The Original Run Time of The Black Cauldron, The Editing and why is there no extended cut

Excerpt from Rotoscopers.com's interview with animator Steve Gordon:

"I get asked all the time "gee, where's the original cut?" I was like "there was no original cut."

Jeffrey got in there pretty quick and trimmed the scary stuff.

 

Nowadays it's not unusual, even back then it wasn't unusual to go in and rework the movie several times until a lot of the movie kept getting reworked and reworked even before Jeffrey and Eisner were there, 

We knew that the Fair Folk section must have gone through 3 or 4 different incarnations before they settled on the final one."

Excerpt from Walt's People Vol 11

https://www.amazon.com/Walts-People-Talking-Disney-Artists/dp/146536840X/ref=pd_ybh_a_13?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=SY40CBEW0CEH54HMB32T

Joe Hale: "Somewhere  along this timeline, Michael Eisner took over at Disney and Ron Miller was disposed. Roy E. Disney came back to work in animation. Jeffrey Katzenberg was working directly under Eisner.

I had known Roy off and on for years. I worked with  him a little bit when he was doing his true life adventures  television shows.  I did some of the titles for him. in fact, he was the only one there who ever called me a genius. He was doing a picture called Boy from Bahrain. Roy really liked to start his pictures out with a map showing where they took place. I painted this big map of that area showing the island and the Persian gulf. the first scene in his picture was nothing but ocean, and this Arab sailboat comes crusing along in the water. So I made a tracing of the first frame of that picture, then redrew it onto the map. it showed the whole area and then the camera slowly trucks into the boat, and as you get to a certain point the drawing of the boat lines up with the real Arab sailboat in the live action. Then there was a cross-dissolve, and the boat starts moving. It was a perfect introduction to that film. I never discussed it with Roy. I just did it. I was doing this in a hurry and I was always working on something else at the time an I kind of worked these in. he was really tickled with it.

I worked with Roy on The Black Cauldron a lot more than I did with Katzenberg. Katzenberg came to Disney with an attitude, like with "you guys have failed, and now we're coming in and we are going to show you how pictures are made." We were not prepared for this Eisner/Katzenberg team. It was sort of like The Sopranos took over the studio.

Anyway, Roy was interested in taking over animation, because he had grown up at Walt's knee and knew the importance of animation to Disney. He had his company, Shamrock Productions, that was very successful, and he had tons of money, but he wanted to get back into filmmaking. I was happy to see Roy's interest, because I felt that he would be protective of animation. There were rumors that Eisner might get rid of animation altogether since he was more interested in making live-action pictures.

One day Jeffrey wanted to see The Black Cauldron, so Roy and I ran it for him. When it was over he said, "Cut 10 minutes out of it."

Now the picture at that time only ran 82 minutes. Ron had always said, "I don't want this picture to run over 80 minutes," but it did go two minutes over. Eighty two minutes is not long for a picture.
Usually they run closer to two hours. so I asked, "What is it you want cut?" He said, "You just figure it out. Well that: shorten this or whatever."

Roy and I got together on a Moviola and we ran reels and tried to figure out what scenes that we could cut without destroying the story. we cut six minutes, I believe, which is a lot of costly animation footage. We ran the picture again for Katzenberg. He said, "Now is that ten minutes?" I think Roy said, "No, we only were able to cut out six minutes." Katzenberg replied, "I said ten minutes," and he left. By this time, I realized this was more than cutting a picture. This was a power grab. He wanted Roy to know that he was the boss. when we had cut about 8 1/2 minutes, we ran it again, he insisted that ten minutes had to be cut. By the time we cut ten minutes, Roy and I agreed that the story began to suffer. We finally cut twelve minutes for the sake of continuity.

The animation building was being remodeled into smaller offices, so they moved us over near WED into a warehouse with no windows. It was a terrible place to work."


82 minutes.


Edit: Even though Joe Hale remembered Jeffery Katzenberg cut 12 minutes, but before Katzenberg the work in progress was 82 minutes?

I have excerpts from Christopher Finch's The Art of Walt Disney 1995 edition that mentioned "2 or 3" minutes were cut. 

"Most people in and around the feature animation department believe very strongly that Roy Disney deserves credit for saving Disney animation from possible extinction. Certainly, he took control of the department when it was at its artistic and commercial heights. Had he not stepped forward at the critical moment, it is conceivable that executives whose backgrounds were exclusively in live-action films might eventually have decided that the animation department was a costly luxury the Studio could no longer afford.

