Disney Plus-Or-Minus: Robin Hood

Original theatrical release poster for Walt Disney's Robin Hood

In 1973, the future of Walt Disney animation was in doubt. The division had been in danger before. Whenever times got tough, the labor-intensive and not-always-profitable animation group always seemed to be the first one on the chopping block. But before, they’d always had Walt to protect them. Now, not only did they not have Walt anymore, they didn’t even have a Disney. Walt’s brother, Roy O. Disney, died at the end of 1971, just two months after the opening of Walt Disney World. The company was now run by CEO Donn Tatum and President Card Walker, two businessmen who seemed like they’d be just as happy to turn Disney into a theme park company that occasionally made low-budget movies and TV shows.

With the release of The AristoCats in 1970, the studio was officially out of projects that Walt had anything to do with. It was Walker who suggested that they return to the classics for their next animated feature, the fairy tales and legends they’d done so well with in the past. Ken Anderson, who had been with Disney as an art director and writer since 1934, thought Robin Hood would be a good fit. Walker liked the idea. So did Wolfgang Reitherman, who had become the primary animation director and producer, and story man Larry Clemmons. Anderson was given the go-ahead to start breaking the story and designing the characters.

Now, Robin Hood was not the most original idea they could have come up with. There had already been countless adaptations of the story in film and television. Disney had already done one in live-action themselves, The Story Of Robin Hood And His Merrie Men back in 1952. Even in 1970, the world did not need another Robin Hood movie. (We need one even less today but that doesn’t seem to stop Hollywood from going back to Sherwood every few years or so. Please, on behalf of a grateful public, please stop.)

Anderson’s primary innovation with his Robin Hood was depicting the characters as animals. But even this idea was heavily inspired by Anderson’s work on Chanticleer, a project that had failed to get any traction for decades. Anderson and Marc Davis had spearheaded the most recent attempt to get Chanticleer off the ground but it had been shot down in favor of The Sword In The Stone. Since then, Davis had left animation to design attractions for the parks, leaving Anderson free to take another pass at the Chanticleer art. With a little softening, Reynard the Fox became Robin. Chanticleer himself became the narrating minstrel Alan-a-Dale.

Many of Anderson’s other ideas were never used. For instance, he’d wanted to shift the location from England to the Deep South. Anderson had been one of the key animators on Song Of The South and wanted to recapture some of the fun of that movie (and say what you will about the film, the animation in Song Of The South is genuinely outstanding). Reitherman didn’t think that was a good idea, partly because he wanted to stick to the original English setting and partly because Song Of The South was already starting to be a touchy subject around the studio.

So Robin Hood stayed in England but Anderson’s concept does possibly explain why so many of the film’s characters have Southern accents. It does not, however, explain why only the stupid characters have Southern accents. I live in Atlanta now and I can tell you that it’s movies like this that reinforced my Yankee stereotype that only stupid people have Southern accents. Having now met many Southerners who are smart, wonderful human beings, I think Disney owes my friends an apology.

Before long, Anderson found himself benched as Reitherman and Clemmons took charge. Anderson wanted to incorporate Robin’s band of Merrie Men. Reitherman wanted a buddy movie focused solely on Robin and Little John. Whenever Anderson’s character designs ventured a little too far out of the box, Reitherman would push things back to the obvious and stereotypical. By all accounts, it was an unhappy experience for Anderson.

Reitherman also tried playing it safe with casting. Peter Ustinov had given Disney a big hit with Blackbeard’s Ghost, his first film for the studio. He was an obvious but still inspired choice to play the cowardly lion, Prince John, and in the film’s closing minutes, King Richard. We’ll see him again soon.

Phil Harris is back, making his third and final Disney appearance as Little John. This choice was even more obvious and considerably less inspired. Look, Harris is a lot of fun in The Jungle Book and The AristoCats but there is no difference between these characters. Here, I can practically see Reitherman sitting at his desk, thinking, “Let’s see…Harris was a bear, then a cat…ah, screw it. Let’s just make him a bear again.”

