Maggie, our contact of long standing at Disney had become good friends with us all and was our guest of honour at the 1993 Blackpool Film Convention Dinner, which co-incidentally had been Mickey Mouse’s 65th Birthday. Following the evening meal Maggie had given a short, but absorbing speech on the relationship between the two companies, after which she had answered a barrage of queries, while still managing to look cheerful…quite a feat. However at Disney her hard work, got her the promotion she wanted and she worked in Dubai for a number of years, promoting the Walt Disney name and legacy, before retiring and moving back to Ohio in the USA. Anne, (Mrs. Simmonds) kept in touch with her for a number of years and both Derek and Anne had made a detour to see her while on a trip over there in order to see how she was. Meanwhile we had to befriend a new Disney contact, who began by telling us that we’d only got the 8mm feature deal because they were far to busy with their DVD release schedule to do it themselves. Very nice! There were some titles that for one reason or another we did not release, ‘Robin Hood’ (1973) and ‘Alice in Wonderland’ (1951), solely because Derek wasn’t keen on either of the films, while ‘The Great Mouse Detective’ (1986) and ‘Oliver and Company’ (1988) were mentioned but were passed over. There were lots of discussions, that all ended nowhere on ‘The Absent-Minded Professor’ (1961) which was only dropped due to it being black and white, ‘In Search of the Castaways’ (1962), ‘Blackbeard’s Ghost’ (1968), ‘The Love Bug’ (1968)’, ‘The Rescuers’ (1977), ‘Tron’ (1982)’, as well as a number of their Touchstone and Silver Screen Partners Productions, ‘The Rocketeer’ (1991) and ‘Return to Oz’ (1985), were often on both our agender and we were so near to releasing ‘Honey, I Shrunk the Kids’ (1989). I personally wanted to see ‘Bedknobs and Broomsticks’ (1971) released. while Derek pushed hard for ‘20,000 Leagues Under the Sea’ (1954), but sadly that never happened. And then there were some that we wanted to issue, but they for reasons of their own they wouldn’t consider, ‘Fantasia’, ‘Song of the South’ and ‘The Black Cauldron’ in particular. Our next animated feature was to have been ‘Atlantis: The Lost Empire’ (2001), but with Derek’s untimely death it was never released. The final years of the Disney deals were conducted, as were all of the deals and new releases, by now, over the phone and I would generally be brought up to date as we were on our way home in the evening…I never met or knew the name of our Disney contact by this time.
…. to be continued.
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