Mishaal Arshad C.M Underground News.
Late music icon Michael Jackson was rejected by Disney after he expressed his desire of contributing to the soundtrack of The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
Composer Alan Menken said, per SlashFilm, that he had received a call from the King of Pop’s assistant who said the singer was trying to ‘change the subject’ after he was alleged of sexual abuse by a 13-year-old boy in 1993.
“He obviously loves Disney so much. So I mentioned Hunchback. He said he’d love to come to my studio, watch the movie, and talk about it. So we got in touch with Disney Animation. They said, ‘Meet with him! If he likes it…well, see what he says,’” said Menken.
“Michael said, ‘I would like to produce the songs and record some of them.’ Wow. Okay. What do we do now? Michael left,” he said.
“We got in touch with Disney. It was like somebody dropped a hot poker into a fragile bowl with explosives. ‘Uh, we’ll get back to you about that,’” he went on to say.
“Finally, predictably, the word came back, ‘Disney doesn’t want to do this with Michael Jackson.’ I go, ‘OK, could someone tell him this?’ You can hear a pin drop, no response, and nobody did [tell him],” he added.
“It fell to my late manager, Scott Shukat, to tell Michael or Michael’s attorney. In retrospect, it was the right decision. [But] Quasimodo is a character… if you look at his relationships with his family and his father, I would think there’s a lot of identification there,” he said.
