Some tidbits I've been saving

I have had that professor, seriously. We were all begging him to be more specific about a certain assignment, but he refused to give us anything more than the base description (it was a core course, so all the sections were exactly the same, regardless of who taught it). And then after the assignment was graded, he berated us for doing it wrong. -_-

Trolling the Jim Hill Media archives, I found this little sidenote in an article from 2004, and thought I'd share it:

Speaking of Disney & money ... There's a fascinating story about that "Mission to Mars" movie. The Walt Disney Company actually let the first director that they hired for that film -- Gore Verbinski -- go because he wanted "M2M" to be a special effects extravaganza. A film with no less than 600-700 effects shots.

Disney wasn't willing to spend the money necessary to to make that version of "Mission to Mars." So they let Gore go and replaced him with Brian DePalma. Who significantly pared down the scope & proposed cost of the project so that his version of the film would only feature 240 effects shots.

Long story short: Brian's low budget version of "M2M" failed to really wow audiences. So -- the next time that Disney hired Gore Verbinski to direct a motion picture -- they let him have all the special effects shots he wanted.

That picture turned out to be much more popular than "Mission to Mars." Maybe you've heard of it? "Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl"?

I was actually looking in the archives for a story I figured I read there, that gave a brief synopsis of how the Tinker Bell movie (then occasionally called "Tinker Bell and the Ring of Belief") was going to be about.  Turns out I was thinking of an article on a completely different site that was linked through Animated News.

I was thinking about 'what might have been' because the movie that did come out, while probably better than the one planned, felt a little lackluster to me, and all because of one particular plot point.  Now, the meat of the movie is that Tinker Bell, brand new fairy on the block, wants to go to the mainland (London) with the nature fairies, but since she's a tinker fairy, she can't, so she tries to make herself be a nature fairy instead.  However, it's never explicitly stated that she can't go.  All that's really said is that tinker fairies don't go to the mainland.   I mean, if there had been a scene where she asked if she could go and was turned down, then maybe I wouldn't feel so 'meh' about the rest of the movie, or even if there had been a reveal later, a kind of "All you had to do was ask" scene.

And personally, I just don't buy the whole "Tink was the only tinker to ever think of using 'lost things' to make things" bit.  I do, however, believe that Fairy Mary was able to quash any other tinker fairy who tried to, though.  Heh.  But I am glad for the version that we got, because if the original version had come out, there wouldn't have been any Vidia in it, and that would have been tragic indeed.