List of abandoned projects

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Sotiris
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Re: List of abandoned projects

Post by Sotiris »

Disney's Divinity wrote:First I've heard of the Tim Burton TV film.
The entire film is on YouTube if you want to watch it.
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Re: List of abandoned projects

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Good to know. I might have an opportunity to watch it in the next few days. :D
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Re: List of abandoned projects

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXuwWEzQBeI
I found this piece of James Baxter animation online. I was trying to figure out where it's from and in the comments section, there is speculation that it was for a scrapped animated version of The Swiss Family Robinson. Does anybody know if Disney ever had plans to remake this film in animation?

I heard that even before Treasure Planet, they had been interested in an animated film of Treasure Island so clearly Disney doesn't seem to mind remaking their live-action films in animation.
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estefan
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Re: List of abandoned projects

Post by estefan »

I remember when that first appeared online. It was apparently test animation for "The Croods 2" before it was cancelled and then un-cancelled. I think the plot is supposed to involve The Croods coming across a society that was a bit more evolved and modern.
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Re: List of abandoned projects

Post by JeanGreyForever »

Thanks for the info! I never watched the original Croods so I'm definitely not too familiar with what a potential sequel would have looked like. The comment about an animated Swiss Family Robinson intrigued me though and made me wonder if this had ever been a Disney project.
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Sotiris
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Re: List of abandoned projects

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Andrew Chesworth wrote:Six years ago, Adam Green and I developed a pitch for Disney called ‘Fright Train’. It featured the 1930s versions of Mickey, Donald, and Goofy as Depression-era hobos who hitch a ride on a train to find a town where they can make ends meet. ‘Clock Cleaners’, ‘Lonesome Ghosts’, ‘Mickey and the Beanstalk’, and ‘Mickey's Trailer’ are some of my favorite cartoons featuring these characters. We also wanted to capture the modern sense of fun and danger of ‘Runaway Brain’. Even though Disney passed on making the short because the greenlight committee had an aversion to ghosts, we had a ton of fun with this idea. Every "fright car" would be like a funhouse with a different haunted theme. We brought back the ghosts from ‘Lonesome Ghosts’, and Peg Leg Pete was a hell-spawned train engineer delighting in mortal meat to fuel his engine. The short was designed to be a CG/2D hybrid.
Source: https://www.instagram.com/p/BuzrM-chXK0/

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Source: https://www.instagram.com/p/BuzrM-chXK0/
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Re: Pixar Animation Studio

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I read Bob Iger's book, "The Ride of a Lifetime," yesterday (Random House, 2019). The context is it's Iger's first trip to the Pixar campus; he wanted to visit them before fully deciding on buying them. On Page 139:
Lee Unkrich, who would go on to direct Toy Story 3 and Coco, pitched a movie about pets in an apartment building on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
It's not much, but obviously it sounds like The Secret Life of Pets from that brief description. Has anyone heard of a pet movie that had previously been in development at Pixar circa 2005/2006?
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Re: Pixar Animation Studio

Post by JeanGreyForever »

blackcauldron85 wrote:I read Bob Iger's book, "The Ride of a Lifetime," yesterday (Random House, 2019). The context is it's Iger's first trip to the Pixar campus; he wanted to visit them before fully deciding on buying them. On Page 139:
Lee Unkrich, who would go on to direct Toy Story 3 and Coco, pitched a movie about pets in an apartment building on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
It's not much, but obviously it sounds like The Secret Life of Pets from that brief description. Has anyone heard of a pet movie that had previously been in development at Pixar circa 2005/2006?
That's interesting for sure. I wonder if that idea found its way over to Illumination afterwards or if it was just a coincidence that a similar concept was considered there as well.
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Sotiris
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Re: List of abandoned projects

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I didn't know Walt wanted to adapt T.S. Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats.
Q: You say that Walt Disney, the Walt Disney Studios, tried to secure these poems.

Andrew Lloyd Webber: Many years ago, I understand, from his widow who’s still alive, that Walt Disney wanted to make them as a film. I think 1947, 1948, but he didn’t want to do it then because he felt they would become too pretty. I remember when I first went to see her. I was terrified because I thought no way would she let me have the rights and she said to me all the things that I wanted to hear about how he really thought they were street cats.
Source: https://www.nbclearn.com/portal/site/k- ... card=39442
Pollock said that other studios approached Lloyd Webber about adapting “Cats” over the years and that Walt Disney approached Eliot “25 or 30 years ago.”
Source: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm ... story.html
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Re: List of abandoned projects

Post by DisneyFan97 »

Did any of these abandoned projects besides "A Few Good Ghosts" have a voice cast attached ?
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Re: List of abandoned projects

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Sotiris wrote:I didn't know Walt wanted to adapt T.S. Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats.
Q: You say that Walt Disney, the Walt Disney Studios, tried to secure these poems.

