The Mummy (1999): Everything You Didn't Know

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Speaker 1: Too Much Information is a production of I Heart Radio. Hello everyone, and welcome to Brendan Fraser Information. I mean too much Frasier, I mean Brendan much. I mean for I'm just pitching wild too much, too much Friend and Fraser. There's never enough Brendan Fraser. Too Much Information, the show that brings you the secret histories and little known, fascinating facts and figures behind your favorite Frasier's, Brendan's movies, music, TV shows, and more. Because that's what this show is really about, living, laughing, loving. Brendan Fraser started Brendan Fraser Podcast. I do really well these days, probably right where you're two, Brendan Fraser's friend. In fact, I had Scared Beatles of Behind the Seatles first Bad. We could work with that, Yeah, can we a be it? Can you cut two different versions of this market tests to check the traffic on both. Yeah, yeah, we'll go with that and Jordan's Today we're gonna be talking about one of the most beloved hits from those waning days of the last millennium. We're talking about the Mummy. I'm talking about the Mummy, not to be confused with the Mummy or ninety two is the Mummy or even nineteen fifty nine the Mummy. That's right, we're talking about the Mummy parentheses, where so I could call it Mummy nine. Can we make that a thing? Mummy? Just riffing wildly here. You thought this was gonna be a short one. You're recording this at eleven PM your time, and I'm just riffing into the wind. You know, Jordan, what I think about this time in my life? I think mostly about being bitterly let down by Star Wars the Phantom Menace, and then having my mind blown wide open by the Matrix. But in between those two things, it was all about the Mummy. Baby bing Bong PG. Thirteen horror movie. Quippy but dashing lead performance from Brendan Fraser, who I didn't know that dude is six four. Yeah, I didn't know that until reading this too. Yeah, Big Fraser would wash either of us in a fight with especially, would rocks either of us in a fight. That's true. God, Um, what do you think about Mommy Jordan's I liked it. I mean I think I saw, in the best possible scenario that anyone could ever see, Mummy nine. I saw it at a drive in movie theater, which like, yeah, I mean, that's that's all I have to say. I you know what I will say. I was so enamored by the fact that I was at a drive in movie theater that I don't really remember paying much attention to the movie, which is kind of in the grand tradition of going to a drive in movie theater. But I was just yeah, but we were like twelve, so you wouldn't have been trying to get like a squeezer or anything. No. I was just so happy that I was at a drive in, and you know, I see so many time, and I think it's my first time I had to drive into That's awesome. That is just great. I imagine that this scratched some of your your like a like a like an Indiana Jones age for you though, because you and I both love love Indiana Jones. Yeah, I mean it's swashbuckling. It was literally pitched as swashbuckling. You love them, you love when buckles are swashed. I've heard you say this. What is the derivation of of the phrase swashbuckling, No idea. I assume it has to do something with like keeping a sword built up. Oh that makes sense. Why is it called swashbuckling compound of swash to swagger? Wow, I was wrong on both counts. It is a compound of the archaic word swash to swagger with a drawn sword and buckler a small shield gripped in the fist, dating from the sixteenth century m far out anyway, Yeah, I guess this is probably was probably too spooky for you though you don't like spooky. Yeah. And also, I mean I I love the old universal Mummy stuff and the Abbott Costella Meet the Mummy and all those kind of you know, the native of those strong Yeah that was was first exposed to. So I love that. Um, And yeah, I mean I loved Indiana Jones more so that there were some of the elements that felt a little too It crossed the line from being a nod into being just like kind of pastiche to me. But but it's so perfect, I I I mean, it's so tightly edited, it's so funny, it's so he's so good in it. I mean, I I don't really, I don't know, I don't. We talked a lot. We were talking about it's kind of depressing that the Rock ended up being the biggest bank of action draw out of this. Brendan Fraser should have had more. He would have been like Harrison Ford. Honestly, I think they think they tried to do it with a couple of films and it didn't take. They were just like, you're too goofy. They kept giving him comedies. Man, he could have been like he should have been three hundred. He should have been like Gerard. But Butler didn't have much of a career after that either. Yeah, he could have been like a He could have been a like a like a Bruce Willis type. He could have just been playing you know, sarcastic detectives for for forever. I mean some of his comedies were good. So we were talking earlier. You've never seen Blasts from the Past. Nope, Oh it's great. It's about a guy who has lived in a in a bomb shelter since the late fifties or