Controversial Scenes So Bad They Were Pulled From Movies + Did Disney Ruin ‘Lilo and Stitch’ for Mike? + Trailer Park:  F1 and Why Brad Pitt Will Never Play a Grandpa

00:00:00
Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome back to movie Mike's movie podcast. I am your host Movie Mike. Today I want to talk about controversial scenes that were so bad they had to be pulled from movies. It's actually inspired by this week's movie review, Lelo and Stitch. Could you believe they pulled a scene out of Lelo and Stitch? Which I've been waiting for this movie for so long. I've been following all of the campaign, all the merch that's been dropped. If you are a longtime listener to this podcast, you know Lelo and Stitch is my favorite Disney movie of all time.

00:00:30
Speaker 2: Did they do it justice?

00:00:32
Speaker 1: Or will I be sobbing here on the podcast because they ruined my favorite movie? In the trailer Park, we'll be talking about F one and why I think Brad Pitt is never going to play a grandpa. Thank you for being here, Thank you for being subscribed. Shout out to the Monday Morning movie crew. He Now let's talk movies from the Nastrolle podcast network and this is movie Mike's Movie Podcast. Some of these scenes are so bad. I just say to myself, what were they thinking? How did they think this was going to be perceived of course they were gonna end up eating to cut this. Sometimes I feel like filmmakers or some animators were just trying to get one over on people. Other times I think it was just bad timing when things happen in the real world that you had no idea that was going to happen when this movie comes out two years later.

00:01:18
Speaker 2: Just unfortunate timing.

00:01:20
Speaker 1: But what inspired this entire topic is, did you know there was a scene from Lelo and Stitch that had to be taken out because they were worried that kids were gonna.

00:01:30
Speaker 2: Start doing it?

00:01:31
Speaker 1: And this is a thing that I didn't really think a whole lot about as a kid, But once you see movies come out and kids trying to emulate what they see on the big screen, you have a problem. And there is a scene in Lelo and Stitch that was taken out of the Disney Plus version where Leelo is hiding from her sister and she goes into a dryer. And you watch that scene, you probably think nothing of it. Leelo getting in a dryer trying to hide from her sister. Her sister gets on top of the dryer and makes it sound like she has left the room by kicking the door with her foot, and then Lelo, thinking the coast is clear, gets out of the dryer, but her sister has left the trap she left down like this little blanket thing or a big towel, and then immediately swoops up Lelo and traps her in there, and she's now captured her. The reason they cut this scene is because what we're kids gonna do? They were gonna see Lelo getting into a dryer and thinking that is okay, and you can't do that, you can't have that. There were even instances where back in the day, whenever they're making back to the future, the original concept for the time machine was not the DeLorean.

00:02:40
Speaker 2: It was a refrigerator.

00:02:41
Speaker 1: But what would kids have done. They'd got into the refrigerator. So same thing happened here, except back to the future. It never made it to the film Lelo and Stitch. This actually came out. This is the version I know. I have rewatched it on Disney Plus. And what they've replaced it with is Lelo gets into all almost this little end table that when you look at the layout of the room, that it's a launder room really doesn't make sense. It's almost like this little cupboard and she hides behind a pizza box that's kind of in the opening of the cupboard, so it was really just them taking out the dryer, putting in this cupboard, and she just peacefully hiding behind a pizza box. They didn't want kids climbing into dryers causing real life injuries. Some people argue the other side, saying they're being a little bit too sensitive and overprotective. But you got to think about childhood safety, and you think about Disney not wanting to get sued. So with some of these edits, there's this line you have to walk between the artistic vision of what the filmmaker wants, in this case, director Chris Sanders, and what the studio wants to make sure that they don't get in trouble over a scene.

00:03:47
Speaker 2: And this wasn't the only thing they had.

00:03:49
Speaker 1: To change for Leelo and Stitch, but the other thing they changed never made it to theaters and never made it to home video. And the version we all know there's a scene where a spaceship it's hijacked by some characters and they're flying it over the ocean and it ends up crashing. In the original version, a plane, a commercial plane gets hijacked and then flies through a city and crashes into buildings. Now, Lilo and Stitch came out in two thousand and two, and it was being made, it was being developed prior to the attacks that went down on September eleventh, So before this was the thing that you just commonly see. Now you may say, maybe that's a little bit too adult for a family Disney movie, but that aside, it wasn't out of the norm for a movie, an action movie to have a scene like this of somebody taking over a plane and crashing it into something. Look at con Air, But in a post nine to eleven world, you couldn't do that, especially right after they ended up changing the commercial airplane to a spaceship and instead of it being in downtown, they moved the scene out to the Hawaiian mountains. So I think that one was a great call. Next up, this one's along the same lines. Movie also came out in the year two thousand and two.

00:05:03
Speaker 2: But in two thousand and one they put out.

00:05:06
Speaker 1: The first teaser trailer for Spider Man, the first one with Toby McGuire, And this was the first thing I remember seeing about this movie that had my jaw on the floor because me being such a huge Spider Man fan, I was like, this movie looks amazing. And in this pro mo, you see this group of burglars robbing a bank and they all go in with their guns. So they robbed the bank, then they get away in a helicopter. Then Spider Man comes to save the day. They shoot some webs, he catches their helicopter between the Twin Towers, so you have this helicopter dangling in between Tower one and between Tower two. And this was the big focal point of Spider Man, the first time anybody had seen the character at this level, and the Twin Towers just.

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Speaker 2: Happened to be a really big part of that.

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Speaker 1: In the poster that first came out for Spider Man, you see Toby Maguire's and in the reflection of his bug eyes you see the Twin Towers there.

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Speaker 2: And they use this a lot.

