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Movie Trivia: Who Framed Roger Rabbit

Stacy — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 00:07:44 +0000

Who Framed Roger Rabbit is a staple in our household, which is funny, because I remember being quite scared of the steamroller scene near the end when I was a kid. Now that I’m older, I appreciate it more from standpoint of how much work it took to get such a groundbreaking movie made – and here are some of the inside details on exactly what it took to make that happen. For the record, I still find the steamroller scene a little creepy.

Who Censored Roger Rabbit?

Like so many movies, this one was a book before it ever hit the screen. In this case, the book was named Who Censored Roger Rabbit?, by Gary K. Wolf. But the film doesn’t follow the book exactly. For instance, the book took place in present day – which was 1981 – not 1947.

And instead of famous animated cartoon characters making appearances, famous cartoon strip characters pop up to chat with Roger, including Dick Tracy. Most Toons like Tracy “spoke” in the book the only way they knew how – through word bubbles. Some became “bilingual” and could speak without balloons. The only line in the whole book that made it to the silver screen was spoken by Baby Herman – “I’ve got a 50-year-old lust and a three-year-old dinky.” In the book, though, Baby Herman was actually 50, not 36. The ending is a lot different too, but I won’t spoil that for you (Google will tell you pretty quickly, if you’re dying to know).

After the movie became a success in 1988, Wolf wrote a second book (though not necessarily a sequel) that fell more in line with the movie than with his original book. It’s called Who P-P-P-Plugged Roger Rabbit?

Who Discovered Roger Rabbit?

It’s probably music to the ears of Roger Rabbit fans: a prequel. According to the prequel, Roger grew up on a farm in the midwest and headed out to California to try to find his real mother. That’s how he falls in love with Jessica Krupnick (Jessica Rabbit has a much better ring to it, don’t you think?) and eventually meets not only his mother, but his father too – none other than Bugs Bunny.

The movie would have been a direct-to-video release. As of 1997, Michael Eisner was onboard for the prequel and commissioned a rewrite of the script; in 1998 some test footage was even shot. After estimations brought the cost of the movie to about $100 million, the idea was more or less shelved.

However, just last year, Robert Zemeckis said he was interested in doing the prequel and it’s rumored that the script is being worked on again. I guess we’ll see. I’d certainly go see it.

Who Trivialized Roger Rabbit?

I did. Here are some other fun facts from the movie.

Although Roger and his cartoon pals have largely been abandoned at Disney, you can still find traces of them here and there. Be sure to keep your eyes peeled the next time you’re at Disney Hollywood Studios – if you look in the right place, you’ll find Eddie Valiant’s office, complete with the “hole” where Roger busted through the glass. There’s also a billboard for R.K. Maroon Studios.

Kathleen Turner famously provided Jessica Rabbit’s sultry voice, but Amy Irving – then Steven Spielberg’s wife – was her singing voice.

This was the last film Mel Blanc provided his famous voices for, including Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Tweety Bird, Porky Pig and Sylvester the Cat – with one exception. He did provide Daffy’s voice one more time in 1988 before passing away in 1989.

The movie’s original budget was $29.9 million dollars – the most an animated movie had ever cost at the time. But the price tag could have been even more astronomical – Roger was slated to cost $50 million at first, but Disney refused to shell out that much and wouldn’t approve production until costs were slashed. Rumor has it that by the time production was finished, the budget had soared to around $70 million.

Despite the cavalcade of characters from across the cartoon universe, a few that Disney wanted are missing: Popeye and Olive Oyl, Tom and Jerry, Casper the Friendly Ghost and Deputy Dawg. They couldn’t secure the rights for these in time for the movie.

Before the final title was finally settled on, others that were considered included Murder in Toontown, Dead Toons Don’t Pay Bills, Trouble in Toontown and Eddie Goes to Toontown.

The book has a question mark after the title, but the movie doesn’t – ending a movie title with a question mark is considered bad luck in the industry, apparently. This hasn’t stopped Who’s Harry Crumb?; What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?; or Dude, Where’s My Car?. The principle does apply to What’s Eating Gilbert Grape and Who’s That Girl, however.

