Hocus Pocus: Everything You Didn't Know

00:00:00
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 history of little loan facts behind your favorite music, movies, TV shows, and more. We are your two witches of the world wide Web, your two conjurors of classic movie anecdotes, your one waving weirdos of way too granular details. My name is Jordan run Tug and I'm Alex and today we are talking about a Disney Halloween classic, much beloved by our fellow millennials, Focus Pocus, he said, with lead in enthusiasm. Yeah, you know, folks, I'm gonna drop my mask a bit. I'm gonna level with you. You know, normally when we do these shows, at least one, if not both of us, we have a fondness for the topic. Though I have to say I do love it when you hate something high goal. I maybe I'm a masochist. I think it's funny when you hate something I adore. But this time around, we can't fake this. I don't want to lie to you. Neither of us particularly care for this movie, so my knowledge, neither of us have ever seen it. I've seen it once. You didn't see it in must have been nineties six, all right, yeah, so yeah, I've never seen it. I've seen it once, um, five years ago. I've I've tried to get into it. You know what. Actually, yesterday I took a field trip to the town of Salem, Massachusetts to really try to get into the spirit. And it just wasn't happening for me. I wasn't a spooky, scary kid. I tell you what. I really didn't like Halloween ever. Tell you my Halloween story. No, yeah, my first Halloween, I was just like, all right, let me get this straight. Five years old. My whole life so far, you've told me not to take candy from strangers, and now you're telling me to do exactly that. So they're giving me pep talks. They're like, all right, you know, it's okay, you can go up to the stranger's house. You can. You know, I'm not it was an introvert anyway, So actually go up to a stranger and ask for something is just completely you know, an athemat to anything that I'm about. No, it's okay, it's okay. You say trick a treat and then they give you candy and you walk away. It's gonna be great. I liked candy, so this, you know, all right? At last it was a payoff here. I was a bowling pin for my first Halloween, um, because I love bowling. So I went up to the first house and I rang the door and the woman came to the door. I said, trick a treat and she said trick, what are you gonna do now? And I burst into tears and I turned around and I left. And that was my first Halloween. And i've i've really, i've hated it ever since. And I i've also I've looked like I do now as a thirty almost thirty five year old man since I was about eleven or twelve. So when I would be eleven or twelve, you would get parents at the door handing out candy, saying I got you a little old for this, and to be in like fifth grade. So yeah, oh no, I'm just always way too shy and self conscious to have a really enjoy Halloween, way too easily scared to enjoy all the spooky stuff. Yeah, some pokus focus never really did it for me. What do you think? I love Halloween? It's the best. Halloween's the best, best season it's got all the best stuff candy and jan Kee decorations and yeah, I don't know, I just I love it. My parents had great costumes for us. And what's your favorite. I had a pretty good Dracula one, Yeah, pretty good Dracula one. I had a pretty good Werewolf one. Yeah. And I just I just really love horror movies too. But this is not a good movie. Let's let's just say the quiet part out loud. It is like I get the thing is I was like ten to twelve and I was just not yeah and then and so I have no like grandfather day in affection for it. And it's just it's not that good. And and I'm sorry. I mean people are gonna be like, who could you see that? Like because you watched it when you were a child, and like, I like, there's a lot of things that this is. This whole thing is like you could like things when your child, and but that doesn't you know, let me say this. Roger Ebert agrees with US Entertainment Weekly and Jane's Sisko, And yeah, it was when it was released. It was not a success when it was released. It's like that, it's like the it's the Hannibal Birds Day, It's like, why are you booing me? I'm right, you know so, But you know what I think. I say that without malice though. It's not a good movie, but I love that people are excited about it. I am, and it's got some great stories behind it. So let's just let's just dive in. Yes, absolutely, through no fault of its own, this movie never really resonated with either of us, but you know it's important to you, dear listeners, so we did our very best to give you what I think is a truly spectacular show. And especially now we've got the release of the sequel, Focus Focused Too earlier this year, it's as good a time as any. I can't wait. Let's dive in from all the weird ties this movie as to the film Titanic and the film American Beauty, and the show Friends. To the surprising reason it broke Steven Spielberg's heart, the reason Kathy and Jimmy was initially afraid to appear in it, the Sarah Jessica Parker's ancestral ties to the Salem witch Trials. There's an army of black cats, piles of rotten pumpkins, mouthfuls of moths, and also the true reason why everyone in New England says that things are wicked. Here's everything you didn't know about Disney's hocus Pocus. The plot of hocus Pocus was born when a black cat crossed the path of producer David Kirshner in the early eighties. Usually that's supposed to be bad luck when a black cat crosses your path, But in this case, I'd say I worked out pretty well for David Kirshner. The time, he was known mostly for coming up with the story for an American tale, but he says that the plot for hocus Pocus came to him one day when a black cat wandered into his family yard, and to amuse, slash terrify his young daughter, he made up a bedtime story about this cat being a boy who was cursed by three witches some three hundred years ago to inhabit the body of a cat. And this alway isn't quite as strange as it may sound. He later told the rap that Halloween was a huge deal in the Kirshner family home. He said, our family is a bit like the Adams family, so you know, telling two little girls a bedtime story about which is sucking the life out of children. It's probably not the best decision as far as parental gentleness is concerned, but from the time they were little, they love this kind of world of things that go bump in the night, and the story would ultimately become the tragic tale of Thackeray Binks, a young man who was turned into a cat by the three Witchie Sanderson's sisters, and the name Thackeray Binks actually has a personal connection to David Kirshner. The name was inspired in part by a stray black cat he'd taken in as a kid, who they called Inks for his inky black fur. Hence Binks and Kursner liked this story well enough to write it up and submit it to Muppet Magazine, which I had no idea was a thing where it got some attention, and that's when he just I did to start developing it into a full length script. Yeah, David Kirshner has just one of the wildest cvs. I mean, he goes from American Tale, which he also wrote, to the Child's Play franchise. He is, along with writer director Don Mancini, the big creative engine behind that franchise. He created the animatronic doll for Chucky and has produced all seven films in the original franchise. Yeah, good on him. Also, Muppet Magazine. Did you read anything about Bumppa Magazine? No? I know nothing about It's kind of incredible. It featured real life celebrity guests alongside the Muppets, and the Muppets got like recurring columns like, uh, Floyd from the band would review records, and Statler and Waldorf would review movies. Well, that's their cisco and Ebert I exactly give me ms. Piggy has an advice column. Um. And you can see all these covers out there from this magazine that we're um like Brooke Shields, Olivia Newton, John Christopher Reeves, Steve Martin, Danny DeVito, Don Johnson. I mean, this whole thing was run by a guy named Don Wells who had came to it after stints at Fortune and Rolling Stone. So yeah, dude, Muppet Magazine real, real heavy hitter in the publishing world. Wow. So okay, this makes a lot more sense that success in Muppet Magazine put him on the path to trying to pitch this to Disney. Okay, so the plot of the movie that you all, I'm not gonna say, we know and love. You know and Love mostly focuses on the kids, but the original version of hocus Pocus was a lot darker. Krisher developed the story with a guy named Mick Garris, who had a career writing horror movies and he produced and directed several documentaries about horror films and worked as a story editor and writer on the Amazing Stories TV series that was produced by Steven Spielberg, who will talk more about in a moment now. Chris Star had worked with Spielberg somewhat extensively, most notably and most recently on the American Tale movie. So that was the connection between the producer David Kirshner and writer Mick Garris. G Garris has written critters to the Main Course. He also wrote Batteries