The History of "Home on the Range": Everything You Might or Might Not Have Wanted to Know About Disney's 2004 Animated Movie

In 2004, Disney released the forty-fifth entry in their Animated Canon, a little movie called Home on the Range. The movie focused on three cows voiced by Roseanne, Jennifer Tilly and Judi Dench who pursue a yodeling cattle-rustler in the hopes of using the reward money to save their farm. It received mixed reviews from critics and wound up bombing at the box office (somehow, the sequel to that awful live action Scooby-Doo movie managed to perform better than it). For years folks looked at it as a "black sheep" (ha ha, farm animal joke) of the Disney Animated Canon, along with other 2000s-released animated movies of theirs like Brother Bear and Chicken Little. However, around 2013 (maybe 2012, actually) many folks online came out of the woodwork and revealed that they actually like it. As for me, I personally have never had a problem with the movie. Though admittedly I haven't watched it in years...

However, it would interest all of those that DON'T like the (now twenty years old?!) movie to know that it got its start as a very different, much darker movie. A movie so dark that it had the word "Bullets" in the title!

Sweatin' Bullets, as Home on the Range was originally called, was thought up by Disney animator Mike Gabriel before he directed Pocahontas - heck, it was before he PITCHED Pocahontas. According to Mike, he was "trying to think of an idea that might combine Captains Courageous with a Western. Something simple like that, I thought, would make a hell of a movie." So he pitched it, and it went into production... and then wound up being taken off the project five years later. Ouch.

The initial idea for the film was this: a rich young guy from the east coast is sent out to the west and gets shoved into a cattle drive. Lucky Jack, the rabbit sidekick in the movie, was still part of this version. The villains were to be cattle-stealing ghosts. Then at another point, the main character was a timid cowboy who visited a ghost town and confronted a ghostly cattle rustler named Slim and his gang, the Willies. The ghosts wanted revenge on cows because being trampled by cows is how they became ghosts in the first place.

When they pitched this idea to Michael Eisner, he said, "Oh... well, I thought this was gonna be a movie about cattle. Why don't you make the movie about one of the cows?". So the filmmakers said "Okay." The cowboy was replaced by a calf named Bullets, who wanted to be more like the horses that led the herd.

Concept art for Bullets and another cow who I'm guessing was going to be the love interest.

From there, characters were constantly being inserted into and removed from the movie. One minute there were more human characters, then the human characters were taken out, then there were more animals. I personally would've preferred more animals than humans, but that's just me. I love animals.

I was initially going to make this an edition of Back to the Drawing Board, but one thing stopped me from doing that: see, with Back to the Drawing Boards about movies that actually did wind up getting made, I like to go into detail about these early versions of the movie - an early draft of the film's script with a lot of differences from the film we got, for example. Problem is, not much in the way of plot details about this early version of the movie has been posted online. No story reels, no early script drafts, no interviews that go into detail about it, nothing. However, I do have a book - I believe one of those They Drew As They Pleased books, which I highly recommend getting your hands on - that features concept art for it, such as some early versions of Lucky Jack and Alameda Slim, and one piece that features another character, a vulture named Uriah, who is shown protecting Bullets from the hot desert sun. A good guy vulture? We don't have enough of those in animation. Vultures get a bad rap...

Mike Gabriel posted some storyboards for the movie on his Instagram page. The storyboards feature some two female cows (perhaps early versions of Maggie and Grace?) and another vulture, this one clearly a bad guy.

More concept art.

At another point, there was a mutiny of sorts with the story department on the film. They were having difficulty with the villains being ghosts because, well, how do you kill a ghost? I suppose you could call up the Ghostbusters, but they're not owned by Disney. As a result, the story hadn't gotten past Act 1.So, eventually, management said (and I'm paraphrasing here), "Okay, this clearly isn't working. Everyone just go away until you have an idea to fix this movie."

Finally, in 1999, story artist Michael LaBash suggested that the film focus on three dairy cows becoming bounty hunters to save their farm. Other story artists and writers honed the idea, and in 2000 Will Finn and John Sanford stepped in to direct it. The film started production in April 2001. The rest is history, right?

Not quite - the film still had a lot of developing to do. For example, Alameda Slim was considered to be a gold miner before they decided to make him a cattle-rustler again. Alan Menken suggested having Slim yodel to hypnotize the cows.

Incidentally, I've also heard that Will Finn and John Sanford originally pitched the film as an animated adaptation of the story of the Pied Piper. Maggie was going to be a deaf girl immune to the Pied Piper's piping. Michael Eisner hated the idea, pointing out that nobody would take their kids to a movie where children are murdered, so it was reworked into a film where a cattle rustler hypnotizes cows with his yodeling. However, I haven't been able to find solid proof of this, and it contradicts most of the information about Sweating Bullets that I've seen (including the aforementioned "Slim's hypnosis-inducing yodeling being Alan Menken's idea" fact), so let's take this with a grain of salt.

Concept art for Lucky Jack.

According to John Sanford, "The film had been through countless iterations. It started as a sort of Captain Courageous in the old West where this rich kid learns how to be a cowboy, to the story of a little bull on a cattle drive who encounters a ghost town, to ultimately, the story of three cows trying to save their farm. They were still struggling just to get the movies up on reels."