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Speaker 1: To show that this movie was taking place in New York City, because what is more iconic than the Twin Towers in New York City pre two thousand and one. But then the teaser trailer comes out and nine to eleven happens, so they pulled the teaser. They pulled the posters, and none of this footage was ever included in the real movie, which I tried to find some info on why this was even created because Sam Raimi was working on the movie.

00:06:33
Speaker 2: But it almost feels.

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Speaker 1: Like they shot a mini movie just to give the studios some test footage. So maybe that's all this really was. We were never supposed to have a bank robbery scene like this in the first Spider Man movie because it really doesn't fit in anywhere. But it's just kind of eerie to think that the Twin Towers were such a big part of this movie's DNA in the beginning, in the marketing and the tragedy that happened soon after this up next from nine teen seventy seven The Rescuers, And before I talk about what happened with the Rescuers, I want to address one of the biggest rumors that I remember about Disney growing up. There's a scene about three fourths away through the movie when you see Simba, Pumba and Timone in the first Lion King movie and they're all laying on their backs. They're looking up at the stars. Simba gets up and walks over to an edge of a cliff because he's kind of being made fun of by the two other guys. They don't really get him, so he goes to the edge of the cliff. He flops on the ground and then a cloud of dust is just erupted. And the big rumor, the big myth, was that the letters sex gets spelled out in that dust. And this was largely due to the fact that at this time VHS's were now really popular. And this was right before I probably five, six, maybe even ten years before DVDs. But people were now pausing things because you can watch it at home, and before you could kind of hide things in movies because you were watching it in theaters. You weren't watching it again, so if you missed something in a second, you aren't going to catch it. But I looked all through the bowels of the Internet and this was completely just a rumor. There was no truth to it. Maybe now some screen grabs have been photoshopped. It never spelled the words. Disney never admitted to it. It didn't really happen. There were other instances where Disney was accused of hiding other adult things on VHS covers. I think The Little Mermaid was one where there were a couple with.

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Speaker 2: The Little Mermaid.

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Speaker 1: One was that Homeboy gets an erection while giving a speech during the movie, and the other one was on the VHS cover that if you look in the middle of all the golden things, that you see something that resembles something naughty. And those were always this myth that went along with Disney that they were working things into their movies that were not appropriate for kids. But before VHS and before DVDs, you could probably get away with some of these because it's just a quick second. If you don't see it, it's gone. But what happened with The Rescuers in nineteen seventy seven was not a myth. This one actually happened. They had to go back and fix it after it came out on VHS, so this was actually seen in theaters. There is a scene in The Rescuers that a very questionable background image appears where you see the two characters, the rodent heroes, Bianca and Bernard. They're flying through the city on a sardine box on the back of their buddy Orville, which I loved Orville in The Rescuers and The Rescuers down Under, and what do you see inside one of the buildings. It's an image of a topless woman who can be seen through one of the windows. It's not even an animated character. It was one of the animators who took a nude image of a woman and just like pasted it onto the background. Because it happened so quickly that you would not see it if you did not pause it. I'm quite surprised how anybody even discovered this back in the day, because Disney was forced to re release the VHS with the edit. So maybe it's just one of those instances, like right now, I'll be watching something and I'll posit it to go grab a drink or something from the kitchen, and it's always kind of funny when I pause it on something where like somebody looks like they're sneezing. I'm like, that's an unfortunate screen grab.

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Speaker 2: I kind of think.

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Speaker 1: That's what happened here, because why else would you posit in the scene. You're probably just getting up to do something. You hit pause, and you're like, wait a minute, it's not a naked woman in this animated movie. So that was a big controversy. Disney did say that it wasn't one of the animators, but instead it was inserted in post production. I don't know if that was true or they were just covering themselves, but it's just crazy to me that this got through and they had to recall three point four million copies of this video. You know, not everybody, if anybody wants send back in their copy of The Rescuers to get the new version without the topless woman.

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Speaker 2: This is now a relic.

00:11:12
Speaker 1: Next up, since we're talking about Disney, I do love Disney, but man, they have a checkered past. If you look into the early Disney vault, there are some questionable movies that they try to erase from our memories. But it's something that I've learned as cinema is forever. And in nineteen ninety three they put out an R rated movie about college football starring Halle Berry, and it instantly found a place in cinematic infamy. Not really for the performances of anybody, because I think otherwise this wouldn't be as memorable of the movie, although I do hear a lot of people say this is one of their favorite sports movies of all time, but it is the program and the craziest part about the program. In this controversial scene, is this was actually shown in theaters. The moment in the movie where you have several players we're trying to cope with the pressures of playing football at a major university, and they're all dealing with this pressure in different ways. Some of them are drinking, some of them are doing drugs. Others are just studying and trying to keep their mind focused on the game. But the scene that was cut from the movie shortly after its release was them getting in the middle of a road and lying down in between oncoming traffic. I understand the message they were trying to get across. Here's the actual scene from the program. It's still on YouTube. It's not a great high quality rip, but here is that moment when one of the players tries to convince everybody else, Hey, come lay in the middle of the road with me. Hoy, let's get out of here.

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Speaker 2: Hey fo.

00:12:45
Speaker 1: They're talking about how good I amazur pressure, what's some drinks across the line the past.

00:12:51
Speaker 2: You can't take the heat off the highway.