Not Included Um and the sequel to The Fly. Yeah, he's a legit dude. So he's collaborating with Dave Kirshner on Focus Pocus. And in this early version, the kids were actually a little younger and everything was a little bit more evil. As Gary said, the kids being younger in more Jeopardy was certainly more explicitly frightening. Later versions of the script made two of the children older to attract the different demographic to sell more tickets and make the film more broadly comic. My version centered on the fears of a younger, less mature kid and how they would face death in a graveyard, which damn. Kathy and Jimmy also says that the movie they shot was pretty drastically different from the movie that was completed during the anniversary screening in eighteen. She told sci Fi Wire it was cut and edited completely different than it was filmed. It was really more about the witches and less about the kids. Apparently, Disney being Disney, wanted to make the film more kid friendly, so they removed, by the Jimmy's estimation, five huge scenes with the Sanderson's sisters the witches, including one scene that was set in the supermarket that actually wound up in the movie trailer, And there were also scenes that were cut where kids tried to push the witches into a pool, and also seeing where the witches were handing out candy to trick or treaters. That sounds funny. The original title of this movie was slated to be Disney's Halloween house, which flows, yeah, exactly, hocus pocus clearly superior. The phrase has been in use since at least sixteen twenty as an incantation used by magicians alongside Abrica dabra, and the idea behind these exotic phrases was part shamanship and drama, but also kind of the audio equivalent of sleight of hand. The magicians would hope that these phrases would serve as brief distractions for the audience so that they could, you know, do what they needed to do to pull off the trick. And the phrase hocus pocus is thought to be a pervert ursion of the Latin sacramental blessing hawks corpus menum, which is I'm sure I'm pronouncing wrong. This is my body from Latin Mass. I've never been to Latin Mass that much of a Catholic and Catholic yeah yeah, my my relatives were priests. I didn't know that. Um. Yeah. So Kirchener goes to pitch his movie at Disney way back, and to really sell the idea, he made what was essentially an elementary school Halloween party for these executives, which is, yeah, it's very cute, he says, He got to the meeting a half hour early and arranged somewhere between two and fifteen pounds of candy corn accounts of arry on the conference room table in the shape of a snake to create the smell of Halloween. Pitching is about, you know, all five, engaging all five of the senses. He also hung props all around the room, like childlike drawings of black cats, brooms suspended from the ceiling, and even a vacuum cleaner, uh, which is a nod to the way that the Sanderson sisters get around in these modern times. Then he darkened the lights in the room and ushered the executives in being Jeffrey Katzenberg being led into a child's Halloween party in his conference room. They all loved the idea, but apparently the initial plan was for this to be a made for TV movie for the newly created Disney Channel, which had launched a year earlier in eighty three and was just desperately in need of new material. That is the rumor. It's unclear what point in the process that it was upgraded from made for TV to theatrical feature. Um there are versions that say that the exacts were just super excited about the script. There's other versions that claim when Bette Midler signed up, they decided to go big with it. There's also a theory that the finished movie was just too frightening for Disney Channel consideration, especially some of the makeup stuff, which we'll get too later. And given the fact that it was eight years between the pitch meeting of eighty four and the start of production in n clearly there was some conversations that took place. I like to imagine, um, they did the old blindfolding and gave him a cold spaghetti and they're like the grapes appeeled grapes, and they were like, and this is Steven Spielberg's eyes, cold spaghetti being like in this is is David Geffen's brands, Roy Disney's brands. Who Uh. It's a long standing tradition here on t M. I to drag Jeffrey Katzenberg whenever he appears on the show. Which a powerful enemy. Yeah, we've picked we picked possibly the most the worst enemy. He is a vengeful man and thin skinned. Um. This story recently came out in Andy ortiz Is Amazing Oral History of Hocus Pocus. A few weeks back. In the rap. So it's important to remember that David Kirshner had made his name with An American Tale, which he had initially pitched to Katzenberg at Disney before Spielberg picked it up. According to a recent interview Kershner gave to the Rap, Katzenberg turned it down quite rudely. Uh, this is Kirscher saying. I presented an American Tale to him, and Jeffrey said, I won't use his language, but who the f is going to go see a film about a Jewish mouse? And I said, well, who's going to see a film about a wooden puppet? M I mean, it's where you take these characters, with the art, with the emotions, what the story is. And he said, nice, try thank you anyway, and that was the end of it. God, he sucks, And I was fortunate that Spielberg felt very differently and bought it. Spielberg bought An American Tale for his new production company, Amblin Entertainment, and in nineteen six on American Tale became the highest performing non Disney animated movie ever at the time, all thanks to Steven Spielberg giving him the chance. Now, in this retailing in the Rap, Kirshner said that he took hocus Pocus to Disney first, even though they'd rejected an American tale, and according to Kirshner, this broke Spielberg's heart. He recalled seeing uh Spielberg's production partner, Kathleen Kennedy at a party and she said, you know, he really hurt Stephen. And, as Kirshner tells the story, and I was like what And she said, the fact that after he gave you your first film, you didn't even bring hocus Pocus to him, You went right to Disney. I honestly felt tears in the back of my eyes. This is a really painful memory for me that I upset Stephen, who, as I say, I owe everything too. However, this is when it begins to get fuzzy. Mick Garris, screenwriter, has claimed that he and producer David Kircher pitched hocus Pocus to Spielberg first, but he ultimately passed because Spielberg was starting his own production company, Amblin and didn't want to work with Disney. Garris said he loved it until he found out that Disney was already involved. At that time, Disney and Amblin were very competitive in the family film market, so neither of them wanted to be in business with the other, but it was very close to being a project with Steven Spielberg. Reps for Spielberg did not comment on the rap story, which is famously cold shoulder in the celebrity entertainment journalism world, so jury is still out on that one. If you were a loved one can prove a verified timeline of the pitching process for Hocus Pocus. Jordan vemo you five bucks. So that's enough industry backstabbing for one episode. I tend to believe Kirshner because the story doesn't make him sound good, which makes me believe him. You know, you, piste Off Spielberg, the guy who gave you your big break seems like the kind of mortifying thing that you probably remember kind of sticks with you. So I tend to believe Kirshner in this whole version that he just accidentally hurt him. So that's sad, but anyway, for a director, Disney tapped Kenny Ortega, who t m I fans will remember as the choreographer who worked with Gene Kelly on the roller disco Bomb Zanna Do, and he would go on to direct Disney Juggernauts High School Musical one through three Cheetah Girls too, and he also choreographed tours for share Kids, Gloria Estefan, and to me most famously, Michael Jackson for the ill fated This Is It tour that never happened in two thousand nine because he died. But back when hocus Pocus was getting off the ground, or Taka had just directed the Disney movie musical news Ees starring Christian Vale, but that movie tanked after its release in the spring of pulling in just two point eight million dollars unreported fifteen million dollar budget, thus making it one of Disney's lowest grossing live action movies. Ever, I didn't realize it was that big of a flop, so hocus Pocus was seen as a chance to prove himself and unfortunately, as we'll find out, the box office score for hocus Pocus was pretty much as dismal as Newsies. Yeah, so we mentioned earlier that one of the armchair theories behind why hocus Pocus went from being a made for TV movie to theatrical release was because Bett Midler signed on. So now we must talk about Bett Midler. Initially, the part of Winifred Sanderson was written with Chloris Leachman and mine Chloris leech friend of the Pod, Chloris Leachman, famously of The Last Picture Show, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and an X of Bobby Boris Pickett. If decades old