think in some ways it may have been ahead of its time and in some ways it almost seems like a dry run for what Jeffrey Katzenberg would do when he moved to Dreamworks and started making snarky movies like Shrek. That worked for Dreamworks because they were positioning themselves as the anti-Disney but from Disney itself people wanted something a little grander, at least in this era.

**1/2 out of Five

The current era is called the Revival.

Golden Age: Snow White to Bambi
Silver Age: Cinderella to Jungle Book
Dark Age: Aristocats to Oliver
Renaissance: Little Mermaid to Lion King
Post-Renaissance: Pocahontas to Tarzan
Experimental: Dinosaur to Bolt
Revival: Princess & Frog to Present

I have zero memory of you watching Tangled, Wreck It Ralph, Frozen and Big Hero Six .

It's a ways away, but I'm interested for your take on The Emperor's New Groove when you get there.