In this episode we discussed The Black Cauldron from 1985, and briefly, the Sierra video game of the same name.

Many thanks to our guest Mattie!

Our email address is stillscaredpodcast@gmail.com and we're on instagram @stillscaredpodcast and twitter @stillscaredpod! Intro music is by Maki Yamazaki, and you can find her music on her bandcamp. Outro music is by Jo Kelly, and you can find their music under the name Wendy Miasma on bandcamp. Artwork is by Letty Wilson, find their work at toadlett.com

Transcript

Ren Welcome to Still Scared: Talking Children’s Hororr, a podcast about creepy, spooky and disturbing children’s books, films and TV. I’m Ren Wednesday, my co-host is Adam Whybray, we’re joined today by my boyfriend Mattie —

Mattie Hullo!

Ren — And we’re talking about The Black Cauldron, the first PG rated Disney film, from 1985. Enjoy!

Adam Good evening, Ren! And happy halloween!

Ren Ohh yeah, this is going to be our Halloween episode!

Adam Let’s be real, this is going to be our Halloween episode. I’ve already got a great halloween decoration from TK Maxx —

Ren The home of Halloween decorations.

Adam I know, they come in so early. It’s a skeleton toad but the toad skeleton has warts, the bones of the toad have warts!

Ren I need to introduce our guest, Mattie, so he can react!

Mattie Your toad has bone spurs! Your toad cannot serve in the military!

Mattie But yes, hello, I’m Mattie and I’m here!

Ren Mattie is here and in the same existing zone as me, sitting at the same countertop.

Mattie About 2ft away.

Ren New experiments in podcast recording.

Adam I’m existing in the same zone as a broken shoulder, my broken shoulder, not just any broken shoulder, that sounds quite sinister.

Ren So yeah, give Adam lots of sympathy.

Adam Yes thank you, I came off my bike. I feel guilty about having a week off teaching, though I know my students will be like: “Yeah, cover teachers! We can run riot! Destroy the room!” They’ll be having a whale of a time.

One of the cover teachers did message me and say that the kids have been behaving badly so I’ve put a note with tomorrow’s cover lesson that says, “Look your Peppa Pig and Paw Patrol stickers have arrived and you won’t be getting them if you treat the cover teacher badly.” I didn’t think they’d go for them, but I guess it’s nostalgic for that generation of teenagers.

Mattie Beautiful.

Adam But nevertheless I did manage to watch this weeks film and play this weeks game: The Black Cauldron!

(Trailer for The Black Cauldron. “Legend has it there was once a king so cruel and so evil, that the gods feared him. Since no prison could hold him, he was trapped forever in the form of a black cauldron. Walt Disney pictures presents: The Black Cauldron!
Escape into a world of darkness! A world of excitement!
A world of dreams! Through the magic of 70mm photography and six track Dolby sound. You will be transported to a fantasy event for the entire family.
In the great tradition of Disney animated classics, the newest spectacle of them all: The Black Cauldron.”)

Ren Adam despite being injured has gone above and beyond and played a game for this! I have not, I’ve just watched a film.

Adam You mean you didn’t play an ancient Sierra game with punishing deaths and almost no way to complete it without a walkthrough!

Ren No, I didn’t!

Mattie Broadening the horizons of the podcast.

Adam I will say that to play this I had to blu-tack down my function keys, because in an exciting innovation this doesn’t work by text prompts, it works by the function keys, those keys that normally control the volume and other things. But it’s quite a strain, especially with a broken shoulder, to stretch your way across to the function keys with your little finger to interact, I bluetacked it down.

I will say I only lasted ten minutes in the game, but I’ll go back to the game, it is a faithful adaptation so I played the equivalent of the first twenty minutes of the film.

Ren Okay.

Mattie Do you get the impression that it is like playing along the film where if you make choices that diverge from the plot of the film, you die?

Adam Well, I died of dehydration and not drinking enough water and I didn’t see much water consumption in the film so I think there was a hard survivalist element that wasn’t present in the game.

Mattie Simulationist Black Cauldron game.

Adam And also the goose was far more agressive. In the film the geese are quite scared.

Mattie Those are some unrealistic geese!

Adam Me and Ren have lived on York campus, and they were some unrealistically fearful geese, the Sierra game did a much better job of stimulating geese, because there was a goose that kept knocking me down, again and again.

Mattie Awww.

Ren When we did live in York, Adam would get particularly picked on by the geese, for some reason.

Adam I’m glad you recognise that, my dad gets picked on by chickens, it’s in the family.

Ren They really went for you.

Adam And I don’t even eat them!

Ren You don’t even eat them!

Mattie Yeah, but do they know that?

Ren This is The Black Cauldron from 1985, it’s a Disney film, it didn’t do very well —

Adam It managed to earn back about half of its production budget?

Ren Yep. And was consequently banished to limbo for quite some time.

Adam It’s not even an offensive one like Song of the South, which is rightfully banished because it’s horrendously offensive and racist, this was just banished because it didn’t make Disney enough money. Clearly the greater sin in Disney’s eyes, let’s be honest!

Ren They were still advertising Song of the South on videos I had as a kid in the ‘90s.

Adam Yep, whereas I didn’t hear anything about The Black Cauldron, I never heard about it as a kid!

Mattie See this is where I reckon The Black Cauldron is to Disney what Earthsea is to Studio Ghibli, they wanted it to be something and then too many cooks made it not a good film so they had to mind hole it.

Ren

Adam I still get quite cross about Earthsea, because the great Ursula Le Guin was lied to about it - they told her that Miyazaki would direct it, and obviously she didn’t think ‘that’s his not very good son’, it’s a bait and switch! You can’t do that!

Mattie This is a much lighter version of that situation, when asked about it Lloyd Alexander who wrote the books said: “It’s a great film, I enjoyed watching the film, not much like the books, hope you read the books, but it’s fun”. We’ll take that.

Adam He wasn’t bitterly disappointed —

Mattie — Profoundly offended

Ren You’d seen it before, Mattie?

Mattie Loved it as a kid!

Ren I’d not seen it until two days ago —

Adam I watched it for the first time ever today!

Ren — What were your feelings about it as a kid Mattie?

Mattie Watching it yesterday for the first time since I was about 7, I was struck by the fact that I remembered nothing of the interpersonal relationships whatsoever, and mostly just remembered how cool the horned king was and that the pig was having the time of her life. So I was watching it going — I don’t remember this romance, who’s this dude, what’s going on. So presumably as is classic little kid Mattie was just like ‘the horned king is awesome, look at all those corpses coming out of that cauldron, this is a great time, I want to watch this again’

Adam My understanding is that the final cut is quite censored, quite a lot of footage was cut out.

Mattie I had a four hour train journey, so there has been research! From what I can gather twelve minutes was cut out, on the 25th anniversary DVD eight of those minutes were put back in as bonus, but what we didn’t find out wether the version on Disney plus is that one or not. I think it’s the original cut, because you’re watching it and someone will say something and it will never be referred to again, and it’s like: “ah, I see, cuts".

Adam I don’t understand the censorship on Disney Plus! They get rid of the Simpsons joke: “That’s not a knife, that’s a spoon, I see you’ve played knifey-spoony before then,” —

Mattie I didn’t know that!

Adam Yeah, that’s completely cut!

Mattie Gutted.

Adam But then the whole Cartridge Family episode, where Homer gets a gun is on there. I don’t know, and obviously all of American Horror Story is on there, which is not just queasy and unpleasant but often quite aggressively problematic in it