Hi everyone, I'm Em. Welcome to Verbal Diorama, episode 287, the Great Mouse Detective. This is the podcast that's all about the history and legacy of movies you know and movies you don't who may not be the world's greatest criminal mind. But this is why we need Basil to get the real one. Welcome to Verbal Diorama. Whether you are a brand new listener to this podcast, whether you are a regular returning listener or thank you for being here. Thank you for choosing to listen to this podcast. I am so happy to have you here for the history and legacy of the Great Mouse Detective, AKA Basil the Great Mouse Detective, which is what I know this movie as. And I will regularly call it Basil the Great Mouse Detective throughout this episode. Just FYI. But this is a really special episode because this is one of the first episodes to celebrate this podcast birthday. So happy birthday to Verbal Diorama. This is the sixth birthday of this podcast. And this, as I say, this is the first episode of three special episodes that I'm doing to celebrate the sixth birthday of this podcast. This podcast started in February 2019. It also started with an animated movie which was Titan ae. Every year I celebrate the birthday of this podcast during the annual animation season. And so every year I get to do a miniseries on animated movies for the birthday of this podcast. And this time around I wanted to look at some of the more underrated movies from Disney and I wanted to look at the pre Renaissance Renaissance and post Renaissance eras of Disney. This is obviously the pre renaissance, but this movie is so important to what would come after this movie. So I am so excited to be going into the history and legacy of Basil the Great Mouse Detective. I told you I'd say the name, but welcome to Animation Season 2025. This is the fifth annual Animation Season. If you are not aware what animation season is, it is simply a celebration of animation in all of its forms. It's something that I do every year on this podcast. And although there has been quite a lot of Disney featured in animation season, it's hard not to feature Disney. They are so prevalent. I've also covered movies in this animation season and past animation seasons on other studios like Leica, Aardman, Dreamworks, Sony Animation, Pixar Studio, Ghibli, Cartoon Saloon, even studios that are no longer with us like Fox Animation, Blue sky and Don Bluth. We're going to be coming back to Don Bluth a little bit later in this episode. One of the reasons I do animation season is because there is a misconception that animation is just for children. It really is not. And I think a movie like Basil the Great Mouse Detective kind of proves that in so many ways because this is quite a dark and scary movie in places. Animation is also not a genre. It is just a perfect art form. It is capable of depicting anyone or anything. It has no limitations that live action cinema has. You will never get a live action adaptation of the Great Mouse Detective. It's as simple as that. It just would not exist. And not just because Disney doesn't really promote Basil's the Great Mouse Detective. But animation season is so important to this podcast and it remains so important because it is here to highlight incredible animated films from all of those studios. And they're all movies that you may have discounted purely because they are animated. But you shouldn't, and you definitely shouldn't discount Basil the Great Mouse Detective either. Before we jump into the Great Mouse Detective, I just want to say, genuinely, a huge thank you to everyone who listens to this podcast who has listened, continues to listen, and continues to support this podcast and has done for however long you have. But I know some listeners have been here for the entire six year run and it is a truly humbling thing to have a podcast and to be able to have a podcast, to continue to work at this podcast and to be here six years later and there's genuinely no sign of me slowing down or doing less. Because I love this podcast. I love telling these stories, I love histories and legacies of movies, and I love what I do. So from the bottom of my heart, thank you for being here and letting me do the thing that I really love to do. Birthday episodes are always special and this one is no different. It was elementary, dear listener, to do an episode on this particular forgotten Disney gem, the movie that truly cemented the Disney renaissance, the movie that was literally make or break for Disney animation with A truly menacing villain. And with very little time or money to actually get made. The odds were stacked against Basil from the very start. But like all good heroes, it didn't take much for him to become truly great. Here's the trailer for Basil, the great Mouse Detective.

