Two words, Don Bluth:
A Hippie in the House of Mouse (Jim Henson at Disney, 1980)
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While that would take a bit to get used to, I will admit that this would, in fact, be an improvement over the Mario movie that we currently have, Illumination notwithstanding.Two words, Don Bluth:
Then again, roadkill would be an improvement over that feature.
Speaking of Bluth, did he buy any shares in Disney during the "Save Disney" campaign/battle agaisnt Holmes à Court? Just thought it be funny if an ex-Disney animator now owned shares in his current rival...Two words, Don Bluth:
If he did it's probably as a 'Knight Errant' the news of that may lead to Jim Henson to make overtures to bring him back into the fold.
Hoskins could still be a pretty good choice for Mario. It wasn't the casting choice that sunk that movie, after all.
Not so crazy about the art style, but Bowie as Bowser could work. Who would you cast as Princess Toadstool? I'm liking the idea of her having a New York accent when she's being snarky with Bowser.Slow long as we can have David Bowie as Bowser
While not a New Yorker I've been thinking about Lori Petty, what do you think?
I have no idea who that is. Either way, the actress playing Princess Toadstool needs to be able to both be a bubbly sweetheart and a deadpan snarker. Just to show how much contempt she has for Bowser.
Animator's Perspective VI: Basil V. Max
Chapter 9: Wild Max vs. Basil Mouse
Post from the Riding with the Mouse Net-log by animator Terrell Little.
If you ask any given person to name one special thing about Disney’s Where the Wild Things Are animated feature, you’ll undoubtedly hear the same answer: “it was the first computer animated movie!” This is wrong any way you look at it. First, it’s not an “all computer animated movie”, at least not in the way we talk about them today. That honor would have to wait until 1992. It’s also not the first animated feature to use computer animation. The Black Cauldron has that honor, with the DATA machines used to produce some animated boats, floating balls of light, and the trippy portal to the Fairy Realm.
What you can say about Wild Things is that it was the first animated feature to rely heavily on computer animation for set-building, framing, motion, compositing, and transitions. The bulk of the animation, however, was old school hand drawn. Normally, if you wanted to get a 3D or depth effect with hand animation, you had to draw and paint multiple cels and then physically layer them on a big rack below a suspended camera. You could use multiple cameras from multiple angles to further enhance the effect. But this all added up in terms of time and cost. So, what we did with the DATA machines was to build vector-animated backgrounds with the depth already built in and some vector “skeletons” for lack of a better word to help guide placement of the hand-drawn character and object cels. Then you could simply “move forward” on your vector animated background rather than redraw another set of background cels, and then swap out or move the character and object cels. This drastically accelerated compositing and reduced the total number of cels we needed to painstakingly draw, paint, and transfer and simultaneously sped up the process. While DATA offered the ability to digitally paint and color cells, the cost was prohibitively high due to the limitations of the technology at the time. The only real “true” computer animation was the occasional background prop like a shattering lamp, or the transition effects used when Max’s room transforms into the jungle and back.
By comparison, the other feature animation under development at the time, Basil of Baker Street, was a traditionally hand-animated feature that used a handful of DATA effects for specific scenes, such as the dozens of whirling gears inside of Big Ben, which would have been hell to hand draw in a smooth, non-clunky way. Not only were the animation techniques that Basil used more traditional, so were the stylistic techniques. Basil looks like a Disney feature. Wild Things looks like it was drawn by Maurice Sendak. And if all this comparison and contrast sounds like a competition, well, that’s because there kind of was.
You see, not long after production ramped up on both features (which was in itself something new for Disney animation, two features in active development at once!) Frank Wells came on board and immediately set out to cut costs, particularly in animation. We were apparently not pulling our weight profit-margin-wise compared to the parks, live action, and the Muppets. Jim Henson and Stan Kinsey sold the board on the purchase of the Lucasfilm graphics group in a large part based on the theory that we’d save money in the long run. Wells, meanwhile, was pushing for cheaper animation, something like Care Bears, which was slow frame rate, flat-color crap that no one at Disney would be caught dead putting on TV, none the less on the big screen. Frank was a firm believer in the theory that small budgets led to greater creativity by forcing the producers to think of new ways to do things. This works well and good in live action, of course, but in animation, you truly get what you pay for, if you ask me.