early sixties and then come out. Ah, it's a good bit. Is he like you where he like Lee wishes that he lived in the past because he also didn't see no man where he was from the past? Right, And they also did Dudley do right right after the same year as The Mummy. Yeah, and he did be Dazzled, which is remake of a sixties British comedy with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. Wow, maybe you know what set? Yeah, you guys, you guys, Brenda Frasier and like Billy Joel. I think the three of us was sit around and watch the History Channel talk about Long Island. First Brandon and Frasier from I'm gonna say California. I'm gonna say Indianapolis, Indiana to Canadian parents. That is the least Californian thing you can be. A Hoosier born of Cannex first of his name. Who's your born of Cadocks first of his name? Oh boy, I'm pretty sure he's going to win that Oscar. Is it good? I haven't seen it. No, I've heard the movie is like grotesque and kind of but it's the narrative for him. I mean, you know, his whole thing about getting molested and blacklisted and so, I mean, this is they're going to make a biopic of Brendan Fraser and this is or excuse me, a biopic as I was yelled at, or so I saw it on Twitter? Is that actually it? I just saw something being like like a semi viral tweet that was like, biopic doesn't rhyme with myopic bio because it's biographical pictures. Well that makes sense, Okay, yeah, yeah. Anyway, in the arc of Brendan Frasier's in the Brendan Fraser biopic that's gonna get made MM in twenty years starring Austin Butler, the Mummy is surely going to be like a first third high point. It's gonna be that George of the Junk. Oh well, from the Mummy's tortured path through the late eighties and early nineties development hell, to the all too actually perilous shooting conditions of the film, to the semi real life Egyptology in the film. Here's everything you didn't know about the Mummy. Way, do these people see how horny I am for Brandon Fraser? Actually I think I'm a horny here for my parents. Listen to this shows what is my father in law story? The Mummy? Mummy story? Mum really begins with a producer named and I cannot stop saying this guy's name, James Jim Jack's James Jim Jacks. His nickname is Jim Jim Jacks. Yeah, yeah, James Jim Jacks. I mean he's dead, so no one's calling him anything, but uh they starting Jim Jacks. That's the Mummy. No this guy, Uh he was He was a producer for ed Universal, then he started his own company. He was attached to Days and Confused Tombstone, John Woo's first American film, Hard Target, starring j C v D mall rats, but like he worked with the Coen Brothers on Raising Arizona, Barton Fink Miller's Crossing, so like three Bangers, and then in Tolerable Cruelty so it warn't warn't. But he and his producing part named Sean Daniel had started work on a version of The Mommy in the late eighties, which I think probably had something to do with it the sort of mid to late eighties vogue of like Monster teen movies, because eighties seven was Monster Squad, which basically brings back like non contractually violating versions of the Universal Monsters Crew and pits them against like the Goonies. That's like the pitch of Monster Squad, and that was huge hit in Universal still held all the rights, so people started um started trying to develop the money, and the money probably had the whole you know Indie and the Jones adjacent thing going for it too. I imagine he is unraveled to death in the Monster Squad. That's how they like. They're like fleeing from in a car and they snagged one of his bandages and he gets unraveled. We do villain death. Oh yeah, it's terrible. It's terrible. That's the film where they blow up the Wolfman that since have you have you never seen Monster Squad? Monster Squads? Amazing? Yeah, they have this whole there's this whole running gag about like, well, like you have to shoot a werewolf with with a silver bullet, but would dynamite work? And it does. It's also probably more famously it's the movie where they kicked the Wolfman and the nuts and then say Wolfman's got nords. It's like the eighties Man. Anyway, based on the success of that cinematic classic, they probably wanted to get the Mummy. They were like, let's spin off this mummy guy. He's got legs. This is wild to me. I did not Another thing I didn't know this other than the fact that Brandon Fraser was built like a brick house, was the fact that they were like everybody in Hollywood was attached to this thing. George Romero was originally of of the of the Living deads yes to write and direct um, well it's an my god. And then then Nick he was just pushed into directing role. And this woman named Abby Bernstein told us at Sine Fantastique, who had this incredible making of article about the about the Mummy, that they were going to do something that was like the Terminator where they were just going to have like a mummy, just like stalking through um. At one point it was set in Beverly Hills. Uh, but this thing. Everyone was attached this. Romero left the project and then the next two people that were brought on were Clive Barker, who had done the two hell