Rhett Wickham: Great Animated Performances: Profiles of Modern Masters
Page 4 of 7
RW
Once you got to TREASURE PLANET did you decide ‘Okay, this is an entirely different animal. This is not a musical’ ?
JM
Yes. I had an idea for a song, and he said ‘No, no, forget the song.’ I thought Ben could have a song and he said ‘It’s not a musical.’ I had in my mind for the Ben Gunn Boogey, and he would kind of be this crazy guy where he does this kind of weird boogey number where he would…I was originally picturing Jim Carey…and I was picturing this really fun thing, and he was ‘No, you don’t understand. It’s not a musical!’ Ohh…oh…yeah…okay. So it went away and became the action adventure thing. It’s like writers with songs –
CM
There was a long history of TREASURE PLANET. It was pitched at the same time as MERMAID in 1984
JM
‘85
CM
We worked on it a little bit between MERMAID and ALADDIN. There was a period after MERMAID we wanted to do ALADDIN and we picked ALADDIN, it wasn’t our choice, it was Howard’s idea…the idea of ALADDIN was Howard Ashman’s idea…but we liked the project and wanted to do it. But there were some contract negotiations that got into a snag and during that period they didn’t want us to work on ALADDIN.
JM
We were at a contractual impass on ALADDIN where we weren’t in agreement with the studio, but you (to Clements) had sort of brought TREASURE PLANET to their attention because Charlie Frank who was the head of development at the time was looking for something with either pirates or space ideas and you said “Well, you know I pitched this thing that has both of those.�? “Oh really? What was it?�? You dug out the couple of page treatment and they liked it and he and Peter Schneider put it into development. So some visual development work was done as early as 1990.
RC
But even in the early stages, when everything was musicals, we were thinking this is not a musical. And certainly we thought we were going to be doing it after ALADDIN, that was the plan. Then Jeffrey didn’t want to do it after ALADDIN. We never really knew what Jeffrey’s reservations were, and ultimately those reservations may have made a lot of sense in retrospect.
RW
Why do you say that?
RC
No, I’m just saying that commercially speaking… but that’s not what it was because he never really expressed what his reservations were, I’m just speculating. We never really knew what his reservations were.
RW
I don’t think he did either, Ron.
JM
When the movie came out I said to him “So, what did you think?�? and he said “Well, it’s like I always said.�? Which is fine (laughs) because he never said anything, and he’s like “I just …uh…don’t think it….uh…�? So even there he was a little vague, but I think the gist of it was that it just didn’t have something that appealed to everybody.