OM DENNE EPISODE
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 its cheerful kind of way!
Ren So the setup for the Black Cauldron — We watched the intro again just before this, because it does go by quite fast. There’s some kind of ancient evil king, and in order to depose him he’s thrown alive into molten iron at which point he becomes a cauldron, which is the black cauldron which can then be used to bring forth the deathless army of the undead, at a future date.
Adam So the king is the cauldron?
Ren I believe so, yes
Adam Because I thought the spirit of the king had been trapped in the cauldron, but this explains why the cauldron had a face.
Ren I think he is meant to be the cauldron.
Mattie There’s also a few scenes later on when the climax of the film is occurring and the cauldron’s face looks so judgemental!
Adam “That’s not cooking a hotpot!”
Mattie “They don’t evil king like they did in my day!”
Ren I haven’t written a summary of this so it might be a bit erratic —
Adam Well, Mattie watched this as a kid so he knows this plot inside out by the sound of it.
Ren So we have a boy, Tarran, who’s like the twin brother of Arthur from the sword int the stone —
Mattie — Same actor
Ren — Same actor. He’s an assistant pig keeper. I’ve written: ‘The child craves war’, he wants to be a solider, there’s a war going on and he wants to be involved —
Adam Yeah, he wants to kill.
Ren But his mentor is like “you’ve got to look after the pig, she’s very important”.
Adam He’s very jealous of the pig, a lot of his anger is coming from the preferential treatment of the pig. What’s her name?
RenHenwen.
Adam Penguin?
Ren Henwen! She’s having a bath and she starts squealing and is frightened, and they realise that — the pig can see visions and they realise that the horned king is searching for the pig so he can find the cauldron, right?
Mattie I think the horned king is searching for the cauldron but he’s aware of the pig as a route to the cauldron.
Adam How do you discover that you have an oracular pig? Was it traded as an oracular pig or were there weird coincidences, like the pig makes a scuff mark in the dirt that looks like an acorn and then you go into the field and it’s full of acorns? Does this pig come from a long line of pig oracles?
Mattie I mean, the method of drawing visions from the pig is getting her to look at some water and swirl it and say an incantation, so I do wonder if at some point the pig was stood next to a pond and a duck swims by and it’s suddenly full of visions of the future, and they were like: “Ah, that would be an oracular pig.”
Adam I don’t know about the incantations, they might just be in an almanack.
Mattie I like the idea that they’re not necessary, they’re just a bit of razzle-dazzle.
Adam Yeah, maybe!
Ren So the Horned King has this flowing purple cloak and these curling horns, he wants the Black Cauldron to raise this army of deathless warriors, he is thirsting to be a god among mortal men. So Tarran, the boy, has to take the pig and go —
Mattie Go and sit in the woods with the pig, his mentor will come and get him at some point —
Adam I thought he was taking the pig to the fae folk because they’re invisible and could invisible the pig?
Ren Is that what he’s doing?
Adam I think so, he says goodbye to his mentor so I think he’s setting out on a journey to get the pig to safety with the faeries. He just fails really quickly!
Mattie He really does! He goes to hide in the woods, that he’s lived in his whole life, and within the distance that it takes for a pig to run away there’s a giant ominous castle that apparently no-one knew about!
Adam That’s about as far as I got int the game, I fed the pig some gruel and then the pig follows you and runs into the cottage and you get the divination and you’re told to lead the pig to the fairy folk, and then one of those huge pterodactyl creatures swoops down and picks up you and the pig, you’re thrown to the ground and then I just kept being told: “You’re really thirsty’,” went to the water trough that the pig uses, “nothing to use here”, and then I died of dehydration and then being a Sierra game it lectured me, and told me I really should make sure my character drinks water, and I thought: “I’m too old to be lectured by a Sierra game”.
Mattie “I’m not having this.”
Adam I’m not having this
Ren Fair. Did you meet Gurgi in the game?
Adam Yes, he just pranced in, he’s a little beast man, asked for some food and then I didn’t have any so he pranced away again. That was the best part of the game.
Ren Tarran - in between losing the pig and the pig being taken away by dragons meets this hairy little creature who steals an apple and has a little Gollum voice —
Mattie Kind of a a cross between Gollum and a Fizzgig —
Ren Does anyone want to do the Munchings and Crunchings?
