Most Troubled/Complicated Animated Productions Ever

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I really started to think about this ever since somebody in a previous thread (pertaining to the best/worst vocal recasts in animation history) that mentioned The Real Adventures of Jonny Quest. Basically, the first and second seasons are for all intensive purposes, separate shows. Both seasons have radically different animation styles and voice casts. To make a long story short, Turner Broadcasting fired the first team (who worked on what would be the first season) for being behind schedule. The replacement team finshed the show in what would turn out to be, classified as the second season.

The most obvious example of an extremely troubled animated production is The Thief and the Cobbler (or when it was first released in the United States in 1995, Arabian Knight). I can't really properly explain all that happened without anything right in front of me. In a nutshell, the project dated as far back as 1969. It was animator Richard Williams' lifelong pet project. I think that it was initially going to be released by Warner Bros. but Williams couldn't keep up with their time table (especially with Disney's Aladdin being on the horizon). Then the project ultimately fell into the hands of Miramax, who got somebody else to finish it. The end result, is kind of a piss-poor Aladdin wannabe (e.g. with musical numbers and what not) instead of what Richard Williams originally envisioned (for instance, the protagonist originally, wasn't supposed to speak). It was also Vincent Price's (who played the rhyming talking villain) last released (he passed away two year's prior to Arabian Knight's release, but supposedly recorded his vocal tracks as far back as the '60s) work.

Ren & Stimpy is another obvious example. Nickelodeon fires John K. and Spumco in part for being late/slow production wise. Nick also censored or banned certain episodes for content (i.e. the "Man's Best Friend" episode).

The Jetsons movie from 1990 had to cope with both the deaths of Mel Blanc (Mr. Spacely) and George O'Hanlon (George Jetson) before production was finished. There was also the utterly egregious decision by the powers that be to replace Janet Waldo (Judy Jetson) with Tiffany Darwish (Tiffany was at the peak of her success/popularity/notority as a pop starlet/teen idol and Universal wanted to use her as a way to draw in more youngsters), even though Waldo had completed her vocal tracks.
 
Wasn't The Black Cauldron a horribly-troubled production, with Disney chickening out and removing/altering a lot of completed animation as being too scary for the wee ones? Also Titan A.E. had Don Bluth coming in mid-production to replace another director, correct?
 
Ralph Bakshi had a horror animated movie that he was working with Paramount called Cool World, but however it ended up being re-written behind Bakshi's back. The producer who rewrote the script changed it from a horror movie to a Roger Rabbit like movie Bakshi didn't approve of this, he later ended up punching the guy in the face. This is the reason why Bakshi hasn't made another film in years....I think Coney Island had a few production problems.

Chris Sander's American Dog, John lassester fired him off and changed it to a more "disney" like movie. Which is wildly considered by sander fans a knock-off of *ahem* "one of pixar's films".

I would say it was, but however some of the scenes that were taken out of the film and put in storage. I'm guessing Disney either still has the footage or its locked up in the safe.
 
The Emperors New Groove was originally called Kingdom of the Sun and it was a standard prince and the pauper syory where yzma tries to block out the sun to regain her youthful looks. ANd it was a musical w/ songs done by sting. Roger Allers, director of The Lion King, had a hard time fixing the story and getting everything together, so he quit and handed it to Mark Dindal and, there you go!
 
It was going to be an R-rated movie with Tim Burton designs at one point.

Up there with The Thief and the Cobbler is Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland. Chuck Jones, Ray Bradbury, John Canemaker, George Lucas, Hayao Miyazaki, Isao Takahatta, Yoshifumi Kondo, and Moebius were all attached to it at one point. All we got in the end was a piece of plotless eye candy from Chris Columbus.
 
Wasn't Rock N Rule in development hell for a long time before release? mostly because it was so expensive to make?

I'll never know why they decided to go on with that. It was terrible imo.
 
Disney's Bonkers is another one.

It started off with Bonkers as a cop with his partner Miranda Wright. It's been said that Disney executives were none too pleased with how the show turned out; so they fired the production team led by Duane Capizzi midway in production and replaced them with a team led by Robert Taylor. Taylor's team revamped the show's premise, thus introducing the character of Lucky Piquel and giving it a new look and feel. Only a handful of "Miranda' episodes made it to the air as the rest were either destroyed or locked away in the Disney vault.
 
