#wasn't the original a don bluth movie?

[kylesvariouslistsandstuff]

Interesting Statistic

Tweeted by Disney Animation Promos...

Before I start, I'll point something out here.

THE LION KING didn't gross nearly a billion dollars back in 1994-early 1995. That full total, which you can find on BoxOfficeMojo and various other sites, is made up of the original release (which itself stopped and re-started at one point), the 2002 IMAX-only re-release, and the 2011 3D re-release. The original 1994/95 take was around $768m, approximately... Which is still a monster total, and held the record for highest-earning animated movie until 2003, when Pixar's FINDING NEMO took the crown.

It's almost kind of... Rhythmic, in a way...

1990s... Movie that made $700m. 2000s, a movie that made little over... $300m... 2010s, big billion dollar hit and one of the highest grossing movies of all-time... 2020s... A movie that coughed up around $250m...

Wanna go back further? 1980s... Obviously, the biggest Disney animated feature at the box office - not counting any re-release totals - was THE LITTLE MERMAID, which made around $183m at the worldwide box office. That was an unprecedented total for an all-animated feature back in the day. Hybrid movie WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT, a year and a half earlier, collected $329m worldwide. That same year, Don Bluth and Steven Spielberg's THE LAND BEFORE TIME made $84m worldwide, while the full worldwide total for Disney's OLIVER & COMPANY - released the same exact as the Bluth dino movie - has never been disclosed. The domestic take was $53m, a record at the time... LITTLE MERMAID was a big jump up from OLIVER and LAND BEFORE TIME... And things only got bigger and bigger, as evidenced by THE LION KING making over $700m worldwide. Animated movies in the mid-1990s were now sharing the big leagues with blockbusters like TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY and JURASSIC PARK, but also leggy sensations like FORREST GUMP.

The 1970s is where things get muddy, given limited box office data - especially worldwide data... But I *do* know that THE RESCUERS was the biggest at the time, and that the domestic take was somewhere around $16m. Nowhere near that top ten of 1977, for sure... Hey, did you know that THE RESCUERS was *massive* in Europe? Like, so massive, that it outgrossed STAR WARS that same year in both France and West Germany? That's wild, isn't it? A fairly slow-paced, slow-burn mystery movie with two mice made on a tight budget, beating out the big spectacle that redefined the escapist blockbuster landscape and the family film as a whole? French folk and Germans not trapped inside by the Iron Curtain seemed to feel so... France and West Germany always seemed to come to the rescue with Disney during the 1970s. The movies that did okay-ish over here, like THE ARISTOCATS and ROBIN HOOD, were blockbusters over in those territories. The secret weapon that kept Disney's animation division afloat during a period where it was in the danger of being shut down, and a period where it wasn't easy to convince Americans other than families and children to go see a Disney animated movie in the cinema.

Anyways, some context for the 1990s vs. the 2000s vs. the 2010s vs. this decade...

We all know the story. The '90s was the "Disney Renaissance", a mostly fruitful period where they came back with a wallop, and scored some of their most successful animated movies since the final years Walt Disney himself was among the living. THE LITTLE MERMAID proved to be Disney's biggest animated domestic hit in a long while, in terms of attendance, and did excellently worldwide. BEAUTY AND THE BEAST, ALADDIN, and THE LION KING built upon that success, big time.

But then the grosses dwindled. Some audiences caught onto Disney kind of reusing the same musical comedy-adventure formula with each movie (such as with movies like HERCULES and MULAN), and some were turned off by what they felt was the studio biting off way more than they could chew (the misguided ambitions of POCAHONTAS and the darker but tonally all-over-the-map THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME). That said, Disney continued to score box office successes, take home some Oscars even (largely for musical categories), and get decent to good enough critical reception for most of the post-LION KING/pre-FANTASIA 2000 movies. By the time Disney switched it up with the genres, such as doing a zany buddy comedy with THE EMPEROR'S NEW GROOVE, action-adventure with ATLANTIS: THE LOST EMPIRE, and space opera with TREASURE PLANET... It was too late.