Raisers and was about to do Candy Man and was like the hot big thing in horror of the of the mid to late eighties. And then Mick Garris, who is uh guy Stephen King Pale and very horror guy about Towne. They were brought on to do this and I didn't realize this. The pitch for hell Raiser three was going to be UM was basically Clive Barker's really funny because he's been kind of kicked around by Hollywood, and so he's sort of discussed for the whole place is very funny. So I guess what happened was he had written a treatment for hell Raiser, for the third hell Razor movie that was going to be um essentially the first center bite, like the pinhead, the first demon that's in the hell Raising universe, was going to have been a pharaoh. And then that didn't get made. So he was like, so, now it's a Mummy movie. And I took that to Universal and I think they we're gonna make it. They were they I was reading a little bit about this draft. It was just very outre and very weird, and Universal was literally like this is too weird to us, Like you can't, We're not going to make this. And so then uh, it went to a screenwriter named Alan Ormsby and Joe Dante who is doing the who had done Gremlins and was going to do Gremlins too, and has and has a very deep love of this whole era of fifties kind of monster making stuff. Because then he went on to do matten Ae. Have you ever seen matten Ae? That is William It's like a senda. It's starting John Goodman. It's like a send up of like William Castle style homegrown kind of budget d I y horse stuff. Um. Anyway, that it was kicked back to George Romero and then Mick Garris again. So if you're keeping track, that's like five different iconic horror directors who were all attached to this thing in like three years. Joe Dante's version had Daniel day Lewis attached to star. Christopher Lee was going to be in it because he had just been in Gremlin's too. Christopher Lee was famously in the Hammer Horror version of The Mummy back in the fifties Mummy fifty nine, And it got as far Dante's version got as far as because Joe Dante and Steven Spielberger buddies, because Dante done Gremlin's and he got as far as Steven Spielberg apparently talking this over with Sid Sheinberg, who is the head of Universal at the time, and on the set of Casper. Supposedly Joe Dante has told this interview where he's like, yeah, so we went to the set where they were making Casper, and Spielberg pitched this version of Mummy to Sid Sheinberg, and Sheinberg was like, and you're gonna make it a period piece, right, Like it's going to be like set in the twenties or thirties, And Joe Dante was like, no, it's gonna be set in the modern day. And that scotched it. That that one little detail ruined it. So by Mick Garris has a version that he said was virtually greenlit, and then Universal m c A was sold to Seagram's and Sid Sheiberg departed. Part of his exit deal was that he could pick whatever project in the works at Universal to take with him, and he picked The Mummy, the version that was in the works currently, and he over developed it. To hear Mick Garris tell it, what happened was he was gonna attract a much higher name writer and then he was going to attract a bigger cast and then this basically just kept driving the budget up and it just died in development. Hell Um, even Nightmare Are on Elm Street. Uh creator Wes Craven was was called in and offered this thing at one point and it still didn't happen. And then the next draft of this. Because you can trace these back through the Writer's Guild, which is not a thing that I knew. You can trace the development of movies back through stuff that gets registered with the writer's Guild. The next one is in the writer named Kevin jar who wrote Tombstone and Glory, and it is about this time that the film's actual and eventual director, Stephen Summers gets involved. I'd always wanted to do a version of the Mummy, he said to Entertainment Weekly. When I was eight years old, I saw the old Boris Karloff one. It took me to ancient Egypt and Cairo of the twenties and thirties and scared the crap out of me. The film's producers, Sean Daniel and Jim Jacks, had been developing it for nine years. I was just finishing Deep Rising and I'd heard they'd parted ways with another writer director. They took me right into Universal. One of the first things I said was, nobody wants to see a guy wrapped in bandages. They're going to laugh at it. I walked out and Jim was like, the studio wants to do it for fifteen million. I said, I'm going to need that for visual effects alone. The hoot spa on this Stephen Summers guy is incredible. That movie Deep Rising is like a sea monster picture. I don't think did super Well stars treat starting treat Williams, anybody star of the movie version of Hair, the Broadway musical Hair. It gets worse. That movie Deep Rising released on February gross eleven mill on a forty million budget. So this guy is going into meetings with Universally going, I want to make The Mummy, this movie that's been in development hell for ten years at this point, and I want to do it for more money, for just the VFX budget. Then my last film grossed totally. One