What happened to Spirit?

For some reason, animation studios like to return to their past works, often ones that were incredibly successful and destroy everything good about it in the first place. This is what they have done to the film Spirit: Stallion of Cimarron. Write Owl reports

Growing up, I have always had a major soft spot for horses. I never really understood what it was, but I’ve always had a fascination for these majestic creatures. It took me 16 years, but I finally found a way to get myself in a saddle, one of the best experiences of my life. So, you can imagine when my mother got me this film on DVD for my 7th birthday, I was completely ecstatic.

The movie was made by Dreamworks and follows the journey of a wild Stallion who comes into contact with a few humans after being captured, the idea is that he is too wild to be tamed. I’ll be very honest with you; I love this film so much I rewatched it a few weeks ago on YouTube and it’s aged beautifully. It wasn’t until recently when I learned the film was based on a real-life Stallion horse name Donner that is surprisingly still alive to this day. The money I’d give to visit that beauty.

So why am I writing this column, I hear you ask. That’s because I want to understand the monstrosity of a series, soon to be a movie, Spirit Riding Free is. They took an amazing storyline and did what DC did to the Teen Titans series. When they made Teen Titans GO, which surprisingly I actually like.

Of course, you could argue that they did this to market to today’s youth, but did they really have to change the design of Spirit? The fact that he was a buckskin dun with a dorsal stripe was iconic to his character, what possessed them to change his coat colour and add a marking?

One thing that Spirit: Stallion of Cimarron was known for was its soundtrack by Bryan Adams and Hans Zimmer. It had very emotional and powerful songs which linked with the thoughts and feelings of Spirit. But I guess it wasn’t good enough for Dreamworks since they threw that out the window when it came to the riding free series and Spirit Untamed film. The series doesn’t have a set focus on Spirit either, it’s mainly on his new rider called Lucky. Honestly, they could have made the same series with the same horse and called it a different name because Spirit didn’t even live in this time frame.

I guess I’m just fed up with industries going back in time and meddling with things that don’t need to be meddled with. I mean how many times is Disney going to create a live-action version of the same story. What was wrong with the original?

I understand that Dreamworks owns the rights to Spirit and have complete control over what happens to him, but couldn’t they have the same storyline and characters but switch out spirit’s name? What was the point of reusing this character if nothing from the original is the same? Not even the way he looks.

I guess we’re just going to have to suck it up and allow these companies to tarnish our childhoods.