The Making of Treasure Planet (2002)

What happens when the plan goes bad?

What do you do when you can't salvage things?

This is gonna take a minute, but I promise it's good.

A couple of weeks ago, Latchkey Movies recorded our review of Treasure Planet. And during my research, I dug up the story of its production, and it's stuck with me.

Plus, it's full of scandalous Disney gossip.

To tell this story though, we have to go back to its very beginning.

The Gong Show

Animation at Disney in the early 80s was rough. The Nine Old Men were all retired, and Don Bluth had recently defected, taking a huge portion of the staff with him. The guys that were left were stuck trying to eke out projects that they actually wanted to work on, not another Goofy movie or Pete's Dragon.

Additionally, Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg were newly at the helm, and their general disdain for Disney's animators is well known. They didn't want to make more animated movies, and they definitely didn't want to spend any money on them. The only person standing in the way was Roy Disney, Walt's nephew.

After the disastrous returns of The Black Cauldron in 1985, the animator's studio became downright despondent. And that's when Eisner and Katzenberg held their first Gong Show.

If you're not familiar with the show, then stop right now, and go look it up. The Gong Show was a variety show in the 70s hosted by Chuck Barris. Chuck was always clearly intoxicated AF, and by the end of the show, things had almost always devolved into utter hilarity. It was the 70s, y'all.

But like everything else they touched, the Eisner/Katzenberg Gong Show became an incredibly divisive and antagonistic process. Animators would gear up for months to go to the Gong Show to pitch ideas. Hearing no at a pitch meeting isn't unusual. What was unusual was the way it was used to deliberately create competition.

In the days of The Nine Old Men, everyone took turns, writing, directing, being in charge. Because it takes years to animate a movie, this distribution of work allowed them to focus on the projects that were important to them, while ensuring the grunt work still got done, too.

But The Nine were long gone, and their successors had mostly quit or been forced out. The guys who were left were forced to compete for the crumbs from the Eisner table. If your pitch wasn't accepted, that meant grunt work, and with new technology emerging, it was grunt work on unfamiliar tech, on a movie you hated. Basically, it was an utter shit show.

For Ron Clements and John Musker, this Gong Show was an opportunity. Both were currently knee-deep in Basil of Baker Street, a disaster of a film that was supposed to be Sherlock Holmes as a mouse. By the time Eisner and Katzenberg were done with it, however, the budget has been reduced by over half, production schedule moved up an entire year, and as a final nail in the coffin, renamed to The Great Mouse Detective, because, and I quote, "the name Basil is too English." (It's so bad it didn't even make Latchkey's list of forgotten Disney films. Please, keep forgetting it.)

This generated an interoffice memo suggesting that perhaps we should reevaluate some other names, like Seven Little Men Help a Girl, The Wonderful Elephant Who Could Really Fly, The Little Deer Who Grew Up, The Girl with the See-through Shoes, Two Dogs Fall in Love, Puppies Taken Away, and A Boy, a Bear and a Big Black Cat. Proof that office politics will always be office politics, regardless of the job description.

And so Clements and Musker carefully drafted their proposals for that first Gong Show, to include The Little Mermaid, and Treasure Island in Space. At which point story artist Pete Young flippantly suggested Oliver Twist, but with dogs.

Tent Poles and PR Problems

Ostensibly, Eisner said no to The Little Mermaid because a Splash sequel was in development, and no to Treasure Island in Space, as Paramount Pictures' early drafts of what would become The Wrath of Khan had actual treasure, and not the Genesis device.

Oliver Twist with dogs it was. However, because the pitch came from a nobody story artist without clout, it was given to two of the junior animators, one of whom was fired six months into the project.

Eventually, both Tom Hanks and Daryl Hannah backed out of Splash Too, because...duh, and The Little Mermaid was given the green light. It went on to become both the literal and figurative tent pole of the Disney Renaissance, grossing over $233 million at the box office.

(And if you're not laughing at my tent pole joke, then you need to watch that movie again as an adult.)

Emboldened by their success with The Little Mermaid, Clements and Musker presented Treasure Island in Space a second time. Eisner didn't bite. Instead, he offered them a choice between Swan Lake, King of the Jungle (The Lion King), and Aladdin.

They chose Aladdin. The score was initially developed by Howard Ashman and Alan Menken. Linda Woolverton, the first woman to write an animated screenplay (Beauty and the Beast) developed the screenplay.

But Katzenberg hated it. He demanded the entire script be rewritten, without deviating from its scheduled release date—only 18 months away. Later, he changed the body double for Aladdin from Michael J. Fox to Tom Cruise, which was not a small change, and required a number of scenes to be reanimated entirely. He also stiffed Robin Williams out of several million dollars worth of pay, and lied about the usage of the Genie in promotional materials and merchandising rights, but it's fine. He sent him a Van Gogh as an apology. It's fine.

