Disney Lies

Disneyland has always maintained a focus on safety (aside from a brief period beginning in the mid ’90s). Even so, park management thinks that guests are not doing enough to keep their part of the safety bargain.

“You have no idea how unsafe guests can be,” said Perry Winkle, fictional Disneyland management professional. “They dance atop trash cans, put their kids on stilts to get them past height restrictions, and barely get out of the way when chunks fly off of insect-themed parade vehicles. Despite the safety benefits, it would be cost prohibitive to relieve the park of guests. That is why we have begun the Disneyland Safety Performance Initiative.”

This initiative involves teaching cast members to work safety information into their characters. Haunted Mansion cast members, for example, already use safety-related dialog (e.g., “Drag your body to the dead center of the room, or the unstoppable closing doors may leave half your corpse behind.”)

Our Official Disney Lies Photo Correspondent caught sight of a pair of newly trained Indiana Jones cast members perform the “if you’re not at least this tall, you could end up like this” skit.

Hopefully, this will make us all much safer!

There was a report that Walt Disney Pictures and Stan Lee (famous mustachioed comic-book writer and excelsior salesman) have signed a three-picture deal, and we are inclined to believe it, even though the news only appeared in some little tabloid rag called Variety.

According to the article, the three films will have nothing to do with existing Disney characters or Lee’s classic creations. Instead, they will be about entirely new characters. This is quite a surprise for Disney fans, as Walt Disney Pictures has shown a reluctance to produce family fare that is not tied to an existing property.

In any case, the three films — Spider Mouse, Four Fantastic Caballeros, and The Incredible Hannah Montana — will be released in 2010, 2011, and 2012, respectively.

All Disney fans are familiar with Herbie, the lovable anthropomorphic VW bug from The Love Bug and a raft of sequels and remakes. But did you know that the car originally chosen to play Herbie was, in fact, a girl? “It’s a lot like the situation with Lassie,” says Pete Wrench, car customizer to the stars. “Lassie was a girl dog that played a boy dog, only in that case ‘Lassie’ is kind of a girly name where ‘Herbie’ isn’t, but it’s no big deal. Who cares? It’s a car!”

Well, at least one person cared. It’s a well known fact that after learning Herbie’s true gender Dean Jones spent an entire afternoon throwing up.

In honor of the announcement of Academy Award nomination, Wendy the Disney Psychic has hauled out her Ouija board to give us the lowdown on which Disney features will be “taking home the gold” (in the form of a little bald guy with no pants).

• Best makeup: High School Musical 2 (despite appearances, no actor is younger than 37)
• Best special effects: Meet the Robinsons (filmed entirely with blue screen)
• Best animated short: WALL-E trailer (much better than Shrek 3)
• Best documentary: National Treasure: Book of Secrets (a fascinating insight into American history)
• Best actor: Game Plan — Dwayne Johnson (truly a brilliant thespian!)
• Best animal performance: Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End — Wilbur the octopus for Davy Jones face (uncontested!)

Congratulations, Disney!

Although Cloverfield was released by some other movie studio, Disney’s special effects department was intimately involved in certain aspects of the film. In particular, the fact that Cloverfield was filmed entirely with a consumer video camera made it impossible to insert conventional computer animated special effects, so former Jim Henson Productions creature specialists were called into create a 900-foot-tall puppet that could be used in the movies more dramatic sequences.

“The movie’s conceit is that huge amounts of the secret ingredient for a popular soda are released into the ocean, causing this enormous baby monster to be over-stimulated by caffeine and just go nuts,” says Jimmy “J.J.” Jaybrams, supposed head of Disney’s Imagineering Creature Shop, Gigantor Division. “We went through a lot of concepts for this one. We eventually settled on a creature by thinking of what Lucky the Dinosaur would look like if he were horribly mutated, angry, carnivorous, gigantic, covered in parasites, and lived on the bottom of the ocean. The final puppet was a real masterpiece. It took more than seven hundred dedicated operators to control the thing for filming, and at one point one of the guys sneezed and accidentally knocked a couple of floors off an apartment building. You should have seen the company insurance guy’s face!”

Those who pay close attention to the film may notice the sly reference to a certain Disney mascot. Says Jaybrams, “If you look at the traditional Disney silhouette of Mickey Mouse, it looks kind of like a mutated three-leaf clover. So many Disney people worked on this film that at one point the director said it looked like a ‘field of Disney’ — which, because of the clover-look thing, became ‘field of clover’ or ‘clover-field.’ So there you go.”