Mattie “Munchity crunchity!”
Ren “Munchings and Crunchings in there somewhere!” He’s trying to steal the apple.
Mattie Gurgi has no friends but Gurgi wants friends to steal food from.
Ren So Henwen’s taken away, and Tarran’s like “Oh well, I need to go to the castle to get my pig back.” and Gurgi’s like —
Mattie “You will absolutely die and I'm not getting involved.”
Adam Yeah, I rather liked the desolate vision of Gurgi on the clifftop edge, saying: ”I’ll never see my friend again"
Mattie Yeah, so sad! And he’s not wrong, don’t go to that castle!
Adam Oh yeah, by all rights he should die very early. The game is far more realistic to be fair, there’s a lot of close scrapes in this film.
Ren There’s definitely peril!
Adam It’s not even mild peril!
Ren Moderate to severe peril, I’d say. In the castle poor little Henwen is in shackles, it’s very sad.
Mattie Very tragic. The worst party imaginable is happening.
Ren There’s goblins, I thought it was a two-headed dragon but it’s actually just two dragons sitting next to each other, which is less exciting, and there’s a fat dancing lady of the kind that Disney enjoys animating.
Mattie She’s having a blast!
Adam Disney himself?
Ren Yes, I will make that claim.
Mattie There’s really good flags. All the drapery at this terrible party is great, and the people at the party are the worst.
Adam I think there’s actually a real difference in quality in this film between the backgrounds and the character animation —
Mattie and Ren Yes.
Adam Because there’s some astonishing background work and some pretty shonky character animation.
Mattie Yep.
Ren The backgrounds are beautiful.
Adam Yeah! The backgrounds are, there are times in the game where I didn’t know what I was doing and I was like: “huh, this is like a walking simulator.” But with the film I probably would be just happy to look at it, there’s not much of a storyline, go full slow cinema.
Mattie
Ren Shall we do Texture of the Week?
Adam Oh yeah, okay, let’s do it. (Medieval chanting style: Texture of the Week, of the week, of the week, Texture of the week)
Ren Lovely, thank you. Yes, because mine is the mossy craggy interior of the castle —
Adam Oh come on! We keep having the same textures Ren!
Ren We’ve been doing this too long!
Adam We keep doing this! It was cute at first but now it’s starting to feel a bit odd, it’s starting to freak me a bit! Yeah, same here.
Mattie Mine was the delight of that pig having a bath —
Ren and Adam Awwww
Mattie The soft pink skin, the bubbles and the scrubby brush, that’s just a really good pig bath.
Ren I did also really like the skeleton of the former band, that was just really nicely painted.
Adam Some gorgeous backgrounds in this. I wrote ‘moss and lichen’.
Ren There’s all these blue-greys and orange-browns, really good backgrounds.
Mattie The red of the sky around the Horned King’s castle, if you’ve ever seen a sunset somewhere with a lot of air pollution, it was really well done, like yeah, that’s a bad place to be breathing, do not be there!
Ren So in this castle in this bad-vibes party, Henwen refuses to show the Horned King where the black cauldron is, she’s threatened — I couldn’t quite tell if the Horned King’s henchmen were orcs or if they were just bestial humans?
Adam They definitely seemed like beings you would encounter in a Fighting Fantasy game book, they have this slightly generic dark fantasy vibe, and I know this was an attempt to appeal to a more teenage audience and I do wonder if this was trying to ride the DnD coattails a bit actually —
Mattie — Right in the middle of the satanic panic. Which probably didn’t help at the pictures.
Adam Too many parents who were like: (Suffolk accent) : ”You’re not going to see that!”
Mattie “It’s got a devil in it!"
Ren It’s John Hurt who plays the Horned King with some relish, and when Tarran falls out of his hiding place he says: “Boy are you the keeper of this oracular pig!”
Adam That’s quite a good John Hurt impression!
Ren Oh, thank you! Tarran’s like “No, she’s not going to tell you where this cauldron is,” but then they get the guillotine out and he’s like: “Alright, Henwen, tell him,” but then some kind of commotion happens, he runs away with the pig, I might have lost the timeline a bit because there’s the bard —
Mattie There’s a chase scene through the castle —
Adam Well, we’re in the dungeon, right, and we get the two other characters in our plucky trio —
Mattie I think that before that we have to punt Henwen into the moat for a fall that would absolutely kill a pig. If you hit water at that height it’s like hitting concrete, but she’s a magic pig so it’s fine.