In 1897 London, Basil is a skilled detective who lives beneath 221B Baker Street. Every time Basil tries to stop his arch nemesis Ratigan, or when he tries to find a clue on his whereabouts, he gets outsmarted by the mobster and the clues become a dead end. When a young female mouse called Olivia tells Basil about her father's abduction, the detective becomes determined to bring Ratigan to justice. Basil gets help from Dr. David Q. Dawson and Toby, a smart yet resourceful dog owned by Sherlock Holmes. In order to stop Ratigan once and for all with his plan to overthrow the Mouse Queen and become the supreme ruler of mousedom. Let's run through the cast of this movie. We have Vincent Price as Ratigan, Barry Ingham as Basil, Val Bettin as Dawson, Suzanne Ponacek as Olivia Flaversham, Candy Candido as Fidget, Diana Chesney as Mrs. Judson, Eve Brenner as Queen Mousetoria and alan Young as Mr. Flavisham. The great Mouse Detective has a story by Pete Young, Vance Gerry, Steve Hewlett, Ron Clements, John Muska, Bruce m. Morris, Matthew O'Callaghan, Bernie Mattinson, Dave Mishener and Melvin Shaw. Was directed by John Musker, Ron Clements, Dave Mishener and Bernie Mattinson. And was based on Basil of Baker street by Eve Titus and Paul Galdone. So where was Disney in 1986? Well, Disney Animation was at a bit of a critical crossroads. Following Walt Disney's death in 1966, the studio had struggled to maintain its creative and commercial momentum. The 70s and early 80s saw several animated films that, while not complete failures, failed to recapture the magic of Disney's earlier classics like Snow White and Cinderella. And so Walt Disney animation in the 80s was really struggling. And they pinned all their hopes on a project that took 12 years to reach the big screen. Something that they hoped would change the studio's ailing fortunes. A movie that had some of Disney's finest animators working on it, despite many of them leaving with don Bluth in 1979. And that movie was not the Great Mouse Detective. It was the Black Cauldron. And the Black Cauldron was lavish and it was expensive, and it was also a huge flop. The story of the Black Cauldron is a fascinating one. I have done an episode on the Black Cauldron that is episode 241 has the whole story on the Black Cauldron. And the Black Cauldron is one of those movies that is so frustrating to watch because there is so much potential in that movie, and it just didn't do very well at all. And the failure of the Black Cauldron had a profound and direct impact on the production of the Great Mouse Detective. And it essentially served as a wake up call for Disney Animation. The Black Cauldron nearly bankrupted Disney's animation division. It cost $44 million to produce, which was an astronomical sum for an animated movie. In the mid-1980s, it only grossed $21.3 million, making it one of Disney's biggest financial failures up to that point. The catastrophic performance of the Black Cauldron created a climate of intense scrutiny and cost consciousness within the studio. The leadership, including then CEO Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg, became much more fiscally conservative and demanded tighter budgetary controls and more commercially viable concepts. The Great Mouse Detective was, to all intents and purposes, seen as a last chance saloon. In many respects, it had to be innovative but not extravagant to take creative risks but also ensure commercial success. It had to undo the mess of the Black Cauldron and restore faith in the public's affection for Disney. Basically, it had a lot on its little mouse sized shoulders, so they needed a good story. The Great Mouse Detective was based on Eve Titus Basil of Baker street book series, which followed a mouse Detective who lives beneath Sherlock Holmes residence at 221B Baker street and solves mysteries. Along with his personal biographer, Dr. David Q. Dawson. They live in a mouse community where the mice live in tiny versions of their humans dwellings. Basil of Baker street was named after actor Basil Rathbone, who played Sherlock Holmes 14 times between 1939 and 1946. The first five books, Basil of Baker Street, Basil and the Lost Colony, Basil and the Cave of Cats, Basil in Mexico, and Basil in the Wild west were released between 1958 and 1982. Published by McGraw Hill, written by Titus and illustrated by Paul Galdone. The series was revived three decades later with Basil and the Big Cheese cook off in 2018, written by Kathy Hapka and illustrated by David Mottram, followed by Basil and the royal dare in 2019 and Basil and the library ghost in 2020. And as it turned out, veteran Disney layout artist Joe Hale suggested adapting Basil of Baker street back in the 70s, but the project fell into limbo because of the similarities to the Rescuers, which came out in 1977. So the idea of adapting Basil of Baker street was initially conceived as a way to revitalize Disney's animated storytelling. After a period of uncertainty, with production of the Black Cauldron struggling and with many Disney animators unhappy with that movie's progress by 1980. Basel of Baker street was pitched to Disney president ron Miller in 1982 and approved as an alternative project to the Black Cauldron, but also managing to retain some of the scarier imagery of this darker period of Disney history, like Fidget's introduction and the climax in Big Ben. The budget for Basel of Baker street was estimated at around $24 million and Bernie Mattinson and John Musker were assigned as directors, while Dave Mishener was also added as a co director. Bernie Mattinson was actually the longest serving employee of the Walt Disney Company. He joined in 1953 aged 18 and he worked there till his death at 87 in 2023. That is almost 70 years of service. And I don't think we give Bernie Mattinson enough credit for being at that company for as long as he was. Anyway, the first thing they needed