Who Framed Roger Rabbit: Everything You Didn't Know

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Speaker 1: Too Much Information is a production of My Heart Radio. Hello everyone, and welcome to Too Much Information, the show that brings you the secret histories and little known fascinating facts about your favorite movies, TV shows, music, and more. We're your two, but I can't pick up any more literate puns about trivia. We hosted research and write all of this, and then Jordan edits it and I sit there and do nothing. I'm Alex Heigel and I'm Jordan run took the editor. Jordan. I think we alluded to this in our fir Gali episode. But from the ages of six to ten, I had multiple reoccurring nightmares, all of which were directly related to classic cinema. One was the chest bursting scene from Alien, which is a movie I watched at six years old, which is obviously way too young. No, that was my home was being invaded by dinosaurs, which was from seeing Jurassic Park in theaters for he was being stalked by Michael Myers like Implacable Murderer, because the kid down the street from me was very much into those movies and we watched like five of them in a sleepover once and four was christ for Lloyd spoiler alert in all of his horrifying Judge Doom cartoon villain glory from the end of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, which I guess means that Steven Spielberg has had a direct hand in two of my childhood reoccurring nightmare. Wow. Yeah, good for him. Uh yeah, your hexas is my Judge Doom, Judge melting. Yeah, he takes it way too far. Just that saw it when he pulls out the saw hand and it's just like Uncanny Valley enough that it's like to be actually horrible. It's not the melting. It's like when he turns into look, just look, and when he pops up and inflates himself. Oh yeah, and his eyeballs pop. And that's something I didn't understand when I was a kid, when the fake eyeballs popped out. I thought his eyes just popped. It's the worst. Everything about that is not I mean, we'll we'll get into this later in the episode. Why this movie was initially catered towards kids and then they very quickly realized in test screenings and no, so they just doubled down on the adult thing. So what's your history with w f R are No question? Mark. I watched it all the time as a kid too. I think, like many people, my parents sort of mistakenly thought that it was a kid's movie, which dominantly is. But there's a lot of boobs stuff too, and guns and knives. Yeah, I watched a lot. I don't think it was a scarring to me, is it was for you? I kind of like the old Hollywood noir kind of side of it too. It's such a great bit that doing the doing the like whimsical animation stuff and then like C D L A noir. Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, I agree, that's so genius. Man, we are Probably I shouldn't say this. I haven't tested this. I haven't talked to kids under the age of ten because the courts won't let me. But um, I feel like we're the last demographic. We're in our mid really mid thirties now to grow up watching like Looney Tunes stuff because it was just me what kind of would watch whatever was on on table? And now I would venture to say quite a few of those probably aren't shown anymore for various, uh, various reasons related to violence. P Yeah, exactly. I don't know if kids seeing stuff in syndication is a thing really that much anymore. It's all probably all like, yeah, what do you bump into on, Like when you're like sitting at home and you don't have hobbies yet, you know, you don't accidentally watch things anymore the same way. I feel like we just would kind of watch because it was on. Yeah. I I don't really remember when I first saw this movie, but yeah, man, I distinctly remember having nightmares about good old, good old Lloyd Well from the Bronze Star Avoided Vietnam Vette, who conducted horrifying psy ops during the war, and wrote the novel the film is based on, to the contract wrangling that necessitated getting all of these animated figures on screen at one time, to the movies still in development health sequel Here is Everything you didn't know about Who Framed Roger Rabbit? So as I alluded to a second ago, The film was loosely adapted from Gary K. Wolf's novel Who Censored Roger Rabbit. Wolf had a pretty bog standard Midwest upbringing until he was shipped off to Vietnam, where he served as an Air Force captain with the fifth Commando Air Squadron and one A Bronze Star and two Air Medals when I wikipedied them. The fifth Air Commando Squadron has been described as conducting both humanitarian programs and ominously psychological operations until they were deactivated in nineteen sixty nine at Woodstock, while Jimi Hendricks played the national anthem and CCR somehow simultaneously played fortunate Son, how whether if he had anything to do with Operation Wandering Soul? Are you familiar? Just go for it? Man ripped the band aid off. Yeah, heigl tried to get me to not talk about this in this episode. I alluded to it. I went with it. You gotta go. Speaking of absolutely traumatizing nightmare fuel, this is way up there for me. Um. For those of you not aware, the US Armed Force has made horrifying tapes of ghostly sound some voices, saying that they were ghosts of the dead wandering aimlessly. This was said in Vietnamese, and there's basically exploiting this Buddhist belief that once a person dies, their body must be buried in the family plot or their soul will wander aimlessly. So American forces broadcast these ghostly voices into the jungles at night via huge speakers as a way to try to frighten Viet Cong communist forces into UH surrendering or defecting, And a tape of one of them is online and it's on the shortlist of the most horrifying things I've ever heard. So um so there you go, we uh this movie has a piece of our own personal fear quilts for both of us. Wolf has written three Roger Rabbit books, and UH subsequently took Disney to court in two thousand one, alleging that he was owed money from the merchandizing of these characters. That's a rookie move. You do not take Disney accord. This is yeah. I mean, we're not gonna dwelt too much on this, but case study and why you never go against the House of Mouse. He estimated that he was owed something like seven million, which I ever sure, and Disney counter that not only did they not owe him that money, that in the bookkeeping they did for this case, they turned up that he owed them one million dollars over various accounting airs. That's that's a very round number. That seems like something that they were incredible, man, Like you're they're suing us and they just they have the hotspot would be like, actually, you owe us money, and he eventually won the one heavy air quotes between eighty grand and four hundred thousand of damages. But man, you do not mess with Disney. And here this will interest you. Mr Wolf has an extensive collection of antique carousel horses at his home, which landed him on the cover of a San Francisco area magazine in nineteen. I can't really articulate why this is, but that just feels like the logical conclusion the inevitable outcomes to participated in psyops in Vietnam. I don't know, a collection of carnival toys like you gotta have something in your Yeah. That was actually his payout for Nixon, that we're going to give him a Congression Metal of Honor, and he was like, I'll take it in carousel horses. Uh. Wolf said in twenty nineteen that he changed the title from censored to framed, fearing that the American movie going public, seeing the word censored in the title, would think it was about porn. But maybe they were right to think that. Yeah. Maybe, I mean, I I actually haven't read these books myself, but I've heard that all the cartoons in his novels were stars of comic strips and not movies, and that's why the novels contain characters like Dick Tracy and Haggard the Horrible and Snoopy and Beatle Bailey. And the plot in the books are set in present day and the crime at the heart of the story is that Roger Rabbit himself has been murdered or censored. Uh so, maybe that's why they took it out of the title. The movie. Also is that the plot was different. He was murdered because I guess he was demanding his own solo comic strip and the studio heads killed him. But I mean, yeah, as you can probably guess just from this brief description, the novels are a lot darker than the movie. It's revealed that Roger Rabbit has killed the studio head in the novels, and his wife, Jessica, is a former adult film star who married Roger just for his money and doesn't really love him. It's also a dark yeah, I mean I think they also he's like a clone in the books, like there's a blade Runner demension, Like they can clone cartoons or make copies of them, but they only last three days, so there's like a race against time for them to solve this crime before like this copy of him dies. It's very weird. I can't say that I actually want to read it, but I think that I don't think it's really talked about in the context of this film, at least currently. That Will very pointedly made the book about his discrimination and civil rights, which he says Robert Zemakis, who directed it, immediately picked up upon is something to highlight. Um. The what they call the Incan Pen Club is a very obvious nod to the Cotton Club, which is the famous Harlem spot where like Duke Gellington and Cab Callaway could play but couldn't be served. There's a sign in the book that says no tunes served. And there's a whole bit in there about Jessica. Uh, she like suppresses her thought balloons, yeah, or her speech bubbles. She like consciously makes a choice or like has to like suppress them so that she can pass. It's very interesting as a human and not as a cartoon. Wow, that is really interesting. Yeah, the time sit a profile in this and as Amica said, we were very aware of what we were doing before immediately making one of the worst comparisons possible by saying, although we drew the line at calling the dip the final solution good God, which is incidentally is made of turpentine, acidtone, and benzine, which are all chemicals used to strip paint from animation cells. Uh, speaking of the dip, did you know that the scene when Judge Doom is demonstrating the dip, I'm sure you do light late at night for most of your childhood. Uh. He dips a little cartoon shoe into this vat of the pick me box that says squeaky shoes. Yes, yes, you know who does the voice of the Squeaky Shoes. That Nancy cart Right, who later went on to do the voice of Bart Simpson. They got really good voice actor. I mean they got no blank Wow. We'll get to it. Um. So the novel comes out. Ron W. Miller, who was the president of Disney, buys the rights to the novel pretty much after it was published. In Miller's fascinating to me. He was Walt's son in law, and he was a professional football player for the l A Rams until Walt saw him take a really bad hit at a game and offered him a job at Disney because he didn't want his grandkids to grow up without a dad