monster match Hollywood scuttle Buddies to be believed, David Kirchner admitted at the annual screening of hocus Pocus, and the first person that I really wanted for Winnifred Sanderson was Chloris Leachman, And that was the first person because I was so in love with her from the mel Brooks films, from Young Frankenstein especially, which makes total sense. It's unclear whether or not Chlorus was actually offered the role, but ultimately they went with Bette Midler, who had already made a number of movies with Disney's Touchstone Pictures in Print, Down and Out, Beverly Hills, Ruthless People, and Outrageous Fortune, as well as voicing Georgette the Poodle in Oliver and Company, a movie I remember nothing about except for that banger of a Billy Joel song that's a rip Street Savoir fair. Why shut up will Uh. Anyway, her involvement was really pivotal for this uh. David Kirshner later said, had she not said yes, I'm not sure if hocus Pocus would have ever been made. Mittler was interested in the movie because of her young daughter, Sophie. She told Kirshner that she wanted to do something that her little girl could actually watch and appreciate after making mostly R rated films throughout her career. She based her character on both the Wicked Witch of the West from Wizard of Oz played by Margaret Hamilton's who will get to in a moment, and also Angelica Houston's character of the Grand High Witch from nineteen nineties The Witches. Do you have? Did you have familiarity with the Witches? No? Not at all? Oh boy, horrifying, horrified, truly horrifying, or just yes she is. Just do be a favorite. Google the Grand High Witch. Wanna I want to get your facial reaction live on live on the screen. Oh my, yeah, that's her. That's Angelica Houston. Baby, I mean she's she's decomposing. That's wow. That makes the crip Keeper look vivacious. Jesus Christ. Okay, wow, I did not need to see that at this hour. Okay, well quick, let's get back to Bette Midler, her and her campy career. I love it. There's a cute nod to Bette Midler's career. Earlier in the film, Kathy and Jimmy's character Mary says to Winnifred winnefer thou art divine Bette Midler, famously known for her nickname the Divine miss m And she did indeed singing this movie. Because they're gonna have Bette Midler in your movie. It's stupid not to have her sing. She does a version of I Put a Spell on you, uh, famously by screaming Jay Hopkins and Nina Simone pick your favorite. They're both amazing uh. And credence and credence. Okay, I put a spell on you song by a witch, low hanging fruit, but I'll allow it. Uh. And Thora Birch remembers Bet wowing the set during downtime on the shoot with her singing. She said, Bett and Thora, who was like and at this point were suspended from the ceiling and flying harnesses to film one of the final scenes of the movie, and as Thora recalled to the rap for that amazing oral history we just spoke about. It was towards the end of how long we had to be up there, and we were both pretty miserable. But then all of a sudden, Bet just starts singing and everybody stops, which probably wasn't a good idea because they clearly needed to keep working. But when Bet sings, everybody stops, and I was just like, oh my god, this is freaking awesome. She's like singing to comfort us. That was a completely memorable moment. And Thora, who was like ten at the time, remembers that Bet quote had two people running around behind her with dictionaries of old curse words, and that's where she came up with legendary unscripted digs like Trollamog and magatry mouthfeasance, which is awesome. Unrelated side note, do you know that Thora birches mom, Carol Connors, was in Deep Throat? Yeah. The only reason I checked that was because I saw that her mom was Carol Connors, and I misread it as Carol O'Connor, and I thought briefly that Thora Birch's dad was Archie Bunker, and all in the family Carol O'Connor, but I was wrong. Um yeah, I guess both of Thora's parents were adult entertainment performers. Your dad, Jack Birch, was a porn star. So wait, did they meet doing porn? I think so that's incredible. Yeah, good for them. I bet that's not a story that gets told every Christmas. I was googling. Someone suggested that they did meet on the set of Deep Throat, but I wasn't able to Actually, yeah, that was what I thought I heard. Yeah they yeah, so yeah, they were both in Deep Throat. That's uh, that's a hell, that's a meat cute, that's a that's a movie we should make. I mean, it's basically love. Actually it's the it's the Martin Friedman character gets stuff in there. I mean soccer to me. For the part of the youngest Sanderson's sister, Sarah, Oh god, that is the one of the only things I remember about this movie is having a young preteen stirring for Sarakha. Jessica Parker is the hot goth, which they nearly got Jennifer Lopez cartoon Wolf. My tongue falling out of my jaw. I have to hit myself on the top of the head to roll it back up with I hit myself on the head with a mallet, et cetera. That was more of a that Mittler boy and they're in there in lives. The difference between us on Carson Saraha and Carson on the second to last episode, Come On Melts. Jennifer Lopez auditioned for this, but it went to Sarah Jessica Parker, who is then hot off her appearance and Steve Martin's l a story and this is wild makes sense because for all Jennifer Lopez as many and obvious charms, she is not related to an actual woman accused of witchcraft in the sixteen hundreds, as Sarah Jessica Parker is during an appearance of the genealogy show Who Do You Think You Are? Isn't that the one where they surprised like like didn't afflect try and bury the fact that his family like owned slaves That I didn't hear that, but that's possible one of the two of them did. Anyway, Sarah Jessica Parker learned that she's the tenth great granddaughter of Esther l Well, who stood accused during the Salem witch trials. When a young girl said she saw esther's specter strangling a neighbor. L Well was arrested but never actually went to trial because the accusations were starting to get so out of hand that even the governor's wife was getting accusations hurled at her. And naturally, when the powerful get accused of crimes, the laws changed quickly, so s JP's ancestor was released and reportedly lived into her eighties. Now, the so called Salem witch trials occurred roughly between February and May see, during which time more than two hundred men, women and children were accused of witchcraft. Out of all of those, nineteen of them were hanged. Most of these were women, but there was one man named Giles Corey who was pressed to death under heavy stones. Isn't that in the Crucible when he's he's a guy who keeps calling for more weight? I think so. Yeah, great death scene. We we we stand Giles Corey. At least five more of those who've been found guilty dyed in jail. Obviously the most famous witch hunt this side of Joseph McCarthy and the Red Scare of the fifties, but sadly not the only one Between sixty seven and sixteen sixty nine in Connecticut, thirty people were accused of witchcraft and eleven were hanged. During the same time as the Salem witch trials, there were similar trials in New Hampshire and Virginia, and these would just keep popping up sporadically throughout the seventeen hundreds. Not much to do, not not much else happening, might as well accuse a bunch of people of witchcraft. However, the last trial for witchcraft in the United States would occur Faithful in Salem in eight Hopefully some of those spirits were somewhat appeased by the casting of Sarah Jessica Parker in Hocus Pocus. I mean, it's I've read somewhere. I should probably research this before I say this, But like a lot of the people that were accused of being, which is in addition to being people that the accusers just didn't personally like because they owned land on land, I heard that there were also just people with you know, people with tourettes, for example. But it was a really easy way to seize land from women, which was already a tenuous position for them, as was the fashion at the time. But yeah, you could. If you got her successfully accused and hanged, then you can just take that land right right quick. Yeah. I think I read some instances where like there would be people who would by all accounts, seemed to go crazy. They start having visions and start howling and start and it was I don't remember what exactly it was, but it was some kind of like fairly easier to remedy vitamin deficiency that you know, could have been solved in a matter of days. There have been different academic studies that have advanced the theory that the brief and intense illnesses suffered by townspeople that were chocked up to witchcraft were air goot is um, a disease commonly contracted by rye bread And isn't that where LSD you are, correct, sir? After the after the after the rye plant contracts arrogate, the fungus grows and replaces the shoots on the grains with sclerotia. Sclerotia I'm getting and um. Those growths contain lysurgic acid and basically, uh, this stuff caused severe convulsions, muscle