was a script and the script writing commenced. And while the title and characters were based on Basil at Baker street, no one of the books story served as the story for the movie. Although the first book, which is also called Basil and Baker street, is Basil and Dawson going on the search for some missing children. Otherwise the rest of the book's plots were thrown out in favor of Ratigan becoming an actual rat, Basil being an accomplished violin player, and Dawson becoming a well meaning bumbling sidekick. As opposed to the intelligent, resourceful book version. In Disney's story, it would be a missing father with his young daughter Olivia being the audience surrogate. Originally, Olivia was conceived as a grown mouse and a potential love interest for Dawson, but Ron Miller suggested she was changed to a child to make the audience feel they could relate and feel sorry for her. It would become an homage to traditional Sherlock Holmes tales, but it still languished in story hell for years with Pete Young, Vance Gerry, Steve Hewlett, Ron Clements, John Muskerman, Bruce m. Morris, Matthew O'Callaghan, Bernie Mattinson, Dave Michener and Melvin Shaw all ended up with story adapted by credits because they all contributed parts of the story. We talked about him extensively last episode in Shrek 2, so we might as well bring him back into the discussion. So everyone please welcome Jeffrey Katzenberg to the chat. So Ron Miller was fired from Disney in 1984 and the board of directors appointed Michael Eisner from Paramount to become the CEO. Eisner then recruited Katzenberg to become studio chairman and Frank Wells to become chief operating officer. And these three men are pretty integral to what happens to the story of then named Basil of Baker street going forward. So Bernie Mattinson had been appointed producer slash director by Roy E. Disney, but Mattinson chose to concentrate mostly on the producing duties since he was becoming overburdened with the amount of work required for both positions. The original directors, John Musker and Dave Mishener, retained their director roles after the new senior team joined, but Ron Clements then joined as a new director due to the additional work and limited production schedule. Because this new management team wanted to ensure the projects were worthy, there were immediate questions asked as to the viability of of the work that had been done on Basel of Baker Street. Over three years of story and storyboarding work had already been done, and yet there was no guarantee that all of this work wouldn't be scrapped by the incoming Eisner, Katzenberg and Welles. Basically, the team had to pitch the movie again to the newly appointed executive management team purely to obtain authorization to keep the movie's production going. They came with numerous storyboards, character concepts, a little bit of animation that had been completed, and plot outlines, and they brought it all to this pitch. During this meeting with Roy E. Disney, Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg, Bernie Mattinson, Ron Clements and John Musker went over three or four outline storyboards that were pinned with drawings and a story reel. But Jeffrey Katzenberg had issues with the plot, particularly the connection between Sherlock Holmes and Basil. And Michael Eisner openly admitted he was confused with the storyboard process. Both complained about the slow pace and ordered rewrites of the movie before the animation portion could continue. Those rewrites were done and the team received confirmation that Basil of Baker street would be continuing production. The jubilation that the animation team had was on hearing that news was short lived though, because Eisner and Katzenberg also slashed the production budget from $24 million to just $10 million. Not only that, they'd also have to have the movie ready for release in July 1986 and not Christmas 1987 as they were originally planning. Also, the movie was planned to be 90 minutes, but because of these budgetary reasons, it was cut to 74 minutes with a simpler, tighter story, a smaller cast of characters, as well as some shortcuts in animation and dropping several scenes. This gave the production team one year to finish Basil and Baker street. And it was a tense, fraught year. After the failure of the black cauldron in July 1985, there were rumors that Michael Eisner believed there were enough animated films in the Disney vaults for years of successful RE releases without creating new material. Disney frequently re released movies theatrically, but animators at the Disney studio were terrified about the future of Disney animation. And this was mostly due to the fact that 101 Dalmatians had a third theatrical release in Christmas 1985, which made $33 million. That is more than the Black Cauldron. It also made it the most successful reissue in the company's 63 year history. And the idea from Michael Eisner was if we can make guaranteed money from re releases, why would we make new stuff? More rumors about the impending demise of theatrical animation were stoked when within months of Basel of Baker street production beginning, the animation crew was transferred from the original animation building on the Burbank studio lot, a building that was built especially for animators, to a converted warehouse in a seedy area of Glendale, which