thing that actually helped him making this case Bay Pig in the City not a sentence I ever thought. I was gonna say, nine million budget gross sixty nine million. So a flop, and the studio and its new leadership needed a hit, and new chairwoman Stacy Snyder sent out a list of scripts and properties that Universal owned, and Summers jumped on it, and Jim Jacks told The l A Times at the time that his vision for The Mummy was quote the most expensive version we'd had. It was also the biggest. It was a period piece and so all everyone lined up on this and Uh. Summers took an eighteen page pitch to the studio. They gave him eighty million to make this. He spent six months researching it, eight weeks writing the screenplay. Production designer Alan Cameron, who worked with Summers on The Jungle Book, the live action Jungle Book, Remember that movie? I have no memory of that whatsoever. This is a big era for live action Disney movies. Though. Wasn't the have action under one Dalmatians? Yes, it was. Production designer Alan Cameron, who worked with Summers on The Jungle Book, went to the British Museum where he spent hours researching Egyptology. He turned a book commissioned by Napoleon Bonaparte. When Napoleon invaded Egypt. He commissioned a book that included etchings, drawings, and catalogings of everything they that the French found in the tombs they rated, and that became the film's production bible. Uh. They initially wanted to shoot it in Arizona and California, all the usual probably out in Utah, the places that usually stand in for the desert when they're shooting in the States. But they decided to shoot in Morocco in Marrakech and out in the desert and a place called air Food, and then eight weeks at Shepperton Studios in England. And there's some interesting real life nods to uh, this era of Egyptology in this film. I didn't know this, but when you if you're the scene when evis in the library, if you zoom in really really close, mostly on the binders that are on those shelves, they contain the real life seal of the egypt Exploration Society. He spent six months research in this, he got those details. Yeah, yeah. And the book that Ev is reading on the boat in that scene when the boat is attacked and they all have to jump off, is called The Dwellers on the Nile by a guy named E. A. Wallace, budget published in five It's been since discredited, but it would have been an appropriate thing for a budding Egyptologists to be reading the twenties. So some nice little uh, some nice little Oh, here's a fun side note that I didn't think to bring this up before, you know. Bram Stoker also wrote a famous novel about mummies. Bram Stoker wrote of the of the Dracula, of of of the Dracula. Yes, uh. He he wrote a novel called The Jewel of Seven Stars that it features a mummified Egyptian queen. So you have Bram Stoker batting two thousand per scent for creating universal monsters. Did they base any of the mummy properties on that book or no? Nope. But it was extremely controversial when it was published in nineteen o three because it was so violent, and he tried to republish it in nineteen twelve and they told him to change the ending or they wouldn't publish it. What was the ending? I don't know. I didn't read that far. M I can find out for you if you're really interested. I mean, if, if, if that was really the sticking point in a book that was supposedly that violent. Now I'm curious. Well, you have to understand this was occurring during the backdrop of egypt Omania, as Wikipedia is calling it, the peak of British fascination in Egypt between eighteen sixty and nineteen fourteen, teenage women screaming at mummies. Ah, that's really funny, uh something just a bunch of people dying. I guess they didn't like that. Yeah, it just says in the second version, no one is harmed, so they were basically just like, yeah, you you can't have this books insane. There's a mummified cat. There's a theory that the ancient Egyptians had discovered radium, the invention of electricity. Yeah, sort of a charity to the gods thing Egypt, Domania bram Stoker Jordan brings us back to whatever the hell we were talking about before comesting Mommy casting. Supposedly, the lead role of Rick O'Connell was offered to, of course, Tom Cruise. I feel like every action movie in the nineties had Tom Cruise in the running at some point, but he was busy filming Eyes Wide Shut. Notably not an action movie. Well it was action in it, but not that kind of action. Brad, thank you. H Brad Pitt was considered, as was Matt Damon ben Affleck. I can't see ben Affleck. He would have been coming off Army Gedton, Oh yeah, I guess, and phantoms and he's I can't be in Brunette. Honestly, that's like kind of the big thing, I don't you know, Like in the desert, you gotta have the sandy blonde, you gotta have the Brendan Frasier. I'm taking that out of context. Next time I need to cancel you. I just can't imagine the lead guy being a brunette and Leonardo DiCaprio, although he would have been too small, I feel like I wasn't actually would have that. This is like one of those things that's on like I amdbing everywhere. Leonardo DiCaprio desperately