Those three movies came out in the early 2000s, a period when all-computer animated movies like Pixar's films and DreamWorks/PDI's spectacles were wowing audiences everywhere, and it also helped that the stories they were telling weren't the musical comedy-adventure romps that Disney Animation kept offering with each new movie. Pixar had buddy comedies TOY STORY 1 & 2, and Western-themed adventure A BUG'S LIFE, inventive workplace comedy MONSTERS, INC., and the perilous ocean adventure FINDING NEMO. PDI had the very PG ANTZ, and the very snarky and equally very farty SHREK. Audiences weren't moved by the trailers for movies like NEW GROOVE, ATLANTIS, and TREASURE PLANET... And they similarly ignored films like THE IRON GIANT, THE ROAD TO EL DORADO, and SPIRIT: STALLION OF THE CIMARRON. Beautifully hand-drawn movies, even if they changed up the stories a bit, just seemed same ol' same ol' to audiences. Throw a movie like SHARK TALE in front of them in 2004? Boom, big hit. As long as you were CG, competently made, and had some kind of edge, you were good to go in the early 2000s.

Hence why CHICKEN LITTLE of all things is the highest-earning Disney animated movie of the 2000s, if we’re excepting the hybrid collaboration film DINOSAUR, which only made about $20-something million more. This rather maligned 2005 movie even outgrossed the beloved LILO & STITCH, which made around $267m at the worldwide box office. That was a movie that had an enormous second life on DVD, and there was a brief Stitch-mania of sorts from around 2003-2006. A period where he was *everywhere*, to the point where he was as ubiquitous as Mickey, Donald, and Goofy... I was there, and I remember getting kinda tired of that little blue renegade, despite that I liked him and his movie. Very similar to how Disney aggressively shoved FROZEN front and center following its out-of-nowhere home run success, and trying to keep up with the demand for a movie they supposedly had muted confidence in when they were releasing it.

So the first half of the 2000s for Disney Animation was one 2D movie that did fine, and a bunch of movies that just didn't cut it. Even BROTHER BEAR, which made back its small East Coast budget, made $250m worldwide. That's a fine number, but when FINDING NEMO made $870m earlier that year... Yeah, things weren't looking great. Disney Animation switched to making all-CG movies, and while CHICKEN LITTLE made the most money of the pack, it was still pretty below what Pixar and DreamWorks racked up. MEET THE ROBINSONS was dumped, and BOLT was given a ho-hum release and consequently it just didn't make all that much for a 2008-release animated movie. THE PRINCESS AND THE FROG ended the 2000s with a whimper, a 2D animated movie... and it sadly and predictably made less than $300m worldwide... and CG TANGLED, arriving one year later and starting off the 2010s for WDAS, collected nearly $600m worldwide.

The 2010s, with the exception of the 2D animated and left-for-dead WINNIE THE POOH, was like the 1990s. Hit after hit. WRECK-IT RALPH, FROZEN, BIG HERO 6, ZOOTOPIA, MOANA, a pair of sequels, etc. Oscars, too. Good critical reception. They were back to being a well-oiled hit machine that would've likely continued into this decade, if not for COVID-19 and the whole cinema landscape being upended...

The 2020s... The world shutting down, and the re-opening being very unpredictable before the release of a vaccine... Plus The Walt Disney Company also had a very sloppy CEO running the joint. Unlike Universal, who either waited things out (like delaying MINIONS Deux by two full years, and wound up with a monster gross for that movie) or tried experimental strategies with other movies (such as the strategy they tried for THE CROODS: A NEW AGE), Disney kind of screwed the pooch with many of their animated releases...

Disney largely seemed to be using WDAS' movies, and Pixar's movies too, more as a carrot to get people to subscribe to Disney+ during this lull period. And I will be fair, RAYA AND THE LAST DRAGON debuted before the vaccines really got out. That was in March 2021. I was 28 at the time, and didn't get my second Moderna jab until two months later. It was available for the elderly first, then middle-aged adults, then folks my age, then later teens and children. Maybe not the most ideal time to release a family movie, no matter what the strategy was. When I started going back to the movies in spring 2021, I didn't really order snacks much, I wore my mask when in the lobby. When Delta was cropping up, I kept my mask on, even in the auditorium. Omicron, I was back to working at said movie theater, so I was masked when with customers and out of the break room...

