TIL Thread: Today I learned...

[Princess Flufflebutt]

TIL the name of H.P. Lovecraft's cat

...the dude was racist as hell

Oh boy! Do I have the game for you!

[Madeline]

H.P. Lovecraft was so racist, other white people (including people from the American South) considered him hella racist in his own time.

[Pocket]

The man did give one of his eldritch horror monsters a name that's pronounced "shub n****r wrath", if I recall.

[Highbrow Dash]

That seems like a stretch but there's plenty of racist crap in his books that's as explicit as it gets

[Mr. Big]

TIL about hydrangea flowers and how it can change from pink to blue depending on the PH level of the soil.

This video has more:

[Cthulhu Inc]

H.P. Lovecraft was so racist, other white people (including people from the American South) considered him hella racist in his own time.

IIRC his wife was Jewish so ?????????????????????

[Princess Flufflebutt]

IIRC his wife was Jewish so ?????????????????????

She was the exception, obviously

[Mr. Big]

Here's an animation history that I just learned.

TIL that the Disney film "The Black Cauldron" came out around the same time as the "Care Bears" movie.



....and the Care Bears did better at the domestic box office. Disney executives were NOT pleased

[Octavia]

Here's an animation history that I just learned.

TIL that the Disney film "The Black Cauldron" came out around the same time as the "Care Bears" movie.



....and the Care Bears did better at the domestic box office. Disney executives were NOT pleased

I had the Care Bears movie on VHS. I did not have The Black Cauldron. Checks out.

[Mr. Big]

I had the Care Bears movie on VHS. I did not have The Black Cauldron. Checks out.

Another thing I learned: "The Black Cauldron" didn't come out on VHS until 1998, 13 years after the theatrical release. The movie was a huge box office bomb for Disney (nearly bankrupting them) and wanted to bury it as much as possible.

[Mr. Big]

Another TIL with animation. Anyone familiar with Cookie Jar Group, a Canadian studio that, among other things, made "Johnny Test" and "Arthur". Some of you may even know that it was formerly Cinar.

Well, I found out WHY they changed their name and ownership. TL;DR: Cinar committed plagiarism, fraud, cheated Canadian tax credit (in order to qualify, most of the production crew has to be Canadian; Cinar cheated by hiring American writers and crediting Canadian names to the script). Here's a long article about it

The last of the lawsuits went on until 2013.

(oh, and Cookie Jar is now owned by DHX Media, the makers of Pony)

[minty]

Canada takes its Canadian content very seriously. Yet they refuse to hire me to write all cartoons and make them all about me.

Speaking of Canadian animation companies though, here's a fun fact: Nelvana worked on the dreaded Star Wars Holiday Special, making the animated sequence.

[Mr. Big]

Okay, my mistake, the scandal went on until 2016, when the co-founder of Cinar got sentenced to 9 years in prison.

The other co-founder (his wife) likely would've gotten sentenced, too, but she died from plastic surgery complications in 2004.

Children's television is full of lies and corruption, huh?

[Pocket]

TIL there's a Portal board game.

[Perrydotto]

that's been out for a good while, too

wonder if it's any fun

[Madeline]

Another thing I learned: "The Black Cauldron" didn't come out on VHS until 1998, 13 years after the theatrical release. The movie was a huge box office bomb for Disney (nearly bankrupting them) and wanted to bury it as much as possible.

That’s actually a huge oversimplification. I know you don’t like the Disney company, and for good reason (because they treat employees like shit while empowering creeps like John Lasseter and J. Michael Roddy), but by 1985 70% of the company’s income was already coming from the theme parks, and merchandising revenue also counted for a huge chunk of the company’s gross income. For one animated film to tank the entire company, even a huge bomb like The Black Cauldron, the theme parks would have had to be failing for years. Development of The Black Caludron was a gigantic, money-losing mess, to be sure, but it came at the tail end of a long stream of embarrassments and box office failures that Disney had been financing between the late 1970s and mid-1980s. Disney lost more money on The Black Hole, The Watcher in the Woods, and their Paramount coproductions Popeye and Dragonslayer than they did on The Black Cauldron. They lost nearly as much money on Tron as on those films, which didn’t even break even, with a modest gross of $33 million against a $17 million budget. But what The Black Cauldron did almost kill was the animation division.

