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The Black Cauldron

slate.com

37 pointstosh12 comments

I have fond memories of the Sierra adventure game that was licensed from the Disney movie.

IIRC the game ran on Sierra's original 286/EGA era interpreter (the same as Space Quest, Leisure Suit Larry and others), but it required less typing and had less complex language than other Sierra titles so it was much more approachable.

I was about 9 years old. I and my friends wanted to play adventure games so bad, but we didn't speak English, so in practice we were dependent on an older kid or a parent to play Space Quest for us... The Black Cauldron was a Sierra game that we could learn to play ourselves. I learned so much English from that game. (I can vividly remember learning the word "cupboard" in a scene that was set inside the protagonist's home.)

Maybe The Black Cauldron didn't do justice to the original work, but it certainly made an impact on me, and I'm grateful to Disney and Sierra for making it.

That game is probably what got me into computers (I was 9 when it was released). I'm getting a sleeve of it inked onto me next Tuesday. :)

Disney's new Snow White may already have been made, but unless you have a small child you may not have seen Frozen. Great songs, better script extremely but subtly subversive of the Disney archetypes.

Frozen is absolutely enormous with the "female, under 10 yo" demographic.

Like Star Wars, it's going to be a big thing that people remember about their childhoods in 20-30 years time.

Reading the part about Disney Animation's lack of success prompted me to check the date of the article. Sure enough this is from 2010, so pre-dates Frozen, the biggest grossing animation, and fifth biggest overall grossing film of all time.

It is also an excellent film that stands up to rewatching.

Which is fortunate as my kids want to watch it over and over and over...

Indeed, I've had a lot of opportunity to appreciate each and every nuance of the film myself. I thank goodness it's a good movie...

Also one of those things that can be enjoyed by adults too - there are constantly small twists and jokes that fly right over the heads of the children.

I thought that too as have been exposed by my neice.

Turne out this article is from 2010, hence not mentioning "let it go".

Or 'Brave'.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGsds9s615E

"And despite the cuts that removed its goriest details, the Cauldron-Born sequence is still a glorious outlier in the Disney canon—loud, gross, and delightfully scary, with dramatic gouts of green flame and melting fiery skulls."

"A great deal of the books' power comes from the development of Assistant Pig-Keeper Taran from callow youth to reluctant hero to lost soul to, in the end of the series, wise leader of men. But at the time Disney opposed sequels, so the full, five-volume epic was merely grist for the Disney mill: Joe Hale plucked story elements from the first two books and discarded the rest. Even before it flopped, The Black Cauldron would always be the only Prydain movie; that it fumbled such terrific material just made it worse."

I've always felt, since watching the movie after I finished the novels, that they would work much better with live actors; filming five movies over the course of five years could benefit from the natural aging of young actors. It strikes me as a shame that so much effort in Hollywood goes into creating shallow imitations of classic tales, rather than retelling the classics for a new generation.

Why the Treasure Planet hate? I really liked that film when it came out. It was just torpedoed by interdepartmental politics that hurt theatrical sales, like Emperor's New Groove. IIRC, they weren't allowed to make a trailer for it until the last minute, so the boring and uninformative one that aired in theaters came to be.

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