or a brain damaged one. I think he literally said something like, you're gonna get killed out there, so come work for me instead. And you'd think with this background that he would have been kind of a pushover, and indeed he did only last four years the job. He was made president in nineteen eighty and was basically forced out in nine eight four in favor of Michael Eisner, Frank Wells and recurring too much information enemy Jeffrey Katzenberg. But before then he was actually pretty forward thinking. As a head of a major animation studio. He pushed for Tron, which is one the most groundbreaking films of the era as far as computer animation, funded the early Tim Burton stop motion animation shorts like Frank and Weeney, and acquired the rights to Roger Rabbit. Jeffrey Price Peter s Semen were hired to write the script. They did two drafts of it, and they are respectfully hacks. There are other credits include Wild Wild West, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, which I believe you have a personal connection to. Yeah, that's right, I have Christmas Lights from The Grinch still Christmas set from the Universal backlot when I was wandering around back there as a kid. Well, do you have items from the other movies that they scripted, such as Last Holiday and Shrek the Third? Uh? No, I do not, incidentally, hacks, though they may be. The whole subplot of this movie, which everyone forgets about. I forgot about, is about Judge Doom buying up the public transportation lines and tuned town so that he can like gut the city. Is actually what happened. Yeah, It's incredibly insightful though, because it plays into the whole noir thing. You know, Chinatown was seventy four, so it's about fourteen years in the review mirror, but it cast along shadow. Chinatown is probably the greatest Delloye noir movie ever made, exactly. I mean, this is what's so fascinating. They picked up on and there's this whole notion in like this whole trope and noir of like the detective has like his a case of like infidelity or I don't know whatever that he has to investigate and then gets enmeshed in this larger like usually city planning based like conspiracy it's a corruption at like a state level or like government level. So the whole thing about the red car line being bought up by clover Leaf and the gutting of public transportation is real. And in the DVD commentary, Peter Siemens says, there had to be a real story, So we came up with the red car plot, which is a real one where the tire companies and auto companies conspired to get rid of the trolley cars in Los Angeles because the car was the future. And Zamka's adds in the commentary, that's right, the freeways in Los Angeles run right along the same roots as the red car tracks. And it's god, that is so funny to me, because first of all, there's that line where Bob Hoskin says, you don't need a car. In l A. We got the greatest public transportation system in the world, which is hilarious to anyone living or peripherally familiar with modern day l A. And I no, I mean, it's I'm hard pressed to name another city of that caliber in every other regard that has a worst public transportation system. It's really and the red cars. It might might be worth to add where the the slang term for the public trolley system, which was great, which was you know, it was a massive, really impressive especially for its time public transportation system. We'll talk about why this film is like in the lagist right now. But the guys that read letter media or a cliche to say this, but one of my favorite like YouTube film reviewers, they just put out a thing on Roger Rabbit and they said at one point that there was a proposed sequel to Chinatown, not the two Jake's which actually got made, but sequel to Chinatown that would have focused on this public transportation scheme. Wow. And I don't know how much they knew about this, the screenwriters knew about this or whatever, but it is fascinating that that was somewhere ambiently floating around Hollywood as like a pitch for a noir plot that made this. Yeah, but the funniest thing is the company in there would have been called clover Leaf, supposedly in the Chinatown in this in this Chowpac. It's so crazy to me thinking about how I mean, I've send naives saying this. Companies do that all the time. And then look what happened to the electric car in the nineties. I mean, uh yeah, but it's just amazing to me that the tire and automobile companies conspired against the entire city to kill their public transportation system to force people to buy cars. That's incredible. What does he say? He's like four lanes of gleaming perfect concrete from here to Pasadena. You do an incredible Christopher Lloyd. I remember, I think it was They're gonna say something serious. It was in Hook. It was our first episode we did sitting in this very room. That you did amazing Christopher Lloyd as Captain Hook. I love him so much. Um So Zamacha's had actually offered to direct an early version of this film in nine two, but he had just made I Want to Hold Your Hand and used cars, which flopped, so Disney shot him down. I Want to Hold Your Hand is a great movie. It's about a bunch of kids trying to get tickets to see the Beatles on Ed Sullivan when they first arrived in America. It's really sweet. Prime directly at you exactly anyway around this time. Test footage is actually created with Pee Wee Herman, Paul Rubens voicing Roger Rabbit, and I don't think it gets any further than that. But Ron eight five, Eisner, who we mentioned had just taken over as CEO, picks it back up again. Enter Ambulance Entertainment, Steven Spielberg, Frank Marshall, and Kathy Kennedy, who Disney approached to produce Roger Rabbit with them. This is because Eisner, who had been a paramount previously, had helped Spielberg with the Indiana Jones movies, and then Spielberg subsequently returned that favor by bringing I l M, which just George Lucas's company, Industrial Light and Magic, groundbreaking special effects firm, to help with Roger's effects. It is so fascinating me that in the eighties and nineties they were like, well, I don't know what, two dozen people in Hollywood and they all just like did each other's stuff. Uh. The original budget was projected at fifty million, which Disney felt was far too expensive. It was greenlit when they slashed to thirty million, which still made it the most expensive animated film ever at that point, and then the budget did subsequently balloon back up to fifty million, which we will talk about. But so Samaka has comes back into favor. He's hot off Romancing the Stone and Back to the Future, so they're like, Okay, you're our golden boy again. You can direct. Terry Gilliam, who is apparently just everybody's first or second choice in the eighties after Monty Python in Brazil, was also off of the chance to direct, but he found it too technically demanding, which is bizarre to me because it wasn't his whole thing on Monty Python doing into live action. Maybe that's why he turned it down, and heater he didn't blend them. It was mostly just linking bits into live action anyway. He said it was pure laziness on my part, which he says he completely regrets that decision. A little bit of Bob Zamca's film Synergy here uh the tunnel to Tunetown and Roger Rabbit the very distinctive road tunnel. It was used at the end of Back to the Future too, when Marty is trying to use his hoverboard to escape Biff who's trying to basically run him down in his car. Back in and ironically in both films, Christopher Lloyd is waiting on the other end of the tunnel. He's doc and back to the Future and he's judged Doom and Roger Rabbit, and I guess some elements of Roger Rabbit also came in handy when Bob Zamechas was doing the third Back to the Future, which was set in the Old West. For some of the scenes when Marty mcflies being dragged by a horse, he's actually being dragged by the Benny, the cab go kart that they just had leftover. Good didn't he shoot Back to the Future two and three? Like concurrently, I think so, yeah, that is insane, but that is my favorite movie. I would have to say where it's Star Wars rules. I sentimentally I have to say the first one, but I think two is probably the best. Yeah, like three, three, we don't really talk no like Godfather exactly actually got Godfather rules, Star Wars rules, Back to the Future rules, second ones always terminat Terminator rules, although there are people who go to bed for the first Terminator every second, but those people are wrong. Um Spielberg's contract included an extensive amount of creative control, and crucially, Zamakis gets final cut and Spielberg gets split for box office and licensing, which was a great deal. But man Spielberg. Really he earned it. Yeah, So he went around and convinced Warner Brothers, Fleischer Studios, King Feature Syndicate, Felix, the Cat Productions, Turner Entertainment, and Universal Picture Slash Walter Land's production to lend the various characters to the film. And I mean, considering that he'd been attached to literally billions of dollars in movie properties at that point, his negotiating power was pretty good. And it was so great that he, I guess, secured the use of Looney Tunes characters from Warner Brothers for just five thousand dollars a character, which is insane. And the final tally for the pre existing cartoon characters using Roger Rabbit number that I came across at least was a hundred and forty, including eighty one from Disney, including once from Song of the South, the most memory Hold movie and Disney existence memory Hole. I think it's very well true. People remember they do not acknowledge it. Yeah. Um, and there are nineteen characters from Warner Brothers. Good, that's all good. I think um retroactively, Wiley E. Coyote and the road Runner are in there, even though anachronistically, they were not invented at that time, but Spielberg pushed for them to be in there, which is I just love the fact that all these guys were, like, we love cartoons so much, we're gonna make ourselves insane doing this love letter to the era. Except the idea of like the cigar chopping executive, that coyote stays in the picture. Coyote stays. But all these permissions came with strings attached, which are some of my favorite bits about this So Donald Duck and Daffy Duck both appear in that club scene. They do the dueling piano scene, and their respective studios mandated that they would both be made to appear equally talented as pianists. One could not be made to appear more confident a piano player than the other one. I mean, yeah, I'm sure that was enough to make at least one high powered attorney want to just walk into the ocean, like I'm negotiating for cartoon Ducks right now. That scene is so weird in the annals of this movie, because they talk about I read this as a rumor somewhere that so Daffy Duck does all the like they do that shot of him from the back end of the piano and he's got like props like the boxing glove and stuff. One of them was supposedly there's a frame of