Infamous Disney Memo

You may have heard of a notorious memo once circulated through Disney's Animation Department.

When Disney Management in the eighties noted the box office failure of the film Young Sherlock Holmes, which I happen to like, by the way, they panicked. In an effort to distance themselves from this financial failure, someone conceived the not-so-brilliant idea of changing the name of their own picture Basil of Baker Street to a generic title: The Great Mouse Detective.

Disgusted, the animators and crew of Basil of Baker Street created a memo, supposedly from management, changing the names of all previous animated features. Here is a scan of that memo, preserved for posterity:

It is interesting to note that, in much more recent years, Disney and Pixar seem to have been plagued with the same mentality, giving us ludicrous titles like Tangled, Frozen, Brave, and worst of all, John Carter. Good movies; bad titles.