The Disney Touch: How a Daring Management Team Revived an Entertainment Empire
Original Book written by Ron Glover
© Richard D. Irwin, 1991

08.  MR. SPIELBERG COMES TO TOONTOWN, page 123

A week after Jeffrey Katzenberg arrived from Paramount, Roy Disney hauled him and [Michael] Eisner down to his office to show them the early sketches and storyboards for a project called Basil of Baker Street.  The project, a tale of a family of mice who lived beneath Sherlock Holmes' London flat, had been started by a group of animators frustrated with the slow pace of working on The Black Cauldron.  To mollify then, the studio had allowed then to start a new project.  Basil of Baker Street was also the only animated film far enough along to move into production.  By late-1984, when Team Disney arrived, the company had already spent $1.2 million on the project.

With the storyboards lining one of the building's narrow corridors, Roy Disney went through the story line.  With him were John Musker and Ron Clements, two veteran Disney animators who had broken away from The Black Cauldron project.  "I'm not sure that Michael and Jeffrey even knew what they were looking at," said Roy Disney.  "But they said go ahead anyway."

Basil of Baker Street was later renamed The Great Mouse Detective, but it was hardly a box office sensation.  Set in 19th-century England, and without a flashy soundtrack, it sold only about $25 million worth of tickets.  But during the year it took to complete the film, Roy Disney effectively lobbied for a larger presence from his animation unit.  By early-1985, Eisner had set a goal of a new film every 18 months, a dramatic cut in the four to five years that it had previously taken Disney's animation unit to move a film from the story stage to final production.

16.  RINGING UP MICKEY, pages 260-261

[In the production of multi-million dollar franchise of Disney merchandise in the 1980s:]  Although the comic book Basil, based on the detective star of Disney's 1986 animated film The Great Mouse Detective, wasn't a big hit in America, it sold well as a comic book in Europe.