Trivia / Home on the Range

• Box Office Bomb: Believe it or not, the film actually cost over $110 million to produce and promote; they came up woefully short and caused the film to gross $145, which indeed ultimately bought the farm.
• Completely Different Title: As the title is a reference to an American folk song that doesn't lend itself well to other languages, non-English dubs tend to give completely new titles to the movie. These include "La ferme se rebelle" ("The Farm Rebels") in European French, "A legelő hősei" ("Heroes of the Pasture") in Hungarian and "Kogänget" ("The Cow Gang") in Swedish.
• Creator Backlash:
  • Zigzagged with co-director Will Finn, who doesn't think much of the movie itself, but doesn't think it really deserves the heat it gets either, and claims its production was nowhere near as bad as his experience directing on films like The Road to El Dorado.
    "I think it's not a great movie but I do think the hate it's been served up is a little undeserved. It's very lightweight and jokey. More like an extended short than a feature. I had hoped that would work in its favor but it didn't."
  • Co-director John Sanford likewise has reservations about the movie. While he enjoyed working on the film sometimes, he doesn't particularly like the final product, to say the least.
  • Animator Chris Buck (co-director of Tarzan and Frozen) doesn't look back on the movie with fondness either. When asked about it at a Q&A session, he expressed strong disappointment at the change from the original "Sweating Bullets" concept during development and recalling the experience of animating on the film (which he summed up as spending two years listening to Jennifer Tilly's voice and animating her as a cow) as the low point in his career.
  • Animator Lee Crowe recalls that the film got a disparaging nickname of "The Shitty Cow Movie" among many of the crew members who hated working on it.
• Creator Killer:
  • This movie was one of several 2004 bombs that mixed together with Roy E. Disney's second Save Disney campaign and general turmoil at the Walt Disney Company to bring CEO Michael Eisner's 21-year long reign to an end. Eisner was forced out the year after this film's release to allow president Bob Iger to keep Pixar in their family, whose staff and films would indeed help Disney recover from this flop.
  • It also put iron halters on Will Finn and John Sanford's (the two men who directed this movie) careers; Finn wasn't able to direct another movie until 2013, and Sanford wasn't even heard from again until 2015, when he got attached to DreamWorks Animation's Dragons: Race to the Edge.
• Cut Song: "Heroes and Villains (and Cows!)"
• Dear Negative Reader: Despite his mixed feelings about the film, co-director John Sanford did not like Doug Walker's Disneycember review of the film, seeing it as obnoxious and taking umbrage at the review calling the film a half-assed, uncreative effort. Co-director Will Finn, while nowhere as vocal about it as John, likewise disliked the review.
  John Sanford: "Yes, I love it when people live stream Home on the Range and tweet comments. Good or bad, it’s fun. Except you, Nostalgia Critic. You can go fuck yourself, you unfunny douche nozzle. My issue was the incredibly abrasive tone of his reviews, and in particular, when he accused the crew of HoTR of "laziness". You can say what you want about the movie, it’s deeply flawed, but our crew was anything but lazy. I won’t stand for that."
• Descended Creator: As one of the film's story artists, Sam Levine voices the Willie brothers.
• Executive Meddling: As co-director John Sanford will gladly tell you, the artists were not slacking off on this movie, pointing out that executive interference was all over the project from start to finish.
  • The Working Title for this film was Sweatin' Bullets. Despite being much less conventional than a title taken from an already-famous song, Disney reportedly changed it because they did not "want children seeing a film with the word 'bullets' in the title!" (And besides that, it would probably get lost in translation when dubbed into other languages.)
  • Originally, the film involved literal Ghost Riders in the Sky stealing cattle with a young calf as the protagonist.
  • A Deleted Scene features Slim's ultimate plan: to use the captured cattle to march on Washington, DC and take over the White House. Sadly, they decided the idea was too strange.
  • When the White House plan was scuttled, Slim's plan was changed to having the cows sold for slaughter. Disney had an eye on a McDonald's promotion (which never actually took off), and didn't want kids making the connection, so the fate of the cows is left ambiguous: the only reference left in the film is the line "Don't wanna be late for that big round-up in the sky!"
• Franchise Killer: The failure of the movie killed Disney's traditional animation department and made them move into CGI starting with Chicken Little. An attempt to move back into traditional animation in the late 2000s/early 2010s with The Princess and the Frog and Winnie the Pooh was unsuccessful as the two films were written off by the company as financial disappointments, and led to ten members of the staff in the traditional animation department being handed their walking papers.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: This one hardly ever gets re-released on home media, let alone broadcast on television domestically, due to how badly it performed at the box office, and Disney's blacklisting of Roseanne Barr for racism as of June 2018, as well as the separate controversies surrounding Randy Quaid, is only going to make it even harder to find. Rescued, as it's available on Disney+.
• Playing Their Own Twin: Sam Levine voices the Willie brothers, Phil, Gil and Bill.
• Reality Subtext: The September 11, 2001 terror attacks inspired Alan Menken to write "Will the Sun Ever Shine Again?"
• Star-Derailing Role: In addition to being a Creator Killer it also killed off Roseanne Barr's career outside of TV guest appearances prior to the 2018 revival of Roseanne which was set to be her big comeback (and even that got retooled a few months later due to her controversial views, which promptly finished off Barr's Hollywood career for good).
• Trend Killer: The film's critical and commercial failure was the final nail in the coffin for Hollywood-produced traditionally animated films, which were already experiencing diminishing returns as audiences gravitated toward CGI films. Nowadays, the only traditionally animated movies being produced for the big screen are based on TV Shows and even that is changing (eg, SCOOB! and The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run are CGI movies based on traditionally animated shows).
• Vindicated by Cable: Home on the Range was overpowered by Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed, Walking Tall (2004), and Hellboy (2004) but it finally found its audience on cable.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Originally, Slim and the Willies were going to be ghost rustlers after being killed in a stampede. The one-legged rabbit whose leg Slim stole was going to be a protagonist.
  • The deleted scenes revealed an alternate opening with three mariachi butterflies who would narrate the story, an alternate meeting with Lucky Jack, a coyote chase scene, and a different goal for Slim to use his hypnotized cows to storm the White House and become president. The producers realized all these scenes worked well on their own, but not in the context of the overall film, so they cut them all out.
  • The main character was a human boy at first, then a male calf, then the three cows.
• Working Title: Originally titled Sweating Bullets, the higher-ups at Disney decided against releasing a children's film with the word "bullets" in the title.

---