Adam “It’s just a little aireborne, it’s still good, it’s still good!”
Mattie It’s fine, water’s soft! Because yeah, he gets the pig away and then is caught and goes to the dungeon.
Ren And in the dungeon there is a bard who has a Welsh name that is not pronounced Welshly.
Adam So how should it be pronounced? If you were pronouncing this Welshy Mattie, how would you pronounce it?
Mattie (with correct Welsh pronounciation) Fflewddur Fflam?
Ren And the way they pronounce it…
Mattie It’s not quite “Floody Flum”, but it’s not far off.
Ren You were telling me a bit about the author and the background —
Mattie So is this kind of Welsh-flavoured several times removed, because The author is an American called Lloyd Chudley Alexander, who writes as Lloyd Alexander, and he was a soldier in the US army during World War II but he wasn’t in any combat roles, because he couldn’t combat role so good. He was a cymbal player in a marching band for a while, and a chaplain’s assistant and he was stationed in England and Wales for a few months and just got really into Welsh folklore and the Mabinogion and then used a lot of that as background for the books. But it’s flavour, and then that going through the Disney machine, and then voice actors who don't know Welsh, it’s beautiful, I love it. I am personally delighted to see my culture get mangled because it’s really funny, and it’s just nice that people know we’re there.
Ren Yep, so there’s a bard —
Mattie Who has a harp that has a string on his harp that breaks when you lie, which is implied but never really gone into, and he’s also King of his own Kingdom, which is also mentioned in passing and never touched on again.
Ren And the other member of the trio is Princess Eilonwey who just wanders into the attic where Tarran’s being kept?
Adam I found that quite odd, is she mid-escape herself?
Ren I think so, she does seem to have a lot of free rein for a prisoner.
Mattie You don’t really get a sense of if she’s in the process of escaping or if she’s just like ‘I’m going to live in the walls and do people’s heads in, this is fun’
Ren But she was captured because she has a mote, a floating bauble thing, very similar to what Link has —
Adam Yes, Navi!
Mattie She’s got Navi!
Ren The Horned King captured her because he thought that her bauble could tell him where the black cauldron is.
Adam I quite like the idea that the Horned King is going through the random divination objects locally, just — “Special shaped stick, yeah, have ‘em in the dungeon, we’ll see if that works”.
Mattie I also like the idea that the Horned King’s got the equivalent of when someone has a hamster and it lives in the walls — someone let her escape and now we can hear her, but we don’t quite know where she is.
Ren She leads Tarran to escape and on the way he finds a glowing sword, which is quite handy —
Adam It’s a bit too handy, isn't it.
Mattie It’s basically a plasma cutter!
Adam Uh-huh! It’s like the equivalent of playing a video game with a game genie, basically.
Ren And they have a little fight and a chase across a drawbridge, and they run away —
Adam What’s really cool about the sword, which is cool but also removes any heroism at all, is that the sword isn’t just powerful, it knows what to do — so the sword cuts the rope of the drawbridge, he doesn’t think to do that, the sword just always attacks the most useful thing to attack. So the sword has some kind of intelligence or it’s just so lucky that it can bend space-time? I quite like that idea, it’s not explained, but the idea is that it’s not just a powerful sword but it’s a cheat code, the sword always lets you win, somehow.
Mattie It’s the intelligence of a magical weapon that’s been stuck in a basement for a long time. It’s like: “You’ll do, just get me out of here”.
Ren I get a similar sense to The Mouse and his Child that this would make more sense if I read the book — Mattie’s shaking his head.
Mattie This is two books of five, and the Horned King is a very minor character —
Adam The Horned King is just this guy, you know.
Mattie He’s just this guy, he’s a weird little guy. I don’t remember very much about the books - I was going to try and read them but then I realised that I knew about doing this two days ago and that was stupid. But I don’t think the books would help.
Adam My main enjoyment — you said Mattie that your main memory of the film isn’t plot-based, the plotting is just one thing after another, and the characters aren’t that memorable, but it does have a certain something! I can see why it didn’t do very well, but it does have quite a lot of peril, and a certain atmosphere, and some of those backgrounds are gorgeous.
