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You could hardly call it a competition. But back in the early seventies, two feature films were being developed at the Walt Disney Studios. Ultimately, only one project would be given the green light for production.

F-Wing was on the second floor of the Animation Building. And at the far end of the wing, Disney Legend Ken Anderson was developing a project called "Scruffy." The movie was based on an idea about the Apes of Gibraltar. And -- as you can imagine -- it featured a zany cast of monkeys. However, the story was set during the Second World War and Nazis were also involved.

Q: Did you work on [Scruffy]?

Burny Mattinson: No, I didn't work on it. Actually, I don't think anybody worked on it except for Ken Anderson. Ken Anderson was pushing it. He found the book, so he developed loads and loads of pictures on it and he had done much pre-production work. But for some reason, Walt decided against it. He let him go for a long time and then he just simply—I don't think he was interested in it and it just didn't go anywhere and it was finally just shelved.

Q: Was there some cool stuff in what you saw?

Burny Mattinson: I thought it was kind of cute; it was kind of a fun little story. Paul Gallico had written the story and it was about this Barbary ape and the British during WWII, and then it was based on the idea that if all the apes on Gibraltar were gone that the British empire would fall. And so the Germans supposedly were trying to steal the apes, get rid of them. It was kind of a cute story. They had one honorary ape that they couldn't get and that was Scruffy. I think Walt didn't want to go with anything around WWII.

Floyd Norman wrote:I guess I could go on and on about the movie projects that failed to garner the attention of Old Maestro, or films that were cancelled because of a series of reasons. I’ll close this remembrance with a project entitled, “Scruffy and the Rats of Gibralter.” This unusual animated project took place during the Second World War. Hardly the stuff of animated cartoon making, one might think. However, this was now the seventies and the Old Maestro had long since passed. Hoping to jump start creativitiy at the studio, veteran Disney conceptualist, Ken Anderson saw potential in this new project and gave it a full court press. Ken filled his expansive office with sketches, character designs and background ideas. This was all for a film that looked to be a break out project for the Walt Disney Studios after a series of rather uninteresting, and lackluster feature films. Once again, Mr. Anderson came out the loser when his bold movie idea was passed over in favor of a more traditional animated film called, “The Rescuers.”

Mark Kennedy wrote:A few years ago I bought a packet of Ken's drawings that I think were from a project called "Scruffy" that never got made at Disney. It was about orangutans fighting on the side of the British during WWII. I don't know much more about it than that, but also in the packet were drawings of Nazi spiders. This was the only one I had framed because it was the only one in color. It was done with his usual Mont Blanc fountain pen - his tool of choice in that era. I scanned it through the frame, but it looks pretty good anyway.

"When he came to Disney in the 1980s, Jeffrey looked in the vaults to see what jewels he could find," says Martin Kaplan, who was vp live action at Disney from 1987 to 1999 (he's now a professor at USC's Annenberg School of Communication). "And Mary Poppins was the most guarded jewel of them all." Kaplan flew to London to meet with Travers, then in her 80s, on five occasions — twice bringing Katzenberg along — trying to nail down a sequel. They pitched her a next-generation plot line, with the Banks kids grown up and Andrews playing an older Poppins. Travers hated everything about the idea, except for Andrews. She suggested a sequel set just one year after the original, but with the older actress still playing the part. "Julie looked great for her age. But still, it didn't make sense," says Kaplan. "Also, Travers had all these rules: 'Mary Poppins cannot wear red because everyone knows Mary Poppins never wears red.' It just became impossible to deal with her. Finally, we gave up."

Sotiris wrote:There was going to be a stop-motion animated Pooh TV series titled "Winnie the Pooh and You" in the late 90s. A pilot was produced in 1999 but the show wasn't picked up. It was developed at Curious Pictures. Very little is known about the project. Betty G. Birney worked as a writer on it, Julie Morgavi as a dialogue director, and Tim Collings as an animator. There are two animation tests for Owl and Rabbit available online by Tim Collings.

CLEMENTS: After we finished Mermaid, it was like, “What are we going to do next?” We actually pitched a project that we were interested in. The studio wasn’t that interested.

MUSKER: Well, it turned out Spielberg had the rights to this book. It was We’re Back, a book about dinosaurs that we wanted to do as a feature. They came back and said, “Can’t do it, forget it…”

CLEMENTS: “…But here’s three projects we’re interested in. Pick one of these three.” One was Swan Lake, and we thought that was too close to Mermaid. One was a project called King of the Jungle, which was about a lion king in Africa, and we thought that doesn’t sound—

MUSKER: Who in the world would want to watch that!

