#listen the folks at filmation had nerves of fucking steel
We need to get on top of copyright reform so we can have more unauthorised sequels to classic Disney movies where the title character straight up fights the Devil without needing to piss around and pretend we’re merely drawing on the same public domain source material. Pinocchio and the Emperor of the Night is pulling a lot of weight here, and we need to share the burden!
@nerdragons-hoardreplied:
Pinocchio and the HWAT
Pinocchio and the Emperor of the Night.
The 1987 unauthorised sequel to the 1940 Disney film.
You know, the one where Pinocchio fights the Devil:
I saw this~ It was undoubtedly cool but was so strange relating it to Disney Pinocchio X3; I always assumed it was just riffing on classic Pinocchio as a theme. There was also another one that was like, Pinocchio in space? and there was a giant space whale? Like, people trying to use established characters I assume to save time on explanations but they went in wildly different directions with it.
Pinocchio and the Emperor of the Night is specifically positioned as an unofficial sequel to the Disney adaptation, and contains elements that are present in the Disney adaptation, but not in the public domain source material. There was a big lawsuit about it and everything – one which Filmation ultimately won, as the court determined that the film doesn’t contain enough Disney-exclusive elements to qualify as a derivative work.
(Funnily enough, this isn’t the only time that Filmation had pulled this stunt. Their 1989 release Happily Ever After is very obviously an unofficial sequel to Disney’s 1937 Snow Whiteadaptation.
Happily Ever After faced a trickier writing challenge than Emperor of the Night because the iconic Seven Dwarfs – Grumpy, Sneezy, Happy, etc. – are original inventions of the Disney adaptation, and thus obviously could not appear in an unlicensed sequel.
Filmation worked around this by having the Seven Dwarfs be mentioned in general terms, but never appear on screen, having accepted a mining contract in a neighbouring kingdom in between the two films; their own diamond mine is left in the temporary care of the Seven Dwarfelles, an all-girl set of thematically similar cousins who are, for no particular reason, given X-Men style super powers.)
