Disney Rewind – June 1994 – Lion King opens, Jafar top VHS
For Disney, the circle of life included duds and roaring successes. Amid forgotten films like Renaissance Man, The Lion King reigned in the company’s Renaissance era. It’s been 25 years since June 1994, the month that brought us a Mickey game on Sega, video game announcements from Microsoft and Sony, a television special about Innoventions, and much more.
June 2: Great Circus Mystery released
Sega Genesis and Sega Mega Drive release The Great Circus Mystery starring Mickey & Minnie in North America. In November 1994, the Capcom video game was released for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System and Game Boy Advance.
June 3: “Disney turns out duds”
While The Lion King is a sure hit, says The Austin American Statesman newspaper, Disney’s live action department “has been rolling out movies in assembly-line fashion, and too many of them are Edsels.”
Unnamed Disney employees acknowledged that the studio was “salvaged” by its animated films. While Warner Bros had a similar list of weak releases, action-adventures performed better overseas than comedies. The company’s strategy was to release “an avalanche of movies in the hope that two or three of them will turn into hits,” wrote the Statesman, citing Sister Act and Pretty Woman.
What a change: from “let’s try it, see if it works,” to carefully planned franchises, plotted out years in advance, in just a quarter century.
The article’s list of then-recent flops is stunningly obscure: The Air Up There, Aspen Extreme, Another Stakeout, Blame it on the Bellboy, Born Yesterday, Cabin Boy, The Cemetery Club, Father Hood, Holy Matrimony, Money for Nothing, My Boyfriend’s Back, My Father the Hero, The Program, and Swing Kids. Two exceptions on the list are Blank Check and Hocus Pocus, the latter in particular.
June 3: Renaissance Man opens in theatres
Fired from his advertising job, a down-and-out divorcee (Danny DeVito) begins teaching English at an army base. Apathetic and from underprivileged backgrounds, his students start to click with a unit on Hamlet. Directed by Penny Marshall, the Touchstone Pictures film included Mark Wahlberg and Gregory Hines.
June 4: Disney Canada
Canadian animation industry rumours say that Disney will announce the location of their animation studio this month, June 1994, according to the Vancouver Sun newspaper. The studio will either be located in Toronto or Vancouver, and focus entirely on the direct-to-video market. The announcement didn’t come until late November 1995, with the expected 200 jobs split between the two animation hubs. Each opened in 1996.
June 9: Disney watches baseball bid from the stands
The City of Orlando was eager to attract a baseball team to their county, but Disney wouldn’t play ball, shared Orlando Sentinel sports columnist Larry Guest. While the City and County provided Major League Baseball team owners with pamphlets at their annual meeting, this week, Disney remained on the sidelines.
June 10: Disney top on VHS sales, rentals
Disney titles are taking many of the top spots at Canadian video store behemoth Jumbo Video.
Canada’s most rented movie is 1993 Disney pic The Three Musketeers, starring Chris O’Donnell, Kiefer Sutherland, Oliver Platt, and Charlie Sheen. It’s followed by The Return of Jafar, Fox’s Mrs. Doubtfire, and Disney’s Cool Runnings. In ninth place is 1993 Touchstone film Another Stakeout, starring Richard Dreyfuss, Emilio Estevez, and Rosie O’Donnell.
The Return of Jafar takes the top sales spot, followed by Mrs. Doubtfire, The Fox and The Hound, and Buena Vista Home Entertainment’s Johnny Carson Collection: The King of Late Night in fourth place. Taking sixth is 101 Dalmations, and eighth, 1966 Fox feature D-Day: The Sixth of June.
On June 19, The New York Times reported that The Return of Jafar had sold more than seven million copies. Variety said that placed it among the 10 best-selling videos, ever. Green-lit in early 1993, it was made in less than a year for roughly $8 million, as opposed to the $33 million price tag of the theatrical feature.
Producer-director Tad Stones remarked to the Times that “There were some things I would have redone if we had had the time and money. We didn’t have Disney’s best animators working on Jafar. But then you don’t compare a TV movie-of-the-week to Schindler’s List.”