spasms, delusions, the sensation of crawling under the skin, and that's basically what they think witchcraft was people tripping balls on bad rye bread. You know, as with so many things in this country, the explanation is so much stupider. Yeah, yeah, wow, amazing. Only took us, like maybe, you know, under thirty minutes just to to link hocus focus with acid. As you meditate on that. We'll be right back with more too much information after these messages, But back to your beloved Sarah Jessica Parker. She later said that she felt her character was quote the most fundamentally evil of all the Sanders and sisters. She's so not bright, not calculating, but it's her innate nature to be evil. For her older sisters, it's a learned thing. Yet she's still somewhat seductive. She's just awful, but I love her. There was very little about our characters beyond the script itself, so it gave me my first chance to really create a character, like finding the voice and physical stuff. They wanted me to do a Marilyn Monroe voice, but I found that boring, so I came up with something like a small five year old boy on helium. And there's a funny little detail about Sarah Sanderson's hair that ties back to classic cinema. There are actually several nods of the Wizard of Oz in hocus Pocus, and one of them is the length of Sarah Sanderson's hair. During the production of The Wizard of Oz, I guess I'd never noticed this. There were continuity issues with Dorothy's hair in some scenes, for pigtails rest just below her shoulders, and in others they're quite a bit longer. Apparently as a little nod to this detail, Sarah Sanderson's hair constantly switches from curly to straight, and I also believe it varies in length at different times throughout the movie too. And this is just one of several allusions to The Wizard of Oz, including the use of the wicked Witches theme, you know the And this sets me up perfectly for a crazy fact that I learned the other day about the Wicked Witch of the West from The Wizard of Oz, or rather the actors who played her, Margaret Hamilton's I'm from Boston yesterday you yesterday. As I was making my very first visit to Salem, I started to wonder why people in Boston always said wicked. You know, wicked, great wicked Whatever I was wondering, if it had something to do with Salem and the Witch trials, if it was just like a local nod to that moment in our history. The truth is possibly very much weirder of the stories to be believed. Apparently, the whole wicked slang phenomenon was inspired by a Boston mayor's affair with Margaret Hamilton's actors who played the Wicked Witch to the West, and this is from an article in Boston Magazine written by Matthew Reid Baker. He said, quote the year zero was nineteen forty two and former Mayor Jay Michael Curly was running for the U S House of Representatives, but his campaign was crippled by his horrid affair with Margaret Hamilton's, still hot from her role as the Wicked Witch of the West and The Wizard of Oz, which had come out three years earlier. Once the Rascal King dumped his Hollywood mistress, he swept to victory thanks to an endorsement from Cardinal O'Connor, who exclaimed, our wicked man has become wicked good and the rest is local slang history. Um. The author of this piece does admit that there's an excellent chance that this whole wicked witch of the West connection is just local legend, and there's actually, in truth, no consensus when it comes to the slang history of wicked in New England. According to the Merrion Webster Dictionary, the traditional use of wicked for bad dates back to the thirteenth century. Perhaps is a bastardization of the Middle English word wicca or the Old English wicca, which is kind of a more familiar or word to me, which you know, to me is a synonym for witchcraft. However, there is a theory that Salem City officials started using the word wicked as a trend to promote tourism in their town, but obviously the use of that phrase went through the roof after Google Hunting came out. I'm surprised we haven't gotten you to bust out of Boston accent on this yet. I can't do them because I'm from like just far enough West that wasn't like a local and my parents were both from Pennsylvania, so I never really grew up surrounded by Boston accents too much. I mean, I heard it was something that was like native to me. M hmm. I bet you had two different accents. Huh growing up you were like two different people. Oh yeah, this is this is the form where the podcast just evolves into a US reciting lines from The Depoted. Let's get this thing back on the rails, folks. That's a much longer podcast. We gotta do the Departed. That's like the movie I think I saw the most in theaters. Oh it's so perfect, it's so perfect. What's my favorite? I mean, my favorite Boston in that is is marky Mark just doing them? Well? Yeah, maybe maybe maybe not? Maybe you The best line of that movie is Leo when he goes to his therapist house. You don't have cats? I like that and it's all going, no, you know. The best line of movie actually is is Alec Baldwin saying I'm the guy who does his job. You must be the guy. I use that, and it was Micky Mark. Maybe you're right. I don't know anyway, now that we've talked about a movie we actually care about. Uh, Kathy y Gemi was reluctant to take this role because she had a fear of real life, which is Rosie O'Donnell, who fears no one man of God or Bordal was originally hasked to play the role with Mary Sanderson, but she turned it down because she didn't want to play a witch, so that part ultimately went to Kathy to Jimmy, who had just broken Big and Sister Act along with Whoopi Goldberg, but apparently Kathy didn't want to play a witch either. At the twentieth anniversary screening panel, she told fans she was afraid of offending real life, which is which, Yeah, sure, that's tracks. She reportedly told the audience, I really believe in white witches, as in witches who are use their magic for good. It's not a whole race thing, even though it even though it is Boston related, the whole witches busting controversies. Um, I really believe in white witches, and I'm a witch and a lot of women I know who are very spiritually forward are witches. She said she was worried that the Sanderson sister's obsession with killing children would create a negative, harmful stereotype around which is which, But they'll do that. Ship's kind of sailed though, Kathy Yeah. Dijim apparently asked writers to include mentions of white witches or good witches such as Alison, the character played by Vanessa Shaw, who she saws human ish and funny. Is that she talking about the actress the idea describing and funny. The rare reason that Jimmy agreed to do the movie was because she had been a massive bet Middler super fan for fifteen years, to the point where you said you kept seeing the phrase borderline stalker attached to her name. Yes, simlistical, Yes, so she was happy to tempt Black Magic Reprisal for a chance to work alongside her hero. Cathy thought of her character, Mary is half bloodhound, which is why she has that sort of crooked mouth and barks occasionally. She said, one day in rehearsal I just sort of went to the side, she explained to Sci Fi Wire. We decided she was like a bloodhound. So this sort of sniffy thing happened. But the but the wasn't the only sniffy thing that happened on this say, hey, I actually don't know where any of these people drug abusers. Charles Rockett was in the cast. It can't be on Saturday Live in the eighties. Yeah, yeah, it's true. But the most seismic instance of alternate universe casting in this movie is that. Apparently, Kenny Ortega wanted Leonardo DiCaprio for the part of Max Dennison. Interview with Variety, Leonardo DiCaprio said that he was offered quote more money than I ever dreamed of to play Max, but he turned down the role because he was holding up for a chance to audition for What's Eating Gilbert Grape. He said, quote, I don't know where the hell I got the nerve. You live in an environment where you're influenced by people telling you you make a lot of money and strike while the iron's hot. But the move paid off, because Leo got an Academy Award and Golden Globe nomination for his portrayal of Arnold Arnie Grape, making him the seventh youngest nominee ever in that category at just nineteen years old. However, director Kenny Ortega remembers things a little differently. In a two eighteen interview with D twenty three, he claims that Leo was never actually available for this movie, but he met with Leo anyway at the assistance of a couple of casting agents during pre production. But even so, everyone already knew that Leo would very likely pass up this role because he was already up for parts of What's Eating Gilbert Grape and This Boy's Life, And sure enough, Ortega said that during the meeting, Leo politely made it clear that his head was quote somewhere else, and the part of Max ultimately went to al Marie Cats. And after hocus Pocus, Cats briefly started in shows like General Hospital and Freaks and Geeks before we retired from acting in two thousand two, and Cats recently