Today, we look at how Disney essentially retconned reality with the film, Dinosaur, so that it could promote Tangled as its 50th animated film.
In Abandoned an’ Forsaked, we examine stories and ideas that were not only abandoned, but also had the stories/plots specifically “overturned” by a later writer (as if they were a legal precedent) with a retcon (retcon stands for “retroactive continuity,” but we’re specifically talking about retcons that contradict earlier stories).
If you’re a comic book fan, you know how popular the idea of short-term sales bumps are in the industry. Titles get relaunched with new #1s with a good deal of frequency, because a new #1 sells better than issue, like, #68 or whatever. An amusing thing, though, is also the way that companies use “legacy numbering” to do some pretty fuzzy math to get to numbers they want. You see, “legacy numbering” is the practice of counting the previous volumes of a title along with the current volume. So for instance, Amazing Spider-Man is on #32 in its current volume. That, however, is also the 926th issue of Amazing Spider-Man period. So the previous issue, Amazing Spider-Man #31, was treated as a “Special” issue, since it was the 925th issue. Yes, they seriously decided to treat 925 as a notable number.
More interesting, though, was when Marvel came up with some bizarre math in order to get Incredible Hulk to 600 issue so they could do a #600th issue (and then the same thing with Ultimate Spider-Man to get to a 150th issue).
I mention this because that’s how Disney essentially retconned reality to make Tangled its 50th animated feature.
In 1996, Disney bought the special effects company, Dream Quest Images. It was then merged with Disney’s Feature Animation’s Computer Graphics Unit to form “The Secret Lab.” The Secret Lab was designed to get Disney into the CGI age for its films. And The Secret Lab was given the direction of creating the film, Dinosaur, which came out in 2001…
When the film was released, it was simply from Walt Disney Studios…
It wasn’t considered a Disney Feature Animation film (even though technically The Secret Lab was a sub-section of Feature Animation). It was its own thing.
A number of years later, though, Disney was releasing the animated film, Tangled, and it realized that if it counted Dinosaur as a Disney Animated Film, then Tangled would be the 50th film…
And obviously, the company loved that idea, so Dinosaur was then retconned into being a Disney Animated Film, and included in the promotion for Tangled…
This is obviously a particularly odd “retcon,” but I thought it was funny enough to spotlight.
If anyone else has a more conventional suggestion for Abandoned an’ Forsaked, drop me a line at brian@poprefs.com!
Now to get to 100 they have a Blu Ray box set with all the Pixar and Disney Toon Tangled is now 70.
An interesting wrinkle in this is that, in the UK, the Disney-adjacent animated film The Wild had already been declared (for some reason) as the 46th Disney animated classic – or whatever it was – so by the time Tangled came out, we were already up to 50. So, in the UK, The Wild is part of the Disney “canon” but Dinosaur technically isn’t.