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When I told a friend that I’d caught an advance screening of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice](The Sorcerer's Apprentice (2010) - Movie | Moviefone) last week, the conversation eventually drifted to the inspiration for the movie. And he told me that he thought the movie was based on a young adult novel. Which gave me pause.
My friend is not entirely ignorant of the history of movies. But he’s never seen Walt Disney’s Fantasia](Fantasia (1941) - Movie | Moviefone), which began life as a cartoon short, titled The Sorcerer’s Apprentice](Fantasia - Wikipedia), in which Mickey Mouse gets into some hot water with a mop and an errant magical spell. (The sequence is recreated in the live-action version, out tomorrow). It’s been some time since Disney stopped re-releasing their classic animated movies into theaters every seven years. They have slowly but surely been remastering the films for DVD and Blu-ray. Fantasia was released on DVD in 2000, but has since gone out of print; a new edition is rumored to be coming in December, as our own Erik Childress reported.
Yet that means an entire generation has never seen Fantasia. And so when they see a trailer for a movie starring Nicolas Cage as a modern day sorcerer dressed in a long trench coat and Jay Baruchel as his reluctant, college-aged apprentice, naturally it looks and feels like an adaptation of a young adult novel or series, likely patterned after the Harry Potter series.
Continue reading ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’: Losing the Inspiration?