The problem with the animation department wasn’t that it was costing the company money, it was that it was costing the company money over a long period of time with only two really successful films to show for it (The Rescuers and The Fox and the Hound). And since it was an elitist, closed environment driven by factional infighting, it wasn’t easy to reign it in. Moreover, The Black Caludron wasn’t even the only film to be mired in development hell at the animation studios. Animator Marc Davis, one of Walt’s “Nine Old Men,” had tried for years to get a Chanticleer film made, and when it never materialized, he retreated into the Imagineering department (where he then tried and failed for many years to get a parodic Wild West dark ride made to replace an aging Disneyland attraction called “Mine Train Through Nature’s Wonderland,” only to lose out to the Big Thunder Mountain attraction).

The Fox and the Hound, despite being a hit, was also a troubled production. The original director, Wolfgang Reitherman, had chosen not to retire and had been one of the studio’s directors almost by default for years. Walt had chosen him to direct animated features; CEO Card Walker and president Ron Miller (Walt’s son in law ) made many of their decisions either trying to imitate what Wlat would have done or in reaction to what they thought Walt would have done; and so Reitherman kept his job out of seniority more than anything else. Reitherman clashed hard with the studio’s cadre of younger animators on the film, trying to insert a musical sequence that of all things would have been a duet between Phil Harris and Charo despite it not matching at all with the tone of the film. Several of the younger animators, led by Don Bluth, chose to resign rather than work under Reitherman on September 13, 1979 (and they were all thrown off the lot by noon of the same day). The losses amounted to 17% of the studio’s animation staff. Ultimately, it was released with direction credit going to the team of Ted Berman, Richard Rich (yes, the Richard Rich who churned out all those awful DTV Disney and Bluth imitations for 20 years), and Art Stevens, with Reitherman getting a producer credit. All the trouble caused the budget to raise to $12 million. For reference, the previous animated film, The Rescuers, had also had a somewhat troubled production, and had still come in at $7.5 million. Even with 4 years of inflation, that increase should have given some suit pause. But The Fox and the Hound was a bigger hit than The Rescuers, and studio management were preoccupied with their string of live action bombs.

By the time The Fox and the Hound was in theaters, The Black Cauldron had finally moved from development hell into actual production. Disney had optioned the book in 1971 at the behest of animators Ollie Johnston and Frank Thomas, who were tired of fairy tales and innocuous family fare, and wanted to do a more serious fantasy film that could appeal to a wider audience. Most of the next decade was spent constantly throwing out huge amounts of work as new people were brought on to the project and subsequently left, one reason why the film’s cost was so high. The studio had originally planned to open the film in 1980, but by August of 1978 it was already clear that there was no way the film could be made anytime soon, and the decision was made to open it over Christmas of 1984. Six years was felt to be a long enough time to get the film done. By then, the studio had already strayed away from the book’s original story.

Lloyd Alexander’s original book was published in 1965, and is the second book in his series The Chronicles of Prydain. Alexander wasn’t a philologist or professor of literature like J.R.R. Tolkien (who taught at Oxford). Nevertheless, Alexander shared Tolkien’s interest in mythology and folklore, which he had been studying since he was a child. Rather than try to create a new hybrid English mythology out of various traditions, Alexander’s goals were more modest. He enjoyed writing fantasy novels for children, and had fallen in love with the Welsh language and Welsh literary tradition during his service in WWII. Alexander used The Mabinogion as inspiration and as a basis for his world-building, plotting, and characters for a cycle of five novels.