Jim and Roy proposed an experiment: Wild Things would rely heavily on the DATA machines while Basil would get a reduced budget, a paltry $9 million. The results would speak in the end.
I was an inbetweener on the Wild Things side, a job description that was starting to lose its distinction in the world of DATA-enabled electronic transitions, which made me start to worry about the long-term prospects for my job. Even before the “experiment” there’d been an undeclared friendly rivalry between the Wild Things crew and the Team Basil. In addition to the divergence in style and technical approach, we diverged in our music and casting. With not that much actual text to work from given the source material, we in the Wild Things crew went for an original soundtrack with original musical numbers to help pad out the story. With several books in the Basil series to work from, much like the Prydain books behind Cauldron, Team Basil skipped the musical numbers and stuck with an orchestral score like Cauldron. We went for big name musicians and lyricists. They went for big name voice actors.
Once again, I got to be an eye witness to the big stars. Team Basil brought in Vincent Price to voice the villainous Professor Ratigan, a character whose shape, appearance, and genteel persona were partly based on Ron Miller, and brought in British stage actor Barrie Ingham to play Basil, whom they based in shape and appearance on Jim Henson. There’s no truth to the theory that the Watsonesque Major Dr. David Q. Dawson was based on either Ray Watson (despite the name) or Frank Wells.
We on the Wild Things crew brought in big name musicians, first lyricist Paul Williams (who wrote the lyrics for the Muppet Movie soundtrack) and then legendary musical producer Quincy Jones, who was just coming off of his work on The Color Purple. Maurice Sendak, who was assisting in the writing, wanted to have a 1960s setting and Jim Henson wanted to use the Trogg’s hit Wild Thing in the opening credits. This led to a blues-rock based soundtrack, which was perfect for the zeitgeist of the mid ‘80s with all the middle-class white people suddenly into the blues thanks to Jake and Elwood and with the Austin blues-rock scene going national.
Quincy Jones wasn’t content to just have the cast perform the songs, though. He brought in none other than the already legendary Michael Jackson, as well as blues-rock performer George Thorogood, to do covers of two of the songs as a way of boosting interest in the film. So, while Team Basil got to dazzle us all with the walking bit of macabre charisma that is Vincent Price, the Wild Things crew got to dazzle with a double concert: George Thorogood and Michael Jackson.
Now, I was stoked to see Michael. This was peak Jackson, with the hat, the glove, and the moon walk. He came in early in the morning and we all wanted to talk to him. He was friendly and kind, but he was surprisingly shy for such a huge star and honestly seemed intimidated by all the attention. Quincy had to basically escort him in through a gauntlet of animators and get him to the recording booth. Mikey was covering the big show-stopper “Love is the Greatest Magic of All”, and boy did he nail it. I mean, even sitting in a sound booth he was breathtaking with his ability to emote and seemed to spin and dance even while seated facing the mike. He nailed it in one take. I thought I’d seen it all.
And then Thorogood came in. He and his band set up and started to tune while Michael finished up. He and Mikey greeted each other warmly and we were all treated to an impromptu concert while the techs got the sound booth swapped out for George and his band. George and the band started playing The Trogg’s Wild Thing and Mikey joined in, singing and dancing. Gods I wished someone had been able to record it. Then Mikey was gone and George and the band went on.
Now, I’d heard Thorogood on the radio, mainly “Bad to the Bone”, and he was good and all, but he was no Mikey, so I wasn’t expecting much. But as the band started to jam to the song “Be the Beast I Wanna’ Be” from the scene where Max “makes trouble of one kind or another”, with George’s growling voice and chopping blues licks…man, I was floored. And then George cuts into this guitar solo at the bridge, and he’s making the strings growl and roar and shriek like a monster, and then it starts to answer itself in a big monster call-and-response. To this day I maintain that he upstaged Michael Jackson, which I would never have thought was possible. To this day I question my memories.
