Stubby Kaye

By the mid-1980s, the fabled animation studios of Walt Disney had fallen on hard times. The artists were polarized between newcomers hungry to innovate and old timers not yet ready to relinquish control. These conditions produced a series of box-office flops and pessimistic forecasts: maybe the best days of animation were over. Maybe the public didn't care. Only a miracle or a magic spell could produce a happy ending. Waking Sleeping Beauty is no fairy tale. It's the true story of how Disney regained its magic with a staggering output of hits - "Little Mermaid," "Beauty and the Beast ," "Aladdin," "The Lion King," and more - over a 10-year period.

'Toon star Roger is worried that his wife Jessica is playing pattycake with someone else, so the studio hires detective Eddie Valiant to snoop on her. But the stakes are quickly raised when Marvin Acme is found dead and Roger is the prime suspect.

The Doctor and Mel go for a holiday trip to Shangri-La aboard a Nostalgia Tours bus, only to get dragged into the battle against genocide of their fellow passenger Delta, a Chimeron Queen fleeing from the Bannermen who wish to make her species extinct.

In this sequel to 1979's "Goldie and the Boxer," the ingratiating twosome, heavyweight champ and his 10-year-old manager, flee to California when a vengeful promoter who lost a bundle on the title fight wants retribution.

A buxom, beer-guzzling and naive country gal travels from her small town to Miami to find a 'sugar daddy' to save the family restaurant.

A tough, hard-drinking Alaska logging foreman likes fighting only slightly less than working.

A simple-minded blacksmith named Charley, well loved by the townsfolk, saves for a year to send off for a mail-order bride.

Heironymus Merkin is an internationally successful singer approaching middle age who retells his life story in a series of production numbers on a seashore in front of his two toddlers and aged mother. Merkin's promiscuous relationships with women are explored, particularly Polyester Poontang and the adolescent Mercy Humppe. Merkin is constantly surrounded by a Satan-like procurer, Goodtime Eddie Filth, and an angelic 'Presence' who interrupts Merkin's biography with cryptic Borscht Belt-level jokes to denote births and deaths in Merkin's life. Newley periodically steps out of character to complain about his 'Merkin' role with an unseen director, two screenwriters, the film's producers and a trio of blasé movie critics who are turned off by the story's eroticism and lack of plot.

Earthlings chafe at the peace established by a benevolent alien race and set about to rebel.

Taxi dancer Charity continues to have faith in the human race despite apparently endless disappointments at its hands, and hope that she will finally meet the nice young man to romance her away from her sleazy life. Maybe, just maybe, handsome Oscar will be the one to do it.