I still hold that, because WDAS and Pixar's films are so goddamn expensive... that they should've held some of them like how Universal did with MINIONS: THE RISE OF GRU... At the same time, they did need something to release... So I understand their RAYA strategy, and ENCANTO was to get a month-long theatrical run but Delta happened, and it being on Disney+ in a matter of weeks probably conditioned audiences who knew of its existence to wait. (When I saw ENCANTO on a weekday, two or so weeks into release, maybe 4 other people were in the auditorium with me?) ENCANTO was deus-ex-machina'd by just how well it did on Disney+ and how incredibly well the soundtrack did. Not a box office hit, but huge in the second life. It's strangely a tradition for Disney animated movies... PINOCCHIO, FANTASIA, BAMBI, ALICE IN WONDERLAND, SLEEPING BEAUTY, etc. All flops on their initial releases, big favorites afterwards...

By the summer of 2022, audiences had fully returned to cinemas, and not just for Marvel movies. MINIONS 2 made nearly a billion, and there were other big hits in TOP GUN: MAVERICK, JURASSIC WORLD DOMINION, and SONIC THE HEDGEHOG 2. Animated movies like THE BAD GUYS and DC LEAGUE OF SUPER-PETS did quite well, but were lower budgeted, so their grosses made the grade. Did Disney take advantage of this resurgence for their 2022 WDAS offering? No... They just straight up left STRANGE WORLD for dead, they let it wither on the vine. Poor test screenings drove that decision, and audiences who did see it on opening week... gave it sour grades, too. Sometimes I wonder, what if RAYA came out in fall 2021, and ENCANTO this past fall? Could've been a blockbuster, pre-Disney+...

Just a sticky situation all around that could've been handled differently. Two movies impacted by how things were going in the world, and another that they straight up lost faith in...

Now it is mid-2023. Cinemas are very much alive and well, animation is benefiting from it, too... but audiences aren't made of money, so choices are narrower than ever before. WISH, along with the other not-sequel movies WDAS is making and releasing this decade, have an uphill battle to face. It's no surprise that ZOOTOPIA 2 and FROZEN III are in the works, partially because they're easy hits. Franchise favorites. They'll probably single-handedly make back the money RAYA, ENCANTO and STRANGE WORLD lost as theatrical titles. Expect at least another sequel to come out before 2030, likely a second ENCANTO. It's also no surprise that WISH is being marketed and positioned as this "definitive" Disney film, and being previewed as a sort-of "origin story" for all fantastical Disney animated movies. The teaser has a silly title card that says it was a story "centuries in the making"... They really want and need this thing to be their first bona fide box office success since... 2019's FROZEN II... And omitting sequels, since 2016's MOANA... Damn!

And I certainly hope it does well, it seems like the kind of movie that *would* come to the rescue when things aren't looking too hot. It's why I'm really curious to know what's after WISH, as in... Movies that aren't ZOOTOPIA 2 and FROZEN III, both of which seem to be deep in development and quite a while away. STRANGE WORLD's failure stung me because it happens all too often when Disney Animation tries on clothes that it doesn't normally wear in the post-Walt era. Like ATLANTIS, TREASURE PLANET, and MEET THE ROBINSONS before it, a sci-fi-flavored adventure movie with no musical numbers went belly-up. On the other side of the coin, Disney Animation - this past decade - scored hits with the video game adventure WRECK-IT RALPH, the superhero comedy BIG HERO 6, and the sorta police procedural/48 hours-almost-political conspiracy tale ZOOTOPIA. These balanced out the familiar musical comedy-adventures - TANGLED, FROZEN, and MOANA - quite nicely... So, I do hope that the post-WISH movies still play around and even experiment. I wouldn't want repeats.

With various complications out of the way, they now have to really battle for audience dollars and make the rest of this decade an upswing for them. Especially for leader Jennifer Lee, who assumed the mantle in 2018. Her tenure consisted of two sequels that were locked to do well to begin with, and then a couple of original movies that got affected by a worldwide crisis, and then a movie that was screwed. WISH should be her first not-sequel hit, a movie she apparently co-wrote, too. And a movie directed by her FROZEN partner, Chris Buck. Chris hasn't had a duff film there yet, his TARZAN made its money back in 1999, FROZEN and FROZEN II, need I say more? WISH likely continues his own little hit streak.

