The Black Cauldron

The Black Cauldron was conceived as a renaissance picture for the Disney company. Just like Sleeping Beauty over two decades before, the film was several years in the making, with a colossal budget, a different style, a scope format...
When the film met with little success, it was shelved, and Disney spent much effort to make you forget they ever released such a failure. I remember seeing it in the eighties and later not remembering clearly if the film was a Disney movie at all.

1983 Tim Burton drawing

The film finally resurfaced on home video and has lately been restored for a new DVD release. Some other previously lost material also made its way on the disc and on various books. These include preliminary drawings made by Tim Burton when he worked at the studio. He drew sketches of the Horned King's lair and various creatures. Apparently none of which were used in the finished film.

Tim Burton creature

A "deleted" scene was also part of the bonus features. It is actually an alternate and extended version of the scene where Taran and his friends meet the Fairfolk. Details vary: the group makes its way out of the cave thanks to a growing magic bean, much like Jack's instead of magic dust, the design of the king is rather different, the kid fairies weren't in the film, etc.

Concept by James Coleman

This is just a sample of the various scenes in development which, although fully animated, were completely changed or deleted at great costs!
The real treat that is yet to come, would be a documentary about the making of the film, and to see all the other scenes, especially considering that some of them were removed in a later stage of production.
In fact, twelve minutes were apparently edited out of the finished film by unhappy studio chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg. It is still unclear what the scenes are but the recent release of the film's soundtrack by Elmer Bernstein throws new light about this.

Character design

Its producer Randy Thornton explains that the eighth cue of the third reel "Incantation" was meant to underscore one of the excised scene. The cue alone lasts 1 minute and 52 seconds and it seems obvious, given the dark tone of the music, that the scene featured the Horned King, which seems to confirm that the cuts were essentially made to lighten the mood of the picture and avoid a restricted rating in spite of the obvious attempt of the studio to get out of its corny image. Incidentally, that scene was right after the Fairfolk sequence mentioned before.
In other cases, the scene remained but was shortened by several shots. This is the case of the famous Cauldron born scene. There again, the complete cue on the CD shows us that several seconds were cut right before Eilonwy says "Oh it's horrible!" And indeed what she saw was too horrible to make the final cut. A devoted fan mixed the soundtrack with rare cels of the original sequence to give you a rough idea of what the scene looked like originally.

Here's hoping that these scenes make their way back to the public on a future Blu-ray release.
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That's all for today folks!

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