Both covers would go platinum and Mikey’s cover would hit #1 for a month after the movie came out. But today, with all of his legendary hits, the cover of “Love is the Greatest Magic of All” is something only his serious fans really play anymore. But turn on a classic rock station anywhere in America, even today, and sooner or later you’ll hear George’s gravelly voice and monster-possessed guitar roaring out “Be the Beast I Wanna’ Be”.
Meanwhile, the game between Team Basil and the Wild Things crew went on. But the game was rigged, whether Jim and Roy realized it or not. You see, animation is a time-and-materials game. The greater the detail on your art, the longer it takes to paint and the more supplies you use. This means each cel you produce will naturally cost more for something detailed than for something simple. Even beyond the reuse of cels and a slow frame rate to reduce the total cels per minute of screen time, Care Bears was cheap in large part because it was all thick black outlines surrounding bright monotones. Cauldron, by comparison, with its details, depth, and shaded transitions of color, was expensive even beyond the sheer number of cels needed per minute.
Wild Things’ Sendak-inspired art, with its patterned “paper cut-out” backgrounds, thick lines, and simple colors, lent itself to quickly-produced, low cost cels. Basil’s traditional, naturalistic Disney artistry achieved the opposite. The DATA backgrounds certainly helped, but in the end Wild Things was guaranteed to cost less per cel just based on the style of the artwork!
Halfway through production, Wild Things was well within its budget while Basil was facing numerous overruns. The “short-cut” animated sequences that resulted from the ridiculously low budget betrayed their very cheapness. The shots were jumpy, with sloppy tone-pairing and poor transitions, requiring scenes to be remade at additional cost. Even Frank could see that the “cut-rate” cels were crap. In the end, Basil would cost $14 million[1] and Wild Things $22 million[2], but the results were like night and day in my opinion. Basil was good. The animation was well done and the Big Ben scene, done with DATA animation for the gears, was pretty exciting. But Wild Things, even if it cost half gain as much, was probably three to four times as good in my admittedly biased opinion. It moved in ways that no one had seen in an animated movie before. It flowed from scene to scene in both art and story. It was pure eye candy. A true work of art.
Now don’t get me wrong, Basil, or Elementary! as it came to be known, was a damned good movie. The animation was pretty impressive given the huge constraints art director John Musker and his team had to work around. It was released in time for Christmas of 1985, ultimately made a good $50 million worldwide on its run, and turned a good profit.
Where the Wild Things Are, as we all know, was a whole different story when it was released the next summer, a summer I will never forget because it was the summer my daughter Mo was born, just a couple of years after my marriage to Suzanne, but that’s another story.
Oh, and about that name Elementary! Basil sounded “too British” for marketing, so they looked for a new title. Ron Miller, noting the success of the one-word-title Splash, suggested Elementary! We all hated it, John in particular. Marketing even had to work extra hard for fear that the title would remind children of school and turn them away, which required an expensive media blitz on the Disney Channel and World of Magic just to associate the word to the character of Basil rather than homework, which further cut any cost advantage. They should have just left the title as is! Someone (looking at you, Ed Gombert) even started circulating a fake memo that included direction from management to henceforth rename all of the Disney Classics with similar one-word titles. Standouts included “Dwarves!” (Snow White), “Puppies!” (101 Dalmatians), and my personal favorite “Smooch!” (Sleeping Beauty). We were all laughing about the fake memo when Jim Henson found a copy pinned to a message board. We all watched in anticipation, half afraid we’d piss him off, half afraid we’d hurt his feelings. Instead, he chuckled and walked on, leaving the fake memo in place[3].
Others in the department were less amused, of course, but Jim gained some extra credit points after that. This helped alleviate some of the stress and bitterness starting to result from the high operational tempo that he maintained, and which honestly wore the rest of us out.
[1] Eisner and Wells tried the same thing with Basil in our timeline, to similar results. Production costs and box office were roughly equivalent.
