Tale as old as time/Song as old as rhyme...
So coos the heart-tugging theme song of Beauty and the Beast. But wait a minute: Isn't it a bit unusual for a brand-new movie to make a big point about being old? Aren't movies always supposed to be new and original?
Not at Disney — not this time.
The studio tried that last year, and look what happened. Disney's heavily promoted holiday-season release was The Rescuers Down Under, an animated adventure sequel to 1977's The Rescuers that quickly sank at the box office. The problem, as Disney studios chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg now sees it, was that ''Rescuers didn't have the ingredients critically important to our other animated successes, the great themes of good and evil and the potential of humanity.''
This time, Disney was taking no chances: It crammed Beauty and the Beast full of good and evil, humor, great songs — and it launched an unprecedented campaign to guarantee the film's instant acceptance as an oxymoron: a brand-new ''classic.'' The strategy seems to be working: In its opening weekend, Nov. 22-24, Beast earned more than $9 million, the strongest start ever for a new animated film.
Under Katzenberg's watchful command during four years of development and production, a battalion of nearly 600 artists, designers, writers, musicians, and other creative types gave Beast the stage-musical style that made Disney's 1989 The Little Mermaid a major hit ($181 million in ticket sales worldwide) as well as the second-best-selling movie on video, behind E.T. (Disney's own Fantasia is expected to top both by January). Equally important, they dressed the movie in the familiar look of the classic Disney cartoon features. With production still in full throttle last May, Disney released 6.4 million videocassettes of The Jungle Book with a behind-the-scenes teaser about Beast hosted by Katzenberg, who assured viewers that Beast would ''take us to a magical place like all Disney classics.''
In late summer, the studio submitted an unfinished cut to the New York Film Festival (which had never shown a cartoon feature) and then, before the completed film opened, ran newspaper and TV ads proclaiming it ''an instant classic.'' Then there's the merchandising: ''Collectible'' toys and books appeared in stores in mid-November, all designed to reinforce the idea of Beast as something upscale and special. That cachet is increasingly important to Disney now that rival animation producers such as Don Bluth (The Land Before Time) and Steven Spielberg (An American Tail: Fievel Goes West) are competing to capture the hearts, minds, and dollars of the baby boomers' babies.
Putting all this image building in motion has involved ''armies, absolute armies,'' says Beast producer Don Hahn, who himself spent 3 1/2 years on the film. In the fall of 1989, before a single scene had been animated, Hahn began drumming up excitement among ''the ancillary departments in Disney that make these movies into events.''
Armed only with sketches and a demo recording of Beast songs by The Little Mermaid's Oscar-winning team, composer Alan Menken and lyricist Howard Ashman, Hahn hawked his project to the people in product development, hobnobbed with Disney Store managers, and chatted up park planners at Walt Disney World, Disneyland, and even Euro Disneyland, which opens in France next April.
But doesn't all this promotional energy threaten to make the movie itself a mere footnote? ''When Jeffrey Katzenberg green-lights a movie, it's because it's a good story, not because it's going to be a good merchandising vehicle,'' Hahn says. ''We don't let the tail wag the dog.''
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