Mattie It’s beautiful and it barrels along really well, certainly as an adult who’s been diagnosed with ADHD I can certainly imagine my child self phasing out to look at the background and then being barrelled along with the action. You don’t really need to know what’s going on. It’s a good film but not in the way that films are meant to be good.
Adam Yes, yes.
Ren There’s some amazing set-pieces, The Horned King is so captivating. It must have been so scary. You have a friend, Hywel, who —
Mattie He may have been taken to the pictures to see it, and he may have been hiding because it was not a good time. And this film was made in the armpit between classic Disney and Disney resurgence, so that old guard had left and the new guard hadn’t settled in yet. So there was a lot of turbulence at the studio.
Adam It’s directed by the same people as Fox and the Hound, isn’t it?
Mattie Yeah, and basically all of the edits that were taken out of the final footage, all the work had been done. Usually you’d cut things about when you were still in storyboard but part of it was just that when they tested it, people were too scared! It was previously, more frightening, and they were like ‘No, you need to cut a bunch of this’.
I think there’s more of the army, but I'm really curious about this because as a story there’s no world-building. The only people who we know exist are Tarran, the fae folk and the castle — so who was the Horned King going to kill? What is he conquering? And I don’t know if some of that footage was people getting absolutely ganked by a lot of skeletons.
Adam Ray Harry Hausen skeleton war.
Ren Ah, I want the horror cut!
Adam Yeah, because it is still pretty dark but I do feel like it could lean into it a bit more. I looked up Tim Burton’s initial character designs that were rejected—
Ren Ah, that was this one!
Adam Yeah, they were just as you imagine: sharp teeth, ridiculous body proportions, scraggly hair.
Mattie That would have been brilliant. And there was a whole soundtrack done, but because of the cuts they made none of the soundtrack lined up anymore, so they had to cobble something else together, so there’s clearly an amazing film that didn’t quite happen. *
Adam Yeah, I agree, I think it's one of those death by a thousand cuts films where it’s been butchered in production but you can still see there was something great there.
Mattie And there was an animator’s strike halfway through, which obviously absolutely support strikers, but also that can have an interesting effect on production, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. So we don’t really know how that affected things.
Ren So the boy and the princess and the bard escape, Gurgi turns up again and points out tracks that could be Henwens that they follow to a pink and purple whirlpool which they fall in and there’s these cutsey baby fairies, and this is the fae folk! They’re not all babies, some of them have beards, but they live under this whirlpool, and one of them asks: “Is the burning and the killing still going on up there?”. I’m not actually sure what burning and killing they’re referring to.
Adam I just took that to be humans being humans.
Mattie I also quite like that we know that the fae folk are magical fae folk because they’re the only ones with American accents in the whole film. Which I found very sweet.
Ren I didn’t notice that, that's funny.
Adam They also glow pretty nicely. Apparently this is the first animated Disney film to use some CGI, and I assume that was with the elemental effects. There’s a really odd cloud that looks very composite early on, and I wondered if the glowing was done with CGI, because I always thought the glowing in Fantasia must have taken a ridiculous amount of time. That always looks so labour intensive.
Mattie Later on, around the cauldron when it gets all green and bubbly, the smoke on that they matted in dry ice, it looks really good, you wouldn’t notice. It’s so cool!
Adam There’s some really great compositing actually.
Ren So the faeries say that the cauldron is hidden in the marshes of Morva, so they go there and find some swamp witches in a cave of frogs, both me and Mattie made a note of a quite overly-long shot of the bard being turned into a frog and bouncing in one of the witch’s cleavage.
Adam I’m glad you pointed that out because I did think Texture of the Week, and then I thought: “No, I’m not, that’s not becoming.”
Mattie Would you like a Welsh language fact?
RenYes!
Mattie Morva is a fen or a saltmarsh, so the marshes of Morva are the Marshes of Saltmarsh. Welsh facts!
Adam It could be a recurring segment!
Ren We should get you back on if we do Diana Wynne Jones and Howl’s Moving Castle.
Mattie Champion.
Ren The book of which is significantly more Welsh and the studio Ghibli film, unsurprisingly. They ask the witches about the black cauldron and they say that they’ll trade the magic sword for the cauldron. And they’re like: “Ahaha we’ll get the sword and then they won’t be able to do anything with the cauldron so we’ll have that too!”
