Pocahontas Premiere in the Central Park, New York City (June 10, 1995)

After the success of The Lion King, there were high hopes for Pocahontas. The project originated as a traditional animated feature where the animals talked with John Candy portraying Redfeather the turkey and Stephen Fry as Percy the pug. After Beauty & the Beast was nominated for the Best Picture Academy Award, studio chief Jeffrey Katzenberg rebooted the movie hoping to tailor make an Oscar winner. The tone of the film shifted from a traditional family film packed with Disney fun to a much more serious in tone drama. It was essentially a Romeo & Juliet story set in the first long-term settlement in America.

The Walt Disney Company collaborated with several leftist activists in shaping this film and this was really the start of political correctness entering the animated films. Pocahontas was also the first of the animated features to inject leftist ideological beliefs into the narrative. Here, we find an extreme environmentalist message overpowering the film. Lyricist Tim Rice refused to work on the film finding the concept to be anti-western culture. While the decedents of the real-life Pocahontas had initially collaborated with Disney on film, they became some of its loudest critics. The real-life Pocahontas was a pagan woman who converted to Christianity and united her people with the settlers in Christ. Her baptism into Christianity is one of the paintings of the most significant moments in American history that's depicted in the Capitol rotunda. In the Disney version, Pocahontas converts Captain John Smith to paganism in a reversal of the historical record.

When the film was released, it was a much hyped affair -- the biggest to date. One of the promotional events was the film's premiere marketed as the largest film premiere in history. The film was screened drive-in theater style at Central Park in New York City. Here's broadcast of the premiere edited with an introduction from the laserdisc release on what the premiere entailed along with a local news report from that evening. This is to give modern audiences an idea just how big the Walt Disney animated features were at the time. These were major cultural events when the world stopped to take notice. Throughout the broadcast are behind the scenes segments on the making of the film.

While Pocahontas is regarded as a flop today, it wasn't. The film made more than Aladdin, Beauty & the Beast, and The Little Mermaid. It just didn't top The Lion King, which was the most successful animated feature ever released up to that time and one of the highest grossing films ever made. Pocahontas marked the beginning of the decline for Walt Disney Feature Animation. For a variety of reasons, the hand drawn films would never again enjoy the popularity they shared in the early 90's. What's interesting about Pocahontas is even though the Walt Disney Company bent over backwards to placate the activists at the time, the woke of today smear this film as racist for the very same points leftist activists praised the film for in the 90's. That's why you just make the best film you can produce and ignore the critics. That's what Walt Disney did.

Original air date June 10, 1995

Posted for historical purposes. This channel is not affiliated with the Walt Disney Company.