1996 was not a good time to be Michael Jackson. The child abuse allegations against Jackson, and the general tabloid-driven chaos that surrounded him, had come to eclipse his music completely. Jackson’s 1995 album HIStory: Past, Present and Future, Book I had been a commercial disappointment. In 1996, Jackson divorced Lisa Marie Presley. Jarvis Cocker mooned him at the Brit Awards. And Disney evidently rejected his offer to record songs for the Hunchback Of Notre Dame soundtrack.

Slash Film has a new oral history of Disney’s 1996 animated version of The Hunchback Of Notre Dame, and it includes the revelation that Disney wanted nothing to do with Jackson. Alan Menken, the longtime Disney composer and recent EGOT winner, tells a story about Jackson wanting to record for the soundtrack but getting the cold shoulder:

I met Michael Jackson when we were looking for someone to sing “A Whole New World” for Aladdin. Michael wanted to co-write the song. I could get a sense of who Michael was. He was a very unique, interesting individual… in his own world.

I get a call out of nowhere from Michael’s assistant, when Michael was at the Four Seasons Hotel in New York. He had to [deal with] allegations about inappropriate behavior with underage kids, and the breakup with Lisa Marie Presley. He’s looking to change the subject. And he obviously loves Disney so much. So I mentioned Hunchback. He said he’d love to come to my studio, watch the movie and talk about it. So we got in touch with Disney Animation. They said, “Meet with him! If he likes it… well, see what he says.” [laughing]

There’s three songs. One was “Out There,” one was “God Help the Outcasts,” one was “Someday.” Michael said, “I would like to produce the songs and record some of them.” Wow. Okay. What do we do now? Michael left. We got in touch with Disney. It was like somebody dropped a hot poker into a fragile bowl with explosives. “Uh, we’ll get back to you about that.”

Finally, predictably, the word came back, “Disney doesn’t want to do this with Michael Jackson.” I go, “OK, could someone tell him this?” You can hear a pin drop, no response, and nobody did [tell him]. It fell to my late manager, Scott Shukat, to tell Michael or Michael’s attorney.

In retrospect, it was the right decision. [But] Quasimodo is a character…if you look at his relationships with his family and his father, I would think there’s a lot of identification there.

Instead of Jackson, the Hunchback soundtrack had All-4-One and Bette Midler singing versions of the Hunchback songs. Michael Jackson had done business with Disney before then. In 1986, Jackson made Captain EO, a short 3D sci-fi movie that Francis Ford Coppola directed, and you could only see it Disney parks. Those Disney parks kept running Captain EO until 1998, so it was still playing when Disney rejected Jackson for the Hunchback soundtrack. You can read that full oral history here.