a dead baby in there and they took it out, id that the director made him take it out understandably yea. And there's also a persistent rumor that Donald ducks like Gibberish includes a slur I've heard that too, which I don't believe is true. I hope not. I mean, come on, guys like But then again, it gets back to the whole like racial elements of the of the tunes versus humans humans and the piece that they are playing in. There is a bit of a cartoon Greatest Hits. It is Franz Leash Hungarian Rhapsody, which also plays in a Tom and Jerry cartoon, The Cat Concerto which one an Oscar and the Bugs Bunny cartoon Rahapsody Rabbit from Um the other Big Thing from their Um. Bugs and Mickey are both in this movie for like a brief scene when Eddie is falling from the top of a very tall building and Bugs gives him a spare tire instead of a spare parachute. Yeah, their respective screen time was negotiated down to the second millisecond I'd read, and they had to have an equal number of words. Dave Stafford is one of the animators on this, and he called that scene the most complicated one ever because they, you know, they have Bob Hoskins suspended, and they have to keep all the site lines between him, Mickey and Bugs consistent while all three of them are moving up and down and horizontally while falling. It's insane. Man, I don't know how they like. I will talk about this and once we get into the making of but I don't know how they I really don't know how they did this. There's a great story with the scene when Mickey and Bugs and Eddie are all falling. I guess the animators were annoyed with Disney because they were being a little too precious about the depiction of their characters in general, and Mickey in particular, because he's you know, he's he's the mouse, he's the big guy. Uh So, in the sequence when they're all falling, I guess they inserted a one frame image of Bugs flipping off Mickey, who has a shocked look in his face. You can see it online. It's pretty funny. Um, there's so much freeze frame stuff in this movie. Yeah, we'll get to stop at that. Uh. There's also a moment where Bugs appears for a brief second outside the Maroon Cartoons studio at the opening of the movie. Like it's just like a fraction of a second. Despite the agreement with Disney that Bugs and Nikki had to appear together at all times have an equal amount of scenes, I choose this to be a giant middle finger to Disney. Also, like, all right, we'll sneak our guy in there a little bit more. Yeah, I mean talk us through a little bit more about these uh negotiations about this. Oh yeah, this whole like tune swap Disney Warner Brothers armistice for Roger Rabbit is really funny. It gave rise to this amazing feud that happened a few years later. So Roger Rabbitt was being overseen by Disney and Warner Brothers let them use their characters for a nominal fee. Uh. And in the nineties, when Warner Brothers is working on their own cartoon crossover movies Space Jam, they reached out to Disney to basically return the favor and allow them to use some of the Disney characters in Space jam But by this point, Disney was under new management and not willing to play nice with Warner Brothers, and they refused, and Warner Brothers were piste, and they accused Disney of breaking a decades old gentleman's agreement, and they even threatened legal action. And these threats never materialized. But Space Jem has a number of barbed jokes aimed at Disney, and as a result of this kerfuffle, Warner Brothers claimed that they would never work with Disney again. And I don't know how true that is, but I think Roger rabbits the only film where there's Disney characters and Warner Brothers characters appearing together. I think that's still the case. Um. And there's an incredible deleted scene that I'm so sad. I don't even think it was ever animated, but it was an early storyboards, uh. In an early version of the film. There's a scene where the tunes are assembled at Marvin Acne's funeral at Forest Lawn, which is a famous cemetery in Los Angeles, and Popeye and Bluto are pall bearers and a fight breaks out, and an early storyboards Popeye has shown socking Goofy and Elmer Foot, which is just tremendous. Fog Horn Leghorn delivers a eulogy, and the coffin winds up being a giant jack in the box. It's it's so great. I'm really sad it didn't end up happening, but I'm guessing. You know, these studios were already pretty nervous about licensing out their precious characters anyway, so having them get into a battle royal in a cemetery was probably a bridge too far from them. Cowards uh. Warner Brothers also freaked out that Dave Spafford, who is that animator who I mentioned earlier, had used the older Bob Clampet design for Daffy Duck instead of the modern version by Chuck Jones, which is period accurate, and they got around is by baking him do more work. ZAMCA has had to animate a separate sequence using the current Jones design and send that to Warner Brothers as part of the dailies to mollify them, and then was like, yeah, and now use the old one in the actual movie. So they designed two sequences, one of which they faked out Warner Brothers with, and one is in the current film. Um, I I can't imagine there wasn't an easier way to just put your foot down, but all right, Spafford really went above and beyond for this. He pulls his groin doing Daffy Duck's signature the hooting as he gets carded off in the piano because Mel Blank was a hundred and seventy six years old doing this and like just physically couldn't do that anymore. I think the other one is Yosemite Sam. He doesn't do the like whoa like, He couldn't do that, so they had other people like step in and do that for him. Um, I'll talk more about Mel Blank. I mean Mel Blank is just the greatest cartoon voiceover artist tip what's his credits in the thousands of characters that he has voiced, but I mean, among them, he got bugs, Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Tweetiebirds, so best of the cat, Good Lord, Yeah, Barney on flint Stones, the Jetsons. Yeah, the guy was really an m v P of the era. Yeah, And this was one of the last ones in which he did the Looney Tunes characters before he died in eighty nine after making his last movie, Daffy Ducks Quackbusters. Have you heard the story about Mel Blank and dead Man's Curve? Sure haven't, but I bet you have it? Well? Yes, Well Radio Lab did a really cool episode on it. Um Okay, So it's one. Mel Blank was driving along the same dangerous bend in Los Angeles that Jan and Deane sang about for their famous song dead Man's Curve and he gets into a head on while driving his ass in Martin sports car and he's almost killed and he slips into a coma and blanks son and wife spent two weeks at his bedside trying to revive them, but they're not getting any response. Then, as a last ditch effort, one of Mel's neurologists went over to his bedside and asked bugs, buddy, Hey, how are you doing today? And there was silence for a moment, and then this extremely quiet but extremely recognizable voice says, yeah, what's up, doc? And then the doctor asked if Tweetie was in there too, and then he does the I thought I saw a prettycat thing, and Mail spent I guess seven more months in a body cast. He even voiced the first few episodes of The flint Stones where he was doing Barney from the hospital. In this body cast, they had dangled a mic above his bed. But um yeah. He was later asked about this sort of unorthodox way that he emerged from his coma and he said, it seems like bugs Bunny was trying to save his life. Oh uh. Speaking of classic voice actors, Betty Boop in this movie is voice. Yes May Questles, I think how you say her name. She provided Betty Whoop's voice for a hundred and fifty cartoons shorts starting back in one until the series wrapped in ninety nine. She also did the voice of Olive Oil and the Popeye cartoons, which I didn't realize, which is also interesting because Popeye was supposed to be in this film and made it all the way to the storyboarding stage and mentioned the Battle Royale at Acme's funeral. But I guess the studio that owned the rights held out. Maybe they were still recovering from the Robert Altman Robert Williams movie debacle. Start. Speaking of Misbegotten Yeah, the live action thing from the start of the decade. Other cartoon holdouts included Chippendale, Pepe Lapew, Mighty Mouse, Tom and Jerry Pedro from Saludos Amigos, Casper, the Friendly Ghost, Witch, Hazel, Heckel and Jekyl, several characters from Fantasia, the Tasmanian Devil, Screwy Squirrel, Rocky and Bullwinkle, and even Superman. That's Superman. No, no, no, they weren't in there. Oh you know who is Frank Sinatra. Baby. That is a real recording of him singing Witchcraft when Bob Hoskins pulls out the singing Sword. I think in the Red Letter Media reviewed they're like, it gets a little inconsistent at the end when he's doing all the wacky bits to make the Weasels laugh themselves to death, which is also horrifying when one of them tries to cram his escaping soul back into his mouth. That is one of the grimmest things I've ever seen in a child's movie. But it's funny that it is actually consider because in that shot of him with his brother, this is the craft in this movie is so good. They don't do a ton of over explaining about him. He doesn't sit and like stare out the window and go, oh god, my brother. Well, I mean he mentions it, but like they do that thing where he goes back to his office and starts drinking, and they do that long, slow pan over all of the materials of him and his brother, and you find out that they were vaudeville kids clown And that's why I love that in scene because Eddie Vllen has like suppressed all of his whimsy and wackiness and he's such a grump. And then at the end he's like mugging and doing the all the all the clicks and stuff try to make the he's getting in touch chefs with his inner himself. As you meditate on that, we'll be right back with more too much information after these messages have yet to talk about Roger, who is deliberately one of the most annoying creations ever put on screen. He is a design composite of all the famous animation studios house styles at the time. He has quote a Warner's face, a Disney body. Texts every attitude, Goofy's overalls, Mickey Mouse's gloves and porky pigs bow tie. Can you define a text every attitude that's interesting to me. It's a genuine question. I don't know text Avery, I think I mean he did Warner Brothers and MGM, he created a load of them. I think it's mostly like the frantic mugging and like all the Man seventeen thousand bits a second. Like basically Robin Williams um animated Robert Williams before Robin Williams. Uh yeah, and Richard Williams, who is the supervising animator on this, who is another everyone in this movies m v P. But he really just went above and beyond for this. And he says he based the Roger color model on the American flag, red overalls, white body, and blue tie so that everyone would subliminally like it. How that go over in Russia? We won the Cold War with this