were further cost cutting measures to a production already starved of money. The new Disney mantra seemed to be make them fast and make them cheap or we'll just re release the back catalog. And so the team cracked on as best as they could, including casting the movie. Both British and American voice actors read for the part of Basil, with Royal Shakespeare actor Barry Ingham getting the role within six minutes of his audition. Val Bettin, an American who had a perfect English accent, was first choice for Dawson, who was physically based on Disney legend Eric Larson, as well as having the same amiable personality, even down to wearing his trousers pulled up over his belly. And of course, the inimitable Vincent Price as Ratigan. He was remembered from Champagne for Caesar, where he played the villain. And he inspired a redesign for Ratigan, who was originally thin and weak. This redesign was alongside producer and Disney President/CEO Ron Miller, who was a 6 foot 6 ex football player for the Los Angeles Rams. Miller was imposing. Vincent Price was Vincent Price. And it inspired animator Glen Keane to design Ratigan as strong, powerful and charismatic, opposed to the much smaller, less physically imposing and slightly more erratic Basil, who is not Sherlock Holmes. But Holmes does make an appearance. In 1966, Sherlock Holmes actor Basil Rathbone performed a reading of the Adventure of the Red Headed Lee for Cadman Records. Before his death in 1967, he completed four volumes of Holmes stories. To have Rathbone in the movie posthumously meant a certain amount of legal and financial wrangling. Disney had a different actor record the lines in a Rathbone style delivery due to financial concerns about using a portion of the recording. But last minute, a deal was reached to have Rathbone's voice in the movie. Candy Candido, the voice of Fidget, the peg legged, broken winged bat, had previously worked on other Disney films like Robin Hood, Sleeping Beauty and Peter Pan. To make him seem less menacing, his naturally low, gravelly tones were sped up. So I watch or rewatch every movie for every episode and I was pretty certain I'd seen this movie when I was a kid. And then I got to the Big Ben scene and I was like, I have not seen this before because I was floored. And while the Black Cauldron did contain the first CGI in a Disney movie, the Great Mouse Detective literally upped it and truly amalgamated computer and hand drawn animation to create this fluid, almost steadicam like movement through this animated version of Big Ben. It makes it even more astonishing when you know that they made this movie in one year. Originally, the finale of the Great Mouse Detective was to take place on the hands of Big Ben, with Ratigan eventually falling to his demise. Art director Mike Pirazza approached director John Musker with the idea of restaging the fight so that the final confrontation would break through the face of Big Ben, with the grinding clockwork gears providing added menace to the diminutive mice. Musker agreed, and that eventually led to the use of the early version of computer animation. The Technical development for the Big Ben sequence was spearheaded by Disney animators under the guidance of of a team that included Mike Pirazza and Tad Gilo. He was responsible for computer generated graphics. He went on to work on Men in Black, the Iron Giant and Disney's Aladdin. They faced the challenge of creating a complex sequence inside the clock tower that would require intricate mechanical movements and dynamic camera angles that would have been extremely difficult to achieve with traditional animation alone. Perez's inspiration was Hayao Miyazaki's debut the Castle of Cagliostro, which is great by the way. Piratza was granted unprecedented access to Big Ben. The tour was arranged through the resident engineer over the Houses of Parliament. Because Big Ben is considered part of the palace of Westminster. Pirazza and his wife visited London to film the reference footage not only in Big Ben, but in other areas where Basil and his friends would visit. For the trip to London. The Paratz has hauled heavy video equipment. In those days, the camera and the recording device were each separate and they were large and bulky. They trekked up seemingly endless stairs in Big Ben to behind the face of the famous clock. As they made their trek upward, they discovered that the entire tower would vibrate significantly every time the bells would chime. The Pirazzas got to visit the bell chamber itself, but only had roughly 10 minutes to take photographs and film videos because the bells would chime on the quarter hour. During the trip, they photographed London landmarks at mouse height for references for the animation team, including Big Ben, Buckingham palace and Tower Bridge. The internal gears of Big Ben were of course created using computer animation. The team used a computer system to model and render the basic geometric shapes of the gears. Each gear's movement had to be precisely calculated to match the actual mechanical operation of a clock. The computer generated elements were printed out frame by frame and then hand traced onto animation cells to integrate with the traditional animation. To make the computer generated gears look like they belonged in the same world as the hand drawn characters. Basil and