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"The Sweatbox" is a documentary that Disney doesn't want the public to see due to the chaotic production of "The Emperor's New Groove." The documentary chronicles the struggles, changes, and controversies that the animated comedy went through behind the scenes. Disney owns the rights to "The Sweatbox" but has never released it, leaving fans curious about its contents.

Disney has been involved in various controversies throughout the years, and there’s one documentary that Disney doesn’t want the general audience to watch due to the chaos shown in it. Disney’s reign in the world of animation began in 1937 with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the studio’s first animated feature, and since then, it has become a powerhouse in animation and family-friendly content. Surely, the Mouse House has had some failures with its animated movies, but most of them have now become classics of not only the studio but film history,...

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From Flushed Away and Hunchback to Titan A.E. and Sky High - the family movies that don't get the love they deserve...

When I sit through a film such as Zootropolis, Rango, Frozen, Wreck-It Ralph, Eddie The Eagle or Coraline, I can’t help but be thankful somebody has bothered. As a parent as well as a movie lover, I’ve grown to really dislike family movies that just turn up to act as a surrogate babysitter for 90 minutes, with no intention of becoming anybody’s favourite film. The films I'm going to talk about are the family movies therefore that I think both try and do something a bit more, yet continue to fly under many people's radar.

A bonus mention before we get going, and number 26 in the list, much to my surprise: Alvin & The Chipmunks 4. I was expecting next to zero from it, courtesy...

Feature Mark Harrison 5 Mar 2014 - 06:39

For every animated movie that gets made, there are dozens more that never make it. Mark looks at some failed Disney projects...

In the age of the internet, Hollywood studios are much quicker to announce the projects they have in development than they used to be. Now that the demand is there, there's a huge turnover of movie-related news every day, and if you follow it in any significant way, there are probably a whole bunch of projects that you've heard about, maybe even gotten excited about, that never came to fruition.

Still, it's not only via the easier availability of such information that we know about projects that never came to be. At a studio like Disney, projects will get as far as being fully developed in animatic form before falling apart, and the artefacts left behind from such abridged projects have made for some fascinating reading.

The Emperor’s New Groove

Written by David Reynolds, Mark Dindal, and Chris Williams

Directed by Mark Dindal

USA, 2000

With Disney leading its 1990s renaissance with self-serious tales accounting Greek (Hercules), Native American (Pocahontas), and Chinese (Mulan) empires, it may seem like a slight against the Disney-fication of the South American pre-Inca empire to present a through-and-through comedy. Indeed, The Emperor’s New Groove was fully prepared to be another historical drama firmly planted in the Disney canon under the title of Kingdom of the Sun, but thanks to economic troubles (Read as: really weird circumstances best covered in the documentary The Sweatbox. Look to Josh’s piece and the Mousterpiece Cinema podcast for further reading and listening.) its fate was left to the comedic stylings of Mark Dindal. It’s the sort of destiny that may have lead New Groove to the realm of films like its predecessor in Disney-proper,...

Odd List Simon Brew 20 Sep 2013 - 07:14

They don't make funny movies any more, right? Wrong. If you're looking for a laugh, then here are some you may have missed...

For this list, blame The Hangover Part III. It was whilst walking out of that film that I got into a chat with someone, who was bemoaning the lack of genuinely funny movie comedies. Certainly, big budget Hollywood comedies have no end of problems right now - with the occasional exception - but I couldn't help thinking of the many neglected gems that had gone through my DVD player over the past decade or so.

As such, I started to put this list together. It's inevitably subjective, as one person's comedy is another person's snore fest. But I've tried to dig out a mix of comedies from the past three decades that have either flown under the radar completely, or...