movie. Um. He said that he animated Roger's ears to reflect his emotional state and whatever seeing that he was in and he wanted them to move with the grace of ballet dancers, which is one of those things that sounds insane until you watch it again and they are moving like they look like, um, look like seaweed moving underwater. They have this it's uh, this is this is like the platonic ideal of animation for me, Yeah, this is our second instance of animators incorporating ballet movements another work Becau. Isn't the Disney team study ballet dancers for Bell and her sort of graceful movements and Beauty and the Beast? Yes, um, so there is a bit of an acronism in this. Tom Cito, who's an animator who worked on the film, said it is it is said there's a Marquis or Chiron or whatever that says it's ninety seven. And he said that the reason they picked seven was that in seven is for one, the actual year in which they decided to scrap the street cars in l A. But it's also the last year of Hollywood cartoons that he says were unaffected by what he calls the U p A Revolution, And it's when you get away from what he called the Campbell's Soup model of animation, where all the characters are like distinctly cherubic and and Rosie looking like snow White's face, and into like more I guess, realistic or more technically advanced cartoons. Up A was basically a renegade studio that broke free of working at Disney and they felt was the oppressive Disney House style. But that does give rise to a number of anachronisms in this which we mentioned earlier. Roadrunner and Wildly Coyote are in there, but they were not created at the time of the movie was set. And there's another one when they're in the theater right, Yes, that's right there watching a cartoon short called Goofy Gymnastics which came out in nineteen forty nine, and the filmmakers were aware of this, but they went ahead and used it anyway because they thought it was the best example of Goofy's visible comedy, which Roger was a big admirer of. Yeah, man, I love the internal logic that cartoons respect each other's craft. When he's like, nobody takes a bump like Goofy or whatever. It's just, man, it's so good if every frame of this movie is crafted with beautiful love. Uh. Charles Flescher Fleischer who does Roger Benny the Cab and then two of the weasels, Greasy and Psycho, apparently took the additiontive to request a life size rabbit suit to wear for his scenes. You could see all of this on YouTube. He looks ridiculous. He wore it every day to the set, and so Disney exacts would look in on the shooting and also see him in the commissaries and then be like, this Roger Rabbitt picture looks like Yeah, I mean it looks like something from like Party City, Like it really looks super cheap. Yeah, I don't know why. I mean, you know, it makes to me, it makes sense why he did that, like to of her mind. The actors that he's he's acting against, like what they're dealing with here, Yeah, because you see the behind the scenes and they have all the voice actors like standing out of frame and that they're all these like schlubby dudes in like usc sweatshirts, like doing these outrageous cartoon voices. And then there's Rung in a life size rapid gusts like jumping up and down, and he moves like a cartoon to I mean, he's an interesting guy. I guess. Robertson Mecha saw him performing stand up at the Comedy Store in l A and was impressed with what he called his vocal presence, and they initially hired him one word for it exactly, And they initially hired him to just read the part of Roger while they're auditioning actors for the part of Eddie Valiant, you know, reading sides it's called. And ultimately they just gave him the vocal role because he did such a good job of that. While helping out with auditions for Eddie and to come up with the voice, he recalled a piece of advice that he'd received from an animation director named Dick Williams, and Dick Williams said, all great tunes have speech imbediments, that is characteristic vocal hook, and that's where he upon the like, I can't do it. I can't do anything. I tried. I tried to do it, to bring it, to bring it to this episode, the whole cheek flutter thing, and I guess animators literally had to study Charles Flesher's mouth so that they could animate the micro muscular movements he was doing when he would do that. God love him exactly. Um and cap. Yeah, No, there's no motion capture stuff. This was all like done by hand. We'll get it this later. There's no c G I anything in this movie. This is all done by hand, which is insane. And Charles Flesher, the voice of Roger, later said, of all the characters I've played, he's the closest to me. Roger is there's a line in the movie saying, I'm a tune. Tunes are supposed to make people laugh, and working as a stand up comic during the last fifteen years or so, that's the job I've had. I think that's very Sweetie identifies with Roger. Yeah, until you see even Zodiac and he's like that horrifying guy at the end, he's like one of the Zodiac suspects. And Jake Killet Hall goes in to his house and it's like one of the creepiest scenes. He's our Lee Allen or something, Arthur Lee out near the end of the film. He's not Lee, the guy with the wah Yeah, yeah, he's not that. He's he's another tangential figure that they think he's like vaguely connected with it. And Jake Killenhill goes to his house when it's like pouring outside and it's like the James Gum scene and signs the lambs. It's like his decrepit, freepy house and then him Yes, that's Charles Flesher and Jake Kilan ages out of the basement. He's like, not many people in California have a basement, and he just looks at He's looking down at me, just goes I do. Oh my god, there's something unsettling to me about Charles Flesher. Do you think he's endearing. I think he's horrified. Well, no, I don't think he's endearing. I thought that quote was endaring, that he he as somebody was a stand up for many years exactly. I thought that was nice. Oh my god. I love Zodiac. I know idea perfect film. Um yeah, so Bob Hoskins man, what a saint on earth. You know, he's done Long Good Friday at this point. He this just perfect, almost the Tetris block of a Cockney gentleman. And you know, Long Good Friday one of the arc typal British gangster movies. And he's such a pitch perfect counterpoint to Roger and has just this beautiful little arc. But holy did they run through every single leading man in Hollywood before they got this. Harrison Ford was Spielberg's original choice, but he costs too much. I really sad that we missed out on the like piste off exasperated, grumbling that Harrison Ford would have done to the dad. I got a lot of good memories about that dog. Chevy Chase was the second choice, but he was not interested. Bill Murray was also considered for the role, but he was not home to pick up the phone to accept the offer, as is his famous idiosyncratic habit of only accepting offers over the phone and or a dedicated voicemail line. I believe, and if it's full or he's not home, he just doesn't get the role. And I guess he was like, really heartbroken about this. He says that he found out that he was up for consideration while reading a newspaper interview with Spielberg years later, and he was reading this newspaper in a public place, and when he learned that they wanted him for the role and he just wasn't home. I guess he screamed at the top of his lungs in agony and public. But at least he got a second chance to live out his cartoon fantasies in space Jam a few years later. So truly the highest cold comfort. Eddie Murphy has also expressed his regret since about turning this role down and he would have been in because Eisner had done forty eight hours. Oh yeah, right, because that's why he h Joe Silver, Yeah, yeah, yes, exactly, which we'll get to. Robin Williams, Robert Redford, Jack Nicholson, so Vester Stalone, Wallace, Sean, what ed Harris? Which would have been terrified, creepy and Harris just staring holes and people through the whole movie. Charles Grodan, that would have been great. I can see that. Don Lane, all considered, and uh Wolf, Dick Wolf, No, that's lawn Order. Gary Wolf, the creator of creator Roger Rabbit, the guy wrote the book in his audition, Bob was the only one who made us believe the rabbit was real. Ah, and nobody has anything bad to say about Bob. On the shoot, he had the most demanding role. He's in almost every scene, shooting up to sixteen hours a day with either these big creepy rubber mannequins or um just with robots that they built to do these scenes. UM join a Cassidy who plays Dolores, who has my favorite line reading in the movie when he storms out of the bar and she's like a tune killed his brother and they do this perfectly timed pause and a slow push through. Mono dropped a piano on his head and like, hits, it does, it really does? Oh my god? But wait, what did she say about about he was masterful? He had a photogenic memory, He was a genius and had to be to do this because the consistency you need to do over multiple takes to get your site lines right, to make sure your gestures are consistent. I mean, and how did he prepare for this? Rold Jordan's I guess to get the feel of acting with cartoon characters, he studied his three year old daughter playing with her imaginary friends, which I love. And also, uh, speaking of Bob Hoskins and his kids and cartoons, I guess for two weeks after seeing the final movie, his young son, who was like two years old, wouldn't talk to him. And when Bob Hoskins finally asked his son why he wasn't speaking to him, his son said he couldn't believe his father worked with cartoon characters like Bugs Bunny and didn't introduce him. He wanted so badly to meet Bugs. Why didn't his dad bring him over and introduce him? Now, this is I don't know if I ever told you this. I was on the set for Nutty Professor to and but it was the movie Bumps the Clumps, and it was the one with Eddie Murphy where he's playing all the characters himself, and I was watching him film a scene I forget. I haven't seen the movie in a million years, but I think it was a scene when they were having like a family dinner and he was supposed to play all the family members and he was dressed as Sherman in the big suit and all the other characters that he was going to do later. They had tennis balls on dowels labled to get the eyes, the sight lines right and everything. It was so interesting. In the Red Letter Media thing, they pulled this clip of Ian McKellan on the set of one of the Lord of the Rings having like like crying to himself softly because he's in the Hobbit hole and he's just surrounded by an ocean of green. I don't know why the Peter Jackson let this get released, but it's like sad, eighty year old Ian McKellan just like crying because he can't act in this horrifying ocean acting he's actually broken down. Yeah, no, he was like they were like take after take and it's like him hunched over in this completely green screen set. And he talks about it in in a Talking Hit interview. He's