Warner Brothers would only allow the use of their toons if they got the same screen time as Disney’s toons. Thus, when you see Bugs, he’s usually with Mickey, and when you see Daffy, Donald is probably there too. Screencap from Obsessed with Film.

To make Judge Doom extra creepy, Robert Zemeckis had Christopher Lloyd refrain from blinking during his scenes. I’m tempted to watch just to see if I can catch him. Tim Curry auditioned for the role of Judge Doom, but he was so disturbingly sinister that Zemeckis, Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and Michael Eisner all nixed him for fear that he would give children nightmares.

The inspiration for Jessica Rabbit was taken from a bunch of Hollywood glamour girls, including Lauren Bacall, Lana Turner, Rita Hayworth and Veronica Lake.

Zemeckis and Spielberg both really wanted Bill Murray for the role of Eddie Valiant, but Murray is notoriously hard to get a hold of, so it never happened. Murray has said that when he later found out that he was the number one choice for the role, he screamed out loud because he would have loved playing Eddie.

If you haven’t kept track of all of the animated cameos in the movie, here’s a list to watch for the next time you catch Roger on T.V.:

From Disney: Mickey; Minnie; Pluto; Donald; Goofy; Pegleg Pete; Horace Horsecollar; Clarabell Cow; the dwarves from The Merry Dwarfs; the flowers and trees from Flowers and Trees; the Three Little Pigs; Snow White and the seven dwarves; many of the characters from Fantasia (though not Chernabog); Dumbo; his mom and the crows from Dumbo; Br’er Bear; Tinkerbell; the penguins from Mary Poppins; Mr. Toad and his horse from The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad; Bambi and some that are a little more obscure.
From Warner Brothers: Bugs, Daffy, Porky, Tweety, Sylvester, Yosemite Sam, Foghorn Leghorn, Marvin the Martian, Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote, Sam the Sheepdog and Speedy Gonzales.
From Paramount: Koko the Clown and Betty Boop.
From Walter Lantz: Woody Woodpecker
From MGM: Droopy
You can also catch Felix the Cat, but he’s not an animated cameo. Instead, his face appears as the comedy and tragedy masks on the entrance to Toontown. He’s also shown in a photograph shaking hands with R.K. Maroon.

The Dark Side of Disney

Stacy — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 04:53:10 +0000

Disney isn’t always the Happiest Place on Earth. The parks sometimes harbor deep, dark secrets – and we’re not talking the Haunted Mansion or the Tower of Terror. Below are a few sinister secrets Mickey doesn’t want you to know about.

Deaths

We’ve all heard the rumors that no one has ever died at a Disney park because Disney has paid officials to refrain from declaring injured or ill people dead until they hit a hospital outside of Disney property. But it’s not true. There are several incidents where the victims were reported to have died at the scene.

In 2007, a Spanish teenager died while she was riding the Rock ‘N’ Roller Coaster at Disneyland Paris. Her friends noticed she was unconscious when the ride stopped, according to the BBC, and park medics immediately rushed to the scene. There was nothing they could do, though, and she was pronounced dead by the time an ambulance could get there. Photo from DLPInfo.

In June of both 1973 and 1983, 18-year-old boys drowned in the Rivers of America. Both had stayed in the area when they weren’t supposed to – the incident in ’73 occurred when a boy and his brother decided to stay in the park after closing and the ’83 incident happened when a boy capsized a rubber emergency raft he had stolen from a cast-only section of the park.

In 1984, Dollie Young was riding the Matterhorn Bobsleds at Disneyland when her seatbelt became unbuckled. To this day, it’s not known how Dollie fell out of her car, but she did. She fell to the track and was hit by another car, then caught under its wheels and dragged for a bit before the ride came to a stop. She was pronounced dead at the scene due to massive head and chest injuries.

And, of course, there was the infamous “America Sings” death of 1974. An employee named Debbi Stone was working as the hostess to the show one evening when her fellow cast members were alerted to the fact that she was missing. Some reports say they noticed at some point during the evening; other reports say a guest heard Debbi’s screams and immediately told cast members. Either way, by the time she was found, Debbi had been crushed to death between a rotating theater wall and a permanent theater wall; she definitely didn’t make it to a hospital first. Photo from Yesterland.