The Black Cauldron is one of those children’s or YA books that can still be enjoyed as an adult because like all great children’s and YA authors, Alexander treats his readers with respect and isn’t afraid to touch on heavier themes. Taran is ashamed of being a lowly-born assistant pig keeper. His rival Prince Ellidyr is just as poverty-stricken as Taran, being the youngest son of a poor regional king, but since Ellidyr has a title, he treats Taran with contempt. Ellidyr is driven by pride and insecurity, and everything he does comes from an attempt to seize credit or glory. Alexander’s story revolves around classism, sacrifice, and altruism.

Disney tossed most of that out. In vintage Hollywood style, they decided to mash up parts of the plots of the first two books (The Book of Llyr and Cauldron). Arawn, the main villain of the novels, never appears or is even mentioned in the finished film. Instead, a character from the first book, the Horned King, was made the film’s main villain, while most of the rest of the supporting cast was also cut. Amongst the characters cut is Ellidyr, which further robs the story of much-needed dramatic tension. In the book, Tarzan is given a magical brooch that finally gives him a gift that makes him feel special for the first time in his life, and he struggles with the decision of whether or not he should sacrifice it. The book explicitly rejects the idea of a sword being a worthy enough sacrifice to earn the heroes the Cauldron, because there is nothing great about swords or warfare. So of course Disney’s story team replaced the brooch with a magic sword, and it’s the sword that becomes the ultimate sacrifice. Yes, I’m spoiling part of a 33-year-old movie that is also a legendary bomb without shame.

The costs kept mounting as the animation staff shrank and as people were moved on and off the film. At one point, it was slated to be the feature-length directorial debut of John Musker, future codirector of The Little Mermaid. but fortunately for his career he was pushed off the project and onto The Great Mouse Detective. Eventually, the team of Berman, Rich, and Stevens were assigned to the film, with a fourth director (Dave Michener) coming in shortly thereafter. Disney president Ron Miller decided that there were too many people involved, which in isolation is a sensible decision, and Stevens was off the movie, followed by Michener (again). At least Stevens got a story credit for his troubles. From here on, the film was to be shepherded by story artist Joe Hale as producer and Berman and Rich as codirectors.

The animation department got itself in further trouble during this slog by costing the studio further money on Tron. The animators resented being told to work on a live action film being directed by someone who was not only an outsider to Disney, but an outsider to Hollywood in general (Tron director Steven Lisberger). They stalled work on that film and caused its budget to further balloon by outright refusing to do the work that they had been assigned to do, and in a panic, Miller had to outsource the animation work to Cuckoo’s Nest Productions in order to get Tron finished. CEO Card Walker then exacerbated the problem by moving Tron’s release date forward several months (from Christmas 1982 to summer 1982) out of pique towards Don Bluth. Bluth’s first feature, The Secret of NIMH, was scheduled to open in July of 1982, and Walker wanted to destroy the film’s box office chances and wreck Bluth’s career. Instead, he wrecked his own career (and Lisberger’s) by opening Tron against some humble little films known as E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn, Poltergeist, and Blade Runner. This is probably not the best decision ever made by a Hollywood executive, as the Spielberg-affiliated films were monster hits, Star Trek sewed up the sci-fi fans, and Blade Runner has endured to become one of the most influential sci fi films ever made, even though it too bombed.

So. The animation department is insubordinate and costing Disney a huge amount of money. What better thing for producer Hale to do than to inspect production on The Great Mouse Detective and find out that they, too, were getting to use CGI after Tron and Wrath of Kahn had proved it could successfully be used for special effects? Disney’s animation system had long been revolving around an “A” and “B” team system, which caused a lot of internal strife in the animation studio as everyone sought to be sssigned to the higher-prestige “A” team rather than the lower prestige “B” team. Mouse Detective was a “B” team picture. It didn’t seem fair that they got to use CGI bells and whistles on the much-lower-budget-and-prestige picture being made by relative newbies. So Hale persuaded the B team to postpone some work on their own picture and do some effects work on his so that The Black Cauldron could be the first Disney feature to use CGI. This further forced up the budget.