like, yeah, I like had a I reached my limit. It's horrifying that they make that. They at least in this movie, it was on real sets and they had got to this point of where they're saying any of it. Yeah, just Matt just would do it in a green box and it will do it in post, you know. And man the other bit. Dean Kundi is one of my favorite for probably the guy who got me into like actually learning about Roger Deakins and and other famous like cinematographers. So he was John Carper NEWSDP. That's why I know him. Um. But he talks about shooting in London. He says that Bob Hoskins would come on the set and do Cockney rhyming slang with all the other guys on the set, which is just being adorable. It's all gone six and sevens. This brings us to We've been We've been to Lang. Yeah, we got to talk about Christopher Lloyd as Judge Doom I'm sorry. Here we go. Long time listeners to the show, We'll remember a tangent we went on in our first episode, Yes, I think with hook Yeah yeah, where we debunked the whole thing about Anthony Hopkins not blinking his Hannibal lecter. He frequently blinks. Christopher Lloyd does not blink in this movie, he said, quote. I felt like a tune doesn't have to blink their eyes to remoisten their eyeballs, which is a horrifying phrase. He said. It's on Twitter, and they're not human. So I just felt Judge Doom should never blink. It makes him even more ominous, more scary if he's just looking like that. It wasn't really difficult. I just keep my eyes open as long as I could, try to time it out with the next take and all that. Sure, man uh and then uh, you know, alluding directly to me, he told Gizmoto. A lot of people have come up to me since Roger Rabbott opened to say that they saw the movie when they were kids and they had nightmares afterwards. The first few Disney films, Bambi and Snow White and The Seven Dwarves, etcetera. Each gave me nightmares too, so I thought it was a reasonable payback. And people have said it's kind of obvious that he's a tune. It's not subtle, but most of his skin is covered up and his clothes are kind of ill fitting and weird. He's clearly wearing pancake makeup and has the horrifying ben Affleck porcelain veneer teeth, like way too bright and squared off. Did you ever hear about that they doing Armageddon? And Michael Bay took umbrage with ben Affleck's pre stardom teeth. He was like, Yeah, we're doing all these low hero shots of him, and his teeth look too small. He's got baby teeth. Get those fixed. So he got like porcelain veneers for the rest of it for the shoot. Oh that's hilarious to me. Um. Also the fact that I guess the dip is supposed to not be harmful to humans, but then he has to wear Yeah, and I never noticed this before until I was researching this. Even in scenes indoors, his duster is like slightly blowing in the wind, like a like a true cartoon villain. Ah, so good. I guess Roberts a Megas keeps the stop motion model of the flattened steamroll Judge Doom in his office something to walk in on. Oh yeah, and now we come to a yet another fernal it comes back again. Wow. Yeah. The link between my childhood trauma to cartoon character and yours is Tim Curry, which kind of makes a certain amount of emotional spiritual sense. Uh. Tim Curry was an early choice to play Judge Doom. While I haven't been able to pin down exactly where this comes from, it's been off repeated that he was just too terrifying for the role, which if Hex's is any indication, which I believe. They also told him to dive back and made him redo some of the line readings. That's probably true. I hope it's like Prince's Vault, where Tim Curry just keeps all the test footage of him doing this that's too frightened, way too far. Yeah. So instead of going with Tim Curry, they tried to get Christopher Lee to do Judge Doom, which would have probably been a lot scarier than Christopher Law, one of the few people that would have been even scary. Yeah. No, so that didn't work. Christopher Lee, I guess turned it down and then on the other side of the coin. I love this. John Clice expressed interest, but he was turned down for not being scary enough, which makes a lot of sense. He was in another movie in the Villain, his run over with the steam roller, a fish called Wanda, just making connections energy. I love that. Yeah. He was also the one that they wanted to get to play Hogsworth and Beauty and the Beast, but I turned it. I think he was in Five Agoes West. I forget what he chose Five AOEs West. I mean I think so is that rescue was down under John Bird. No, I'm getting the Dead Parents sketchy alright, Moving on other almost Judge Dooms, Peter O'Toole. That would have been good, would be good if Murray Abraham as Roddy McDowell different kind of scary, kind of weird, creepy. Yeah. Adson is in I Want to Hold Your Hand The Early Um. Yeah, he's kind of like a nerd character. I thought. I think he's like, yeah, I don't know how that would have gone and sting too scary. Well, he would have been coming off of Dude Dune. Yeah, okay, I could have seen that. I had read that Robin Williams was also considered, but he was also up for any valiant maybe too would have been just wanted to put him in everything. Yeah, that's justifiable. Two other notes about Judge Doom. He was originally supposed to be accompanied by a vulture named Voltaire, and in an early draft I love this, he was revealed to have been the hunter who killed Bambi's mom. Yeah, I really love that. What a great way to tie that back to this classic carriage. The Sting thing is also funny. Sting maybe the guy with the highest track record of being turned down for Disney musicals. He was involved in the first version of The Emperor's New Groove when it was supposed to be a full musical. It's called like I don't think it was called The Empire of the Sun. Isn't that the Spielberg that's the Christian bale one. I think it was supposed to be way more focused on the Incan culture, and they brought in Sting to do like a full like tim Rice Elton John style score, and then like CANNEDID. I mean, it's been done to death, but we should do that. The making of that movie is incredible. But Sting also wrote a song for this when Roger was originally going to die in the movie in a shootout caught in the Crossfire, and it's called The Lazarus Heart, and Disney ordered the death scenes scrapped. The song was deleted, and it ended up on Sting's album Nothing Like the Sun. Not a good song. I'm guessing from the title The Lazarus Heart that Roger rises from Yes, yes, yes, yes, um here this will interest you. Regarding Judge Doom, he may have his roots in episode of the popular radio show Dick Tracy. Yes, there is an episode concerning a man named JP Doom who's described as quote a shady character mixed up in politics, and his whole thing is that he's illegally trying to buy up real estate to be used for a super highway, and he does this by directing a gang of idiotic goons. It's unclear if this is a coincidence, but the characters follow many parallels, including their ultimate fate of getting killed, so I can only imagine. I feel like there are no accidents in this movie. I feel like it has Yeah, the weiz old, stupid, smartass, greasy, wheezy, and Psycho aur Rips on the Seven Dwarves. I love the one that's wearing the zoot suit, which is again also a period accurate thing because like the Cherry Pop and Daddy's songs zoot suit riots, it's based on a real racially motivated incident. Zoot Suits were very popular in the Latin Chicano population in l A. And there was a whole incident where there was like this I think bar fight that was like really blown out of proportion, and so at one point the navy bunch of sailors were going on and trying to beat up dudes and zoot suits, and then police were called and it turned into like a full scale, like actual riot in l A. The zoot suit riot was a very real thing and tremendously racially motivated. Uh. Two of them, Slimy and Sleazy, were written out of the script and mentioned. I also forgot that the racist crows from they are the jazz musicians, which is kind of but I love that. I love the one shot of them, uh, And there's two of them playing the upright bass stacked on top of each other. One is lucking and one is fretting. Because they wouldn't have been tall enough for it. Again, it's the little things. It's up there with The Truman Show in terms of just world building. Yes, exactly, it's really incredible. Jordan tell us about Jessica Rabbit. Yes, the inimitable Jessica Rabbit was based in the book at least on a Texas Avery cartoon character named Red in Red Hot Riding Hood. Gross. Yeah, I don't like that. And for the movie, the animation director Richard Williams added elements of Rita Hayworth in the movie Gilda and Veronica Lake for the very distinctive peekaboo hair do, and at the suggestion of director Robert Zemeckis, he based her on Lauren McCall as well. Her outfits were also inspired by those worn by the model Vicky Dugan, who is famous for wearing these dresses that were super low cut in the back in the early fifties. And they're all these famous photos in Life magazine of her walking down the street and every head is turned in her direction. You've probably seen them in pretty famous photos. Her speaking lines were delivered by an uncredited Kathleen Turner, who was nine months pregnant at the time, and her singing voice was done by Amy Irving, who was Steven Spielberg's wife at the time, and Bob Hoskins claimed that the character design wasn't finalized by the time that they were filming. So samech has just told him to imagine his ideal sexual fantasy. Bangers of Mash play the Bangers of Mash and uh and he so he says that he that was his direction, your ideal sexual fantasy, and then he claimed that the character designed was sexier than what he came up with. Pa, Pa, It's it's just ridiculous. Um. You know, there's a ton of boob jokes. People keep bumping into her boobs. She pulls out the bear trap and or the bear trap comes out of her cleavage. At one point he says, that's a great booby trap, which is hilarious to an eight year old um. And they animated her so that her breasts bounce against gravity as she walks. Just ridiculous. Man. I I wasn't gonna get into this, but it feels the completest that made would feel wrong if we didn't. There's a popular inner at myth regarding Jessica Rabbit and uh what I'll just say, is brief nudity during the scene where Benny the cab crashes, and we won't really get into it here. Google it if you're you know, if if pen and ink is your kink um. And as you might expect, there are websites that go frame by frames studying this scene as if it were as a Pruder film, which is sad um and it's reportedly been removed from the DVD release, but Roger Rabbit creator Gary Wolf has confirmed this in an interview with the author Jim Davies, and uh, well, let's just say there's mounting evidence that the animators have a touch of the purv. He says that there's also brief subliminal nudity involving Betty Boop in this movie as well, but it's actually an homage to the