John admitted in a 2018 podcast, "I hate westerns. I really think they're stupid and, uh, I'm not exactly a city boy, but I'm definitely someone bound for the great indoors... I kind of like the Italian spaghetti westerns because they're so off-the-wall... so I was intrigued because I thought we could make an 'inside-out western'... an 'anti-western'... cows are the heroes and the cowboys are the bad guys. I thought that was really funny. But in order to do that, you have to understand what a western is and it took me over a year to learn what a western is... frantically, on my own time, thinking about them and watching them... and basically, a western is, the lone individual against the group and the wilderness. And when I got that, finally, I said 'Okay, everything in this movie will be about the opposite of that.'" It would be about a group against lone individuals - mercenaries. The filmmakers also wanted to do a film without "grandeur" and "gravitas" like the phenomenally dull Pocahontas - something more in line with Woolie Reitherman's films. Which turned out to be its downfall... Disney fans, it would seem, WANTED "grandeur" and "gravitas" (even though Pocahontas and The Hunchback of Notre Dame were considered box office disappointments by Disney, so...).

After finishing work on The Emperor's New Groove, Nik Ranieri was asked to join the project. He was to be the supervising animator for Duke, a horse voiced by Cuba Gooding Jr. This character, of course, was eventually renamed Buck - though at one point he was also named Jake.

Here's some storyboards from Sweating Bullets featuring an early version of Buck.

Nik wound up leaving the project after Will and John joined - on Facebook, he said that "The problems that I had in the past working with Will colored my decision to leave the project. Working with him, I could handle. Working for him was another story. I wasn't sure what to expect and frankly, a little afraid so I quietly bowed out... as a postscript to this, it needs to be noted that no one expressed any problem working with Will. So most likely it was more about my insecurities than it was about Will's abilities and demeanor."

A 2003 summary of the film from ComingSoon.com gives us some idea as to how else the film evolved - the plotline isn't too different from the one in the finished film, but it claims that Buck is the "family horse", that he used to belong to a bounty hunter, and that it's his idea they go nab a bandit and use the reward money to save the farm. For those that haven't seen it, in the movie we got, Buck belongs to the town sheriff, not Pearl. And it's Maggie's idea to go nab a bandit and use the reward money to save the farm. Will Finn turned Buck from a genuine hero horse who had seen it all into an ambitious horse who was eager to take a shot at heroism. He felt that this made him more vulnerable.

As a result of the film's reworking, Alan Menken had to scrap several songs. But they loved the title song, "Sweating Bullets", so much that they reworked it into "You Ain't Home on the Range". Will Finn and Alan Menken wound up getting into an argument at one point - according to him, "I'm not a fan of musicals. I don't like musicals. And I don't like songs in movies. For eleven years, I worked on musicals, even though I hated musicals. I could tell you how to set up a song, how to ramp into a song, I can tell you how to board a song, and how to get out of a song, but I don't like them." Here he was working with a guy who writes songs for movies, and he told him he didn't like it when characters in movies burst into song. He was basically told by the higher-ups not to argue with Alan Menken.

Sarah Jessica Parker was originally supposed to voice Grace (some sites claim she was going to voice Pearl, but the directors said otherwise in the aforementioned podcast). Apparently when they rewrote the character, Sarah wasn't working, so they recast her with Jennifer Tilly. Ja'Net DuBois was originally the voice of Maggie (maybe they would've been better off sticking with her than getting the now very controversial Roseanne Barr). One of the directors asked if the film could be made in CGI, but for some reason was told no. After a test screening, Michael Eisner suggested having the Willies tell the story to the audience, via flashback, in jail, but by that point the film was almost done so the crew rejected the idea. 

Concept art for Alameda Slim.

And of course, then there was the executive meddling. Lots and lots of executive meddling. We could dedicate a whole article to the meddling that higher-ups at Disney did during production of some of their most popular animated movies. For example, the title was changed from Sweating Bullets to Home on the Range because Disney knew parents wouldn't take their kids to see a film with "bullets" in the title. The film wasn't allowed to have guns in it either. In addition, John Sanford claimed in an interview that the studio felt they should be aiming their films at very young children - which meant a somewhat more juvenile tone - as a result of Atlantis: The Lost Empire's being a box office flop. He said, "We’d have screenings with the crew, and we’d have gags and jokes that got big laughs. Then, we’d have a screening for a bunch of school kids and the kids wouldn’t laugh, so we’d cut the jokes! Horribly frustrating!"

Did you know that originally, they were going to explain just what, exactly, Slim planned on doing with the cattle once he'd rustled them up? Well, originally the idea was for him to sell the cows for slaughter. There was just one problem with that: you see, Home on the Range was developed and released during that time period where Disney had a partnership with McDonald's going. McDonald's was required to promote Disney's movies, theme parks and VHS releases...

And in return, Disney could open up McDonald's locations at the theme parks.

Including locations that just sold McDonald's French Fries.

It only made sense that this film would get a McDonald's tie-in as well, right? Because of this, the higher-ups at Disney didn't want the film to say the cows were being sold for slaughter because they were afraid that if it did, children who'd seen the film would go to McDonald's and put two and two together. Like, let's say a kid goes to see Home on the Range. When they leave the theater, it's lunchtime, so their parents take them to McDonald's. They get a Happy Meal, and inside is a toy of Maggie. Then as they're munching on their hamburger the kid thinks, "Wait a second... am I eating Maggie?!"