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Speaker 1: You can't take the heat get out of the highway. So he is trying to prove to all of his other teammates that I can do this, I can stay calm, cool and collected and lay here in the middle of the street reading I think it's a newspaper or a book, and he's just chilling there as cars are zooming past him. This scene actually came out in theaters. I was reading some of the YouTube comments and some people say they went to the theater on opening night, this scene was there, their friends saw it maybe the next night in a different city, and it was gone. And the reason it was removed was because of the death of a kid named Michael Shingldecker who he along with the group of friends, tried to imitate this and he died. And they did this because they saw the movie. Probably did it, I think on opening night, and there were a lot of other copycats who did this around the country. So you had the one in Pennsylvania, the one in New Jersey. And Disney owned Touchstone Pictures initially tried to defend themselves. Here's the statement they put out. The scene in the program clearly depicts this adolescent action as an irresponsible and dangerous stunt by a troubled and heavily intoxicated individual, and in no way advocates or encourages this type of behavior. I understand what they mean in that statement, but they also made it look cool, and they made that scene be the most memorable scene. Even me watching it now on YouTube as I was doing this research, it's a really well shot scene. I wonder exactly how they did it because you see the players all lining up one after another on the road essentially on the little dotted line, and.

00:14:34
Speaker 2: You see the cars getting really close to them.

00:14:36
Speaker 1: So I have to assume they probably filmed it on an empty road with just the players, and then filmed in that same shot you take away the players and just have the car zooming by them, and then impost you mix the two shots together because otherwise you're like, man, this is making me uncomfortable, even though I know they're going to be okay. But what they were trying to show is like this is the test, Like, hey, you want to bond with us, You want to show you can handle the pressure. This is the most pressure. So I think where Disney and Touchstone messed up was they made.

00:15:08
Speaker 2: The scene look too cool.

00:15:10
Speaker 1: And if you make a scene look too cool, people are gonna want to emulate it and somebody is gonna get hurt. In this case, people did so long story short, do not try this at home, kids. Speaking of not trying things at home, there was a scene cut from Jackass, the movie, which also came out in two thousand and two. This is a big history lesson on the year two thousand and two, more importantly on what not to do. But Johnny Knoxville said that they had to cut out a scene where they got choked out by a stunt man, a famous stunt guy by the.

00:15:42
Speaker 2: Name of Jean LaBelle, who.

00:15:44
Speaker 1: Is somebody who was a hero of Johnny Knoxville. He was a fighter, a stuntman, a professional wrestler. He was nicknamed Judo Jean. Also called the Godfather of grappling, He is credited with popularizing grappling and professional ding circles, serving as a precursor.

00:16:02
Speaker 2: To modern mixed martial arts. So, dude is legit.

00:16:06
Speaker 1: And what I love about Jackass is they have the big, elaborate stunts that they planned, that they spend more money on, but then they always have these little one off skits that is probably just them on a rainy day saying, man, we can't film our big stunt today. Let's just grab a camera and go do something random, like fight somebody in a department store with boxing gloves, and I think sometimes that has given us some of the best moments in Jackass. And what they did in Jackass the movie that they ended up cutting was this stunt man, Jean LaBelle, choking them out, and it was a great scene. They all got choked out, and the way he does it, I guess there's a specific way you can choke somebody out. You can cut off their oxygen, which is not good the person will die, or you can just cut off the blood circulating to I don't know exactly what part of the bundy their brain, but LaBelle knows how to cut off the blood circulation causing you to pass out, and that is what he did to the Jackass guys. Johnny Knoxville was the first one to be choked out Boom unconscious. He woke up and thought he was still a child. Chris Pontius said he actually had to get choked out twice because the first time they didn't film it right, so he had to get choked out again, and then they.

00:17:22
Speaker 2: Just ended up not using the scene.

00:17:24
Speaker 1: Man if I got choked out and woke up and I didn't know what was going on, and I thought I'd reverted back to my childhood.

00:17:31
Speaker 2: That would be wild.

00:17:32
Speaker 1: So in essence, I guess cutting your blood off is the smarter way to do it. But if kids saw this scene and thought, oh, I want to choke out my friend. Here's how he did it, not knowing that this guy is actually highly trained, he and I say he coulse, it'd probably be a kid because it's probably something I would have done because I love jackass, although I never really tried to emulate.

00:17:56
Speaker 2: A whole lot. Probably the only thing I did.

00:17:59
Speaker 1: I really wanted to race in shopping carts, but I also didn't like getting in trouble, so I never did that. I did go down a giant hill on a skateboard on my stomach because I thought it was a jackass type stunt that they would do, and I was wearing a sweater. My sweater got caught in the wheel of the skateboard and it just started like twirling around and then it spun my hand over and then proceeded to drag it on the hot street in the Texas summer and obliterated the skin on the top of my right hand. Even to this day, I still have this scar where I peeled off all the skin, trying to be like Jackass. So that's the only thing I ever tried to emulate. But the reason they cut the scene is because dumb kids like me were gonna see that and try to choke out their friends and somebody would end up dying. So maybe they learned from the program. We can't put this scene in there, even though it looks cool. We'll move forward to the next decade. Twenty thirteen, Gangster Squad comes out, and there's a scene that was actually in the trailer of this movie where you see these gangsters trying to assassinate the heroes of the movie, and they do so in a crowded movie theater, and much like what we were talking about earlier with Leelo and Stitch and having somebody hijack a plan and crashing into some buildings in a pre nine to eleven world, probably not a crazy.

00:19:20
Speaker 2: Thing to include in a movie.

