Oh dear. Disney does it again. A new animated series based
on Disney’s 50th feature Tangled
(2010) is due to air on Disney Channel in 2017, with stars of the film Mandy
Moore and Zachary Levi expected to reprise their respective roles as Rapunzel
and Flynn Rider (aka: Eugene Fitzherbert). Needless to say, upon receiving this
news, Rapunzel’s hair isn’t the only thing that’s been let down.
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| 'Tangled', Disney 2010 |
To begin with, Disney hardly have a good track record when
it comes to movie spin-offs. Throughout the ‘90s and noughties, DisneyToon
Studios and Walt Disney Television Animation produced a series of frankly painful
sequels, prequels, midquels and television spin-offs that often threatened to
tarnish the very name of Disney. While some direct-to-video productions weren’t
quite so pitiful (The Lion King II: Simba’s
Pride (1998) and The Lion King 1½ (2004)
spring to mind), and some TV spin-offs weren’t as terrible as they could have
been (The Legend of Tarzan was only a
little bit terrible…), they were all nonetheless inferior to their original
source bases by a substantially wide margin.
Now, sequels, I can *usually* bear (aside from The Hunchback of Notre Dame II (2002) –
that is unequivocally an affront to animation, period), and I can tolerate them
in the sense that, should they be far inferior to the original, they at least
do nothing to disturb the plot of the original – you can quite easily pretend
the events of the sequel never occurred. But any midquel is almost always a
complete atrocity. Taking place sometime during the events of the film, a
midquel has the potential, like no other spin-off, to defecate all over what
was previously your favourite movie.
A good case in point would be The Fox and the Hound 2 (2006), in which young Copper is tempted to
join a band of singing dogs. Did Disney release this thinking it was an
essential accompaniment to the original story? No, of course not. It’s nothing to do with the original story.
The original (1981), based on the novel by Daniel P. Mannix, is a commentary on
the preservation of friendships of alternative backgrounds in spite of the
heavily dissuasive pressures of society. The sequel fails to regard the film’s
arching moral narrative and sentiment, and consequently delivers something
rather obscure and outlandish merely for the sake of profit.
My point in highlighting this is that a TV show based on Tangled, while hardly in danger of
diminishing the gravitas of the original as a full-length sequel would, will logically
nonetheless assume the role of a ‘midquel’, as Rapunzel’s hair (which was (SPOILER) cut at the film’s climax) is
essentially what makes her character interesting. However, with members of the
original team at the helm, including composer Alan Menken and lyricist Glenn
Slater, this cash cow may yet surprise us. But one thing is certain: with
Disney’s track record with spin-offs, their status as avant-garde
groundbreakers in animation is hanging by a hair.
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