Harris was basically done with movies after Robin Hood. He made a few TV appearances but mainly focused on his live act in Vegas. In 1991, Don Bluth (more on him in a minute) coaxed him out of retirement to voice the narrator in Rock-A-Doodle, his rockabilly riff on Chanticleer. Around the same time, Disney rehired him to voice Baloo on their new animated series TaleSpin. But Harris’s voice had changed with age, so Ed Gilbert ended up with the part. On August 11, 1995, Phil Harris died of a heart attack at home. He was 91 years old.

To voice Robin Hood, Reitherman picked another of Walt’s favorites: Tommy Steele, the madly grinning entertainment dervish from The Happiest Millionaire. But while Steele could handle the comedy and the romance (and could’ve handled the music if they’d bothered to give any songs to Robin), he was less inspiring as a heroic leader of men. So Reitherman decided to scrap everything they’d recorded with Steele and replace him, putting the movie behind schedule and over budget.

Eventually the role went to Brian Bedford, a celebrated Shakespearean stage actor who’d appeared with another Disney star, James Garner, in Grand Prix. I’ve seen a few sources claim that Monty Python’s Terry Jones was also considered for the part but I don’t know how much stock I put in that. Monty Python’s Flying Circus was still being produced back in England at the time and didn’t catch on in America until 1974. I suppose it’s theoretically possible that someone involved with Robin Hood could have visited England and become a Python fan. But, no offense to the late, great Terry Jones, he is not the member of the troupe I would single out as a candidate to voice Robin Hood as a fox. Why not the more fox-like Eric Idle? Or John Cleese, who actually would eventually play Robin Hood in Time Bandits? Or literally anyone else in that group apart from maybe Terry Gilliam? I don’t know, maybe Jones was considered. It just doesn’t make sense to me.

Reitherman did cast one legendary British comic actor. Terry-Thomas, the gap-toothed star of It’s A Mad Mad Mad Mad World, voices Prince John’s advisor, Sir Hiss. Unfortunately, this will be his only appearance in a Disney film. Terry-Thomas had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 1971, which resulted in his working less and less throughout the decade. His health forced him to quit acting in 1980 and he and his wife spent much of the 1980s living in poverty thanks to his medical bills. In 1989, a benefit concert was held to honor and raise money for Terry-Thomas, which gave him some degree of comfort in his last days. The disease finally took his life on January 8, 1990, at the age of 78.

Perhaps the film’s most significant casting was Roger Miller as Alan-a-Dale. Miller was a Grammy-winning singer/songwriter whose songs, including “Chug-A-Lug”, “Dang Me” and “King Of The Road”, were smash hits in an era when there was a whole lot more crossover between the country and pop charts than there is now. This wasn’t the first time Disney dipped a toe into the pop music world. But inviting an established star to not only voice a character but to write and perform several original songs was something new. Even the Beach Boys had to sing a song written by the Sherman Brothers in The Monkey’s Uncle and, let’s face it, Brian Wilson was a better songwriter than Roger Miller (again, no offense to Roger Miller, whom I love).

Robin Hood record album cover

Miller’s songs, from the opening “Whistle Stop” (later to achieve internet notoriety in sampled form on the HampsterDance) to the ambling “Oo-De-Lally” to the melancholy “Not In Nottingham”, establish the movie’s tone from the get-go. And Larry Clemmons’ script reinforces those songs at every opportunity. You could make a dangerous drinking game out of taking a belt every time a character uses the expression “oo-de-lally”. Later Disney films would make pop stars part of their entire tapestry, like Elton John and The Lion King or Phil Collins and Tarzan. Roger Miller paves the way for all of that right here.

Miller contributes the movie’s best songs but not the only ones. Naturally, the Academy decided to nominate Robin Hood’s worst song, “Love” by Floyd Huddleston and George Bruns, for Best Original Song. Sung by Huddleston’s wife, Nancy Adams, “Love” isn’t aggressively bad but it is as generic and forgettable as its title. This was Bruns’ fourth and final Oscar nomination, all of which had been for Disney movies. At the Oscars, the song was performed by Napoleon And Samantha costars Jodie Foster and Johnny Whitaker and I really, really wish I could find that clip online. It lost to “The Way We Were”, which I’m sure came as a surprise to no one (it was also up against “Live And Let Die”, so it really didn’t stand a chance). I still think it’s a bad song but evidently Wes Anderson is a fan. He used it on the soundtrack to Fantastic Mr. Fox.

