SilverWook said:
Titan A.E. got pretty close to what made Star Wars fun, IMHO...
It had a young hero with father issues, spunky heroine, Han Solo type, loveable alien sidekicks, and a MacGuffin both sides were chasing after. It had it's own humorous spin on sneaking into a secure area to rescue the heroine. There was a chase scene in a field of giant ice crystals that could give the ESB asteroid scene a run for it's money.
Did I mention the Earth gets obliterated in the first few minutes of the film? That sequence blew me away on the big screen.
It also had a great musical score, and a decent song filled soundtrack. I played the CD to death for a while.
I don't think it was marketed very well, (non cutesy animated films are still a tough sell) and it wasn't a box office success. Had it come out before Episode One, I feel it could have caught the wave of pent up demand for Star Wars that was building at the time. I went to see it about three times, and I only saw TPM once.
It does have a footnote in history as one of the first digitally projected films. Also probably one of the last feature films to have a honest to goodness Cinemascope credit.
I liked this movie so much, I collected quite a few items. Beyond the action figures, I've got animation drawings, and the now pretty darn rare Laserdisc release. (As with TPM, the LD never came out in the U.S.) I've also got a demo disc for a Playstation game that unfortunately was never released.
The movie did get a small cult following as evidenced by the amount of fan art out there. Alas, some of the fan sites I used to visit have vanished over the past decade.
If Fox would get off it's butt and release it on Blu Ray, I'd rush out and buy it. :)
What a fun topic, and what truth that this film was horribly underrated. I really don't have much to add to the original topic, but I did want to make the extremely off topic but fully in character point that Don Bluth, the genius behind Titan A.E., Land Before Time, Anastasia, The Secret of Nimh, and many other brilliant films in competition with Disney, is...a...Mormon!