And then, when Disney approached McDonald's with the idea of doing a Happy Meal tie-in for the movie, McDonald's turned it down. Do you know why they turned it down? Because they were concerned that kids would realize that beef comes from cows after seeing the movie and not want to eat their hamburgers. Oh, the irony.

After being told that they couldn't have the cows sold for slaughter, the crew came up with another, much funnier, idea. Get this... he was going to use them to STORM WASHINGTON D.C. and overthrow the president. The higher-ups weren't thrilled by this idea either, dubbing it "too political". So in the movie, I don't think it's ever said what Wesley (the Steve Buscemi-voiced guy who Slim sold the cows too) was going to do with the cattle.

Still more concept art.

Here's an amusing anecdote: in 2003, David Koenig (the author of books like Mouse Under Glass and Mouse Tales) wrote an article for Mouseplanet.com implying that early previews for Home on the Range had been overwhelmingly negative. That's not the amusing part. No, no, the amusing part is that Will Finn wrote back to David, giving him a piece of his mind. This is what he said - "Who does it help to start a negative buzz on Home on the Range more than half a year before its release, other than yourself and the 'insider' pipsqueak who predicted it will be 'the biggest bomb since Black Cauldron'? Every feature from Great Mouse to Finding Nemo has been tarred with this tired brush by somebody and the sky hasn't fallen yet. No wonder Disney is so keen on producing Chicken Little! Secondly, you report an audience preview quote that called Home 'more boring than church,' which your source could only have heard from either John or myself. We quoted this remark liberally as one of only two negative notes out of hundreds of favorable ones given at a preview last October. John and I found the quote funny enough to repeat, but by isolating it you have thrown it way out of context. You could just as easily write a one-line bio of Adolph Hitler that reads: 'He was a German guy who loved his pet schnauzer' and say you are not being inaccurate, just selective. For the record, the response to Home previews in October, April and one just two weeks ago were overwhelmingly positive, literally--unequivocal raves from parents and kids who laughed, cheered and applauded throughout. One typical one was from a lady who begged us to 'keep making 'em just like this one!' At the end of the recent screening kids were bouncing off the walls with glee, quoting lines and re-enacting scenes from our film. It was like a dream come true for those of us who have worked so hard on this film, which admittedly got off to a rocky start and has had its share of chaos through the years of production. What film hasn't, animated or otherwise?"

Home on the Range was made and released during a time when Disney animation wasn't in a great place, but the filmmakers did their best with the restraints put on them and the chaos flying around them. And their reward for all of that hard work? Bombing at the box office, having their film brushed off as crap by critics and Disney fans, and being blamed for Disney abandoning traditional animation. That third one is especially unfair, because actually, Disney decided to stop making hand-drawn films after Treasure Planet - they were under the impression that because Atlantis: The Lost Empire and Treasure Planet bombed while CGI films like Shrek and Monsters Inc. were big hits, audiences didn't like hand-drawn animated films anymore (even though Lilo and Stitch was successful at the box office and it was ALSO hand-drawn)... apparently, it never occurred to them that maaaaaaybe Treasure Planet actually bombed because they put it up against the second Harry Potter movie and barely advertised it. I also have a book about the Florida animation studio that claimed they began to think hand-drawn animation wasn't profitable anymore immediately after the first Toy Story was released in 1995. Make of that what you will.

In fact, Home on the Range's bombing could ALSO be because it wasn't advertised very well. Disney insiders have theorized that the company did this deliberately in order to sabotage the film, then when Chicken Little was released and did better they'd have "proof" that people don't like hand-drawn animation anymore. Consider this as well - when a movie studio wants a movie to reach the widest possible audience, they usually release it during the summer or in November or December. April isn't a popular month for studios to release movies. It doesn't help that many of the people in the company looked down on the film. Thomas Schumacher said that "it appealed to young and dumb." Would Treasure Planet, Brother Bear, and Home on the Range have been more successful if they were CGI? Maybe, maybe not. They might've been given better release dates, if nothing else. It's worth noting that the CGI-animated Meet the Robinsons was a box office disappointment as well.

Will Finn and John Sanford also had to deal with David Stainton, who was the president of Walt Disney Feature Animation from 2003 to 2006, apparently blaming them for the film's failure. Suddenly, they weren't being invited to meetings, and whenever they tried to pitch another movie David wasn't interested. Ouch.

So the next time you're looking for something to watch on Disney Plus, I'd recommend giving Home on the Range another look. It's a film that could become a cult classic if enough people give it a chance instead of just brushing it off as "that one really lousy Disney movie" based on everyone's complaining about it online. It's no Beauty and the Beast, but there are far, far worse Disney films.

Like this one, for example!

One more thing: remember that short film on the Home on the Range DVD? "A Dairy Tale"? Which was about Mrs. Calloway trying to tell the story of "The Three Little Pigs", only for the other characters to barge in and mess things up? According to John Sanford, they were planning to do more shorts starring the characters - parodies of "The Wise Little Hen" and "The Ugly Duckling", one about the Willie Brothers in jail telling the film's story from their point of view (as was previously suggested for the film - apparently whoever suggested it really liked that idea)... alas, when the movie underperformed, the shorts were cancelled.

