Currently sitting proudly at #1 on the Internet Movie Database "Bottom 100" List is Titanic: The Legend Goes On, the first of the animated Titanic exploitation films so memorably dismembered by The Nostalgia Critic. TNC did get one thing wrong in his review: The Legend of the Titanic, a.k.a. "The One With the Dog-Nosed Octopus in Which Everyone Survived," was released before T:TLGO, so, if either of these films was "the ripoff of the ripoff," then "The One With the Rapping Dog" was. But there was one fact that I'm glad TNC kept from us, not that he would have been likely to have recognized its significance. In the opening credits to T:TLGO -- which are available on YouTube and are just as bare-bones as you would expect -- the VERY FIRST cast-and-crew acknowledgement that we see is:
The creator... of TaleSpin...the writer... of A Goofy Movie... and the... co-author of.... DuckTales' "Treasure of the Golden Suns"... worked on this thing?!?
NNNNNNNNNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!
For my own Disney Afternoon-related peace of mind, I can only hope that Jymn's "creative consultantship" concluded with him emulating Tennessee Tuxedo:
"Get me out of here! GET ME OUT OF HERE!!"
I suppose I could post a question about Jymn's experiences on this film -- in a nice manner, of course -- to his blog. But, somehow, I just don't have the heart to do so.
9 comments:
Chris:
Whether or not one walks away with an altered view of Mr. Magon – visually, this is one FUNNY post! Nicely done!
Joe.
Joe,
I knew right away I wanted to do the "NOOOO!!" thing... but I didn't want to simply leave it at Darth Vader. Then I remembered Hank, and...
Chris
This is not the only time I've seen that kind of credit given to Jymn. I remember "The Secret of Nimh 2: Timmy To The Rescue" had a "Special Thanks" or something like that credit for Jymn Magon.
CBRehab,
That sort of "special recognition" credit is so disturbingly vague that I suppose it could literally refer to ANYTHING. "Secret of NIMH 2" was bad, but it didn't have ANYTHING akin to the rapping dog.
Chris
I could only guess Jymn's contribution was some 11th-hour fix to connect it more with the first film by having them revisit the NIMH Lab, because the final act is a big shift from all the precocious sing-songness of the first 2/3's. It's like a rejected script from a "Pinky & The Brain" episode, with Eric Idle as Snowball, or Pinky becoming Snowball.
The fact that they're Italian productions jogged my memory of buying "Pirates Of Tortuga", which has nice animation, but awful audio and no captions (I'm not hearing-impaired, but there are a LOT of cartoons/live-action films on DVD with audio and sound problems)- I could not figure out what the movie was supposed to be about, or care what was happening. Even the Pound Puppies movie had captions!
I remember SNL made fun of this in "TV Funhouse" "Tidy" right? A talking Titanic, with Gilbert Gottfried as the voice of Napoleon Bonaparte as sidekick to an evil talking iceberg.
When I saw this through IMDB; my reaction was this:
So much for hitting rock bottom with Quack Pack; the barrel has shifted again.
And this was a number of years ago; so it's not like I didn't know about this before. But damn; talk about killing your marketability. No wonder Jymn is having difficult finding scripts to work on.
Chris, Joe, 'rehab, Gregory, et al:
Yeah, as a "consultant" (whatever that actually entailed...), I would suspect that Jymn's role was tangential. I suspect (and hope!) that he was in no position to truly shape and influence the production (and from the sound of it, the best realization of the premise's potential would have been to scrap the whole thing and forget about it!) Or, in other words, he wasn't the (if you'll excuse the pretentious term!) auteur, as he was in the cases TaleSpin, A Goofy Movie, or "Treasure of the Golden Suns". I like to think that those were his babies, and this was just a gig.
I like this post "motif", too. And considering two of the three images used, it's a nice little Mike Judge homage! :)
'rehab -- even though I'm not deaf either, I, too, like to watch DVDs with the subtitles on. Keeps me focused and at attention, much in the same way as when I'm doing "regular" reading, and helps if it's, say, a British movie with thick accents or an older movie with poor sound and dated lingo.
-- Ryan
Greg,
Well, according to his IMDB site, Jymn has had quite a few writing credits since the release of T:TLGO. But he's only gotten "story editor" credit once since then. Make of that what you will.
Chris
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