Dumbed Down Disney Movie Titles

The word 'Dalmatians' is misspelled

The new name for The Aristocats was not horribly imaginative. I thought it might have been a mistake, but it is indeed correct.

Oh we dumb peasants don't know the word Aristocrat. Maybe Rich Cats would be better.

I think it's the former, he probably thought Aristocats was already a dumb title so wanted to highlight how bad he thought it was in the letter.

The 16% of people who missed The Aristocats were the people who thought the answer couldn't be that obvious.

I would say they are the ones who never heard of such movie, like me.

Great quiz overtired!

I guess I'm among the 75% of test takers who has never seen The Black Cauldron.

Honestly, read the books instead of watching the movie. Even though they are "kids" books, they are absolutely good enough to entertain adults too.

If this memo is real it would have been written the year after Black Cauldron was in theaters and probably more present in people's minds. If it were written again today I'm sure that one would be omitted.

It is indeed real. Well... it wasn't a "real" memo, in that it wasn't something officially put out as a company announcement from the animation supervisor, but it was actually written in 1986 as a frustrated joke by a Disney animator, Ed Gombert, and was unofficially circulated around the department.

It might have irked Schneider (not really just an animator, but the head of Walt Disney Feature Animation), but it worked... and it saved his job.

For so many reasons, back in the 80s, WDFA was in a dire situation, as Michael Eisner (Disney CEO) wanted to shut it down for good. They even were kicked out of Disney studio lot, for crying out loud!!

WDFA received an ultimatum before The Great Mouse Detective hit cinemas: If it bombed, that was it. No more feature animated movies from Disney (if any, those would be outsourced).

The movie did fairly well, enough to keep WDFA running.

So, we can thank The Great Mouse Detective for The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King, Mulan, Tangled, Frozen, Moana and, basically, every Disney feature animated movie from the 90s onwards.

Sure, the movie is really, really good... good enough to do well whatever its name would have been. However, a dumbed-down name in dire circumstances proved to be quite helpful, too!

If that's true I'm surprised they even considered TGMD to be a success. It was only marginally more successful than Black Cauldron - widely considered to be a huge flop. It made half as much as The Fox and the Hound, for example, which itself was pretty far from being a huge hit. Oliver & Company helped get things back on track; much more than Great Mouse Detective, anyway. But things wouldn't really turn around for Disney Feature Animation until Little Mermaid 3 years later - that movie was a gigantic success compared to how much the studio had been struggling in the decade prior. Rescuers Down Under did okay... but didn't make anywhere near Mermaid money... then Beauty & the Beast proved that Mermaid wasn't a fluke. Then Aladdin was an even bigger hit. And then Lion King made so much money that every other studio in Hollywood suddenly wanted to open their own animation departments. But I'd credit Ariel with starting this trend, as most do, not Basil.

It "saved" Disney animation in the sense that Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg had just taken over Disney in 1984, shortly before The Black Cauldron was released. It was the first animated movie released under their watch, and when it only made half of its budget back at the box office and was a critical failure, they were ready to shut down Disney feature animation entirely. TGMD was the next movie lined up, and Eisner slashed its budget in half and moved its release day up by more than a year. Under those conditions, TGMD still ended up getting positive reviews and made back almost three times its budget, so they were convinced that Disney's feature animation department was worth keeping around.

So basically, if TGMD had failed, Disney animation never would have had the chance to reach the blockbuster successes it had starting with The Little Mermaid.

fair enough, then. Though the only way you can say that it made "3x its budget" is, then, that they were slashing budgets after Black Cauldron, forcing it to be made for less.

Oh, sure. The point is that it showed Eisner and Katzenberg that Disney animated movies were still capable of making money.

Honestly I've never even seen Black Cauldron but I just memorized all of the Disney films. Great quiz btw.

For "The Fox and the Hound," "The Fox the Hound" should be accepted, for the people who use an ampersand.

The first clickbait

The Great Mouse Detective is awesome. 9/10, one of the best Disney movies.

Haha love this quiz! Although (as JoshPen mentioned above) I do find it a bit odd that the new name for "The Aristocats" just dropped the "The" at the beginning. I probably would've gone with something like "Rich Cats" to dumb it down further.

overtired didn't choose these - it's a real memo sent by a real disney employee at the time

Cute quiz! This is not important, but I wanted to mention that Disney spells it "Dwarfs" not "Dwarves". I wish this weren't the case, but I guess either spelling is considered correct in English.

Wonderful quiz as always! I love the letter format and the rainbow of answers :D

Also loved the bluntness of the Aristocats' clue lol, it's pretty hard to dumb it down even further, and the pun is pretty great anyways (as is the movie, absolutely loved it as a kid and I still do)

Do think this quiz is a little flawed in that he wrote it in order of when they were released so you didn't technically have to even read his dumbed down version. Also think it should be yellow boxed.

no

no

I regret missing Aristocrats and Robin Hood.