Walker and Miller’s bad decision making had caught up with them. The cost overruns on EPCOT Center and the long string of live action box office bombs had caused a hostile takeover attempt, and after a bunch of stock ownership and sale kerfuffles beteeen the Disney family and others, outside investor Sid Bass ended up in charge of the company, where he installed Frank Wells as president and Michael Eisner as CEO. Eisner brought along Jeffrey Katzenberg from Paramount to oversee film production.

At this point the film was almost done. Disney held a disastrous test screening of The Black Cauldron some time in the fall of 1984. The common theme of every Disney box-office failure over the last several years had been attempts to redefine what the studio’s public image and make blockbusters and more “adult” films. The studio had tried to solve this issue by throwing money either at hot young unknowns (Lisberger) or at veterans who were entering career slumps (Robert Altman, who directed Popeye). Sometimes the results were interesting, like Popeye or Tron, and sometimes they were just boring, like The Watcher in the Woods. The animation department was not immune to this impulse. They had lovingly animated scenes of people being melted into corpses by the power of the Black Cauldron in hopes of being taken more seriously as an adult fantasy film in the vein of Heavy Metal or Wizards, despite not being willing to match that tone in the rest of the film’s content, which is often pretty dull. Please note that while the cauldron born are explicitly undead in the novel, at no point is the process of melting corpses ever explicitly described anywhere. Again, Disney’s A team had failed to match the tone or content of the novel, this time going too far in the other direction.

The results should have been predictable. Disney marketers brought lots of parents and very young children to the screening. The children, in turn, freaked the hell out and most of them ran screaming and crying from the theater at the cauldron born sequence. Katzenberg hit the roof and demanded 12 minutes’ worth of cuts. When Hale tried to pull an old Disney style power play and refuse to edit or change the film in any way, Katzenberg took the film into the editing bay himself. Eisner stopped Katzenberg, but only because Katzenberg’s edit was reportedly incomprehensible. In the end, Katzenberg got his way: the film was edited by 12 minutes and the offending corpse melting scenes were cut completely. Because the film was locked in post-production and already scored, there are audible jumps in the soundtrack during the finished film during some of the edited scenes.

The film finally opened in July of 1985, where it had to compete with Back to the Future, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, Silverado, Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, and National Lampoon’s European Vacation, all of which significantly outgrossed it. BTTF in particular outgrossed all of these films combined. It failed to break even on a reported budget of $25 million, already twice as expensive as The Fox and the Hound. Its production manager, Don Hahn, reports that the film’s actual cost was more along the lines of $44 million, making it the most expensive animated film ever made to that date. Yeah.

People routinely try to make the case for the film and its reputation, trying to revive it, or get Disney to release an uncut or restored version. As a film geek, I get it. Lost scenes can exert a powerful pull on curious viewers, especially when attached to stories like that test screening from hell. If a print of Orson Welles’s lost cut of The Magnificent Ambersons ever surfaces, which is unlikely, I’d move heaven and earth to see it. But The Black Cauldron isn’t some great lost fantasy film, unfairly butchered by the mean old mouse at Disney. It’s a meandering and often dull film with a confused tone that doesn’t know if it wants to be a Spielberg film, a scary adventure, or the sort of tepid family film that makes a lot of adults refuse to watch animation in the first place. Elmer Bernstein does demonstrate why he was one of the great Hollywood film composers with his score, but all it does is underscore the difference between the tension, drama, and excitement he is doing his best to create with the music and what is actually happening on screen, which is inert and sometimes inane. The only voice actor who does an outstanding job is John Hurt, and it wasn’t the first or last time that he would give the keystone performance in a bad film. I say this as someone who was very excited to watch that VHS release in 1998, thinking I’d be seeing some film that was just too real for Disney, and then felt that excitement rapidly deflate over the film’s first five minutes.