There was also a fairly significant dust-up with the Arab-American Anti-Defamation League about a line in a song about ear cutting, not to mention a fair bit of ire over lack of the cast diversity, plus, an overhyped allegation about kiddie porn (this one still gets trotted out by conspiracy folks as proof of Disney's Illuminati ties, and no, I'm not joking).

Despite these obstacles, Aladdin grossed over $500 million dollars. It is still the third highest-grossing traditionally animated film of all time.

So surely, now was the time for Treasure Island in Space?

Uh, no.

The Intervention

After Aladdin, Clements and Musker had some free time available before the next Gong Show. This is just conjecture on my part, but I truly think that they were led to believe that Treasure Island in Space was a done deal, because they spent nearly a year in development.

But Katzenberg turned them down again, and instructed them to take over production of Hercules.

What happened next has never been fully disclosed, but we can make some educated guesses.

Because Roy Disney told Michael Eisner (very publicly) that he wanted to see Treasure Island in Space, and then he personally oversaw a seven-year contract extension for Clements and Musker to specifically include that film. So.

And, I think that's when things started to get really bad for this film, and possibly Disney Animation in general. I am quite certain that Eisner resented the interference and went out of his way to make things difficult.

Meanwhile, Hercules was having casting issues. See, the problem with hiring an all-star cast and then "accidentally" not paying them is that it made it hard for Disney to line up the actors they wanted. Danny DeVito turned them down twice before he finally agreed to play Phil, a character that was drawn FOR him. Jack Nicholson completely turned them down for Hades. So they hired John Lithgow, and then fired him nine months later. More than a dozen people read for the role before they opted to hire James Woods.

However, Woods' quick-talking, ad-libbed dialogue was difficult to animate. Seconds of him speaking took weeks to draw.

Additionally, this particular animation style had never been done before. Remember, it was the late 90s. The tech still hadn't quite caught up with the vision, and the way these characters were drawn didn't allow for the reuse of old stills.

But surely, things were on the upswing, right?

Well, no.

Because we haven't even gotten to the Hercules' promotional tour. The one where the Greek government said "no, you can't air your revisionist history at the site of modern democracy, Pnix Hill, thanks." So that was embarrassing. Then there was the time the city of New York said, "absolutely, you can totally buy the city of New York for your parade and private party, regardless of how the people of New York feel about it." (We won't even get into the simultaneous technical employee strike from ABC and Disney, because, I mean...I'm sure it's not relevant.)

When it was all said and done, Hercules netted a very respectable $252 million, but it fell well short of its very lofty expectations.

A Subdued Production

NOW was finally the time for Treasure Planet in Space.

At this point, almost a year's worth of initial planning had gone into film, although clearly, no effort had yet been made on the title.

Ted Elliot and Terry Rossio are both credited on the story, but it's unclear when their involvement ended. If I had to guess, it was probably only for the initial development in the year after Aladdin, because both writers moved on to other non-Disney projects. They didn't return until Pirates of the Caribbean.

But the only other writer was Rob Edwards, a decorated TV writer but film neophyte. The difference here is that a story credit is given when the writer contributes to the idea or early drafts. The screenplay credit is reserved for the final cut.

Is it possible that Clements and Musker suddenly became jealously protective of their work, desiring no outside influence? Sure.

However, if that were the case, I'd expect it to hold true long after Eisner and Katzenberg left Disney, as well. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

See, Katzenberg left the studio in 1994 and went on to help create Dreamworks (which is incredibly ironic, considering that Dreamworks Animation is Disney's biggest competitor).

Rumor has it that both Disney and Eisner were deeply concerned about how much credit Katzenberg was taking for the success of the Disney Renaissance, and when president Frank Wells was killed in a helicopter crash, Katzenberg lobbied Eisner for the empty position. Instead, they forced him out. (Unsurprisingly, Katzenberg blamed Hercules' lackluster returns on his absence. )

Nevertheless, early production efforts mostly involved taking a seafaring journey and converting it to outer space. Which they did with only passing thought to science. There's artificial gravity, but also apparently air. It's fine.

They called this the 70/30 rule. 70% ships, 30% space. This is true for the social and cultural norms as well—it allows for a Captain Amelia Smollet, but it's clear that in her species, cats are female and dogs are male, which is...I don't even know.

And, with the move to the new Animation Studio building, animators found themselves increasingly siloed. There weren't any big open spaces for people to gather and cowork (a problem that wasn't rectified until 2016). It's not that Clements and Musker were feeling territorial, but rather, they were practically isolated.

