Pocahontas
Disney's follow-up to The Lion King premiered to 100,000 people in Central Park and gave the '90s one of its defining songs in "Colors of the Wind." Critics were divided; audiences wore out the VHS anyway. Two Oscars, $346 million worldwide, and a legacy history has complicated ever since.
Pocahontas arrived in the summer of 1995 as Disney's follow-up to The Lion King, riding the crest of the studio's animated renaissance. Its debut was as outsized as its ambitions: on June 10, 1995, Disney staged what it billed as the largest movie premiere in history, in New York's Central Park, where officials estimated 100,000 people watched on giant screens while Vanessa Williams performed live. Then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Caroline Kennedy, Mariah Carey, and Disney chief Michael Eisner were all in the crowd — spectacle as marketing, fully realized.
The film opened wide on June 23, 1995, across 2,596 screens and grossed $346.1 million worldwide, the fifth highest-grossing film of the year. Critics were divided, but audiences ignored the split and made Pocahontas a VHS-era staple nearly every '90s kid could quote or sing along with.
The music was its greatest achievement. Alan Menken's score and Stephen Schwartz's lyrics produced "Colors of the Wind," which won the Academy Award for Best Original Song while Menken and Schwartz also took Best Original Musical or Comedy Score — two Oscars for the film in all. Vanessa Williams' pop version of the song earned a Grammy nomination for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance. The voice cast paired Irene Bedard as Pocahontas' speaking voice with Judy Kuhn as her singing voice, and Mel Gibson voiced John Smith — doing his own singing, which he called the most difficult part of the role.
The legacy is complicated. The real Pocahontas was around 10 or 11 years old when John Smith arrived in 1607, and the film's romantic adult portrayal has drawn lasting criticism over its history ever since. Yet the movie endured on its own terms — a summer-of-1995 event that a generation made its own, with a song most '90s kids can still sing from the first line.
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