     

"Roy was the hero," says producer Don Hann. "Without him there might never have been Beauty and the Beast or Aladdin. He believed in animation, he understood it, and fought for it."

   

Disney himself admits to having some early doubts about the wisdom of his choice.

    "The first thing I did," he recalls, "was to run the production reel of The Black Cauldron, which was close to being finished. I had heard there were problems, of course, but I wasn't prepared for what I saw. I looked at it and knew we were in deep trouble. There were bits that worked on their own, but they didn't hang together. The story got lost partway into the movie, and the movie was dark in an unrelieved way, without the kind of light relief that's need to make the bad guys palatable."

   

One of Michael Eisner's first executive acts had been to appoint Jeffrey Katzenberg - former head of production at paramount - to the position of chairman of Walt Disney Pictures. Ot would be Katzenberg's responsibility, in tandem with Roy Disney, to determine the future of feature animation.

Like Disney, Katzenberg screened the production reel of The Black Cauldron and, like Disney, he was horrified by what he saw. Drawing on his experience with live-action movies, he announced that he would take the expensive production (it had cost twenty-five million dollars at that point) into the editing room and recut it. Katzenberg did not realize (or perhaps care) that such a notion was looked on as sacrilege in animation circles. 

As explained in chapter 2, an animated movie is layed out in storyboards and pre-edited by layout artists and scene planners before animation ever begins. The idea that an executive would have the effrontery to cut a Disney animated feature seemed almost scandalous,

and it appeared to augur badly for the future the department. If the new regime was capable of committing such crimes against the nature of the medium, how could it be expected to support animation in the future?

  

In reality, it was the animation department that had created the monster. Katzenberg was merely trying to save what he could of a sizable investment in the only way he knew how.

   

"We had to get in there with a scalpel," he says. "I know this was very disturbing for some people, and I understood this, but I was not imposing my personal values on what I saw as our responsibility to the  consumers to the members of the public who vote at the box office."

 

 Katzenberg managed to trim two or three minutes from the film, but it was too late to alter the overall conception." 

Why doesn't Disney do extended cuts?

Probably for the same reasons that  lesser films were not given the same extravagant bonus features treatment as the crown jewels ( Walt Disney Signature Collection) on the Blu rays and DVDs

The lesser films didn't do as well in theaters and home video.

altough Fantasia, Pinocchio, Bambi and Sleeping Beauty started as flops eventually made their way to crown jewel status through their theatrical reissues.

and also allegedly Disney has a "theatrical cuts only policy" to most or all of their movies.  
(even though some titles are exempt from that, like the 124 minute restored roadshow cut of Fantasia, and censored cuts for home video and streaming like the 67 minute "edited for content" cut of the package feature: Make Mine Music)

Ok on to what Disney did extended cuts of:

There was a time when Disney (and Anchor Bay) made restored extended cuts of Disney films

even Disney made extended “Special Edition” cuts of some of their animated Disney renaissance films as well as their live action films. 

somewhere around the early to mid 2010’s Disney quit doing that, and for most of their classic films that extended were back to their theatrical cuts.



Bedknobs and Broomsticks 25th Annversary edition  139 mins 1996 (LaserDisc 1996/VHS Disney DVD 2001/Disney DVD 2009) restoration director: Scott MacQueen


The Happiest Millionare Roadshow Cut 172 mins  1999 (Anchor Bay VHS DVD 1999/Disney DVD 2004)
http://articles.latimes….9/entertainment/ca-60536


Fantasia 60th Annversary Roadshow Cut 2000 124 mins (Disney DVD 2000/Disney Bluray and DVD 2010) restoration director: Scott MacQueen

added scenes with Deems Taylor’s onscreen appearance and more footage of the orchrestra was restored. unforuntently the soundtrack for Deems voice was shortened for the 1946/1956 reissues.
so Cory Burton was brought in to redub Deems.


there was an attempt to make a longer version of Watcher in the Woods (1980)
more about it here:
http://www.oocities.org/…cin4/watchermystery.html


Beauty and Beast Special Edition 91 mins 2002
musical song number “Human Again” added.

The Lion King Special Edition 90 mins 2003
musical song number “Morning Report” added. (currently as a bonus feature)

Pocahontas Special Edition 84 mins 2005
musical song number “If I Never Knew You” added. (currently as a bonus feature)

and also there were extended cuts of Muppet’s Christmas Carol (1992) (currently in the extras section of the theatrical cut on Disney+) and Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe (2005)