Reaction
Freddie received poor reviews in its home country, the United Kingdom, and despite huge media coverage of the making of the film on television and huge publicity, it was a critical and financial flop. A sequel, Freddie Goes to Washington, was already in the works long before this film was released, but because of the poor performance at the box office, the project was shelved, never to be seen or heard of again.
Another contributing factor to its fall was that it was made by an independent company, Hollywood Road Film Productions. At the time, Disney was at its peak with its new releases, meaning other companies, such as Sullivan Bluth Studios (known for The Secret of NIMH, An American Tail and The Land Before Time) couldn't compete with the popularity of Disney.
The fact the film was a flop in the UK meant that overseas, the distributors released the film straight to video, although it did get a very extremely limited theatrical release in the United States. It was also released theatrically in Spain during the 1992 Christmas season. An alternate version in the United States, not released until three years later, includes a title change (Freddie the Frog) and a new narration from James Earl Jones. Parts of the animation were also cut, including that of Freddie transforming Messina into a buzzard, and an almost entire song from the UK version was trimmed, replaced with a narration that was dubbed over by Jones. It is still a very little known animated film, which to this date has never been released on DVD in the original 1992 UK version nor the 1995 US re-edit (although copies of the 1995 re-edit are known to exist in the Netherlands and Hungary).
On 21 May 2007, AOL claimed the film is the lowest grossing animated film of all time by counting it's US gross ($1,119,368), while as of August 2009, two widely released animated features, The Ten Commandments ($952,820 / 830 theatres) and Delgo ($694,782 / 2,160 theatres) have actually grossed even less than F.R.O.7.
Read more about this topic: Freddie As F.R.O.7
Famous quotes containing the word reaction:
“Sole and self-commanded works,
Fears not undermining days,
Grows by decays,
And, by the famous might that lurks
In reaction and recoil,
Makes flames to freeze, and ice to boil.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“In contrast to revenge, which is the natural, automatic reaction to transgression and which, because of the irreversibility of the action process can be expected and even calculated, the act of forgiving can never be predicted; it is the only reaction that acts in an unexpected way and thus retains, though being a reaction, something of the original character of action.”
—Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)
“Children, randomly at first, hit upon something sooner or later that is their mother’s and/or father’s Achilles’ heel, a kind of behavior that especially upsets, offends, irritates or embarrasses them. One parent dislikes name-calling, another teasing...another bathroom jokes. For the parents, this behavior my have ties back to their childhood, many have been something not allowed, forbidden, and when it appears in the child, it causes high-voltage reaction in the parent.”
—Ellen Galinsky (20th century)