Ratigan were animated traditionally by hand, and animators had to carefully match the character's movements to the computer generated backgrounds. Rain effects were all hand animated to add atmosphere and shadows, and lighting effects were done traditionally to maintain consistency. At one point, there were 54 moving gears, winches, ratchets, beams and pulleys in one scene. Character animator Phil Nibelink and Tad Gilo spent months designing the interior of Big Ben, building a room in the computer's brain with each gear represented digitally as a set of radiuses, diameters, distances and lengths. Nibelink was able to use a joystick control mechanism to zero in on any specified location. And this sequence used multiple virtual camera movements that would have been nearly impossible to achieve with traditional animation alone. The computer allowed for complex tracking shots through the gears. They created dramatic sweeping movements to enhance the tension of the chase. It feels very reminiscent of what Richard Williams would go on to do in the Thief and the Cobbler, except that was all animated by hand. Please go and look on YouTube for information on the Thief and the Cobbler. It is some of the most incredible hand drawn animation you will ever see in your life. That didn't mean that the rest of the animation in this movie was perfect and flawless. Because if you look at this movie, many background scenes are still and unanimated. And that's purely because the team ran out of time to actually animate those scenes. And not only did they slash the time and the budget on this movie, but Michael Eisner specifically decided to also change the title at the last minute. And this was following the box office underperformance of Young Sherlock Holmes. In 1985, Eisner decided to rename Basil of Baker street into the Great Mouse Detective, feeling the name Basil was too English. The retitling of the film proved to be unpopular with the filmmakers so much that animator Ed Gombert wrote a satirical inter office memo ridiculing the change and giving preceding Disney films generic titles such as Seven Little Men Help A Girl, the Wonderful Elephant who Could really Fly, the Little Deer who Grew up, the Girl with the See Through Shoes, Two Dogs Fall in Love, Puppies Taken Away, and A Boy, A Bear and A Big Black Cat. The memo was addressed from department head Peter Schneider, who knew nothing about it, and the search to find the author was fruitless because nobody was breaking rank in the animation department. Katzenberg ultimately told Schneider to basically accept they were never going to find the person and take it on the chin. The memo then leaked to the Los Angeles Times, where the made up titles would ultimately be called category on the US game show Jeopardy. To add to the gag, the only title that wasn't changed on the list was the Aristocats. The movie would be released here, as I said, as Basil the Great Mouse Detective. Which is mostly why I call it that and mostly why anyone in the UK will call it Basil the Great Mouse Detective. And that's also why when it came to titling this episode, I had to get a Basil in there, because that is how I know this movie. Speaking of getting things in there, this is the ideal time for the obligatory Keanu reference of this episode. And if you don't know what that is, it's a part of this podcast where I try and link Keanu Reeves to pretty much every movie that I feature for no reason other than he is the best of Men and there is probably a mouse version of Keanu Reeves somewhere in the world. That's not the reference. But the easiest way that I could think to link Keanu to this movie is is simply the fact that there is a character called Mouse in the Matrix. He is the young programmer and crew member on the Nebuchadnezzar, and obviously also in the Matrix is Keanu Reeves. So Keanu Reeves has starred technically with a mouse. So the Black Cauldron famously doesn't feature any songs, which is a bit of a rarity when you think of Disney movies. And perhaps if it had featured a couple of songs, it might have done a bit better at the box office. Henry Mancini composed the score of the Great Mouse Detective. This was his first animated feature score. Aside from the opening titles of the Pink Panther, which he also did. He originally composed a song titled Are you the one who loves Me? To serve as a parody of Victorian British music hall in rough animation. The song was recorded by Sharni Wallace. However, as the the Great Mouse Detective's budget and time constraints changed, Jeffrey Katzenberg and the new management wanted a more contemporary song as they thought it would help the film become more marketable. And so both Michael Jackson and Madonna were suggested for the song by Michael Eisner, but both probably would have been too expensive anyway. Melissa Manchester had been a successful recording artist for some time. She'd sung two Academy Award nominated songs, through the Eyes of Love for the movie ice castles in 1978 and I'll never say Goodbye for the movie the Promise in 1979. As well as being a Grammy Award winner, Manchester wrote and performed Let Me Be Good to you and the original animation was retimed and reanimated to sync with the new song. Mancini also wrote the World's Greatest Criminal Mind and Goodbye so soon, both performed by Vincent Price. But while