I dunno, the parents of my generation survived taking us to the Care Bears and My Little Pony 80's movies. It's not that unheard of
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I think they just thought it would be a throw away direct to video type movie...
That was a different time too. Movies were cheaper. Among other things, the Pony and Care Bear generation was a little bit older than the Elmo fan generation. See, Elmo's fans are about 3-4 maybe. You just can't bring kids to the theater that young and expect them to sit still. Pony and Care Bears was more of a 4-7 type deal.
But our generation loved films that were unique and whatever. This generation...not so much, because they choose what they like & dislike so early in life and stick with it.
I don't agree so much with that in this topic, so much as it seems Hasbro had a lot more money to make their toyetic cartoons into movies. And let's not forget that some porduction companies had more confidence about putting stuff in the theaters (since DTV films were virtually unthought of).
That's it. The DTV. No wonder why they gave Heathcliff a "movie" that was just episodes of the TV show spliced together. Had the DTV been perfected, movies like Care Bears and Ponies and stuff like that would have gone that way. it's a surprising money maker.
Plus, I doubt (back to EIG) parents wanted to pay 10 bucks for their kids to scream about how loud the movie was (trust me), and run around the theater, when they could wait for the DVD/VHS and have them just run around the house.
Either that or the main movie audience had a 5 minute attention span.