What a Disney Version of A Clockwork Orange Would Look Like

“Fam­i­ly-friend­ly enter­tain­ment” means dif­fer­ent things to dif­fer­ent peo­ple, despite near­ly a cen­tu­ry of the Walt Dis­ney Com­pa­ny attempt­ing to asso­ciate the con­cept exclu­sive­ly with its own brand. And on the busi­ness lev­el, Dis­ney has become increas­ing­ly iden­ti­fied with enter­tain­ment itself. “With Mar­vel, Star Wars, Pixar, and their princess con­tent tucked safe­ly in their port­fo­lio,” writes Boing Boing’s Devin Nealy, “Dis­ney is only a few stu­dios away from hav­ing a monop­oly on nos­tal­gia. At this point, it’d be eas­i­er to count the IPs that Dis­ney does­n’t own.”

When it comes to extract­ing all pos­si­ble val­ue from IP — that is, intel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty — no com­pa­ny shows quite as much deter­mi­na­tion as Dis­ney. This goes for the cre­ations it has late­ly acquired as well as those it already owned.

Wit­ness, for instance, its recent spate of live-action remakes: The Jun­gle Book direct­ed by Jon Favreau, Aladdin by Guy Ritchie, Dum­bo by Tim Bur­ton. That these are hard­ly the least plau­si­ble prod­ucts to be put out by Dis­ney Stu­dios in the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry sends the imag­i­na­tion toward ever more incon­gru­ous pos­si­bil­i­ties for IP-reusage. What if Dis­ney remade, say, Stan­ley Kubrick­’s A Clock­work Orange?

Such is the premise of the uncan­ny trail­er above, cre­at­ed by Youtu­ber Jaba­Toons. Using audio tak­en straight from Kubrick­’s eclec­ti­cal­ly night­mar­ish vision of Antho­ny Burgess’ dystopi­an nov­el, it also ren­ders a host of its scenes not in the style of the CGI extrav­a­gan­zas Dis­ney puts out today, but the more tra­di­tion­al, two-dimen­sion­al ani­mat­ed pic­tures it still did in the nine­teen-nineties. The trail­er announces the film as “Dis­ney’s 35th ani­mat­ed clas­sic,” a posi­tion occu­pied in real­i­ty by Her­cules: also a hero’s jour­ney, albeit with a much dif­fer­ent tone, to say noth­ing of out­come, than A Clock­work Orange. Alex Delarge may look strange­ly plau­si­ble as a Dis­ney char­ac­ter, but a pro­tag­o­nist with a less fam­i­ly-friend­ly set of inter­ests would be hard to imag­ine.

via Boing Boing

Relat­ed con­tent:

A Lccokrkow Gar­neo: All 245,000 Frames of Kubrick’s A Clock­work Orange Ran­dom­ized

Mon­ty Python and the Holy Grail Re-Imag­ined as an Epic, Main­stream Hol­ly­wood Film

The Shin­ing and Oth­er Com­plex Stan­ley Kubrick Films Recut as Sim­ple Hol­ly­wood Movies

Don­ald Duck Dis­cov­ers Glenn Beck: A Remix

Mick­ey Mouse In Viet­nam: The Under­ground Anti-War Ani­ma­tion from 1968, Co-Cre­at­ed by Mil­ton Glaser

When Stan­ley Kubrick Banned His Own Film, A Clock­work Orange: It Was the “Most Effec­tive Cen­sor­ship of a Film in British His­to­ry”

The Mak­ing of Stan­ley Kubrick’s A Clock­work Orange

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.