Would I watch an uncut version? I’d be willing to do it once, I guess, if only because I’m that big old film geek. I’d at least like to see if the plot is any more comprehensible in its original cut. It’s different enough from the books that having read those doesn’t help with the gaps or omissions in the plot. But to be blunt, I doubt the uncut film is any better than the released one, and may even be worse, since it suggests that the tonal whiplash would be even worse with more scenes of gore and violence.

TL;DR: Holy crap the Black Cauldron is a hot mess and not in the fun way.

[Madeline]

For the curious, a dude on YouTube has been trying to dig up deleted Black Cauldron material for a few months now:

[Madeline]

Postscript: I forgot to note that the animation department, considered for cutting by the new regime at Disney, was at least in part saved by that B team feature, The Great Mouse Detective, which cost a hell of a lot less and got Katzenberg to put Musker and Clements on to The Little Mermaid.

Also Disney didn’t learn their lesson with the competition between A and B teams, because the same exact scenario happened again in the ‘90s with The Lion King (B-team; stolen from Osamu Tezuka and Shakespeare; monster hit) and Pocahontas (A-team; disappointed audiences; was really pretty bad for a number of reasons, including whitewashing racism, that I don’t have time to get I to right now )

[Mr. Big]

Ha, damn. Reading that, there's a case for why a you shouldn't have too many cooks (and the power play that can come within the industry). Yeah, I can see why the film came out the way it did (and I can only imagine what it was like with Katzenberg at the editing bay. Oof!).

[Mr. Big]

Oh, and TIL that those red plastic cups you see in parties are called "Solo Cups".

I just referred to them as "red plastic cups" in the past

[Perpetual Motion]

That's the brand name, I think. It's kinda a "bandaid" or "kleenex" type situation.

[Madeline]

Ha, damn. Reading that, there's a case for why a you shouldn't have too many cooks (and the power play that can come within the industry). Yeah, I can see why the film came out the way it did (and I can only imagine what it was like with Katzenberg at the editing bay. Oof!).

You can just look at the movie’s IMDB or Wiki page and see that even the finished film has 9 people credited under story. And then realize that there are people like Dave Michener or Rosemary-Anne Sisson (who wrote a complete screenplay for it in the 1970s) who aren’t credited on the final film, yet did possibly significant work on it. Definitely a case of “too many cooks,” for sure.

It’s such a weird movie. It’s got a lot of great and expressive animation in it (as well as some slow and floaty and unconvincing animation). The score is good. Some of the designs are good, but some are not. The Horned King’s sidekick looks like a little green refugee from A Troll in Central Park or something, but then he goes and threatens to shove a red-hot iron into Hen-Wen the pig’s face (and although this action is quickly cut to Hen-Wen’s frightened reaction, it kind of implies that this goofy little goblin who looks like comic relief from a bad cartoon is going to shove a poker into a pig’s eye ). But then here’s 5 minutes of Taran wrestling with Gurgi (more comic relief) over an apple. Like, you can rent it online for $3 pretty much anywhere and it might be worth it for people to see how odd the end product is, especially for a Disney movie.

Edit:you can see clips of some of this stuff in the YouTube playlist I linked, but I didn’t post it directly because part 1 has actual cels from the corpse melting scene in it and yeah I should have warned people about that because they’re graphic

[Perrydotto]

Holy shit, thanks for all that super rad info on Black Cauldron and Disney stuff, Madeline. You are smart and you write very engagingly. Seriously, thanks.

[Perrydotto]

I read the first Taran story and I really should read the rest

[Madeline]

Holy shit, thanks for all that super rad info on Black Cauldron and Disney stuff, Madeline. You are smart and you write very engagingly. Seriously, thanks.

The Disney marketing got me when I was little. For better or for worse, the company and its history fascinates me and I like reading up on it

[Mr. Big]

Animation history in general is a fascinating subject for me, so it's all good.

TIL that Keenspot is still around...and their front page is (mostly) still the same for the past 15 years.