How well it does remains to be seen. Maybe a movie that comes out later this year, and not FROZEN III, is the surprise and takes the decade box office crown... Maybe not. Whatever happens, I hope WDAS claws its way out of the COVID-19 mess and keeps up with the other heavies.

[kylesvariouslistsandstuff]

Further FOX AND THE HOUND Observations

I watch THE FOX AND THE HOUND... Like, a lot...

Not too long ago, while scoping around Goodwill... Even though I have largely halted collecting Disney VHS tapes (something I regularly did from the early 2000s up until the late 2010s, with some additions every now and then afterwards), I couldn't help but pick up some Disney VHS tapes that I saw there...

One of them was the 2000 release of THE FOX AND THE HOUND, which was in the Gold Classic Collection. This release came in both VHS and DVD formats, but I scooped up the tape, largely for the front artwork. I never really collected the Gold Classic Collection editions, even though they were the newest releases of several Disney films when I was in my late single-digits. I had gotten a couple of them, too, back in the day, as previous editions were no longer available. I had FUN & FANCY FREE, ALICE IN WONDERLAND, and THE RESCUERS DOWN UNDER circa 2000-2002. I had also gotten the GCC DVDs of THE SWORD IN THE STONE and THE BLACK CAULDRON. Many years later, when I started collecting Disney VHS tapes, I did eventually throw in at least one more GCC release. I remember being given the 2000 release of TOY STORY from a relative, and... I didn't really pick up any after that, until I got the FOX AND THE HOUND VHS the other day.

I tend to watch the movie a lot, and I wanted an excuse to the other day, so I popped in the VHS. I had never seen what this transfer of the movie looked like, I was only familiar with how it looked on the original 1994 VHS release (from "The Classics" line) and the 2011 Blu-ray... But, THE FOX AND THE HOUND fascinates me, even if it's not among my personal favorite Disney animated features...

There was a period in my life where I watched it frequently, too. Circa early 2002, I want to say? And another time around mid-to-late 2005-ish, when I was nonstop watching many of the animated classics. Studying them like the obsessed 12 3/4-year old that I was at the time! These films are like my sun and moon, even the ones that aren't regarded as the greatest, or even considered below par.

Anyways... Where was I? Yeah, THE FOX AND THE HOUND. Well-known amongst the average animation (and/or Disney) historian as the smack-dab-in-the-middle of the transitional era picture of the Disney animated feature library. The film whose production was fraught by Don Bluth's mass exodus from the studio, resulting in a half-year delay and the enterprise scrambling to hire many new animators to work on the picture, getting it to its summer 1981 release date. A film worked on by many future giants in the animation and cinema landscape, from John Musker to Chris Buck to Glen Keane to Brad Bird to Tim Burton!

Wow-wee!

THE FOX AND THE HOUND wasn't quite a beloved picture upon release in 1981, with some brushing it off as yet another Disney cartoon in the age of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. In fact, this dog picture shared the same summer with RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK. It is a very compromised picture, as it is well-known that the young artists and the veterans were both at odds- not so much with each other, but with a very strict management that feared the wrath of angry letters from parents and the Bible Belt. This middle-management wouldn't allow the animated features in the works at the time (THE RESCUERS, this film) to be more in line with the films overseen by Walt Disney, films that weren't afraid to frighten young children and commit to their visual drama. Thus, you had Chief surviving a fall from a railroad bridge that was *supposed* to result in his death (thus fueling Copper with vengeance and hate for his best friend), and a general lack of oomph in other scenes. Jerry Rees, one of the animators of the film, recently revealed in an interview that the directors and executives didn't want the death of Tod's mother in the opening sequence to be explicit! They had to fight, tooth and nail, to get that gunshot sound effect in the movie!

That tells you everything you need to know...

