Disney Magic and More: Recent Episodes
Irrelevant But Awesome
We're jumping right back into the straight-to-video sequels with The Lion King II: Simba's Pride, which for some reason is a lot of people's favorite Disney sequel. Does it stand above the world of the straight to video sequels as the one true good one, or is it actually just like all the rest? Let's return once again to Pride Rock.
Unfortunately, this latest episode of The Disney Magic Podcast was plagued by audio difficulties. We have worked to smooth things out as much as possible, but you will still be able to tell some of the issues we had trying to get this particular episode to you. (As an apology, we will also be posting episode #84 simultaneously so you get at least one episode that's easier to listen to.)
Still, it's worth addressing The Good Dinosaur, as it's one of the biggest misfires in the entire Pixar lineup. Everything that it's customary for Pixar to hit out of the park feels like it didn't come together on this one. We break down what could have happened and why the pieces of this particular puzzle never come together quite right to form a real picture.
Pixar has gone from the depths of the ocean, to the far reaches of space, and now they're going inside the mind of a middle school girl. We get five main characters that, by definition, should be the most one dimensional character to ever get put into a movie, and yet, somehow it's one of Pixar's deepest and most thought provoking movies yet.
Pixar brings us their first prequel, the story of how the heroes of Monsters Inc., Mike and Sully, first met and became best friends back in their college days. Pixar also figures out how to take the "college movie" genre and somehow make it fit into a great G rated kids movie.
It was a title that didn't seem to make a lot of sense when they first announced it, but now that we've seen Pixar's Brave, it's easy to see where the movie's original title, The Bear and the Bow, came from. It's Pixar's first movie with a female lead, as well as the first Pixar movie to be what we could consider a fairy tale.
Cars might not be the most critically acclaimed of the Pixar movies, but with merchandise sales putting just about every other Pixar franchise to shame, the fact that there's a Cars 2 isn't a surprise. That being said, the fact that this is a spy movie that's heavy on action sequences where Michael Caine is involved and Larry the Cable Guy is the main character this time was a bit unexpected. Lets dive in, to this incredibly strange installment in the Pixar lineup.
The toys are back for the third movie to complete the Toy Story trilogy (for now). Pixar returns to the world of Buzz and Woody to put on their version of a prison break movie, as we watch the movie in the Toy Story trilogy with the lowest rating on Rotten Tomatoes. (It has a 99%. It's just that the first two movies both have 100%)
You know that feeling of the word getting you down and just wanting to float away from it all? Well now that feeling has it's own movie and it includes, an old man, a young scout, a talking dog, a magic bird, like three more talking dogs, another old man but this one's an old time adventurer, and of course a house that flies via balloon.
It's been a frequently cited bit of trivia that Walt Disney is the individual with the most Academy Awards in history with a grand total of 26. Of the 26, 22 of them were in competitive categories while the other four were honorary Oscars. And while that's a fun stat to rattle off, if you really take a moment to break down what this means, the results you come up with are interesting.
For example, even if you discount the four honorary Oscars and want to say that Walt Disney only won 22 Academy Awards, that still double the number of statues that have been won by anyone else in history. In second place is Cedric Gibbons, a production designer who has won the award 11 times. Interestingly, Cedric Gibbons is actually the person who is responsible for the design of the Oscar itself, but Disney still won the award twice as many times.
In fact, Walt Disney is not only the person to have won the most Oscars in total, he's also the person with the most consecutive wins, winning ten different Oscars over an eight year period from 1932-1939. He's also the person to be nominated the most with a staggering 59 nominations to his name, though second place, composer John Williams, has been slowly catching up over the past several years and currently sits at 51 nominations.
So, how exactly did Mr. Disney get so many award, especially so many in such a short period of time? Well, the bulk of his 22 Oscar wins came from victories in the "Animated Short" category, or "Best Short Subject (Cartoon)" as it was known at the time. Starting in 1932, Walt Disney won the award for "Best Short Subject (Cartoon)" for Flowers and Trees (1932), The Three Little Pigs (1933), The Tortoise and the Hare (1935), Three Orphan Kittens (1936), The Country Cousin (1937), The Old Mill (1938), Ferdinand the Bull (1939), The Ugly Duckling (1940), Lend a Paw (1942), Der Fueher's Face (1943), Toot, Whistle Plunk and Boom (1954), and finally Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day (1969) which he was awarded posthumously. There was a bit of a joke in the late 2000s, and early 2010s that the "Best Animated Feature" was basically the Pixar award, as it was usually given to whatever movie Pixar had released that year, but can you imagine trying to be any other animator and seeing the grip that Walt Disney had on this category throughout most of the 30s? Keep in mind that in addition to all of these victories, Walt Disney also had several nominations he didn't win in the same categories in the same years because Disney was essentially competing against himself.
