Was there ever a more telling signal that my childhood was nearing its end than when they changed the Disney Home Video Logo from the spooky but awe-inspiring sorcerer Mickey to this...flavourless mishmash of ungainly colours? I can't recall exactly which Disney VHS I was watching when this showed up in place of Sorcerer Mickey, but I do recall it making the experience feel immediately "off" to me. I was highly critical of Neon Mickey in my coverage of his logo, but at least he had something resembling a personality, even if it was a decidedly unpleasant one. This combines a tasteless (and oh-so-very 90s) colour scheme with a ruthlessly anodyne ethos, and the resulting logo does absolutely nothing for me.
According to the description in the above YouTube video, the first Disney VHS to feature this logo was The Return of Jafar, which seems oddly poetic, given what a nightmarishly slippery slope that release proved to be for Disney's reputation, although it would take a number of years for the effects to truly kick in. Back then, we were definitely on the cusp of great change. The last Disney VHS release I ever purchased was Toy Story in 1996, which also seems oddly poetic in that regard. The innovative visual style of Pixar's debut feature had generated much excitement, although at the time nobody quite appreciated just how swiftly and dramatically it was to reshape the landscape of Hollywood animation, to the extent that, in less than a decade, traditional 2D animation would be all but extinct. Primarily, I stopped buying because it was around that time that my family finally forked out for a satellite subscription, meaning that we didn't have to wait an age for new films to show up on television - but it's also accurate to say that it was around the same time that Disney stopped making films that had me itching to rush out and consume them on the day of release. For a long time, I feared that this was all a sign of me getting old and cynical, but it turned out that my waning enthusiasm merely chimed with popular opinion. Disney were entering that phase in the late 90s where the experience of heading to theatres to watch their latest feature was beginning to feel less like entering a magical kingdom filled with joy and surprises and more like nipping out to McDonalds for a quick lunch of french fries and cola - good for a temporary fix but totally lacking in any kind of meaningful nourishment and, above all, individuality. Not for nothing do I refer to that particular stage in Disney's life as the "Happy Meal Era".
One of my main qualms with this particular logo is that it feels a heck of a lot more kiddish than Sorcerer Mickey, what with its cheesy colours and innocuous animation, but then I can't say for certain that this truly wasn't just a sign of me getting old and cynical. I'm sure that there are numerous folks out there who get the same bittersweet pangs of "Childhood!" and "Nostalgia!" from this logo as I do from Sorcerer Mickey. Heck, I'm sure that some Neon Mickey fan was howling with anguish the day their beloved childhood logo was replaced and has harboured a grudge against Sorcerer Mickey ever since. That's just the circle of life, is it not?
Also, there is a little twist in this particular tale - according to the Closing Logos Group Wiki, this logo wasn't used on Disney VHS releases in the US until 2000 (although I've no means of confirming this), and it was just us international consumers who were treated to its appalling blandness throughout the late 90s. It also transpires that the version we were accustomed to in the UK was not the standard one - in most other territories, this logo had a somewhat different colour scheme and a flashy little cube effect. Did that make it any spiffier than the UK variant, or all the more monstrously tacky? I'll let you be the judge of that.
Return of Jafar was good, despite its many flaws. (Well, the plot's good.)
ReplyDeleteI'd agree that it's got one of the more interesting and unique DTV sequel plots, given that its main purpose is to justify having Iago on the main cast in the spin-off TV series. At the same time, there's a lot there to picket at - the songs and animation are a massive step down from the original, and the lack of Robin Williams sucked a lot of the energy out of this world (Dan Castellaneta is a talented voice actor when he's doing his own thing, but his Williams imitation is basically a weird amalgamation of his Homer Simpson and Sideshow Mel voices).
DeleteOn the plus side, it has a great end-credits stinger.