spoke to Entertainment Weekly about the hocus Pocus sequel. He said, quote, people have been asking, and unfortunately I'm not in it. I would have loved to have been involved. Thora Birch, however, was I guess offered to reprise her role as Danny Dennison and hocus Pocus too, but she declined due to quote scheduling conflicts, which I think is industry code for I don't want to do it, but maybe wrong. Um. There's a frequent rumor that hocus Pocus is the first Disney movie to use the word virgin, but that is reportedly untrue. That honor belongs to nine one Dragon Slayer. And speaking of there's a funny moment in the movie when Max's father snaps at him watch your language. His dad in this movie is played by the aforementioned Charles Rocket, who is probably most famous for his tenure on SNL when he dropped an unscripted f bomb live on air during an episode in February. And I believe he was only on the show for one more episode. After that, NBC put the show on hiatus and retooled the cast and kicked him off. This is just from my memory bank. I think he killed himself by slitting his own throat in a field on his own property in Connecticut in two thousand five. I'm a Cobb end of this, good lord. Uh something we didn't have in our Hocus focus bingo card. Well you didn't, Yeah, well so James Horner. Uh, enemy of the pod James Horner. I don't know. We're kind of cool, but but that is not the only Titanic connection in this movie. And I knew you would find it. Yeah. Uh. The song that Sarah Jessica Parker's character sings in the film, Come Little Children, which he uses to summon the Little Children, was written by James Horner, who wrote My Heart Will Go On and the score of Titanic just chock full of penny whistles. That soundtrack was just like that was like our generations. Frampton comes Live and I feel like everyone I knew had that CD. Yeah. Uh. He was nominated for eight Oscars over the course of his career, winning two both for Titanic, but also earning nods for Apaular Thirteen, Field of Dreams, Brave Heart, A Beautiful Mind, the Avatar, and It's hilarious. He want up working with James Cameron again on Titanic and again on Avatar because ten years earlier he vowed never to work with Cameron again because the scoring sessions for Aliens were, in Horner's words, a nightmare, which is you can probably just plug that into every single interaction with James Cameron. Anyone has ever had not a guy famously well liked in Hollywood. Uh. Mr Horner is uh fame over in his corner eating some pumpkin pie. What am I doing that, right, little Georgie something? What am I free associating here? Jordan's Jack Horner, Little James Horner sat in his corner self plagiarizing um as some pumpkin and pie. Uh and plagiarizing from other people. What I'm getting at here, folks, is that James Horner has been accused of reusing both his previously written works or lightly reworking pieces by classic composers for the material he generates in him. His scores from Star Trek to The Wrath of con and Star Trek three The Search for Spock include excerpts from Prokofiev's Alexander Nevsky and Romeo and Juliet. The action Austinado from Aliens is originally lifted from the werewolf movie Wolfen, starring I want to say, Albert Finney, and the film's main title is almost identical to Aram catch A Kourian's Gayanne Ballett Sweet Theodagio, which was already used in an outer space context in two thousand one Space Odyssey. That's just dumb. Don't steal classical music cues from Stanley Kubrick, who did more than perhaps any other filmmaker to popularize classical scores in films in space, in Space throughout the twentieth century. Good lord uh, And then he would use it again in the score of Patriot Games. Oh, James Horner, you Rube Field of Dreams includes cues from the Saturday Night Waltz portion of Aaron Copeland's Ballet Rodeo and Copeland score from Our Town. In issue of Film Score Monthly, an editorial review of Titanic said Horner was skilled in the adaptation of existing music into films with just enough variation to avoid legal troubles. But that is not strictly true. He did indeed get in trouble for his main theme for Honey, I Shrunk the Kid. This is which incorporates cues from the score by Nino Rota from Federico Fellini three film record A Record I'm a Chord of Thing, and Raymond Scott's Peace Powerhouse, regularly heard in the Loony Tunes God. This led to Raymond Scott's estate to threaten a lawsuit against Disney, who paid an undisclosed settlement out of court. However, history has taken a kinder view of James Horner following his Titanic mega success and his death in a single occupant plane crash in the Los Padres National Forest. R I P. James Horner, You're plagiarizing in Heaven now kisses me off. I'm sorry. I good Lord, I know good Oars borrow graad oars steel but like come on, come On. And on the topic of reusing music, a little bit in fact about hocus Pocus was that there was a theme song written for it by the Swedish pop duo rock Set, who had number ones in the late eighties with songs like it Must Have Been Love Yeah, that song rules and Listen to Your Heart which rules less Um. They wrote a song called Almost Unreal, which is this great cynthi pop banger that references hocus Pocus a number of times, but ultimately the producers decided it wasn't right for a family friendly witch movie and decided to cut it from the film. But since the song was commissioned for Disney and they obviously owned the rights, the company decided to recycle it for another one of their movies, Super Mario Brothers No Famously Misbegotten Horrendous Box Office Bomb. And the band rock Set were apparently pretty pissed about this switch, but then again, they weren't exactly huge fans of the song in the first place. In the booklet for the two thousand six release a collection of rock Set hits their twenty greatest songs, one of the band made set of this song not one of our most inspired moments, so it's probably good it wound up in a not very inspired film, saying that in your own greatest hits, how somebody wasn't in charge of the track listing there. The shoot for Hocus Focus began on October twelve, and though the film's obviously set in the town of Salem, most of it was done on a back lot in Burbank, California, which will talk more about in the moment. But they did do two weeks of shooting on location in Salem and then the nearby town of marble Head. That's where they did the scenes for the human Thackeray Binks running through the woods. Among many exteriors the high s cool in the film, Jacob Bailey High was actually Phillips Elementary School, which was unused at the time. I think I might have shot inside as well as exteriors. And now that's an apartment complex, so if you're a Hocus Pocus super fan looking for a place to live, check it out. You can live in the school from hocus Pocus. The Dennison's family home is a sweet eighteen seventies Victorians on Ocean Avenue, which has become a popular tourist attraction, and the Halloween party in the film takes place in the supposed Old Town Hall, which is actually the Salem Museum on Derby Square. But most interesting to me is the house belonging to the character Allison. The exterior was shot at the Ropes Mansion on Essex Street in Salem, which is open to the public and operated by the Peabody Essex Museum. According the website for it, the house was built in seventeen twenty seven in Georgian style, but the interiors were shot at a famous mansion in Altadena, California, known as the Crank House, named for its former owner, businessman James F. Crank. And this is cool because the interiors were used not only for hocus Pocus, but also in the movie Matilda, where it was used for Miss trunch Bull's house and also screamed to during the scene where CC was played by Sarah Michelle Gellar receives her final fatal phone call, and it was also used in Catcher If You Can when Leonardo DiCaprio celebrated his engagement to any Adams in New Orleans. I think, I think that was when he was in New Orleans in that movie. If you can, Oh, it's actually really I didn't see it ever until relatively recently, like maybe five years ago, and it's it's not one of those ones that you had to see like at a certain time to enjoy it. Like it's it's really good. Um. Yeah, it's up there with like The Sting in terms of just like that kind of fun. I meanotus, the Sting is a lot better. But yeah, just as unrelated aside, I'd assume that the cemetery scenes in this movie were shot on location, but apparently they were filmed on the largest sound stage at the Walt Disney Studios, and real birch and elm trees from the East Coast were uprooted and moved to the set to give it that spooky Salem vibe. Well, as we said, aside from some location shots in Salem, the majority of hocus Pocus was filmed in California. Exteriors were mostly done at the Warner Brothers Ranch and Burbank, which is basically an open air movie set museum. The neighborhood where the kids walk in the movie is known as Blondie Street after the comic strip Blondie, which was then turned into an early television sitcom. This little U