Rhett Wickham: Great Animated Performances: Profiles of Modern Masters
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JM

Yes. I had an idea for a song, and he said ‘No, no, forget the song.' I thought Ben could have a song and he said ‘It's not a musical.' I had in my mind for the Ben Gunn Boogey, and he would kind of be this crazy guy where he does this kind of weird boogey number where he would...I was originally picturing Jim Carey...and I was picturing this really fun thing, and he was ‘No, you don't understand. It's not a musical!' Ohh...oh...yeah...okay. So it went away and became the action adventure thing. It's like writers with songs -

CM

There was a long history of TREASURE PLANET. It was pitched at the same time as MERMAID in 1984

JM

‘85

CM

We worked on it a little bit between MERMAID and ALADDIN. There was a period after MERMAID we wanted to do ALADDIN and we picked ALADDIN, it wasn't our choice, it was Howard's idea...the idea of ALADDIN was Howard Ashman's idea...but we liked the project and wanted to do it. But there were some contract negotiations that got into a snag and during that period they didn't want us to work on ALADDIN.

JM

RC

But even in the early stages, when everything was musicals, we were thinking this is not a musical. And certainly we thought we were going to be doing it after ALADDIN, that was the plan. Then Jeffrey didn't want to do it after ALADDIN. We never really knew what Jeffrey's reservations were, and ultimately those reservations may have made a lot of sense in retrospect.

RC

No, I'm just saying that commercially speaking... but that's not what it was because he never really expressed what his reservations were, I'm just speculating. We never really knew what his reservations were.

JM