Disney was kind of cool in the 80s.
It had that scrappy underdog energy that made their output fascinating to study, even though it rarely made blockbuster money. It wasn’t a question of visibility – the brand was still global, every kid still knew who Mickey was, the theme parks were still packed, and the classic catalog was still doing the heavy lifting. But if you were just looking at what came out of the studio year to year between The Black Hole and The Little Mermaid, you’d think the place was being run by a committee trying to pitch to six different focus groups at once.
This was a company during one of its experimental phases. Two decades out from Walt’s death, it still clung to the old legacy, but if the ‘70s had been hit-or-miss while sticking to tried formulas, the ‘80s tried hard to figure out what the kids were into. Even branching out with Touchstone Pictures to explore what even older kids were into.
You got the sci-fi trending of The Black Hole and Tron, the gothic horror leanings of Watcher in the Woods, Something Wicked and Return to Oz, the gritty realism of The Journey of Natty Gann, the Spielbergian wish fulfilment of Flight of the Navigator (distributed by Disney but the production is another story), and the animation department was flirting with soft PG-laced material like The Great Mouse Detective and The Black Cauldron. Every release felt like a new attempt at self-definition. There was still ambition in the fuel tank, but the core strategy looked more like a dartboard.
Oliver & Company was released in the middle of all that in 1988, and for once, something connected. It made money. More than anything they’d done in years. Over $50 million domestic, going head-to-head with The Land Before Time, which had Spielberg and Don Bluth behind it and still came out winning the long game at the box office.
For a studio that had spent the decade trailing its former animator, that brush with success made Eisner and the rest of the boardroom take notice.
Not to mention the mega success of Roger Rabbit earlier that year helped make animation cool again for a new generation. It gave it a meta language that would serve the industry for the next couple of decade with Tiny Toon Adventures, Animaniacs, and the auteur era of the post-Ren and Stimpy 90s.
The film itself is still very grounded, very 80s-cool-kid friendly. It’s got a modern setting, a pop soundtrack by hit makers du jour, a hydrant-level POV by street-wise talking dogs. You could feel them edging toward a new formula – a tighter story, some hookier songs with a bit of Broadway swagger – but it hadn’t quite clicked yet.
To me, what makes Oliver and Co. interesting now is how it fits into the post-Walt Disney evolutionary arc as a major turning point. This movie is the signpost. It showed the house of mouse that a musical animated feature with mass appeal could still win, even in the 80s.
It wasn’t an appeal to nostalgia or the repackaging of an old disney property in funky fresh new wave duds. Well not quite. There was a path forward – and that path was already in motion.
At the time of Oliver’s release, a smaller film about a red-haired mermaid was already in production. And not to overstate things, but that little mermaid would push the company into the 90s and ignite what armchair historians call the Disney Renaissance.
All told, audiences didn’t have much patience for Disney’s movie R&D phase at the time, they were swinging for the rafters when other Amblin-adjacent family fare was keeping their BMX wheels closer to the ground in a way that felt much more relatable.
Disney was never one to put their eggs in the same basket, though.
That’s one of the things that’s kept them going for a hundred years, there’s always something brewing somewhere and nothing works in isolation.
So maybe Oliver’s success owes a little something to a cartoon that started winning over the hearts and minds of latchkey kids every day after school. DuckTales had started in syndication in September of ’87, and the Disney Afternoons didn’t stop there. -Pop