Since we had him on the line, we asked Jabrams for the solution to a number of frequent questions about the film:

What happened to Marlena? “She exploded. On the set we joked that she’d eaten too many churros. It was really funny! Seriously! Okay, I guess you had to be there.”

What is the whispered phrase after the credits? “It’s dirty. We Disney folks always like to put hidden dirty messages into films. It’s jus t part of who we are.”

What falls out of the sky into the ocean at the end of the movie? “I’m surprised anyone even noticed that. It was a model of Michael Eisner’s private plane — a bit of in-joke wish fulfillment from the crew.”

Disney’s new stop-motion-animal direct-to-video holiday special, The Nightmare Before Kwanzaa, premiers today. If you’ve seen it, e-mail us your review!

Actor Kurt “Vogel” Russell will be 57 next March, and is already planning a very special celebration for his 60th birthday in 2011. In coordination with Disney, Russell will be remaking and updating two films from early in his career. The first film, The One and Only, Genuine, Original Rest Home Band will be released in 2010, followed soon after by The Computer Wore Orthopedic Shoes in 2011.

After his work with Disney is complete, Russell will continue his birthday celebration by playing the corpse of Elvis in an upcoming John Carpenter production.

It has been announced that the upcoming Jungle Cruise movie will officially be titled, Jungle Cruise: Heart of Darkness, making its title a combination of references to literature by two separate authors — Joseph Conrad and Upton Sinclair.

Conrad fans know that his work has long been a source of inspiration for Disney. For example:

• The Rescuers was inspired by Conrad’s The Rescue.
• Conrad’s Typhoon is the namesake for Walt Disney World’s Typhoon Lagoon.
• Treasure Planet’s Jim Hawkins was named for the title character in Lord Jim.

Non-Disney sources also often refer to Conrad — the space ship in Alien was named Nostromo after Conrad’s sci-fi novel of the same name, for example, and his The Secret Agent served as the template for James Bond.

But despite the fine pedigree of the Jungle Cruise film’s main inspiration, some Disney fans are apparently worried about another feature based on a Disneyland attraction when two of the company’s three previous efforts (Haunted Mansion: Northanger Abbey, and Tiki Room: A Room of One’s Own) were dismal failures, with only Pirates of the Caribbean: Treasure Island turning a serious profit. When asked his opinion of the Jungle Cruise: Heart of Darkness concept, long-time Disney commentator James Hillock pretended to die and said, “The horror! The horror!” Not a good sign.

Tim Burton fans will be thrilled to hear the famed director and hair stylist is returning to Disney to work on a trio of new animated features.

The first will be a remake of Disney’s classic Alice in Wonderland, reinvisioned so that it retains all of the biting nineteenth-century political satire of the original novels. As Burton has worked with Johnny Depp so many times in the past, the veteran actor will star as the title character.

Second on Burton’s Disney feature list is an expanded version of his frightening stop-motion short subject, Frankenweenie. For those of you who are not familiar with this brilliant piece of animation, it is the story of a young boy who, by calling upon certain forces that should have remained unknown to science, brings a frankfurter to life. Johnny Depp will voice the title character. Despite rumors to the contrary, there will be no cameo performance by Vincent Price, largely due to certain philosophical concerns.

The third in Burton’s trilogy of Disney epics will be a traditionally animated anthology feature in which Burton’s films are reimagined as Disney cartoons starring the “fab four” (Mickey, Minnie, Donald, and Goofy) and an animated Johnny Depp. The lineup is currently listed as: “Planet of the Ducks,” “Toontown Attacks!,” “Pee-Wee Mickey’s Big Adventure,” and “Goofy Sciscorhands.”

Continuing yesterday’s update on Pixar, details continue to emerge about the company’s next animated feature WALL-I. Informants deep within Pixar’s maintenance organization were able to provide DisneyLies with the following synopsis for this exciting science-fiction tear fest (which, ironically, was made by humans using computers to animate the computers that act like humans).

The movie is about a robot named WALL-I, the last robot left on Earth because all of the other robots’ dialogue was left unfinished due to the Hollywood screenwriter’s strike. Although WALL-I has work to do on Earth, he is always looking toward the stars because he has this one eye that wasn’t installed correctly and points up instead of straight ahead. WALL-I, although a robot, has human-like feelings, and falls in love with the beautiful EVA, a robot with an excellent singing voice and political aspirations in Argentina.

One unique aspect of this film is that the robot characters do not speak English. Rather, they speak in modern computer languages such as C++ and JavaScript (with older robots shown in flashbacks speaking Pascal, Fortran, or Cobol). In keeping with the technological theme, film’s soundtrack will be made available only in binary.