original nineteen thirties cartoon clips and this is his quote. The animators wanted to do an homage two Flesher's Betty Boop. He had her topless in every movie for six frames, invisible to the human eye. So they did the same with her and Roger Rabbit. And when we decided to release the film on video, the producer went on Johnny Carson and spilled the beans, so we were forced to take it out. However, there are numerous other spicy numbers which remain. This is still his quote, you have to find them yourself. My favorite is that he claims that among the many other rest eggs in this movie, they inserted Michael Eisner's home phone number into the movie, they have Allison wonder It's like in a bathroom scene they have for a good time called Alison Wonderland, and maybe it's that phone number. I don't know. Yeah, it's funny because I guess they figured it wouldn't show with the frame rate. And then when LaserDiscs came out, that was the first thing where you could go to names and they didn't count on the power of horny men and home media, um and a lot of free time. Anyways, since Jessica is the most human looking, which is a stretch but still of the tunes, it would have been very easy for them to have had a real actress play the role. And then they would have rotoscoped, which is a really interesting early technology where they paint directly on the film strips, incredibly time consuming. Famously, the thing I have to repeat every time I say the word rotoscope what Martin Scorsese used to paint over Neil Young's coke booger in The Last Walls um. But so they consciously give her that ridiculous waistline so that they animation joke. They painted themselves into a corner, uh, so that they couldn't have used a real woman in there. So they wanted to prove that they had a rotoscope to anybody, and which I guess they thought was cheating, which sounds just as hard to me. It's it's there's a tremendous amount of hubris that they baked into this movie. We'll talk about it in a second, where they were like, here's all the rules we're going to break. Yes, God love them. You know you mentioned earlier that when they were filming the live action scenes, the character designed for Jessica Rabbit wasn't fully completed yet, and you can see an early version of her character in the scene where Roger Rabbit is looking at the photos that Eddie Valiant took of Jessica Rabbit playing Patty Cake. And those photos were, you know, real photos that the live action actors had to handle in the movie. So they had to use that while the live action stuff was being filmed, even though the animators had an animador yet. So you actually see when you look at those pictures in the movie, she actually looks a little different. She almost looks like Ariel from a Little Mermaid. She looks very different because there's an area like fourteen. Yeah, weird but Disney. Yeah. Also, while on the topic of Roger Rabbitt and photos, there's the photo that Roger has in his wallet that shows him sitting with Jessica at a restaurant that's supposed to be the Brown Derby, and there's a lot of their brown Derby was famous for having portraits of its famous clientele up on the New Yorker style caricatures. Yeah. Yeah, And in this picture, if you pause it, you can see that the portraits behind them in this restaurant are Roger himself as well as Mickey Mouse, and there are sort of anonymous looking people, and those people are the filmmakers associated with this movie. I think robertson Mexas is in there, possibly Spielberg and some of the other designers. Yeah, and we have blued it earlier how these guys were just like here's how everyone for the past fifty years of filmmaking has done this that they didn't. They literally have a meeting where he was like, yeah, you know, so there are fifty years of doing this, this is what we've learned not to do. And so yeah, so you this, I'm gonna try and keep this as non nerd as possible. So Mekasine Dean Cundy go in to early meetings in this film, and Disney's like, all right, you know they had been doing there's a famous Mary Poppin scene right, that's them interacting with cartoons on the carousel horses. There's a lot of other early Disney movies that did technically combine live action and animation, but they had all these rules. It's like, you gotta do it with the locked camera, can't move, can't do close ups, can't do depth of field, don't get fancy with the lighting shadows, don't do anything that would take too much work for the animators. And then Cundy says he tucked in the rap inen. When Bob and I left the meeting, we said, well, those are the rules were going to break. How are we going to do it? Um? So they enlist this guy. Animation supervisor Richard Williams to do this test sequence that would literally show them breaking every single one of those rules, in which Joe Panaliano Joey Pants stars as Eddie from The Suppress and the dick head in The Matrix. Oh my god, the most relatable character in The Matrix. Rewatching that movie in two where he elects to not live in the real world anymore, wants to be put back into the simulation. Yeah, anyway, And isn't he in Goonies too? Is any one of the hotelities? Maybe I asked them too long sept seen Goodies? I mean famously he's the bad guy in Risky Business back when he had hair right. Oh yeah, No, he was in the Goodies too. Joey Pants. Yeah. So in that scene, Roger comes down a stairway and a back alley, walks in and out of shadow, and the camera tracks him, and there's interactivity with the trash cans. All the things we were told were difficult or impossible. That's Cundy again. He's talking to Gizmoo. It was so encouraging and so successful that Disney looked at it and said, this is going to be very expensive and time consuming. Let's go for it. That's what I heard said about this show. We're going to take a quick break, but we'll be right back with more too much information and just a moment. So the actual workflow for this movie five month live action shoot which happens in London, and during this there's so much great behind the scenes footage in this. They have dummies, so they have like these weird like rubber stand ins, like there's a rubber roger and whenever they have to like man handle them move them around, and they use all these early animatronics that look like these erector set things that were controlled by guys with actual armature, like the sea when Rogers breaking the plates over his head, that's a robot arm and they use a bunch of these. How do they get it out? How do they just animated over it? And that's that's the compositing process over this is so nuts. The club scene is essentially like a three layered set. It's built eight feet off the ground so that guys could run under it, holding the drink trays on these long rods through channels that were cut in the floor. Those are the drink trays that the penguin waiters are running around with and then there's also a layer on top of it so that they could hold on strings like the Octopus bartender. They're holding all of those glasses and stuff on strings. That is the same puppeteer, David Allen Barclay who puppeteer job of the Hut in Return of the Jedi. It's wild, It's just every bit of this is insane. He's standing on beams above the set doing all of this. Richard Williams, the supervising animator, said he was openly disdainful of the Disney bureaucracy and refused to work in London, so they established his studio in Camden Town to shoot all the live action, which was done in Elstree Studio, and Cundy called shooting there probably the hardest part of it because it was so cold. The winter was one of the coldest they've had in about forty years. Was fifteen to twenty degrees when they shot this. The building was not insulated or heated and fun fact, the entrance to Desilu Studios, the I Love Lucy Studios that Lucy and Desi set up is the fictional Maroon Cartoons studio A lot. I don't think we have a running. I love Lucy count but we should I don't have the Hanks. We've had no Hanks sightings in this one. Was Hanks not considered for Yeah, so yeah. Before the animation even happen, Zamache's would sit Richard Williams down with rough cuts of the scenes, the dailies and describe what was going to happen. You can watch him do this. He Williams is sitting there with a sketchpad, and Zamaica's is going, Okay, Bob's gonna take Roger and you know, force him down into his trench coat. And you see him furiously sketching this stuff out like as it's being described to him. And then when the animation team took over, they were given monochrome prints of the still frames of the live shots, every single frame of this movie that they would put under essentially tracing paper, so that they could animate each individual frame over all of the existing live shots, which are then photographed one frame minute time and sent to ILM to be composited fifty five minutes of animated shots eighty two thousand animated cells as part of a hundred and four minute movie. Fourteen months of post production was something like three D twenty six. Full time animators said there were fifteen hundred composite shots because it's almost essentially like almost a full length animated film plus a full length live action film. It's just wild. Yeah, it's like fourteen months of post production sounds short because I mean don't Disney features take like two years. Wow, So I mean that's I guess they don't have to do all the backgrounds and stuff. But still that's insane. And it's important to reiterate here that there is no computer animated anything in this movie. And I guess it was briefly discussed, but the technology at the time was too primitive and it just what they did have available would have looked way out of style for the nineteen forties aesthetic that they had in the rest of the movie. Uh Eddie Valley. It's initial thirty seconds stroll through the Maroon Cartoons studios was so complex that it involved over one hundred eighty individual elements, and when it was assembled with the film pieces, it created an eight foot tall staff of animation cells for thirty seconds of animation. I mean, just you talk about all the composite stuff. There were some moments in the film where with effects layers with you know, it's a layer done for the cartoon carricter, a layer done for shadows. Is all separate layers. There would sometimes be six hundred separate drawings that were required for one second of animation. It's insane. It's ridiculous that you mentioned the wallet scene. The way that that looks with the red lighting coming in and he's also backlit by the lighting from the club and he's in shadow. Were they on to think that a good idea? Yeah, that's true. One of the guiding principles that they have was that the animated character should always be interacting with real elements so that they didn't have that pasted on flat look. They love to prove I mean again, Jessica rabbit looking like a human who could never exist, so they couldn't be accused of rhotoscoping an actual human, taking the quote easy way out. No, we're only