Sources:
- https://lookbackmachine.libsyn.com/home-on-the-range?fbclid=IwAR3Arw75GivluaQrKJC8Ev5h2ragcldUK_kyxpLhr1tehEsz9CDOJ1LPGqI

Let's Watch This: An Episode of "The Little Mermaid"

As you know, The Little Mermaid is the film that pulled Disney out of its slump and got the Disney Renaissance up and running. The Great Mouse Detective and Oliver and Company helped as well, but The Little Mermaid - THAT was the film that really got theatrical animated movies seen as something worth doing again. If it weren't for The Little Mermaid, we might not have gotten The Lion King. Or Beauty and the Beast. Or Frozen, or Tangled, or maybe even Toy Story.

So let's go back in time to 1992. The Disney Renaissance is going on, Beauty and the Beast was successful, Aladdin is going to be released in November. Disney knows that people love The Little Mermaid, I'm sure Ariel dolls were still flying off the shelves. Surely there's a way to keep the movie's hype going. And Disney was just dipping its toes into making TV shows based on their animated films - The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh and TaleSpin were both successful. So why NOT make a cartoon show starring Ariel?

And thus was created The Little Mermaid... the TV show. Premiering on CBS in September 1992, the series was a prequel to the movie, taking place before Ariel met Prince Eric (since, y'know, it wouldn't make sense to call the show The Little MERMAID if the main character had legs). Jodi Benson, Pat Carroll, Samuel E. Wright, and Kenneth Mars reprised their roles as Ariel, Ursula, Sebastian, and King Triton for the show. Flounder was now voiced by Edan Gross, then Bradley Pierce (who you might recall as the voice of Chip in Beauty and the Beast), and Scuttle was now voiced by Maurice LaMarche as opposed to Buddy Hackett. There were songs, there were bad guys for Ariel to fight, there were presumably also increased sales of Ariel dolls and Flounder plushies. They even had an episode where Ariel met Hans Christian Anderson, who for those unaware wrote the original Little Mermaid story. Neat, huh?

Three seasons, making for a total of thirty-one episodes, were produced of The Little Mermaid. Since its run on CBS, reruns have aired on Disney Channel, Toon Disney, and Disney Junior. A couple episodes were released on VHS and DVD, and now you can find the whole show, except the pilot movie for some reason, on Disney Plus. I've watched the show before - first via reruns (I recall my older sister loved The Little Mermaid at some point, it might have been her favorite Disney movie but don't quote me on that) then at some point in the 2010s I found episodes of the show on YouTube. From what I recall, it's a pretty good show. Since I'm probably going to be looking at all of these Disney shows adapted from their movies at some point on this blog (I already did Aladdin, 101 Dalmatians, and Hercules, you'll recall), I might as well give this show a review too. I'm tempted to do a review of the episode where Sebastian turns into a giant, or the one where Ariel encounters dinosaurs (this show could get pretty out there), but nah, I'll do the seventeenth episode, "Save the Whale", instead. This is The Little Mermaid!

First of all - no, this episode does not focus on Ariel becoming a member of Greenpeace or trying to prevent whales from beaching themselves. A shame, because the more we can do to spread awareness of whale conservation, the better. To learn more about saving the whales, visit this website.

The episode starts off with Ariel, Flounder and Sebastian on the surface of the water... which, as the movie establishes, is a big no-no for Ariel because her father does not want her to get caught by humans, lest she wind up served as an entree at a Red Lobster or mounted to a plaque on somebody's wall singing novelty songs (you're welcome for that mental image). But then a shark fin pops out of the water and comes their way!

Dah-dun, daaaaaaaah-dun, daaaaaaaaaaah-dun...

Oh, wait. It's not a shark fin. It's the fin of an orca. And not just ANY orca - Spot, the orca who Ariel met in the aforementioned pilot movie. One look at his Casper the Friendly Ghost-shaped head and his weird bulbous human-esque nose (which Flounder also has, have you ever noticed?) and Ariel is overjoyed.

Y'know what this reminds me of? Did anyone else have Brother Bear on DVD? I recall there was a game part of the bonus features where you could put together fossils, and then once the fossil was complete, the narrator would tell you about the animal that fossil came from accompanied by clips of a Disney production featuring that animal. One of those animals was an orca, and the clips you'd receive were of Spot from this show. If you also had that DVD and played that game, well, there's your daily dose of nostalgia for the day.

He reminds me of the octopus from that animated Titanic movie.

King Triton shows up, and he says that he hopes they don't have a repeat of the previous time Spot visited. Ariel assures him that this time, Spot will stay outside the palace. "Good. Better make it outside of Atlantica as well," King Triton suggests. Ariel asks why everyone is so afraid of orcas.

Well, Ariel, orcas might look cute - particularly when they have big round heads and bulbous human noses like Spot does - but they are carnivorous. They are sometimes referred to as "wolves of the sea" because they live and hunt together in pods (which is what a group of whales is called) much like a pack of wolves. Among the things an orca can and will eat include fish, walruses, seals, sea lions, penguins (as Happy Feet showed us), sea turtles, sharks, and even other kinds of whales, and the average-sized orca can eat about five hundred pounds of food a day. There. Now you can't say you've never learned anything from one of my reviews.