The Black Cauldron was in development hell for about ten years, but when it was finally nearing the end of the line in 1985, it had the misfortune of being the first animated film to be scrutinized by the then-new executive team of Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg. Their decision to cut several scenes from the finished film was pretty earth-shattering to the Disney animators, as no completed scenes had ever been cut from an animated Disney movie before. Ultimately, the cuts just ended up making the already baffling story even more confusing.
 
Ah, Michael Eisner, the man who nearly ruined the Walt Disney Company by producing horrible Direct-to-Home-Video sequels for Disney classics, and other abominations.
 
Um, Snow White? At least one fully-colored scene with the Queen was cut, and several B&W scenes with the Dwarves were cut after all the animation was finalized, only awaiting the final color.
 
D'oh! Got me there. (I wasn't sure if the stuff they cut from Snow White was completed footage or just early pencil tests - guess I was wrong.) But still, no film since that one had done any post-completion editing; The Black Cauldron brought the practice back, and it's be come fairly common now. I know fully animated scenes were cut from The Lion King, Pocahontas, and Lilo and Stitch, and there were probably others too.
 
I don't know if it really counts as troubled, but The Jungle Book was originally going to be much darker and more faithful to Kipling's book. Walt Disney completely threw out Bill Peet's storyboard work on it and then had the Sherman Brothers almost totally replace Terry Gilkenson's songs (and then ditch the minor key of The Bare Necessities, the lone hold-out).

Speaking of Roger Rabbit, that might also count since it's pre-production predates Eisner and Katzenberg and different drafts would have had Jessica Rabbit or Baby Herman as the main villains.

Would animation problems count as troubled and complicated productions? Because The Simpsons' "Some Enchanted Evening" almost killed the whole show before it started.
 
The Magic 7 - It started production in 1990 (apparently, it was originally scheduled to air on TV on Earth Day 1997) but as far as I can tell, it has never been released. The late John Candy and the late Madeline Kahn both recorded vocal tracks for the project long before their untimely deaths.

As for Cool World, I read that Kim Basinger thought that she was making a kiddie movie. Apparently, she thought that it would be a great idea to be able to show this movie to sick kids in hospitals.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CoolWorld
 
 
He didn't save Disney animation from ruin so much as he just didn't kill it outright. Eisner and Katzenberg were planning to shut down Walt Disney Feature Animation in the mid '80s, because none of their movies were turning a profit anymore and they thought animation in general was dead. But Don Bluth's An American Tail turned out to be a huge smash hit for Universal in 1986 (ironically, smothering Disney's own The Great Mouse Detective), and it made Eisner realize that animation could still draw an audience after all, so he let WDFA live.
 
The Pirates of Dark Water - The show ended before all of the the treasures could be collected (eight out of the thirteen treasures). It aired on ABC during the first season and in syndication (as part of The Funtastic World of Hanna-Barbara) for the second. The series was never able to met a natural conclusion due to expensive production costs and failing to meet airdates (I think that's why ABC dumped it).
 
Paul Grimault's Le Roi et l'Oiseau started production around 1948. It was taken away by his investors in 1952 before he could finish it.

Whatever animation that was completed by that point was turned into "The Curious Adventures of Mr. Wonderbird".
Grimault regained control of the film in the 1970s and finally finished it in 1980. He had no access to any of the original artwork or cels and had to match the new footage to the old just by looking at the incomplete 1952 version. He did a pretty good job, IMO.

The final 1980 version of the film is available in continental Europe, Japan, and in French-speaking Canada. The US only got a very brief theatrical release in the early 1980s and sadly nothing more.:sad: It's artistically one of the best animated films to ever come out of France.
 
In fact, all the vocal songs on the Emperor's New Groove soundtrack were originally recorded FOR Kingdom of the Sun, so it really gives you a feel as to what the movie was originally going to be like (despite being a musical, it seems it was originally going to be a much darker film than it ended up as).
 
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