The last original song sequence, “The Phony King Of England”, is remembered more for its animation than the song itself. That’s a little surprising considering it’s the only Disney song written by legendary songwriter Johnny Mercer. But it’s really just another excuse for Phil Harris to do his thing and not as memorable as “The Bare Necessities”. However, those budget overruns and schedule delays took a toll on Reitherman’s plans for this number. Running out of time and money, Reitherman was forced to recycle animation from previous films. This was a trick they’d used before as far back as the package films of the 1940s. But they’d never been quite as blatant about it as they were here.

Reusing animation from The Jungle Book and The AristoCats would have been bad enough. Phil Harris is singing the song and playing another bear. Of course that’s going to stand out. But having Maid Marian inexplicably grow about two feet and transform into Snow White doing one of the most famous dances in animation history is just plain lazy. If you’re subtle about it, you can disguise reused animation so only the keenest of eyes will notice. There’s nothing subtle about this and it pulls you right out of the movie.

That feeling of déjà vu extends to the rest of the film. Reitherman doesn’t so much tell a story as compile Robin Hood’s Greatest Hits. There’s a little robbing from the rich, a little giving to the poor. There’s Robin in disguise, there’s the archery contest, there’s the kiss with Maid Marian. It’s the most basic, pared-down telling of the Robin Hood story I can imagine. Even the stuff that works feels like a hand-me-down. I like Ustinov and Terry-Thomas but we just saw a kingdom ruled by a lion and his officious assistant (a bird, not a snake) in Bedknobs And Broomsticks. But Robin Hood never makes the unexpected choice when the obvious one is right there for the taking.

Despite its many drawbacks and shortcuts, Robin Hood is a hard movie to dislike. It’s too easy-going and relaxed to get mad about. Do I wish it was better? Absolutely. Would I say it was one of my favorite Disney movies? Not a chance. But have I watched it more than once? Yep. I never love it but I don’t wish I had the time back, either.

Robin Hood theatrical reissue poster

Most critics seemed to feel the same way, although some, like Gene Siskel, absolutely hated it. But in general, they gave Robin Hood a light pass while still pining for Disney’s glory days, which seemed to be a distant memory at that point. Audiences, on the other hand, loved it. Released on November 8, 1973, it became Disney’s highest grossing film of the year and one of the ten highest grossing films of the year overall.

The success of Robin Hood earned the animation division a reprieve. The studio now wanted to stay in the cartoon business but to do that, they’d need to make some changes. For one thing, most of the team had been with Disney since the 1930s. If Disney animation was going to survive, the studio needed some new blood.

The studio would hire several new animators in the years following Robin Hood, many from the animation program at CalArts, a school Walt had helped found back in 1961. But one member of the next generation was already there. Don Bluth (see, I told you we’d get back to him) was first hired by Disney as an assistant to John Lounsbery on Sleeping Beauty. But he got bored and went off to do other things, including missionary work overseas and graduating from college.

Bluth returned to animation in 1967, first as a layout artist for Filmation. In 1971, he went back to Disney where he was put to work on Robin Hood. Don Bluth would become a big figure at Disney over the next several years. Eventually, he’d become an even bigger problem for them after deciding to strike out on his own. But we’ll get to that story down the road.

Robin Hood has never been an A-list Disney title. Whenever it shows up on home video, which is frequently, the studio doesn’t make a big song-and-dance about it being locked up in “the vault”. It’s just one of those titles you can always pick up, usually at a big discount. But it’s had a low-key impact over the years. People who like it seem to like it quite a bit (and I’m sure I’ll hear from a few of them over my dismissive attitude…Disney fans are a passionate lot). It’s frequently cited as a seminal film in the furry community, a fandom so foreign and mysterious to me I’m not even going to question or comment about it apart from to say yeah, I guess that tracks. And the movie definitely had an influence on later films like Fantastic Mr. Fox and Zootopia. Not a bad legacy for a movie that frequently feels like an afterthought. Oo-de-lally, indeed.