I don't think orcas eat human beings, but I imagine Ariel's being half-human half-fish makes things
a bit more complicated. Maybe he'd just eat her tailfin?

"I know Spot wouldn't hurt anyone. I'm just not sure Spot knows it," King Triton tells her. Ariel seems pretty sure, though, and starts teaching Spot how to do fancy leaping-out-of-the-water tricks. After this, Spot went on to star in Free Willy.

Boy, that's the chubbiest orca that I've ever seen. He should really lay off the walruses...

While leaping out of the water, Spot is spotted (see what I did there?) by two sailors, one of whom looks very much like Jasper from One Hundred and One Dalmatians. "Just what I've been looking for," the Jasper lookalike says. "Something to make Pettigrew's Penguin Park a real money-maker." Then he lets out an evil chortle, making it pretty clear who the episode's bad guy is going to be.

Dr. Doofenschmirtz, before he went crazy and devoted his life to fighting a platypus.

Ariel wants to introduce all of Atlantica to Spot, but King Triton isn't sure - most of Atlantica's residents are afraid of orcas (since most of Atlantica's residents are sea creatures, and orcas are also sea creatures, would this be considered some sort of underwater racism?). Ariel says that if everyone sees Spot perform tricks, they'll see that they have nothing to fear. "We'll do it out in the Shallows! Away from Atlantica!" she insists. "Oh, it'll be great!" King Triton agrees to let Ariel have her little undersea carnival, with Flounder as a shark-tamer and Sebastian as the ringmaster.

The carnival... well, technically it's more of a circus, but apparently the writers thought circuses and carnivals were the same thing... begins with a kickline of octopuses.

I wonder if they had any difficulty deciding which tentacle to kick.

A squid juggles sea urchins, Flounder attempts to tame a tiger shark (and fails at it), and Spot performs his leaping-out-of-the-water tricks. I'm trying so hard not to make another Free Willy reference... you know what, I'll make a reference to Moby Lick from Street Sharks instead. In hindsight, isn't it kind of funny that Moby was an orca and yet it was another character on that show, the whale shark mutant, who was named "Slammu"? Wouldn't it have made more sense to name the orca "Slammu"?

The Atlanticans like Spot - they really, really like Spot.

Hey, look, it's that fish from Pinocchio.

But then a b-b-b-b-BOAT shows up overhead. Sebastian tries to stop Spot from getting too close, but they both wind up getting caught. Ariel and Flounder swim off after the boat.

Is it just me, or does the water look really polluted?

The boat, of course, belongs to the Jasper lookalike, Pettigrew, and the other sailor, Tom... who is revealed to be Pettigrew's son. Pettigrew has a son? So somebody actually married this guy? Boy, and I thought Bluto having a wife was hard to wrap my head around...

They bring Spot (and Sebastian) to Pettigrew's Penguin Park, which is kind of like SeaWorld, except it's EEEEEEEEEE-VIL! They've also captured the penguins from Mary Poppins. Good to know they survived when the rain washed away that chalk drawing...

"I told you guys we should've stayed in the chalk drawing. But NOOOOOOOOOO... 'Let's take
a vacation,' you said. 'We could go to Denmark, I hear it's nice this time of year,' you said..."

"Look on the bright side, David. It could be worse."

"Yeah, we could be forced to appear in a direct-to-video sequel with a walrus who's just Pumbaa
from The Lion King in all but name and species."

"...how do you even know who Pumbaa is? This is 1992. The Lion King hasn't been released yet."

"I'm telling you, Tom, once we get this big fella trained, he'll make my penguin park a WHALE of a show!" Pettigrew declares. Tom thinks that Spot is too young to train, but Pettigrew claims that the younger a whale you capture and try to turn into the next Shamu is, the sooner they forget about the ocean and the sooner you get rich, rich, rich. It should be clear by now what Pettigrew's motivation is...

...aaaaaaaaaand now I wish they'd gotten Eric Idle to do this guy's voice. And given him a musical number.

He doesn't have that whip because he's a fan of Devo.

"Dad, don't you care about anything but making money?" Tom asks. "Of course I do! I care about PENGUINS!" Pettigrew insists. And speaking of penguins, they comfort Spot over the whole "stuck in an evil version of SeaWorld" thing. Isn't it kind of funny how in this show, the crabs and fish can talk, but the whales and penguins can't? Of course, in the movie there was a shark who didn't talk... I wonder why some sea animals are capable of speech but others don't seem to be.

Ariel and Flounder make it to Pettigrew's Penguin Park (I'm tempted to start calling it "PPP") by nightfall. Now they just have to figure out how to get by that big wooden fence... the obvious answer is "just swim under it", but for some reason they don't think of that. Maybe it's because they're too distracted by the fireworks...

Wow, Ariel, that's quite a sunburn you've got there. Even mermaids have to use sunscreen,
ya know.

Fortunately, the gate opens up so a boat full of people can enter the park, allowing Ariel and Flounder to swim inside.

Which is good, because apparently swimming under the gate isn't an option after all...

