Once upon a time Colin O’Donoghue, a freelance designer working on Disney watches, attended merchandising previews of ‘Pocahontas’ and ‘The Hunchback of Notre Dame’. Although inspired by the presentation and the graphic art of the work in progress, O’Donoghue had severe doubts about both films merchandising appeal.
Disney Stores needed hits, nobody would buy a watch or anything else featuring a limping, stooping, one eye-popping, retarded hunchback. Like the Hunchback himself it was a no-brainer but it seems nobody dared tell Walt’s naked emperor. Just retelling a classic story was no longer good enough, these films drove a whole licensing industry with its own special character requirements, get it wrong and thousands of livelihoods were on the line, not least his.
However Disney’s dilemma gave O’Donoghue an idea for an original tale, the sort he thought Disney should have made. He imagined a king left surrounded by sycophants in a decaying fortress, threatened not only by evil but also by a back-stabbing court where the credit for a good idea created rancour as it climbed its way up from a naive young inventor to the very top.
Witches on biker-style broomsticks would join the protagonists, adding magic and glamour to the plight of a self-centred, ambitious and fashionable princess, the exact opposite of Pocahontas.
Ideas were O’Donoghue’s stock in trade but dashing off a fairytale was another matter. He remembered enjoying a class at school performing a poem by ‘Winnie the Pooh’ author AA Milne, called ‘The Royal Slice of Bread’, so he decided to write something similar just to get the idea out of his system. He really didn’t believe it would actually turn into a feature length story or an epic rhyme, one of the longest ever written, but that’s what it became and that’s all it stayed, tucked away in a drawer while internet technology raced on.
As it turned out, the Hunchback was tolling the death knell for Disney Animation Studios as well as lots of Disney Stores but a few years later wizards and witches and all things magical came back with a bang. The time was right to bolt ‘The Mystery of the Dragon Code’ into the internet and publish the enigma with its classic twist in the tail that you can only learn by solving the riddles and unencrypting the cypher. We hope you enjoy both the fun of the rhyme and the challenge of the quest.
