Who determined the "Disney Canon" and when was it created?

[Disney Duster]

Part of me wishes I had been an older child, or even an adult in the late 80's and 90's when Disney really was at it's best. The Disney Renaissance, Beauty and the Beast being nominated for Best Picture, all the merhandise, including the Walt Disney Classics Collection and so much high quality adult-oriented merchandise and art, and of course the sepcial and magical quality still being so potent. But fortunately as a kid in the 90's I did have one of the other wonderful apsects - great merchandise specialized around each film, especially my favorites. Now it's usually lumped in under a Disney Princess label.

[Rumpelstiltskin]

Not sure if it makes any difference if it is Disney themselves or someone outside Disney that is referring to the canon, but here is an article from 1985:

https://www.nytimes.com/1985/07/26/movi ... ldron.html

The black cauldron that gives a title to the latest Walt Disney animated feature contains the spirits of dead warriors, and the movie, which opens today at Radio City Music Hall, tells of the exertions of a boy named Taran to keep the cauldron from the evil horned king, lest he bring those ''deathless warriors'' to life and conquer the world. The tale is based on ''The Chronicles of Prydain,'' a series of books for youngsters by Lloyd Alexander that won critical and popular attention in the mid-1960's.

This is the 25th full-length animated feature from Walt Disney studios, and professionally put together as it is, many of the ingredients may seem programmed to those who have seen some of the others.

So, if The Fox and the Hound was announced as the 20th movie in the canon just four years earlier, what happened? I still suspect it has something to do with Einser, Wells and Katzenberg which entered Disney in 1984. But that's just guessing.

(The Great Mouse Detective was to some degree made simultaneously with The Black Cauldron. It had already been in pre-production for three years. Considering that The Black Cauldron was a flop, one should probably be grateful that The Great Mouse Detective was already in production.)

An article from 1986 about The Great Mouse Detective (again from The New York Times):

https://www.nytimes.com/1986/07/27/movi ... ation.html

On July 2, Walt Disney Pictures premiered ''The Great Mouse Detective,'' its 26th animated feature in 49 years, its seventh in the nearly 20 years since Walt Disney died and the first made since the new management of Walt Disney Productions took over. This movie - finished during a period of major upheaval at Walt Disney Productions -throws some light on the problems of an art form that must struggle to survive inside a big corporate business.

As soon as they took over, Mr. Eisner and Mr. Katzenberg reviewed what had been done on ''The Great Mouse Detective,'' said that the story was slow getting started, and that it would have to be done over before animation could begin.

They also decreed that the animation department must increase its output from a feature every three years to one every 18 months, and that the cost of each feature must drop from the $30 million range spent on the nearly completed ''The Black Cauldron,'' a sword and sorcery cartoon begun under Mr. Miller nine years before, into the $10 million range. That meant that the animation department had to animate the 72-minute ''Great Mouse Detective,'' start to finish, in one year, by the summer of 1986 (the artists had been aiming at a Christmas 1987 release) - about half the time that the Disney Studio had been taking to animate a feature since the opening of Disneyland began the diversification of the company in 1955.

''There is a lot on the line here,'' said Ron Clements, a story man/ animation director who came to the studio in the 70's. ''We have to show the new management that we can make them cheaper and faster and yet do them in the classic Disney way. If 'The Great Mouse Detective' is successful, they may be a little more reassured.''

''The Great Mouse Detective'' was finished on time - for $12.8 million.

An article about The Black Cauldron from August 27, 1984, where nothing is mentioned about the number in the canon:

https://www.nytimes.com/1984/08/27/movi ... isney.html

After nearly 30 years of throwing its energies into amusement parks and movies and television programs featuring live actors, the studio founded by Walt Disney is turning back to the brush strokes of its youth. Because of recent changes in the entertainment industry, including the arrival of video cassettes, animation has become a priority once more at the empire built by Mickey Mouse.

''The Black Cauldron,'' the most complex and expensive animated feature ever produced by Walt Disney Studios, will be released next summer. It is conceivable, said Ron Miller, president and chief executive officer of Walt Disney Productions, that the movie will be the first Disney cartoon to get a PG rating.

The studio is also at work on a Sherlock Holmes mystery played out by some mice who live in an apartment below the famous detective. This $13 million movie, ''Basil of Baker Street,'' will follow ''The Black Cauldron'' into theaters in 1987. A year and a half later, there will be another animated feature. Two top candidates are a version of ''The Three Musketeers'' starring Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Goofy and Jose Carioca, and T. H. White's ''Mistress Masham's Repose.''

''Animation is more important to us now than it has been for at least 20 years,'' said Mr. Miller.

Pay cable, the growth of video cassette recorders and the vast merchandising bonanza created by the ''Star Wars'' movies show how animation can be financially as well as psychologically important to Disney. Disney's revenues from merchandising characters and publishing increased from $41 million in 1978 to $111 million in 1983.