00:19:22
Speaker 1: In a pre twenty twelve world, what happened in Aurora, Colorado might not have been as crazy of a thing to put in a movie, But just the year before, in twenty twelve, a gunman walked into a screening of The Dark Knight Rises in Aurora, Colorado. He opened fire into the crowd, killing twelve people and injuring seventy, And this was such a horrific scene. It was one of the worst tragedies involving guns in the twenty tens. First of all, just awful for all the lives that were lost, all the trauma that the survivors went through. On another level, I think for me and maybe a lot of other people who I can recognize, I'm lucky that I didn't have to go through this. I didn't lose people in this tragedy. But I think we also feel things by seeing things like this in the news, empathizing with people. But ever since this happened in twenty twelve, I think about this constantly as much as I go to the movies. And it's not so much that I get scared every time I go. It's more so when I see somebody get up out of the corner of my eye, or I see somebody walking around that maybe doesn't look like they know where they're going, or they walk in halfway through the movie and I'm like, why are you just walking in now? My head always goes to this incident. So this is one of those cases where not only did it affect everybody there who lost their lives, who lost the loved one, I think it also sent a wave throughout the country and throughout the world of taking a place that we all feel safe at. For me, I feel the most safe in a movie theater. That is my comfort zone, like me in a dark room watching a movie. It allows me to escape the world and go to places that I never would have otherwise. It's like my dreams in real life because I just walked through a hallway and immediately I'm engulfed and immersed in this different world. That is my safe place. But when this happened in twenty twelve, it took that away a little bit, and it made it feel just like, oh, this isn't as safe as I wanted to be, as I needed to be, And I suddenly started to feel very vulnerable at times and had to start thinking of how would I get out of here? Do I want to be in this theater right now? And anytime somebody gets up, my head always goes there. So obviously Warner Brothers knew that this scene wasn't going to fly post twenty twelve. They ended up removing it and replaced it with a sequence taking place in Chinatown. To date, this scene has not been released in any form, And for me now, this is what I remember most about Gangster Squad and how they had to cut this controversial scene. And like I said, not all of these were awful decisions from the beginning.

00:22:09
Speaker 2: Sometimes it's just a time and place.

00:22:12
Speaker 1: And they had no way to know that something like this was going to happen when they filmed the scene.

00:22:18
Speaker 2: Just overall, just awful.

00:22:19
Speaker 1: Got a few more left for you here The Santa Claus in nineteen ninety four. Tim Allen in the movie pretended to call a sex hot line. There is a moment where he jokes around and he calls the number one eight hundred Spank Me, And the filmmakers didn't know this at the time, or later they claimed they didn't know this at the time, One eight hundred Spank Me was a real sex hot line. So this scene made it out into theaters, it made it onto the home release, and two years after the release of the movie, the hot line was still available, meaning that anybody who watched The Santa Claus saw that number and ended up calling it would actually get a service on the other side of it. The scene was eventually cut from the movie to prevent any impressionable audience. Again me ninety four, while I was probably three years old, I would be impressionable and want to call that number just because I thought it was funny.

00:23:16
Speaker 2: And as a kid, I love prank calling people.

00:23:20
Speaker 1: It doesn't matter whether there was a number, if I could find it, I would grow through the phone book if anybody gave out their number in any way. Sometimes my school would send out directories, which I.

00:23:30
Speaker 2: Don't know why they did this.

00:23:31
Speaker 1: I don't think they do this anymore, but they would have like all the families listed in their numbers, and I would prank call people. I would be in third grade pre calling people I didn't even know in fifth grade just because I thought it was funny. And it is always interesting to me whenever movies or TV shows include numbers, and a lot of the times just big fake numbers that are so blatantly fake, like five five five six two two two, which I hope that's not real number, but you gotta be careful about things like this. So yeah, that was pretty dumb and that could have been easily prevented. Also in nineteen ninety nine, Toy Story two a scene that was later cut from the movie is there's a moment where Stinky Pete, who is the old prospector, he is talking to two barbies and he is being kind of creepy, and he offers the two barbies a role in Toy Story three, with the implication that they might give him something in return. So you think old creepy guy in a position of power talking to too young in this case dolls, but they represent women saying, you know you want to roll in this next movie. If you do a little something for me, I can do a little something for you. And the reason this was cut was in twoenty and nineteen, the Me Too movement came around and suddenly things like this weren't funny anymore. Not only were they not funny anymore, we should have never been joking about things like this, And the fact that it made it into a Pixar movie joking about getting girls a role in an upcoming movie is pretty awful. The fact that things in Hollywood have happened that are just horrible when it comes to casting people and much like Stinky Pete in the situation being in positions of power to offer roles to young women with the hopes of getting something else out of them. That that is so prevalent that a Pixar movie would include it as a joke, saying like, oh, here's this all, Oh, I know what he is doing. Oh oh that is awful. That is really bad and shows you just how just dark Hollywood can be. So I'm glad that something like this would never be included, never even be thought about anymore. But back in nineteen ninety nine, this went through all the layers. The other thing that is just astonishing about this is animation takes forever. There are so many levels that a scene has to go through to make it to a movie, and Toy Story just have these infamous scenes at the end of the movies where it's like, here are these bloopers. Even those have to be edited and drawn, and there's so many levels where you don't have leftover b roll footage from an animated movie because you have to work on every single scene.

00:26:33
Speaker 2: It takes a lot to cut something out of a movie.

00:26:36
Speaker 1: So all that work that goes into it, all of these layers that it has to go through to make it into the movie, and this joke made it into Toy Story.

00:26:43
Speaker 2: Too. Crazy that doesn't make me feel good. Let's move on. I have two final movies for you here.

00:26:49
Speaker 1: In twenty nineteen, a movie we can all laugh at was The Cat's Live Action Movie, Awful all.

00:26:54
Speaker 2: The way around.

00:26:55
Speaker 1: Probably one of the biggest box office bombs of all time, definitely the worst movie of the twenty tens.

00:27:01
Speaker 2: You had so many famous.