[2] My estimate based on the mix and use of hand and computer animation and the cost advantages of the Sendak-style animation; compare to the similarly CG-filled but more traditionally drawn Oliver & Company ($31 million) released in 1988.
[3] A similar fake memo got circulated in our timeline after Basil was renamed to The Great Mouse Detective. It featured such new titles as “Seven Little Men Help a Girl”, “Puppies Taken Away”, and “The Girl who Seemed to Die”. Jeff Katzenberg reportedly did not take it with the same sense of humor as Jim does in this timeline. Things got worse when the memo was leaked to the press. Steve Hulett, who’d recently been fired from Disney, later took credit for the leak.
Post from the Riding with the Mouse Net-log by animator Terrell Little.
If you ask any given person to name one special thing about Disney’s Where the Wild Things Are animated feature, you’ll undoubtedly hear the same answer: “it was the first computer animated movie!” This is wrong any way you look at it. First, it’s not an “all computer animated movie”, at least not in the way we talk about them today. That honor would have to wait until 1992. It’s also not the first animated feature to use computer animation. The Black Cauldron has that honor, with the DATA machines used to produce some animated boats, floating balls of light, and the trippy portal to the Fairy Realm.
What you can say about Wild Things is that it was the first animated feature to rely heavily on computer animation for set-building, framing, motion, compositing, and transitions. The bulk of the animation, however, was old school hand drawn. Normally, if you wanted to get a 3D or depth effect with hand animation, you had to draw and paint multiple cels and then physically layer them on a big rack below a suspended camera. You could use multiple cameras from multiple angles to further enhance the effect. But this all added up in terms of time and cost. So, what we did with the DATA machines was to build vector-animated backgrounds with the depth already built in and some vector “skeletons” for lack of a better word to help guide placement of the hand-drawn character and object cels. Then you could simply “move forward” on your vector animated background rather than redraw another set of background cels, and then swap out or move the character and object cels. This drastically accelerated compositing and reduced the total number of cels we needed to painstakingly draw, paint, and transfer and simultaneously sped up the process. While DATA offered the ability to digitally paint and color cells, the cost was prohibitively high due to the limitations of the technology at the time. The only real “true” computer animation was the occasional background prop like a shattering lamp, or the transition effects used when Max’s room transforms into the jungle and back.
By comparison, the other feature animation under development at the time, Basil of Baker Street, was a traditionally hand-animated feature that used a handful of DATA effects for specific scenes, such as the dozens of whirling gears inside of Big Ben, which would have been hell to hand draw in a smooth, non-clunky way. Not only were the animation techniques that Basil used more traditional, so were the stylistic techniques. Basil looks like a Disney feature. Wild Things looks like it was drawn by Maurice Sendak. And if all this comparison and contrast sounds like a competition, well, that’s because there kind of was.
You see, not long after production ramped up on both features (which was in itself something new for Disney animation, two features in active development at once!) Frank Wells came on board and immediately set out to cut costs, particularly in animation. We were apparently not pulling our weight profit-margin-wise compared to the parks, live action, and the Muppets. Jim Henson and Stan Kinsey sold the board on the purchase of the Lucasfilm graphics group in a large part based on the theory that we’d save money in the long run. Wells, meanwhile, was pushing for cheaper animation, something like Care Bears, which was slow frame rate, flat-color crap that no one at Disney would be caught dead putting on TV, none the less on the big screen. Frank was a firm believer in the theory that small budgets led to greater creativity by forcing the producers to think of new ways to do things. This works well and good in live action, of course, but in animation, you truly get what you pay for, if you ask me.
Jim and Roy proposed an experiment: Wild Things would rely heavily on the DATA machines while Basil would get a reduced budget, a paltry $9 million. The results would speak in the end.
I was an inbetweener on the Wild Things side, a job description that was starting to lose its distinction in the world of DATA-enabled electronic transitions, which made me start to worry about the long-term prospects for my job. Even before the “experiment” there’d been an undeclared friendly rivalry between the Wild Things crew and the Team Basil. In addition to the divergence in style and technical approach, we diverged in our music and casting. With not that much actual text to work from given the source material, we in the Wild Things crew went for an original soundtrack with original musical numbers to help pad out the story. With several books in the Basil series to work from, much like the Prydain books behind Cauldron, Team Basil skipped the musical numbers and stuck with an orchestral score like Cauldron. We went for big name musicians and lyricists. They went for big name voice actors.
