FROM THE VAULT: The NeverEnding Story (40th Anniversary Edition)

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Speaker 1: Too Much Information is a production of iHeartRadio. Hello everyone, and welcome to Too Much Information, the show that brings you the secret stories and little known, behind the scenes details about your favorite movies, music, TV shows, and more. We are your foreman of facts. My name is Jordan Runta and I'm Alex Saigel, and today we are going to talk about truly one of my all time favorite movies as a kid, The Never Ending Story. And you know how little kids get into this routine where they watch movies over and over again, That's how I was with this movie. They were showings of this movie in my house horribly daily. Oh yeah, I couldn't get enough of this movie. It was just always on. It has to be part of my genetic code at this point. Like whenever I see storm clouds off in the distance, I think of Madridded nothing. Whenever I see a beautiful white horse, I think of our tax and his demise and the swamp of sadness. I tray, you still the coolest kid who's ever lived, as far as I'm concerned. And it was really only after revisiting this movie for this episode that I realized the Ending Story is kind of terrifying. Yeah, it's dark, So we're really hitting our personal kinder trauma trifecta this summer. We've got I know, we we we gotta save some of these for season two. Man, we're gonna run out of all this. Yeah, who friend Roger Rabbit and the never ending Story. Sorry to all of our listeners for all of the repressed nightmares that these episodes may have dredged up. Don't worry, We're not sleeping either.

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Speaker 2: This is one of those.

00:01:31
Speaker 1: Movies that I assumed that everybody of our age group had a personal connection with, like you know, the Lion King or Beauty and the Beast or something. But after talking to you, I'm starting to get the sense that that's not the case. What's your relationship like with this movie? Non existently?

00:01:46
Speaker 2: I yeah, I mean as far as fantasy stuff, growing up, it was Princess pooh.

00:01:51
Speaker 1: Yeah, oh we should totally do that too. Yeah.

00:01:53
Speaker 2: I think the bigger thing for me was Star Wars. I mean that guy was a Star Wars kid. Didn't know that, but oh yeah, oh oh yeah yeah. In many ways, I pined the death of my childhood on two late nineties properties, which is Batman and Robin as we've talked about many times and the prequels. Oh yeah, but no, I get back to never any story. I think I have literally seen this movie once.

00:02:16
Speaker 1: Wow.

00:02:17
Speaker 2: I think we've watched it in like teacher has a hangover, we're going to watch movies day in like middle school, and then I just never revisited it. In fact, I remember being exposed to that scream O band or Metalcore or whatever the band to tray You more than the actual child's character tray You, which is hilarious.

00:02:37
Speaker 1: Wow. Do you have any images burned in at Morse Dying? For sure? I mean I think I actually I confused the rock dude from this movie with the one from Return to Oz because I saw a Return to Oz way too early, and I remember like being like, I have the wheelie guys for me, is like, which is common, Like everyone was like, what the are those things doing in a child's movie? But I think I saw that at like six or seven and was like, oh goodness, Well, I guess we'll see over the course of this episode what horrifying memories shake loose from your subconscious. It's time to dive in to our never ending episode. You'll learn the many ways that the kid who played a tray you nearly died on the set, the true fate of that horse that sank in the quicksand the insane length they went to build Falcore the Luck Dragon out of airplane pieces, and Steven Spielberg's secret role in helping finish the movie. So here is everything you never knew about The never Ending Story. Wow. Given the popularity of The Never Ending Story of the movie, it may surprise fans to learn that the film was actually based on a nineteen seventy nine children's novel by German author Michael Ende, who hated the film adaptations so much that he sued the studio. Well, let me backtrack a bit. The book was phenomenally popular in Germany and around the world, but especially in Germany, where it stayed at the top of the literary charts for three years and sold more than a million copies before being translated into twenty seven different languages, including English. It sold quite well in the States as well. I think it sold something like one hundred thousand copies. The utopian themes of The Never Ending Story book were embraced by anti nuclear activists at the dawn of the eighties and I've seen reports that people would line up around the block and camp out in sleeping bags in order to hear the author, Michael Ende speak. So this was a big deal. And doing a film adaptation of this book was basically like making Harry Potter or something in the early eighties. This was a big deal. Michael Ende seems I think that's how you say his name. He seems to have something of a persecution complex. He said that the critical reaction to the book quote ranged from amazement to black rage. You could enter the literary salon from prison, from the insane asylum, from a whorehouse, everywhere, but from the children's room. So yeah, mixed reaction. That's a pretty incredible quote, to be fair. Yeah, no, it's true. I mean, I guess yeah, it probably is. I mean, I'm not I don't know any children's authors personally, but it must be hard to get that sense of respect, you know, that is afforded to people who have like a gritty personal story that was told from you know, prison diaries or you know something some kind of harrowing personal memoir or some well speaking of arrowing personal memoir. Oh yeah, you have a lot to say about this author. Yeah. He.

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Speaker 2: His father was a surrealist painter in Germany. His work was, like many others, shut down by the Nazis, and Michael was twelve years old when the first air raid took place above Munich, about which he has a delightful quote that I was unable to verify but don't want to know the truth about, frankly, because it can't be worse than you assume.

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Speaker 1: Quote. I remember singing and careening through the blaze like a drunkard. I was in the grip of a kind of euphoria. I still don't truly understand it, but I was almost tempted to cast myself into the fire like a moth into the light, which imagine I can't do it. I didn't have I didn't bring this prepared. But imagine that in Werner Hertzeg's voice, I say doctor Evil. But yeah, that works too close. Yeah yeah, yeah, Wow. Okay, so so much about never ending story, like the swamp of sadness and the nothing, just this impending aerial force coming sweeping over the Okay, this is all starting to make sense now. Wow.

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Speaker 2: He was visiting his uncle during the nineteen forty three Hamburg bombing, which was one of those horrifying carpet bombing situations like Dresden. They blew up I think a petroleum there's a petroleum refinery or something like that, and then the whole town went up and it was like a horrifying firestorm. Thirty seven thousand people died.

00:06:54
Speaker 1: Oh my yeah. A year later, his father's studio burns up and he loses like the bulk of his work. And then in nineteen forty five, the kid is drafted into the Volkstrum, which was like the.

00:07:07
Speaker 2: Quote volunteer German Army. A bunch of his classmates went to war and died, three of them.

00:07:14
Speaker 1: I guess that's not a bunch. That's enough children dying. And then he tore up his draft papers and joined a Bavarian resistance movement. Cool.

00:07:23
Speaker 2: Yeah, so quite the CV, even before he created one of the most immortal children's books of all time.

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Speaker 1: Wow. I guess what I say I'm saying is he's earned that persecution complex. Okay, because he was literally persecuted. I take that back. Thank you for putting me straight on that. Well, back to slightly happier occasions in this man's life. He sold the film rights to the never ending story for fifty thousand dollars, which I find to be a pretty low figure considering his popularity, and perhaps this is what helped sow the seeds of resentment in years to come. According to an interviewed he gave with the German newspaper Dershpiegel, his first choice for director was a Kira Kurosawa, the legendary Japanese director. His second choice was Polish director Andrejta Is that how you say that? I have no idea.

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Speaker 2: I googled that. I mean Okira Kurasaw was would be incredible. But I googled this guy Andres and he won like an honorary Oscar he won the palmed Or Yeah, it's just funny. It's like when Morris he was putting out his autobiography and he's like, it has to come out on Penguin Classics. Oh yeah, Like, way to pick two of the most iconic, apparently twentieth century directors as the guys to do your children's book.