VERDICT: This is a tough one. Compared to other Disney animated classics, this is a Disney Minus or, at best, a Disney Shrug. But compared to a lot of the other crap we’ve seen in this column lately, it’s a Disney Plus.

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Disney Plus-Or-Minus: The AristoCats

Original theatrical release poster for Walt Disney's The AristoCats

When Walt Disney died in December 1966, he left behind a handful of animated and live-action projects in varying stages of production. Four years later, that stockpile was almost gone. The AristoCats, Disney’s twentieth animated feature and first since The Jungle Book in 1967, would be the studio’s first feature-length cartoon produced entirely without Walt’s guiding hand. So perhaps it isn’t too surprising that it feels a lot like some of their earlier work.

Walt was involved in the project’s earliest development. In 1961, he had tasked producer Harry Tytle and director Tom McGowan with finding animal stories for the Wonderful World Of Color TV series. McGowan had made the popular short The Hound That Thought He Was A Raccoon and Walt wanted more stuff like that. Here’s where things get a little tricky. According to some sources, McGowan found a kid’s book about a mother cat and her three kittens set in New York City. Tytle thought New York was boring and suggested transplanting the story to Paris, since One Hundred And One Dalmatians had benefited from its London setting. Others claim that the film is inspired by a true story about a group of cats who really did inherit a fortune left them by their eccentric owner in 1910 Paris.

Now, I don’t know if either one of those stories is true. If it was a book, I don’t know who wrote it, what it was called or when it was published. And presumably Walt would have had to buy the rights to this thing if it existed. As for it being a true story, the internet has tons of stories about rich weirdos bequeathing their money to their pets. But sources that make the claim for The AristoCats are noticeably light on specifics. Could it have happened? Sure, why not. But I wouldn’t swear to it under oath.

Regardless of where the story originated, Tytle, McGowan and cowriter Tom Rowe envisioned it as a live-action production. Boris Karloff was in mind to play the devious butler, which is wild to think about. As usual, the script went through numerous revisions, none of which pleased Rowe. One by one, the original production trio of Tytle, McGowan and Rowe would either quit or be reassigned.

Sometime in 1963, Walt decided the story was better suited to animation. With the animation department fully committed to The Jungle Book, Walt put the project on hold. Shortly before his death, he handed it to longtime employee Ken Anderson. Anderson and Wolfgang Reitherman tossed out most of the old work and came up with a more cat-centric story. Walt approved the new direction and signed off on some early sketches before his death.

Once The Jungle Book was completed, the animation department turned their attention to The AristoCats (the studio has never been entirely consistent with the title stylization but since the official on-screen title has a capital “C”, that’s what I’m going with). A team of seven Disney veterans cracked the story, including Anderson, Larry Clemmons, Vance Gerry, Frank Thomas, Eric Cleworth, Julius Svendsen, and Ralph Wright. Winston Hibler was originally going to produce the picture but it had been a while since he’d worked on the animation side. Most of his 60s work had been in live-action, mostly animal and nature movies like the recent King Of The Grizzlies. When Hibler ran into trouble, Reitherman took over the production.

The version of The AristoCats that hit screens on Christmas Eve, 1970, was markedly different from the one Tytle, McGowan and Rowe had come up with. A secondary human character, a maid named Elvira, was dropped entirely. New animal characters like Roquefort the mouse (voiced by Disney Legend Sterling Holloway) were either added or had their roles expanded. The Parisian atmosphere Tytle felt was so important gradually fell by the wayside. Harry Tytle walked away from animation and returned to live-action. Tom Rowe tried suing the studio but since this had always been a work-for-hire gig, he didn’t get far. It’s a surprisingly bumpy origin for what ended up being a pleasant but innocuous movie.

Quad poster for The AristoCats

I don’t necessarily want to say The AristoCats straight-up borrows elements that worked in earlier Disney movies but it’s impossible not to see the similarities. The family of cats trying to make their way home across the French countryside recalls One Hundred And One Dalmatians. The dynamic between Duchess and O’Malley gives off some serious Lady And The Tramp vibes. And while The AristoCats team reportedly tried to differentiate Phil Harris’s O’Malley from his performance in The Jungle Book, they didn’t try very hard. O’Malley is basically Baloo in cat form.

