Trivia / The Black Cauldron

• Box Office Bomb: The film only returned 85% of its $25 million budget. It remains one of Disney's poorest-performing theatrical releases. Adding insult to injury, it was also outgrossed by The Care Bears Movie, which had been in theaters for three fewer months, and had cost just $2 million to produce.
• Bury Your Art: Due to how poorly the film did, Disney has gone to great lengths to disassociate themselves from the film. For example:
  • Disney opened a Black Cauldron-themed restaurant, called "Gurgi's Munchies and Crunchies", at Disney World in anticipation of the film's release. Once the film bombed, they closed this restaurant down and later remodeled it into a Beauty and the Beast themed establishment (which since has been replaced with a Robin Hood establishment).
  • Because this movie was both atypical and unpopular, it wasn't released domestically on home video until 1998, 13 years after its theatrical run. It also didn't come to Blu-ray until it received a Disney Movie Club-exclusive disc in 2021, marking the last of Canon's post-Walt traditionally-animated movies to reach the format.
  • The Horned King occasionally makes appearances such as in Disney Heroes: Battle Mode and Chibi Tiny Tales, and all the characters were featured in the company’s Massive Multiplayer Crossover for the 100th anniversary, Once Upon a Studio. At the same time, however, it was one of the films excluded from the credits of Wish (2023) (the Milestone Celebration feature for the centennial), making it unclear how Disney feels about the movie.
• Completely Different Title: Taran and the Magic Cauldron in France, Spain, Germany, The Netherlands and Belgium.
• Creator Killer:
  • The failure to get the film out in any reasonable amount of time helped bring down Ron Miller's regime at Disney, and its financial failure ensured that he would never work in Hollywood again. He founded the Silverado winery and moved into that business instead.
  • Co-directors Ted Berman and Richard Rich and producer Joe Hale were fired from Disney in the wake of the film's release ^note — Berman had technically retired, but Hale and Rich also allegedly took an antagonistic attitude towards both Jeffrey Katzenberg and deputy Peter Schneider, which was the other half of why they got the ax —; Berman and Hale never worked in animation again. Rich ended up being recruited by Utah entrepreneurs to produce videos based on The Bible and American History, leading to the creation of a new animation studio. Rich is still working, but his career is now built on low-budget, direct-to-video franchises based on The Swan Princess and Alpha and Omega, the only two (minor) successes he has had post-Disney.
  • It was very nearly the death of Disney itself. But its spectacular failure, as well as the growing amount of competition, led to Disney making some changes, and The Little Mermaid, released a few years later, is generally considered to be the start of their Renaissance Age.
• Dawson Casting: Despite Eilonwy being a teenager and presumably around the same age as Taran, Susan Sheridan was 34 when she recorded the voice - a full 20 years older than Taran's actor, Grant Bardsley.
• Disowned Adaptation: Well, the author of the original novels, Lloyd Alexander, didn't really consider the movie an adaptation. Surprisingly, he actually liked the film anyway, mostly because he felt it had so little to do with his work.
• Dueling Works: This movie, Legend, and The Legend of Zelda all feature the same three main characters: a young man in green clothes with a magic sword, a beautiful princess, and a fearsome demon-king. All three came out within a year of each other, meaning that all three were in development at the same time, and couldn't have influenced each other's development. One can only imagine Nintendo's, Disney's, and Ridley Scott's reactions when they discovered what the other two had done.
• Executive Meddling:
  • It jumps straight into a very loose adaption of the second story of The Chronicles of Prydain. Which in of itself is a very, very dangerous move.
  • After watching a test screening, the then-newly appointed studio head, Jeffrey Katzenberg, wanted to cut out the less family-friendly parts of the film and parts that he felt were unnecessary. The animation team explained that animated footage isn't typically edited like live-action and refused to make the necessary changes. Katzenberg personally tried to edit the film before then-CEO Michael Eisner got him to back off. A compromise was eventually reached to cut out 12 minutes.
  • The film's creation was a result of this. Originally, the animators wanted to work on an adaptation of Mary Stewart's The Little Broomstick. However, the higher-ups wanted a more ambitious project. Thus, The Black Cauldron was the end result.
• Franchise Killer: Disney secured the rights to the entire Chronicles of Prydain, but the film flopped so hard, it killed off any future plans of continuing the series for three decades. The film was also nearly this for the Disney Animated Canon. Disney would announce a live-action adaptation of the original books in 2016, but nothing has come out of it since.
• No Dub for You: This was the case for Finland until 1998, when a Finnish dub was released on home video. In the original release in 1985, Finland got the movie in English with Finnish subtitles due having a high age limit.