Walt Disney also went on to win Academy Awards for his work on the shorts Seal Island (1949), In Beaver Valley (1951), Nature's Half Acre (1952), Water Birds (1953), The Alaskan Eskimo (1954), Bear Country (1954), Men Against the Arctic (1956), and Grand Canyon (1959). He would also win for two feature length documentaries, The Living Desert in 1952 and The Vanishing Prairie in 1955. While Disney will always be best known for his work in animation, his work in nature documentaries has a lasting impact as well, and as a result almost half of his Academy Award wins would come from that including his only competitive wins for feature length projects. (An animated film would not be nominated for an Academy Award until Beauty and the Beast in 1991.)
For those keeping count, that's Walt Disney's 22 competitive wins, but what are the four "honorary" Oscars that bring the total up to 26? In 1932, at the 5th Academy Awards, Walt Disney was given an Honorary Academy Award for the creation of Mickey Mouse, then again in 1939, at the 11th, Academy Awards, he was given a second Honorary Award for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, as it was "recognized as a significant screen innovation." While Honorary Oscar winners are traditionally given Oscar statuettes like all of the other winners of the evening, for Disney's Snow White Oscar, he was given a traditional Oscar statuette, along with seven miniature Oscar statuettes.
Finally, in 1942, Walt Disney would receive a third Honorary Oscar for "outstanding contribution to the advancement of the use of sound in motion pictures through the production of Fantasia" as well as the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award. This award in an honor given out by the Academy to "creative producers whose bodies of work reflect a consistently high quality of motion picture production" and is generally considered to count as an Honorary Oscar. It's one of the few awards that the Academy does not necessarily give out on a yearly basis, but only when it is deemed appropriate. Walt Disney is one of only 39 people to have ever received this award, bringing his Oscar total up to 26.
Once again, Pixar takes an idea that sounds bad (or at least incredibly bizarre) and turns into into a flat out masterpiece. This time in a post apocalyptic future where humanity has abandoned earth, one Robot that's obsessed with Hello Dolly falls in love and goes on an epic space adventure. Also there is pretty much no talking for the first half of the movie.
Pixar's next movie is their rat/food/french film Ratatouille that manages to combine thinks that shouldn't go well together (rodents and food) and manages to make something fantastic out of it. It's very much like cooking that way, where things are mixed to make even better things. They probably did that on purpose.
In this episode, we look at the first movie in Pixar's Cars series. While Cars is often considered to be the "sellout" Pixars movie, or the franchise that's only there to pay the bills, we actually breakdown the first Cars film to see how it holds up as a Pixar movie on its own.
The final trailer for the live action version of Beauty and the Beast has been released. Take it in in all its glory below, and count down the days until this thing gets released in theaters.
The big news this past week is the Oscar nominations. Both of Disney's 2016 movies (Moana and Zootopia) were nominated for Best Animated Motion Picture. In addition to that, Moana also received a nomination for the song "How Far I'll Go." If it wins Best Original song, then it's composer, Lin Manuel Miranda, will be the youngest person ever to win an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar and a Tony.
While Pixar's Finding Dory wasn't nominated for anything, the short "Piper" that was bundled with Finding Dory was nominated for Best Animated Short.
Disney's live action The Jungle Book was nominated for Visual Effects along with two other Disney properties, Marvel's Dr. Strange and Star Wars: Rogue One.
All in all, not a bad showing for Disney this year.
In other news, Disney World's new raft ride set to open sometime in 2017 is being renamed to Miss Adventure Falls, Originally titled Miss Fortune Falls, the name was changed to better reflect the ride's backstory. Miss Adventure Falls, located in the Typhoon Lagoon, is expected to have a ride time of two minutes, making it one of the longest rides in the Disney Water Parks.
Finally, you may or may not remember Newsies the 1992 Disney Musical about the Newsboy Strike of 1899. Staring Christian Bale, the movie made very little impact in its initial release, but over time a cult following has grown around the musical, and when the movie was adapted to a Broadway musical, it was much more successful, winning two Tonys and playing for audiences of thousands. Now Disney is giving you a chance to see the musical adaptation of Newsies even if you can't make it to New York.
A filmed performance of Newsies: The Broadway Musical will air in 700 theaters across the country on February 16th and 18th at 12:55 PM and February 22 at 7 PM. For a complete list of participating theaters, you can click here.
This episode takes on Pixar's first superhero movie, The Incredibles. It's also the first Pixar movie to have primarily human characters as well as their first PG movie. The Incredibles breaks a lot of new ground for Pixar so come along with us as we explore the action/adventure/comedy/animated/family film.