Adam I didn’t really get the logic there, did they just think that they’ll get the cauldron and then go: “Oh, we can’t do anything with this, have it back.”
Ren I think so, yeah. So Tarran gives up the sword, they get the black cauldron and they learn that it requires a sacrifice. Someone has to be consumed by the cauldron, to stop it.
Mattie And specifically they have to go into it willingly, you can’t just punt someone in.
Adam If you put unwilling sacrifices in it just creates more evil power —
Mattie — Yeah, the cauldron would be pretty into it.
Adam But then if you put a willing sacrifice in, it doesn’t like it. So I did wonder whether at the end of the film there would be a back-and-forth, where one character willingly sacrifice themselves, and then the Horned King throws someone else in, and then it’s this awful tit-for-tat, when will they learn. That didn’t happen, but I did wonder if it would be some horrible balancing act.
Mattie Or that one hand on the other hand slapping game that you play with little kids, but with death.
Adam I probably over-thought this, but what if you willingly sacrifice yourself to the cauldron and then change your mind half a second before hitting the water, does that not count?
Mattie Buyer’s remorse —
Adam If you’re like: “No, actually --“ and the Cauldron’s like: “Haha, I do like this now!”
Mattie Good question!
Adam Yeah, I was really trying to work this out. And remember the cauldron is an evil king who’s become a cauldron with a face, so presumably he makes his own rules. Does it mean that the more scared you are, the tastier you are?
The demon king, the Horned King, does not want to go into that cauldron, right? He’s a very unwilling sacrifice. But the cauldron likes unwilling sacrifices, so surely by that logic the Horned King going in to the cauldron should give the cauldron more evil power and bring the skeletons back to life.
Mattie It’s kind of a question of whether the magical objects in this world have an intelligence, like that sword and that cauldron. Because if that cauldron is the last vestiges of the consciousness of an incredibly evil king, that’s just been dug out of a hole periodically by every one who wants to try and be an evil king, do you think at some point he’s just like: “Can I die?” I’m done, I’ve seen every mediocre Johnny-come-lately villain for eons uncounted and I’m just done, I don’t want to do this anymore, give me the little fluffy guy.
Adam And to be fair, while the cauldron has a frozen evil face, maybe he’s changed, it’s been a long time.
Mattie The cauldron’s done the twelve steps and is moving away from eating people.
Adam It might be a Manny rat situation all over again. I want to learn more about this cauldron because the title is The Black Cauldron and the fact that he’s a king, I need to know more what’s going on with this cauldron.
Mattie Yeah because we have a whole section that Ren quite rightly skipped over, presumably because you forgot about the ‘romance argument making up’ section in the woods. Yeah, we didn’t need that! Like you, Adam, I want more cauldron.
Adam Yeah, the cauldron’s the good stuff.
Mattie It’s a big lad.
Adam It makes this great composition, they’ve been given the cauldron by the witches and it’s our little trio sat around the fire and this cauldron in the background looming large, and they don’t know what to do with it.
Mattie And the fairy who bought them there being like: “You’re a bunch of idiots I’m going home. This is why I don’t deal with people.”
Ren And they are quite swiftly captured and strung up in the dungeon, and the Horned King really goes to town with the cauldron. He’s got his hood back now and you can see his skull face —
Adam — He’s gone full Skeletor
Ren There’s this great bit of animation where he lowers this skeleton into the cauldron to reanimate the army of death, and as the skeleton is reanimating there’s this effect that looks like double exposure —
Adam — Yeah, it does look like double exposure and I was trying to work out how to do that with animation and whether that it is something to do with the film itself.
Ren It’s very cool.
Adam Some of this is like the end of Fantasia, actually, in terms of doing interesting things with animation.
Ren I don’t think I ever got to the end of Fantasia, I just watched the broom bit and then I was good.
Adam I thought that Fantasia was edifying and it was my moral responsibility as a young child to watch this educational film, even though I didn’t like large parts of it, I made myself watch it.
Mattie I feel like I can relate to that, not necessarily with Fantasia, but I feel like child you and child me had some things in common. At some point we hit puberty and were like: “Hang on, I don’t have to do that!”
Adam Yeah! I still have a lot of fondness for edutainment, but a lot of reasons why I played educational games like Mavis Beacon’s teacher typing was I thought it was a morally good thing to do: “I’m not playing silly games, I’m playing educational games!”