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Speaker 1: Yeah. I can't tell if this speaks to like the high popular regard for this book or for the author's arrogance. Maybe a little bit of both. Again, he really wants that cred. He really wants that cred. He's not getting it from coming in through the kid's door. He's sitting at the kid's stable, so that's interesting. But ultimately they got Wolfgang Peterson as director and more on him director Wolfgang Peterson's director, Wolfgang Peterson. Fans of the podcast will know him from our Air Force one episode, so more on him soon. But together, Wolfgang Peterson and author Michael Endey collaborate on the script, and the author later said I worked as an advisor because I wanted a beautiful movie. I trusted them. Then things went south in a pretty big way. Michael ende claimed that Peterson later secretly rewrote the screenplay, making major changes that offended him deeply, and he's quoted as saying, I saw the final script five days before the movie's premiere, and I was horrified they had changed the whole sense of the story. And he objected to numerous additions to the movie that were not found in the original book, specifically the final scene of the movie. You'll remember that the movie opens with the nerdy bastion, the kid Bastian, getting tormented by bullies and he hides out in the school's attic and reads this enchanted book, and the adventures within the book kind of formed the bulk of the movie. At the end of the movie, after Bastion has developed confidence through what he's read in this book, he flies into the real world on the back of Falcore, the luck Dragon, and he gets revenge on his bullies. So suddenly this fantasy world enters the real world. Author Michael Ende violently objected to that scene, saying that it undercut the meaning of this story, and he angrily told producers, you're trying to do a Disney movie, to which they basically said, yeah, yep, Shire are exactly as we're trying to do. That's our bit. Yeah. He also objected to this is my favorite part, the twin laser shooting oracle statues, which he felt were a little too voluptuous. He later said, the sphinxes are one of the biggest embarrassments of the film. They are full bosomed strippers who sit there in the desert. Sounds like a Russ Meyers movie. So the author was pissed, so pissed that he attempted to halt the movie by filing a lawsuit against the movie's German production company for breach of contract. When the suit was dismissed, he tried to get them to change the name of the movie, which also failed. Ultimately, he organized a press conference to coincide with the release of the film, which he referred to as quote the Revolting Movie. The makers of the film simply did not understand the book at all. They just wanted to make money, and he was so ashamed of the final product that they refused to have his name in the opening credits of the film, instead opting for just a small mention in the closing credits. But yeah, we'll talk about director Wolfgang Peterson's sort of take on all this basically says most authors aren't happy with movie adaptations of their books because it's really hard to compress everything that happens in a novel into ninety minutes two hours of screen time. Not to mention, this book is so fantastical. There are so many elements that just technologically speaking, couldn't be put on the screen anyway. So this guy didn't take kindly to having his words and stories altered, and it kind of needed to be to appear on screen. Is that famous story about Vlatibourn Nabokov writing the screenplay for Lolita, the original screenplay, and it was like I think it was something. It was like over three hundred pages, and they were like, we can't make this, we can't lift this quote. That's great.

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Speaker 2: Well, I mean using that as a springboard, we might as well do a lightning round of other famous authors who were displeased with the cinematic adaptations of their work, starting with probably one of the most famous one, Stephen King versus Stanley Kubrick. Stephen King was a big fan of Kubrick, but he disliked that adaptation of The Shining calling it a big, beautiful Cadillac with no engine inside. Coming from the author of Christine, that's harsh, that's harsh words. And he especially did not like Shelley Duvall. Hi, I'm Shelley Duvall. Shelley Duvall's performance, which I don't think is fair. This is a horrible quote. He told the BBC. She's basically just there to scream and be stupid, and that's not the woman that I wrote about. That performance is a triumph. How dare you?

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Speaker 1: King may have been unduly influenced by Kubrick's weird habits during filming, one of which I just remembered that he called Stephen King like late at night, asking him stuff like do you believe in God? Wow?

00:13:31
Speaker 2: Anyway, moving on another Kubrick boy Buddy and Kubrick did.

00:13:37
Speaker 1: Nabokov's Lolita too, and I don't think Avokov was particularly happy with his adaptation of that either, so stracking out right and left. Yes.

00:13:46
Speaker 2: Anthony Burgess, author of Clockwork Orange, was so upset by Kubrick's film adaptation that he said he wished he had never written the novel in the first place, saying the film made it easy for readers of the book to misunderstand what it was about, and the misunderstand will pursue me till I die. I should not have written the book because of this danger of misinterpretation.

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Speaker 1: Uh famously misinterpreted by John Bottom, who is a big fan of all the drugs man dressed like them on stage. Boie did too, but I think he, I think he understood that dressing like them and acting like them were two very different things.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, distinction lost on Bottom. Cooper also pissed off Wendy carlos Man. Hard guy to work with, hard guy to work out.

00:14:28
Speaker 1: I mean that's yeah, that's my tremendous that's my ice cold film take for this episode your Galaxy brain film takes Stanley Kubrick hard to work, moving right along.

00:14:43
Speaker 2: Roald Dahl felt the movie version of Charlie and Chocolate Factory was quote crummy, and thought Gene Wilder's Willy Wonka was pretentious and bouncy.

00:14:53
Speaker 1: That's not really that sounds like a slur. Yeah, that sounds like, yeah, I don't know racial somehow, just like it sounds like a homophobic slur.

00:15:02
Speaker 2: Oh that tracks, and felt director Mel Stewart had no talent or flare. No other Wonka movies were made while he lived. You, Rold Doll, how dare you say that about Gene Wilder's performance. Let's be real, that's why he's so good.

00:15:18
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:15:19
Speaker 2: I watched the office scene like daily, the.

00:15:24
Speaker 1: Oh, that's so upsetting me nothing, and then just and then later like just the tenderness's voice when he so shines a good deed in the warry world, when the tenderness in his voice when he just goes Charlie, it's so good. It's upsetting. It's too upsetting to me. It's like that anger. I watched that movie. That movie.

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Speaker 2: We should, now, I don't know, we should. Oh that's I watched that movie for me a lot, me too. Oh yeah, because you're a candy door. All right, put it a bit in that. We'll get back to it. P. L. Travers famously hated the Disney version of Mary Poppins so much that she wept at the premiere and forbade the company from remaking any of her other books. And you folks, you may remember Jesus ten years ago at this point, saving mister Banks and Disney began to work on a theatrical production of Mary Poppins in the nineties, and she relented. She gave them consent on the condition that no one associated with the film version be involved. Savage Forrest Gump Winston Groom, the man who wrote that book, was so pissed that he got screwed out of points on the back end from that movie adaptation or mentions in the Oscar acceptance speeches which.

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Speaker 1: I get won six mentioned the nun I believe, don't get greedy. Winston. He wrote a sequel book which I know nothing about. What is it? Called A Good Day to Forrest Gump? Forrest Gump harder Forrest Gump, forrests actually Forrest Gump back in the habit.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, opens with the line, don't ever let nobody make a movie of your life story. Whether they get it right or wrong, it don't matter. Ah and all right, jesus, cool it. No, I don't want to know this about cool Hand Luke. Don Pierce wrote the book Cool Hand Luke, inspired by the two years he spent on a prison road gang. He was supposed to write the screenplay, but the studio gave it to a more experienced writer for polishing. They did a lousy job, and I disliked it intensely, he told the Telegraph Boy. Authors man, they do not mince words. He thought the famous line what we have here is a failure to communicate, which I believe is firmly installed on the AFI top quotes one hundred list A stupid line.

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Speaker 1: That's what he called it. You gotta do it like like like the foreman.

00:17:49
Speaker 2: Oh no, no, I can't do it. Here is failure, failure to community communicate. See some men you just can't reach.

00:18:01
Speaker 1: So you get what we had here last week, which is the way he wants it, where he gets it, and I don't like it. Anymore than you man. Uh you know how I know that whole thing is from the Guns n' Roses song Civil War. It starts with that more on them later, Yeah, exactly.

00:18:24
Speaker 2: He even disliked Paul Newman because the guy was so cute looking. He was too scrawny. He wouldn't have lasted five minutes on the road. Pierce got a small part in the movie and talked to Newman on the set and saying he even asked me to dinner, then canceled when his pr people realized he didn't need to be seen eating with an X con. He continued, I didn't like the guy. I didn't like that whole Hollywood crowd. I was never made welcome, and at one point he got so upset with the film that he actually punched someone on the set, which I don't know, dude, there's some tough dudes on the on that set, but I don't think you George Kennedy, you murder you yep. Ken Kesey famously pissed at one flew over the Cuckoo's Nest that book takes place from the perspective of chief. It's all narrated from his point of view and obviously in the movie he is mute and not a point of view character. Brett Easton Ellis, American psycho, should have been made. I disagree with him, well, I mean I would agree with him only inasmuch that Brett Easton Ellis should not be famous because he's a piece of not that great of a writer. E. B. White thought that Charlotte's Web cartoon from nineteen seventy three was a travesty. Truman Capoti hated Breakfast to Tiffany's spent the rest of his life trashing it because he thought that Marilyn Monroe was the only woman fit to play Holly go lightly and weird.

