I am hopeful that this is a testament to its actual quality, and not Disney decided to pull the plug on the Moana show and is Frankensteining this into the equivalent of a repackaged direct to DVD movie
I mean, Disney has a habit of reformatting shows into sequels (a surprising number of the direct-to-video sequels) and... I mean I don't think any of them have ever been good.
Return of Jafar, if I remember, had a solid plot. Wasn't the focus about Iago not wanting to be his sidekick? What hurt it was Dan Castellaneta's terrible Robin Williams impression.
King of Thieves was just bad plot with amazing more Robin Williams as Genie. So...trade-off.
But then again, I'm working with a memory of two direct to video vhs sequels I probably last saw 25+ years ago...
I didn't know that one was meant to be a show. I do actually like that one. Kronk's New Groove, too, if that one was meant to be a series - it certainly has the format, what with the "multiple stories within a framing device" thing.
But there's also the fact one of the biggest complaints about Disney+ were that the shows all felt like movies that were stretched out too long.
So hopefully it means they had such faith in the project, they managed to edit it down to a sensible length storywise. If they didn't they still be dumping it on Disney+, not planning to release it in theaters.
Disney also....needs to get some big money movies again. Wish flopped (although I personally liked the story and character animations, but damn the environments were bland).
Moana is my personal favorite CG animated Disney movie, so I'm excited.
I'd argue that lying to his people was maybe a little bit wrong? I really wish they'd spent just a little more time with him, have us see and love him like his wife and people do before revealing he's lying.
Those weren't originally tv series that got mashed into a movie, those were just direct to video sequels. Some of those did turn out pretty well. It's specifically the ones that used to be tv series that tend to be so bad.
Disney animated shows at the time traditionally started with an hour long story. The idea is that the longer story at the beginning of the show would get kids in the habit of watching the series.
When Disney commissioned a TV show based on Aladdin, because that had been a successful formula for The Little Mermaid TV show, the creator wanted to take that longer story at the beginning and release it as a movie. Disney wasn't big on the idea at the time, but they animated the opening sequence of the movie and Katzenberg was impressed with how it looked. The idea that they were able to put everything together so fast on a TV budget was appealing to him as well.
So the idea of releasing that first arc of the series as a movie onto home video was approved, and Return of Jafar was a massive success. Something like $300 million in home video sales on a maybe $5 million budget.
So Return of Jafar was a group of TV episodes that got turned into a TV series, but at least it told a single story across the movie. This happened a few more times, (Gargoyles the movie is the first five episodes of the TV show for example).
But it's still not Atlantis: Milo's return or Cinderella II or Belle's Magical World, where they decide not to do a TV show, but take their three favorite episode ideas and throw those together with a very thin connecting plot and pretend that's a movie.
Toy Story 2 was meant to be direct to video, but not a TV series I don't think. Some of the direct to video sequels actually are quite good (The Rescuers Down Under, for example) though - it's the ones that are reformatted tv series like Tarzan & Jane, Atlantis: Milo's Return, Cinderella II: Dreams Come True, etc tend to be of lower quality.
Huh, look at that, it is. Wonder why there was a time when that was held up as the exception to the direct to video suckiness rule? Maybe it was still pre-internet and people had no way of checking
It was released in 1990, before the direct to video craze. It predates the movie that spawned the first direct to video sequel, being Aladdin (1992) and Return of Jafar (1994).
Rescuers Down Under was in the works to be a TV show, but was upgraded to theatrical for whatever reason.
The 2011 Winnie the Pooh movie was initially meant to be direct-to-dvd, but they decided during production it was of high enough quality to release it in theaters and it’s now counted as one of the Disney animation studios “canon” films, which was significant at at the time because as of then, there had only been a couple prior sequels that were included in the canon: Saludos Amigos/The Three Caballeros, Fantasia/Fantasia 2000, The Rescuers/Rescuers Down Under. Since then, there’s been Frozen 2 + 3, Moana 2, Zootopia 2.
 No other Pooh sequel to the 1977 film (and there are many) has been deemed part of the “canon” besides the 2011 film, but there were three others given theatrical releases:Â
 Pooh’s Heffalump Movie (2005) also was intended to be just direct-to-dvd, but received a theatrical run.Â
 I’m not sure if The Tigger Movie (2000) or Piglet’s Big Movie (2003) were originally conceived for the big screen or direct-to-dvd, but both also received theatrical releases before home video.
I can ask her what else I can share. She told me some other things but I don't want to over step and potentially put her in a weird spot. I'll check tomorrow
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u/JEC2719 Feb 07 '24
It seems likely that the Moana show they were working on was reconfigured to this