Trivia / Treasure Planet

Film

• Acclaimed Flop: Has a respectable 69% on Rotten Tomatoes but didn't make back its $140 million budget, which was already a pretty massive tally for an animated film. Its performance wasn't helped at all by the fact it came out against Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets and had a ridiculously spoilerific trailer for the kids, to say nothing of a spoileriffic name for the adults.
• Box Office Bomb: Budget, $140 million. Box office, $109,578,115. This was a well-below-average gross for any Disney animated film, coming in for an extremely ambitious movie with a well-above-average budget, combining to result in the first film in the canon since The Black Cauldron to fail to even make up its production budget in theaters. Its underperformance pretty much erased most of the profits Disney made from Lilo & Stitch earlier in the year and helped ensure the end of traditional animation at the studio (their next two projects both being well into development when this film cratered).
• Budget-Busting Element: At the time, this was the most expensive animated film in history, with a budget of $140 million. Because it was the first Disney film released with an IMAX release in mind, most of that budget was dedicated to integrating CGI and hand-drawn elements and creating immaculate line-work suitable for such a high-quality screen. The film was a financial failure, only grossing $109 million.
• Creator Killer: Very nearly became this for John Musker and Ron Clements, the Little Mermaid/Aladdin director duo who also helmed this film, as they did not work another movie until the end of the decade. The Executive Meddling involved with Disney and the film's bombing led to them temporarily resigning from Disney, and they also considered reuniting with former boss Jeffrey Katzenberg at DreamWorks Animation before the management shift in 2005 led to Katzenberg's own former boss Michael Eisner having to resign from Disney himself. Musker and Clements were brought back to Disney by John Lasseter circa 2006, and they moved on to The Princess and the Frog, briefly reviving traditional animation at the studio, and even after the studio fully shifted to CGI animation they went on to direct Moana before leaving Disney again. They are currently trying to develop an animated film for Warner Bros. based on the Metal Men comics from DC.
• Deleted Scene:
  • The prologue was going to be narrated by an older Jim Hawkins and start the film properly at the time Jim got arrested.
  • Dr. Doppler was originally going to end the movie as a Mr. Seahorse with Amelia; Disney execs apparently nixed that idea pretty quickly.
• Doing It for the Art: Musker and Clements spent sixteen years trying to get this movie made, first pitching it after the success of The Great Mouse Detective and immediately following each successive movie they directed. They've openly admitted that the only reason they directed Hercules was because the studio heads flat-out promised that they would give it the green-light if they made one more financially successful movie.
• Development Hell: Musker and Clements had proposed "Treasure Island Recycled In Space" in the mid-80's before The Little Mermaid (1989) came out, but Disney kept assigning them to shepherd other films and it was only after Hercules they got the go-ahead.
• Dueling Movies: One of the most destructive duels ever, in its race to be released before the long-delayed Titan A.E.. Both animation teams were constantly looking over their shoulder at each other, according to Word of God:
  Fatherless boy tries to solve his daddy issues by going on a space voyage in search of a long-lost treasure, hidden on a Big Dumb Object, with a less-than-stellar crew of galactic Beast Men, one of whom is a Parental Substitute, but proves to be The Mole, using a starmap only he can read. The villain redeems himself in a Take My Hand! moment while trying to activate/deactivate the forgotten Doomsday Device. Both films were deliberately marketed to single-parent Gen-X kids, with an uplifting Grunge soundtrack. One is about Pirates in a Steampunk-ish/Cyberpunk-ish Alternate Universe, based on a classic novel. The other is about Space Pirates After the End, inspired by Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica. Both films got an Earth-Shattering Kaboom.
  • Eventually, neither film won; in fact both ended up tanking their respective studios because of divided profits. Both were good movies in their own right but couldn't hold up with competition. Don Bluth hasn't produced a movie since (though he's hoping for a theatrical adaptation of Dragon's Lair) and this was almost the end of traditional animation for Disney.
• Executive Meddling: The film was conceived as far back as 1985's The Black Cauldron and was was first pitched by Musker and Clements in the same meeting as The Little Mermaid (1989). Jeffery Katzenberg ruled in favor of Mermaid and skipped over it again on two separate occasions, in the end promising to give it the green light if Hercules was successful. Then, when it was finally produced, it was given a Totally Radical marketing campaign that completely turned off audiences, ensuring that it would never be seen.
• Fake Russian: One of the gunners.
  We are wanting to move!
• The Foreign Subtitle: In France, the movie is known as The Treasure Planet: a New Universe.
• Genre-Killer: The film's massive failure against several successful computer animated films proved to be the final nail in the coffin for hand-drawn animation at Disney. They and their rival DreamWorks Animation dropped the medium a couple years later and Disney's two efforts to bring it back at the end of the decade proved similarly unsuccessful.