00:19:46
Speaker 1: Place to end up here. The author of I Know What You Did Last sume we get through all these iconic works of literature to land on I Know What You Did Last Summer, Lois Duncan. Oh. I shouldn't have made fun of her, That's sad. She based her novel partially on the murder of her eighteen year old daughter and was deeply offended by the slasherization of the movie and its sequel. I think there's like five of them now. This poor woman is getting checks based on the murder of her daughter.

00:20:16
Speaker 2: Oh my god, Oh buddy, Alan Moore, who has written some of the most important capital iye graphic novels of the twentieth century. Watchman was his with a guy named Dave Gibbons, and they explicitly worked on that with the aim of showing what comics could do that other mediums couldn't, between all the visual information contained in the frame and the thought bubbles, and like, actually, I don't think there's thought bubbles in that anyway. He was like, I want to show what comics can do as a medium that no other medium can do. So the fact that it was adapted into a movie is hilarious to me. He has disowned every adaptation and Viva Vendetta he called a bush era parable by people too timid to set a political satire in their own country. Fair and that League of Extraordinary Gentleman movie he's also based on nol Moore thing and a movie so bad Sean Connery left the business after making it.

00:21:15
Speaker 1: I thought it was after finding Forrester.

00:21:17
Speaker 2: No no leaving Extraordinary Gentleman and it was, yeah, famously so bad. He never didn't. I mean, I don't know if that was he said. He said as much, but yeah, it was his last movie.

00:21:27
Speaker 1: Now onto a segment related to call director Wolfgang Peterson. Yes, Director Wolfgang Peterson defends his film adaptation of Michael Ende's book. Peterson claims that the script was quote very faithful to the book and that Michael Ende was a control freek who let fame go to his head.

00:21:45
Speaker 2: Uh.

00:21:46
Speaker 1: Peterson said that he was treated like Jesus Christ in Germany, which is quite a thing to say about an author. He also said that the author didn't understand movie adaptations, and you know, louies aren't books. Story was sacred to him, Peterson said, And you cannot change that. So while I was trying to work with him on the script, it was difficult to make any changes. If I needed to cut something out. He wouldn't understand that. There were a lot of things that at the time we just could not yet do technically. Maybe today it would be different. The bottom line is he could not really understand the process of making a two hour movie from his big and very very rich book. He didn't understand it and didn't want to understand it, which is all fair points. Yeah, yeah, it's unfortunate that the author doesn't like the really beloved adaptation of his book, But maybe he likes the checks. Do you think you got points on? It was that part of the deal back then. I almost I gotta wonder if if you sue the studio that's making your movie, I almostly apparently surrender some kind of Yeah. I don't know, Yeah, that's fair. Let's talk about director Wolfgang Peterson for a moment. He's making his second appearance on TMI. He would later go on to direct my beloved large plane movie, Air Force War, in addition to Outbreak Troy with Brad Pitt and the two thousand and six Remakeup but Besign Adventure. So this is really, as far as I know, his only real foray into the children's film Realm. But in the early eighties he was essentially Germany's answer to Steven Spielberg. Remember this comparison, because we'll come back to it. He just broke them through with nineteen eighty one's Doss Bout, the World War Two drama set aboard a German U boat, which earned him an Oscar nomination, And he'd spent three years painstakingly recreating this German submarine and immersing himself in this dark and gritty story, so he was ready for something a little different, although I would argue that he brought this same dark and gritty sensibility to this children's movie. He later told Entertainment Weekly for their truly incredible Never Ending Story oral history from twenty nineteen, Doss Boot was a tough, tough movie to make. From the story point of view. It was very dark and emotional material. My son at the time was around ten years old, so he didn't really care for Doss Boot very much. As a father, I wanted to do something that my son would really be interested in and that he could be proud of. And that's when he got a call from another German director, a guy named Helmet didel And this guy, Helmet was the original director of The Never Ending Story, but he was known for small scale dramas and comedies, and once they started the ball rolling on the complex practical effects and puppets and miniatures for this movie, he found himself completely overwhelmed and basically resigned. He called Wolfgang Peterson and more or less begged him to take it over. Since Technical Tour Deforce Epics for sort of Peterson's whole deal after making the Submarine movie so Wolfgang hopped into the director's chair and proceeded to make a living hell for his actors. I'm only sort of kidding. I compared to Miss Spielberg a moment ago, but a more apt comparison might have been Stanley Kubrick, a director who was famous for pushing his actors to the brink of sanity by demanding take after take after take. Your average director would ask for five, maybe ten takes of a given scene. Peterson was famous for going for forty takes basically every scene in this movie. Wasn't Shelley Duvall going down the staircase like one hundred and thirty in The Shining? Yeah, something like that. Yeah, I mean, wasn't she reduced to tears? I'm sure everybody on The Shining was reduced to tears? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know if Peterson reduced people on the set of a never running story to tears, but there were some injuries. We'll get to that later. So he asked for dozens and dozens of takes and basically every scene. And partially this might have been a result of Peterson's very limited English at that time and the resulting language barriers, but he was also kind of a perfectionist, and these long arduous days caused the budget of the film to inflate considerably to twenty seven million or seventy six million in today's dollars, making it the most expensive film to be made outside of the United States to the Soviet Union at that time, and amusingly, the previous record was also held by Peterson for dos Boot, so he broke his own record. Actor Noah Hathaway, who played a tray you the Warrior Child, gave an interview in the News Tribune in twenty fifteen in which he claimed that the shoot was originally slated for three months, and instead because of all these retakes, it stretched to a full year. The shoot quadrupled in length and Halfaway says that two of the scenes in the movie are tax death in the Swamp of Sadness and the introduction of the giant turtle. Morla took two months to shoot.

00:26:28
Speaker 2: That's a long time. I watch a horse drown and I know from horse drownings. Alright, stares out the window with your Scotch oh as you meditate on that, We'll be right back with more.

00:26:48
Speaker 1: Too much information after these messages, this brings us to a Tray You, or more appropriately, the young man who played him, Noah Hathaway, here in a reputation as a bit of a diva on the set, or at least by one account. Special effects director Brian Johnson gave an interview to sci Fi Now where he described Noah Hathaway as quote, a bit of a pain in the urs. Frankly, it was very difficult for Wolfgang to get anything out of him. But perhaps he's being a little harsh considering the kid nearly died several times on the set. The whole process of making this movie was a nightmare for this poor Noah Hathaway kid. He was one of apparently fifty thousand Hope folks who tried out for the role of a Tray You, and he wound up auditioning at least ten times. That's insane. After yeah, that's it. Well, I guess because you originally cast by the original director and then once the director left and Wolfgang Peterson stepped in and he had to start the process all over again. So that was part of the problem. But Noah Hathaway eventually got the gig, later citing his half Native American heritage as a crucial factor in giving him a certain look that producers were looking for to play the warrior child. The name A tray You, by the way, has several different origin stories. In A Never Ending Story novel, it's revealed that a Trayu means son of all, because he was an orphan and raised by all the members of his village. But it's also possible that a tray You was derived from the ancient Greek are treyus, meaning fearless, or an ancient Sanskrit word for great warrior.

00:28:21
Speaker 2: It's all ancient Sanskrit, right, All these all these, all these fantasy terms are stolen from Sanskrit.

00:28:27
Speaker 1: Yeah, very fitting for this child warrior. Initially, Noah Hathaway, prior to getting cast in A Never Ending Story, was supposed to appear in a Broadway production of Chaplain starring Gene Kelly and Anne Margaret, but he opted to Never Ending Story instead.