Ashes

Even when people aren’t dying at Disney, they want their mortal remains to be forever interred at the Happiest Place on Earth. Disney doesn’t like to talk about it, obviously, but sometimes cast members spill the beans to inquiring reporters. David Koenig, author of Mouse Tales: A Behind-the-Ears Look at Disneyland, says that the Haunted Mansion has definitely been the site of a quickie memorial service at least once. A cast member told him that she had been working the ride when a group requested extra time on the ride to say a quick goodbye to a little boy who had died and loved the Haunted Mansion. She agreed, but then spotted one of the guests emptying grey ash out onto the ride. The ride was shut down so it could be cleaned up.

In 2007, a guest alerted cast members at the Pirates of the Caribbean attraction that she had seen another woman sprinkling some sort of a powdery substance into the water, and the Los Angeles Times reports that the ride was shut down the same year when a group of people managed to leave a pile of ashes in the Captain’s Quarters section of the ride.

Hidden Messages

I’ve done it, and I bet a lot of you have done it as well: pausing and rewinding and going frame-by-frame to catch hidden messages or images in certain Disney films. Some of them are really there and some of them are just products of our active imaginations. Here’s the lowdown:

Aladdin does not tell children to take off their clothes in Aladdin. It’s a scene where “Prince Ali” is trying to get up to Princess Jasmine’s room to talk to her when he comes across her tiger, Rajah. The tiger growls at him menacingly, and Aladdin says, “C’mon… good kitty. Take off and go!” while shooing the feline away with his turban. The captioning supports this argument. However, the line is whispered and not enunciated well, and in addition, it seems to be edited poorly. Snopes http://www.snopes.com/disney/films/aladdin.asp says that the same bit of dialogue seems to have been inserted twice, so the whispered line is doubly garbled. Because it was so close on the heels of The Little Mermaid controversy, people heard what they wanted to.

Speaking of which, The Little Mermaid did not contain any sexual images on purpose. There were two issues that concerned the public: first, that artwork for the movie contained a phallic images as part of a castle in the background, and second, that the priest officiating over the wedding scene near the end of the movie seems to get an erection right in the middle of the ceremony. Neither is true, according to Snopes. The phallic image was unintentional and was not drawn in by a disgruntled employee who had recently gotten laid off (the artist didn’t even work for Disney) and the “erection” is actually the priest’s knees.

So what is true? Well, there’s definitely an image of a topless woman in the 1977 movie The Rescuers. And Disney fully admits it. In fact, the image – which is a photograph, not an animated bit, and was clearly intentionally placed in the movie – was basically pointed out to the public by Disney themselves. The image occurs so fast in two single, non-consecutive frames, that a viewer would have to know exactly where to pause the movie in order to even see it. The movie was recalled in 1999 after Disney discovered the image was there; they claimed it must have been inserted in post-production. Photo from Snopes.

One that’s maybe true: Jessica Rabbit going commando in Who Framed Roger Rabbit. There’s a scene in the movie where Jessica and Eddie Valiant are thrown from a car, causing her dress to flip up very briefly. It goes fast, but people who have slowed the movie to frame-by-frame say that the way the coloring was done suggests that mischievous animators may have drawn Jessica without any undergarments. However, the coloring, which is darker than the rest of Jessica’s skin, may also suggest underwear.

And here’s a not-so-hidden image you can check out for yourself the next time you’re at Disney World – there’s a Nazi “hidden” in plain sight in a mural at the Grand Floridian resort. In the book Sabotage in the American Workplace, the artist who painted the piece says that Disney hired him to create a Great Gatsby-esque mural for the ballroom in the upscale hotel. He decided to paint a Nazi in the background of the mural to “comment on what was happening in the rest of the world while the Great Gatsbys where whittling away their hours with cocktails.” Photo from Snopes.
There are definitely more dark Disney tales – in fact, we could probably turn this into a series! What weird and/or disturbing rumors have you heard about the House of Mouse? Share in the comments, and maybe we’ll investigate for future posts.