Byzantium's Shores: chronicling the misadventures of an overalls-clad hippie

Our local Blockbuster has a bad habit of being less-than-attentive when shelving movies. For instance, last week we thought we were renting Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey, a film in which two dogs and a cat are stranded somehow in the wilderness and have to make their way across many miles of mountainous, wild terrain to their home. Well, I didn't know that this 1993 movie was actually a remake of a 1963 movie, which is what we ended up with. All was well and good, though -- the original turns out to be pretty good, and tells the same exact story.

But it's interesting to note the changes between the 1963 sensibilities and the 1993 attitudes. In the later film, the animals are given voices with which they interact, Babe style, whereas the earlier film has one of those earnest-sounding Disney narrators who describes all of the action. More interesting, though, is the obvious differences in how filming with animals was different back then. There's a scene where one of the dogs kills a rabbit, for example, and totes the dead bunny around in its mouth for a while; later on, the other dog has an unfortunate run-in with a porcupine. In each case I was wondering if they really killed a rabbit and inflicted a porcupine on the dog, since I assume this was before the days of the SPCA monitoring filming. Maybe, maybe not. It struck me, anyway.