June 11: Animator Jack Hannah dies
During the Great Depression, movie poster artist Jack Hannah dropped his portfolio off at Walt Disney Studio. He got lucky, being hired in 1933 as an in-betweener and cleanup artist for animated shorts. He graduated to the position of animator beginning with 1937’s Donald Duck cartoon Modern Inventions. He’d soon join the story department, work on comic books, and even direct 94 shorts and Walt Disney’s introductions to their anthology series. Leaving Disney, he worked on Woody Woodpecker projects at Walter Lantz Studio and co-founded the Character Animation program at CalArts.
June 12: The Lion King opens in New York City
June 13: Hollywood Pictures boss named
There’s a new president at the Disney-owned Hollywood Pictures, cherry-picked from the company’s publishing department. The adult-focused studio chose Michael Lynton, the senior vice-president of Disney Publishing Group. His first day was to be June 27. “I’ve been running the book and magazine business here for the last five or six years,” Lynton told Reuters. “I believe and hope and feel that the management of a creative enterprise, be that in the book and magazine business, is somewhat analogous to the movie business.”
June 14: Composer Henry Mancini dies
The Great Mouse Detective composer Henry Mancini died at age 70 in Los Angeles.
June 15: The Lion King opens in Los Angeles
June 20: The Lion King soundtrack at Burger King
The soundtrack to The Lion King will be available at Burger King, beginning June 20, The Orlando Sentinel reports. This was likely also the launch date for the chain’s kids meal toys and souvenir cups.
June 23: The Making of Innoventions on Disney Channel
The as-yet-unopened pavilion at Epcot ’94 got its own half-hour television special, on Disney Channel.
June 23: Microsoft, Sony computer games announced
“With Mickey on a computer, it will now be possible to control a mouse with a mouse,” remarked the Seattle Times. Disney announced two software licensing agreements at the Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago, with Microsoft Home and Sony Imagesoft.
While the classic Disney characters had appeared in a screen saver, these “multimedia titles” were their first. Sony’s Mickey Mania: The Timeless Adventures of Mickey Mouse was bill as the first Disney game, not tied to a movie or TV show, to feature original animation. It was released in October and November 1994 in North America. The first of three programs planned by Microsoft, Mickey’s Carnival was to be released on floppy disks that winter.
June 24: The Lion King opens in theatres
Disney releases animated feature film number 32, it’s first wholly original story, made by a crew of 600 people.
“There’s a whole new generation at the studio,” co-director Rob Minkoff told Baltimore newspaper The Sun. “We’re more irreverent, much younger. We see it as our job to re-invent Disney. The studio really began to die right after the beginning of the war, when the European market was closed off, which set a certain limit to what could be done.”
Producer Don Hahn told Ontario newspaper The Windsor Star, “What you’re seeing here is a maturity of the artistic talent at the studio and the technological advances we’ve been able to make in the last year and a half.”
The Star noted that the film ran counter to the trend to rewrite traditional kids stories “to make them less disturbing for young readers.” James Earl Jones’ wife believed that Mufasa’s death “will traumatize as many kids as the death of Bambi.” But the scene was valid, as “I think most kids do know their fathers will die one day.”
Co-director Roger Allers commented, “I would advise parents to use discretion. All children have individual responses to things. But I think it’s legitimate to go to a movie and be upset and cry.”
Brian Ferguson, one of the animators of Timon, told the Edmonton Journal, “It’s a very powerful story. I think maybe part of the reason that the scenes I worked on are so funny is because of the tragedy, the intensity of the other feelings. You really need a laugh by the time you get to the comic relief.”
June 29: I Love Trouble opens in theatres
Nick Nolte and Julia Roberts butt heads as reporters for rival newspapers, until they suspect a government conspiracy is behind a train crash. The Touchstone Pictures film was written and produced by rom-com duo Nancy Meyers and Charles Shyer.
June 29: Iron Will released on VHS