The Legend of the Titanic review

 Do you like the art style in The Legend of the Titanic? You just enjoyed North Korean art.

Part 1: The Company

To fully understand The Legend of the Titanic, you need to understand the company behind it. This is no justification for their quality, but context is the only thing missing from the glut of the animated Titanic movie reviews.

The Legend of the Titanic, along with a certain sequel, was created by Mondo TV, an Italian studio headed by Orlando Corradi, formed in the 60s and slowly growing to cover various key mediums, well as far as their home-base anyhow, if it hadn't been for MrEnter and Phelous the Titanic movies would be all we know about Mondo.

By the way, Corradi died in 2018, so there's no chance anyone could get insight from the man himself.

A recurring theme in Mondo's programs are high fantasy and adventure... as well as content based on popular characters. Yeah, let's get the elephant out of the room, they had their own takes on Cinderella, The Jungle Book, Mulan, Hercules, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Robin Hood, Snow White, Robin Hood, Pocahontas and even The Lying Douche.

Okay to be fair, most of their takes predated the Disney releases.

There're two key reasons why Disney didn't intervene. Number one, Mondo TV operates almost exclusively in Italy. While Disney is known the world over, their main base of operations is the United States and Mondo's content rarely, if ever, shares the same market as Disney's releases (most of them were produced for television.)

So, they really had no reason to bother with them as they were not in direct competition with Mondo. Only reason they sued GoodTimes was because the latter released knock-offs around the same time Disney issued home media releases of their movies and used covers that would deceived buyers. And even then, GoodTimes borrowed from the fairy tales and their takes were different enough to remain in circulation.

That brings us to number 2. At least a majority of Mondo's productions are based on the public domain tales that originated them, I mean maybe aside from The Lion King, but I don't care about that, I mean who am I? Adum the Lion King Simp?

Part 2: The Movie

This was Mondo's first feature film, though it's indeterminate if it ever played on that many screens. Unlike their other productions, they had a little help this time around.

Mondo were no strangers to international collaborations, as they received financial support through Spain via ITB (International TV Broadcasting, this being their only hurrah apparently) and... North Korea.

Italy and North Korea had steady diplomatic relations at the time, until 2017 saw a bump in that and 2020 led to permanent severance, but at the time, North Korea was the primary place Mondo outsourced their cartoons to. Enter SEK Studio, North Korea's lone animation studio. While primarily producing content exclusively for their country, they have assisted in animation services and outsourcing, some notable works they did were episodes for Avatar and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, as well as The Simpsons Movie and Bender's Big Score.

If I were to say cartoons can bring everyone together, this would be my thesis on that.

Also referring back to the shake in relations between Italy and North Korea, their last collaboration was in 2016.

In a bittersweet note, this was the closest North and South Korea had to a steady collaboration together, producing an animated film, Empress Chung, which is now lost to the sands of time.

Another company that helped produce this was Hollywood Gang Productions, ran by Gianni Nunnari, which I only note for the fact that the inception of the company was supposedly wrought through Nunnari siphoning funds to create it, though Nunnari isn't listed as a producer on this movie. Who knows if this is where he got his start. If so, this was the same guy who produced 300.

The film never saw any kind of release in North America, which explains why the Nostalgia Critic had to use a burned copy for it. It was supposedly released theatrically in Germany and Italy, but thanks to the Nostalgia Critic, we have people who tout themselves as beacons of information when their points are surface-level at best.

As mentioned in my previous review, Gregory Snegoff was on board for all three movies. Think English voice over work in Italy was mostly dry, so at the end of the day, a paycheck is a paycheck. He had initially dropped off after another RoboTech stint and seems to have gotten into live-action roles, albeit, providing English dubbing if the credits are anything to go by.

Also did you know Gregory appeared in Misery?

Another notable actor in this is Jane Alexander, who would also return for the sequel. She got her start as a child actor in dubbing and appeared in the comedy film Women Don't Want To, but mostly stuck to television roles since then. Can't say it's any more tragic than Katie Barberi's career (let alone say it is tragic.) You don't wanna know the movie she appeared in that killed her career and lead her to go back to her home country.

Some other actors I could talk about are the voice of Don Juan, Francis Pardeilhan, and there's a recurring thing with these actors. They're not Italian natives, Francis was born in San Franscisco and had some roles in non-notable shows.

Anna Mazzotti lived and died on these movies, well she had some scattered roles before then and it seems just like Jane Alexander, she was also from the UK at first, appearing in two British shows in the early-90s.

Sean Patrick Lovett appears in his first and only role here, and that name alone should indicate he was also not an Italian native.

