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Disney the black hole4/25/2023 “It got kicked around, and they went through a series of writings and rewrites and they gave up on it. “They never could get a handle on it,” recalled Nelson. Initially positioned as an Irwin Allen-style disaster movie in space called Space Station One from writers Bob Barbash and Richard Landau, The Black Hole went through years of development with a variety of different creatives, dating back to February of 1974. The producer of the film and president of the studio (who also happened to be the son-in-law of Walt Disney) was angling to broaden the appeal of Disney movies, make them less predictable and usher the studio into a new direction that would include more innovative filmmaking (such as the computer graphics-driven TRON in ’82), the creation of The Disney Channel and the establishment of more mature fare under its Touchstone Pictures banner, starting with Ron Howard’s Splash in 1984. That was Ron Miller’s sentiment and directive. “Up to that point, all Disney films were sort of directed for a younger audience, and I didn’t want older people - anybody over 18 - to stay away from the theater if they thought it was just a typical Disney film.” “It was my idea to remove the Disney logo for the picture and use Buena Vista Productions,” Nelson said. “It’s a little more of an adult kind of movie,” said Robert Forster, who played one of the film’s heroes, Captain Dan Holland. So we decided that we would say that it was ‘too intense for younger audiences.’ Plus, ‘damns’ and ‘hells’ never appeared in Disney films until The Black Hole.” “At first we didn’t know exactly what would make it PG. “We deliberately went after the PG rating, just to get away from the G rating,” director Gary Nelson told The Hollywood Reporter. What the Mouse House ultimately delivered, however, was more akin to 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea in outer space with throwback trappings: an uneven mix of Gothic drama, kiddie adventure, clunky dialogue and characters, cool-but-derivative robot designs and retro-styled rockets amid a very colorful palette, a wonderfully moody John Barry score, and spectacular visuals thanks to signature animation techniques and ingenious, matte-based special effects.Īnd despite the studio’s efforts to eschew its traditional branding with an edgier film that would also appeal to a more mature audience (it was the first-ever Disney film to flaunt a PG rating), it still resonated as good old-fashioned Walt Disney entertainment - albeit with a serious atmosphere of dread and darkness and topped with an unexpectedly mind-blowing, off-the-rails ending. Moreover, the film was Disney’s challenge to demonstrate that it could compete with a new breed of technically proficient blockbuster entertainment, despite operating more with old-school techniques and resources.
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