Trivia / A Troll in Central Park

• Box Office Bomb: One of the biggest percentage-wise in the history of filmmaking. The film had a budget of $23 million and grossed a mere $71,368 domestically, which is less than one-third of 1% of its budget, making it one of the biggest box office bombs in the history of animation (formerly the biggest until Delgo). Warner Bros. gave both a limited release and Invisible Advertising, because they expected it to flop.
• Channel Hop: Warner Bros. released the film originally, but is now distributed by 20th Century Fox due to Rupert Murdoch's ownership of Media Assets, the company that owned the film. It's now owned by Disney, for what it's worth.
• Creator Backlash:
  • In the July 2001 issue of Toon Talk, Bluth admitted A Troll in Central Park was a terrible film, and apologized for how badly it turned out;
    "As it is never a good thing that a child is born prematurely, so it is with producing a film. Development of a script is like the development of a child in the womb, it takes time and must be done right. Building the movie, A Troll In Central Park, taught us this lesson, but indeed, the hard way. I tell you all this in the hope that you might benefit from our foolish mistakes. Scrutinizing your own work is so important, but let's face it, we all are afraid of not measuring up, so we stubbornly cling to our own opinions, shutting out all others. Stanley could have been a richer character with more levels to his personality. Maybe he could have had a dark side, a troll side that he struggled with."
  • Gary Goldman stated he agrees with Bluth with not being impressed with doing this film.
• Creator Killer: This was the second-to-last feature from the animation studio Bluth founded after he left Disney on really bad terms, and the last one to actually credit him (he ordered his name removed from The Pebble and the Penguin). The film's Defcon-1 sweetness level and the fact that it directly contrasted his earlier work effectively soiled the studio's reputation for good.
• Dueling Works:
  • With Disney's The Lion King in that both films are animated musicals about an exile living in banishment from a kingdom. Needless to say, Lion King easily defeated Troll in 1994, seeing as how the former became the highest-grossing traditionally animated movie, while the latter became the biggest animated Box Office Bomb until Delgo in 2008.
  • It was also this with the American theatrical and VHS releases of My Neighbor Totoro, which also involves two siblings who discover a nature-related creature and go on an adventure with it, which came out around the same time as this. In that case, Totoro won because it's more fondly remembered by kids from that decade than Troll was.
• Executive Meddling: Bluth and Warner Bros. made the mistake of shortening production, hoping that it would inspire more spontaneity among his crew. It wound up being his worst-reviewed film.
• Fake American: The parents, who for some reason are voiced by none other than Jonathan Pryce and Hayley Mills. They don't do a very good job of hiding their British accents.
• The Shelf of Movie Languishment: The film was completed in 1992 and then sat on the shelf for two years.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Bluth has said that, had they not rushed their production, he would have wanted Stanley to be a much darker character with more abundant flaws.
  • Buddy Hackett was initially the voice for Stanley, but Bluth ended up replacing him with DeLuise because he was easier to work with (for example, Buddy's contracts demanded a limited number of takes per line, while Dom was more than willing to do multiple takes).

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