wanted to be in the Mummy, even tried even tried to suppose that. The thing that I kept reading was that he tried to get he tried to like weasel out of filming the beach so that he could film the Mummy. But I wasn't able to actually find that and like verify that from any primary source stuff. So if anyone out there has a line on Leo, and if you or a twenty three year old that you know is currently dating Leonardo, tweet at Jordan and I using the hashtag Mummy and we'll venmo you five bucks. I mean, it seems like he wouldn't want to do this for the same reason they didn't want to do Titanic initially, Whereas it's just like a one dimensional, you know, cardboard honky character. Maybe he just loves mummies man, Oh yeah, maybe, or maybe he knew it was just gonna be physically grueling being out in the desert and that's kind of his thing. It's like, well, if the characters lamb, can I at least suffer physically for it? And then that's true. Yeah, although Brendan hasn't beat because he died, right, that's true. We'll get to that later. Director Stephen Summers told sinape Can say this cinemon pastique, that is quite a name for their incredible article about the making of Mummy. Pretty early on, I wrote the lead guy as a macho action hero because he was involved with a lot of physical conflict and I wanted him to be able to respond. But I also wanted the story to have an element of humor and fun. At six four and close to two hundred pounds solid rock, Brendan Fraser was a big, strong guy who could throw a punch and shoot a gun, and he could also make you laugh and laugh at himself. He has that kind of charm. Stephen Somers continue The Entertainment Weekly, my editor and producing partner. As soon as he read the script, he said, this is Brendan Fraser and Brandon Frasier. At the time, he just come off George to the jungle, where he spent the entire movie oiled up in a loincloth. I believe I'm missing something that good, which grossed a hundred and seventy four point five million dollars worldwide. I don't know is that big of a hit. Wow. Brendan Fraser was a little more muted about his first impressions to the Mummy. He told Entertainment Weekly simply, I liked the script very much. Narrator voice, he did not. I mean, I don't think he knew it would have. In his defense, I don't think he knew it was going to kill him, right, Yes, yes, yes, yes, Okay, we're putting the cart ahead of the horse here. We'll get to the Brenda Fraser almost died story later. We're going to take a quick break, but we'll be right back with more. Too much information in just a moment pole of Evie Carnahan. Stephen Somers told Entertainment Weekly, the studio started throwing up all these American actresses. Nobody knew who Rachel Weiss was. She auditioned four or five times and The character Evie Carnahan was named in honor of the explorer Evelyn Karnavn Carton Carnivan. Well. I know this because he's the daughter of George Herbert, who's the fifth Earl of Carnarvon, who I know as the guy who bankrolled the king discovery of King Tut's tomb uh And he notably died soon after He's supposed to be the one of the first victims of the supposed King Tut's curse when he got bitten by a mosquito and then cut the bite when he was shaving and it became infected, and he died fairly soon after the discovery of the tomb. I think it's a real freaky way to die. So anyway, that's how the female lead in The Mummy got her name, Evi knar Hand Rachel Weiss wasn't as well known as Brendan Frasier or even the rest of the cast for that matter, but she would return for the Mummy returns, but not the third one. I guess Mummy returns kind of slaps. It's got a dirigible and it has the rock and rock you know, now I'm getting my my Mummy's confused. Was the Rock not in the first one? No, No, he's the Scorpion King who, yes, he earns his own film. Ah, he is the titular Scorpion King. Apparently he was. He filmed everything from Mummy Returns in a day because he had like horrific food poisoning. So he was like sweating and pooping and puking in like a hundred and thirty degree heat, and Stephen Summers had him for a day. He was like he'd be under this blanket and then we'd be like call, I'd be like action and then and the Rock would like throw himself in like and nail all the all the physicality and stuff and then just like collapse in a pile of food poisoning when the cameras stopped rolling. He's a pro, what can you say? He pops. M Original Vice trained six to eight hours a day for three months to do her fight scenes with Returns. You remember that scene where they're like fighting with size. For some reason, they have like Japanese weapons in ancient Egypt and they're like bikini fighting seen rules. But as she said, she did not return for the third Mummy. Vice told the Birmingham Post i don't normally like horror films. I get really scared. I was petrified watching Gremlin's which I don't recall is being that scary. Uh, But I don't think that this is a horror movie. It's Hocum a comic book Worlds for the titular role of not the Scorpion King but the Mummy. Production cast Arnold Vosslu a stage train South African actor, but on Broadway. He's