shaped street features house facades that have appeared in I Dream of Genie, The Donna Reed Show, The Partridge Family, and appropriately enough for this episode, Bewitched, as well as more modern stuff like Young Sheldon, Son of a Bitching, Young Shaldon, Enemy of the Pod, Young Sheldon, The Apocalypse Now looking through the Venetian Blinds, Young Shell Children. They also did the Three Stooges, the original Batman and Superman Cereals, Lethal Weapon, Dennis the Menace, but one house in particular, which appears in the background when the kids are prematurely celebrating their defeat of the Sanderson sisters after locking them in the kiln. These kids can be seen talking in front of the house. As they walk to the park, Max stops to talk to beings the cat outside of this house too. This house has a wrought iron fence and blue shutters. This house previously used as the Griswolds House in National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, but just a few years after hocus Pocus was used as the Burnham family home in American Beauty. The house with the red door and Thora Burch's character lives there in American Beauty. So six years earlier in Hocus Pocus, Thora Birch is visiting her future movie home and then, Uh, you said, you think it's also in WandaVision. Yeah, I think it's um the home in wand Division, the division. I love this stuff so much. I'm good. I'm happy you do. I mean it's just the way that they reused the same like eight houses for dozens and dozens of movies and TV shows. Like, for example, I mean that that the home in Bewitch where Samantha and Darren Stevens lived during the whole run of The which it's the same house that in a dream of Genie, Larry Hagman's boss Dr Bellows lives. It's just like they only have like a couple of houses. They all just swap out, change the you know, the aluminum signing on the front, and call a day. Well, as with all things in Hollywood, it ends tragically. Uh. Warner Brothers announced a massive plan to overhaul this movie ranch, with a five hundred million dollar redevelopment plan to build sixteen sound stages. This means that this beloved filming location will be no more and these famous facades will either be destroyed or God willing, just moved. Um, you said that you think they're they're being kept. The thing that I think that they're keeping is the park square that is used in the opening of the TV show Friends. Oh well, thank god, And this leads us to the next topic. Uh. Yes, That set also makes an appearance in Hocus Pocus. Perhaps the most storage set piece in this movie was missed by most viewers for years. It was only recently that Internet Salutes took a close look at a park fountain that appeared in the scene where Max, Danny Allison, and Factory Banks are celebrating the demise of the Sanderson sisters, and fans determined that this is the very same fountain from the opening credits of the TV show Friends. Right, you do you do the thing? Uh? The fountain is located at the Warner Brothers studio in Burbank and has appeared in all sorts of TV shows and movies dating back to the sixties. It was used in Friends because it looks very similar to the Cherry Hill fountain and Center or Park. The fountain was moved from the Warner Brothers ranch to the main studio lot earlier this year to preserve it, where it was added to the Warner Brothers Studio Tour in Hollywood, which means you can see it and pose for photos with it, and there are still many more traces of classic movies and shows in hocus focus. This was a film that had originally been conceived as a made for TV movie, so the budget was fairly tight, and one place where they cut corners was the costume budget. Specifically for the scene but they filmed the town's Halloween party and for the costumes worn by the townspeople, the producers just dipped into the Disney costume vault and pulled out old outfits that have been worn in prior films. And this was a god cent because, as customer Mary Vault told Glamour in, they had literally run out of money when it came to shooting this scene, and she said, fortunately, I had access to the Walt Disney costume department and they had saved clothes from all the movies they've done, so I went through there and took everything that looked like a costume in some movie. They must have had these three girls and red sequin dresses so I said, let's get that. We'll ask three women to play the supremes, and if you look closely, you'll see that their outfits in the background that we're used in Trawn the Old Treasure Island with Robert Newton, the sword and the rose which I don't know that one, and even costumes from Bette Midler's amy nominated TV version of the stage musical Gypsy, which is the biopic of burlesque dancer Gypsy Rose Lee. And there's a little nod to it in hocus Pocus. When Winniford, played by Bette Midler takes the stage perform she says, Hello, Salem, my name's Winniford. What's yours? And that's a very famous line in Gypsy, when Bitte Midler's character goes on stage says, Hello, everybody, my name is Rose what's yours. I only saw the the Natalie Wood version of Gypsy, but I think she does it in the middle of let me entertain you. Your mom is a musical person, you know any of the Gypsy stuff? He tunes from Gypsy? Bette Midler is a huge blind spot for me. I don't know. I don't know any of the I don't know Gypsy. I don't know beaches. I don't know any beaches. It's bum or sad one. Anyway, Apparently, back in the day used to be able to actually rent the Witch's costumes from hocus Pocus. The studio would just rent out their costumes from their costume vault. At least that's what costomer Mary Vaught says in this Glamor piece. Now, she says, studios keep everything. They have their archives and keep absolutely everything. But at that time it was different. I think the real hocus Pocus costumes, people would just rent them out all the time so they could get money out of them. But then when the movie got more popular, that stopped. I've seen photos of the real costumes and they actually look like they're in pretty good shape even though they were rented out for years. That's cool. H It's like how in UM. I forgot which studio, But sometime in the seventies I think it was MGM. They just I think MGM was like either looking to downsize its actual facility and not store all of their movie props and stuff, or or they just wanted to make some money and wanted to sell some stuff off and get some cash. I want to say it was in nineteen seventy they were selling Dorothy's ruby slippers and just all of this I think stuff gone with the wind and all this stuff. It's like, you know, like when hotels go out of business, like that kind of thing where they just would She's let people in. Yeah, I mean there's like a really look it up. I think this whole Wikipedia page about like the nineteen seventy MGM sale and they sold you know, up to that point, what nineteen seventy, so say, fifty years of the most amazing historic movie memorabilia ever. This is the biggest. It belongs in the museum segment I've ever had on this show. Yeah, it's pretty crazy. We're going to take a quick break, but we'll be right back with more too much information in just a moment. So well, you can't actually wear the same outfits worn by the Sanderson's sisters in Hocus Pocus. You can stay in their house sort of fine print asterix. Uh, you know, consult local dealer for details. Their cottage has recently been recreated in the town of Danvers, Massachusetts, about fifteen minutes away from Salem, as part of the celebration for the Hocus Pocus sequel this year, and Airbnb ran a competition where two guests could stay there for just one night for only thirty one dollars all of us. I don't really understand how all this works economically. I'm guessing was all just a promo for the film, and I think the cottage is independently owned and operated. Um. The big catch is that there's not much in the way of accommodations. There's an outhouse in place of a bathroom, there's no kitchen, there's no TV, there's no air conditioning. But the lucky guests who did manage to make a reservation for this, I think one might only event uh we'll see some uh. I guess this already happened. Were able to see some of the more memorable details from the film, including the spell book, the famous cauldron, a few brooms for flying, and a black cat who looks quite a bit like Thackeray Banks. And now we must come to Thackeray Banks. This movie was made when c g I was still in its infancy, so this was a difficult effect to pull off. The talking cat. It was created with a mix of practical effects and very rough and ready computer effects. It involved nine, yes nine and not for a bit, black cats plus an animatronic robot cat. The nine cats were basically the filmmaker's way of hedging their bets, because you see, if you teach one cat every single trick that you might use in a movie, you're screwed if the cat is having a bad day and refuses to cooperate, which, as anyone would tell you, he's frequently. So Instead, animal handlers will train multiple cats to do different tasks and tricks. Vanessa