And that lead me to look up the history of webcomics. It's honestly fascinating. What's amazing is that some of the 1990s-era webcomics, like "PvP', "Sluggy Freelance", "Penny Arcade", "Superosity", and few others are still around. And some of the names involved in the webcomic scene back then went on to bigger things, like Ian Jones-Quartey, John Allison and Dana Simpson.

[Princess Flufflebutt]

Keenspot is still alive??? Wow

[W.T. Fits]

KATAMARI DAMACY IS GETTING A REMAKE FOR THE NINTENDO SWITCH AND I AM HYPE AS HELL ABOUT IT!

(I missed yesterday's Direct.)

[Mr. Big]

TIL that both "cliche" and "stereotype" were printing terms, originally meaning a solid metal copy of type that can be reused over-and-over (as opposed to having to reset the movable type whenever things were reprinted later).

[Pocket]

However, cliché originally had a slightly different meaning, being an onomatopoeic word for the sound that was made during the process of striking a block into molten type–metal during another form of stereotyping, later called in English "dabbing".

...heh

[Mr. Big]

Keenspot is still alive??? Wow

Indeed! They seem to be focusing more on print comic books now, tho.

Plan Nine Publishing is no longer around, however.

[Mr. Big]

TIL that Michael Bay directed the first commercial to feature the "Got Milk?" campaign



(yes, THAT Michael Bay)

[Pocket]

Today I learned that college mascot kayfabe is serious business.

Seriously, read through the comments; so many people chime in about it.

[The Doctor]

TIL that Michael Bay directed the first commercial to feature the "Got Milk?" campaign



(yes, THAT Michael Bay)

He did music videos too. One of his most well known being Meat Loaf's "I Would Do Anything For Love".

[Mr. Big]

TIL that the Sand Whale in "Courage the Cowardly Dog" was voiced by Arnold Stang (Top Cat, among other things)



The show actually had a ton of voice actors from old cartoons involved. Eustace's original voice actor, Lionel Wilson, dates back to Terrytoons, for example (most notably "Tom Terrific"). Stang in particular voiced several of the show's monsters throughout the run.

[Orange Fluffy Sheep]

Edit:you can see clips of some of this stuff in the YouTube playlist I linked, but I didn’t post it directly because part 1 has actual cels from the corpse melting scene in it and yeah I should have warned people about that because they’re graphic

holy fuckin moly was it, and I also kinda want to see the uncut version just to see that goddamn nightmare happen.

Like, the guy has his eyes tightly shut for the whole thing, and the penultimate image has just a strand of flesh in front of the otherwise fully exposed eyeball, that is some attention to detail with a man's flesh boiling and melting away.

It's pretty fucking intense.

today I learn I should look at every random ass thread in case it has super interesting animation motion picture history in it, that is not sarcastic

[Madeline]

They ought to release an uncut version, I’m sure it would pick up some mild interest as “the film that was too intense for Disney in 1985” if they licensed it to Shout Factory or something like they did with Gravity Falls. It’ll probably be locked away forever though because it wasn’t a hit and it cost them an absurd amount of money for the time.

[Orange Fluffy Sheep]

They ought to release an uncut version, I’m sure it would pick up some mild interest as “the film that was too intense for Disney in 1985” if they licensed it to Shout Factory or something like they did with Gravity Falls. It’ll probably be locked away forever though because it wasn’t a hit and it cost them an absurd amount of money for the time.

They could probably get a few cents by putting it on a streaming service, get a little out of it at least.

[Pocket]

TIL "namesake" can mean both something that another thing was named after, or the other way around. I always assumed only the first meaning was correct, and a lot of people were just using it wrong. I guess this technically makes it a "Janus word", a word that can mean both one thing and its opposite.

[Madeline]

They could probably get a few cents by putting it on a streaming service, get a little out of it at least.

Yeah, they could at least let people rent it or stream it or something. Better than letting it rot away in obscurity, anyway.