Places of Fancy

Prydain on the cover of 'The Black Cauldron' OST This week marks 100 years since Disney's founding. To get to where it is now, the world's second-largest media company had to go through numerous peaks and troughs over the course of a century.  Glossed over at times in the celebrations are the failures that paved the way for its many successes. For most of the 1980s, Disney had to endure its own Dark Ages, a period marked by discontent among employees and a string of poorly received films.  None flopped harder than "The Black Cauldron," the big-screen adaptation of "The Chronicles of Prydain." Despite its extravagant budget and then-state-of-the-art animation techniques, the movie bombed at the box office upon release in 1985, following years of delays in production.   On paper, the story of a young farmhand finding adventure in a magical realm called Prydain sounded very captivating.  Prydain is actually a real place, a whole country. The Welsh call