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Production Code Episode 60: The Lost Ones

Two things about this episode: 1) I always thought this was a later Mirage episode because she’s redesigned in it, and it’s one of the ones that aired on Saturday mornings and not on weekdays. Truth told, chronologically this is her second ever encounter with Aladdin. 2) This is apparently, canonically, Wahid’s first episode. However, in the airing order, another of his episodes, A Clockwork Hero, comes way way WAY before this one. We may have to check out that one soon (another Mechanicles episode, if I’m not mistaken) just to see how that’s addressed, whether Aladdin seems to already know him (whether in that one or in this one) and other little goodies.

This is another of my favorite episodes, but I haven’t seen it in years.

Production Code Episode 18 – My Fair Aladdin

Surprise, I decided to do another Mechanicles episode! My roommate mentioned liking this one, and because I didn’t give his episodes a lot of chances as a kid, this is one I haven’t seen from beginning to end. I thought I’d watch it through before doing the full liveblog, but I realized there were things I wanted to talk about pretty much from the beginning, so here we go!

Since it’s a Mechanicles episode I’m going to go ahead and warn in advance for potential ableism or sanism, based upon what I observed the last time I did one of his episodes. No seriously.

Production Code Episode 27: Sandswitch

We knew at the end of Sadira’s first episode that she hadn’t learned her lesson yet. So here we go.

This is actually one of the very first episodes I ever saw, and definitely my first Sadira episode, and it was a long time before I ever saw another (her final episode, actually!), and I was always a little disappointed because it seemed like it would be going in other, more interesting directions for her, it just wasn’t to be. I appreciate this episode more now that I have a better grasp of Sadira’s personality, at the very least.

But this is one of several “Iago and Abu are the main characters” episodes that crop up every now and again.

Return to Oz – Walt Disney Pictures © 1985
Directed by Walter Murch

Content Warnings for disturbing imagery, old-timey insane asylums, stop motion animation of the damned, fire, and whatever the Hell Wheelers are. In some cases I really can’t put a finger on what should count as a potential trigger warning, other than the treatment of the mentally ill in the start of the film.

As I catch things I will try to post warnings, but as I said before, I highly recommend that people who fear they may be disturbed by the stuff covered and discussed here please blacklist/tumblr savior the tag “dvdfairy: return to oz”

This movie famously did “horribly” at the box office because this came out right after the Disney company switched CEOs, and as is tradition, the job of the new CEO is to trash any of the remaining pet projects of their predecessor. In fact, the studio changed regimes twice during production. As a result of this, Return to Oz saw a limited release (lasting less than a month), with no advertising, screened at only a handful of theaters, but in that time managed to recoup more than half the money it cost to make it. Because of its limited release (with no promos, toy tie-ins, etc), Eisner and Katzenberg were happy to deem it a bomb and left it at that. Its home video releases were huge, however, and it has since gained a cult following.

Production Code Episode 74: The Secret of Dagger Rock

Apologies in advance for the wall of text. In the original airing, this is the second episode Mozenrath appears in. In the production code order, however, it’s third, coming after “The Wind Jackals of Mozenrath.” I am doing these out of order because I think they were switched around for good reasons. The way that the characters interact in that episode (particularly Moze and Jasmine) makes less sense if you argue the other came before this one. It’s a little sad, because I kind of like the idea of Aladdin immediately going home and telling the Sultan “this guy’s dangerous and you need to gather some intel on him, because he’s not going to stop looking for magic to add to his collection, and he intends to use it on us.”

We can still assume this has happened here because in this episode Jasmine and the Sultan seem to have an equal amount of understanding of what Moze can do despite neither of them being present in his intro episode. It just took a little longer for the Sultan to get spies in there (something we’ll discuss when I do that episode). (Also take note: there is a trend in Mozenrath episodes of having to steal away into his domain [or wherever he is at the time] in secret in order to foil one of his plots, which is kind of awesome.)

Okay so some disclaimers about this episode:
1. I may spam with more screencaps than usual, because I’m kind of in love with the animation; it’s all very smooth, very stylistic (the most stylistic I’ve seen for a Mozenrath episode), very distinctive, and my video player lets me take frame-by-frames.
2. These posts may take a little longer than usual because one thing that’s common of pretty much all English versions of this episode, including the original, official VHS release (on the Jasmine’s Enchanted Tales volume, which was coupled with “Forget Me Lots,” actually), have a serious problem with brightness. In that it’s too high. It’s so high, in fact, that Mozenrath’s face is pretty much invisible in almost every scene he’s in. So I’ll be running my screencaps through photoshop to try to simmer that down a bit. The only time I have EVER found a clearer transfer is in a copy of the Russian Dub someone put online.

I will probably do “Sandswitch” after I do this episode.