Andrew Lloyd Webber: Many years ago, I understand, from his widow who’s still alive, that Walt Disney wanted to make them as a film. I think 1947, 1948, but he didn’t want to do it then because he felt they would become too pretty. I remember when I first went to see her. I was terrified because I thought no way would she let me have the rights and she said to me all the things that I wanted to hear about how he really thought they were street cats.
Source: https://www.nbclearn.com/portal/site/k- ... card=39442
Pollock said that other studios approached Lloyd Webber about adapting “Cats” over the years and that Walt Disney approached Eliot “25 or 30 years ago.”
Source: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm ... story.html
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Re: List of abandoned projects

Post by Disney's Divinity »

It’s a shame Walt didn’t go through with that. I’ve always thought it was a shame there are so many great dog films from Disney, but the only cat film is… The Aristocats. :headshake:
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Sotiris
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Re: List of abandoned projects

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There was going to be a series of shorts at DTVA featuring characters from Disney classics.
Nico Colaleo wrote:Here’s something I worked on almost 3 years ago that’ll never see the light of day. It was gonna be new shorts of these characters (Lilo, Tigger, Chip & Dale, and Peg-Leg Pete also included later). Some things never move past the Development dept though. The plan wasn't to have them all together in the shorts, it'd be all separate. A Toad short, then a Cheshire Cat short, then Stitch, etc. Tigger's was particularly hilarious, TBH!
Source: https://twitter.com/NicoColaleo/status/ ... 7208122368

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Source: https://www.instagram.com/p/B8MRJHwjSnv/
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Re: List of abandoned projects

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Aw, I wish this one had materialized. Toad, the Cheshire Cat, Mim, and Stitch are great characters for shorts, imo. Watching them play with and/or terrorize other characters is never not funny.
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Re:

Post by blackcauldron85 »

Sotiris wrote: The Hero from Otherwhere
Here's a little more information, w/ another pic (which I know I've seen before somewhere...):

https://prydainonfilm.blogspot.com/2018 ... art-2.html

*edit*

And Vance Gerry & Frank Thomas worked on The Hobbit, although the studio wasn't pursuing the rights, per a blurb in this post:

https://prydainonfilm.blogspot.com/2018 ... art-1.html
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Re: List of abandoned projects

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*edit*

More The Hero from Otherwhere:
https://youtu.be/FfU8iPEy4ZQ?t=54
(I saw the pic on the top right in the Disney Animation Recruitment pamphlet that Andreas Deja posted on his blog, and my first thought was Moana, but I think the caption on that page says that pic is from The Hero from Otherwhere.)
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Re: List of abandoned projects

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"Goofy of the Apes" was a proposed featurette in the late 80s that was going to be directed by Kirk Wise and Gary Trousdale.
While developing a project called “Goofy of the Apes,” described as “Goofy as Tarzan,” Kirk and Gary received a call asking if they could drop what they were doing and fly to New York to take over directorial duties on Beauty and the Beast, which was being retooled after over a year in development with another director.
Source: https://www.laughingplace.com/w/article ... ter-hours/


Concept art by Richard Vander Wende.

http://www.vanderwende.com/?lightbox=dataItem-jd0s3t5y4
http://www.vanderwende.com/?lightbox=dataItem-jd0s3t5z
http://www.vanderwende.com/?lightbox=dataItem-jd0s3t5y5
http://www.vanderwende.com/?lightbox=dataItem-jd0s3t5y9
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Re: List of abandoned projects

Post by UmbrellaFish »

Based on the title alone, that sounds like gold. I can just imagine! :lol:
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Re: List of abandoned projects

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https://www.laughingplace.com/w/news/20 ... ter-hours/
Rob Minkoff wrote:Disney Legend Burny Mattinson was working on a project with the Sherman Brothers that never came to fruition. “They were writing new songs and I don’t know exactly how this came about, but they needed someone to sing a demo for one of their songs and I got the job. So I got to work with the Sherman Bros and record one of their songs, I think it was called ‘Wandering Star.’”
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Re: List of abandoned projects

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The upcoming book "They Drew as They Pleased: The Hidden Art of Disney's New Golden Age" contains artwork from a lot of canceled projects.
One of the many highlights of this series for me has been the chance to see artwork from abandoned projects and this releases features the most recently announced and cancelled animated film from Walt Disney Animation Studios, Gigantic. Through Joe Grant’s section, we get to see artwork from some Walt-era canceled projects for the first time, like a Mickey Mouse short called The Hollywoods and a detective story starring a hound dog that looks a lot like McGruff the Crime Dog called Inspector Bones. Moving into the era that the book primarily focuses on, Disney Animation fans will learn about and see artwork from scrapped projects including The Little Broomstick, Bitzi and the Hollywood Dream, The Abandoned, The Nightingale, My Peoples, Wild Life, Fraidy Cat, I Am, and Swabbies. It also covers earlier versions of two projects that became two very different films, Sweating Bullets (Home on the Range) and American Dog (Bolt).
Source: https://www.laughingplace.com/w/article ... olden-age/
Q: During your research on that period for the book, is there something you found that surprised even the expert that you are?

Didier Ghez: The most exciting find must have been all the early character designs for Who Framed Roger Rabbit developed in the early 1980s by artist Michael Giaimo, which you will discover in the book for the very first time. I also loved discovering the shelved short project I Am, which Hans Bacher had worked on for a short while and which meant so much to him. I am just fascinated by that artwork. Another key discovery was the amount of work that Joe Grant and his colleague Dick Huemer had done on the projects that the Disney Studio was developing during World War II. I had no idea that there were so many and that their production history had been so complex.
Source: https://animatedviews.com/2020/didier-g ... ll-circle/
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