Toon Talk: - May 19, 2003

Toon Talk:
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(c) Disney

On the other hand, at first glance, it appears that the Treasure Planet disc has a significant amount of extras to please the film’s supporters. But while watching them, you’ll have several moments of déjà vu: many of the features are repeated more then once (an animation test of Silver’s CG arm on the original Captain Hook’s body is nifty, but it is shown three times!), and all of them (including the music video?!) are used during the course of the ‘Visual Commentary’, making their inclusion elsewhere very misleading. And the footage of a cool 3-D tour of the RLS Legacy is used three times as well. Some work was obviously put into the creation of these features, which is safe to assume was for a two-disc set that will now apparently never see the light of day.

So much for Disney’s Robert Louis Stevenson legacy…

Treasure Planet Bonus Feature Highlights:

  • The MTV Music Video for “I’m Still Here (Jim’s Theme)�? featuring Jennifer Aniston … oops, John Rzeznik of the Goo-Goo Dolls, shows surprisingly little footage from the actual film.
  • Find all the globe maps in the RLS Legacy Virtual 3-D Treasure Hunt game and you are rewarded with an alternate version of a scene from the film otherwise not accessible on the disc.
  • Three more Deleted Scenes are included, including the film’s original prologue and an alternate ending.
  • DisneyPedia: The Life of a Pirate Revealed details the history and mythology of pirate lore, including backgrounds of some real-life pirates … both male and female. Watch for clips from other Disney pirate movies, such as Blackbeard’s Ghost, Swiss Family Robinson and Peter Pan, as well as Disneyland’s Pirates of the Caribbean attraction.
  • In the Behind the Scenes section, viewers have direct access to a lot of the footage used in the actual Video Commentary. As you can’t listen to the Audio Commentary without the Video Commentary, I would recommend watching them in this context. Participants in the Audio/Video Commentary include producer Roy Conli, co-directors/co-writers Ron Clements and John Musker, supervising animators Glen Keane (Silver) and John Ripa (Jim) and art director Ian Gooding:

The Top Ten Things We Learn From This Commentary:

  1. Originally, the film was told from the point of view of an adult Jim Hawkins.
  2. Although one Star Trek joke survived the final cut, an early one did not: Dr. Doppler’s reaction to the death of Billy Bones: “He’s dead, Jim.�?
  3. As Dr. Doppler, David Hyde Pierce did a lot of adlibbing, including the infamous “Go Delbert�? line.
  4. In the original script, Captain Amelia (delightfully voiced by Emma Thompson) was described as a cross between Emma Peel (of TV’s The Avengers) and Mary Poppins.
  5. Conversely, Morph was described as a cross between a puppy dog and a lava lamp.
  6. The manta birds and space whales seen during the launch of the Legacy were the first use of the Deep Canvas animation program on characters instead of backgrounds.
  7. Silver’s striped pants led to a lot of headaches for the clean-up crew, which explains why he changes to a solid color pair of pants for the second half of the film.
  8. The song montage was originally to a U2 song, but Glen Keane reworked the scene to include flashbacks of Jim’s growing up, and used the Goo-Goo Dolls’ song “Iris�? as a temporary track. This led to the eventual hiring of Dolls’ lead singer John Rzeznik to write the film’s songs.
  9. The pirate characters were ‘killed off’ in the order of “how hard they were to draw�?.
  10. For key scenes between Jim and Silver, voice actors Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Brian Murray (respectively) recorded their dialog at the same time, a rarity for voice acting.

Toon Talk Ratings:

Treasure Island DVD: B-
Treasure Planet
DVD:
B+