00:27:03
Speaker 1: People in this movie too, like Taylor Swift, who thought this was a good idea. But what happened here and what was cut and changed from this movie is something I've never really heard of. They actually went back in and tried to fix some of the CGI because the controversy this movie created was that it was so bad people were walking out of the theater. It was getting dragged on rotten Tomatoes. They hated this movie so much audiences and critics alike that they had to change scenes to make them look better, because a lot of it came from the CGI where there were moments where you had these cat characters suddenly have human hands because they forgot to edit in and change the human hands into cat hands.

00:27:49
Speaker 2: Cat pause.

00:27:51
Speaker 1: There were other moments where things were left on the characters that shouldn't have been left on the characters, where it just made them look like they did know what they were doing when putting out cats. So they actually sent out a memo to theaters saying, Hey, we're gonna provide you guys with a new and updated version of this movie that you can start showing. So this one happened while this movie was still in theaters. They went back, made changes and it didn't help. Didn't do this movie any good. But what an unusual turn. And finally, let's talk about the Mean Girls musical remake that came out last year. It was a big deal for them to get Lindsay Lohan to come back. A lot of headlines came out that was part of her return to the Spotlight. But in this version of the movie, Megan the Stallion who plays herself, makes a joke about Lindsay Lohan. She's like filming this video like on TikTok or Instagram, and she says, we are going back, red Y two k Firecrotch is back. And this is in regard to Lindsay Lohan's character. Why would you ask somebody to come back and make a big cameo in one of the movies that she's most known for, only to make a firecrotch joke, which is also such a dated joke that is so nineties or early two thousands. When the original Mean Girls came out, knowing that people had used this term against Lindsay Lohan and tabloids and just in the media to degrade her, why would you ask her back to this movie and then have this joke. So Lindsay Lohan took public issue with this joke, saying she was very hurt and disappointed by this reference in the film. So they actually went back in once the movie was released digitally and on streaming, they took that joke oheat of the movie. So justice for Lindsay Lohan. I'm glad this movie didn't do as well as they wanted it to. It should have never made fun of her. I'll come back and I'll give my spoiler free review of Leelo and Stitch. Did I love it or did I hate it?

00:30:02
Speaker 2: Let's get into it now.

00:30:03
Speaker 1: A spoiler free movie review of Leelo and Stitch, the live action movie. I've been waiting for now for twenty three years. Leelo and Stitch is my favorite Disney movie of all time. I went all out. I reverted back to my childhood at the end of this review. If you're watching on YouTube or if you're only listening on the podcast, you gotta go watch it because I got all of the exclusive merch to regal. So I'm gonna do a review of my popcorn bucket, which I got, the one that looks like Stitch. It is my favorite thing ever now and there's actually a big story behind it of how Kelsey tracked it down for me and then we went to go see it in theaters and I just couldn't help myself to get all this merch because it's all so cute and adorable. So stick around to the end of this review to watch it on YouTube, and if you're only listening to it on the podcast, go to YouTube dot com slash Mike Dstro or follow me on TikTok because I'm gonna post some stuff over there as well. Well, let's get into this review. As I said, aside this popcorn Bucket for now, which I can't really spoil it, I'm only going to talk about some of the differences that changed it a little bit. But overall, my feeling going into it is I didn't want them to ruin my favorite Disney movie, and I've been critical of live action Disney movies in the past. I've called some of them cash grabs, And then whenever you see your favorite one get made, you see your feelings start to change and you really see how it's a lot different when it's your favorite movie. What I realized was they had to change a lot of things in adapting it to live action, because when you look at the story of Lelo and Stitch, it's actually quite sad. Leelo loses her parents and her sister, Nannie is now her mom, and their relationship has changed because they were really good at being sisters, but now Nannie is having to be the mom and the dad taking care of her, trying to keep a job, trying to keep a roof over her head, and Lilo is going through a lot by losing her parents. She also doesn't have friends, and that's all you want. She just wants to have a friend. She wishes upon a star, which is actually Stitch's spaceship crash landing into Hawaii, and then she meets Stitch, and then Stitch becomes this new force in her life who was designed to destroy, was designed to tear everything up that he came in contact with. By Jumba, who was played in this movie by Zach Galifanakis. So overall they change things because I realized that story is actually quite sad. When you start seeing this with real life people and you see Leela as not an animated character, you see how it really kind of talks about people who lose their parents are being threatened by the state to be taken away from each other. You see it as somebody who is struggling to keep a job and just pay the bills. At the start of the movie, the social worker comes out and sees all the unpaid bills on their table, and you see also how the kids are bullying Lelo, and you're like, man, the story is quite sad here. When whenever you see it in animated form, even though at its core it's still a sad story, it doesn't really hit the same way because it's a little bit more playful. It's a little bit more fun when the girls are being mean to her. It doesn't cut like a knife quite like it does in a live action movie. But when you hear the girls that Lelo goes to school as being so rude to her, you're like, man, she's really going through a lot right now. So overall, I've found a live action version to be a lot more emotional than the animated version, and what it sacrificed a little bit with some of the comedy, because I think a lot of the comedy came from things you can only do in animation that don't translate the same way. One of the things that was very different here is you realize how much violence was used in the original one one at the very beginning of the movie. Whenever she gets into the altercation with the kids it's school.

00:34:00
Speaker 2: There is a fight.

00:34:02
Speaker 1: Also, the way that her and her sister communicated and chasing her around the house, you start to think, like, man, she really couldn't do that in this movie. That would straight to be child abuse and she'd be taken out. Stitch himself is also more destructive and gets into a lot of fights and firefights. So they kind of had to pull away from some of the action and they sacrificed a little bit of the big moments. But what they really emphasized more was that connection between Nannie and Lelo and their relationship. That is really what developed more. I think the hardest part was connecting them all back to Stitch. It was almost like Stitch was on his own journey in this movie, and it wasn't really until that third act where him and Lilo really connected.

