Trivia / Quest for Camelot

• All-Star Cast: A big part of the voice cast were pretty big names.
  • The singers were no slouches either. Andrea Corr for Kayley or Céline Dion for Lady Juliana are the best examples.
  • Even the non-English versions got pretty big names and talented voice actors and singers from each respective country. See the Your Mileage May Vary entry for details.
• Box Office Bomb: Budget: $40 million. Box office: $22,510,798 (domestically). Despite schedule changes to avoid stiff competition from Anastasia, it wasn't enough to save the film from tepid-to-negative reception. It didn't help that this Disnyesque film was going up against not one but two films from the Disney Animated Canon entries (Mulan and the reissue of The Little Mermaid), which critics unfavorably compared it to. One of the more infamous reasons why the film failed was a botched Wendy's Kids Meal promotion — the toys that came with the meals also gave tickets for adults to pay child admittance prices to see the film, which cut a lot of their box-office in half.
• Breakaway Pop Hit: Few people realize that "The Prayer" was initially written for an unsuccessful animated film. Likewise, "Looking Through Your Eyes" was a surprisingly big radio hit relative to its origins, although it has mostly faded into obscurity since the film came out.
• Creator Backlash: Many of the animators who worked on this movie did not have fond memories of it.
  • Animator Lauren Faust has spoken at length on how she hated making this film. She admitted that Warner Bros. only wanted profits. Faust, whose staunch feminist philosophies are a complete 180 from this film's standards of a strong female character, has been particularly brutal to it in the years since. She later admitted that she had no idea what the movie was actually about when she was animating for it and was furious once she saw it. Faust also hated how the animators were rushed to finish the film on time. Along with the other animators, she knew that the film was going to bomb and they were right. In the end, she agreed that the original PG-13 version would be better.
  • Animator Derek Lee Thompson doesn't look back on the film with fondness either.
    "The first movie I animated on. Bad movie. The sound track was good and the one song won an Oscar but the movie was a bunch of miss steps and they switched everyone around after I signed on. I was on the Kayley team, they changed directors designers animators writers and on and on. Kayley was first Suzanna...Then Lynett and finally Kayley. Garrett was originally a blind swordsman. Christopher Reeve was brought on to be Merlin but couldn't get any inflection because he was on a breather after being paralyzed. They put the songs in the worst places. Putting the award winning song over a chase sequence. Kayleys first song where we are supposed to really care for her was farmed out and then crapped out. She floated from rock to rock..I just have post dramatic stress all these years later..."
  • Animator Jerome K. Moore likewise doesn't have warm feelings for the project.
    "WB's first mistake (of which there were many) was in trying to emulate the Disney style. I mean, we're talking about a studio that was and still is at the top of the animation game, and WB tries to copy their expertise??? Better to have done what they did in the old days, with Looney Tunes' Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and Termite Terrace being the antithesis of Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and the Nine Old Men. Then they lost the Croyers, the couple that started out designing the whole Q4C production. They couldn't pick a consistent direction with Kayley, originally making her more heroic and tomboy-ish, then switching to make her more girlish. It was indeed an absolute mess. As I sat up there on the 19th Floor of the building in Glendale, I mostly heard complaints from all the animators and production assistants."
  • Assistant animator Karen Marjoribanks doesnt think much of the film either.
    "This film is filled with bad examples (of animation). The director was a nice guy but did a very poor job. Too many producers with nothing to do but meddle. It was a painful work experience, and I had always wanted to work at WB. I've loved the WB characters best of all my whole life long. We did a bit with Space Jam but that studio was dysfunctional in the Quest for Camelot days. Too bad."
  • Ryan Simmons, an assistant effects animator, had this to say about the film:
    "Hey, I worked on that movie and I hate it too. Even though my name was in the credits, I didn't own it for over a decade."
• Creator Killer:
  • Warner Bros. was banking entirely on the success of this film to ensure that they would have a future in animated features (one of the reasons Cats Don't Dance was Screwed by the Network was so it wouldn't "outshine" this one!). When it flopped, WB halted production on all of their animated films still in development and stopped investing in advertisements of the three films it still had in production, ensuring that they'd all die quickly and quietly as a way to let their feature animation division peter out... which they would eventually come to regret when one of the films they screwed over was The Iron Giant, which received universal acclaim and has become a beloved animated classic. Whoops.
  • Frederik Du Chau, who turned the film into a Disney-clone musical, did not direct another film for 7 years, and one of the writers, Kirk De Micco, had that exact same hiatus; both worked on Racing Stripes, but De Micco went to DreamWorks Animation and did The Croods, while Du Chau is in the C-list of animators.
  • Both this film and the next one from Warner, The King and I, also liquidated the career of another one of the writers, David Seidler, as he didn't work on another film until 2010.
• Dueling Movies: With Disney's Mulan, which also has a heroine trying to get out of a traditionally female role and join the battlefield, fighting against her country's sexist traditions, along with a dragon sidekick. Disney prevailed yet again, and this did not help Warner's business at all.
