Can Roger Rabbit Sweeten ‘Honey’? : Disney Plans Summer Double Bill of Toon, Feature Film

This month, audiences will be treated to a Disney moviegoing experience that most young children have never enjoyed and many adults only vaguely, and fondly, remember.

When “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids” premieres on Friday, it will be preceded in theaters by a 7 1/2-minute animated short--Disney’s first in almost 25 years--of Roger Rabbit in “Tummy Trouble,” produced by Disney and Steven Spielberg.

“Tummy Trouble” is Disney’s move to begin the grooming process of its first animated star in decades for a lasting place in Walt Disney history. In doing so, Disney is hoping the double bill will assure that “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids” doesn’t get lost amid the summer’s bonanza of major motion pictures.

Disney was prompted to produce its first animated short since 1965--a once-common practice used to introduce Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Goofy and other Disney characters--by the wild success of “Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” which the studio claims has grossed more than $325 million worldwide since its release one year ago.

“Tummy Trouble,” produced under the banner of the film-inspired Maroon Cartoons, represents the first in a series of proposed Roger Rabbit animated shorts. The gag-ridden, Tex Avery-style cartoon, rumored to cost $1.8 million, is intended to pave a cartoon roadway to a Roger Rabbit sequel, said Walt Disney board chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg.

“Disney, as a whole, has made a commitment to try and really grow Roger into what one day may become a classic Disney character,” Katzenberg said. “The only way you can do that, if you look back historically at the way it was accomplished, is to continue to make product--movies, animated shorts, television shows, whatever format you can to keep these characters alive and growing in front of the American public.”

“Who Framed Roger Rabbit”--despite featuring a starkly drawn Roger Rabbit whom critics found less lovable than many warm, soft-hued characters of Disney past--was a shot in the arm to a flagging animation field. Pioneering new techniques in the combination of animation and live action, the film received six Oscar nominations in technical categories, winning three of them for visual effects, editing and sound editing. Most significantly, “Roger Rabbit” demonstrated that animated features can still paint the box office green.

“Disney sees that they have a character with real potential, but you cannot keep a character alive who’s done only one film,” said Leonard Maltin, who chronicled the history of modern animation in his book “Of Mice and Magic.”

“It’s costing Disney a lot to keep Roger alive because you can’t make money doing shorts today. But it will be a smart investment in the long run. Disney has its tentacles in . . . merchandising, licensing, video, television, books, records, comics, theme parks. Roger Rabbit can be very valuable in all those areas.”

In “Tummy Trouble,” Baby Herman swallows a toy rattle and Roger Rabbit must whisk the infant to the hospital. The Indiana Jones-paced adventure is relentless and exciting, and pummels Roger with flying gags, objects and hospital utensils. The cartoon is a departure from Disney’s traditional character-generated films. At the end, the Toons step out of the cartoon and into a live-action set--a tantalizing reminder of the original film and the sequel to come.

(Katzenberg said that, due to the complexity of assembling a live-action animation movie, the sequel to “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” is about four years away.)

According to one source, exhibitors who receive “Tummy Trouble” will find it spliced directly to “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids” on the film reel. Disney will insert detailed warnings preventing exhibitors from removing the animated short or running it out of order. Spotters, the instructions read, will be sent out to make sure the rules are adhered to.

A few insiders who have not seen the moderate-budget “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids,” which boasts special effects such as a giant bowl of Cheerios filled with 16,000 gallons of artificial milk and O-shaped cereal bits 20-feet in diameter, suggest that “Tummy Trouble” is being used as a crutch to prop up a film that might otherwise fare poorly against this summer’s heavy hitters.

The Walt Disney feature film is a family-oriented, science-fiction adventure starring Rick Moranis as a discredited scientist whose electromagnetic shrinking machine accidentally zaps his children and the neighbor’s kids down to 1/4-inch in size, forcing the tiny troupe to fight their way home across a back yard that has become a jungle teeming with danger.

“In the ‘70s, Disney re-released a lot of feature cartoons to support movies that were not so good, movies like ‘Unidentified Flying Oddball’ and ‘Gus the Pigskin Mule.’ These are some of the worst movies ever made,” said Jere Guldin, vault manager of the UCLA Film and Television Archives. “I don’t know if it is or not, but ‘Honey, I Shrunk the Kids’ sounds like one of those titles.”

“If we didn’t feel we had a good movie, wouldn’t we be hiding it? Not letting critics view it until the day before it opens, as some studios have done?” Katzenberg responded. “We had a press junket as early as May. Unfortunately, that’s just the sick, cynical aspect of this business--everybody has to find a negative side. We experienced the same doubts with ‘Dead Poets Society.’ Four weeks ago we were schmucks. Now we’re geniuses.”