THE FOX AND THE HOUND was in full production by the end of 1978. An inked and painted image of Tod and Copper meeting each other in the fallen log appeared in a November issue of LIFE Magazine that year, in celebration of Mickey Mouse's 50th birthday. In this issue was also some concept art done up by Mel Shaw for THE BLACK CAULDRON, which ended up being the feature film to be completed after FOX/HOUND. Not too long ago, I had read that one of the remaining bits of Don Bluth's work on the film was in the scene where Tod causes trouble in the barn while Widow Tweed is tending to Abigail the cow... and yeah, it does look like a Bluth scene!

There's a particular way Bluth does eyes, and I feel like you can see that with both Tod and the cow. Also, Tod doesn't keep his tongue in his mouth (before he takes a drink), another Bluth staple. You can see where his work is, using the tongues as your guide, in THE RESCUERS and WINNIE THE POOH AND TIGGER TOO. He has a thing for characters' tongues flopping out of their mouths.

But I definitely think that Bluth-ness can be felt in other scenes during the film's first 10 or so minutes, such as Big Mama comforting Tod after losing his mother, and Widow Tweed feeding Tod milk. And then about 20 minutes or so into the picture, once Amos, Copper, and Chief go on their lengthy hunting trip, you can see where things resumed following Bluth's September 1979 exit from the animation wing. You can see the work of the Cal-Art animators, and the vibe of the picture is slightly different. The first 10-20min of the movie have that '70s slow quietness to it, the veterans and the animators who already had ROBIN HOOD, TIGGER TOO, and THE RESCUERS under their collective belts... And then the rest of the picture, the new animators. There's a looseness to the animation and structuring of that half of the film, I feel.

I find that very, very fascinating. We have roughly a quarter of the movie that was made in 1978-79, and then the rest resumed in - presumably - early 1980. Of course, the story itself was probably locked by the end of 1978 with few major changes made afterwards (for example, the earliest iterations of THE FOX AND THE HOUND had some crow characters instead of woodpecker Boomer and the Brooklyn-accented sparrow Dinky), it's the execution of what was laid down. One team handling the first 10-20min, the other handling the rest. There's at least two schools of thought at play here, maybe a third, because Glen Keane's bear sequence feels - from a visual and staging standpoint - like it's from a completely different movie. The powerhouse sequence showcases a kind of intensity and raw pencil-drawn power that did the early Walt-era films proud, that the rest of the movie could've lived up to if the filmmakers had been allowed to just make a great family movie without the fear of upsetting someone.

Then you look at MICKEY'S CHRISTMAS CAROL (1983) and THE BLACK CAULDRON (1985), it's the new team's work through and through... THE FOX AND THE HOUND is the full bridge from the end of the Nine Old Men's lengthy careers to the "Young Turks" who would eventually be at the forefront of Disney Animation's "Renaissance"... You have a little bit of everything in it, really... Nine Old Men stuff that feels like it's from the late 1970s, Don Bluth stuff that's in line with his work on THE RESCUERS and his first feature THE SECRET OF NIMH (and also his part-time short BANJO THE WOODPILE CAT), the new animators' work that rings more CAROL and CAULDRON, and Glen Keane just absolutely going off with a scene that looks like it could've come right out of one of the '90s movies.

Kind of an eclectic collection of filmmaking choices, if you think about it, all rolled into this often-overlooked 83-minute movie.

[kylesvariouslistsandstuff]

The Many Mystery Tours of Winnie the Pooh

What do a Disney animated movie about a stuffed bear and a Beatles album have in common?

In some articles I wrote back in my WordPress days concerning the Disney "Animated Classics Canon", I talked about how The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh - released theatrically on March 11, 1977, was more of a clipshow than it was a fully-fledged Disney animated feature.

Now, the bonus features on various home media releases of this 1977 compilation film have often insisted the opposite. Disney seems to want your average consumer and us semi-historians to know that the story goes: Walt Disney was unsure about American audiences' familiarity with A. A. Milne's bedtime stories and the stuffed animal characters within. Instead of making a feature film as planned during the early 1960s, Walt planned to make three separate shorts to get audiences acquainted with those characters... and then string those three cartoon featurettes together into a 70-or-so-minute movie later down the line...