Once again, I got to be an eye witness to the big stars. Team Basil brought in Vincent Price to voice the villainous Professor Ratigan, a character whose shape, appearance, and genteel persona were partly based on Ron Miller, and brought in British stage actor Barrie Ingham to play Basil, whom they based in shape and appearance on Jim Henson. There’s no truth to the theory that the Watsonesque Major Dr. David Q. Dawson was based on either Ray Watson (despite the name) or Frank Wells.
We on the Wild Things crew brought in big name musicians, first lyricist Paul Williams (who wrote the lyrics for the Muppet Movie soundtrack) and then legendary musical producer Quincy Jones, who was just coming off of his work on The Color Purple. Maurice Sendak, who was assisting in the writing, wanted to have a 1960s setting and Jim Henson wanted to use the Trogg’s hit Wild Thing in the opening credits. This led to a blues-rock based soundtrack, which was perfect for the zeitgeist of the mid ‘80s with all the middle-class white people suddenly into the blues thanks to Jake and Elwood and with the Austin blues-rock scene going national.
Quincy Jones wasn’t content to just have the cast perform the songs, though. He brought in none other than the already legendary Michael Jackson, as well as blues-rock performer George Thorogood, to do covers of two of the songs as a way of boosting interest in the film. So, while Team Basil got to dazzle us all with the walking bit of macabre charisma that is Vincent Price, the Wild Things crew got to dazzle with a double concert: George Thorogood and Michael Jackson.
Now, I was stoked to see Michael. This was peak Jackson, with the hat, the glove, and the moon walk. He came in early in the morning and we all wanted to talk to him. He was friendly and kind, but he was surprisingly shy for such a huge star and honestly seemed intimidated by all the attention. Quincy had to basically escort him in through a gauntlet of animators and get him to the recording booth. Mikey was covering the big show-stopper “Love is the Greatest Magic of All”, and boy did he nail it. I mean, even sitting in a sound booth he was breathtaking with his ability to emote and seemed to spin and dance even while seated facing the mike. He nailed it in one take. I thought I’d seen it all.
And then Thorogood came in. He and his band set up and started to tune while Michael finished up. He and Mikey greeted each other warmly and we were all treated to an impromptu concert while the techs got the sound booth swapped out for George and his band. George and the band started playing The Trogg’s Wild Thing and Mikey joined in, singing and dancing. Gods I wished someone had been able to record it. Then Mikey was gone and George and the band went on.
Now, I’d heard Thorogood on the radio, mainly “Bad to the Bone”, and he was good and all, but he was no Mikey, so I wasn’t expecting much. But as the band started to jam to the song “Be the Beast I Wanna’ Be” from the scene where Max “makes trouble of one kind or another”, with George’s growling voice and chopping blues licks…man, I was floored. And then George cuts into this guitar solo at the bridge, and he’s making the strings growl and roar and shriek like a monster, and then it starts to answer itself in a big monster call-and-response. To this day I maintain that he upstaged Michael Jackson, which I would never have thought was possible. To this day I question my memories.
Both covers would go platinum and Mikey’s cover would hit #1 for a month after the movie came out. But today, with all of his legendary hits, the cover of “Love is the Greatest Magic of All” is something only his serious fans really play anymore. But turn on a classic rock station anywhere in America, even today, and sooner or later you’ll hear George’s gravelly voice and monster-possessed guitar roaring out “Be the Beast I Wanna’ Be”.