This episode of Disney Magic goes deep underwater to watch one of the most successful animated movies of all time, Finding Nemo. If you were around in the year or so that followed the release of this movie, it's safe to assume that you've watched this fish adventure approximately a thousand times minimum.
The next Pixar movie is the hilarious Monsters Inc. featuring two best friends, a ton of crazy character designs, and a whole lot of metaphors about parenthood that I could have sworn weren't in the movie when I watched it as a kid.
This week, our movie is the first sequel to a Pixar movie, and will be the only Pixar sequel for quite a while. We get to see Buzz and Woody again out on their next adventure with new toys, toy collectors, and an old, forgotten TV show in the movie that has the all time highest rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
We continue with Pixar's next movie A Bug's Life. Like Toy Story before it, A Bug's Life takes something that doesn't normally have emotions or feeling (bugs) and then makes you feel things for them. Let's see if this will be a trend when it comes to Pixar.
A heavy metal version of "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" has found it's way on line and lines up quite nicely with the original Mary Poppins footage to result in a rather well done little video. Check it out:
Disney's live action version of Cinderella is fast approaching, and to celebrate Disney has a special Cinderella themed popcorn bucket that will be avalible at Disney World and at Hollywood Studios.
Speaking of Disney's live action Cinderella film, we can't forget that a new Frozen short will be debuting with the movie, and we have a new trailer for that as well. It's only forty seconds but we'll take pretty much any new Frozen footage that we can get!
And finally in some big Television news, Disney has announced that 2017 will mark the return of their hit animated show Duck Tales on Disney XD. We don't know much of anything about the new show yet, but any chance to get back to Duckburg is one to get excited about!
Disneyland has released a video of several characters from rides including Pirates of the Caribbean and The Haunted Mansion singing For the First Time in Forever to celebrate Frozen coming to the park.
Here's a nice little Gallery of some behind the scenes pics from the making of Marry Poppins
Oh My Disney has ranked all of the Disney dogs from cute to cutest. Now your milage may vary on how exactly these dosg should rank but fair warning, Doug from up is on the list, yet somehow does not come in at number one. Full list here.
After the live action version of Cinderella comes out later this year, (and the Jungle Book next year,) Disney's next live action remake of one of their animated classics is going to be Beauty and the Beast. It has been announced that Emma Watson, famous for her role in the Harry Potter movies, will be playing Belle in the live action film. No release date for the movie has been announced yet, but it is said that the movie will start shooting later this year.
That's all for this week, see everyone in February!
Disney's latest movie Big Hero 6 will be released on Blu Ray and DVD on February 24th. To help celebrate that Disney has released a teaser of one of the special features that will be on the DVD, a video that points out all of the Frozen references that the animators hid throughout the movie. Check out the video below.
Some Aladdin concept art was revealed earlier this month, about twelve pieces in total. It's always amazing to look back at these images years after the movie has become a success and think about what made it into the final product, what didn't and what the movie could have been, for better or for worse. (See the entire gallery here)
Finally, Disney has announced the release dates of two of its upcoming, live action movies.
A live action adaptation of The Jungle Book, directed by John Favreau is scheduled to be released on April 14th, 2017.
Also before that, a live action remake of the 1977 musical Pete's Dragon will be released next year on April 15th, 2016.
Disney Magic begins its trek through the Pixar films, starting first with Toy Story staring Tom Hanks and Tim Allen. So join us through the next several weeks as we look at some of the very best computer animated films of the past twenty years.
It's the first roundup of the new year everybody!
First up, there was a time when Disney was going to make Toy Story 3 without the involvement of Pixar. Eventually the two companies came back together and the non-Pixar version of Toy Story 3 was put away for good. But recently some concept art of that never to be made version of the movie was released. While I'm sure we're all very glad to get the Toy Story that we got, it's interesting to look at what might have been. Check out the entire gallery here.
A small update on Pixar's movie The Good Dinosaur, Pixar has released a bit of concept art as well as an official logo, both which can be seen below. The Good Dinosaur is scheduled to be released in November of this year.
The Sorcerer's hat at Disney's Hollywood studios will be removed starting Wednesday this week. Disney has not yet announced what they expect to build in the place of the hat. The Sorcerer's hat has been at Disney's Hollywood Studios since 2001.
Finally, remember that little girl who was caught on video talking to Gaston a few weeks ago? Well that same Gaston seems to have been challenged to a push-up contest and it was once again captured on video.
Conclusion: Gaston is really good at push-ups.
For our Christmas special, we take a look at a Disney Princess direct to DVD presentation. How was it. You should listen to find out how good it is (even though you can probably make a good guess.)
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Disney Magic makes it's return by listing some of their favorite, but perhaps less well known characters.
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