Hacker Cinema
The Black Cauldron
1985 · Film · 80 min
Directed by Richard Rich, Ted Berman
AnimationAdventureFamilyFantasy
Taran is an assistant pigkeeper with boyish dreams of becoming a great warrior. However, he has to put the daydreaming aside when his charge, an oracular pig named Hen Wen, is kidnapped by an evil lord known as the Horned King. The villain hopes Hen will show him the way to The Black Cauldron, which has the power to create a giant army of unstoppable soldiers.
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5 comments on Hacker News
As far as I know The Black Cauldron is not referenced in their parks and if anything some fantasy land (outside say the princess castle and sword in the stone) would be great.
I actually think it was a good movie. The airy, strange, but very capable princess seemed like an interesting change from the typical Disney princess.
Granted I get it, people had expectations of Disney movies and that one was not it.
You’re in luck:
> On July 16, 2019, it was reported that a live-action remake of The Black Cauldron is in early stages of development.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Cauldron_(film)
> I don't know what you think a Disney story is, but all of Disney's major works are based on existing folk stories and other works already in the public domain.
False. Here's some of their animated features based on copyrighted works (as best as I can tell):
Dumbo
Bambi
Peter Pan
Lady and the Tramp
One Hundred and One Dalmatians
The Sword in the Stone
The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh
The Rescuers
The Fox and the Hound
The Black Cauldron
The Great Mouse Detective
Treasure Planet (partially based on the 1987 TV miniseries Treasure Island in Outer Space)
Meet the Robinsons
The Princess and the Frog
Big Hero 6
(I'm using the list in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Walt_Disney_Animation_Studios_films, and picking out the “based on” or ”inspired by” credits that look recent enough.)
"A great deal of the books' power comes from the development of Assistant Pig-Keeper Taran from callow youth to reluctant hero to lost soul to, in the end of the series, wise leader of men. But at the time Disney opposed sequels, so the full, five-volume epic was merely grist for the Disney mill: Joe Hale plucked story elements from the first two books and discarded the rest. Even before it flopped, The Black Cauldron would always be the only Prydain movie; that it fumbled such terrific material just made it worse."
I've always felt, since watching the movie after I finished the novels, that they would work much better with live actors; filming five movies over the course of five years could benefit from the natural aging of young actors. It strikes me as a shame that so much effort in Hollywood goes into creating shallow imitations of classic tales, rather than retelling the classics for a new generation.
I have fond memories of the Sierra adventure game that was licensed from the Disney movie.
IIRC the game ran on Sierra's original 286/EGA era interpreter (the same as Space Quest, Leisure Suit Larry and others), but it required less typing and had less complex language than other Sierra titles so it was much more approachable.
I was about 9 years old. I and my friends wanted to play adventure games so bad, but we didn't speak English, so in practice we were dependent on an older kid or a parent to play Space Quest for us... The Black Cauldron was a Sierra game that we could learn to play ourselves. I learned so much English from that game. (I can vividly remember learning the word "cupboard" in a scene that was set inside the protagonist's home.)
Maybe The Black Cauldron didn't do justice to the original work, but it certainly made an impact on me, and I'm grateful to Disney and Sierra for making it.