Disney/Pixar/Dreamworks Animated Mockbusters

Grandchildren, lock up your grandparents, Mockbusters are on the loose!

Whenever a new big animated movie comes out, there's usually a couple of shoddily produced knockoff DVDs (often from overseas) with eerily similar covers designed to trick the uninformed, confused, and senile into confusing it for the original hit.

The Hall of Shame:

Video Brinquedo: The company, the myth, the legend. From Brazil, Video Brinquedo is notorious for having some of the worst of the worst when it comes to the animated mockbusters. Ratatoing, What's Up Balloon to the Rescue, The Little Panda Fighter... pick your poison. Even though I want to say the company's been out of business for a while, but all of their movies are available on their YouTube channel - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTeYgS2nF06Ccp7OKTY2ziA

Spark Plug Entertainment: Not like the States can't get in on the fun! Their most notorious flick is A Car's Life. Watch it here with a text commentary that is infinitely funnier and better than the actual movie. I'm also thinking of re-editing the movie so that the awful pink car stays dead.


Dingo Pictures: A German company. Their nadir is technically a game/movie by the name of Snow White & the Seven Clever Boys. Let Caddicurus guide you through it:


UAV: I've actually heard people have real nostalgia for these ones (in their defense, they're probably the best of at least this lot), but they're also some of the strangest. Musical Hell is doing some MSTing on these ones, like this one with Mulan with insects.


So, does anyone have any other good "recommendations"? Did anyone watch any mockbusters as a kid?

 

Quick reminder that Dingo Pictures is responsible for this:

 

The fact that they have all their movies are on their Youtube channel is so telling, like they know its not worth copyright protecting. Also probably a bad business idea regardless, as it eliminates the ironic market.

 

But everything changed when the Fire Ant Nation attacked ...

 

There was a studio in the late 80s and 90s called Mondo if I remember correctly. They were a joint Italian-Japanese venture that produced a lot of films based off of historical or public domain figures and a lot of them were released in the United States to coincide with major studio animated films.

Almost all of Mondo's work was drawn in a late 70's/early 80's anime style, which was semi-unsurprising. I say semi because the general anime-esque style made sense given that the company was partly Japanese-owned and so I assume there were second and third-string anime artists in their production crews and animation crews. The surprising part is that said anime artwork is from a style that was over 10-15 years out of fashion when most of these films were made.

One of my favorites from Mondo (and probably the first mockbuster I ever saw) was a 1992 film about Christopher Columbus. I owned it on VHS as a kid and we even watched it in Second Grade for Columbus Day.

A lot of Mondo's work can be found on YouTube in their entirety at Mondo's official channel.

 

Dingo Pictures is responsible for the best character in all of fiction: The Epic Head Bobbing Guy

SALISH DEE SALISH DEE SALISH DEE SALISH DEE

 

Sadly that link seems to be dead now. They have this channel, but it's mostly in Portuguese anyway.
https://www.youtube.com/user/videobrinquedooficia

I was about to talk about these guys! You stole my fire! The reason for the anime deal was that their previous venture, "Doro TV Merchandising" used to license a number of key titles from Japan to air on TV in Italy, including this favorite...


I can only assume creating their own crap showed up later on when they realized they didn't have to pay too much if they own it outright.

Their Jungle Book series wasn't bad though. I got some cels from this series! This show must've interested someone in the US as many Christian TV stations picked it up.

Ironically, when The History Channel came on the air in the mid 90's, they would run the Christopher Columbus series weekend mornings on a block called "History for Kids", which also featured Inspector Gadget's Field Trip (for anyone who may remember that). Seems like nobody had History Channel that early so any knowledge of that seems to be pretty moot I noticed.

Mondo TV does have one weakness though, and it's something I only really noticed when it came to how they did their films, they really love animals, even as sidekicks, they take over everything!

Unfortunately the Japanese involvement (especially on stuff like a Zorro series) could only go so far. Sometime in the late 90's the began dealing with North Korea's "SEK Studio" in Pyongyang (yes, sleazy Italian producers don't mind giving Kim the time of day).

This studio ended up doing a number of movies for Mondo including TV shows like this series, which some had incorrectly stated was Disney's The Lion King due to a similarly named title (not to mention their rip offs of Jungle Book characters from before just so they could pad more animals into this.).


Oh, did I mention they had an octopus destroy the Titanic with an iceberg..?

No...?

TOO BAD!!!

 

You know, when I was younger I had a tape of Kimba the White Lion and I thought it was a rip-off of The Lion King.

 

Now that's funny! (those of us who went through the opposite know how pants pissing that time was)