Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas opened on this day 20 years ago. It was, sadly, DreamWorks Animation's last hand-drawn animated movie (or "tradigital" feature as the the studio liked to call them due to their heavy usage of CGI), bombing badly to say the least. I've talked about some disappointments in OTs before--Quest for Camelot and Hulk being two recent examples--but Sinbad takes the cake for probably being the biggest flop I've covered here for quite some time. Which is a shame, because it's a great action film, filled with fun monster battles and likeable characters. Really, if you haven't checked it out, it's sort of like an animated Pirates of the Caribbean as far as tone goes. Also, it has Marina, voiced by Catherine Zeta-Jones. Marina was my animated crush as a teenager. I probably would've literally married her if it were possible to, you know, marry cartoons (actually, everyone in this movie is pretty sexy; even the villain Eris is a sultry hoot).
This looks like her vacation photo from Stonehenge.
Anyway, DreamWorks didn't exactly go all out with the marketing for this thing. Foolishly opening it against Terminator 3 and Legally Blonde 2, Sinbad also feel to Pixar's Finding Nemo, which had been playing for more than a month at that point. Also, they only ever made one trailer, a brief teaser that told you nothing about the plot and basically said "well, we got these famous people to do voices, so go see our movie, I guess." Most infuriatingly, DreamWorks honcho Jeffery Katzenberg intentionally punished the movie's lackluster returns by not submitting it for the Best Animated Feature Oscar that year. This was like a slap in the face to everyone who worked on it, and something I still get kind of mad over.
Anyway, as you probably guessed from the thread's title, the film did at least get a solid Burger King promotion. Although I was kind of disappointed that Sinbad himself was the only human character to get a toy, with many of the others being the various creatures he has to escape from (I also never got a complete set, so I'll have to remedy that someday). Also, this was from the time when Burger King sold floats, and I wish they would start having those again. If I recall correctly, they were pretty tasty, even if they did embarrassing things to the color of your tongue. And call me overly cautious, but I highly doubt that drinking one of them when skateboarding was particularly safe to do.
Have a great day, y'all!
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