this was a team who got the movie done on time and on budget, and it had songs in it to help with the marketability, the general consensus from this new management team was that the film would probably be a failure. And also they were a bit sour about that internal memo. And because of these reasons, a good deal of support and marketing were withdrawn from the initial release of of the Great Mouse Detective it was Roy E. Disney who personally provided the funds needed to develop the costumed meet and greet characters from the film for the Disney theme parks. So that's why for a period of time you could only meet and greet Basil and Ratigan, and those characters were brought to life under the coordination of costume designer Alya Kalinick. The finished characters had to be approved by Roy E. Disney because he was paying for them, as well as the directorial team Matinson, Muska, Clements and Michener. So the Great Mouse Detective released on the 4th of July 1986. It opened at 5th at the box office behind the Karate Kid, Part 2, Ruthless People, back to School and Top Gun. It came out the Same Week as Psycho 3 and Big Trouble in Little China. It would stay in the top 10 for three weeks and in its third week aliens came out. That was the sort of movie it was up against at the box office, but on its eventual $14 million budget. The Great Mouse Detective grossed $25.3 million domestically in the US and just under $25 million internationally, for a total of $50 million, which was not a huge success, but it was a financial success and it was a much needed success for Disney Animation. It was retitled as the Adventures of the Great Mouse Detective and re released theatrically on 14 February 1992, where it grossed an extra $13.3 million in the US for the time being, the future of Disney feature animation was saved, but Disney's history would come back to bite it in the bum. Four months later An American Tail was released by rival animation studio Sullivan Bluth Studios, helmed by ex Disney animator Don Bluth, which became the highest grossing non Disney animated film in history at that time and beat the Great mouse detective by $22 million. It was also a fairly good critical success too, with Rotten Tomatoes having it at 78%. With the consensus reading the Great Mouse Detective may not rank with Disney's classics, but it's an amiable, entertaining picture with some stylishly dark visuals. Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel gave it two thumbs up on their syndicated TV show At the Movies, and coincidentally, Siskel and Ebert had signed with Buena Vista Entertainment for their show in 1986, around the same time that they reviewed the Great Mouse Detective. Now there is obviously no sequel to the Great Mouse Detective. However, Tom Caulfield said in 2022 that that he, Bill Motts and Bob Roth presented Disney Television Animation, a crossover series that would combine the Great Mouse Detective with, of course, the Rescuers. The story featuring a descendant of Basil, who would have been a member of a contemporary rescue aid society, a bit like Kingsman or Mission Impossible. And this would be under the leadership of Ms. Bianca Caulfield, claimed that the idea was abandoned because of the recent release, at that time, of the Chip and Dale Rescue Rangers movie. And obviously you can only have so many rodents out at one time. Which is kind of funny really, because if you look at the history of Disney, Disney has always been a friend to the rodent population, Whether it's studio mascot Mickey Mouse, his girlfriend Minnie, the mice in Cinderella. Who can forget Gus Gus the Rescuers almost recently, Pixar's classic Ratatouille. Disney loves rodents. Mice characters are the best characters and they're just tiny versions of human characters. And if you want to get the job done, you contact the mouse version. Sherlock Holmes is no different. If you can't get him to help and you're mouse sized, you just contact Bassan of Baker Street. Every human in this world has a mouse counterpart who lives underneath the human. Holmes has Basil, Watson has Dawson, Mrs. Hudson has Mrs. Judson, and even Queen Victoria has Queen Mousetoria. Which means there's a little mouse version of me. Currently recording a podcast for mice who love mouse film history. And all movies have a mouse version, even movies containing mice. Although maybe the movie version of the Great Mouse Detective stars fleas or mini humans. I don't know how it works. I'm just guessing. But Verbal Mouse O Rama is real and I am 100% certain of that fact. But just to get serious for a second, because considering how low morale must have been during the 80s at Disney, the animators were insistent on proving the value of Disney animated projects. A huge deal was at stake with this film. The Black Cauldron had lost at the box office to the Care Bears movie. Disney's animation division was in trouble, and management threatening to re release the classics instead of investing in new movies could easily have happened. Without this little mouse detective movie, Disney might have become an animation studio of the past. And this little mouse detective movie has some of that later Black Cauldron darkness to it. And it has a protagonist that may or may not be Neurodiverse or on the Spectrum. Basil is wonderful. He's eccentric, socially