gonna have cartoons. We're gonna have them in weird lighting, interacting with real life stuff so that dust would fly up. It would not only be animated. We will also give her a sequined dress in a nightclub, which they apparently did by filtering light through a plastic bag that they scuffed up with steel wool. Yeah, they said, if the rabbit sits down in an old chair, dust should come up. They should always be interacting with real objects. You know. When the weasels barge in and one of them is holding like a real pistol, it's aimed at the camera and then it pivots left and pivots right on strings that they they animated around again. They flew too close to the sun, but they did not crash. The only thing that isn't in this movie the like the bit of Hollywood trickery that's not in it. There are no Ma paintings. Explain what those are. I'm not sure Matt paintings are. Like it's basically a hyper detailed illustration that they use real projection to compose it into a film. So like the classic one is um in Indiana Jones when they wheel the Ark of the Covenant into the government warehouse and you see all the hundreds of other things that the government has like stockpiled. That's a matte painting. It's just a big, super detailed illustration that serves as a background when it would be impractical to shoot one. Um. Yeah, he said, they made it through the entire production. They're like, Oh, we don't have a Matt painting. Should we put one in? And he was like, ah, I have a question for you about the blending of animation go on and live action humans. Uh. The scene where Eddie Valiant is riding around in Benny the cab, he's animated in some of those shots, is that because it was just I think there were some cheats in there. The Red Letter media guys again point out a few where there's just like people missing in certain pans. I think Jessica's hand is actually rhodoscope when she grabs Eddie's tie, because I think there was certain things where they were just like, you can't get they ran out of cocaine. They were just like, we can't do this anymore. But they there's now a term at Disney among the animators inspired by this movie. They used the term bumping the lamp because there's that scene where they burst into the prohibition hiding room in Dolores's bar. They're so handcuffed together at that point, Eddie's interrogating Roger and they bump the overhead lamp and it starts swinging around. So between animating all the physical parts and the lighting on there, and all the shadows are consistent across the characters with all the textures of them. That's what Disney animators now use for any time that they have to go above and beyond. They call it bumping the lamp because by bumping the lamp, you would have to make these wild and consistent shadows on these animated characters in there, just that random because the things swinging around wildly, and I LM actually built the cameras that they had to make. And this is gonna get a little in the weeds. I'm gonna try and explain it as best I can. When you composite illustrated aspects onto live film, it's called optical printing, right where you essentially paste the image over the film. And what that creates is like you start seeing all what they call the artifacts, like the grain of the film, and the image starts to degrade from the printing process, and then you see this in you know again, Mary Poppins is the biggest one that I can think of. So they shot in Vista vision, which is this archaic and I guess it wasn't archaic. It was probably cutting edge of the time. These cameras that are developed by Paramount in the nineteen fifties that essentially capture an image twice as large as standard film camera, so that when then that's compositive at I l M and printed down, all of those other grain and the weird colors that's gone. And what Kundi says is they used twice as much film but got twice the clarity and sharpness. This is why they ended up with sacks of film eight feet tall. But the original cameras from Paramount had been scrapped because I guess it was too expensive or not needed or whatever. So I LM just built a new set of them from scratch. Again, so much cocaine, so much hubris, Like, how are we going to do this? Have George build him? And yeah, so this, obviously we talked about. This was so ungodly expensive. Budget was hacked from fifty mill projected down to thirty ticks up to forty. Michael Eisner is like, you know, let's maybe pull the plug on this, and uh, Jeffrey Katzenberg, enemy of the program, actually intervenes. I never expected to say good for Jeffrey Katzenberg. But speaking of Michael Eisner. It's off repeated that Joel Silver's cameo is the director of the Baby Herman short at the beginning of the movie was a jab at Eisener because there have been bad blood between the two ever since they had butted heads making forty eight Hours. Joel Silver shaved his beard, kept his name off the cash sheets, and even paid his own way to be in this movie. And when Eisner was told that it was Silver, because I guess he didn't recognize him at first, he reportedly shrugged and said he was pretty good. We could get into there. I actually don't know much about too much about this either. I think it was so Walter Hill, who did The Warriors, I'm pretty sure so when he came to fourty eight Hours, he wanted to be a little more gritty, and I guess Eisner he was just like up their asses when they were making this up, Joel Silver and Walter Hill being like, it's not funny enough. It's not funny enough. You gotta let Eddie Murphy off the leash. He's got to do more. You've got to write more jokes, Reddie Murphy, you gotta write more jokes for Nick Nolty. Just like in Daili's and uh Hill said they rewrote Murphy's character right down to the last Dave shooting based on Eisner's interference. I guess with it, which good lord. So that's why he plays this like Harry director, who's just like screaming, all right, baby, you were great, You were great, You were great. Roger. Um, I don't think too much in the score for this Alan Silvestri iconic film composer. I mean, admittedly, it was probably a very big technical challenge to kind of merged the like a late night jazz and war kind of vibe with the these car earl stalling insane Yeah, all the all the all the tune cues, coked up carnival music. Yeah, exactly. Um. I just think this is interesting that that when Jessica Rabbit, not for her musical number, but when she's like strolling through scenes, they just had a bunch of like jazz session guys in the and they were just like, I improvise it. So they just do all this like sultry burlesque sexy sacks songs. I mean, and I mean this in the most respectful way. She moves like a metronome. Yeah, I mean from the exactly. It's like when James Jamerson talks about the Motown bassist, I think it's the Bernard Debt or reach Out I'll be there with has that famous bass break we could boom boom, he said. They were like, how did you come up with that? He was like, I thought about a woman's butt moving down the street. Speaking of the music, there's a funny story behind the song that's sung at the end of the movie by all the cartoons. It's like kind of the fade out number. It's an old Mary Melody's chestnut from one called Smile, Darnia Smile. I know the producers, like I said, hired a professional singing group to record it, but it sounded too polished into tame and not you know, raucous and cartoony enough. So at the rat party for Roger Rabbit in March of they miked up the room and had the entire cast and crew just warble their way through the song. And I guess each crew member was paid one pound, which is a little more than a dollar for their singing contribution, and everybody to sign a waiver at this party, and that's what you're hearing at the very end well fittingly, we come to the end of the film and the insane production process and you get into test screening land. Jordan tell us about the test screenings was movie. Yes, early test screenings did not go well, probably because they were really marketing this towards older teenagers, and I guess a lot of them actually walked out because the whole thing is that opening cartoon. They were like, what the hell is this? Well, I mean, this will at least make you happy. Roberts to Mecas later said that the Disney chairman, Jeffrey Katzenberg said that he saw his life flash before his eyes after these extremely poorly reviewed test screenings. Spent fifty bail on a picture. Kids are walking out of the test screening, but it made Latzenberg unhappy, So there you go. Yes, yes, count that as a win. Uh So. Michael Eisner and roy E Disney, the vice chairman of Disney, thought the film was too adult, but again, Robert mckis had final cut on the movie and it refused to make any changes, So, along with Jeffrey Katzenberg, they decided to release it under the Touchstone Pictures Marquee under Walt Disney Pictures. Which is kind of Disney's more adult banner. It should say. Uh. And the thing that I actually hadn't really considered about making this movie was that editing the final composite print was basically impossible. Yeah, that's probably why he was like, do I get final cut? Because again, yeah, it's probably why he was extremely reluctant to make any changes to the final cut. Animation was done, specifically the live action scenes that were already shot and dialogue that had already been recorded. They couldn't do reshoots or use alternative takes because that would mean reanimating everything, and that just would have been prohibitibly expensive and at least a year of delays, you know, I mean something insane. And I guess cutting out even a part of a scene for timing would have screwed everything up and they would have had to just lose the entire scene wholesale. So there really wasn't much to be done after the final composite print was made of this movie. It was editing it was just kind of impossible. Um. An even more granular level, the title of the movie. Many people have you know you and I are both copy editors or have spent a lot of time copy editing. Many people have justifiably asked, why is there no question mark at the end of the film's title? Who framed Roger Rabbit? On the DVD commentary, Robert Semeka starts to say, everyone said you don't put question marks. He's yeah, he's talking to the screenwriters, and someone's like, oh yeah, people kept pointing out to us, like, you guys wrote this without a question marking the title, And he says, everyone said that you don't put question marks, and then someone cuts them off. But there's like the implicit statement in there, because I guess there's like a Hollywood superstition about question marks in movie titles. I could. I don't know everything I googled with just circles back to this, so I don't know where that comes from. But yeah, I mean you've mentioned that there's whatever happened to Baby Jane Who's afraid of Virginia Wolf? And they shoot horses, don't they? Those are all classic movies that have the question mark. And then there's also modern big movies that