• No Export for You: Due to the film being a Box Office Bomb ^note or for content reasons, as those countries do treat animated pieces like children's fare, it has never been dubbed in certain languages.
• The Other Marty: Hayley Mills was originally cast in the role of Princess Eilonwy and hosted a behind-the-scenes special on Disney's Wonderful World in which she introduces herself as the voice of the character. Then, for reasons unknown, Mills was replaced by Susan Sheridan.
• Pop-Culture Urban Legends:
  • According to Yesterworld's video on the movie, many of the deleted scenes were overall much tamer than rumors suggested. While some of the grisliest scenes of the "Cauldron Born" sequence were indeed cut, few other deleted scenes had that level of violent or otherwise family-unfriendly content. One of the biggest casualties was Fflewddur Fflam, who had several incidental lines and even a few plot-relevant scenes deleted.
  • In addition, there was a rumor that circulated that the original intent when Taran first discovered his sword was magic was that he would outright kill the guard rather than just scaring him off, and that him jumping at the end of the scene was The Artifact of him leaping over the guard's dead body, and it was dropped by Jeffrey Katzenburg's request. Yesterworld's storyboard completely dashes this rumor — all storyboards shown in the video predate when Katzenburg joined the company, and the scene plays out the exact way it does in the final project. The storyboard also makes it clear Taran is simply jumping for joy rather than leaping over a guard.
• Post-Release Retitle: In 1990, The Black Cauldron was theatrically re-released as Taran and the Magic Cauldron to try to get more ticket sales and hide the Darker and Edgier elements of the film that caused it to be a Box Office Bomb during its initial release. It didn't work, and the next release of the film (a Direct to Video one in 1998) kept the original title. 1990 Newspaper clippings from Bend, Oregon and Portland, Oregon◊ provide evidence that it was shown in theaters in that state (possibly as a trial run), and 35mm prints with this title are in circulation even if a wide release didn't occur. The only other evidence are posters under multiple languages, children's tie-ins (picture books and puzzles), a Portuguese TV spot (with English audio), and a theatrical trailer, all bearing this new title.
• Release Date Change: The Black Cauldron was originally scheduled for Christmas 1984, but was delayed to July 1985 due to Executive Meddling revising and editing the film to make the film less dark and scary in the wake of a badly-received test screening. A reissue of Disney’s Pinocchio took over the 1984 Christmas slot instead.
• Stillborn Franchise: Disney actually had the rights to the entire book series. When the movie imploded, plans for any sequels and any more adaptations of the books by Hollywood were sunk for 30 years; Disney reobtained the rights and began plans to try the series again in 2016, this time as live action. However, such plans would fall into Development Hell.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The film was initially meant to be Bloodier and Gorier during the “Cauldron Born” sequence, but many scenes were cut by Katzenberg before its release. Imagine if the cuts weren't made (some of the footage Katzenberg had cut actually made it to the film's trailer on early copies of the 1985 VHS of Pinocchio).
  • Concept art on the DVD shows that the ending of the film would have been closer to the books, with the Horned King being destroyed by Gwydion.
  • Early concept drawings of Eilonwy are more akin to the books' portrayal of her, with red-gold hair, bare feet, a ragged scullery maid's dress, and a distinct Cloud Cuckoo Lander vibe.
  • Tim Burton drew up some concept art for the film, not a single piece of which was used.^note He would later claim that his drawings were never going to be used anyway. The studio just wanted to give him something to do until his contract ran out. He ended up getting fired, however, when he was commissioned to make a couple of short films and turned in the incredibly bleak Frankenweenie short. He eventually came back. Animator Andreas Deja stated once that most of the designs Burton made would have been too difficult to animate anyway, and the film was already having enough production troubles as it was. Deja and Burton had numerous arguments regarding this.
  • The film's loftiest ambition: the first cinematic hologram. The filmmakers wanted the Cauldron Born scene to climax with a three-dimensional skeleton warrior flying out of the screen and right over the audience's heads. For the faint-hearted, perhaps it's for the best that it was simply impossible with the era's technology.
  • In an earlier treatment for the film, the Witches of Morva were to have a more active role in the plot, being shown in the prologue in line with the books' depiction of them as the Prydainian Fates.
  • In this same treatment, Taran's meeting with the Horned King would have had the King act Faux Affably Evil, trying to coerce Taran into having Hen Wen use her powers. When Taran hesitates, the King starts getting angry and quickly regains his cool with a Last-Second Word Swap.
  • An earlier version of the Fair Folk sequence shows King Eiddileg with a design similar to King Hubert. The animation for the sequence also shows Fflewdurr with a design closer to his appearance in the books as well as an earlier rendition of his voice, still provided by Nigel Hawthorne. A painted cel for the sequence shows that Eiddileg was to be blonde.

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