Why was this movie such an enormous flop?

Just watched it & the answer is as plain as the hand infront of my face - the songs are AWFUL ! Just dreadful ! Especially when compared to similar musicals of this age . Unforgivable . About half way through i found myself reaching for the remote to mute every time they started singing it was so bad .

There's your answer - simple .

That which does not Kill me makes me Stranger . . .

I like Doctor Dolittle well enough (it gets a 7.5/10 from me), but I think it's easy to understand why it didn't do better at the time, and why it isn't more well-liked now. One problem is definitely the length relative to the type of content and the fact that it could be seen as a kid's film. The music couldn't be more dated, and was dated for the late 60s, too. The tone is very odd in that it is a bit stodgy, it has "comedy of manners" elements, it is surreal and absurdist, and it is a bit dark all at the same time. The dark elements are particularly unusual--for example, the whole bit about eating meat versus being a vegetarian, the idea of animal cannibalism, etc.


http://www.rateyourmusic.com/~JrnlofEddieDeezenStudies

Well...I guess I should chime in here.

I was 11 when the movie came out. I got the soundtrack album for Christmas. I saw the movie just after its exclusive run at some Wilshire-district movie theater, when it went into general release.

I had also read most of the Doctor Doolittle books by Hugh Lofting the previous year and loved them (I read "The Story of Doctor Doolittle" in practically one day, staying up late one night to finish it).

Simply put, given how a movie about the Doctor Doolittle stories might have been pitched to the Hollywood moguls looking for more "Sound of Music" gold, well..."it must have seemed like a good idea at the time."

The idea that all these animals would be used, the character of an eccentric doctor who spoke innumerable animal languages, the presence of two big bugs (the giant Lunar Moth and the Great Pink Sea Snail), the exotic locations, the even more exotic-looking animal the "Pushmee-Pullyou" etc., must have all seemed surefire fodder for a big budget Hollywood musical.

But, in the end, the story has NO HEART. No one gives a $h!t about the good doctor. The character ambles about his adventures (amid a mish-mash of storylines pulled from different "Doctor Doolittle" books) with no driving instinct except that he is some kind of tepid explorer.

I remember looking at the movie stills that were included in the booklet that came with the soundtrack album. It was obvious the movie's budget was huge - and I remember my mother telling me at least a year prior to the movie's release that "Doolittle" was going to require all this expensive pre-production because the animals had to be trained (she had heard on some TV show).

I remember finally seeing Rex Harrison dressed as the Good Doctor and Anthony Newley as "Matthew Mugg, the Irish Cat's Meatman" and thought "Ugh! The whole effect is offputting." All those overblown sets and elaborate costumes - when, in fact, the world of the Good Doctor had been defined in simplistic but charming black and white line drawings by author Hugh Lofting in the books (Doolittle was this rather bland but nevertheless pleasant-looking fat guy, and the resulting renderings required no stretch of the imagination to accept that Jip the Dog or Chee-Chee the Chimp was talking to him).

Harrison in the title role was miscast. The doctor in the books came off as a very honest, humble and good-hearted old man. Harrison came off as gratingly arrogant (he is essentially playing a variant of Henry Higgins - replete with a lush English manor - which was hardly the abode of the doctor in the books).

And the fanciful animals - the Snail, the Moth and the Pushmee-Pullyou - looked stupidly, absurdly FAKE.

The biggest misfire, however, was one of presentation logic:
In the books, whenever the doctor talked to the animals, the exchanged verbage was nevertheless presented in print in plain English, even when the doctor was talking to lots of different animals (monkeys, cows, dogs, chimps, birds of all sorts, etc). Thus, the storylines could progress smoothly because the reader didn't have to actually account for all the different sounds that were presumably being uttered between human and animal. In the movie, however, the sounds/"speech" of the animals is problematic: Harrison and his animal co-stars communicate - often humorously - but what's being "said" ultimately has to be translated to the audience before the story can proceed. The script therefore always has the Doctor explaining the animal "talk" to some other onscreen human character(s) - which bogs down the movie badly. What results is a severe disconnect between the doctor and his animal friends that is never overcome - which was never the case in the books.

Seriously, though, the perfect choice to play "Doctor Doolittle" would have been Frank Morgan, the great 1930s and 1940s character actor who played "Dr. Marvel" as well as the title character in "The Wizard of Oz." Unfortunately, Morgan had died nearly 20 years before! But imagine him in the role in a movie with less ornate trappings and more heart, and you can understand how a screen adaptation of "Doctor Doolittle" could have succeeded very well - both critically and commercially.