Pettigrew puts on his show, forcing the penguins to do tricks for a cheering crowd. Ariel finds a glum-looking Spot. Where's Sebastian? Pettigrew decided to make him part of the show as well - as Crabby, the ever-so-creatively-named Tap-Dancing Crustacean. Don't worry, Sebastian, this ISN'T the most humiliating moment of your life. You still have two lousy direct-to-video sequels to appear in.

Sebastian's Michigan J. Frog impression is always a crowd pleaser.

Then it's Spot - or, as Pettigrew calls him, "Gargantua" - to perform. Sebastian is horrified to discover that Ariel and Flounder are there, presumably because he believes that if Pettigrew sees them he'll force THEM to be in the show as well. Or maybe he'll sell Ariel off to a circus sideshow or something.

Fortunately, seeing Tom turn the wheel that opens and closes the door to Spot's corral gives Ariel an idea. They'll wait until they open the gate to let the boats out, then Ariel will somehow get the door to Spot's corral open, then Spot - with Sebastian sitting on his back - will make a swim for it, with Ariel and Flounder right behind him. It all goes off without a hitch, but wouldn't you know it, Pettigrew sees this going on and he's all "THE WHALE, IT IS GETTING AWAY!"

"AND HE'S GOT MAH DENTURES!"

And on top of that, Spot can't bear to just leave those poor penguins behind. Fortunately, Tom decides to let the penguins go.

"So long, Pettigrew! We're going back to our chalk drawing!"

But Pettigrew decides to actually do something instead of just standing there looking agitated in his purple suit and closes the gate. Gee, I wonder if Spot will use one of his leaping-out-of-the-water tricks to just jump over the gate... yep, that's exactly what he does. I don't know if an orca can actually jump that high, but it's a cartoon, just go with it.

Is this supposed to be an E.T. reference? Probably not, since nobody's on a bike...

"That was one WHALE of a LEAP!" Sebastian exclaims. The episode did that joke already, Sebastian. And then guess who shows up? King Triton, making a hilarious facial expression.

"I am not amused."

Fortunately, all it takes for him to calm down is for Ariel to say that she had to save Spot to save him the trouble of doing it. Then they find a pod of orcas, meaning that it's time for Spot to go back to his own kind. The penguins go with him... I sure hope none of those other orcas are hungry. And that's about it.

What's the Verdict?

Like with the other Disney cartoons based on their animated movies, I personally think The Little Mermaid holds up quite well. The animation, while obviously a downgrade from the movie, is still pretty good. Everyone is in-character. The voice actors all do a good job. And the Mary Poppins penguins showing up is a nice touch. If I do have one complaint, it's that the villain is kind of a bore, and Tom's arc isn't given much focus. Does Pettigrew even get any sort of comeuppance? Aside from, y'know, his penguins all leaving. Surely he can find MORE penguins, or another orca for that matter. But those are nitpicks. As a whole, I enjoyed this episode.

If you're a fan of the movie, give the series a watch. If you haven't seen the movie, watch it first and then check the series out. And remember - places that force aquatic animals to perform are the scum of the earth. Way to make kids feel bad about visiting the aquarium, Disney.

Let's Watch This: An Episode of "ProStars"

NOTE: Please do not take any of the little nitpicks in this review (or any of my other reviews, for that matter) seriously. I write these reviews in the hopes of making people laugh. Those nitpicks are really just dumb little observations that I'm attempting to make jokes out of, not complaints that add to whether or not I like something.

Where do I even BEGIN with this? A cartoon show about Michael Jordan, Wayne Gretzky, and Bo Jackson - three athletes who don't even play the same sport - fighting crime. What? I get it, these guys were popular in the 1990s, but that doesn't automatically mean you should make a cartoon about them.

But hey, it's not like this sort of thing is anything new. Remember that cartoon in which the Harlem Globetrotters were superheroes? Or that one cartoon starring Chuck Norris where he fought evil? Remember those shows? SOMEBODY must've thought having celebrities fight evil was a good idea for a cartoon show, but after Jackie Chan Adventures, that belief seems to have subsided. Which is good, because imagine what kind of cartoons we'd be getting today if people STILL thought that...

Okay, so ProStars was originally supposed to air on ESPN, but they decided to put it on NBC instead because I guess they realized that no kid goes to ESPN for Saturday morning cartoons. It was created by Andy Heward and Douglas Booth at DIC Entertainment and received one season of thirteen episodes. For whatever reason - presumably either the silly premise or the fact that it was competing against Garfield and Friends airing in the same time slot on CBS - it was a complete flop. But does that mean the show itself is bad? After all, if being lousy was all it takes for a cartoon to be a failure, The Cleveland Show wouldn't have gotten four seasons.

Why don't we take a look at ProStars to see if it's as bad as it sounds or a show that could've been a slam dunk if given a better time slot? We'll be watching the fifth episode, "Valley of the Snow Falcon".

The episode starts off with a weird montage of clips of Michael, Wayne, and Bo in action, neon-colored words appearing at random, and the three athletes talking to the audience about the cartoon we're about to watch. This episode, it would seem, is going to be about saving the environment.

Okay, I get the mindset here... who better to teach kids about saving the environment than Bo Jackson and Wayne Gretzky? Nobody's going to disagree with THEM. Except for stock 1990s cartoon villains, presumably.