Is the regret at what could have been enough to discolor what remains? Bit heavy, we know, but hold on, because we’re still talking about a brand-new episode of Mousterpiece Cinema! This week, Josh, Mike, and Gabe are joined by Myles McNutt of the Av Club to discuss the 2000 animated feature The Emperor’s New Groove, as well as the controversial documentary of its making, The Sweatbox. The light, fast-paced buddy comedy with David Spade and John Goodman was once a Prince and the Pauper-style, ambitious film with Spade and Owen Wilson, as crazy as that may sound. Josh, Mike, Gabe, and Myles debate the film, its placement in Disney’s canon, and exactly what kind of voice Lou Diamond Phillips (yes, really) has for animation this week, so make sure to check it out!

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The Emperor’s New Groove

Directed by Mark Dindal

Written by David Reynolds, Mark Dindal, and Chris Williams

Starring David Spade, John Goodman, Eartha Kitt, Patrick Warburton

One of the underlying goals of our show is to discuss the contextual issues at hand with any film we highlight. It’s impossible to attempt a halfway-intelligent discussion of the past, no matter what within the past we focus on, without deliberately acknowledging its context of our present and its original present. When we review, for example, Song of the South, it would be misleading for us not only to comment on how the film appears to us in 2013, but to focus on its initial release and subsequent re-releases, and how society reacted to it then versus now. That won’t eliminate how we feel about the actual movie, but the controversy surrounding the film is impossible to ignore. We don’t...

 

Before the advent of Pixar, Walt Disney Animation Studios was the leader in quality family entertainment. Now that they're both a part of the same company, it's even better. But back then, the Disney Company attempted to differentiate their movies by asking different famous actors to come in and perform their characters in a film. Inspired by Robin Williams' fantastic performance as the Genie in Aladdin, Disney Feature Animation (at the time) decided to get more ambitious with their casting. These are ten actors who were asked to be a part of a film and never got to make it; either due to scheduling conflicts, money issues or even death!

10. Joe Pesci as Mushu in Mulan

In a weird form of typecasting, Academy Award-winner Joe Pesci was originally cast as the little dragon, Mushu. After a few tries at the character, the filmmakers just felt his voice wasn't appropriate...

You may have seen Disney's Emperor's New Groove — the 2000 movie based on the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, centering on a bratty teenage monarch — but you probably missed the movie's interesting backstory. In 1997, Tantric gigolo and musician Sting was asked to compose the soundtrack for New Groove (the movie formerly known as Kingdom of the Sun). As part of his contract, Trudie Styler — Sting's wife — came on board as a documentarian, along with filmmaker John-Paul Davidson. The production process doesn't sound like it was a joyride by any stretch of the imagination. The documentary — The Sweatbox — got its name, because there was no air conditioning at Disney's screening room in Burbank, California. Animators would...

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Script rewrites. Exacting directors. Terrible twists of fate. We look back through the ages to bring you 20 nightmarish film shoots…

The lavish lifestyles of Hollywood’s more famous actors and filmmakers may hint at a world of glamour and cash, but as this list proves, the process of actually putting a movie together is rarely a dignified process. What follows is a lengthy catalogue of ill-advised location choices, tantrums, dreadful acts of God, spiked bowls of soup, ruined studios, bruised egos, broken bones and shattered dreams.

For the prospective filmmaker, this article could be read as a cautionary tale of just how badly wrong a production can go – though in order to keep the tone relatively light, we’ve excised those film productions that ended in tragedy (you’ll have to look elsewhere to discover the sad stories behind Twilight Zone: The Movie and The Crow).

Nevertheless, we suggest you...

Trudie Styler and Matthew Freud at the BAFTA Soho House Grey Goose after party at the Grosvenor House Hotel on February 21 in London. Styler was one of the nominated producers for Duncan Jones‘ Moon, in the running for Outstanding British Film of 2009. Styler’s fellow producers were Jones, Stuart Fenegan, and Nathan Parker. (Photo by Ian Gavan/Getty Images For Grey Goose.) Among the other films Styler has produced or co-produced are A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, Alpha Male, and The Sweatbox. She has also acted in a number of films and television series. Among her feature-film appearances are those in Mamba, Modi, Cheeky, Alpha Male, Bug, and Me Without You. Click on the photo to enlarge it.