Exactly
Ok, I just have to interject here because if you’ve heard anything about this movie, you know that Disney did NOT know how to market it and really sold it as a family-friendly romp (hence the George Constanta gargoyle). Kid-friendly publicity up the wazoo. Hand puppets from Burger King.
I was six years old when Hunchback came out. My mother took me to the movie theater in the mall to see it, and they had set up a giant Notre Dame display in the middle of the mall, where every half hour or so a group of performers would sing the Feast of Fools while multicolored confetti rained down on the crowd. It was the most colorful, manically enthusiastic thing I’d ever seen. THEN, I was brought into the theater and witnessed the darkest film about a crisis of faith and lust that ever inflicted on a first grader.
I have no memory of what I thought of the film. What I DO remember is wandering listlessly through the confetti in the mall after the fact in a complete daze, having an existential crisis, while my mother asked what was wrong because she was convinced there was something medically wrong with me.
To reiterate, one of my first, most vivid memories is being emotionally scarred by this movie.
I was afraid for a minute that I had misrepresented my childhood experience, and there doesn’t appear to be any photo or video record of the mall tour, but there are several articles talking about the over-the-top pageantry of it all. It doesn’t look like the performers actually sang, but my god, to be a six year old standing in front of a two-story Notre Dame replica with a working bell that spouts confetti when you ring it???
(via tinsnip)