This seems to be a well-backed up history, too. After all, the autobiography of brothers Robert and Richard Sherman, known for their many contributions to the Disney songbook including the songs for these classic Winnie the Pooh adaptations, states pretty much the exact same thing. This strategy was not dissimilar to the studio's piecing-together of the Davy Crockett episodes of Disney's anthology series (then known as Disneyland, in promoting the upcoming theme park of the same name), which spawned the 1955 theatrical release Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier and its 1956 follow-up Davy Crockett and the River Pirates... But I feel this is untrue, and has been shown to be so...

Familiarity with British characters was never a problem for Walt and his crew before, or characters from European stories in general. Mary Poppins didn't need a couple of shorts, or some episodes of a TV show to familiarize audiences with the titular nanny beforehand. One Hundred and One Dalmatians was, from start to finish, a feature film project that never detoured into short films prior to release. Peter Pan? Same thing.

Now, the Sherman Brothers autobiography states that the poor reception of Alice in Wonderland - a similarly episodic feature based on beloved and relatively plot-free British books - was what drove Walt to make this bizarre decision with Winnie the Pooh. That seems to hold some weight.

If this all was indeed the case, how come the third short - 1974's Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too - took so long to come to fruition? The third short, and the subsequent final third of the film, is very much a post-Walt affair. More than anything, it was a training picture for many of Disney's then-new animators, including a returning Don Bluth. You can tell Bluth's animation from a mile away when Rabbit gets lost in the woods, for sure, as he can't keep his tongue in his mouth. The story appears to borrow from various Winnie the Pooh story LPs that Disneyland Records released throughout the end of the 1960s. (Blustery Day also first came out in record form in 1967, a year before the animated featurette's December 1968 theatrical debut with the flop live-action film The Horse in the Grey Flannel Suit.) It is unknown what the final third of Walt's unmade Winnie the Pooh film would've been.

Lastly, it is not as if Winnie the Pooh *wasn't* known by Americans pre-1966... So that seems to render the "Walt was unsure if American audiences would see a feature about that character because he wasn't well-known by Americans" claim moot. I firmly think the real story is, "Walt Disney's Winnie the Pooh", was a lot like the original Leica reel for The Wind in the Willows that was put together in 1941. The Wind in the Willows, based on yet another British literary classic (Kenneth Grahame's story of the same name), could've been the next feature-length film after Bambi's release in 1942. Animator Frank Thomas, of course one of Walt Disney's "Nine Old Men", explained in an interview that the Leica reel ran roughly 48 minutes long and did contain story problems. That no doubt pushed it back, as did World War II's effects on the animation wing. Wind in the Willows eventually wound up as a roughly 35-minute segment of the 1949 package feature The Adventures of Ichabod & Mr. Toad.

Walt seemed to have found the Pooh stories to be too fluffy to sustain a roughly 70-minute movie, and figured releasing smaller films based on the stories was the better option. His Winnie the Pooh film was initially planned for a 1965 release, almost two years after The Sword in the Stone and two years before The Jungle Book eventually came out, which partially explains that four-year gap between those two pictures. Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree debuted in February 1966 ahead of The Ugly Dachshund, and was heavily marketed as a double bill, and to no one's surprise, the stuffed bear cartoon completely overshadowed the Dean Jones dog movie. I don't think a Pooh feature was in the cards after that, for the next film after The Jungle Book was The Aristocats, which Walt signed off on before his death in December 1966. Being short films, both Honey Tree and Blustery Day could be shown and shown again on television, which they were. They kept the character a household name, audiences didn't have to wait years for a re-issue like they had to do for longer Disney animated films.

For whatever reason the Walt Winnie the Pooh movie was cancelled, The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh is still a Frankenstein creation. The 1974 Tigger Too short is not from the Walt era and is its own entity. So in the Disney animated feature "canon", you have a film with 2/3s of it coming from an unmade Walt Disney feature released in two parts from 1966 to 1968, and another 1/3 of it from something conceived well after that. Then you have the "goodbye" ending, which reportedly was once meant for the Blustery Day short. John Walmsley, who voiced Christopher Robin in that portion, voices him here too, which seems to confirm that it was indeed meant for it. Plus, it reuses some animation from a scene in The Jungle Book, which - again - opened a little over a year before Blustery Day debuted. If Blustery Day had been the final cartoon with that ending, it would've been a fitting sendoff being Walt's final animated work that he was alive for most of.

