[ad_1]
When Will Finn’s and John Standford’s animated musical Western “Home on the Range” was released, it came with an elegiac announcement. Disney, you see, had been struggling throughout the early 2000s. The 1990s renaissance was over, and much of the studio’s more recent output was either failing critically or commercially. Films like “Fantasia 2000,” “The Emperor’s New Groove,” and “Atlantis: The Lost Empire” were only modest successes, while films like “Dinosaur” and “Brother Bear” were coming and going without much notice. The studio’s clunky sci-fi epic “Treasure Planet” notoriously lost buckets of money, which didn’t inspire confidence. It didn’t help that DreamWorks was attracting huge animation audiences with films like “Shrek” — a notoriously anti-Disney movie.
As such, to appear competitive, Disney announced that “Home on the Range” was going to be the studio’s last-ever traditionally hand-drawn feature film. After that, it was to be 100% CGI. Animation purists panicked, feeling that the world’s most powerful animation studio should stay in business merely for tradition’s sake. Disney would double back on their promise in 2009 with the release of “The Princess and the Frog.”
“Home on the Range,” however, would have been an inauspicious exit. It, too, was only modestly successful and only warmly reviewed. It’s no one’s favorite Disney flick. The film followed a trio of farm cows (Roseanne Barr, Judi Tench, Jennifer Tilly) whose ranch is failing and faces shutdown thanks to the criminal cattle theft of an evil yodeling rustler named Slim (Randy Quaid) and his nephews the three Willie brothers (Sam J. Levine). The film is bright, brisk, and comedic in a nonoffensive Disney sort of way. The songs are average.
One can only speculate, but “Home on the Range” may have been more successful had it retained the premise of its original pitch. It seems that early in the development of “Home on the Range,” it was to be a ghost story inspired by “Ghost Riders in the Sky.” Slim and the Willies, in that pitch, were undead.
the original version of ‘Home on the Range’ was supposed to be a ghost story
The full story of the “Home on the Range” production can be found on the ‘blog Animation and All Things Related, and the author notes that the original title for the film was to be the Tarantino-esque “Sweating Bullets.” The story goes that “Pocahontas” co-director Mike Gabriel pitched “Sweating Bullets” to Disney in the early 1990s, and he envisioned the story as a rollicking swashbuckler, the type of film Disney animation didn’t make much.
The story was to follow a callow city slicker who travels out to the range, where he finds himself unwittingly part of a cattle drive. A rabbit named Lucky Jack was to be his animal sidekick, and Lucky Jack made his way into the final version of the movie (and voiced by Charles Haid). The city slicker was to run afoul of the cattle-rustling ghosts. It seems that the story was later reworked into a new draft wherein the city slicker was replaced by an Ichabod Crane-like cowboy coward and that the ghosts became vengeful spirits, aiming to get revenge on the cows that trampled them to death. In the second draft, the cowboy ghosts were named Slim and the Willies.
The ‘blog says that Disney president Michael Eisner heard that someone was working on an animated Western, but he had assumed it was going to be about talking cows and not cowboy ghosts. That assumption forced production toward a more comedic, gentle, talking animal film. Gabriel storyboarded portions of “Sweating Bullets,” however, and posted some of the images on his Instagram account.
How ‘Sweating Bullets’ became ‘Home on the Range’
Over years of development, and multiple mutations, “Sweating Bullets” became the “Home on the Range” we know today. Some of the details about “Sweating Bullets” were talked about on the special features on the “Home on the Range” DVD, and the filmmakers explained that the original human protagonist eventually became an animal — a young bull named Bullets — likely when Eisner made his observation.
The ghost angle was abandoned, and the story developed into a kid-friendly, more typically Disney-like, feel-good story about a brave child cow who wants to be the leader of his herd. Producer Alice Dewey Goldstone said on the DVD, however, that the higher-ups at Disney weren’t so keen on something traditionally sentimental, aiming instead for a broad slapstick comedy. Eventually, the protagonist is shifted from a boy bull into three vigilante cows who have to save their farm from rustlers. Slim was retained as the villain. “Home on the Range” finally began to take shape. Production finally began in 2001. And what happened to the cows? Nothing fatal. Disney couldn’t risk depicting an evil cow-slaughtering villain when it had toy deals with McDonald’s.
It took almost a decade of development.
“Home on the Range” wasn’t a very exciting film to ring out Disney’s hand-drawn animation era. The film only made $143 million on a $100 million budget and didn’t move any merch. Disney has more or less kept “Home” out of range. One will not find any Mrs. Calloway t-shirts or collectible pins at Disneyland.
As mentioned, Disney decided to return to hand-drawn animation with “The Princess and the Frog,” after their CGI features “Chicken Little,” “Meet the Robinsons,” and “Bolt” also all tanked. It wasn’t until “Tangled” that Disney started finding ways to make hits again. The 2010s saw a new renaissance at Disney, and now “Frozen” is the jewel in their crown. “Home on the Range” barely registers.
[ad_2]