00:28:43
Speaker 2: It's a mistake, kid spending the year in a Buckskin onesie instead of tapping toes with Gene Kelly.

00:28:49
Speaker 1: You'll never work in this town again. I mean to be real though me.

00:28:54
Speaker 2: Yes, it turned out Broadway it turned out well for him, But in the original novel Tray You is a member of the green.

00:29:01
Speaker 1: Skin race, which, as the name suggests, meaning said he is green, and the makeup team for the film adaptation tried to keep this character trait and actually painted Noah Hathaway in green paint for some early scenes. However, the effect did not look good on camera and this whole idea was abandoned. Hathaway said, quote, it wasn't believable. I look like fun guy. They also cut the scene where he does in an easy being green with Kermit. It just felt forced. But I guess they thought he was a little too pale, so they stuck him in a tanning booth for a couple of weeks to make it more believable that this kid, like you know, lived by his wits in the forest. But there is one element of pre production that is way less relaxing than kicking back at a salon. While learning to ride a horse, Noah Hathaway was apparently thrown off and then kicked by the animal, and some sources say the horse actually fell on him and as a result, this poor kid spent a month in traction, and producer seriously wondered if he would be healed in time to play a tray you. To this day, he has titanium screws in his spine and apparently continues to deal with painful back issues. I wonder if there was a settlement just saying thankfully, I guess for Noah. A bunch of other issues slowed down the production, namely trying to figure out ways to make it look like you're drowning a horse on screen without actually driving a horse, which meant that he was able to recuperate in time to participate in filming, only to be seriously injured again. There's a scene when he fights the wolf like beast Gomork, which was actually a robotic puppet. This robot malfunctioned during the scene, and I guess it went haywire and one of its claws slashed the young actor's face right beside his eye and nearly blinded him. It's alive. It's so rare, seriously, and then this robotic puppet fell on him, and it was so heavy when it landed on him that he knocked the wind out of him and injured him pretty badly. They only got one shot with this robotic puppet doing this because he was so badly injured. That's the shot that you see in the final movie, because that was the only one I could get.

00:31:10
Speaker 2: I'd just like to imagine going back to Kubrick that he's like acting alongside this wolf and all of a sudden it starts talking in the howl voice.

00:31:19
Speaker 1: I'm afraid I can't do that. A tray you, I'm afraid I can't allow you to do that. Uh ah.

00:31:26
Speaker 2: While we're on the topic of injuries, I just want to shout out two of my favorite SFX injuries of all time, which is surely a subcategory.

00:31:34
Speaker 1: It's a list of WHI I like to keep handy.

00:31:37
Speaker 2: Margaret Hamilton, who played the Wicked Witch and Wizard of Oz, during her Cloud of Smoke disappearing her like Ninja Vanish scene, ended up with third degree burns on her hands and second degree burns on her face. After that, and you said, that's the take they used, Yeah, that's.

00:31:53
Speaker 1: The take they used in the because I think the I think that the makeup that she was in, the green you know makeup or whatever, well, it was made of copper, which I think I should probably check this.

00:32:05
Speaker 2: But with them, because they also Buddy Ebsen, they painted him in like silver and he wasn't on a respirator or in an oxygen tent.

00:32:14
Speaker 1: Right, Yes, the original tin man Buddy Ebsen, who later became very famous as Jed Klampan on The Beverly Hillbillies. They painted him silver with basically like silver dust, and he I think the line that he said was he went to breathe and nothing happened. He breathed in the dust and it just coated his lungs, and yeah, nearly killed him. I don't know. He had to quit the movie. Yeah, and they got Ray Bolger, I think Ray Bolger or I think it was Ray Boulger. And and they obviously changed the makeup compound quite a bit. I wonder how pisted he was if they didn't wait for him, Like, not only am I in the hospital, but I lost this huge role.

00:32:52
Speaker 2: They didn't wait for Judy Garland to sleep. You think they're gonna wait for him, You're no Judy kid, Buddy, get back in the tent. My favorite one from Jurassic is from Jurassic Park because it is just such a I don't know this one. Oh yeah, So Stan Winston was the effects studio that did the animatronics for that movie. Just some of the all time animatronics work. And a guy named Alan Scott was burning the midnight oil at Warner Brothers studio gluing foam rubber to the skin to the t rex. I actually spent a while trying to find pictures of that thing without its skin on. I wasn't able to find any because imagine how horrifying that would look, like a terminator t rex that's like twenty feet tall. Yeah, And so he's inside the thing's mouth gluing its roof of its mouth onto the mechanical armature. And because its jaws defaulted to closed when the power was off, they had to do this while it was basically plugged in and control it to put the jaws open as wide as possible so he could be in there. And he said to the guy he give this interview about it. He said to the guy who was there, was like, put that switch on and make sure no one can trip over it or accidentally hit it, because if it closes on me, that will be bad. And then someone just shut the whole studio power off. The thing starts to cause these are like industrial hydraulics.

00:34:21
Speaker 1: These things are built out of just starts closing on him. While he's in there, he talks about curlings into a smaller and smaller ball so his limbs or head didn't get caught in that thing. And he lowers, so the jaws close and the head lowers down, and I guess a bunch of the other crew guys had to come and pry him out of it. Huh. Can you imagine that? Probably the last human to be almost eaten by a tea? Really? When I think about that, Wow, I showed you there. I was on the set for Jurassic Park two. I think I showed you pictures of this. They had off to the side. Maybe it was the I aim t rex head For all I know, this dinosaur head pride open and they just used it for craft services. In this t rex's mouth, they just had all these styrofoam coffee cups lined up, just held in place by all the teeth. That's great.

00:35:14
Speaker 2: Umm, yeah, man, God love it. It's a rough industry. Yeah, yes, it is. His poor kid, he was like tens poor Noah Hathaway. Uh.

00:35:24
Speaker 1: Given all of his physical anguish, at least he has the satisfaction of seeing his once in a lifetime performance up on the big screen right raw. During a panel at Dragon Con in twenty ten, Noah Hathaway claimed that virtually none of his lines in the film are his own voice, despite the fact that he did record the lines himself. He claims that another actor was brought in to dub over his lines and that was what we hear in the finished film. The voice actor used for this was apparently uncredited. I was unable to find any information on this person. You can hear Noah's actual voice in a making of special that was released in nineteen eighty three that you can find on YouTube. You can tell that they are slightly different. But I guess dubbing was pretty common in this movie because much of the filming took place in Germany. Many of the actors were German, and they spoke their lines in their native language, only to have them dubbed into English and post, Oh yeah, this is super common.

00:36:21
Speaker 2: I didn't know about it in Germany, but I remember the famous thing about all the Spaghetti Westerns is that all the different actors were just speaking in their native language. So you've got guys talking English, Spanish, Italian. So some of there's scenes where some people have no idea what the other one is saying. Then they just dub it over in post and I think they did that up into the seventies with some of the Dario Argento horror stuff, because those were like like David Hemings is in one of those deep bred so it's like they had English speaking actors on them, but they were shot in Italy, and I think the Italian actors were just speaking in Italian that whole time. Such a fun way to make movies, Daria Argento is that.

00:37:00
Speaker 1: Father wow yep yep uh. The actor who played the night Hob Tilo Pruckner, spoke most of his dialogue in German and had it dubbed over, And the same is true for the rock Biter. You go back and watch the movie, you can see that their mouths are moving and saying something completely difficult. It's actually coming out creepier in German. Can you imagine the original the original dubs of that. I watched a German dub, but not the whole thing of the Wicked Witch of the West doing the ill I'll get you my pretty uh scary, it's really really scary.

00:37:36
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, yes, it's like fascist speeches or something interesting.

00:37:42
Speaker 1: Point the voice of the Rock, Bier Falcor, the Luck Dragon, and Gomork were all dubbed by the same American voiceover actor, Alan Hoppenheimer, who's a veteran of the Smurfs, he Man and Transformers. I know you love your voiceover actor, I sure do. But this all brings us to the horse, se Man. We've been delaying the inevitable. It's time to discuss it. Good God, the moment when a tray's beloved horse sinks in the swamp of eternal sadness, and now we're about to sink in this swamp of eternal sadness too. Well, let's get this out of the way. The horse didn't die.