Shaw, who played Alison Watts, later said there was a whole wall of cats. They all did a different thing. One would bat you, one would jump on you, one would sleep, one would cuttle with you. The fact that there were nine cats was purely a coincidence and not a reference to the old cats having nine lives wives tale. For scenes where Binks speaks, filmmakers either used a real cat and then replaced its head with a primitive c g I version, or they would use one of six animatronic cats to get the job done. At least one of these animatronics found second life on the production of Sabrina the Teenage, which starring Wilson Joan Hart between and two thousand three for the part of the wise cracking Feline Salem. The kids were annoyed with all the cats because each time a new one was brought onto the set, they'd have to become friendly with it, which if you spend any time around cats at all, you know is a herculean task because cats are at the devil. They would have to earn these the new cats trust using a combination of treats and a buzzer, and it was a whole thing. I feel like we say this in every episode, as TBC Fields once said, never work with children or animals. Continuing down, Thackeray Binks Lane Uh. In The Lord of the Movie, he's actually a seventeenth century man who was turned into a cat as punishment for insulting Winnifred Sanderson. The human form of the characters played by actor Sean Murray, who later went on to star in The Crime Procedural and c I S. But they didn't use Murray's actual voice. After he filmed his part, producers decided that his voice sounded too modern to convincingly becoming from a seventeenth century boy, so they call it in. An eighteen year old actor and vocal performer named Jason Marston, who is something of an undercover m v P when it comes to beloved nineties children properties. In fact, he's sort of just he's all. He's all over the T G I F lineup. He plays Eric Matthews, best friend of Boy Meets World. That's the older brother of Corey h He plays DJ's rich boyfriend on Full House, the one who hires Frankie Valley to sing for her, and JT's friend on Step by Step. He also voiced Goofy's son Max in a Goofy movie. That's a hell of a lineup right there. I just want to pause and reflect on that he had a good couple of years. He had a good run, a good spring when I was seventeen. Uh. Marston actually hung out on the set while it was filming because he was working on a television show that was shooting nearby. He was not cast with the voice of Banks till after the film had wrapped, and that's when they called him in to do two or three days of dialogue dubbing. He told The Daily Beast they thought it would be more realistic since the Witch has come from a different time period. For Banks to have an affected accent. Unfortunately, since they had shot the thing already, Marston had to lip sync over the previous guy's performance, both for the live action stuff as well as for the stuff they animated for the cat. As you can imagine, this was something of a chore. Marson recalled the animator in charge of Banks was meticulous, wonderful euphemism there. He said, I'll never forget. There were times when I'm like, oh, I landed. He's like, no, you were off half a frame. H He was so nitpicky about it in the best way. The frustrating part was like, I wish this is nothing against Sean. I mean, this is the way it was, But I wish I would have been able to use my own rhythms because I had to actually match what was already there. So that's enough about cats. Now we have to give equal time to dogs. This is see in the movie where the Sanders and sisters meet a man dressed up as the Devil for Halloween, and hilariously they believe him to be the real Devil and are pumped at the opportunity to meet the Master. They go to a suburban home, only to be chased out by his dog with red bat wings satan wings. I don't really know what he's supposed to be dressed as anyway. That dog is Kathiny Jimmy's real life dog, who is named al Finney Big Albert Finney Fan. I don't I don't know. The dog also made a cameo in Sister Act as well, and the so called devil and his wife in this movie are probably familiar to pop culture buffs. It's Gary Marshall who was famous for the as the TV exam I could even created Happy Days, Laverne and Shirley and Mark and Mindy, before branching out into directing stuff like Pretty Woman, Runaway Bride, The Princess Diaries, Overboard with Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell, and the tear jerker Beaches with Bett Mitler, which is probably how he wound up in here. He also did small acting parts, including the baseball team owner in A League of Their Own, which was directed by his sister, Penny Marshall, who plays his wife in this movie. Mm hmm. She famously played Laverne and Laverne and Shirley and produced the movie version of Bewitched in two thousand five, so I don't know, a nice little bit of synergy there, but uh yeah, she's married to her brother in uh hocus Pocus, which is weird. Um. I remember when I was in high school and I was we did Greece for Drama Society, and the director cast one of my friends to play one of the t birds and he acts Dent Lee. So he says, cast this guy's sister to play his corresponding pink lady, because you know, all the tea bers have names like Duffy, Duty, Sonny, all like no one knows like who they are. And then all of a sudden, on the first day when everybody showed up, he realized that his sister was playing his love interest and they swapped parts pretty quickly. That tracks well. Incest is gross, but you know what else is gross? Moths flying out of your mouth. There's a scene in the movie where the character Billy Butcherson has moths fly out of his mouth. Seeing how this is before the age of c g I, they had to figure out a way to do this with practical effects, which meant that he had moths in his mouth. Character of Billy Butcherson is played by the famous character actor Doug Jones, who is by virtue of being tall and skinny, in almost every monster suit you can imagine. Um. He especially in stuff directed by Garland Dotro. He is the pale man, the guy with the who puts his hands in his eyes in um the most horrifying sequence in Pan's Labyrinth. He's the fish like Abe Sapien in Hellboy and its sequel, and basically reprises the character in a completely different film, Shape of Water, a Best Picture winner The Shape of Water. Uh. He's the silver surfer in Fantastic four movie. He's one of the creepy gentleman and Buffy he's an alien and falling skies. His working relationship with Gambled Detorto dates back to Mimic. You ever here about this movie, the movie where they create humanoid cockroaches. Yeah, it's gross. Doug Jones plays one of them down. Yeah. Um. But hocus Pocus is one of his first major roles, and he actually tweaked his dialogue a little bit. When Billy is re animated and calls Winifred a wench. The line was initially supposed to be bitch, but Doug Jones thought that was a little much for Disney movie and made the edit. He seems like a lovely kind of man, and in no way do we wish that he had moths shoved in his mouth, but such was his lot. You can't fight City Hall, you can't fight moths. Uh. Interview with Buddy Disgusting. Makeup and special effects designer Tony Gardner said that Jones wore a mouth rig phrasing which can be best to be described as a latex pocket attached to denture's that blocked off Jones's throat, basically a dental damn. This was so that he wouldn't swallow them, the moths, and that they wouldn't get so wet that they couldn't then fly out. God, that's gross anyway. At the appointed time, a trainer would place the moths in the dental damn pocket with a pair of tweezers, under supervision from a Humane Society rap. Unfortunately, it took them several takes to nail that shot, which meant poor Doug Jones just had a whole afternoon of moth mouth. Sorry, Ali, we're gonna get the mothman prophecies for you soon, but it settle for Stay tuned for my my full length, My dinner with Andre Parody, that's just my dinner with moth mouth. Oh well, as you can gather considering the fact that they made this man actually have moths in his mouth. Practical effects were very much the name of the game. During the production of hocus Pocus, they really wanted everything to be done for real, and this was down to the jack O lanterns used in the movie, which, as you can imagine jack o lanterns, pumpkins that have been carved out sitting under hot lights for days, maybe even weeks at a time started to smell, and I guess after not very long, the set started smell disgusting. Hocus Pocus set decorator Rosemary Brandenburg later said we vowed we wouldn't use any store bought Halloween decorations, so we made everything from scratch, from carved pumpkins to scarecrows, which is ghosts, you name it. It was a blast. There was a layered quality to hocus Pocus that I continue to strive for my work. But she also added that her most visceral memory of the sets was the overwhelming smell of rotting pumpkins. Sara Jessica Par's main memory from the production was a little less disgusting. In