The story of The AristoCats is one of the simplest in the Disney library. Madame Bonfamille (voiced by Disney regular Hermione Baddeley, last seen in The Happiest Millionaire) is a retired opera star living alone in Paris with her beloved cat, Duchess (Eva Gabor), and her three kittens, Berlioz (Dean Clark), Toulouse (Gary Dubin), and Marie (Liz English). She sends for her ancient lawyer, Georges (Charles Lane, last seen in The Gnome-Mobile), to dictate her will. She wants to leave her entire estate to her cats. Once their nine lives are up, the rest will go to her devoted butler, Edgar (British comedian and performance artist Roddy Maude-Roxby).

Being paid to live in a Parisian mansion with a bunch of cats sounds like a pretty sweet gig to me but it’s not enough for Edgar. He wants to inherit the whole thing right away, so he douses the cats’ cream with sleeping tablets and abandons them far out in the country. He may have had a more insidious plan in mind but his motorcycle ride is interrupted by a couple of farm dogs, Napoleon and Lafayette (voiced by Gabor’s Green Acres costar Pat Buttram and George “Goober” Lindsey from The Andy Griffith Show…don’t bother asking why two French dogs sound like hicks from the American South).

The cats aren’t on their own for long before they meet Abraham de Lacey Giuseppe Casey Thomas O’Malley, an easygoing alley cat. O’Malley finagles a ride back to Paris on a milk truck, then ends up going along when Marie falls off and needs rescuing. And in a lot of ways, that’s kind of the whole story. Oh sure, other stuff happens. The cats meet up with a couple of vacationing British geese (Monica Evans and Carole Shelley) and their drunk Uncle Waldo (Bill Thompson in his final role). Edgar has to go back and retrieve some incriminating evidence from Napoleon and Lafayette. And, of course, we meet O’Malley’s jazz-loving friends, led by Scat Cat (the great Scatman Crothers, stepping in to voice a role originally intended for Louis Armstrong). But none of it really advances the story.

Things wrap up when Duchess and the kittens get back home and O’Malley reluctantly says goodbye. But they’re quickly intercepted by Edgar, who locks them in a trunk bound for Timbuktu. Roquefort runs after O’Malley, who sends him off for the other alley cats. The animals all team up to defeat Edgar and O’Malley ends up becoming a stepfather to the kittens. The movie’s practically over before you even realize it got started.

The AristoCats re-release poster

Now, there are a lot of problems with The AristoCats and many of them revolve around Edgar. He is by far the least interesting villain Disney ever came up with. His plan doesn’t make a lot of sense, especially considering Madame Bonfamille seems a long way from kicking the bucket. Even if he had succeeded in getting rid of the cats, what’s to stop her from just going out and adopting more? If your bad guy’s evil plan is essentially to wait patiently, your central conflict might not be as dramatic as you think.

The AristoCats also manages to feel both needlessly padded out and like it’s missing pieces at the same time. Napoleon and Lafayette are fun characters, so I understand the desire to bring them back. But why do they never once interact with the cats themselves? They really feel like they’re in their own movie that has nothing to do with Duchess and O’Malley.

There’s a similar problem with the geese. Practically their entire journey to Paris takes place off-screen. One minute they’re in the middle of nowhere, the next they’re walking up to the café. They’re pretty important characters for a hot second, then they wander off, never to be seen again. Unlike the dogs, the geese aren’t really funny enough to make much impression. They’re just kind of there until they’re not and you forget all about them.

At this point, you’re probably thinking I don’t like The AristoCats all that much. That’s not actually true. It’s a testament to the Disney animation crew that this is still an enjoyable movie despite its familiarity and story problems. In a way, it feels like Walt Disney’s Greatest Hits. There’s nothing remotely new here but the band can still play all your old favorites and that’s just fine.

A big part of what makes The AristoCats work is the music. This isn’t really a musical, in the sense that you could remove every single song and not effect the story one iota. The Sherman Brothers wrote quite a few songs but most of them ended up not being used. Of the few that made the cut, “Scales & Arpeggios” walks a fine line between endearing and annoying. I think it’s cute but I’d understand if someone hated it.