Mr. Miller also likes to speak of ''synergism'': the studio's research- and-development arm is considering a ride based on ''The Black Cauldron'' for Disney's theme parks; a series of new 2l-minute animated shorts will be released theatrically, then sold on video cassettes; these will have a third life on The Disney Channel, the studio's pay-cable network.

''We have to keep our characters alive and create new characters for consumer products,'' said Mr. Miller.

The studio hopes ''The Black Cauldron'' will entice consumer pocketbooks with products based on Creeper, the dwarf gofer of the evil Horned King, and Gurgi, a furry coward who speaks in rhyme and aids Taran the Assistant Pig Keeper, the movie's hero.

Success in Home Video Field

Although video cassettes are more a rental than a sale market, cassettes for children have been an exception. And the Disney name, which has been spurned at movie theaters by teen- agers over the last decade, is, nevertheless, magic in the field of home video. Disney has had considerable success with its seven Limited Gold Edition cartoon classics on video cassettes, selling 500,000 cassettes at $29.95 apiece.

Now, the studio is preparing to release one of its animated features on video cassettes at Thanksgiving and a second next Easter.

Much of Disney's strength rests on its library of these features, which have never been shown on television and which are released in theaters to a new generation of children every eight years. Last year ''Snow White'' brought Disney $14.5 million in film rentals and became the 50th most successful movie of all time, earning a cumulative total of more than $41 million in film rentals.

''We have 17 animated features that aren't touchable, but a few are marginal,'' said Mr. Miller, who declined to name the marginal films that will end up on video cassettes. ''We can make between $6 million and $10 million per film on cassettes, give the film exclusively to The Disney Channel, and then make a hell of a deal with a television network.''

So the emphasis at Disney is now on what Mr. Miller calls ''a new inventory of animated classics.'' Between ''Snow White'' in 1937 and ''The Lady and the Tramp'' in 1955, the year Disneyland opened, Disney produced an animated feature every year and a half. Since then the rate has been one every three years. In order to return to one feature every year and a half, Disney first had to build a new inventory of animators.

The animation division is bursting with 270 people performing functions from full animation to grinding paint. That is double the number in the division a decade ago; 233 of the employees have been at Disney less than 10 years.

There are also other changes. Computerized cameras are used, and scenes are prepared by being shot 10 or 12 times on videotape.

What kind of 17 "untouchable animated features" was Miller talking about back in 1984? He wouldn't say, but my guess is:
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)
Pinocchio (1940)
Fantasia (1940)
Dumbo (1941)
Bambi (1942)
Cinderella (1950)
Alice in Wonderland (1951)
Peter Pan (1953)
Lady and the Tramp (1955)
Sleeping Beauty (1959)
One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961)
The Sword in the Stone (1963)
The Jungle Book (1967)
The Aristocats (1970)
Robin Hood (1973)
The Rescuers (1977)
The Fox and the Hound (1981)


Weirdly enough, sources still say that the budget for The Great Mouse detective was 14, despite this source claiming it was cut in half: https://thedisneyodyssey.wordpress.com/ ... tive-1986/

Michael Eisner eventually greenlit the project, but the budget was sliced in half and the team were given only a year and a half to complete the film. The film had four directors, Burny Mattinson (who stepped back to produce in the end) and Dave Michener, plus soon to be The Little Mermaid double act John Musker and Ron Clements.

It is also possible that Don Bluth is the one to blame, at least partially, why Disney decided to pay more attention to animation again:

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/dvde ... ldron.html

In 1979, frustrated star animator Don Bluth quit and took 13 colleagues with him. In the wake of his departure, the department was staffed by a few of the old guard and a passel of untested recent CalArts grads (John Lasseter and Tim Burton among them).

Disney finally decided to push ahead with The Black Cauldron in 1981—spurred, it's been suggested, by reports of Bluth's first picture away from the Mouse, The Secret of NIMH. With Cauldron, Disney hoped to draw teenagers bored of Disney fare like That Darn Cat back into the fold. "No respectable teenager would be caught dead watching a Disney movie," Cauldron's producer, Joe Hale, has said of the time.

[Big Disney Fan]

In a special on Disneyland's 30th anniversary (not the one featuring John Forsythe and a young Drew Barrymore, but a different one hosted by the "Entertainment Tonight" people), they touted the then-upcoming "The Black Cauldron" as the 25th animated feature, so I'm guessing that by the time of Eisner's arrival, they had settled on including the package films of the '40s in the canon.

Is this the anniversary segment you were thinking of? Around 4:40 Min. in this video?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5covamEAJw

Did I miss where they pronounced the film as being the 25th animated feature? Is there another video stating this that I have not located?

There is, but I can't seem to find it anywhere. And no, that's not the video I was thinking of. Not even close.