you know, I have a question mark in the title. What about Bob a Brother? Where art thou dude? Where's my car? That's cinematic class really among us? In what other paragraph would you have Who's afraid of Virginia? Wolf? And Dude, where's my car? Spoken in t M I guarantee. I guess there was a similar thing with who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Um? I think the British version as a question mark, and when they brought it over to America they took the question mark. I guess it's supposed to be a statement and producers said, this is not a question who wants to Maybe in our the answer is everyone. Yeah. Anyway, So, speaking of on screen titles and credits, the credit sequence for who Frames Roger Rabbit? I guess broke the record for the longest end credits ever. Huh. They ran nearly seven minutes. I haven't timed it myself, but I've seen some sources say it went actually up to ten minutes. And they're crediting a cast and crew of some seven hundred and forty three people, including three hundred and twenty six full time animators. But again, no credit for Kathleen Turner for voicing Jessica Rabbit. Why was she uncredited? I don't know, man, I wonder if it was a contract pin because she had just been in Romancing the Stone. Yeah, I don't know either way. Zamecha's faith in the film being released as is paid off. Took in eleven point two million it's opening weekend first place finished at the U S Box Office. It's worldwide gross was three hundred twenty nine point eight million, which made it, at the time of its release, the twentieth highest grossing film of all time, and that year, the only thing that came in higher was rain Man Favorite of Yours uh twelve minutes to Wapner In the United Kingdom, the film also set a record opening for any Disney movie period. Now, I'm not a Disney historian, but I play one on tv UM, so I should really tread lightly in saying this, But I've read that who Framed Rodger Rabbit basically saved the Disney animation studio and helped pave the way for the Disney Renaissance of the nineties. Before Roger Rabbit, Disney's animated films had kind of been flopping. They hadn't had a hit since The Fox and the Hound in the early eighties. Black Cauldron was a financial disaster. In six is The Great Mouse Detective barely made its money back. Great movie, yeah, it is a great movie, but audiences didn't think so. I know. Uh So, Disney was in the midst of cutting back projects around the time of Roger Rabbit, and apparently they were seriously considering shutting down their animation department altogether, at least according to sources I've read. I mean again, in the eighties, I'm thinking of like live action stuff like I don't know why this is the first one that comes to mind, but like Flighter than the Vigator. Maybe they were pivoting to those kind of live acts and things are Freaky Friday. But then they made this deal with Steven Spielberg's Ambulance Entertainment to co produce who framed Roger Rabbit, and the success of that movie helped convince them to continue to invest in animation. Yeah, and then a little Mermaids eighty nine and then we're off to the races exactly called the Disney Renaissance, so the second Golden Age of Disney or whatever. Um critics mostly love the film, although I mentioned earlier that Chuck Jones did not. He's on the record is not liking this film. Chuck Jones like the famous Lunar Tuns director that why doesn't he like it? He just said, I think I read something. He thought it was like disrespectful to cartoons and lacked a fundamental understanding of cartoons. Yes, that is, well, let'll do it. I guess that's the line. Um. But yeah, I again, I'm um. I just think Bob Hoskins just a hero's work in this film, and he was not nominated for an Academy Award. He probably wouldn't have won because the it's just too light for the Oscars, but he should have been nominate in my educated opinion. Uh. They did win though, for Editing, Sound Effects, and Visual Effects, which is I think sort of the Big three of technical awards, right, It's like that like production design, maybe wardrobe and Yes, folks, it is in the Library of Congress Film Archive. I guess Bob Hoskins uh sort of understandably how to take a year off from acting after doing Roger Rabbit to just recuperate from the experience, and he later said, I had to learn to hallucinate to do Roger Rabbit. After doing it for six months for sixteen hours a day, I had lost control of it and sort of had weasels and rabbits popping out of the wall of me. Um God. All right, so now we get into sequel territory. This is truly insane. As early as eighty nine, apparently J. J. Abrams, one of my least favorite modern directors, wrote an outline for full length sequel, considering half his career is just doing just sketch versions of better movies that came before him. I cannot imagine how badly that must have sucked. All Abrams fanboys are going to come after me for that. But there were a few different shorts that they made starring Roger. They did kind of go back to the well. Then they would just get thrown out as like teasers or in front of other Disney features and eight nine, and then they shut down four in like mid production. But the feature length treatment that was pitched for this was called Roger Rabbit Tune Platoon, and it would have been a prequel a World War two movie in which Tunes fight Nazis. Jessica Rabbit is kidnapped and forced to make pro Nazi German broadcasts. At the end of the movie, you discover bugs Bunny is Roger Rabbit's dad. That's a great twist. That's a great star Wars and pivot. The thing that I read is that they pivot after this reveal and he says, g and I a stinker because the whole movie is also I forgot even foreground this. The movie is about Roger Rabbit try and find out who his dad is. The Nazi stuff is secondary. At the end they pivot to bugs Bunny being his dad and he says, G A and I is stinker. Ridiculous. Yeah. I guess Spielberg decided the back out of doing this World War two era Rodger Rabbit movie because he had just done Schindler's List and he probably needed a break from Nazis in general, and he really didn't feel good about doing a comedic Nazi movie after that. Yes, so that that makes a lot of sense. But I guess Michael Isier commissioned to rewrite in for Roger Rabbits sequel that wound up getting five songs from friend of the podcast Alan Mankin, the Disney composer who helped write every Disney banger ever. Right, I mean, Beauty and the Base a Laddin, Little Mermaid, Little Mermaid. The plot point of this was that it would have been Rogers ascendance to fame on Broadway. So that's why they were going to make it a full fledged musical. Oh yeah, I guess they called it Who Discovered Roger Rabbit? Oh that's good. I like that. One of the songs, this Only Happens in the Movies, was recorded in two thousand eight on the debut album of the Broadway actors Kelly Butler. So you can see that out there. You can hear some of that. Um So, I guess this sequel got as far as test animation, and you can see some c g I Roger footage on YouTube. I don't like c g I rod It's very it's very early Pixar like beach balloon character. Yeah. I don't know something about hearing the herculean lengths that these animators wanted to avoid c g I. It seems sad to me that the sequel would have relied on that. But I guess costs for this Roger Rabbits sequel balloons over a hundred and fifty million dollars, and that's in two dollars, but still a lot of money. And Michael Eisner pulled the plug in favor of what doing Pearl Harbor with Ben Afflets a second Afflet reference. Yeah, and Asas has talked about this since. He said that in sixteen, the script has now moved on to putting the story of Roger and Jessica Rabbit into the next few years of period film, which would have been a love letter to the cinema of the nineteen fifties. In much worse news, he stated that it also called for a digital Bob Hoskins as the ghost of Eddie Valley and oh God being nightmare. Uh. Hoskins retired inteen. I think he had Parkinson's since passed on, but Jesus Christ, um and he has. I think he said eighteen that it's just not gonna happen. I don't think he thinks it's ever going to be greenlit because quote, the current corporate Disney culture has no interest in Roger, and they certainly don't like Jessica at all. He said that in and then he said he doesn't see it happening on Disney Plus as like a Disney Plus original, because he said, quote, there's no princess in it. We mentioned earlier that this film is back in the zeitgeist because um, they put out Chippendale Rescue Rangers is a future length Chippendale movie out now. Anyone Chipping Chippendale. I guess John Mulaney's in this. I don't know about this movie until just now, and one of the screenwriters called it in our minds. This has always been sort of a backdoor sequel to Roger Rabbit in It's like in Universe and Roger Rabbit appears in the film in a nightclub dance sequence. Because nothing is sacred and there is no dignity anymore. I whatever, man, they actually take shots across Sameka's brow in that film, and a clip that I saw there's a part where they I guess they're walking down the street and they say this neighborhood is the Uncanny Valley, and they say this is where all of the early c g I human characters live, which then they beat into the ground by explaining what the Uncanny Valley is. They're like, you know how when in the early two thousands when they started doing like early c g I humans and they don't look quite right, that's called the Uncanny Valley. And so this neighborhood we're walking through with all of those cartoon characters that are c g I humans. That's why this is called the uncanny valid, classic case of overexplaining your joke. And then at one point they literally they run into a character that is like deliberately kind of wonky looking c g I and they say, he's got those creepy polar express eyes. Oh sas did that? So whatever them. They can't hold a damn candle to this movie. I didn't write an out short of this. I'm not gonna a plus film, no notes. Would you like a sequel? No, no, I would if it's if they do. Here's my pitch. F ast sequel. You get Quentin Tarantino to start doing cocaine again. You get Roberts Meckis to start doing cocaine again. Fasters kind of seems like that's what I'm saying. You get a hard are inglorious fast ards, Roger Rabbit fighting Nazis. It will never happen. That's what I want. They kill Hitler full stop, great sold We opened on Vietcong and the Jungles. We close on killing Hitler, Roger Rabbit, thank you for listening. I'm gonna throw my laptop down as a muck drum. This has been too much Information. I'm Alex Hegel and I'm Jordan ron Tog. We'll catch you next time. Too Much Information was the production of My Heart Radio. The show's executive producers are Noel Brown and Jordan Runtalk. The supervising producer is Mike John's. The show was researched and 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 and I heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.