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Poster for the film Heavy Metal by Chris Achilléos (1981)
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this post was submitted on 10 May 2026
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Thanks for those details. Yeah, several people laud the Gabler book in that thread I linked above, and I like that approach of neutrality. The long comment mentioned proposes that Disney was indeed a bastard, but a bastard for different reasons than usually charged. For example, instead of being a cutthroat capitalist who coldly and cynically drained the life out of his colleagues and employees, instead he was a true visionary who was addicted to working on his passion projects, and in fact all-thumbs at finances. A naive political stooge who could be easily manipulated by his protegees, and highly sensitive when it came to his employees' perceived loyalty to him, a big part of his anti-union activities, evidently. The comment and the book also mention some positives about Walt, which I won't parrot here since I haven't actually read the Gabler one.
H-B did make the Yogi and Flintstones movies back then, so there are those. I have to think that if they'd been profitable-enough, they would have just kept going with that. I mean, why not?
I've watched a tonne more Venture Bros than I have Johnny Quest, so couldn't say on that one, but I'm not sure I agree with you about the Jetsons' viability. The original show only lasted one season, and it had nowhere near the depth and originality of the Flintstones. Basically just a way to briefly cash-in on Space Age mania. I've watched maybe 50%+ of the episodes, and they get pretty vapid pretty quickly, with nowhere-near the writing quality as on the Flintstones. I frankly don't think it would have been anything special as a movie, and turning it in to a 'SF extravaganza' would have been like reinventing the show, and that wasn't H-B at all.
Indeed, across their entire set of franchises, I'm really not sure they had many that were theatre-viable within that 50's-60's time-frame. So no, I don't really think they would've wiped the floor with *anybody* , much less Disney, which was vastly-better geared to do smash-hit animations. Just look at what 1966 held, the final year of Walt's life-- yes, that masterpiece called The Jungle Book.
true visionary that had a habit of crushing his competition with unfair business practices and weird fetish for hiring other visionaries and then defacing their work and relegating to secondary roles like what happened to Oskar Fischinger. Wasting his time on Fantasia only to change the whole thing was a bitch move. Dude did too much ugly shit to get any grace.
The Jungle Book is trash. It is technically sophisticated waste of source material. I don't like in-name-only adaptations that craps all over the source material because it work better with the audiences. If that's so - just do your thing - should've just changed the names instead of "mining the IP" if he didn't liked the book's message that much. The book is about survival and it gets quite grim getting its point across - so naturally instead of that we get a bunch of namechecking and some Broadway setpieces. It just makes "sense:. It is very hard to take any of the Disney movies seriously because they are quite bad at adapting their source material and more often than not they convey the opposite of what the source material was.
As for H-B - their fighting chance was with embracing New Hollywood and providing a total alternative to Disney. They showed they could do that with Yogi Bear and Flintstones - these movies are weird and inventive. Jetsons had their issues but they also had one thing that could keep them rolling - a setting and given the sea change by the mid 70s and the postmodern return of film serials (spearheaded by Star Wars and later Indiana Jones) - they could've morphed even more into proto-Futurama kind of sci-fi (or go full Lost in Space for the hell of it).
Well, I know Kipling, I've read those stories, and I've a bit of Indian cultural context under my belt. I do my best to respect all that, but also give myself the latitude to appreciate creative riffs from different angles.
Fact is, I adore Disney's The Jungle Book for a great many reasons, and from a great many angles. It's clear that we simply can't talk "Disney" in an even-handed, facts & reality-based way. Oh, well. Welcome to the human species, amirite?
Mildly so. And those two certainly weren't cash cows by any stretch. The reality is that H-B took a dip in the filmic pond, found that it didn't work all that well, and retreated to their strengths, i.e. TV.
Dude, you're lost in personal fantasy, at this point. The Jetsons barely had enough creativity going to limp over the season one finish line. I mean, you wanna know why it ended after a single reasons...? It was a cute space-age concept, but a nothing-burger in terms of an engine under the hood.
not everyone's a fan of Disney treatment and since i didn't grew up with these movies i never had any sentiment for them. but I had to analyze much of their classic output for the literary analysis classes back at university and looking at those movies from that perspective nurtures a severe distaste for Walt-era Disney. They figured out how to do it right by the late 80s though - the Sherlock Holmes one is legit one of the best feature film adaptations of the character. Jungle Book isn't the worst offender (compared to Pinocchio, Peter Pan or Alice its treatment is bordering on harmless) - my dislike towards it is based on the fact that the original Bill Peet-led iteration of the project was actually an adaptation of the book and it was rejected in favor of greatly streamlined end product.
as for H-B stuff - none of it rooted in reality because the reality was that none of it was possible because the whole american animated feature market was shaped by Disney - so yeah - none of my comments are realistic and that's the point - there was nothing to be done until Disney faltered in the 70s into the 80s.
That's all well and good, but from an analysis standpoint, if you can't appreciate the many things Walt-era Disney accomplished alongside your slew of critiques, then I have no interest in talking about such with you. On top of that, calling my favorite animated film "trash" is personally offensive.
You say that, and yet those two H-B movies did come out, alongside others I've seen that spanned some decades, like Gulliver's Travels, 1001 Arabian Nights, Yellow Submarine, Fritz the Cat, LotR, Heavy Metal, Fire & Ice, American Pop, The Secret of NIMH, Little Nemo, and I'm sure plenty of others I'm now forgetting.
So I take your point that Disney dominated the market for a time, and I take your point that they may have used capitalistic, underhanded methods to achieve such, and I take your point that it could be financially risky for studios to try producing their own animated films. But you can't tell me that it was outright impossible.
Look... you can have the last reply on these subjects if you like, but I'm withdrawing myself from these particular convos. Also, I would appreciate it if you don't attempt to deliberately steer other convos we might have back to these same topics. Thanks, and bye for now.