Everybody Welcome Delgo, The Biggest Animated Box-Office Failure Ever, to DVD!

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I don't know if this will be a regular feature, or if it's just coincidence that another noteworthy Val Kilmer bomb was released on DVD this week. But considering that no one has been able to see Delgo since last fall, when it notoriously set a new benchmark for all-time box-office futility, today's video unveiling seems far too momentous to allow to slip through unannounced.

As recounted here a few months ago in Movieline's taxonomy of historic animation blunders, no film failed harder and faster than Delgo, which earned a record-low $237 per screen in its wide opening last December. With no advertising and virtually no support from its voice cast (including Kilmer, leading man Freddie Prinze Jr., Sarah Michelle Gellar and Burt Reynolds), Fathom Studios' labor of love about a lizard-manchild framed for a crime he didn't commit -- in a society where bipedal blobs live apart from winged blobs -- probably should have gone straight to DVD in the first place. But then we'd have one less legend in Hollywood, so no second guessing here.

Reacquaint yourself with the magic below, and organize your viewing parties accordingly.



Comments

  • AndyIII says:

    As a 3D animator, hearing about the years of abuse that this company doled out to animators making this ugly, stupid movie, it's a nice bit of schadenfreude to see it fail so spectacularly.
    The legends of people being cheated out of pay, and screaming management date back to at least 2000. The turnover was higher than at a McDonald's in Fallujah.
    It just goes to show you how a great environment like Pixar's kicks out cinematic classics...while an abusive hole like this pukes out this festering boil.

  • JudgeFudge says:

    Will this maybe become a future generations Troll 2?

  • Biff Bronson says:

    It wasn't all bad. The Fathom title card was very pretty.

  • Hypermirage says:

    This is the sort of public drubbing animators daydream about to soothe the chafe-marks on their chained ankles... Couldn't have happened to a nicer company.

  • D.Z. says:

    Delgo was forming as early as... Q3 of 1997. The concepts and artwork for the movie started off in a bad way directly due to the machinations of Adler and Maurer, while other designs were deemed "too cute" or "too pretty" for viewers. I applaud several well-meaning staffers for trying to steer the ship away from the theoretical jagged rocks during the making of this movie, even though their efforts failed and Delgo continued to trudge forward with blinders on his weird little head.
    I'm enjoying my schadenfreude quite nicely.

  • prettyjuls says:

    I never heard of this but found it on Netflix. I watched it... It was really good.. maybe it is just did not get enough attention drawn to it.