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