Trivia / Pinocchio and the Emperor of the Night

• All-Star Cast: The voice cast includes James Earl Jones, Tom Bosley, Edward Asner, Don Knotts, Frank Welker, Jonathan Harris and Scott Grimes.
• Box Office Bomb: Budget, $10 million, the film cost around $4.5-5 million to make, with the rest of it due to the below-mentioned lawsuit against Disney. It opened at #16 for the weekend with $602,734 from 1,182 theaters, and finished its short run with $3,261,638.
• Creator Killer: This sent Filmation's business into the wood-chipper; they had to shutter in 1989 with Happily Ever After as the only other movie they had left.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: Between the poor box-office performance of this film, Filmation's demise, and Disney being really unimpressed with this film's creation, the chances of a DVD release are slim outside of Region 2. However, Filmrise acquired the rights to it and in April 2020 started offering it to free-with-ads streaming platforms such as Pluto TV, making the film legally viewable in North America again.
• Screwed by the Lawyers: Disney was livid with Filmation attempting to make an unofficial sequel on this level and sued the studio to stop it. The suit was defeated in court, but the film bombed and fell off the map anyway.
• Stillborn Franchise: This and Happily Ever After, which was a "sequel" to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, were intended to be the first two films in a whole line of "Disney sequels". The implosion of both movies and Filmation declaring bankruptcy ended those plans, which would have been jeopardized anyway when Disney made their own sequels to films in the Disney Animated Canon.
• What Could Have Been: The whole Malignant Plot Tumor of the visit to Grumblebee's village was in fact a Backdoor Pilot. Gee Willikers was supposed to get his own Filmation TV series called Bugzburg, centering around him and his insect friends. But, when Group W sold Filmation to a group led by L'Oreal after shutting down the studio, the series was cancelled, despite having been sold to TV stations around the country and being near completion with two episodes being fully finished. Similarly, a spinoff of BraveStarr called Bravo, which was about people who live underground, was also cancelled, and also similarly half finished with two fully made episodes.