Okay, two things: One, Great Mouse detective was actually a good movie, it started out underrated but upon revisiting its considered a classic by many. Two, Atlantis is also seriously underrated, it isn't terrible when you consider other disasters Disney has rolled out.
I feel that the description of the Great Mouse Detective is more a look at the objectives rather than opinions. It's a great movie but it suffered during production and it shows at times.
18:30 you see a rise in Atlantis fiction after the discovery of the real city of Troy in 1870. I think the idea that Troy was in fact a real place captures the imagination of many writers who would naturally ask the question “what if other mythical cities weren’t so mythical?”
It's a shame, this is probably up there with Treasure Planet and (ironically) The Black Cauldron with some of my favorite Disney works, and yet it's barely even remembered because it wasn't a musical. Hell, in modern years I think I've only thing one thing that may or may not be a reference to it, and it was a custom skin in Airmech suggested by a user...
I don't care what anyone says, I love this movie. I first saw it when it came to theaters as a wide-eyed kid on a family vacation. And yeah, maybe the story/characters could use some work... but I still enjoyed it for what it is.
The funny thing is that this movie would have been great if it was another hour or so longer, or hell even a 6 to 10 episode miniseries. Fleshing out the characters and everything through the adventure and all that.
sfdebris! I'm glad I caught this in my subscriptions. I wanted to tell you, I watched this video and the second part. I wouldn't have been remotely interested in this topic, except you drew me in. I didn't even know this movie existed and I enjoyed this immensely. Thanks man.
I actually rewatched this film again and loved it. Then again I also loved most of the movies you mentioned in this video. Titan AE, Olivier and Company, Black Cauldron etc.
I actually went to that Deep Sea themed restaurant back in the mid 90s. The place was so darn cool looking on the inside it really made you feel like you were in a submarine.
Many thanks for the great and very interesting information that you provide with these videos. There is nowhere else that I know of that so much background information is provided with a video. I am now looking forward to the next video in this series.
I'm somewhat surprised Secret of Blue Water Nadia wasn't mentioned here, due to the considerable similarities. Under normal circumstances I would suggest that it was simply a case of parallel development, nerdy protagonist, Atlantean power crystals, them being evil conquerors but with a good Princess that has a power crystal necklace, along with the jules verne type setup goes back for a while. However the similarities between Lion king and Kimba the White Lion pretty much demolishes any benefit of the doubt I'm willing to give disney in that regard.
Neo Atlantis was actual threat(more so then the SUDDENLY random idea of the sea captain being EVIL!!!???)also NADIA's "Helga" Electra was actually made to do more then just be the sad throw away character, the American counterpart was turn into, and the Blue Water that everyone was after sounds way interesting and alien then vague crystal thing we are never going to explain!!!
You may wanna consult RalphtheMovieMaker's videos about Kimba there bucko, the main footage people used to do the Kimba/Simba comparisons was actually a Kimba thing released after the Lion King ripping it the hell off.
Besides the casting and the whole behind the scenes, I find the most fascinating thing here to be the story behind the film, I mean the narratives from which it takes its idea. It is interesting to know about the stories and parables behind so many stories. It is funny how many tales have a start so long ago. I know this is an old video, I am just slow on the take. But you said that Treasure Island in Space was a subject for another review. Is that review planned? Or will be between the movies to request for Patreon sometime in the future? (I know you open request from time to time for specific things, that is reason for my question)
Loved your breakdown of the Atlantis "myth"; it's baffling to me that it continues to be such a fixture of conspiracy theories and new-agey bullshit. It's gotten so bad that you can't hardly include Atlantis in a work of fiction without people groaning and rolling their eyes because of the real-world associations.
Sam Vimes I think they like to include Atlantis because A) The idea of an underwater city is pretty cool, and B) Unlike Mordor and Melnibone, Atlantis is public domain. They wouldn’t have to worry about legal action from copyright owners.
For some reason I thought this and Titian AE were live action for a while, during a period when I mostly ignored Disney. I don’t remember where I got the impression from.
