I was one of “those” kids.
I suppose that some are born into Disney fandom, some achieve fandom, and others have fandom thrust upon them; I’m not sure which of these categories I fall into, but my Disney predilection certainly manifested itself early. Perhaps it was the smuggled copies of Disney News in my elementary school knapsack, or the scribbles of Spaceship Earth and monorails in the margins of my notebooks, but my personal obsession was well-known and acknowledged by all. People signed my yearbook “See you at EPCOT!”, and I recently found a document from my 8th grade graduation that predicted what the denizens of Shelby Middle School would be doing in the distant year of 2010. Whoever put together those prognostications suggested that I would be working as Mickey Mouse at Walt Disney World; I recall being incensed by the suggestion at the time – nothing against the Character Zoo, but I was convinced that by 2010 I would be well on my way to replacing Eisner as Chairman.
But the full weight of my early fandom – and the realization of how truly unbearable I must have been – didn’t hit me until I was at home over the holidays and came across several boxes of old papers and school things from elementary and middle school. To even my surprise, it appears that hardly any assignment crossed my desk without me finding some backwards way of working Walt Disney World into the mix. There seems to have been a general tone of resentment that I was being asked to do busy work when I could be in Orlando or, at the very least, thinking about Epcot Center and reading about water hyacinths purifying waste water.
I could probably put together a whole book of my bizarre attempts to insert Disney into my schoolwork, from doodles of Epcot pavilion logos to vocabulary assignments where I managed to come up with a sentence about wanting to be at Walt Disney World for every single vocabulary word. Naturally, I also worked my tendencies into various school projects – sadly, I have never been artistic, or I would have been one of those genius kids who builds scale models of theme parks. Instead, I mostly wrote (surprise). I remember doing a biography of Walt very early on in school, but what inspired me to post today was this hilarious brochure for Disney Animation that I whipped up for some long-forgotten assignment.
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) is so embarrassingly sparse. There are probably about 4-5 different versions of this film that were developed in the last ten years, and barely any of that work is hinted at in this release’s extra features. The apparent disregard by Disney’s home video department for fans and animation buffs is pretty glaring by this point, and the fact that a major new release comes out with barely any supplemental material shows how far things have fallen off at the studio since the glory days of the early 2000s. That being said, the movie is still excellent and well worth your time, so you might as well give into the darkness and check out this bare bones release!
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