• Executive Meddling:
  • The film was originally going to be directed by Bill and Susan Kroyer, the husband-and-wife team behind FernGully: The Last Rainforest, and the film was originally meant to be a much darker, more faithful adaptation of Vera Chapman's novel The King's Damsel. However, when Frederik Du Chau replaced the Kroyers as the director, he overhauled the storyline and turned it from a dark and faithful story into an very loose Disney-esque musical just to compete with Disney. It didn't work out so well and was a complete box-office failure. The move banished his career to the B and C lists in the end for it. The firing of the Kroyers also lead to the cancellation of other films in development such as King Tut, Arrow, and The Snow Queen.
  • Before the executives were through meddling, some main characters were renamed after their children. Kayley was originally Lynette in the book — as in Arthurian legend.
  • It wasn't even going to be a musical at first! All of the songs were added in the very late stage of production, hence why most of them barely forward the plot.
• Fake Brit:
  • Canadian-born Jessalyn Gilsig as Kayley. Her attempt at a British accent slips a couple of times.
  • Irish born Gabriel Byrne as Kayley's father Sir Lionel.
• Feelies: The VHS release came with a necklace whose charm featured Devon and Cornwall. Annoyingly, said necklace was under not the shrinkwrap on the new movie, but under the plastic of the clamshell cover — meaning that you either had to partly ruin the cover to get the blasted thing out, or you had a heck of a time lining it up neatly on your video shelf.
• Genre-Killer:
  • This film, one of countless Disney-copycats at the time, is sometimes seen as one of the signs that The Renaissance Age of Animation was coming to an end, and is an especially easy target for the downfall of traditionally animated features in America towards the end of this era.
  • It was also a sign that the animated musical was about to go into hibernation; this was one of a slew of animated musicals, with DreamWorks Animation doing their own with The Prince of Egypt, which was much more well-received. It didn't take long for DWA to crush the genre and replace Warner as Disney's top Arch-Enemy on the back of films like this.
• Kids' Meal Toy: Wendy's released a set of five toys in 1998. These consisted of a passport, a pull-back toy of Devon and Cornwall, a castle viewfinder, a balancing Griffin figure, and a Go Fish card game. Wendy's also offered discounts on theater admission.
• Non-Singing Voice: Most of the cast, possibly because this wasn't initially written as a musical, so whether a given performer could sing would not have been a concern at the time he/she was cast. In addition, some of the original actors can sing, but it's possible that the songs were added in so late that either the contracts were already completed or the actors were no longer available. The vocal differences between speaking and singing voice actors are especially noticeable. For example, Kayley gains a very clear Irish lilt (provided by Andrea Corr) when she starts singing.
• The Other Marty: Christopher Reeve was originally cast as King Arthur, but was replaced by Pierce Brosnan when he became unavailable to record new dialogue. Interestingly, King Arthur wears a blue and red outfit very similar to Superman’s iconic costume in the final few minutes of the movie, which probably would have been an allusion to Reeve’s iconic portrayal of Superman.
• Release Date Change: The film was meant to open for Christmas 1997, but was pushed back to May 1998 to avoid serious competition with Alien: Resurrection, Anastasia, The Borrowers, The Fearless Four, Flubber, Home Alone 3, Mousehunt, Mr. Magoo, Titanic (1997), and the re-release of The Little Mermaid. Also, To finish the film as production was dragging behind and also to add the songs in the film. Ultimately, it didn't help much.
• Show Accuracy/Toy Accuracy: Zig-zagged. A lot of the promotional pictures and some of the toys tend to show Kayley with her hair loose, something that only happened for two minutes at the most. It makes it hard to tell if Kayley was meant to stay that way or no.
• Stillborn Franchise: Plans for sequels that were based on the other books The Green Knight and King Arthur's Daughter were in the works, but due to the film's commercial and critical failure, the sequels were immediately scrapped.
• Throw It In!: As stated above, the songs were inserted very late into production; you can tell by how they don't impact or move the plot forward.
• Troubled Production: As mentioned above, the film went through numerous changes that led to its Disneyfication. Both Lauren Faust and a handful of other animators who worked on it have unkind memories of this film, full of stubborn executives and a script they hated. It was also stated by animator David Germain that producer Dalisa Cooper Cohen hated animation, and there were rumors that her distain for the project was due to Warner Bros. demoting her to animation after a film she co-produced, A Little Princess (1995), failed at the box office (thanks to WB's own shoddy marketing efforts).
• What Could Have Been:
  • The film was originally conceived as a darker, edgier and generally more serious PG-13 adventure as it was based on a very dark and serious book, The King's Damsel, before being retooled into a more family-friendly Disney-style production just to compete with Disney.
  • Given the implications of the Working Title below, The plot was massively different even with the rating change.
  • One of the films planed promotions for the film was a theme park attractions for the film at Six Flags Fiesta Texas in San Antonio but it was scrapped due to the films failure.
  • As mentioned above, plans for sequels based off both The Green Knight and King Arthur's Daughter were immediately scrapped upon the film's failure.
  • Originally, Christopher Reeve was cast to voice King Arthur and recorded some dialog, but was later replaced by Pierce Brosnan when Reeve was unavailable for recording new dialog.
  • A Nintendo 64 video game was also planned, but was scrapped; however, a Game Boy Color game was released, as was a PC game.
• Working Title: Quest and then later The Quest for the Grail.

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