00:38:16
Speaker 2: That was like a persistent urban legend that I remember hearing growing up, you know, pre Snopes, pre Internet days.

00:38:23
Speaker 1: It was just always like, oh, you know, they actually killed a horse on that movie.

00:38:26
Speaker 2: But no, folks, this was not Michael Simono's Days of Heaven where they actually blew up a horse, nor was it the Italian horror film Cannibal Holocaust, in which they kill a turtle. They did, however, almost drown the horse in a big sea of mud.

00:38:44
Speaker 1: That's an unkind reading of the situation and ungenerous. So but yes, there's a horse. There is mud, it is up to its neck. Yes, but but go on. Yeah, actually, I guess it's not really that because.

00:38:56
Speaker 2: They make horses swim in Westerns all the time, right, They're like usually throw like riding horses into the water to get to the outlaws and such. Anyway, horses are not known for their love of chest deep mud, and so two trainers spent seven weeks teaching one of the two horses playing attacks to stand still on a hydraulic platform in the swamp with mud up to his chin without trying to swim or run away, nearly two months teaching a horse to defy all of its natural instincts of self preservation, a scene they initially only budgeted two weeks of shooting for. Can you imagine being the other horse and just watching from the sides, being like, boy, I'm sure glad I'm not Jimmy today. No, Hathaway didn't have it much better. According to some sources, his leg got caught on that hydraulic elevator and he was dragged underwater during one of these shoots, and by the time he pulled it up, he had lost consciousness, just super bad for you.

00:40:03
Speaker 1: You don't want that.

00:40:04
Speaker 2: You want to be conscious, but uh that you didn't weren't able to verify that. But no horses were harmed other than psychologically and emotionally. And Noah told this to Entertainment Weekly, UH for their oral history on the film, he said, the real horse never really died. They were more careful with that horse than they were with me. I got hurt a hell of a lot more. The horse was definitely looked after, well, which is adorable. We like care Yeah, I guess it's not. I just like the horse, being like the horse, like leading the horse off, like great day of shooting. Yeah, yeah, you were great. You're better than beautiful.

00:40:47
Speaker 1: Cage. He come too, you, I'm going to my trailer, called me when he wakes up.

00:40:59
Speaker 2: The horse did actually live happily ever after. Noah Hathaway said he was given the horse at the end of filming, along with the saddle that he used in the film for it. But due to the cost of transportation, quarantine, and sterilization, they mean germs, right, they didn't have to sterilize the horse, I would assume, so yeah, okay, anyway, it costs too much and the horse was left behind in Germany, where it lived happily for another twenty years.

00:41:26
Speaker 1: You can't just give somebody a horse that's not something like that's a gift that registers as hostile. All the stuff, all the money, all the all the housing for it like that, that's no longer a gift, that's a responsibility. Here's an obligation. Yeah, I mean maybe. I mean, kid looks like a natural on all these horses. Considering you to learn how to ride for this movie, like that's pretty insane. It looks amazing.

00:41:52
Speaker 2: And he says that he loves doing all these conventions for The Never Ending Story because he feels responsible for traumatizing generations of kids with that scene.

00:42:00
Speaker 1: Yep, sure, he says. He hopes it's therapeutic for them to see him.

00:42:04
Speaker 2: In real life, Noah has acted sporadically, but he is now a martial arts teacher and tattoo artist in Las Vegas. One thing you can't get from him is a tattoo of the urn talisman. Am I saying that right, Jordan?

00:42:17
Speaker 1: I think so. It's on the cover of The Never Ending Story Book. It's the necklace that a Trayu wears in the movie. It's kind of the the cool magic prop from the movie.

00:42:27
Speaker 2: And so once people found out that he was the kid who played a tray you was doing tattoos, he got flooded with requests to do tattoos of that, which he says is flattering. But no, he would not do that anymore anyway. Moving on, Jordan, talk to us about the child Like Empress.

00:42:43
Speaker 1: Yes, she's actually known as the Childlike Empress. I'm not editorializing there. I first started coming across that in articles and thought, oh, that's weird, but no, that's actually like her full title. My favorite fact about this horse drowning scene is that was apparently the first day on the set for the little girl who played the childlike Empress. Whah, yes, I know, well I can't. I'm making it heavy. I'm making it in the movies, my first big role. It's probably worth adding right here than it was her last big role. Oh manby, why isn't your first crying? Yes? Yeah. Wolfgang Peterson said that while they were shooting this scene, there was basically not a dry eye on the set, so so wow, welcome to show business. She was cast late in the production and Wolfgang Peterson had invited her down to check things out on the set and surprise. Tammy Stronach is the name of the actress who played the Empress, and she had been attending theater classes in San Francisco playing the part of Piglet in an adaptation of Witty the Pooh, which I love. When she was asked to audition for this role, I guess her acting teacher was friends with the production executive and the talent scout for this movie. Tammy initially believed that she was auditioning for a little play and she had no idea that it was for a major motion picture, and she auditioned alongside Heather O'Rourke the little girl from Poltergeist, which I think is adorable. Can totally see her doing a good job as the Empress also. But Tammy won out and she was cast I guess two weeks before filming began, and if her first day on the set was any indication she was really thrown into the deep end. Here her scene at the end of the movie, when the evil force known as the Nothing is threatening to destroy the land of Fantasia, she is just absolutely tremendous. She's like, you know, close up shot at the camera. You know, bastion, save us, like this absolutely harrowing scene. She's so good. She later described Wolfgang Peterson getting down on his haunches so we could talk to her at eye level to give her acting notes, and he was just saying, hey, it's remember it's the end of the world. Nothing will be left. Look at me. I need you to understand. Look at me, Look at me in the eyes, Tommy, nothing could be left. It's a heavy thing to lay in a kid. She was like eleven, good God, but she pulled off this incredibly complex scene despite her age and also another hindrance dentures the second appearance of child dentures on TMI. The Olsen twin babies were forced to wear baby dentures on the set of Full House and Now poor Tammy when she was playing the childlike Empress. She'd lost two of her upper front teeth shortly before filming began, so she had to wear dentures to cover up the gaps, and unfortunately, the false teeth impacted her ability to speak and caused her to speak with a prominent lisp, which required a great deal of time and diction to overcome. So not only is she doing this incredibly emotionally complex scene. She's trying to overcome these weird fake teeth in her mouth. So good lord, very talented. There's an incredible interview that she gave to the Beacon Reader in twenty fourteen where she shares the notebook that she kept during the Never Ending Shoot and her character notes are as follows, and there's a picture of this notebook. It's in her childlike handwriting. Her notes for the Empress are as follows. Dignity in charge, wise, understanding, magical, very sick, very tired, very old parenthesies three I did years, very empress, very otherworldly, very goddess like. It's my tender bio.

00:46:24
Speaker 2: Back in the day, it was like that, said Rickles thing, Well, it's late and I'm full, and I'm sick of all you people.