00:34:47
Speaker 2: I think that was the hardest part overall.

00:34:50
Speaker 1: That this live action adaptation had, was it is hard to take a child actor and have it connect with something that's not there. And while they do interact, while they do love each each other, and why they do become friends like they do in the original. I think the obstacle was meshing those two characters together in the live action version. And if anybody has a problem with this movie, that's probably gonna be the biggest thing because it is called Leelo and Stitch. But I just found that that bond together wasn't as strong as it was in the original movie, and I think some of the things had to change, but everything I was looking for was still there. There were other elements of stitches emotional development that weren't quite there. So in this he was a lot more cute and cuddly, and I think Disney was really trying to emphasize that, mainly to sell more merch to people like me and the kids, because he spoke a lot more in this movie. It did emphasize a lot more of his high jinks, and I think overall that was kind of the driving force of Okay, we can't do some of the action that we did in the original because it doesn't quite translate, So let's make him do more funny things. And I think that really worked. Overall. The reason this movie didn't feel like a cash grab to me is because I thought overall the special effects were pretty good because Stitch looked great, He looked adorable, he looked cuddly. I thought it was gonna be hard to make him look like an actual alien dog, because in the original, you think, man, how could anybody look at Stitch and think that he is a dog not an alien? I always thought that was the hardest thing to believe in the original, But here, the way they made him look aside from the fact that he's blue, he does look like a dog and act like a dog. So it was really important to make him look good, make him look like you fit in this world, and I think that was the most important part that they got right, and they made him look good. So the fact that his character design was down great, even though he liked a little bit of character development, which is probably asking a lot for a Disney live action movie geared towards kids. Overall, I was really happy with it, and at the end of it, it just made me feel joy. It made me happy, and I think it's because it made me sad at a lot of times. And the actress Maya, who is seven years old and played Lilo, did a fantas plastic job because I think that was the hardest thing of not only bringing Stitch to life, but having someone be the real life version of Lelo, and she completely crushed it. And Disney rarely takes risks like this anymore because there are a lot of sequences. Whereas just Lelo and Stitch on screen, you have a child actor and a CGI character that is tough to do. And overall, where this movie did not fumble the bag was the emotional scene that we all know and love, the one I have done numerous times on this podcast, which for some reason you haven't seen Lelo and Stitch. You haven't heard me talk about this scene posted on Dick dok or heard my interview with Chris Sanders, who is the creator and voice of Stitch. I've talked about this scene a lot, so mild spoiler alert here, even though the original is twenty years old and it is a remake. I feel like we're all okay with this spoiler, but if for some reason you haven't, just skip ahead like thirty seconds right now. But there's a moment when Stitch is going to be taken away and he talks about finding his family.

00:37:57
Speaker 2: That is my.

00:37:57
Speaker 1: Favorite part of the entire movie. It is the most emotional part in the original and it was still the most emotional part here. And what I noticed by listening to it and watching it, I think they took the audio from the original movie and used it again here because it had the same inflection. Everything about it was the same. I have to imagine Chris Sanders was like, I don't know if I could act it out any better than that. Can we just use that original voice recording and place it into this scene?

00:38:26
Speaker 2: And it worked perfectly.

00:38:28
Speaker 1: I was on the verge of tears in that moment, and I was worried for a little bit that they were going to cut it out of the movie, not include it, because there was a lot of things that felt like they had to fit into this movie because the original is an hour and twenty minutes and with them adding more to the story of Nannie and Lee Lo. This one clocked in right under an hour and forty minutes, but.

00:38:46
Speaker 2: It was there. They nailed it.

00:38:48
Speaker 1: The thing I did notice is some of the kids in the theater, which I think Kelsey and I were the only adults there without children, they started to get restless around.

00:38:56
Speaker 2: The hour in ten Mark.

00:38:57
Speaker 1: So I am finding that younger kids do have shorter attention spans, and it is kind of hard to make a movie like this geared towards kids where there is a lot of emotional development that's not just a quick coco melon episode. So a little bit I fear for what films are going to be like in the future. And that's not just with kids. I think all of our attention spans are getting shorter and shorter. But that was the only thing I noticed from the audience reaction throughout the movie. Is about an hour and ten minutes, people were getting up to go pee. They were like, all right, let's wrap this thing up. We got to get these kids home. But overall, there was very little that I did not enjoy about this, and I was surprised because I haven't liked a lot of the Disney Live action movies, but this one was hard to mess up because the story was still there. Stitch looked phenomenal, Leela was great, Nannie was great, David was great. I'm not sure Zach Galafanakas gave it his all in this role, but but aside from that, it was all there for me. So when it comes to rating this, nothing is going to touch the original. The original movie will always be a five out of five. But again, I'm gonna have a huge bias here. But for Leelo and Stitch twenty twenty five, I gave it four point five out of five pineapples. So if you're only listening on the podcast, the next part is only gonna be on YouTube, so you have to go to my YouTube channel to go see me review all the merch I got from Leelo and Stitch at Regal. Go to YouTube dot com slash Mike Distro. It's time to head down to movie Mike trailer Paul grand Grandpa.

00:40:32
Speaker 2: That's a behind the scenes of me screwing up there.

00:40:34
Speaker 1: I was gonna say Grandpa, or maybe I was thinking Grand Charismo, because I better talk about Brad Pitt's new racing movie.

00:40:41
Speaker 2: But what I was wanting to say is Brad Pitt.

00:40:45
Speaker 1: Is never gonna play at Grandpa because he looks too good.

00:40:48
Speaker 2: He's sixty one years old.