Mattie “And I’ve started so I’ve got to finish.”
Adam One of the lines I’ve highlighted here was from the bard, when there’s this raising of all the skeletons and everything looks very grim, he says: “I wish I’d stayed a toad”
Ren Bouncing in some cleavage?
Adam I mean, yeah, I’m sure that would be one of the perks for him, potentially, but I just mean I get that, life and having to live and have consciousness, it would nice to be a toad probably.
Mattie Presumably we’ve found the inspiration for the Cornershop hit Brimful of Asha, this is the original bosom pillow, it was a toad all along. There is also a very good skull made of lava.
Adam Oh yes, good mention, thanks for mentioning that. It was really good.
Ren I don’t know how far Hywel got through this film.
Mattie I should have asked him - I wasn’t going to saw owt but I didn’t say anything to you!
Adam It hasn’t had lasting reprecussions, has it?
Mattie He’s alright, he just doesn’t want to watch Black Cauldron.
Adam I hid in the toilets in the cinema during the bit in Empire Strikes Back when R2D2 gets swallowed by the snakey-sand-worm thing.
Mattie Aw darling, that’s fair!
Adam I remember I just went and hid in the toilets until I was sure that bit had passed. And Hunchback of Notre Dame I think I lasted five minutes full stop! I was out of that cinema!
Ren Hercules really got me, there’s an animation where someone goes into the underworld and I found that very disturbing.
Mattie Bambi got me, the mum getting shot.
Adam I quite liked Bambi, and I found that a bit scary and sad but not to the degree I would have imagined. My mum got really upset as a kid seeing Pinocchio in the cinema, which is fair. We could do Pinocchio, it’s not really children’s horror, but the donkey scene is just remarkably horrifying.
Mattie There is a bit where they’re all tied up and the Horned King is doing his villain monologue, and he’s like: “The pig keeper, and the slightly rubbish bard,” and he called Elionwy a scullery maid, which is never mentioned before and is never mentioned after, she says she’s a princess, he says she’s a scullery maid, and no point is she like: “Oh, I’m so embarrassed to be called a scullery maid”.
Adam I thought that was really interesting, I wonder if she’s just like “I’ve said that I’m a princess and I’m keeping to it, if my friends aren’t going to mention it, I’m not going to mention it.”
Mattie Perfect, that’s spot on.
Ren So Gurgi jumps into the cauldron, in this sequence that’s very visually reminiscent of the end of Lord of the Rings and Gollum falling into Mount Doom but Gurgi goes willingly.
Mattie He turns up, releases his friends as this army are going to murder apparently no-one.
Ren You said that Andy Serkis says that Gurgi is an influence —
Adam Oh what!
Mattie Yeah, apparently so! That weird little guy! This film overlaps with so many different things.
Adam Yeah, that’s really interesting!
Ren So Gurgi jumps in, and then the cauldron is still active —
Mattie The army all falls down, the king is cross.
Ren But the cauldron demands more—
Adam “Feed me Seymour!”
Ren Yeah, and the Horned King is torn to shreds as the cauldron sucks him in.
Adam It’s quite gruesome.
Ren It’s really quite nasty.
Mattie Yeah, he really gets flensed!
Ren And our heroic trio escape by boat as the castle falls apart around them, and the witches turn back up and they want to take the cauldron back, and the bard says they need to have a bargain, and they reluctantly offer the sword back up, but Taran says: “I’m not a warrior, I’m a pig boy” and he says he has no use for the sword but he’d trade the cauldron for Gurgi returning. And my final note is: Gurgi’s alive and he’s enforcing heteronormativity.
Mattie I do particularly like the witches, because they’re like: “Nah mate, he’s dead, that’s not how things work, would you like the sword?” but Fflewddur Fflam is like, “Ah, I knew you weren’t real witches” and they’re like: “Right. I’m not taking that from you.” The laws of metaphysics broken by peer pressure!
Adam And then we get a very nondescript credit sequence. You can tell that all is not right at the house of mouse, because Disney tend to go all in, particularly from the ‘70s onwards, they tend to have all the characters you know and love and little things in the margins, and there's not much of that in this one!