00:46:36
Speaker 1: Very sick and sick and tired. Jordan, tell us more about Tammy. Yes, the Empress, who is not so childlike anymore, is a remarkable lady. She was born in Iran, where her father was an archaeologist. I think her mom was an anthropologist, and her family fled the country during the revolution in seventy nine, and The Never Ending Story was her only feature film role for many years, in large part to the disturbing reaction from her so called fans. The family home was stocked, I guess people were camping out on her law and literally she was inundated with calls on her home phone and adults proposed to her with engagement rings. She was eleven, may I remind you, and the scripts that she relieved from Hollywood featured nude scenes. So I look at people and I see nothing worth likings. So, perhaps wisely, her parents declined to allow her to appear in the Never Ending Story sequel, basically in an effort to avoid the further trappings of child stardom. For years, she pursued a career in dance, working as a dance company director in Brooklyn, and it was recently announced that she's appearing in a movie with Sean Aston, star of another beloved eighties property, The Goonies, and Front of the Program Christopher Lloyd. This is a movie called Man in Which which looks tremendous. It has some of my favorite British comedians, Jennifer Saunders of Absolutely Fabulous, Eddie Izzard and Bill Bailey from never Mind the Buzzcocks. It looks really cool. I can't wait to see Real Pearlman. Yeah. Real Pearlman's in it too. Yeah. Oh my god. Okay, so that's cool. So I guess it's gonna be her first feature film role since The never Ending Story oh forty years ago. And Jim Henson's Creature Shop is doing the puppets. It's gonna be awesome. They have no plans to use CGI. This cool sounds awesome. Wow. Yeah, No, I'm really excited for it. I think it was announced in like twenty twenty. I think they're I think, yeah, it was delayed. They were hoping to have it out last year. This is according to EW in twenty twenty. But there's one mystery about The never Ending Story that's baffled fans for decades, and that is the name of the Empress. You'll remember that. In the climactic scene of the movie, Bastion, the boy he's been reading the never Ending Story book, learns that he must give the childlike Empress a new name and call it out to her in order to save the world of Fantasia by being houred by the Nothing. And there's the very gripping scene when Bastian dramatically runs to the window and shouts into the storm an incomprehensible. I have no idea gold weight bum that dump that in. Yeah, so there's been a great deal of debate over the name Bastian gave the childlike Empress, but the original novel reveals the name to be Moonchild, and if you visit the scene and know how to read lips, it does seem to fit what he's shouting. So Moonchild is the name that Bastian gave the Empress. As to why it was obscured in the first place, no idea, adding mystique is my best guess. There you go.

00:49:45
Speaker 2: Well, that brings us to Bastion. You don't like not my favorite character?

00:49:51
Speaker 1: No, No, I mean he's kind of a whimp, So maybe I just identified with them too much.

00:49:55
Speaker 2: I don't know, spend a lot of time in dumpsters, you did. Jordan has been literally sucking on a lemon throughout this podcast, and yeah.

00:50:06
Speaker 1: Still sweeter than you. Ah ah.

00:50:09
Speaker 2: Anyway, Bastion, Jordan's enemy played by a kid named Barrett Oliver, who you said beat out some two hundred kids, which contrasts this at the alleged fifty thousand that knoweth Hathaway. I was up again switch That is a lopsided ratio.

00:50:26
Speaker 1: Yeah, either though Hathaways lying or not, many kids wanted to play I mean great to Bash's entire role consists of getting thrown into a dumpster then hiding in an attic. So maybe it just wasn't that interesting of a role as opposed to a trayu who's riding horses and fighting lest Dragen. Yeah exactly, and you know, I mean hindsight though Oliver didn't spend a month in traction right, yes, or watch a horse drown for two months, interestingly, just before flying to Germany to film The Never Ending Story. The kids cast is the star of Frankenweeny, which is a twenty nine minute live action short directed by a young Tim Burton, which was shelved for years after Disney fired him amid accusations that he was wasting company resources on this featurette that wasn't suitable for kids. Welcome to Tim Burton, everybody.

00:51:18
Speaker 2: Yeah, once Pee Wee's Big Adventure, Beetlejuice, Batman, Edward Scissorhands, all those blew up.

00:51:24
Speaker 1: Franken Weeny came out in nineteen ninety two. Well, then they remade it in I think twenty twelve. Yes, yes, they And guess who's in franken weeniy Jordan.

00:51:34
Speaker 2: I don't know, Shelley Duval, that's right, Oh my god. Anyway, Oliver does not do the convention circuit, unlike a Treyu and the Empress. He now works as a specialist in historic photographic print technology known as Woodbury type proto copy machines from the mid eighteen hundreds. He's worked with the Getty Conservation Institute and even published a book on this from two thousand and seven. And you can catch him in a short twenty twelve documentary entitled In the Usual Manner for the Huntington Library's Civil War Photography Exhibit. So I didn't have that on my bingo of this movie, but good for him, man, I love we love a nerd.

00:52:18
Speaker 1: We're gonna take a quick break, but we'll be right back with more too much information in just a moment. Special effects.

00:52:34
Speaker 2: The SFX in the movie were handled by a guy named Brian Johnson, who you remember from shotting on Noah Hathaway earlier.

00:52:43
Speaker 1: It was his effects that almost killed him like three times. Yeah, yeah right, maybe no athlete wasn't any mood to be nice to him. Hey, your robot almost cut my eye out, that's true. He received the nineteen eighty Academy Award for Best Visual Effects for Alien, which he shared with designer hr Gieger and a few other guys, and he had, man, everybody is just coming back to Kubrick from this episode. He had previously built the miniatures for two thousand and one A Space Odyssey Wow, and George Lucas offered him the role of effects supervisor for the initial Star Wars. He was unable to accept it, but he did work on Empire Strikes Back and he picked up another Academy award, a Special Achievement Award for that, which he shared with the other guys from that film.

00:53:31
Speaker 2: Interestingly enough, he was also originally in talks to do a film for Italian filmmaker Rafaela di Laurentis of the famous del Lorentis family, which we gather from around the timeline, to be one of the Conan the Barbarian movies. I think so, yeah, yeah, But that deal fell apart and he picked Never Ending Story instead. Not just the sheer number of miniatures and practicals that he had to do in this film, the weather also conspired against him. This was one of the hottest Germany had in twenty five years, and it was so hot that one of the statues of the Ivory Tower actually melted. Where on the other days the crew were forced to shut down production because the blue backgrounds for the matt work wouldn't work properly. Is that because they were melting or because of like heat waves on the side, I don't know.

00:54:18
Speaker 1: I'm thinking like heat waves, Like you know when you look at a road on a hot day and everything looks kind of like, Yeah, I think it's that.

00:54:24
Speaker 2: Johnson said that he built what he believes to be the largest blue screen ever made at the time, ninety five by thirty five feet good Loow.

00:54:34
Speaker 1: Johnson was part of the team who created The Nothing, and fans of the movie will recall that The Nothing is an emptiness or despair fueled by the loss of hopes and dreams, and New Yorkers will know it better as Midtown hell doing the Johnny Carson like golf swing. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Nothing for nothing leaves nothing. You gotta have something.

00:55:01
Speaker 2: And I'm not fronting, believe you me, doesn't he say I'm not stuffing? At one point there I think.

00:55:07
Speaker 1: So for those who keeping track at home, that is our first Billy Preston reference of this episode of a series. Oh Man, but to the Nothing, because Billy Preston, sure is it nothing? In the novel, It's described as an invisible force. So the special effects coordinators had to figure out how to basically make this visual, and they landed on the rolling storm clouds as a way to indicate the Nothing's presence. And I'd always assumed that those terrifying clouds, which I honestly I still think of, you know, whenever see a storm out in the distance, I just thought it was old footage of approaching storm clouds that had been sped up and colorized. But apparently it's colored oil in water, which is pretty ingenious. Yeah. I started.

00:55:51
Speaker 2: I tried to look at what other things that's been done in I don't think the two thousand and one, like that whole trippy thing at the end was that. But I think do you remember that Darren Anofsky movie The Fountain, like sort of little Bit Jackman.

00:56:04
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:56:06
Speaker 2: I think the trippy space scenes in that were like similar oil and water. So it's also like a big live music psychedelic Joshua light show from the old Filmore's and all that. Yeah, Yeah, Moneray pop in the background has all the like pulsating blob stuff.

00:56:22
Speaker 1: It's pretty cool, it is. I mean, it's such a neat little trick. Yeah. But the destruction caused by the nothing is pretty epic. Everything from trees and rocks to people just get sucked into the horizon line. It's like, really rewatching the scene. Fine, we're pretty horrifying. Yeah, And there's a scene where a tray U is literally blown sideways and he's hanging onto a tree. He's like a human flag. I just assume that they got some industrial strength jet turbine to blow the kids, just in keeping in line with complete disregard for this kid's life. But their method for achieving this effect was actually a lot more ingenious. They built a room on gimbals, which allowed the room to rotate and tip over, and in this room they built the set where a tray U was gonna get blown around by the nothing. They have all these rocks and dirt and trees, and when they shot the scene, they just tipped the room over so gravity would cause everything to just fly in one direction. But because they had the camera mounted in the room as well, the perspective stayed the same, so it just looked like this crazy wind was blowing everything away and Noah Hathaway was just hanging from this tree parallel to the ground. Really cool. Yeah, there's a making of documentary on YouTube. There's the original one from eighty three, and then they made one for like a DVD special features that's also on YouTube, and you can see this being done. It's like really cool, very ingenious. Again, it's like the oil and water thing. It's like very effective. Nowhere near as difficult as I would have assumed. Oh, it's easy for me to say, I'm not I don't have the arm power to hang from a tree as this kid did.

