Dacey wrote:That wasn't intended as a recommendation, Rand.
*Giant sea serpent appears*
"Mother, what are you doing?"
"I'm whistling!"
If we're going to
neurotically fixate on that plot point, the sea serpent is an illusion intended to create fear, which necessitates the musical-obligated number of "Whistle a Happy Tune". Where they say they're not afraid, and demonstrate it by...whistling a lot. If you want to blame someone for whistling, blame Oscar Hammerstein, even though he's been dead for fifty years.
A needless distraction, yes, but then, the song did seem a bit of a time-killer in the original musical, too.
As for why Iron Giant failed, think it wasn't so much the marketing, as that the marketing failed to convince us it WASN'T just another bit of forgettable Warner-wannabe, for the rest of us who live in the alternate timeline where Cats Don't Dance and Tom & Jerry
weren't box-office successes. To us by that point, "Warner Animation" meant Quest For Camelot and Space Jam, and you weren't going to convince us otherwise, ever again. EVER. (Of course, back then, adults always blurred which studio made which, so it was hard enough to remember that it was
Fox, not Warner, that made Ferngully and The Pagemaster...Or was it the other way around?) And apart from hardcore animation buffs who remembered the original Amazing Stories version of "Family Dog", Brad Bird in '99 was known only as "an ex-Simpsons writer", which made parents expect the humor would be lowbrow, and the squirrel in the pants didn't help matters any.
Studios treated animation as a marketable generic commodity all the way up to the great Rugrats-Bubble pop of '02, so the marketing accent of any non-Disney/Pixar movie was on the plot and gags. It had to survive on word of mouth, and did (in the underground), but the idea of mass audiences going to see an animated movie because it was
good was one unfortunate year ahead of its time.
