Yeah, I try my hardest to see the original film as a separate entity from the films and series it spawned. What I liked most about this movie is just how dark it is. The characters themselves are generally cheerful and unaffected by the sheer gloom of the world this movie portrays. Bright green is an alien color among this hellscape, with craggy rocks, sheer canyons, dark skies, tar pits, caverns and spewing volcanoes.
The later movies miss the whole point of it all, trying to imagine further and further conflict of varying ridiculousness when the major challenge of reuniting the kids with their parents in the vision of heaven they later call home is overcome. I mean, come one, I know there was a song in the first film, and a great one, but it was never a damn musical like the sequels try to make it.
To be fair though, I don't think any of it was TOO unreasonable or dull until that one with the blue meteor. Talk about jumping the shark; ALIENS, in a friggin' Universe where the dinosaurs speak to each other. That was it for me, seeing the equivalent of the studio throwing up their hands and saying "we've got nothing...".
I'm just disturbed it was allowed to go so far. I hadn't been aware there had been more than seven of the sequels, and I've never even HEARD of the TV series before quite recently.
The worst of it all is how much it seems to drive nails into the coffin that is Don Bluth's career. Here was a man who single-handedly filled the void left by Disney before their big Renaissance in a big way. What I'm most disappointed in, is with how his success seems to run in inverse proportion with Disney's, yet when Disney was floundering for so many years of the new millennium, he never made a move. We really could have used someone like him about the same time "Brother Bear" and "Home on the Range" were getting squitted out into theaters...
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