But we do get one Italy native as far as the main English cast goes, Teresa Pascarelli. She appeared in Mondo's take on Pochahontas and appeared in the initial Italian cut of Winx Club: The Secret of the Lost Kingdom. She has also said no to Tentacolino, so I like her already.

The film has two directors, Corradi himself and Kim J. Ok, aka Kim Jun-Ok. Reason you don't know about the latter is because of his clear North Korean roots.

Part 3: Okay the movie for real this time

First thing I'd like to point out about this movie is the title. It's already insulting. The way the title is written makes it seem like the Titanic is being framed as a fantasy story. At least Titanic: Legend Goes On can be framed like the event was legendary and will go on as one of the most notorious disasters in history.

In spite of how unfocused Legend Goes On was, at the very least it kept things simple, simple as in didn't treat things too seriously, this is just their take on Disney's brand of fairytale barf. This time, the James Cameron allegories feel much more deliberate.

The animal characters receive bigger focus in this, while in Legend Goes On everyone had an equal amount. Now sure, Top Connors is telling the story, but that just reinforces my argument.

The anachronisms are, well, the biggest one in Legend Goes On was the rap number, which can be interpreted in any way intent wise (is this dumb? Good, that was the climate of movies back in the day, do we really wanna see these again) or maybe it's like (Hey, this was in a lot of kids movies, bet this will make mine a hit)

So to reiterate, Legend Goes On's anachronism was the rap number, this one was about when soccer was first introduced (here being too early), a dance jazz number (a genre that didn't exist proper in 1912), and Elizabeth exhibiting feminism beliefs, even though the events of the movie happened, while after the Elizabeth Cady Stanton era of women's rights, was before feminism became more truly main-line. Sure this happened as far back as the 1800s, but... okay, you can have this one, maybe. But the sinking occurred a bit before midnight so there.

Anyway, back to more reasons why Legend Goes On is just stupid at best, remember what happened when the Titanic sunk? It was just a recreation of the actual disaster. You already know what I mean, but if you don't, the sinking of the Titanic was actually a plan coordinated by an evil billionaire (or whaler) with talking sharks.

But yeah, talking sea life. Let's get into the magic moonbeams shall we?

As mentioned before, Mondo's programs were rooted in high fantasy and fairytales, so shit like this isn't out of their scope, but it does feel pretty heavy-handed. Just the fact that there's a specific reason why the humans can understand the talking animals leads to further questions. My best guess is that the villains have a different means to the moonbeam treatment, like they just spat into the ocean or something.

Are we ready to get into the more offensive aspects now?

The reason people took such offense to this movie was that this was based on an actual tragedy, where actual people died, and it disregarded history. Once again, Legend Goes On did it better because we got the idea not everyone got off the ship.

It should go without saying but to drive the point home in four words... "There's room for everyone!" Actually no, there were a limited amount of lifeboats available, and you wanna know who didn't survive? Captain Edward John Smith. We saw a stand-in for him in Legend Goes On and we didn't see him in the epilogue. In this we see him trying to go down with his ship until he is saved by a giant octopus, who enables everyone to get off the ship to safety.

With that we can see why Legend Goes On is the best of the three, hell, it's the closest we have to a legitimate b-movie, which is always fun for a laugh.

But now, whales.

This is one point to everyone's criticisms of this film, hell, I wouldn't be surprised if Marlyonama covered this movie she would use the Nostalgia Critic's points on it verbatim.

My biggest gripe with the whales was their sudden introduction and perceived importance. Some treated this as pro-whale barf, I just saw them as odd extras. But when you take into account the fact North Korea aided in this, if you view the whales in the same context as a dictatorship, this is basically government propaganda.

I can understand stretching on that since it takes up a better chunk of the ending... I'm calling 50/50, but the stupidity in this was much higher than Legend Goes On, so I can't even accept that this was just some idiotic fairy tale a senile Top Conners cooked up.

Overall

I feel the need to bring up the background behind these movies to paint a grander picture against them. With the prior works established, I found more of a reason to hate one over the other. Legend Goes On feels more like an experiment of sorts by a director who worked in a radically different genre of film years prior. Aside from one other attempt he never sought to make more animated films.

This movie feels much more corporate, it followed years of homogenized fairytale and fantasy content and was made to fit with that. You can see a sliver of passion Camilo Teti had for Legend Goes On, whereas all you get is a corporatist slap with this movie, and this is worsened by the fact it was entirely spearheaded by Mondo's founder.

For the sake of pushing a brand, that's probably a reason why we got a sequel, unless the North Koreans loved this movie so much they wanted more of it.