I wonder if either of them still have the "ProStars" jacket they're wearing, or if they sold
them to a pawn shop as soon as the show was cancelled.

Then it's time for the animated part to begin, and the show is taken over by the cartoon counterparts of Michael, Wayne, and Bo... who, by the way, are not voiced by the actual Michael Jordan, Wayne Gretzky, and Bo Jackson. I don't know why that is. Maybe they were just too busy playing basketball, hockey, and football to record the dialogue? Or maybe it's because, as Space Jam demonstrates, Michael Jordan isn't much of an actor.

So instead, we've got Dorian Harewood as Michael, Dave Fennoy as Bo, and Townsend Coleman as Wayne. Wayne and Bo are having themselves a race, until Wayne winds up flying off the roof of the building they're racing on. Fortunately, Michael is there with his giant flying machine to save him. Was the intent for the flying machine to look like a giant Nike shoe, or is it just my weird mind? Michael does make a reference to Air Jordan, so make of that what you will...

I assume the real Michael Jordan does not have, nor has he ever had, a giant flying shoe.

"I hate it when this happens. The landings are always so complicated," Wayne laments as he falls, implying that he has fallen off the roof several times before. Wow, Wayne must be quite the klutz. Michael saves him, then tells him that the owner of the gym that serves as the ProStars' headquarters, Mom (voiced by Susan Silo), wants to see them.

"I swear to Walter Brown, if either of you make one more bald joke at my expense-"

"Who's Walter Brown?"

"Look it up, Bo."

Mom is not pleased by Michael's "busting up" the flying shoe, which as it turns out she invented. Fortunately, all it takes is a little flattery from Michael for her to calm down. "I know he's only sweet-talking, but he's so good at it," she admits.

Michael decided after this to stop using online dating websites.

Then in walks Denise (Diana Barrows), Mom's apprentice who Wikipedia describes as being kind of like the ProStars' groupie. She has a video from a girl named Chasay... or at least, that's how I think it's spelled. She lives near a Himalayan village called Terasue... again, I'm just guessing how it's spelled... and she needs the ProStars' help. How did her video get to the ProStars' headquarters? According to Denise, a bird brought it. Wow, and I thought storks only delivered babies. I guess they're branching out.

Actually, according to Michael Jordan, the video must have been delivered by the sacred Snow Falcon, so called that because its feathers are as white as snow.

You know the gym is owned by a girl because the walls are painted pink. If it were owned
by a boy, the walls would be painted blue.

And what's more, Michael knows that Terasue guards the entrance to a super-secret valley. The villagers there have never allowed any outsiders to enter. Bo's heard of it, too. If he and Michael both know about it, I don't think it's so super-secret after all.

Already in the Himalayas is this guy:

I don't know what his name is, but judging by the fact that he talks about how great it is to be away from the ProStars, Mom, and the gadgets that she makes for the ProStars, I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that he's a recurring character. He winds up being startled by the flying shoe overhead and slides off the snowy cliff he's been climbing. When he lands at the bottom, he's covered with snow. I sure hope he doesn't get hypothermia.

The ProStars arrive in the Himalayas, where they locate Terasue (every time they say that word, I get hungry for tiramisu) and the entrance to the hidden valley. And what a welcoming committee is waiting for them - the Snow Falcon itself! Alas, it seems to be in a bad mood. I wonder what's got its feathers so ruffled... maybe it just really hates giant flying shoes?

"BRAAAAAAAAWK! I'VE ALWAYS LIKED SHAQUILLE O'NEAL BETTER!"

They manage to dodge the great white bird, but then a snowball comes hurtling towards them. They dodge it too, and Michael decides that the falcon must have been on their side because it saved them from being clobbered by a giant snowball. The source of that giant snowball? This lady and her minions:

Gee, I wonder if this is going to be the episode's main villain...

Say hello to Ice Mancuso (voiced by Tress MacNeille), a Joan Rivers soundalike who wants to get into the hidden valley and do eeeeeeeevil things to it. Specifically, she wants to build a hotel there.

"Bo knows birds, and I think that bird wants us to follow it somewhere!" Bo says, spotting the Snow Falcon again. For those unaware, this is a reference to a 1989 ad campaign for Nike shoes called "Bo Knows". The commercial had Bo doing random sports and people going "Bo knows [INSERT SPORT HERE]." And then Bo Diddley showed up. You're welcome, everyone else born after 1989.

Speaking of pop culture references, there's also an Arnold Schwarzenegger parody for some reason.

Rule of thumb: if it's a 1990s cartoon, chances are that an Arnold Schwarzenegger parody will
show up at one point.

The good guys follow the falcon through a chasm and wind up in what looks like the Ice King's summer home.

There's even a white-bearded dude dressed in blue.

As it turns out, the girl in the video is the Princess of the Valley of the Snow Falcons. Her father, the nameless king of the valley, explains to Michael, Bo and Wayne that Ice Mancuso wants to get into the valley like many have tried before to. Why? Because it's the last untouched spot on Earth - the Ice Volcano (so is that a volcano made of ice or a volcano that spews ice? If it's the former, wouldn't it melt every time lava came raining down on it?) makes it a paradise for the Snow Falcon and the multiple other rare creatures that live there. But Ice doesn't care about that - like most 1990s one-episode cartoon villains, all she thinks about is making money.

