- Box Office Bomb: The film made only 5 million dollars the first weekend, breaking a record as the worst grossing animated film released in over 3,000 theaters. It only made 12 million dollars before being pulled. However, its budget has not been revealed, though it was speculated to be somewhere between $70M and $100M. Suffice to say, The Force Awakens helped Lucasfilm overcome the shortfall from this movie.
- Creator Killer: This was essentially the last straw for George Lucas as an independent producer. While being named a Disney Legend in 2015, he was pushed to the backburner regarding Star Wars (though he had retired back in 2012 following his sale of the company).
- Extremely Lengthy Creation: George Lucas worked on it for 15 years before production began.
- Invisible Advertising: The trailer was released only 2 months before release and the movie was barely advertised in those two months. Also, very few of the ads suggested that it was a musical.
- No Export for You: Because of the film's underperformance, the film was never released in the UK or Japan.
- Screwed by the Network: Disney bought out Lucasfilm before it was released. When they did release it, they released it under Touchstone Pictures in January with little advertising. Disney also limited the worldwide home video release to DVD and Digital HD only, with no Blu-ray release anywhere in the world, a highly unusual move for any theatrically released animated film in The New '10s. The decision appears to be a late one as retailers were prepared for a Blu-ray with SKUs set up in advance.
- Stillborn Franchise: There was going to be a sequel series focusing on Dawn and Sunny.
- Throw It In!: At the beginning of the movie, Marianne does funny impressions of all the boys Dawn likes. Her voice actor Evan Rachel Wood actually made those expressions in the recording booth and the animators liked them so much they used them.
- What Could Have Been:
- The film was to include songs by The Beatles, but they couldn't afford the rights.
- Several of the animators who worked on the movie did a livestream chat with some fans where they revealed trivia about the movie, a lot of it is collected here
.- This is the “third” version of the movie that exists, since two versions were sort of scrapped internally before they settled on this version helmed by Gary Rydstrom.
- Earlier versions had a much more realistic art style, very close to the work of Brian Froud.
- Before the Disney merger, Dawn was sort of the center of the story, the narrator, so we get everything through her perspective. The film originally opened with her singing “Can’t Help Falling in Love.” In those early versions, we don’t really see Marianne’s softer side–she starts out as “the tough girl.”
- Originally, Bog felt like he was falling in love with Dawn because he had just never been shown any kind of affection, and so he reacts very strongly to Dawn’s sudden attention after she’s been love-potioned. Eventually, though, once he meets Marianne, he realizes that what he feels for her is “real” love and moves on from Dawn. (This concept felt sort of risky and controversial since she’s so young, so they opted out of it.)
- Dawn comes to realize that she would rather be on her own if she can’t meet “the counterpart to share her love for life,” so she remains single at the end, staying good friends with Sunny. That message, that it was fine to be on your own, was really important to George Lucas, but about a year before the film was released, Disney decided they wanted Dawn/Sunny to be an item at the end.
- Before the Disney merger, the story was a lot darker with just a dash of comic relief. Mostly darker/sadder songs, more realistic designs, etc.
- There are tidbits like the song Dawn is named after ("Dawn, Go Away") was in the movie for a long time but got cut.
- Sunny was originally white and had a full ginger beard.
- There were more diverse models for the fairy population, with variations in hair and skin tone, but for some reason (possibly due to the budget) they didn’t make it into the final film.
- Originally, Roland’s wings were going to have an embarrassing pattern on them, like a smiley face, and he would always refuse to open his wings because he didn’t want anyone to laugh at him. That’s why he’s always riding on a squirrel instead of flying. During the final fight with Bog, he was going to unfurl his wings finally, but they decided the gag payoff wasn’t funny enough to warrant that long of a set-up.
- Dawn is meant to be roughly 14-15. In production meetings, she was sometimes described as “a 9-year-old trapped in a 15-year-old’s body.”
- The original “I Wanna Dance with Somebody” is longer and is basically Dawn flitting from boy to boy and going “don’t you wanna dance? you? don’t you wanna dance?”
- George Lucas’s original concept for the opening was a live-action shot of a little girl’s backyard, zooming in on the fairy world, where we’d start to realize that what first looked like a butterfly was actually a fairy. The film would have ended a similar way. But they decided they didn’t want a human presence in the film after all.
- The first act was changed quite a bit, lots of tweaks. In one version, Marianne doesn’t fly into the Dark Forest until after she sees Roland cheating on her, and she bursts into tears and gets lost in the Dark Forest. Her father comes to get her, and Roland is there pretending like he has no idea what Marianne was doing out there and like everything between them is fine.
- The Bog King was originally an orphan raised by the goblins.
- In one version, Marianne sees Bog when she’s in the Dark Forest, all intimidating and in shadow, and gets really scared of him. Instead of whispering “that place,” she has flashbacks of “that face.”
- There was a scene where Sunny found Dawn imprisoned and said, “I’m here to rescue you!” and she said, “Nope! Nope! I’m waiting for Bog!”
- “Breakaway” by Kelly Clarkson was once considered after “C’mon Marianne.”
- In looking for a duet for Bog and Marianne, everyone wanted something that was both creepy and romantic. One choice was “Bring Me to Life” by Evanescence, which was recorded.
- In one version of the “Strange Magic” duet, they weren’t singing out loud, but “from their hearts.”
- The story used to have a Framing Device where it was a bedtime story being told by Griselda to a baby goblin named Thuff who was the baby of Stuff and Thang.
- In the final version, the opening is narrated by the Fairy King, but it was also narrated by Aura (the Sugar Plum Fairy) and at one point Griselda. In one version, we can see Bog and Marianne’s hands opening the map.
- Dawn was going to sing a very sad, downbeat rendition of “Love Hurts” by Nazareth. Other Dawn songs were “Sunny” by Marvin Gaye and “Someday We’ll Be Together” by The Supremes, which was also a very slow version that she sang while crying on her rose bed while Sunny listened outside her door.
- Matthew McConaughey was originally considered for Roland.
- In early versions of the film, Jessica Biel played Marianne.
- Kristin Chenoweth came onto the project fairly late, after the Disney merger. She played Plum very crazy, and it’s even toned down quite a bit in the final film.
- Since Dawn is less of a focus in the Disney version, Disney executives used to say that Dawn would be more central in “the sequel.”
- Disney planned a typical run of high profile merchandising, Halloween costumes, action figures, the whole nine yards, but it never happened.
- There was also an idea for an Adventures of Dawn and Sunny TV spinoff.
- Working Title: When director Gary Rydstrom visited the Singapore studio, he asked for title suggestions, but since they could never really come up with anything better than Primrose, that was the title for a very long time, until they settled on Strange Magic.
- Written for My Kids: George Lucas made this film for his daughters since he viewed Star Wars as being for 12 year old boys.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Trivia/StrangeMagic
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