Trivia / Son of the White Horse

• Acting for Two: The movie has six credited voice actors; all three brothers share a single actor and so do all three princesses and all three dragons.
• Approval of God: Director Marcell Jankovics was quite fond of a fan-made music video that synced parts of the film to a Mastodon song.
• Better Export for You: Bizarrely, the film's 2020 4K restoration is available on Blu-ray in the United States and Germany, but not in its native country Hungary. Hungary briefly screened the restoration in theaters and aired it a handful of times on television, but its only Hungarian home media release is a bare-bones, standard definition DVD that doesn't have any of the international versions' bonus features.
• Box Office Bomb: One common misconception has it that Soviet era state-funded filmmakers could get away with anything without having to worry about profits. While this film wasn't near as disastrous a failure as the simultaneously produced Foam Bath, it only sold half of the expected tickets and had its theatrical run cut short in the country capital as a result. According to the director, the Pannonia Film Studio was so disappointed by their recent failures (a third example being Time Masters) that they put him and his projects on the sidelines and enforced strict creative control on their films to make them more mainstream and profitable.
• Completely Different Title: The film's original German title, Der Schimmelprinz, translates to "The Grey Horse Prince". The 2020 re-release went with a literal translation, Sohn der Weissen Stute.
• Cowboy BeBop at His Computer: The plot summary on the official Hungarian DVD case labels Kőmorzsoló and Vasgyúró as enemies Fanyűvő has to beat on his way to rescue the princesses. While he does briefly spar with them when they first meet, their wrestling matches are nothing but friendly, since the two are actually his brothers and helpers, in no way his foes. The person writing the plot summary may have been confused by other versions of the folk tale, where they are indeed enemies.
• Creator Backlash: Back in the 80s, with the film's production hurdles and negative reception still fresh in his mind, Jankovics said he didn't find joy in watching it. Later in his life, he thought much more kindly of his work and saw it as his best film, though he still claimed to be dissatisfied with over a third of the movie.
• Creator Breakdown: His original creative vision cut short, his energy depleted, the movie barely finding a distributor, immediately bombing upon release and the production studio sidelining him... this was almost more than Jankovics could handle. What kept him going was his amazement that the film got made at all, and a certain ambitious new project.
• Referenced by...: The Animated Adaptation of Toldi, the final cartoon Jankovics worked on, has a few visual callbacks to this film. Toldi's strength is compared to a living storm resembling the Rain King. When on the run, the white-clothed Toldi flees through a thicket of jagged bushes recalling the opening scene with the White Mare. More on the nose is Toldi's hair bursting aflame to visualize his might, making him a lookalike of Fanyűvő (though comparisons to Super Saiyans are also common). In some shots they even share the same 12 locks of hair.
• Troubled Production: Censorship and paranoid studio leadership kept undermining the film at the development stage, while uncooperative workforce and bad working conditions plagued the rest of the production. The movie had to be re-imagined from the roots up after the powers that be rejected the director's original plans. It wasn't just the higher-ups that gave him trouble. Supposedly, the studio's in-between animators were so utterly inept and required so much help that the characters' expressiveness had to be cranked down several notches. In spite of this, the artists at one point stopped working and demanded a raise because they couldn't get a grip on the film's unusual art style. Animation materials were of extremely low quality to boot, causing entire segments of finished animation to be lost. The director claimed he was utterly exhausted by the time the film was finished, and he regretted that he couldn't devote the energy he had spent on battling the censors to polishing the movie.
• What Could Have Been: Initially, the director meant to take elements from various different folk tales and portray their cyclic nature. This understanding of the nature of time was however deemed anti-Marxist by censors. The completed movie is therefor mainly an adaptation of the tale Fehérlófia (hence the title) and Fanyűvő, Vasgyúró, Hegyhengergető, as well as generic folk tale tropes, cautionary tales, and ancient creation myths. The poster itself is a combination of the head of a white mare (fehérló) and a World Tree.
• Working Title: "A tetejetlen fa", or "The Tree Without A Top" (aka the World Tree). This was before the studio settled on adapting the tale Son of the White Mare. Still, the tree does feature in the film.

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