awkward, blunt, tactless, and sometimes a little bit rude to others. But it doesn't come from any genuine malice. It's mostly from a lack of perception of human emotions. But he's also charismatic, charming, with very typically British dry sense of humor. And as for Dawson, I'm not sure, why he was in Afghanistan and was it a mouse version of Afghanistan? And were the mice fighting in a war? There are so many unanswered questions of this movie. Basil likes to be the smartest mouse in the room, and when he's not, he gets depressed. Ratigan also likes to be the smartest in the room, masquerading as a mouse and not the lowly rat he is. But when Ratigan is outsmarted, he becomes completely feral, dangerous and malicious. It truly is two sides of the same coin, and brains versus brawn. It's very similar actually to Robin Hood and Prince John, except Ratigan is way scarier than Prince John and Vincent Price is just so perfect in the role. Ratigan delights in his evil ways. He's so full of theatrics, including the ridiculous execution scene set up with a musical track sung by him so that his nemesis can listen to him as he dies. Ratigan truly is the most delightful narcissist and one of the most threatening villains. He feeds his minions to his cat Felicia and he throws fidget to his death. It's a bold decision by a Disney movie to have a villain so smug and self important and also comical at times, but also genuinely frightening and menacing. And I was genuinely certain I'd seen this movie when I was a kid. And like I say, watching the Big Ben scene made me realize I hadn't because I would have remembered. And honestly, it is spectacular and I still can't stop thinking about how wonderful it is. It shows Ratigan at his most animalistic and aggressive. It's genuinely scary and mesmerizing and it shows exactly what CG animation can bring to traditional 2D hand drawn animation. Regardless of the reduced budget and timescales, this movie has flashes of occasional beauty, impressive set pieces, and clearly the London trip did wonders to showcase its iconic landmarks. Except a muffin isn't a crumpet. Let's get our crumpets correct, please. Also, some scenes just haven't aged well. Basil dressed in quite racist Fu Manchu esque disguises and the weird sexuality of the bar song and scene. But mostly, this movie set out to do what it needed to do. It did decent box office and meanwhile, ex Disney employee Don Bluth partnered with Steven Spielberg to make his own mouse movie and had the Great Mouse Detective and An American Tale come out at the same time. History may be a little bit different, but it's not all doom and gloom. While still in production on the Great Mouse Detective, director Ron Clements brought to the Disney animation gong show a proposal to do a movie called the Little Mermaid. If not for the Great Mouse Detective, there would never have been the Little Mermaid or Beauty and the Beast. There would never have been a renaissance for Disney Feature Animation. The success of the Great Mouse Detective gave new management, Katzenberg, Wells and Eisner confidence in the abilities of the animation department. Without Basil's success, there would be no Disney Renaissance. And without the Disney Renaissance, Disney itself wouldn't exist in its current state. Basil truly is the Great Mouse Detective and deserves the greatest amount of credit for making it so that we weren't saying goodbye so soon to Disney. Basil saved Disney Animation, but I guess to Basil it was just elementary. Thank you for listening. As always, I would love to hear your thoughts on Basil the Great Nurse Detective. And as always, thank you for your continued support of this podcast. If you want to help this podcast grow and be seen by more people, seen I mean heard by more people even, then you could tell your friends and family about this podcast. You can leave a rating or review wherever you found it. And you can also find me on social media at Verbal Diorama on all of the social medias where you can find posts, where you can follow me, you can like posts, you can share posts. It all helps with the visibility of this podcast. And of course coming next for the birthday of this podcast in a few days time. If you're listening to this on release day, who put the glad in Gladiator? Hercules of course. And this podcast is free and it always will be free. However, it is not free to make a podcast and I rely on some incredibly generous souls who help me with general day to day running costs of this podcast. You are under no obligation to contribute financially. However, if you wish to and you have the means to do so, there are two ways you can do that. The first way is to go to verbaldiorama.com tips and give a one off tip. Or you can go to verbaldiorama.Com Patreon and you can join the amazing patrons of this podcast, Sade, Claudia, Simon, Laurel, Derek, Kat, Andy, Mike, Luke, Michael, Scott, Brendan, Lisa, Sam, Jack, Dave, Stuart, Nicholas, Zo, Kev, Pete, Heather, Danny, Ali, Stew, Brett, Philip M, Michelle, Xenos, Sean, Rhino, Philip K, Adam, Elaine, Kyle, Kyle and Aaron. If you want to get in touch you can email verbaldioramail.com you can also visit my website verbaldiorama.com and fill out the little contact form. You can also find bits that I do@filmstories.co.uk articles and columns in magazines and all sorts of stuff? And finally.

Bye?