Meanwhile, the game between Team Basil and the Wild Things crew went on. But the game was rigged, whether Jim and Roy realized it or not. You see, animation is a time-and-materials game. The greater the detail on your art, the longer it takes to paint and the more supplies you use. This means each cel you produce will naturally cost more for something detailed than for something simple. Even beyond the reuse of cels and a slow frame rate to reduce the total cels per minute of screen time, Care Bears was cheap in large part because it was all thick black outlines surrounding bright monotones. Cauldron, by comparison, with its details, depth, and shaded transitions of color, was expensive even beyond the sheer number of cels needed per minute.
Wild Things’ Sendak-inspired art, with its patterned “paper cut-out” backgrounds, thick lines, and simple colors, lent itself to quickly-produced, low cost cels. Basil’s traditional, naturalistic Disney artistry achieved the opposite. The DATA backgrounds certainly helped, but in the end Wild Things was guaranteed to cost less per cel just based on the style of the artwork!
Halfway through production, Wild Things was well within its budget while Basil was facing numerous overruns. The “short-cut” animated sequences that resulted from the ridiculously low budget betrayed their very cheapness. The shots were jumpy, with sloppy tone-pairing and poor transitions, requiring scenes to be remade at additional cost. Even Frank could see that the “cut-rate” cels were crap. In the end, Basil would cost $14 million[1] and Wild Things $22 million[2], but the results were like night and day in my opinion. Basil was good. The animation was well done and the Big Ben scene, done with DATA animation for the gears, was pretty exciting. But Wild Things, even if it cost half gain as much, was probably three to four times as good in my admittedly biased opinion. It moved in ways that no one had seen in an animated movie before. It flowed from scene to scene in both art and story. It was pure eye candy. A true work of art.
Now don’t get me wrong, Basil, or Elementary! as it came to be known, was a damned good movie. The animation was pretty impressive given the huge constraints art director John Musker and his team had to work around. It was released in time for Christmas of 1985, ultimately made a good $50 million worldwide on its run, and turned a good profit.
Where the Wild Things Are, as we all know, was a whole different story when it was released the next summer, a summer I will never forget because it was the summer my daughter Mo was born, just a couple of years after my marriage to Suzanne, but that’s another story.
Oh, and about that name Elementary! Basil sounded “too British” for marketing, so they looked for a new title. Ron Miller, noting the success of the one-word-title Splash, suggested Elementary! We all hated it, John in particular. Marketing even had to work extra hard for fear that the title would remind children of school and turn them away, which required an expensive media blitz on the Disney Channel and World of Magic just to associate the word to the character of Basil rather than homework, which further cut any cost advantage. They should have just left the title as is! Someone (looking at you, Ed Gombert) even started circulating a fake memo that included direction from management to henceforth rename all of the Disney Classics with similar one-word titles. Standouts included “Dwarves!” (Snow White), “Puppies!” (101 Dalmatians), and my personal favorite “Smooch!” (Sleeping Beauty). We were all laughing about the fake memo when Jim Henson found a copy pinned to a message board. We all watched in anticipation, half afraid we’d piss him off, half afraid we’d hurt his feelings. Instead, he chuckled and walked on, leaving the fake memo in place[3].
Others in the department were less amused, of course, but Jim gained some extra credit points after that. This helped alleviate some of the stress and bitterness starting to result from the high operational tempo that he maintained, and which honestly wore the rest of us out.
[1] Eisner and Wells tried the same thing with Basil in our timeline, to similar results. Production costs and box office were roughly equivalent.
[2] My estimate based on the mix and use of hand and computer animation and the cost advantages of the Sendak-style animation; compare to the similarly CG-filled but more traditionally drawn Oliver & Company ($31 million) released in 1988.
[3] A similar fake memo got circulated in our timeline after Basil was renamed to The Great Mouse Detective. It featured such new titles as “Seven Little Men Help a Girl”, “Puppies Taken Away”, and “The Girl who Seemed to Die”. Jeff Katzenberg reportedly did not take it with the same sense of humor as Jim does in this timeline. Things got worse when the memo was leaked to the press. Steve Hulett, who’d recently been fired from Disney, later took credit for the leak.
Two words, Don Bluth:
Yes. Please. Though Tim Curry would be a better fit IMO (then again, what animated 80's villain isn't?).Slow long as we can have David Bowie as Bowser
Peach's hair makes me think Dolly Parton, though that is a bad idea in hindsight if she can't pull of a good new yorker accent.
