The SmarK DVD Rant For Treasure Planet

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The SmarK DVD Rant for Treasure Planet

– Well, since lots of people seemed to be curious about my opinions on recent Disney releases, I figured I’d fire off this one in between episodes of DS9. Kind of a rant between rants, so to speak.

Anyway, Treasure Planet is the latest unfortunate victim of cost-cutting within the Disney DVD division, as ridiculous 2-disc releases of bombs like “Dinosaur” and “Atlantis” left them with a huge, unsold surplus of extra stock and millions in debt. Thus, more deserving films like “Lilo & Stitch” were limited to single-disc editions, despite hours and hours of extra footage being available for a special edition. Treasure Planet is a somewhat borderline case, as the movie was one of the biggest bombs in Disney’s animated movie history (costing upwards of $100 million and taking in less than $50M all told), but it was an interesting action-adventure tale for kids and grown-ups alike that blended 2D and 3D animation in a way that practically begged for hours of behind-the-scenes documentary footage on the making of it. Having seen it a couple of times in the theater and a couple of more times on DVD, I still like it and it’s a shame that Disney has been forced to cut back their special editions, because I would have liked to see one of this movie.

The Film:

Shamelessly adapted from Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic “Treasure Island” (and making no apologies for it), “Treasure Planet” is basically a pirate yarn in space. It was originally pitched in 1985 along with the Little Mermaid and was rejected dozens of times until finally getting the green light a few years ago. All the characters have been adapted more or less — with a few high-tech changes of course — and the story is pretty much the same thing. Sidenote: If you want to read the original book, it’s public domain as of 1994 and freely available to download through the awesome Project Gutenberg. Here’s a link to directly download the text: http://www.ibiblio.org/gutenberg/etext94/treas10.txt Or check out www.promo.net/pg for literally thousands of other works, covering pretty much every major book released from 1928 backwards.

For those who haven’t read the original book, “Treasure Planet” is the story of a young rapscallion named Jim Hawkins, who gets in trouble with the robot police and spends his days doing cosmic skateboarding. He’s been dealing with the loss of his father all his life, and one day while helping his mother run the local space inn, a ship crashes, carrying only a dying pirate named Billy Bones, who warns him to beware the cyborg and leaves him with a map to the legendary Treasure Planet, home of the booty from 1000 worlds. Along with his eccentric professor friend, he hops aboard a merchant ship in search of the elusive planet. While there, he meets cyborg chef John Silver (voiced by an unrecognizable Brian-Doyle Murray), who he instantly bonds with and accepts as a surrogate father. However, Silver isn’t quite the nice guy he seems to be, which they find out on the way to the planet, leading to a showdown for the largest mound of gold in the universe once they get there.

Admittedly, it’s not exactly challenging fare on any level — as with almost all Disney releases, the rough edges are smoothed off to the point where nothing can possibly offend anyone anywhere. For instance, they introduce a menacing spider-creature as one of the lead heavies, but when it comes time for an Alien-ish showdown with Jim, all the tension is immediately undercut by the comic relief and the scene is edited down so as not to be the least bit scary. It makes me wish that a company like Dreamworks would be able to give Disney a more serious run for their money and produce more adult-oriented animation, or least animation that doesn’t have to be strenuously watered-down until it meets a G rating. True story: When Tarzan and (I think) Mulan were originally released to DVD, people were confused by the audio track, which was mixed in Dolby 5.0 only. Disney’s official stance was that market research had shown that children were frightened by the subwoofer, so it was eliminated from those releases. You can’t make that stuff up.

At any rate, wussiness aside, I really liked the fast pace and snappy characterization of “Treasure Planet”, probably because it was based on the masterful “Treasure Island” and thus had a running head start in those departments. Plus the special effects — like the black hole midway through the film — are just amazing to witness, especially with the digital transfer of the DVD. It’s not “Treasure Island”, but it’s a fun romp through space for 90 minutes and it doesn’t aspire to be anything more.

The Video:

Another beautiful direct digital-to-digital transfer from the original source, this is pretty much a flawless DVD that takes full advantage of the range of colors and contrast that the format offers. Although they might scrimp on the extras sometimes, the video quality is top notch and shows no compression problems. I’m beginning to really hate that bizarre “family friendly” 1.66:1 ratio, though. Either do it proper 16:9 ratio or go full-screen!

The Audio:

The usual competent Disney 5.1 mix, as noted mixed less aggressively than most action movies so as not to scare the kids, it does have its moments. Most of the space battle scenes make good use of the surrounds and the score kicks in nicely when need be, but it’s mostly a dialogue movie and the mix reflects that. It’s kind of too bad, but the DTS mixes they were doing for movies like “Atlantis” up until the bottom fell out of their market were quite impressive for cartoons and this is a movie that would have benefited from a sonic kick in the ass. That’s not to say it’s unimpressive at all — it’s a great mix and up there with a lot of the action movies coming out today. Of course, I always thought that things were getting out of hand when they were putting DTS mixes on stuff like Mickey’s House of Villains, so maybe it’s best they’re letting the DTS thing go.

The Extras:

A decent selection of stuff, but very disappointing compared to those awesome 2-disc editions. I mean, c’mon, DINOSAUR?!? Maybe I’m just bitter.

– First up, the centerpiece is the “visual commentary”, which works sort of like the Infinifilm feature on New Line’s DVDs, popping in and out of the main feature with relevant portions of the special features while the various animators do the audio commentary. Now, this worked great on “Atlantis” (perhaps one of the only cases where the commentary and behind-the-scenes were more interesting than the MOVIE), but here it has a slight disadvantage — you don’t get to choose what features to watch. For instance, during the big musical number with Rze Rez the guy from the Goo Goo Dolls, the video for the song automatically pops up for you to watch. Well, I don’t WANT to watch a video while I’m in the middle of watching the movie, and I don’t generally watch them on the special features separately either. The automatic play “feature” also means that it’ll take about 2.5 hours to watch the movie instead of 90 minutes, so be warned. The commentary is the usual great Disney one, though.

As a note, pretty much everything else in the extras is duplicated by the visual commentary at some point.

– Deleted scenes. As noted, these are all in the visual commentary, but you can watch them alone. Nothing exciting.

– Disney’s Animation Magic. A featurette on a variety of things, which is (again) chopped up and used for the commentary at various points, so if you’ve watched with that enabled, you’ve seen this whole thing.

– DisneyPedia: The Life of a Pirate. Much like the Lilo & Stitch DVD, this is a little summary of various facts about pirates throughout history and stuff like their code of conduct and the origins of the Jolly Roger. Really interesting, actually.

– 3D tour and exploration game of the Legacy. Various aspects of a classic sailing ship are discussed by different narrators as you move through the ship, and you can play a game to unlock another deleted scene.

– “I’m Still Here” video by John Rzeznik.

– Trailers for “Treasure Planet”, the usual ads for other Disney movies, and a couple of promotional posters.

Much like Lilo & Stitch, enough to whet your appetite and make you wish that this had been released in time for the 2-disc craze instead of junk like Dinosaur or Atlantis. I can’t fault Emperor’s New Groove, though, because I love that movie.

The Ratings:

The Film: ***1/2
The Video: *****
The Audio: ****
The Extras: ***