fact, it's kind of whimsical. In an interview with Stephen Colbert in two thousand eighteen, she admitted that she doesn't have very many memories of filming hoaxux Pocus, but she loved flying during the broom sequences. In actually loved it so much that she would hang out in the flying rig in between breaks on the set. Once again, this was just a master class and practical effects. There was a giant grid mounted to the ceiling of the sound stage that was capable of flying the Sanders and sisters anywhere on the stage that they wanted at any angle, and these actors would be suspended something like thirty feet off the ground, which sounds terrifying to me, But Sarah Jessica Parker loved it. As she told Colbert, they'd call cut, and maybe they go to lunch or change the lens, and I would just stay up there. I realized, like I fit an entire New York Times up the back of the corset, and I found that the harness was comfortable, So I would just sit up there and read the Times while people took their brakes or change the camera or sometimes want to lunch. Honestly, this kind of sounds like exactly what I would imagine Sarah Jisco Parker would have done on the set of hocus Pocus. I mean, perfect training for sex in the city. Another of my favorite practical effects from hocus Pocus is when they turned Bette Midler's character to stone at the end of the movie spoilers uh c g. I was still in its infancy again, and painting her like a living statue would have looked like something you would see in Washington Square park Um kind of corny. So instead, the production team went with seven different statues which showed the progression of the flesh and blood Winnifred Sanderson or whatever, which is Are they flesh and blood? I guess they are turning to stone? So these statues were all swapped out as the scene progressed, um and in our it belongs in a museum segment for this episode. One of these statues currently resides in the planet Hollywood in Orlando, Florida, along with the fleshy spell book. Product was well not this part isn't sad, This part was probably quite happy. Production was completed on February, which meant no more moths in a young Doug Jones's mouth. I just can't it's mouth. Um. But Disney fumbled so close to the end zone. Rather than released the movie during Halloween because it's a Halloween movie, they opted to release it wide Midsummer, famously the most Halloweeny of times, July. The idea was that they would take advantage of all the kids out on summer vacation and avoid competition with other Halloween centric releases, specifically Disney's own Night Number four Christmas, which is not a bad idea except for the fact that Summer of nine also featured some movies you may have heard of, like Rookie of the Year, Free Willie, Dennis The Menace, a reissue of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, and a small independent movie that would go on to have no impact on the wider film industry at large. Jordan, have you heard of this one? Jurassic Jurassic Park? Am I saying that right? Those idiots debuted their little Witch movie against Jurassic Park instead of putting out October Spielberg's Jurassic Park. Still that probably scheduled it against it on purpose. It's crushed them like the Moth on the Like a Moth and Doug Jones Mohler's The film debut in fourth place, which, honestly pretty good, pretty respectable considering everything we just rattled off. Earned a reported thirty nine five mill in its initial theatrical run against the twenty eight million budget, so made its money back. But yeah, um, there are some involved with this movie. They got the distinct impression that Disney was just trying to bury it. Um. Aside from a set visit from Entertainment Tonight and the three stars appearing individually on The Today Show the week of its release, there were almost no contemporary interviews out there and very little promo for the film at the time, as Jason Marsden, the voice of Thackeray Banks and no stranger to the Disney machine at the time, later said it wasn't built up as this landmark thing that Disney was going to launch. He joked that if there was a press tour for the movie, they didn't invite me. David Kirshner had similar sentiments, saying I never got the impression that Disney were gung ho. They put the trailer out there and that's about all they did for it. The movie was also torn apart, much like a moth in Doug Jones's mouth. Focus Pocus was torn apart by critics. Jane Siskel called it a dreadful witches comedy with nothing funny to say. Roger Ebert gave it a mere one star, writing of the film's many problems, the greatest maybe that all three whitches are thoroughly unpleasant. They don't have personalities, they have behavior patterns and decibel levels. That's good. A good movie inspires the audience to subconsciously ask, give me more. The witches in this one inspired my silent cry get out of here. Oh man, that's not as good. Hocus Pocus is a film desperately in need of self discipline. It's one of those projects where you imagine everyone laughing and applauding each other after every scene because they're so convinced they're wild and crazy guys. But watching the movie is like attending a party you weren't invited to and where you don't know anybody and they're all in on a joke but won't explain it to you. Ebert not wonder Pool Punches Entertainment Weekly was no kinder, calling it a piece of corny, slapstick trash, and saying it was acceptably scary, silly kid father that adults will find only mildly insulting unless they're bet Middler fans, in which case it's depressing as hell. To this day, the film holds a thirty eight percent critical score on Rotten Tomatoes, so all in all, a bit of a sad trombone. Thora Birch told The Rap After that initial disappointment were off, there was just a period of dead silence about the film, like nobody talked about it, nobody watched It felt like that lasted for about ten years, is and then the cast gradually noticed this ground swell around the movie. They said that the cult status of the movie sort of dawned them them all at different times, but the average was around two thousand seven two thousand eight. So what happened, Well, First of all, it became a constant feature on both the Disney Channel and the Disney owned ABC Family Channel for years, anchoring the multi week block of Festive Halloween programming, and of course was also a huge hit on home video. Hocus Focus was first released in two thousand two, but sales really started speeding up in two thousand eight, So yeah, it's around. You know that that that jibes within the cast started noticing that they were being asked about it more at fan events and stuff, and every October since two thousand eleven, the movie has made more than one million dollars in DVD sales a year, and that figure is sure to rise this year with the release of the Hocus Focus sequel. In September, director Kenny Ortega spoke about the film slow Burn and interview with Forbes. Talking about the initial flop, he said, Honestly, at that point, I thought it was all over for me. I thought to myself, I'm never going to get a chance to do this ever again. My career as a filmmaker is all over. Then over the years everything changes. What I've learned is don't give up. I believed in Hocus Pocus, the girls believed in it, and even though it wasn't found by audiences immediately, the generations have believed in it. And you know, for a movie that neither Haigl nor myself have ever seen or especially care too, I think that that's a beautiful sentiment to end on. Bett Mitler has talked about the film's late blooming success during a Reddit a m a in nah, um, that's amazing, she said, I am shocked. I'm totally shocked. All of us are just stunned by the success of the movie. Kathy, Sarah, Jessica and I have talked about it. We are totally thrilled to death because when it came out, it laid a tiny little bit of an egg. She said, so expect much and now look at it. October is hocus Pocus month. And she also, well, okay, let's give her. Let's give her that. She also told the BBC that it's her favorite among all of the films that she's made, though she doesn't rewatch it much. Kathey m Jimmy, on the other hand, has made an annual tradition of rewatching hocus Pocus with her family every year on August. Apparently. I don't know why that's the case, because it wasn't when it was released and it's not Halloween. Maybe it's in between when it was released in Halloween. I don't know, it's the way point between when it was released in Halloween. But you know, honestly, if it makes Kathy and Jimmy happy, I think this was all worth it. The movie, the podcast, all of it, All of it, folks, Thank you for listening. This has been too much information. I'm Alex Hegel and I'm Jordan run Tug. We'll get you next time. Too Much Information was a production of I Heart Radio. The show's executive producers are Noel Brown and Jordan Runtalk. The supervising producer is Mike John's. The show was researched, written and hosted by Jordan runt Talk and Alex Hegel, 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