Even if that weren't the case, I also suspect that this movie was a bit of a hot potato—on the inside, it's pretty likely that everyone knew all the salacious details of what it took to get this film made, and no one wanted to be tarred with the same brush as Clements and Musker. Eisner was still the boss, even if everyone hated him.

And so no one told them that it was probably a bad idea to take the boy of Treasure Island and turn him into a moody teenager. That's certainly what Terry Rossio considered to be the problem, blogging about it at length many years later.

Actual animation didn't begin until 2000, with artists suffering from the same lack of collaboration the writers faced. But there were other, more serious problems.

The Death of Traditional Animation

The problem with hand drawn animation is one of scope. It either takes a tremendous amount of time, or a very large production team of very skilled artists working together.

After 20 years of being kicked around the country like a redheaded stepchild, Disney's animators were tired. Wages were frequently below industry minimums, the technical staff was regularly farmed out to live-action productions, and new technology was emerging so fast that no one could keep up.

One of those experiments took place at The Secret Lab. (I'm just saying, sometimes Disney deserves its nefarious reputation.) The Secret Lab was a sound production studio that, for one brief moment, was home to its computer animation studio. The result was a film called Dinosaur. It was not a critical success, but by all measures, it was a commercial one, bringing in a little under $350 million.

Meanwhile, the release of Roy Disney's longtime pet project Fantasia 2000 just a few months before had yielded lackluster results—it made less than it cost.

And then, there was our old frenemy Katzenberg, and our new frenemy, Pixar. The relationship between Disney and Pixar is incredibly complicated, but at this point, contract negotiations with Eisner had completely fallen apart, and Pixar had severed ties with its parent studio when it released Monsters, Inc. That was 577 million dollhairs he felt entitled to. And then there was Dreamworks' Shrek, a very nice $487 million paycheck that also didn't belong to Michael Eisner.

I mean, what's a CEO to do? Nothing for it but to downsize, and to focus remaining production efforts on computer animation going forward.

The remaining traditional animators were then forced to divide their time between Treasure Planet and Home on the Range.

One of the things that Sara and I often talk about on the podcast is the difference between drawing people and animals. Artists will tell you that they are functionally very different things to draw. Small wonder then that so many of Treasure Planet's characters became animal in nature.

When Everybody Hates You

I mean, hate may be a strong word. Frankly, strong indifference might be more apt.

So, we'll take the emotion out of it.

Treasure Planet was released November 27th, 2002. The weekend after Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, and Die Another Day. Despite being the first feature film to be simultaneously released on IMAX, it came in 4th that weekend. Behind not just Harry and James Bond, but also the Tim Allen in a fat suit sequel, Santa Clause 2. It made just $12 million that first weekend.

Box office totals were $109.6 million, from a total production cost of $140 million, leading to a 9% stock drop for Disney, and a $74 million write-down. It's since become known as one of the most expensive box office flops of all time.

After spending 15 years of your life fighting for an idea that it turns out everybody hated, one could become pretty despondent.

With the planned sequel for Treasure Planet canceled, Clements and Musker inherited a project called Fraidy Cat. But Disney was done. No one would greenlight a traditional animation project. They resigned in September 2005.

Meanwhile, the wrangling between Roy Disney and Michael Eisner finally reached a conclusion. Eisner was forced to resign his role in late 2004, and served his last day on September 30th, 2005.

A Victorious Return

Less than six months later, Pixar's John Lasseter would inherit the Animator's Studio as Chief Creative Officer, and he called Clements and Musker back for a revival of traditional animation.

That film would become The Princess and the Frog, a masterful blend of hand-drawn and computer animation. Not to mention the introduction of the first African-American Princess.

Their next film was Moana. (It grossed $690 million worldwide, and has a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 95%. It earned more awards and nominations than I can count. I think we can call it a success.)

And, more than 3k words later, here's where we loop back around to the point of all of this.

The question I asked was, what happens when things go wrong? What happens when you can't salvage something?

And the answer clearly is, you keep fucking going.

You take the knocks, and you get back up.

You continue to find ways to do the work that matters to you.

For Ron Clements and John Musker, it was always about telling the story.

Because what do Aladdin and Ariel and Jim Hawkins and Moana and Tiana have in common?

Almost all of their films center the underdog.

These are the movies for the kids who don't fit in.

Long before it was cool, Clements and Musker were telling stories of diversity and inclusion.

They were teaching our children about what it means to believe in something, and how to follow your dreams. They were teaching us what really matters. These films are foundational for not one, but two generations now. They've taught us to be better people. These aren't the Disney princess of old.

And we should take that lesson not just from the stories they tell, but from their example.

To getting back up.