"Don't call me 'honey', mac."
"Don't call me 'mac'... HONEY!"

The overall conception of the film is the first culprit: the studio clearly wanted to mate Mary Poppins with My Fair Lady in the hopes of capturing an enormous audience. Their costly, wrong-headed gamble failed resoundingly. (Chitty Chitty Bang Bang met a similar, albeit less ignominious fate--and it's sort of rewritten its own history by becoming a cult favorite and recent reincarnation as a stage production).

The other culprit is something far less tangible, but compelling: a fickle and dwindling audience. By the time of its release (in the USA), student protests about the Vietnam War, the rise of drug culture, the fact that people over the age of 30 were no longer attending the movies as that group used to--all were determining factors. Escapism became anathema. Children weren't captivated by it, the critics were bored (and scathing), and the average moviegoer of the time just wasn't interested in a soporific musical fantasy for children while The Graduate, Bonnie and Clyde, The Dirty Dozen, To Sir With Love, Bullitt, and European imports like Belle de Jour, Closely Watched Trains, Blow-Up and Un Homme et Une Femme were much more exciting, hip, provocative, and worthy reflections of their time. And that made the cash registers ring. And how!

There's no way to completely rationalize Dolittle's failure: yes, big-time musicals like this, Camelot, Half a Sixpence, Star!, Sweet Charity, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (which should have been a hit; it's terrific) Finian's Rainbow, Goodbye Mr. Chips, Hello Dolly!, On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, Song of Norway (another film that failed utterly because the producers mistakenly believed the operetta setting and scenery of that spectacularly beautiful country would easily duplicate the unparalleled success of The Sound of Music) and The Happiest Millionaire were gilded road-show engagements that failed to earn back their bloated budgets. Some were good, some were bad--nearly all had at least a few real virtues--but the quality of the individual efforts has little to do with their ultimate success or failure. The times, they were a-changin'! Yet, Thoroughly Modern Millie--which came out the very same year--was a box office smash, and both Funny Girl and Oliver! made piles of dough for Columbia Pictures the very next year, so some musical entertainments were pulling in the crowds.

Personally, despite the evident craft and skill that went into producing Doctor Dolittle, (it isn't shoddy or slapdash; the music is frequently lively and amusing, the lyrics slightly less so, and there are a couple of moments when something interesting or surprising actually threatens to materialize but doesn't) I think it's fair to say that it is quite possibly the single worst movie ever nominated for Best Picture. Why? Because it's silly, boring, episodic, lacking real charm or warmth, seems confused about its own identity, features obvious special effects in the incarnation of a Giant Pink Sea-snail, and goes on forfu ckingever.

"Thank you, thank you--you're most kind. In fact you're every kind."

I grew up watching this movie, and I love everything except what you mentioned about the men's attraction to Emma. Only because I feel like Matthew and Emma are a nice love-interest in the first half of the movie, and that's developing nicely, but then after the song "After Today" that ship sails off into the Bermuda Triangle, vanishes, and is never heard from again. And instead Emma and the Doctor sing that other song together, and then they kiss, and frankly the Doctor is way too old for Emma. Plus their relationship wasn't very well built up in the first half--it's like the writers were planning to put Matthew and Emma together and then suddenly changed their minds but never rewrote the first half of the script to reflect the change.

That's the only thing wrong with it to me, but I don't think that's enough to justify this movie being a flop.

As for your point about the natives--maybe TODAY we would think the portrayal of the natives is politically incorrect (although considering the natives are well-read and self-taught and speak English better than most people today, they're not exactly a stereotype), but at the time the movie was made I don't think that would've been an issue to audiences. I mean, the Civil Rights Movement had only just ended. So America had literally just begun treating black Americans like people; it's not like people would have been really offended by non-human treatment of other peoples.

So I'm really not sure. It's a mystery...but oh well. I've got the DVD, so my roommate and I are enjoying it no matter what the critics said.

I think the main reason this film flopped is easy. It's a musical and the songs aren't good. All musicals live and die on the strength of their score. To top it off, the lead actor doesn't sing. It's a formula for failure.


"If Jesus came back and saw what's going on in his name, he'd never stop throwing up."

What's politically incorrect about the depiction of the natives? William Shakespeare X was very well-spoken and talks about how educated they all are??

He carries illegal weapons, drives fast cars, and wears clothes obviously designed by a homosexual.

[deleted]