Blorbo Introduction Time -- Kind of another niche character, though maybe not quite as bad off as Ommadon in terms of obscurity. But mulling and musing over the Red Wizard kinda made me think back to this guy and reminded me how much I loved this character.
You may have seen me making mentions of the Horned King! He's kinda one of Disney's more obscure villains -- some peeps consider him as, like, the epitome of most intense villain alongside Chernabog, Frollo and Shan-Yu -- every scene he's in, he carries this aura of absolute dread and fear. Others consider him one of the weaker for not not really doing much -- we HEAR characters talk at length of how terrible he is, but we never get to see what makes him so bad, beyond everyone crapping their pants whenever he is around, and the climax of the movie where he gets the titular object, but never really has a chance to actually do anything with it. And he gets kinda anticlimactically killed by said object.
Love him or hate him. Disney themselves are a bit shy in regards to The Black Cauldron -- so the movie had a really rocky development history, and they wanted to go a darker route with their films. But then-newly appointed CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg(I think?) saw what they were doing, deemed it all too intense, and cut 12 minutes from the movie.
The movie was STILL considered intense at the time. Between that and it being too different from the books it was based on, the movie nearly spelled the end of Disney. And it wasn’t until The Little Mermaid that they found their footing again. The Black Cauldron itself was one of those movies that came REALLY close to being vaulted, which has only ever happened with one movie(Song of the South). They're... SORTA coming around to the movie, though I feel like it's more of an acknowledgement through gritted teeth sorta thing. 😅
Personally, I find the movie very enjoyable -- it didn't have the same hold on me as The Lion King did as a kid, but I enjoyed it. And in later years I kinda developed a certainappreciation for the movie -- it was bold at the time in a different sense as compared to Hunchback of Notre Dame. And even now, it still stands as being sorta bold for what they TRIED to do.
As for the Horned King himself -- HoKi! -- I got aa bit of sentimentality for the guy because he's arguably what got me into writing in the first place, between RP and Fic... Even though a lot of fics I did write was amateur smut between him and Maleficent. 😅
... Kinda want to write something between those two and Ommadon now. 😋
But also, him just being another one of those Mohg shaped kinda guys!
oh, i've seen the black cauldron, though it was so long ago that i barely remember anything about it - except that the horned king was Very Cool and Handsome :3 maybe i should give it another watch one of these days, since i indeed remember almost nothing of it!