Quite funny how this Winnie the Pooh film is a big honey clustercuss, with a strangely convoluted history... But it's always been thought that it all works together anyways, whether you know the history of the film or if you don't. Ex away the history and the Frankensteinian structure of it, it's a charming anthology of stories about these stuffed animals going on fun misadventures and a nice bittersweet ending to top it off. It works completely fine as a 74-minute animated feature film, and the stories' aimlessness make it work in its own fun way.

To make matters even weirder, in 1983, Walt Disney Productions let out another 25-minute Pooh featurette, Winnie the Pooh and a Day for Eeyore. You would think this one was meant to be a training vehicle for new animator hires, but weirdly enough, it was completely outsourced to a studio called Rick Reinert Productions. The new animators instead worked on the featurette Mickey's Christmas Carol, which debuted later that year.

It occurred to me that there's an album that I love whose assemblage is very, very similar to how the 1977 feature The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh came together...

The Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour...

Magical Mystery Tour was a surrealist television film that was made in the wake of the death of The Beatles' manager Brian Epstein. Six songs were newly conceived for this 50-or-so-minute film, which would air on the BBC on Boxing Day 1967. (That's December 26th for any Americans reading who may not be familiar with such a holiday.) Coinciding with the release was a six-song double-EP set a few weeks prior. An EP - "extended play", typically, was the same size of a single: A 7-inch record. Singles had one song on one side, and one song on the other. A-side, B-side. An EP could contain up to four songs on the record, and The Beatles were no strangers to the EP format. EPs seemed to be a much more popular kind of record in the UK, too. The Beatles' American distributor, Capitol Records, felt a two-EP record set was not viable for the US market...

Capitol Records is best known by Beatles historians for their Frankenstein-like assembling of albums. A single album in the UK like Rubber Soul could have its tracks spread across, say, THREE albums in the US. All of this mangling would eventually stop by 1967, with the seminal LP (long-player) album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band being the first Beatles album to have the same tracklisting in both the UK and the US. (With only a minor little difference between the two.) In Beatles tradition, some songs were never meant to be anything but just singles. For example, in 1966, there was The Beatles album Revolver, and a single: 'Paperback Writer' b/w 'Rain'. Two songs meant specifically for that single 7-inch 45rpm record.

In 1967, The Beatles released three singles. The first of which was 'Strawberry Fields Forever' b/w 'Penny Lane', released in February 1967. Both songs had been conceived for Sgt. Pepper, but because of a relative lull in releasing anything (Revolver had come out in August 1966, and there was - unusually - no Christmas market single release that year), it was decided to have those two songs be a single instead of tracks on the upcoming album. Next was 'All You Need Is Love' b/w 'Baby You're a Rich Man', released in July 1967, nearly two months after Sgt. Pepper. Last came 'Hello, Goodbye', on the B-side they attached the Magical Mystery Tour song 'I Am the Walrus', which later appeared on the two-EP set.

In the US, Capitol Records had all six songs from the movie put on side one of their Magical Mystery Tour LP. Side two would be the five other songs that The Beatles released in 1967, in order: 'Hello, Goodbye', 'Strawberry Fields Forever', 'Penny Lane', 'Baby You're a Rich Man', and 'All You Need Is Love'. Altogether, this is a very strong 11-track sequence. No surprise, that album shot to #1 on the charts, and it even got imported to the UK in early 1968 and charted as high as #31 - despite the EP and the separate singles existing over there. It works so well as an album, and as an equally psychedelic sequel to Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band... even if it was never conceived as such in the first place.

And the weirdest thing is, the Magical Mystery Tour MOVIE was never aired in America, even though the LP came with a picture story of the movie. The movie itself had gotten such bad critical and equally poor audience reception (I'd imagine a lot of the viewership was families tuning in on Boxing Day to watch something together, and they got a weird aimless psychedelic home movie that confused the hell out of them), that ABC opted out of broadcasting it in January 1968-ish. So, Americans wouldn't really get to see that film until midnight showings occurred in the mid-1970s, followed by belated TV airings...

Oh, and the Magical Mystery Tour movie, much like Many Adventures, is just a silly delightful parade of whimsical misadventures...