Mattie Nope! I do particularly like right at the start when we’re getting Taran’s character established and they’re fantasising about the king of the country being such a hero with his sword, but at the end there isn’t any: “Cheers for saving the world”, it just ends. And I like to imagine that backs up the idea that there is no-one else. There’s just Taran, the weird old man who’s like: “Go and live in the woods, I won’t give you snacks or water”, and some fairies.
Adam It is a weirdly empty film!
Ren Oh they do get reunited with the pig.
Adam It’s like the whole of society is living within the castle. Maybe it’s post-apocalyptic.
Mattie They might just be in mid Wales, its pretty sparsely populated.
Adam It’s definitely a curio, but I didn’t hate it!
Ren The background art is lovely and that really sustained me, some really good backgrounds and animation.
Adam I feel like both of us were watching it going “Ooh, that’s some nice moss, look at that nice moss”.
Mattie And the art direction is really interesting, in the opening sequence we’re looking through the trees at this iron-age inspired farm, the trees are old and gnarly, nothing’s cute.
Adam You can tell it’s from the same period as Fox and the Hound because that has the odd disjunction between the cutsey character designs and the oddly naturalistic craggy background art .
Mattie I wonder if that’s partly because if someone from the studio came to Britain and went to the New Forest or something and saw real old oak trees and was like: “I want to draw these forever.”
Adam It does look quite dismal at times, which is interesting. Some of the old Disney films do spooky or creepy, like the wood in Pinocchio or Snow White, but these aren’t spooky trees, they’re dismal trees.
I imagine there’s some people out there for whom this is their favourite ever Disney film. I can totally see how you enjoyed it as a kid, Mattie, I can imagine some kids totally imprinting on this film and I expect I would have liked it quite a lot if I’d watched it at the right age.
Mattie You can imagine it would get kids to want to be an animator, like: “That King is terrifying, I want to learn how to do that.” It is a credit to the people who worked on it, because right at the end when they’re making their escape there are some weird wobbly wooden towers that fall onto them and I’m pretty sure that’s stop-motion animation. There’s no context for why they’re there, just there to make for a dangerous workplace presumably. And there’s loads of stuff like that, where watching as a child and being able to be selective about what you care about, it just looks awesome.
Ren “Art direction by Don Griffith uncredited” Seems a bit rude.
Mattie I think he might have left the company.
Adam There were definitely times where I thought that this looked like a Don Bluth film, to be honest.
Mattie That’s a good point, it did make me think of All Dogs go to Heaven.
Adam Secret of Nim, I’d say.
Ren Do you have any notes that haven't been addressed, Mattie?
Mattie The voice actor for Elinowy, Susan Sheridan: Noddy.
Ren Noddy!
Mattie Noddy. I thought you’d make that face!
Adam And apparently the voice of Trillian in the Hitchhikers Guide original radio series.
Mattie I knew I recognised that voice! Never! And the narrator at the start, John Huston, this is another weird connection, he was the voice of Gandalf in the weird ‘70s animation. Not the Bakshie one, the other one. And he’s also Angelica Huston’s dad. As in Morticia Adams.
Ren And The Witches!
Mattie More connections to your podcast. Well, Noddy’s not a connection.
Ren Noddy is horrifying though!
Adam There’s definitely a troubling Current 93 album about Noddy. We could do a Noddy episode, I’m pretty sure it freaked me out as a kid.
Ren Genuinely quite scary.
Adam I think I had Noddy on a video with Greenclaws, Mattie do you remember Greenclaws?
Mattie No, I believe you.
Adam Okay, look up Greenclaws, if you’re listening to this podcast look up Greenclaws. He’s a gentle soul, but he does look like the Michelin Man has fallen in a swamp.
Mattie Oh that is a situation, that's a situation.
Adam I don’t know what we’re doing next but I’m sure we’ll get another episode in before Christmas.
Ren But if this does come out on Halloween that will be our seventh anniversary!
Adam We’re so old!
Mattie The consistency is astounding!
Adam Something no-one’s ever said about this podcast before, thanks!
Mattie You exist, what else could anyone want!
Adam That’s a high point to leave on, I think.
Ren Thank you Mattie, for joining us!
Mattie Thank you for having me, it’s been great to be here.
Ren Do you have a sign off for us, Adam?
Adam Yes, I hope creepy kids that you can remain as consistent as we have!
Mattie Just keep existing!
