Canned Disney Cartoons

There’s a lot of cancelled Disney shows that are floating around the internet, some of them seeming like they’d be great (like the 3 different cancelled Muppet cartoons and the sequel series to The Aristocats) or not so much (like the High School Musical sitcom and the edgy 7 dwarves cartoon pitched prior to The 7D). However, did you know that there are four cartoons that the Disney Company will never try to unearth again, placed under a special stipulation that would make it illegal to pitch the concepts? These four cartoons are as follows: Maleficent’s Minions, Petit Maureen, Pocahontas’ Quests, and Ring-Ring Girl.
Maleficent’s Minions followed the titular minions as they raised Maleficent’s 4-year-old daughter, Nightshade. The main two minions were a fat female named Louba, and a skinny male minion named Taha, who tried to convince her that Aurora and her prince were pure evil in each episode. However, Nightshade didn’t listen to them, and saw only how kind and good they were to their newborn daughter, Lilac. Thusly, the episodes consisted of Nightshade trying to do something kind for the new parents as Louba and Taha tried to stop her and they all ended with Nightshade recapping the events to her mother’s grave.
Michael Eisner himself came up with the idea in 1996, hoping that it would help children who had deceased parents move on, but he felt like the story was “too juvenile” for the older audiences of the Disney Channel or even Totally Kids Only. When Playhouse Disney began to again popularity, he found it perfect for the block, so he took it off the shelf and screened it for testing audiences in the summer of 2000.
It was moderately popular with children, but adult critics and parents despised it. One overdramatic parent referred to it being “as tasteless as teaching children about the Holocaust with Anne Frank’s tap-dancing ghost” and called the creators sick monsters that deserved to be blacklisted by the industry. Even promises that her father would return at the end of the series and the two would live happily ever after didn’t quell any enraged parents. So, Eisner sadly shuffled the project into the vault, and we’ll never see it now that he’s stepped down from the company.
Petit Maureen was created by French-Canadian writer Rosalee LaRue, another program pitched to Playhouse Disney in 2005 that would teach young children about the aftermath of the French Revolutionary War, as well as bits of the language. While critics were impressed at the history lessons contained within, they originally derided it as a Dora the Explorer knockoff set in France. As a tongue-in-cheek reference to these critiques, the first screening had Dora’s head poorly digitally composited into Maureen’s in the opening credits.  
While the adults in the room got a chuckle out of it, this decision ultimately alienated the target audience, as many children were unsettled and afraid of “Dora eating Maureen” at the beginning. Eventually, Rosalee shelved the idea for a show and simply released the episode scripts in a chapter book under a nom de plume. Even though Disney still owns the rights to the cartoon, they can't legally do anything with it, effectively screwing themselves over. 
Pocahontas’ Quests is a bit of a strange one, namely being that pretty much everyone I’ve talked to cannot remember who created it. Sure, they had Steve Marmel and Andrew R. Robinson as the writers, but the actual creator seems to be completely unknown. A vast chunk of my information about it comes from a woman who was used as a consulting director about Native American clothing styles, so a few details are still a little fuzzy. She told me that it was meant to be Disney’s answer to Danny Phantom and Spectacular Spider-Man, with a heavy emphasis on action and very little on romance (asides from moments between Pocahontas and John Rolfe).  
The first three eleven-minute episodes were compiled into a pilot movie about Kocoum’s ghost angrily coming back to haunt the tribe due to being jealous that Pocahontas chose 'a pale man' over him. Pocahontas would later reconcile with him, and the true villain of the movie would be revealed as an evil plant monster that was trying to wipe out all animal and human life in America, and then spread itself across the globe until only plant life would remain. 
Asides from the pilot, three other episodes were finished, one about Pocahontas meeting a wood sprite named Tiny Bloom, one about Meeko dying of old age, and a half-hour special where Nakoma’s husband is kidnapped by a vengeful Radcliffe on her wedding day. The whole thing was scheduled for a late 2007 release, but the production became a wreck very quickly. 
Many of the artist’s tablets and pencils were destroyed overnight, the plant monster’s voice actor was accidentally electrocuted during a recording session and walked out in an angry huff, and dead animals kept showing up outside the lot. Granted, all of these problems were revealed to have completely solid explanations, a freak windstorm destroyed the art materials, the equipment in the recording booth needed to be replaced, and there were some stray cats that had grown a liking to one of the storyboarders, and kept trying to leave her “gifts” outside the building.
Nothing, however, could explain the dumpster fire that was the first screening. They were using Adobe Flash to animate the entire series, but what can only be explained as a massive file corruption occurred while rendering. The final product was a garbled mess that was full of repeating dialogue and disturbing glitched visuals that looked like someone had beaten their computer with a bat.  
Despite the storyboard roughs with voice acting being perfectly fine for a potential re-do, Disney TVA was too angry with all that had already happened to move any further, refunded everyone involved, and buried the project so deep that even they forgot about it. I'm pretty positive they hired some kind of FBI agent to scour all traces of concept art, too, because I can't find anything. 
The final cartoon is Ring-Ring Girl, a 2011 cartoon pitch made by Swampy Marsh and Dan Povenmire. She was a half Asian, half white kid that sold onion rings in her backyard. The main running gag of the show was that she’d get horribly disfigured by grease once an episode. Finding the entire premise far too dark for a kid's show, and not wanting anyone to know someone at Disney came up with the idea, it was immediately shelved and Dan and Swampy were punished by having their funding slashed to Phineas and Ferb. 
Category:Disney