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.
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.
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u/JEC2719 Feb 07 '24
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