The Further Adventures of Dumbo? Fantasia Frolics? Bambi: the Series? If television had been around in the Forties, would these titles have been a reality? Difficult to tell how far Walt Disney would have gone, but today's popular Disney animated features go on to live forever--not only in the memory of generations who will enjoy them for years to come, but also any child up early enough on Saturday mornings.

As the studio's animated features become increasingly popular, audiences clamor for more. To answer the call quickly and efficiently, Disney has taken to adapting some of their more recent animated films to a format once foreign to the Mouse House: television. Hits such as The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, The Lion King and even the classic 101 Dalmatians have spawned TV siblings. With their characters and stories so entrenched in the mainstream, creating new weekly situations is the first and usually most daunting task.

This fall, WDTVA will debut Hercules, an animated series on ABC's Saturday morning line-up. © The Walt Disney Company. All Rights Reserved

A New Genre
Roy Price, director of development and current programming for Walt Disney Television Animation (WDTVA), used this analogy: "It's sort of like if you wanted to take the theme of a symphony and transport it into a rock and roll song. You could do it, as they showed in A Whiter Shade of Pale, but you have to be aware that the demands of the medium, or the genre, are a little different. If you just tried to play the symphony for minutes at a time, it won't be satisfactory. It won't please the symphony lover or the rock and roll aficionado. So, you have to be more sensitive to what works in the shorter time frame and the different demands of the medium."

Disney has indeed met these demands, as Television Animation has become a strong arm of the company since its inception over a decade ago with shows like Adventures of the Gummi Bears and The Wuzzles. One of the people there for the flash point was Tad Stones, an animator who began his career at Disney in feature animation in 1974. Later he moved to television and went on to serve as executive producer of the series Aladdin, as well as director of the film's two lucrative direct-to-video sequels.

He stated that adapting a popular feature for the small screen comes with inevitable hurdles. "No matter what you do, no matter how much you spend and put into it, you're not going to be spending as much as a feature film," admitted Stones. "Everybody understands that this is a TV series, but they still compare it directly to the feature films. So, basically we're getting something done on a television production schedule, albeit a lush one, compared to something that was four years in the making and is lavished with computer effects and digital ink and paint. That hurts us too, because it's daunting when someone overseas is drawing something `off-model.' We give them notes and we try to refine something, but there's only so much that we can do."