00:57:54
Speaker 2: The one that I always remember from that that he's the same trick as Nightmare on Elm Street when Johnny Depp's character it's killed, he's like strapped up into the ceiling and they did it the same way. And I didn't bring this up earlier, But speaking of SFX injuries, they very bloody scene like insane fountains of blood which was obviously just red colored water, and the cinematographer Jacques Heitken explained that when they begin to dump water through the hole, there's a hole in the ceiling that the water comes out of. It hit the light and it electrified, and so the guy pouring it through the holes electrocuted.

00:58:31
Speaker 1: Oh, Hollywood, where dreams are made. It's like a very avoidable problem. You know, it could happen. Well, let's hope it doesn't. They got deadlines to me. Electrocute the kid. I don't give it shit. Have you seen the dailies? I'm underwater on this picture? Oh man. But in the movie A Tray you is rescued from the nothing by Falcore, the luck Dragon. We have not talked about Fokhre enough. He's one of the crowning achievements of the special effects team in this movie. It was basically like designing an aircraft built by chief animatronics engineer j Just set me to Torah, who you have a factoid on? Oh? Yeah, you did SFX on Conan the Barbarian Man. What else do you do? Surely other? Oh? He worked on the sequel to this. Oh.

00:59:25
Speaker 2: He worked in one of my favorite gross, weird horror movies from Beyond, which is Folks, if you like wet puppets, and who doesn't just look up some of the effects for this movie. It is gross and weird and awesome.

00:59:44
Speaker 1: Sorry, So that is the guy. He's responsible for our beloved Falk. He's actually two models. The biggest is a forty three foot long motorized puppet framed out with airplane steel, topped off with six thousand plastic scales and pink fur I guess it was pink and white. The three foot head alone weighed more than two hundred pounds, and the body required at least fifteen people to manipulate at any given moment via strings. One was in charge of movements of the nose. Two other people were in charge of each eyebrow. Others were on the mouth. It was this incredibly complex puppet. I mean, it makes muppets look like, you know, simple, and those only have two.

01:00:24
Speaker 2: I just remember how much of a pain in the ass the shark was from Jaws, and this thing was like literally twice that big.

01:00:30
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know. They were sinking it to a tape of pre recorded dialogue, so they had to make sure that the mouth matched the words, the body language and facial expression match the emotion. All these people. I mean it was a big, just choreographed operation, incredibly difficult, sounds like an absolute nightmare. But the rock Bier puppet was even more complicated. That took twenty five people to operate. Just absolutely incredible, and director Wolfgang Peterson really believes that these pactical effects played a huge role in the movie Stang Power. He said, quote the creatures were so real how they interacted with the actors. It wasn't just like they were standing in front of this green screen and pretending, which is true, which is something that just ten years later even you would not go through all the trouble of having these kinds of effects built. Really amazing. Given the complexity of the puppet, Fucore was not a beloved figure on the set, despite the fact that he's a beloved figure in my heart. Brian Johnson, the aforementioned special effects coordinators, said an interview with sci Fi Now that Falcore quote worked fine, but it didn't really do it for me. It was huge, and it was difficult moving him around, and we couldn't make him walk. That's true, I guess with all the u motorized parts of it, walking and wasn't really part of it. They just suspend it right now. It's a forty foot dragon. Noah Hathaway, who Lord knows went through more than his fair share of abuse on this film set, said that writing quote wasn't as glamorous as you might imagine. Sometimes it would overheat Jesus and it would start going out of control, probably once every twenty minutes. It ended up being like a bucking bronco. I just had to hold on for dear life from time to time. But it was fun. Considering the thing was suspended from twenty feet up in the air, it sounds like less than fun. What is it with these robots going haywire every twenty minutes?

01:02:24
Speaker 2: I'm saying, I'm saying, well, I'm sorry, Noah.

01:02:31
Speaker 1: But you know, one person who really hated Falcore was unsurprisingly Never Ending Story author and Michael Ende. One of the many things that he disliked about the finished film was Falcore because he resembled a big golden Retriever instead of the dragon that he'd originally written. And I guess this was directorial choice by Wolfgang Peters, and he wanted to make him resemble a dog because he felt the kids would respond more to dogs than dragons, which you know, was arguably correct. He's yeah guy, question the most beloved character in this movie. Yeah. And you know what, if you ever find yourself in Munich, you can meet Falcore and take him for a ride. I love this so much. The original Fucre puppet is on display at the Bavaria Film Studios, where visitors are invited to sit on his back for a photo op. And this is great. They even have a fan just off camera in front of him to get the full windblown effect for your pictures. It's so good, looks like he's flying. There's other things there from a never Ending Store. There's the aforementioned oracles. There's the rock Bier puppet and the racing snail. They're also there. And there are other full sets from the never Ending Story that you can walk through as well. And guess what, it gets better. There are sets from Wolfgang Peterson's large plane movie. Yes, Air Force one sets are there too. Stay tuned from when we'd tape an episode of this from the Bavaria studios. Oh, I would love to go. This is so funny to me, so deeply appropriate.

01:04:00
Speaker 2: The never Ending Story script did not have an end Uh Peterson in the production team because as we mentioned earlier, the shooting script is only the first half of the book, so Peterson the production team had to come up with how this movie was slated to end, and it was thus decided to have the scene where Bastion returns to the real world via Falcor and chases after the three bullies, chases them into a dumpster, mimicking the opening of the movie when he is I believe, thrown into a dumpster.

01:04:29
Speaker 1: Yeah, we call that a framing device.

01:04:33
Speaker 3: Would have ruled if they just like one of us went to film school, would have ruled, if they just like it was like one of the extremely gory like Game of Thrones like dragon scenes, Like these kids just get butchered by an enormous dragon.

01:04:48
Speaker 1: I want them to know it was me.

01:04:54
Speaker 2: If yes, which author Michael Endy was not a fan of Too Bad. Yeah, Tuba sucks to him. It doesn't sleeping on large piles of money for fifty Yeah, he didn't get much.

01:05:07
Speaker 1: From this movie. But come on, dude, thirty billion or whatever movie like it was basically Harry Potter proto Harry Potter, Right. I just think it's so funny that Noah Hathaway was later in a movie called Troll where he plays a character his name is Harry Potter. What when was this pre Harry Potter of the book?

01:05:23
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I found this on I was creeping on his IMDb. It's weird speaking of nothing in particular. Oh, Steven Spielberg, we brought up speak of Jaws.

01:05:35
Speaker 1: There it is.

01:05:35
Speaker 2: There's the connection, giant malfunctioning puppets. Steven Spielberg and Wolfgang Peterson have a cozy relationship. They apparently met when Spielberg was filming Indiana Jones The First One, Raiders The Last Dark and he borrowed the sub replica from dos pot for the scene where the subsurfaces and Indie's still hanging onto it.

01:05:55
Speaker 1: Right. He doesn't like go under He doesn't go underwater with it. No.

01:05:59
Speaker 2: Yeah, anyway, that's when they met, and they were also both up for oscars at the nineteen eighty three Academy Awards.

01:06:08
Speaker 1: Spielberger was there for et Peterson for Toss Boot. You know, I think this friendship is really pure.

01:06:15
Speaker 2: Peterson told MTV News that they spoke quite a bit on the phone during this period, and Spielberg apparently asked him for input on filming locations for what would become Schindler's list. As he was gearing up to release the first English release of Never Ending Story, Peterson asked Spielberg to take a look and give him some notes.

01:06:36
Speaker 1: He said.