The Shermans also contributed the title song, which is probably the most French thing about the movie. Maurice Chevalier had retired after his appearance in Monkeys, Go Home! back in 1967 but the Shermans were able to coax him back for one last recording session. It ended up being his final work before his death in 1972.

Terry Gilkyson’s Jungle Book song, “The Bare Necessities”, had been nominated for an Oscar, so it makes sense that Disney would want him to come up with another signature song for Phil Harris. “Thomas O’Malley Cat” does not stray far from the “Bare Necessities” formula. It’s an okay song but nowhere near as memorable as Baloo’s big number.

Of course, the song everyone remembers is “Ev’rybody Wants To Be A Cat” by Floyd Huddleston and Al Rinker. Huddleston and Rinker first teamed up in the late 40s, writing hundreds of songs at Decca Records. This would be Rinker’s only work at Disney but we’ll see Huddleston in this column again. Their AristoCats song doesn’t sound much like anything you’d have heard in 1910 but it’s pretty terrific, changing direction repeatedly and building to a show-stopping finale.

The whole sequence is lively and beautifully animated, which makes the lazy ethnic stereotyping of the cats even more unfortunate. Supposedly these cats have names but in the credits, they’re just referred to as Russian Cat (the incomparable Thurl Ravenscroft), Italian Cat (Vito Scotti, who we just saw in The Boatniks), English Cat (Lord Tim Hudson, one of the Beatle Vultures in The Jungle Book) and (sigh) Chinese Cat (Paul Winchell, immediately recognizable as the voice of Tigger). And sure, all four of them are broad, over-the-top exaggerations, so it’s not like anyone was going out of their way to specifically insult Asians. But Chinese Cat is the one everyone singles out because he is objectively terrible.

We’ve already seen plenty of examples of Disney’s…shall we say…checkered history of depicting people (and animals) of color and no doubt we’ll see even more. And yes, it is important to view these films within the context of their times and Disney was by no means alone in perpetuating Asian stereotypes. But it is worth noting that these kinds of Asian characters held on a lot longer than stereotypes of other cultures and ethnicities and movies like The AristoCats are partially to blame.

Obviously, the studio thought whatever Paul Winchell was doing was funny and this was going to be a breakout character. He’s the only member of the band singled out with a character box on the original poster above. That poster actually makes it worse by referring to him as “Oriental Cat”. It also says he’s the leader of the band, which isn’t true. Scat Cat is clearly in charge. The character’s bad enough as it is without calling attention to him and trying to build him up. So while we should be able to look back at The AristoCats and forgive it as a product of less enlightened attitudes, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t cringe a little (or a lot) when Chinese Cat pops up.

The AristoCats quad re-release poster

Despite its flaws, The AristoCats was a big hit, winning over audiences and most critics. It did even better overseas, becoming the highest grossing film of 1971 in the UK, Germany and even France. The painted Parisian backgrounds are genuinely lovely. Maybe the movie plays more authentically when it’s dubbed in French.

It’s a little surprising that Disney has yet to return to The AristoCats well, although it’s not for lack of trying. Back in 2000, the studio began developing an animated TV series based on the film that would have followed teenage versions of Toulouse, Marie and Berlioz. Then in 2005, Disneytoon Studios, the direct-to-video branch of the company, announced they’d be making The Aristocats 2. This was going to be a computer-animated feature following the older Marie as she falls in love. Those plans were dropped after John Lasseter took the reins of the studio, realized almost all the Disneytoon movies were garbage that cheapened the brand, and shut the whole thing down. Now the studio is working on a live-action remake because of course they are.

Whether or not the public realized it at the time, the legendary Disney animation studio was in trouble. Without Walt to steer the ship, the department was beginning to cut corners and recycle proven formulas. We’ve already been seeing fewer and fewer animated features in this column. Sad to say, that trend is only going to continue. It’s a shame because The AristoCats proves that even an uninspired Disney cartoon is still pretty darn good.

VERDICT: Disney Plus

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