Disney's Descendants: Summer TV Camp?
Monday, April 27, 2015 at 2:33PM Manuel here bringing a bit of levity to your Monday morning. Sometimes you come across something (a casting announcement, a trailer, a plot description) that leaves you agog.
Such is the case with this trailer for Descendants, a summer original Disney Channel movie which begins with the premise "what if Disney Villains hadn't died at the end of their respective films but instead were sent to an island prison where they had beautiful children who will now attend the prep school with the beautiful children of your favorite Disney princesses?" I mean. Disney has clearly gone full camp, right? With Kenny High School Musical Ortega, one hopes. Even in describing it it sounds like the sort of thing that'd have made a cool animated series in the early 2000s (you know, alongside Jungle Cubs, Hercules, and The Emperor's New School).
That description doesn't do it justice, so take a look:
I'm sharing the trailer because I NEED to talk about this. There's so much to discuss! Will Disney ever stop seeing its classic animated characters as anything other than endlessly replicable cosplay opportunities? Will Kristin Chenoweth (as a bite-sized Maleficent) and Kathy Najimy (as the Evil Queen) get the spinoff we probably all would guiltily watch? Tell me everything that came to mind as you realized this was indeed a real thing and not a Tumblr post gone viral.
Reader Comments (11)
I really want to know who Kristen and Kathy pissed off to get stuck with this.
Also, the pictures on Buzzfeed for this movie...yeesh. More than a little bit of an undercurrent of racism/classism.
Shiiiiiitshoooooooow
On paper it's bad enough, but sweet merciful heavens does that trailer double down. The wig budget alone is dooming this to failure. Yikes.
This is standard live-action programming aimed at school children.
They're basically copying one of Disney's less successful live-action films, Sky High. The only difference is the use of Disney Villains. I'm not a huge fan of the reimagining of these classic characters so I'll steer clear of it, but I think it's odd that with the Maleficent movie, Once Upon a Time, and now this, Disney has three different live action versions of one character and none of them seem to belong to the same universe. I'm sure some of these other characters have popped up on that TV show as well. Maybe I'm just too used to what Marvel is doing?
My only thought was: This looks like shit.
My thoughts:
(a) this looks like fun, something to watch with my nieces, and
(b) Hello, Son of Jafar!
So the son of Cruella is supposed to read as gay, right? Like, that's an intentional part of his character? It was hard to tell from the little snippet he had. If so, interesting choice.
I was appalled at the bad jokes, and bad acting. Seriously - the performances look terrible.
Who in their right mind thought Cheno = Maleficent. Like, i cannot think of a more bizarre casting choice.
Well, on paper it has to look good. I hope KC and KN were well compensated.