If you ask me, I actually think that The Great Mouse Detective is a better name than Elementary! ever could be. I mean, Terrell Little has a good point when he said that kids would flee on contact at that name. Whereas TGMD gives us a sense of thrill at his sharp wit.
Also, may God have mercy on whomever decides that Tangled, Brave, Frozen, Onward, and the like should be named like that, lest he or she awaken the confusion and anger that is Elementary!
Very pleased Basil of Baker Street (please, oh please let that be the international title after the first release as Elementary!) is virtually unchanged in this timeline, The Great Mouse Detective remains one of my favourites to this day.
Likewise very pleased with how Where the Wild Things Are turned out, particularly how they were able to use Sendak's art as foundational and bring it to life.
Altogether a great update, I love these personal retrospectives from people at Disney, they've been a highlight of the timeline for me.
Does this mean Basil is a bit taller in this version, or just that he slouches all the way down when thinking?
Likewise very pleased with how Where the Wild Things Are turned out, particularly how they were able to use Sendak's art as foundational and bring it to life.
Oh so true! I truly think a lot of big-budget flops would have been made better if they had less money to work with (most of which seems to be spent on visual effects and casting these days), while a difference in animation budget can be the difference between 1983's He-Man and Genndy Tartakovsky's Primal (two shows with roughly similar art design but vastly different production funding).
Altogether a great update, I love these personal retrospectives from people at Disney, they've been a highlight of the timeline for me.
I wonder how Superman IV is affected--Disney was one of those that worked on the special effects for this film. IMO, Superman IV could have been a good film, but the production was...troubled, to put it mildly...
Here's an idea for Some Kind of Wonderful--Molly Ringwald was the original choice for the role of Amanda (the Lea Thompson role) but she turned it down to avoid being typecast, causing John Hughes, who had collaborated with her on three other films, to become so upset over her rejection that he never worked with her again.
So, here's my idea: Ringwald agrees to do that movie on the condition that Hughes directs the teen pregnancy movie For Keeps (which was supposed to be a darkly funny, yet cautionary tale about teen pregnancy, but turned into something different when John G. Avilsden (who had directed Rocky and The Karate Kid) signed on to direct, and he saw it as an uplifting love story--more details here: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Trivia/ForKeeps (1)), which she had signed on to do. IMO, Hughes probably would have filmed the material closer to what was originally planned that Avilsden did...
(1) Suffice it to say, Ringwald hates For Keeps today, especially since her career was derailed by starring in it (and Fresh Horses and Betsy's Wedding didn't help--she was good in the 1994 version of The Stand, though)...
Here's an idea for Some Kind of Wonderful--Molly Ringwald was the original choice for the role of Amanda (the Lea Thompson role) but she turned it down to avoid being typecast, causing John Hughes, who had collaborated with her on three other films, to become so upset over her rejection that he never worked with her again.
So, here's my idea: Ringwald agrees to do that movie on the condition that Hughes directs the teen pregnancy movie For Keeps (which was supposed to be a darkly funny, yet cautionary tale about teen pregnancy, but turned into something different when John G. Avilsden (who had directed Rocky and The Karate Kid) signed on to direct, and he saw it as an uplifting love story--more details here: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Trivia/ForKeeps (1)), which she had signed on to do. IMO, Hughes probably would have filmed the material closer to what was originally planned that Avilsden did...
(1) Suffice it to say, Ringwald hates For Keeps today, especially since her career was derailed by starring in it (and Fresh Horses and Betsy's Wedding didn't help--she was good in the 1994 version of The Stand, though)...
I'd rather butterfly away the 1984 Supergirl movie and revive this idea for Superman IV:
Superman III: Supergirl
Superman III: Supergirl was going to be the original version of Superman III starring Christopher Reeve and this version was supposed to be extended to a smaller scale unlike the previous films featuring the villains Brainiac and Mister Mxyzptlk with an appearance by Supergirl. The original...
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