Disney Movies That Should Have Been Left Alone

  Hollywood has been making their bank on sequels since the success of The Godfather Part II.  I know that wasn't the first movie that was a sequel.  I'm sure there were others, but I won't sit here and search imdb looking for that information.  Countless movie franchises have become completely outstanding because a sequel or prequel has come out after the original.  Star Wars, The Godfather, Twilight to name a few.  Hell, Harry Potter movies altogether made a whopping $7.7 billion by the time they all came out.  Unfortunately for Daniel Radcliffe, he will never be known as anything other than the four eyed wizard who didn't get to third base with Hermoine.  
     Then you take the Disney corporation.  Remember when Disney movies used to come out once a year in a two dimensional, hand drawn animation?  Back when each feature presentation was based on a fairy tale or story by some really old and really dead European author?  Now, those types of movies come out every so often, but in between new material they come up with sequels to their classics.  And these are sequels to things that would have been just fine if they had left well enough alone.
    The one exception I will give is the Aladdin sequels.  The Return of Jafar was pretty badass, despite the fact that Robin Williams did not provide the voice of the Genie because he was off playing a gay guy in The Birdcage.  Our ears were graced with the presence of Gilbert Gottfried's nails on a chalkboard voice for eighty some odd minutes instead.  But regardless, The Return of Jafar was still a decent sequel.  But then Disney decided to make a third Aladdin movie.  Aladdin and the King of Thieves was the abortion to the Aladdin franchise.  Thankfully, Robin Williams came back as the Genie, but we still had to listen to Gilbert Gottfried and sit through a painfully depressing eighty some odd minutes of a story line that really sucks.
      Yep, Disney has pooped out many sequels in the last few years since that whole Disney Princess thing happened.  Here is where they went wrong:


   Cinderella II: Dreams Come True and Cinderella III: A Twist in Time


   Seriously?  Why couldn't they just leave it at Cinderella and Prince Charming riding off into the sunset in the pumpkin?  No one cares that Cinderella had kids.  No one cares about the ugly stepsister getting a date with some poor baker and they live happily ever after.  She's the ugly stepsister!  She isn't supposed to have a happy ending.  She's supposed to stay ugly and live miserably for the rest of her life for being an uber bitch to her much prettier stepsister.  
   And A Twist in Time?  That sounds like an installment of a Carmen Sandiego video game.   I do give Disney some credit.  The dynamic of actually going and doing a "what if this happened" scenario was pretty good.  But the name just makes me lose interest.  Cinderella should have just road off to her happily ever after without all the crap afterwards.  "Happily Ever After" is supposed to be vague, so that those of us with an imagination (and nothing better to do) can draw our own conclusions.  So thanks, Disney for being what Cinderella would literally call (because she says it in the first one), a "killjoy"


   The Fox and the Hound 2


   I'm sure plenty of you have never read the Fox and the Hound.  Not the Disney movie, but the actual story by Daniel P. Mannix.  I'll just cut to the chase.  Both of them die. In a very gruesome and bloody way. The Hound kills the Fox, and the Hound gets shot by it's owner because he got stuck in a bear trap or something.  And this is supposed to be a movie promoting liking everyone, even if they aren't just like you.
    Now, I understand that Disney cannot kill their protagonists because that is a big no-no in the Disney universe.  But again, they became friends then went their separate ways when they grew up.  So what is the point of having a sequel to that? Not to mention the fact, that like the Cinderella sequels, The Fox and the Hound 2 came out twenty-five years after it's predecessor.  So all the people who saw it and could remember seeing it when it first came out are way too old to give a crap about it's sequel.  Unless you have children at that point, in which case, show them the original and tell them, "This is from when Disney movies were good, Squirt."


   Bambi II


   Everyone with a soul and a heart not made of coal remembers getting a little case of the sniffles when you watched Bambi.  Bambi will forever be that one Disney movie that made everyone emo after seeing it.  It has a reputation for being a very depressing movie, which is kind of ironic since the company that owns it has theme parks with the slogan "Happiest Place on Earth" tied to them.  
    I have seen grown macho men cry like little girls while watching Bambi, so why the hell did they make a sequel?  Where they aiming to see how many people they could get to jump off a bridge after seeing it?  The only good thing out of Bambi was Thumper and Flower because they were cute and we didn't have to see their mother's get shot by a bunch of redneck poachers.  Besides losing his mother, Bambi turned out okay in the end.  He won his fight and besides, no one cared for adult Bambi.  They just wanted the younger Bambi who was drawn to look cute.  Which is why the sequel kind of takes place when he was still a baby.  But that doesn't really make it a sequel either, because technically they went back in time.  Which brings me to...


   The Lion King 1 1/2


    If I wanted to listen to Nathan Lane piss and moan about how he is so much more awesome than his sidekick, I'd go back in time and buy tickets to go see The Producers.  And that is only because Ferris Bueller would kick his balls in the dirt with his quick wit.  Other than that, I don't like Nathan Lane.  So when my niece had me watch The Lion King 1 1/2 with her not so long ago, I made sure I penciled in a nice tall Jack and Coke for much later if I would have to sit through that hot mess with her.
    It isn't a sequel, and it isn't a prequel.  It's a parallel story of The Lion King through Timon and Pumba's eyes.  Where they came from and such. How they ended up meeting up with Simba and going completely Disney on Hamlet.  As William Shakespeare rolls over in his grave.  
    Kudos for trying to be cute with the "1  1/2" in the title, but they should have just called it something along the lines of Timon and Pumba: The Untold Story.  But again, they ended The Lion King on a good note.  They didn't need to make another one. If they wanted to make a Lion King sequel, they should have made one about Scar coming back as a zombie.  




    I am  a big Disney fan, but I am the kind of Disney fan that sticks with the originals.  I only watch the sequels if I am in the presence of a child that I love dearly enough to knock some sanity points out of my noggin.  Other than that, I keep it to the classics because when you get to be my age, it doesn't hit home as much as the originals did.  Everything nowadays is about global marketing.  Which is exactly why Disney keeps sending crappy sequels out of the crapper.  
   Please, People at the Disney House of Mouse...STOP MAKING SEQUELS and come out with new stories!!  


                                                                                -T.