20:00 - How did you come to that conclusion? Doing both word counts and looking at the size in terms of bytes, the page for Jules Verne is more than twice the size of the one for the Atlantean language. Did you compare the scroll distances?
Actually, I'd wonder if the left-to-right then right-to-left reading part of the "Atlantean language" wasn't based on ancient "boustrophedon" scripts, which are basically read that way. Ancient Greece used this for a good while, although it became less and less common after the Classical period.
Yup, those were a real thing so I strongly suspect the creators were aware of it (since that was discussed even in a freshman Classics class I was in). However, that might be a bit more complex than general audiences might be able to consider.
well, it was a publicity disaster: accusations of Revisionist History style (which garnered a large amount of hate back in the 90s) and all that stuff of historical inaccuracies.
WHAT WAS THE POINT OF HELGA!!!?????, she was seemed to be setup as an interesting and important character(or going at least the movie's vague attempt at it)and originally set up at one point during the movie's development to even be the main character's love interest(and it sounded way more interesting then the brain dead princess Kida ended up as) and in the finished film this uneven goon for that evil captain. Basically they ended up throwing her away and she blows up the zipplin, she says some wisecracks and "looks tough" but in the end was another one of this failed animation's idea of an "anti-heroine". Also i am one of these people who will say she did survive the infamous "death" she may or may not have had. Believe me this movie still makes angry simply because it could been handled soooooooo much better in terms of story and character development(make Helga from the beginning part of the good guys's team and DON'T MINDLESSLY KILL HER OFF and then have the rest of the characters forget she ever existed!!!!!!!!!).
It would have been great if they had set it up so she was the one with a conscience. When I was a kid and she had the line 'there weren't supposed to be people down here; this changes everything', I thought that was what it was building up to. And given the time period the movie is set in, it would have been great if she had turned out to only be working with him because sexism in that era was keeping her from getting decent work. I would have loved for her to, over the course of the film, decide she just couldn't go through with Rourke's plan and switched to Milo's side. It would have given us both more of an insight into why she has her tough persona and also brought attention to the real reason the entire team was onboard with Rourke's plan initially: due to race, ethnicity and gender, they were never going to get fair pay unless they did bad things. All the characters had the potential to get so much more depth if Disney had just addressed the massive inequality present in the era they set this movie in. And they could have done that by rewriting the campfire scene to better address everyone's dreams versus reality and by making Helga sort of a third protagonist alongside Milo and Kida. But two female leads in a Disney movie in the 90's was asking too much, I guess.
Weird. I actually found Kida enjoyable as the person that found the outsiders worth trusting, and Helga upon first seeing her always set off my 'Femme Fatal' alarm pretty damn fast. Though I do agree that there's quite a lot of squandered potential in hindsight, as it didn't push some of the concepts that much further.
Person 1: I am going to find the lost continent of Atlantis! Person 2: Why not also find the Ring of Geyes? Person 1: What? Why would I look for that? It's just a story about what a person would do if he was invisible. Person 2: And yet it comes from Plato's Republic just like Atlantis. Wouldn't that mean the place you are looking for is "just a story" as well? Person 1: ...shut up.
sfdebris commits the biggest sin when studying history, projecting modern outlooks and sensibilities onto historical characters in an attempt to understand them. To say that Plato "obviously" made up Atlantis to make a point and to compare it to modern day fiction severely limits your ability to understand Plato as he really was.
4:57 Am I the only one who finds it weird Disney would only include a crossdresser in a movie not only as a woman, but as a villain as well? I mean, a crossdresser can be a villain just like anyone else... but, they can be good guys as well. Always rubbed me the wrong way how LGBT have not only been kept ambigious at best in Disney movies, but also antagonized. :/
Not only that, but in Mulan, one of the ancestors has a line about how shameful it is another one was a crossdresser. So the choices are either villain or punchline with Disney instead of just, you know, a regular person like anybody else in the world.
