The World of Forgotten Disney

Don Quixote

Don Quixote

Forgotten Cancelled Film

Rose: Sorry everyone, I have to cut my book short for my epic conclusion! Stay turned for more. Sparky tell everyone about our last cancelled film.

Sparky: You bet ya! This film was based on the 1605 Spanish novel, Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. Although it was in development at the Disney Studio for four times from the 1940s up until the 2000's, it never saw completion.

The plot followed a man named Alonso Quixano (or Quijano), a retired country gentleman nearing 50 years old, lives in an unnamed section of La Mancha with his niece and a housekeeper. He has become obsessed with books of chivalry, and believes their every word to be true, despite the fact that many of the events in them are clearly impossible. Quixano eventually appears to other people to have lost his mind from little sleep and food, and so much reading. He decides to become a knight-errant, and with his fat, food-loving, squire Sancho Panza, sets out on an hilarious misadventure.

In 1946, a proposed short, Don Quixote: Fantastic Variations on a Theme of Knightly Character for Large Orchestra is another take on the Don Quixote tale. This time, the Disney animators set it around Richard Strauss' tone poem.

In 1951, a proposed feature film adaptation had the same basic plot as the 1940 take on the Don Quixotestory, but the animation would have had a similar style as seen in UPA animated shorts and features of the time.