They can't destroy this place. If they do, Elsa will be homeless!

"It's game time!" Michael says, and then the three of them put on their rocket-powered skis. Honestly, skiing seems dangerous enough to me without the presence of ROCKETS making your skis go. Fortunately, Wayne has learned how to ski from watching the Olympics. Wow, I didn't know all that was needed for you to become a professional skier was to watch someone do it on TV! Hey, maybe just by watching this, I'LL become the world's best skier too!

Methinks that for Ice Mancuso, her day is all downhill from here. Get it? Downhill? Nyuck
nyuck nyuck nyuck nyuck...

We cut back to Ice and her minions. A kid wearing a parka runs up behind them and starts throwing snowballs at them. "GO AWAY! I WON'T LET YOU DESTROY THE VALLEY!" they snap (so this kid knows about the hidden valley too? I thought it was supposed to be secret). But he didn't count on the Arnold Schwarzenegger parody having a laser gun that traps whatever it zaps in ice. Okay, here's a suggestion for you, Ice: you wanna make money? Leave the valley alone and patent that gun.

Michael, Wayne, and Bo find out that everyone else in the nearby village of Terasue has been frozen in ice too. Dang it, Frozone, there are better ways to vent your frustrations than by taking them out on random civilians...

"I WAS FROZEN TODAY!"

"I WAS ALSO FROZEN TODAY!"

"WE WERE ALL FROZEN TODAY!"

"Could you hurry up and save us?! We're getting frostbite!"

The ProStars had better get started on taking down Ice, because she's finally managed to get into the valley. "IT'S TIME FOR AN OPEN HOUSE!" she shouts, continuing to sound like an evil Joan Rivers. I wonder what made them decide that their villain should sound like Joan Rivers... did she tick off a producer or something?

By the time the ProStars show up, the villains have put up a sign reading "RESORTS UNLIMITED: GIVE US PARADISE AND WE'LL GIVE YOU A PARKING LOT". Then they have to dodge that laser gun that turns things to ice. They use pocket mirrors to deflect the lasers, which promptly zap the bad guys, freezing THEM like ice pops. Now they just have to deal with Ice and the Arnold Schwarzenegger parody. They have discovered diamonds under the frozen pond, and Ice is all "To heck with the resort, let's melt the valley and get those diamonds!".

Fortunately, the ProStars heard everything on Michael's basketball with a radar dish sticking out of it. What the heck did I just type?

"Jeez, what was I thinking when I bought this hideous thing?"

"Bo knows greed, but this lady makes Attilla the Hun look like Santa Claus!" Bo claims. The ProStars can't allow Ice to ruin the valley. They must stop her. Oh, and that guy from before shows up again to get his head stuck in a rock.

How does Ice plan to melt the valley? Apparently, she has heat rockets, which she's having her goons shoot out of a cannon at the ice volcano. It's a direct hit, causing what looks like mud to start leaking out of it.

Ah, so the ice volcano DOESN'T spew lava - it's filled with orange paint!

The king tells the snow falcon to do something to stop the bad guys. Why didn't the falcon do something earlier? It's huge. It's got a sharp beak and sharp talons. It could tear Ice limb from limb! It could carry her off to Alcatraz! It could take a dump on her like a bird on a car's windshield!

Anyhow, the ProStars start fighting the guy working the cannon by launching hockey pucks and baseballs at him (Bo Johnson was a baseball player at one point too, for those wondering why it's not footballs). But it isn't until the falcon shows up that the guy flees. But Ice isn't out of the way yet - she also has a heat bomb that she's placing on the volcano, which will cause it to erupt and melt the entire valley. Wayne tells Michael and Bo to meet him at the volcano in the flying shoe - he's going to fly there on his rocket-powered skis.

"Eat your heart out, Sidney Crosby!"

They manage to carry the car that's carrying the heat bomb off the volcano via grappling hook just before it goes ka-boom. Then Mom and Denise show up so that Mom can beat up Ice and the Schwarzenegger parody, tie them up, and tell them that they're going to jail.

The valley and its people are saved. The king and his daughter thank the ProStars for their help, and the episode ends with a segment where the real Bo, Michael and Wayne answer questions from kids. Thus endeth ProStars.

What's the Verdict?

I'm kind of disappointed that this wasn't worse. I was expecting something really corny and ridiculous, one of those "so bad it's good" kind of shows. But y'know what? I actually thought it was pretty good! Decent animation, good voice acting (although Tress MacNeille's Joan Rivers impression gets grating after a while), and it actually does a good job of getting across the "protect the environment" moral without being too preachy about it. Even the animated versions of Michael, Wayne, and Bo are engaging, and I expected them to just be obnoxious Gary Stus. Too bad this only got thirteen episodes, I feel like it had potential.

If you'd like to watch ProStars for yourself, you can find episodes on YouTube and the Internet Archive. A few episodes were released on VHS in the 1990s, and I think three of 'em were released on DVD as well, but I imagine that DVD is out of print.

I do have one small complaint: it's an episode of a cartoon taking place in the Himalayas, and there wasn't even ONE yeti?! You had ONE JOB, ProStars!