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‘We’ll Never Make That Kind of Movie Again’
An oral history of The Emperor’s New Groove, a raucous Disney animated film that almost never happened.
We’ve republished it now alongside Episode 3 of Land of the Giants: The Disney Dilemma, a Vulture-Vox Media Podcast Network collaboration that looks at the many facets and ever-changing fortunes of the sprawling entertainment company. First, there is The Kingdom of the Sun, an epic tale incorporating Inca myths, which was to be directed by The Lion King ’s Roger Allers and would have starred Owen Wilson as a lowly llama herder bound to switch lives with a selfish, vain prince voiced by David Spade. While all this was going on, however, there was a third movie — a behind-the-scenes documentary called The Sweatbox, directed by Sting’s wife, Trudie Styler, and John Paul Davidson, which over the course of production went from being an informative making-of to a riveting, no-holds-barred, occasionally funny, often heartbreaking look at how the Disney sausage is made, and sometimes unmade.
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