• Kids' Meal Toy: McDonald's sold a set of eight figures in their Happy Meals; Jim Hawkins, B.E.N., Mr. Arrow, John Silver, Morph, Scroop, Dr. Doppler, and Captain Amelia. Each figure came with a piece of the map, and collecting all eight figures would allow one to build said map. The Mighty Kids Meal, which was aimed at slightly older children, featured a set of three CD-Rom games; Treasure Racer, Etherium Rescue, and Broadside Blast.
• Missing Trailer Scene: Missing dialogue from the theatrical trailer:
  Silver: You think a pup like you can take on the likes of me?!
  Jim: Watch me!
• Pop-Culture Urban Legends: There's a rumor that Captain Amelia was shown bleeding in the original theatrical cut of the film, but later re-releases censored the scene. But with the film's relative obscurity, it's highly unlikely that Disney will confirm or deny these rumors any time soon.
• Reality Subtext: Emma Thompson was pregnant during many of the recording sessions. Amelia has babies with Dr. Doppler at the end of the film..
• Screwed by the Network: Disney was utterly un-supportive of this movie as the execs felt that it didn't fit the company's image, added to the fact it was coming out in a time when Disney wanted to shift the focus over to 3D animated movies. It got very little advertisement pre- and post-release, got released alongside big shot movies like the second Harry Potter movie and Disney's own The Santa Clause 2 (instead of what normally would have been done and delaying Treasure Planet not to get overshadowed by those releases), all of which ensured its failure at the box office and has gotten no mention by Disney since then. This video explains the whole ordeal quite thoroughly.
• Sequel First: The video game sequel, Treasure Planet: Battle at Procyon, was released nearly a month prior to the film (31st of October, 2002 for Battle at Procyon, 27th of November, 2002 for Treasure Planet).
• Serendipity Writes the Plot: They mention in the DVD Commentary that they decided to kill off the pirates that were hardest to animate as early as possible.
• Similarly Named Works: 1982 Bulgarian movie, Planetata na Sakrovishtata is also known as Treasure Planet. Both movies are Treasure Island Recycled In Space''.
• Stillborn Franchise: A sequel was planned with hopes of more sequels and even a series, but it was cancelled when the film underperformed.
• Swan Song: This movie is the last film actor Patrick McGoohan (the voice of Billy Bones) ever did.
• Throw It In!:
  • The conversation between Jim and Silver trying to coax Morph into giving them the map was improvised.
  • Also, David Hyde Pierce improvised the "Go Delbert, Go Delbert" line.
• Vindicated by Cable: When released, Treasure Planet found itself overshadowed at the Box Office by Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. It ended up being a colossal flop that ended up turning Disney off of traditional animation. Several years later, separated from being overshadowed by Harry Potter, Treasure Planet finally found its audience on cable.
• What Could Have Been:
  • John Williams was considered to do the score for the film, but due to tight scheduling that never came to fruition.
    • After Williams was unable to do the score, Alan Silvestri was attached to score the film but pulled out to do Lilo & Stitch instead.
  • There's a line cut from the ending that would have revealed it was Doppler who gave birth to the babies.
  • There was going to be a sequel that would pick up where the first movie left off, featuring Willem Dafoe as a robot pirate named Ironbeard. It would have involved Jim reuniting with Silver and meeting (and later falling in love with) a classmate named Kate. More information here.
  • Originally, Jim would have fought Hands on the RLS Legacy instead of Scroop. Thomas Schumacher said to change it to Scroop because he's more menacing and they had too many characters in the film.
  • Captain Amelia was originally going to be a Medusa before being changed to a Cat Girl because her hair was too hard to animate. She was also going to have black hair, but ended up having red instead.
  • Information from the DVD commentary:
    • Originally, a now-grown Jim was supposed to have narrated the prologue.
    • In one version, Jim and Silver's big confrontation in the climax was supposed to take place at a snowy planet, after the two had escaped through one of the portals. In another version of the same scene, Silver would've been actually unable to let go of the treasure due to his arm getting stuck, so he had to take off the whole thing, leaving him truly one armed. This was cut due to reminding the crew too much of The Fugitive.
• Word of Saint Paul: In a Steam forum thread on the Battle at Procyon game, one of the game's developers stated that while the RLS prefix was chosen for Robert Louis Stevenson, the game's development team came up with the idea that it stood for Royal Light Ship.
• Working Title: Treasure Island in Space.
• You Might Remember Me from...: Billy Bones was voiced by Patrick McGoohan in his last role.

Video game

• Spiritual Successor:
  • The PlayStation version's gameplay is very reminiscent of Spyro the Dragon, although it came from a different developer. Features of the PlayStation trilogy were split between this and Muppet Monster Adventure:
    • Drubloons are the equivalent of gems.
    • Treasure Planet Tokens are the equivalent of trapped dragons, orbs and eggs.
    • Jim has a "fire breath" attack (blaster) and a "charge" attack (sword), and enemies and containers which can be defeated by either of them or both. He also has a "headbash" attack which he performs by jumping and striking his sword against the floor.
    • Jim also has a superflame equivalent in the form of the plasma cannon.
    • Jim can also glide by having Morph turn into a hang-glider.
    • Jim has to pay some people to advance, similar to how Spyro paid Moneybags.
  • The PlayStation 2 version is one to Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy.

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