probably best known in Hollywood at this point though, for being the bad guy in A Hard Target, which, as I mentioned before, is John Wou's legendary Hong Kong action director John wouse first American film starring Jean called Vandam and His mullet Um. It's a loose adaptation of the Most Dangerous Game set in Louisiana. So you get John Cod Vandam doing a Cajun accent and it rules. And then he took over the role of dark Man from Liam Neeson for dark Man's two and three. Uh, those are wild movies, Sam Rami anyone dark Man anyway. Apparently they auditioned a boatload of people for the role. Somers told Sina Fantastique that we were kind of at our wits end for im Hootep, and then suddenly Arnold Vosslo walked in. It was funny at first. There was something kind of intimidating about him. I can't explain it. He's Shakespearean, he's serious, he's very commanding. Within thirty seconds I knew he was going to be the guy, and I never do that. But there was an adjustment period for Arnold Voslow. He said, they go, all right, here's your wardrobe. He's talking to e W and it's like a g string. I liked my beer as he continued. I had a bit of a paunch still do. Steve told me afterwards that the wardrobe master said, we've got a problem. We've got a fat mummy, so mean produce to Jim Jack's told Cinefestique Arnold was only about ten or fifteen pounds overweight, but he had to put on this little skirt, and boy did every ounce of its show. I told him he had a month to loose the weight, and I suggested he take a look at the Ten Commandments movie to see how Yo Brenner looked back. Then both Lew added to cinevest they inflicted a trainer on me. That's a great way to phrase that. Who am I tried to avoid at all costs. He cut out alcohol and sugar from his diet and that helped him lose the weight, but it was less easy being hairless for the role. He had had a bad experience with waxing ones, so instead he committed to daily shaves to get the requisite uh smooth look for the character. He said he was doing research for it and he was like, I found out that the priests shaved their head, so I went ahead and shaved everything. That's right. He looks like a Kendall. And also in order to nail the Egyptian required for the role, he worked with Dr Stuart Smith of the Institute of Archaeology at u C l A, who supervised Stephen Summer's script, and vastly worked with Smith over the phone for hours, times at three am because of the time difference between Morocco where they're shooting in l A to learn these lines phonetically. The rest of the film's casting, well, well, the all the entirety of the film's casting. I shouldn't even say the rest. It's troublesome. In three there's no Egyptian people in any of the film's major roles. The guy playing director Terence Bay, who is the chief curator at the museum, is Indian American actor Eric alvary Oh did Fear, who plays r Def Bay, is Israeli. The guy who plays Seti, the Pharaoh at the beginning of the film is also Israeli. Aaron a pal uh Imhotep is played by South African dude, and the next Suna Moon is played by Petrist Velasquez, who is Venezuelan. I always wonder if it were happening today, would I get the part, Vassilo told Entertainment Weekly in twenty nineteen. I mean, here, I am white, South African. They'd probably cast a real Egyptian. Omid Jali, who plays the warden, is one of the only who brings up having any sensitivities around this. At the time, he told e W I have an Iranian background, so I was very aware that if I ever did film roles, I had to represent Middle Eastern culture. This was at a time when there were very few Middle Eastern roles at all that weren't terrorists. Steve said, we're looking for kind of riff key from Midnight Express, and that was a Turkish warden who was really evil. I said, look, why don't we play him differently, because, with all due respect to you, what you've written is not even one dimensional. I can possibly get this to a two dimensional stereotype, which is a great line. So I did this piece to the camera. It had nothing to do with the script, and he said, that's great. Does it have to be so funny? And I said, the only way I can do this without being lynched by my own people is to make it slightly humorous. Uh not. A lot of reviews pointed this out at the time. Um Ciskel and Ebert had a guest reviewer named David Anson on the show who said the error bashing of this movie is quote kind of unforgivable, adding that it was evidence of the kind of condescension and contempt that Hollywood would not dare with any other group. Though uh Cisco nib ultimately both gave it thumbs up. In his New Yorker review, Anthony Lane claimed that he could scarcely believe what he was seeing, suggesting a party game for Hollywood producers that reads, try replacing one submitted group with another Jews instead of Arabs, and then listened for the laugh okay bud Uh. Former Associated Press writer Michael Hoffman called it a racist masterpiece and a consummate example of bigotry that depicts Arab characters as either filthy, greedy, slimy pigs or mindless, murderous zombies. And Raina Shannawani at Cornell University directly wrote universal and