00:40:49
Speaker 1: He is in grandpa age, but by the looks of him in this trailer, he's not there, and I don't think he's gonna be there in another ten years. I feel like him is an actor. He could take those roles. Maybe they've been pitched to him, but I don't think Brad Pitt is ever going to play at Grandpa because he looks too dang good at sixty one years old. In the trailer four at one, there's even a comment of the racer he's going to train.

00:41:17
Speaker 2: His mom comes to visit.

00:41:18
Speaker 1: I think both of his parents come to visit and they see a picture of Brad Pitt and they're like, man, he's.

00:41:22
Speaker 2: Not that old. He's a really good looking man.

00:41:25
Speaker 1: That leads me to believe that we're never gonna get to see Brad Pitt in the way that we're starting to see Tom Hanks right now, who I feel like it hasn't been until maybe the last five years that Tom Hanks has started to take like an older grandpa role where he lets the Grays come through. Tom Hanks is sixty one years old. He is only seven years older than Brad Pitt, but they look so different, just a seven year difference.

00:41:53
Speaker 2: And the roles you.

00:41:54
Speaker 1: Take, the wardrobe you decide to put yourself in, how your hair error is colored, can vastly change how the audience perceives you.

00:42:05
Speaker 2: So I just don't see it. For Brad Pett sixty one, he's still rocking it.

00:42:08
Speaker 1: If he gets to Tom Hanks age at sixty eight and still doesn't want to take these roles, I think he could still pull it off. And if I was as good looking as him, I would hold on to that for the rest of my life. I wouldn't let anybody call me grandpa. I would not take those roles. I'd say, you take that sweater and shove it right up your wardrobe hole. I don't know where you're gonna put that thing. But let's talk about F one. I like me a good racing drama. In this movie, A Brad Pitt plays a guy named Sonny Hayes, who was a former Formula one driver who had a career ending accident in the nineteen nineties. He is brought back into the sport by a guy named Rubin Servantis, who was a team owner played by Harvier Bardem, who you might remember from No Country for Old Men. He played Anton Sugar had the wildest haircut in cinema, and he hated that haircut, by the way, because he said, Man, no woman is going to want to get with me after they.

00:43:02
Speaker 2: See me in this movie.

00:43:04
Speaker 1: But his character is in a position where he wants to go back to doing F one. He's currently doing NASCAR at the beginning of the trailer, he just won Daytona, but now he wants to go back to What I learned is the more difficult of the two. Not discrediting NASCAR, that is a legit sport. What I found in my research of this, and you can correct me if I'm wrong. The reason F one is seen as being more difficult is because in NASCAR, you're just turning the exact same way throughout the entire race. Even though I believe in NASCAR you race much faster, but in F one sometimes you're racing in actual cities, on courses where the turns are all over the place. You have more intricate courses, the cars have more buttons and controls, and overall take a little bit more to operate, so even though you're not driving as fast as you are in NASCAR, all the other logistics are ramped up. But the movie is about Brad Pitt returning to the sport, mentoring a young racer who hates his guts. So before I get into more about F one, here's just a little bit of the trailer. Formula one is a team sport. It always was.

00:44:15
Speaker 2: Listen, let's get this straight.

00:44:17
Speaker 1: We all lose our jobs if you can't put off a mirror coad. No pressure on.

00:44:25
Speaker 2: The only question here is why does Sonny who's come back to F one? I think it's really wonderful to apex and given second chances to the elderly, I take it right, you're.

00:44:36
Speaker 1: Just right on quicker than you.

00:44:40
Speaker 2: The tension between teammates.

00:44:42
Speaker 1: What really sticks out to me about this trailer and the first time I actually saw it in theaters, not the movie, but the trailer, is their use of sound and sometimes the absence of sound in the trailer that makes everything feel more cinematic, where sometimes you're just hearing the roar of the car, you're hearing the breathing, and then it just goes to silence, and that is so powerful. In a theater where you're seeing a really beautiful shot, usually in a racing movie, it's a crash and they always go to silence when a crash happens because it makes it so much more impactful to see a car flipping but you hear nothing.

00:45:18
Speaker 2: It is a really eerie image.

00:45:20
Speaker 1: So I really love the way they use sound to build that up. In one of the first teaser trailers, all they did was use a queen song and it was just so loud and the sounds of the cars were just roaring over it that it matched together perfectly. This movie was also made in collaboration with Formula One, using real team drivers, so it definitely adds that authenticity to it. Because when you're doing a movie based on a sport where you're good to notice if things aren't done just right, it is important to have those people overlooking it. And that really makes me buy into the movie. Because I don't really know a whole lot about F one. I did look up some differences, Like I was mentioning earlier, most F one races are nine minutes, so it's a lot quicker. One of my favorite race movies is Ford v. Ferrari, and those races and that take forever. So I think there's some more instant gratification here with there being a ninety minute race versus a really long race. I think when watching it in movie form, you get more of that. Okay, I feel the tension, I feel what this is important, and it's gonna make everything feel like there's a lot more on the line. And the F one cars can reach speeds over two hundred and thirty miles per hour on average. The drivers are going about one hundred and twenty miles per hour, which I didn't think that was as fast as I thought they would be because I see these cars flying. But I've also never gone that fast in a car. I think the fastest I've gone is probably ninety. And that was one of those situations where in Texas, which is where I'm from, they have roads that go up to eighty miles an hour, and living now in Tennessee, we barely go fifty five. But in Texas we like driving fast, and sometimes you get it's so comfortable going eighty You're like, what's eighty five? And I remember just one time being on I think a toll road that was like eighty miles an hour. Eighty five, and then I looked down. I'm like, oh crap, I'm going ninety. But it didn't feel like I was going that fast. But one hundred and twenty is probably a lot when you're having somebody in front of you, behind you, and you're trying to navigate a pretty complex course. I did say they can reach speeds over two hundred and thirty miles an hour. That is what I'm talking about. I also like Brad Pitt's characters tattoos. It very much reminded me of Ryan Gosling in the Place Beyond the Pines where his tattoos look sick, even though I would never put those on my body because they're very random. And I think that has become more of a trend lately of people getting tattoos that don't really match up. And I am a fan of the look. I don't know how it's going to age, which you could tell me with my tattoo. It's like your tattoos are going tot h poorly, and I'm all about getting tattoos that just look cool. I think maybe in like the nineties, early two thousands, big thing with you got to get something that means a lot to you. I just want something that makes me look a little bit cooler. But that trend is interesting where it almost feels like people are getting things that they just would otherwise doodle on their paper in like math class, and they're getting it on their skin. It looks cool right now, But I just wonder how that is gonna age. But again, people are probably saying that about my dad doos right now, But that is kind of what Brad Pitt's character has, and I guess he is sixty one in this, so hey, maybe it's gonna age just fine. This movie is also directed by Joseph Kazinski, who did Top Gun Maverick, and that makes me feel that the action is gonna be at the level of Top Gun Maverick. And I'm already seeing in this trailer because what I loved about Top Gun Maverick is it really puts you in the seat of the person flying the plane. You were right there with them. They put the camera on the wing of the plane, so not only do you see it from their perspective, you see it from a perspective that nobody else could see.

