Thread: Disney and Swan Lake?

Interesting. They were planing to do Homer's Odyssey, Sinbad, Song of the Sea as well as Swan Lake (what's with that dragon talk?). Those are some awesome choices for movies. I'm surprise none of these got forwarded. It would of been awesome seeing these in 2-D animation. I guess Kazzy took Sinbad idea when he moved to Dreamwork. I would of been pretty cool if Disney made the movie and some time afterward have a special with...

I read years ago that they felt that Swan Lake was somehow too similar to Little Mermaid, and when The Swan Princess was produced it was sort of the nail in the coffin.

http://www.laughingplace.com/News-PID210260-210266.asp Ron Clements wrote: So then Jeffrey came back and offered us three films, and we were to pick one of the three. One was SWAN LAKE - which was ultimately made outside of Disney - and at any rate we thought that was just too close to MERMAID. Another one was then called KING OF THE JUNGLE, which of course turned into LION KING. And the other one was ALADDIN, so we didn't actually turn...

Wouldn't surprise me if Richard Rich had indeed originally tried to green-light the project at Disney, but later decided to go solo. I actually love "The Swan Princess" (though the two sequels suffer from being average Saturday morning-quality cartoon affairs). The soundtrack is really fun, too.

They also worked on Aida, after the Lion King. A project that later got abandoned but did result into the musical version with the music by Elton John and Tim Rice.