It’s a little known fact that David Lynch was intended to be the director of Return of the Jedi, a missed connection that would have awarded the famed surrealist permanent lodging in the House of Mouse. With a tidal wave of reboots on Disney’s cinematic roster, there’s still ample opportunity to make things right.
Below are some possible Lynchian treatments to popular Disney stories.
Beauty and the Beast
Laura Dern is a successful executive for a music label. She has vivid daydreams in which she is Marilyn Monroe, singing before an invisible but adoring audience in an upscale lounge. Instead of roses, admirers throw Victorian-era furniture on stage. Dern beams in all directions, carrying on wooden conversations with the now-sentient antique pieces. The dialogue mostly centers on the minutiae of editing analog recordings with a razor blade.
Just beyond the spotlight lurks a large, hairy puppet that resembles the bastard child of Snuffleupagus and a blobfish. Its appearance interrupts Dern’s fantasies with a piercing shriek and flickering lights. Eventually, the creature begins to haunt her waking life as well.
Toy Story
Justin Theroux, dressed as a cowboy, lies immobile against a wall – his face frozen in an expression of pure ecstasy. At the 57-minute mark, an obese dachshund waddles into view and falls asleep in his lap. Fisher-Price stickers cover every inch of the dog’s midsection.
Occasionally, Theroux lifts one of the dog’s floppy ears and whispers an item from the 1983 Mattel catalog. The film continues for an hour and a half in this manner. It ends with a lid closing over the camera, revealing the audience to have been in the toy box all along.
The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes
A 25-second shot of a pair of Converse All-Stars glued to the monitor of a Commodore 64. The machine, spitting sparks from its cassette drive, is powered by a person in a hamster suit, running on an oversized wheel. In the last four frames, a close-up of a snarling opossum appears on the screen.
The soundtrack is provided by an AI trained on orchestral recordings of Tangerine Dream. Laura Elena Harring, Naomi Watts, and Justin Theroux star as the hamster in eight-second increments. David Lynch himself has a cameo appearance as the water bottle mounted next to the wheel.
The Little Mermaid
The year is 1840. A 235-pound blue marlin named Ariel is the envy of the aquatic community, with her shock of red hair and a beautiful singing voice. Ariel, however, pines for a life on land. With the help of her friend Sebastian, a crab who communicates using Jamaican Sign Language, Ariel hurls herself onto the deck of a Danish fishing boat, but before she can belt out even a single bar of “Part of Your World” she is set upon and butchered by the crew.
The rest of the film chronicles the crew’s descent into madness. Their waking hours are haunted by light-hearted melodies that emanate from the marlin steaks in the hold. At night they are haunted by dream-like visions of Sebastian and various animatronic sea creatures re-enacting the execution of their matriarch. This is conveyed through interpretive dance on a giant film set, complete with anachronistic steampunk film equipment. The run-time is four hours and seventeen minutes.
Return to Oz
A shot-for-shot remake of the original.