00:48:59
Speaker 2: The action was just so great.

00:49:00
Speaker 1: And dialed in that it made that movie feel like an experience, like something you needed to experience on the big screen. And that is also the vibes I'm getting from F one. So I'm not always the biggest fan of race movies because the hard thing about them is they kind of always have to end the same way. If your person doesn't win, it feels like you get ripped off as the viewer. But if you know they're gonna win, it's like, oh, man, I already know what's gonna happen. Of course he's gonna come through with a win. Of Course him and his teammate are going to get over their beef and they're gonna be good by the end, and they're gonna be having that trophy held over their heads by the end of this movie. And of course somebody is gonna crash and you're gonna fear for their life. That always happens no matter what the racing movie is. Those are just the elements of racing. Hero has to win, and there's gonna be a moment where they're not gonna win because they just went through an injury. I don't know if they're gonna make this race happen, and then.

00:49:58
Speaker 2: Boom, they end up doing it.

00:50:00
Speaker 1: So the formula one feels a little bit predictable. But I think in the case of this movie, if you have somebody like Brad Pitt, also Harvey Erbardam, who I really enjoy, a great director, I think is gonna be an experience. It's also my birthday week movie. It comes out on June twenty seventh, and I always have a special place in my heart for the movies that come out around my birthday, so I will be checking this one out. Where will it rank on my favorite racing movies of all time? I think my favorite is Ford me Ferrari. I just loved me some Christian Bale. I thought that story was really interesting and overall had the best acting of any racing movie I've ever seen. In my opinion, Talladega Knights is also up there because I love me some comedy. I love me some Ricky Bobby Grand Tarismo was pretty good. That's the last one I saw in theaters. I wouldn't put it in my favorites, but in recent history, that is the last one I remember going to see in theaters. And you know what I would like to put on my list. I know they're gonna make more super Mario Brothers movies. But they need to just make an all out Mario Kart movie. Take the formula of a racing drama and apply that to Mario Kart. I know they spoofed that one time on SNL and I wanted to see that with Pedro Pascal in that Skit was super Mario driving a car. Oh man, that would be so good. So instead of doing another animated movie, let's do a live action Mario Kart movie. I'll give you my money right now. But again, F one is coming out in theaters on June twenty seventh. Head that for was this week's edition of Movie by Framer Bar and Dad is gonna do it for another episode here of the podcast. But before I go, I got to give my listener shout out of the week. How do you go a listener shout out of the week. All you have to do is comment on social media TikTok, Instagram, You can send me an email movie Mike d at gmail dot com. If you ever forget any of that, it is always in the episode description notes of this podcast. But this week I'm going over to my YouTube channel, which is YouTube dot com, slash Mike Distro and man I was getting hit pretty hard on my Final Destination Bloodlines review, which I just gave my honest opinion, and I was very upfront saying that overall, this isn't one of my favorite horror franchises. But boy did I learn that Final Destination has some hard core fans who did not like my opinion, and I decided to go over there and well, the YouTube comments are always I sometimes shield my eyes because they're usually the most rude about my physical appearance, unlike any other platform. But this week's Listener shout out goes to Sark on YouTube, who said Final Destination five not being memorable to you is wild. It has some of the best and most well known shot kills in the entire series, the gymnastics scene and honestly the premonition being standouts. Not even commenting about the new movie, just the.

00:52:52
Speaker 2: FD five slander.

00:52:54
Speaker 1: So Sark, I have to imagine you did not agree with my entire review on Bloodlines, but the fact that my comment about FD five rattled you so much. I even mentioned that gymnastics scene, how that was one of those moments from that movie that lingered with me that made me never want to do gymnastics. But I think overall it is still pretty forgettable, so you don't have to.

00:53:17
Speaker 2: Agree with me.

00:53:18
Speaker 1: That's why I go read the comments to see what you guys feel about these movies and how you differ from me. I think that is the great thing about having a movie podcast, is opening up that discussion and getting different perspectives from different people or fans of franchises that I just.

00:53:32
Speaker 2: Don't always love.

00:53:34
Speaker 1: So always feel free to tell me when you think I'm wrong, when you think I'm being an idiot, just leave my physical appearance out of it.

00:53:41
Speaker 2: Please, Thank you, Sark.

00:53:42
Speaker 1: Thank you right now for listening wherever you are, and until next time, go out and watch good movies and I will talk to you later.