01:06:37
Speaker 2: I told him that I'd like to show it to him because I had a feeling that for an American audience it was a bit slow. It has a very European feel to it, and I thought that he could give me some advice about edits I could make to it. He gave me some very good suggestions about where I could make a few little cuts here and there to get the pacing up a little bit to where it would suit American audiences better, which is yeah, man, all Europeans just think Americans are like TV adult idiots and Ken.

01:07:04
Speaker 1: Can you how can you make this dumber? Steven Stephen, I need the movie louder and dumber can they? And dances a kid? Mom? Stephen, I need you to send me announce a horse to drum a wolf Gang. We sent you five already, Wolfgang, you blew through the horse budget in two weeks. What are you doing with them? Over there? Opened a factory? Oh boy, this is gonna be a fun one for you to edit, Spielberg cut seven minutes from this, so not really that much else, but many many minor cuts. So I'm just a few seconds in length and just kind of shuffled the order of a few scenes. Uh. And he credited his editing technique to George Lucas, who were famously buddies. He thought George Lucas was a master of pacing and gifted it making his films snappy, which anyone who has seen those Star Wars prequels might beg to differ.

01:08:05
Speaker 2: But yeah, I guess that's just before all that. Yeah, it's true. Among the changes Spielberg made was to increase the rumbling sound of the rock Bier as he approached the night Hob in the beginning of the film. All of that sounds like words salad to me. Oh why did he do that? Though I don't know.

01:08:24
Speaker 1: This is okay, I'll tell you abo go ahead, because the original version that the night Hob swears, and Spielberg wanted to obscure the swearing with this rumbling so that the obscenities wouldn't be there, so it would make it more, you know, more of a kid friendly film.

01:08:39
Speaker 2: Yeah, the drowning Horse stays in the picture but can't have any profanity. To thank Spielberg for his work on this, Peterson gave him the actual ar In talisman prop, which still hangs in a glass display case in Spielberg's office.

01:08:54
Speaker 1: I've heard that Spielberg's office he has this like table where he has all of his awards. But I mean like all of his awards, like his Oscar will be next to his pine with Derby trophy from his Scout days as a kid like I just find that alldorable, like a little kid like, this is my table of my special things. I love that.

01:09:15
Speaker 2: Oh wow, now we come to our famous You gotta start punching this SoundBite in mate. Yeah, I'm it's been enshrined as a bit a little segment that we'd like to always throw to.

01:09:24
Speaker 1: Jordan called it belongs in a museum. Yes, speaking of our Spielberg Lucas collaborations and priceless cinema props, we have to go to that belongs in a museum segment. The original book prop for The Never Ending Story was placed up for auction by an eBay person eBay by an eBay seller named Spirit Robin fifty seven, not once, but twice The first auction listed the item for seventy five thousand dollars, but it failed to sell. Then it was listed again for twenty eight five hundred dollars, but still no takers. I actually reached out to this person who tells Japanese antiques, which I thought was interesting, and they have told me I did sell the book, and I've never heard from the buyer of the many years that have passed. I reached out to them on various occasions, including recently when someone inquired about the book. I've had a number of inquiries about it over the years. At any rate, I've sent all interested parties the NFT LinkedIn. There are currently three owners of the ten that have been minted, So anyone who wants their own special never ending story mementoly.

01:10:41
Speaker 2: You struggled to find a euphemism for NFTs.

01:10:45
Speaker 1: Reach out to spirit Robin R b y N fifty seven at eBay and then for to me on Twitter so I can write click and save it. You did. Perhaps because of this association with spiel and by extension, George Lucas, Wolfgang Peterson made sure to sneak in an assortment of their famous characters into his final cut after amit. I never noticed this, but in the very first scene inside the Ivory Tower, there's a wide shot of a crowd gathered, and in these wide shots, partially obscured by shadows, you can see Yoda, Chewbacca, two E Walks, C three po and E T as well as Mickey Mouse and Gumby. Now they're not visible for tighter shots, probably because they didn't want to be sued into oblivion. I can see wanting to have a little nod the Spielberg and George Lucas for kind of being friendly with them. It seems like putting Mickey and Gummy in there, you're just poking the bear. Yeah, copyright law seats. That's interesting. Uh. Wolfgang Peterson himself has a cameo in the beginning of the movie as one of the people in a street scene that the bullies bump into. That's interesting. One crucial difference between the American version of The Never Ending Story and Peterson's European cut is the addition of Giorgio Moroder's electro flourishes on the soundtrack, and of course his poppy theme tune that's only in the American version. He needed to like Juge up the soundtrack for the Americans. The theme song to Never Ending Story great song. For some reason, I always confuse it with the theme song to David the Nome. You remember that look around You anything, Lucy? I bet you met the David Bowie single different? Yeah, but yeah, never Ending Story theme incredible. The German version doesn't have it. They only have the classical orchestral score by Klaus Dolinger, who also did the Dos Boots soundtrack. Yeah, I'm guessing that Wolfgang Peterson just wanted to add an extra dose of sparkle for what he hoped he is an American film breakthrough, So he hired Georgio Moroder, who also done scores to American Jigglow, Midnight Express and probably most famously, Scarface got him to do his coked out proto techno disco guru thing. The theme tune is written by Moroder, but with lyrics by Keith Force of the German band Aman Duel Too. They are a pioneering Kroud rock band known for their winding psychedelic excursions which not punchy lyrics. Let me tell you that how much mo And The Never Ending Story theme is sung by the British pop singer Limal, the lead singer of Kajaja Goo Goo. Anyone anything there? Yeah? This thing on Kejajha Goo Go Yeah, Nope nothing. The song reached the top spot on music charts in Sweden and Norway and sold more than two hundred thousand copies in the UK, but only made it to number seventeen on the US Billboard Hot one hundred. But then it enjoyed another peak in popularity when it was performed on the third season of Stranger Things in twenty nineteen. Got that Stranger Things bommed Kate Busch. The only way any of us will ever get our dues in life is being featured on a streamer. Ah, and that brings us up to today. You'll notice that we really didn't mention the sequels the Never Ending Story two, starring the late Jonathan Brandis as Bastion, or the even lesser known Never Ending Story three from nineteen ninety four, starring the kid from Free Willie as Bastion and a young Jack Black as a school bully. That's very interesting. We don't mention these two movies because they are both bad. Any fans who for some masochistic reason are holding out for a reboot. I don't know why you would, but if you are, you will have a long wait. Wolfgang Peterson has said that the rights to The Never Ending Story are tied up in litigation, presumably due to author Michael Endez lawsuit, and they are unlikely to be untangled anytime soon, and pretty much everyone is fine with that. Wolfgang Peterson has been quoted as saying, I like the films the way it did. I like the film the way it is, with all its old fashioned charm. Just leave it alone. Alan Oppenheimer, the voice of falcoor Gomork and the rock Bier, agrees, saying I think they need to leave it alone. It doesn't need a remake, and we should really just give the last word to the childlike Empress herself, Tammy Stenach, though she says she'd enjoy a remake on some level. She says the film is quote an invitation to grow the space of making and creating. Hopefully, if Hollywood diversifies and there are more women directors and more minorities writing scripts, the message of the film will be the ultimate winner here. So I don't think we need to remake this, but I think we need to keep growing the space for everyone. That is right, go ahead and do what you dream. That is a lovely sentiment. Yeah, good for her very much. So yeah, huh, well, Heigel, we don't want this to become another never ending episode, so let us wrap the us up.

01:16:02
Speaker 2: Uh. I'll give you that one, you know, just because you love this movie. Folks, thank you for listening. This has been too much information. I'm Alex Heigel.

01:16:11
Speaker 1: And I'm Jordan Runtalg. We'll catch you next time. Too Much Information was a production of iHeartRadio. The show's executive producers are Noel Brown and Jordan Runtalk. The supervising producer is Mike Johns. The show was researched, written and hosted by Jordan run Talk and Alex Heigel, with original music by Seth Applebaum and the Ghost Funk Orchestra. If you like what you heard, please subscribe and leave us a review. For more podcasts on iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.