MENKEN: That’s never going to work!

http://www.ew.com/article/2015/10/13/aladdin-roundtable

Joss Whedon wrote:Then they said, “No, wait, we want to do ‘My Fair Lady’ with Marco Polo.” Which I not only wrote a script for, I actually wrote the lyrics for three songs that [veteran stage composer] Robert Lindsey Nassif wrote the music to.

Stephen Weiner: Unproduced works include 'Marco Polo' for Disney Feature Animation (lyrics by Glenn Slater).

Glenn Slater wrote:During that period, I’d begun working on an adaptation of the film, “Lost in America,” the Albert Brooks film, with a composer named Steve Weiner. We were presenting that show at the ASCAP workshop, and somebody from Disney happened to be there and approached us afterwards and said, “Hey, you know, we have this program where we’re looking for theater writers to do songs for animated films. We’re trying to identify people who might be good prospects for us. Would you be interested in doing this program in which we’re going to put you on a film? That film probably will never get made, but you will get to experience what it’s like to work for us, and we’ll get to experience what it’s like to work with you” – to which we said “Yes!” They gave us a script to work with, which was a Marco Polo story that happened to be written by a writer named Joss Whedon, who later became “Joss Whedon.” [At that time,] it was just a name on a page. As you can imagine, that script was just so funny and well-constructed and with so much heart. And we wrote five or six songs for that, that I think sort of wowed the Disney people, but there was nothing to do with it. Our score got put in a drawer.

Glenn Slater wrote:The script they gave us was Marco Polo written by a completely unknown screenwriter named Joss Whedon [...] and his tone is very much in the world where I live in which is both comedic and emotional. So, we run with that and we wrote six songs in a few months and we thought the Disney people loved them and then we heard nothing. It was like radio silence.

Glenn Slater wrote:I had written a musical adaptation of the movie “Lost In America”, with a wonderful composer name Stephen Weiner. It would ultimately go unproduced (copyright issues), but someone from Disney came to see a workshop performance. Shortly after, we were invited to take part in a special program: Disney gave us an animated script to work with (in our case, “Marco Polo”, by a pre-Buffy Joss Whedon!), and we wrote a six-song “practice” score, which we would told in advance would never be produced, but would give them a sense of how we worked. They seemed to love what we did, but months went by and nothing seemed to come of it.

Glenn Slater wrote:I had been working with a composer named Steve Weiner, who has written The Honeymooners show that's going to be coming to Broadway soon, and we had written a show based on the movie Lost in America, the Albert Brooks film. We had brought it to the ASCAP workshop to present it, and it was a big hit there, and in the audience was somebody from the Disney organization who was looking for young talent. They had at that particular moment, a program where they were assigning young writers to properties that they were not necessarily going to make into animated films, but just to sort of see how you work in their environment, how you react to criticism, how you think in animation terms. They gave us a script called Marco Polo, written by a writer named Joss Whedon, who at that point was nobody, but who went on to become the guy who created Buffy the Vampire Slayer and does all the Avengers movies, Firefly... And it was written in his trademark style, which is very funny and very emotional. We just glommed on to that script, which was fantastic. We wrote six songs in a few months, we gave it to the Disney people who seemed to love it, and then we heard nothing.

Sotiris wrote:I can't believe I just found out about Little Mermaid's Island.

Sotiris wrote:There was going to be an animated musical based on Marco Polo. Stephen Weiner and Glenn Slater wrote songs for it.

DisneyFan09 wrote:

Sotiris wrote:There was going to be an animated musical based on Marco Polo. Stephen Weiner and Glenn Slater wrote songs for it.

I thought Disney learned with Pocahontas to stray away from fictional stories about historical people

bruno_wbt wrote:Too bad it was cancelled... I love the songs.

Sotiris wrote:There was going to be an animated musical based on Marco Polo. Stephen Weiner and Glenn Slater wrote songs for it.

DisneyFan09 wrote:I thought Disney learned with Pocahontas to stray away from fictional stories about historical people

jazzflower92 wrote:And for good reason as well.

Sotiris wrote:

bruno_wbt wrote:Too bad it was cancelled... I love the songs.

Someone uploaded both of the unaired episodes. Go watch before they get removed!

• Episode 01: Sebastian's Birthday
• Episode 02: Tell the Truth