Reply to Ted:

I've been offline and tied up with school for a few days, so my apologies for the late response.

I checked my interview(s) as well as Ray's Animated Life book (which goes into all of this in great detail), and the original script outline for Golden Voyage would have resulted in a three- or four-hour epic, so they had to cut a lot of the secondary plots and related effects sequences. One of those was a fairly substantial subplot (as subplots go, at least) of a prince being turned into a baboon. Ray says they hadn't done a Sinbad film in so long that their original vision for this big-screen "return" was a bit overly ambitious for the realities of time and budget.

When Golden Voyage became such an unexpected box-office success, Ray & Co. were asked to do a follow-up very quickly (at least by stop-motion standards), so they naturally picked up the missing threads of Golden Voyage and used the discarded subplot involving the Baboon Prince into the center of a new narrative. From there they fleshed it out into the film we have today -- imperfect, to be sure, and nowhere near as memorable as Voyage, but as I said earlier, I've warmed up to it considerably over the years.

Hope that helps clarify what I meant in my earlier post.

Terry Pace
pillaroffire@bellsouth.net

"They're going to have to think up a lot of new adjectives when I come back!" -- Carl Denham (Robert Armstrong) in King Kong (1933)