Everyone interviewed for this story who saw advance screenings of “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids” said the movie stands on its own.

“I feel strongly about the potential of the movie on its own merits,” said Chan Wood, head film buyer for Pacific Theaters. “I have to believe that Disney saw the type of product around this summer--’Ghostbusters,’ ‘Batman,’ ‘Indiana Jones,’ ‘James Bond’--and tried to put together the strongest program they could to compete. When I first saw ‘Honey, I Shrunk the Kids,’ I felt it could be this summer’s sleeper.”

The first two-thirds of the film trailer that is playing in theaters is devoted to “Tummy Trouble,” with “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids” appearing as a tag. Katzenberg explained that an exclusive “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids” trailer has already played for three months.

“The response to that trailer was among the best we’ve ever had, but you can’t play the same trailer over and over again,” he said. “We planned it this way nine months ago. Now we want to say with Roger Rabbit, ‘Here’s something new and added and special on top of,’ as opposed to ‘instead of.’ ”

When asked if “Tummy Trouble” was being used as a quick-fix, one film buyer shot back: “Come on. You’re talking about a 7-minute cartoon and a 93-minute feature. A 7-minute cartoon can’t carry a film that’s 93 minutes long. Who’s going to pay $7 just to see that?”

There was a time in the early days of “talkie” motion pictures when nearly every film shown carried with it a cartoon as an integral part of the moviegoing experience. Walt Disney, who magically breathed sound--and later Technicolor--into cartoons with Mickey Mouse, fired the imagination of audiences caught up in the Depression.

Entire movie programs were packaged containing newsreels, cartoons, travelogues, fashion stories and music and comedy shorts. The major movie studios, which also owned theater chains, developed or released their own cartoon series. Woody Woodpecker (Universal), Popeye (Paramount), Bugs Bunny (Warner Bros.), Mighty Mouse (20th Century Fox), Tom and Jerry (MGM) and Mr. Magoo (Columbia) all debuted in motion picture theaters.

“An important factor I try to emphasize all the time is that the old Hollywood cartoons were never made for kids,” said Jerry Beck, animation historian and author of “Loonie Tunes and Merrie Melodies.”

“Cartoons in theaters were like comic strips today in newspapers. They were something everybody could relate to, adults and kids alike. That’s why it’s not so unusual today to see Disney pair ‘Tummy Trouble’ with a feature film. That’s the way movies were first intended to be seen.”

The demise of the theatrical cartoon began in the late ‘30s with the rise of the double feature. In the late ‘40s, the government put an end to block booking, and movie studios were no longer permitted to own and monopolize theater chains.

When television arrived on the scene in the ‘50s, the studio cartoon characters were squeezed into the boob tube as a way for studios to continue earning money on them. When television shows such as “The Flinstones” were introduced in the ‘60s, cartoons had mostly faded from the silver screen. Disney’s last animation short was “Goofy’s Freeway Trouble” in 1965.

Eighty-nine-year-old Walter Lantz, who created Woody Woodpecker, Andy Panda, Chilly Willy and the Beary Family, managed to continue producing animated shorts for Universal until 1972.

“Walter says all the time, he just couldn’t make his money back on animated shorts,” said Faith Frenz Heckman, an executive producer at MCA animation, which owns Waltzer Lantz productions.

“Television stole a big part of the moviegoing audience. Walter’s animation in the theaters was suddenly successful on television. The audience was there and the dollars were there.”

With the renewed interest in animation, attributed largely to the ongoing efforts of Disney and now Spielberg and ex-Disney animator Don Bluth (“An American Tail,” “The Land Before Time”), studio cartoon characters are beginning to show their faces again.

“Who Framed Roger Rabbit” gathered a host of famous characters from the early era of film. Heckman said she has already been approached by a theatrical chain that wants to run Woody Woodpecker re-releases.

Disney, meanwhile, is busy working on its first animated featurette in a decade, “Mickey and the Prince and the Pauper,” and production is already under way at the Disney-MGM Studios in Florida on a second Roger Rabbit Maroon Cartoon short, “Roller Coaster Rabbit.”

“One of our goals is to really stretch the creativity and originality of our animation department,” Disney’s Katzenberg said, “and there is no better format that they can work in than the short format.

“In the original feature, (director) Bob Zemekis and (animation director) Richard Williams created a rich and textured, interesting Toon world where almost anything can happen. It’s a great training ground, and we have a lot of new, ambitious animating talent who are cutting their teeth on these shorts.”