got the response from them, the Mummy is escapist entertainment and as such is not intended in any way to be perceived as a realistic depiction of any group of people. Or is I like to call it the Aladdin excuse? Oh? You think they would have learned a lesson from the backlash from Aladdin? Do you would? You? The real monster of this story, though, was shooting on location at the time that The Mommy was being produced. At the time the Momy was being produced Egypt. Politically, real monster was us in the sun. Shooting Uh in Cairo at the time would have been a difficult because the city is modern uh, you know, it had been modernized and didn't have the requisite looks, and also because of the political instability in Egypt at the time, it would have not made sense for them to shoot it there. Uh. And so they shot the city scenes in Marrakesh, which was easier for them to kind of fake being in the twenties, although they did have to rip down a bunch of street lights and power poles and stuff. Uh. And then also in the Sahara Desert, where the set of Habanaptra was built in a dormant volcano. On the film's production blog on the official site, Summers said, a city hidden in the crater of an extinct volcano made perfect sense. Out in the middle of the desert. You would never see it. You would never even think of it during the crater unless you knew it was inside that volcano. They built the Homonacha set out there over the course of sixteen weeks, which included columns that were rigged to collapse at the climactic moment. But as if building all of this wasn't enough, they also had to house and feed a cast and crew of over eight hundred people, including two hundred Torregg horse riders. Uh. And this is a outside of the tiny village of air Food, which was like not even a tourist destination at the time. Uh. Fortunately they had an expert in the form of co producer Patricia Carr, who had extensive remote location shooting. She had done work on Return of the Jedi, which was wasn't the Star Wars. They were filmed in Tunisia. I want to say Raiders are the Lost Arc Temple of Doom. Uh. She said. We had to do a great amount of work in a relatively small amount of time, but after meeting with local city officials, we were able to get medical cover in place, as well as arrange all the catering and transportation and have everything completed in record time. Summer's told w it was a British crew and I was this young American and everyone was like, who is this guy, and not in a good way. I told everybody we have a six week shoot in Morocco. They looked at the pages. Cinematographer Adrian Biddle, the camera crew in the grips, I think they thought, there's no way in hell we're getting out of here in six weeks. The temperature during the hottest part in the day went up to a hundred and thirty degrees and the local flora and fauna made shooting an absolute nightmare. Josh Hannah, who played Evie's brother in the movie, said the biggest challenge was maintaining the energy level right up to the start of the scene. It was really hot out there, and the snakes and scorpions and the spiders made it difficult to keep focused and your enthusiasm. And Brendan Fraser told e W. We got a lot of B twelve shots in the ass, whether we wanted them or not. Oh, I don't know. It's being involuntarily given a B twelve shot. They just sneak up behind you other like and I guess production created a special beverage that everyone drank every two hours the battle of the dehydration. The crew would often begin their days shooting in the desert at two thirty in the morning to get the first rays of the morning light, and they'd work until midday when it became too hot and not to mention, you know, the sun making it way too blinding to shoot before picking back up again in the evening. When did these guys sleep? Were it cooled down enough? They sent out a memo. Brendan Frazier's great line to the e W. They send out a memo describing a type of snake and fun fact, forever shooting a movie and you get a memo about the type of snake. Maybe it's not your kind of movie. I think it had yellow dots on it, he continued. They said, if you see this kind of snake, do not go near it because if it bites you, at best they'll amputate your limb. Anyway, there I was pissing down a rock and I looked down and there's the yellow dots snake. I was like, I just ran for it. I don't like to hear how miserable brend Of Fraser was during the production of this movie. The number of times he almost died. Yeah, yeah, but worth it. Yeah. Rachel Vice told the Birmingham Post. Quite a few people were airlifted out after they've been bitten by scorpions. They used to have a scorpion wrangler who we collect them an empty avion bottles and then shake them in front of your face, going look what we found. Fortunately, she explained, there was the scene in which a rat runs over while she's tied to an altar. The rat was a professional actor racked now professional after frat they have them they're sag I'm uh not a wild rat. And that scene apparently it took nine days to film because of the amount of effects in it, which meant Rachel Weiss was strapped to that altar for a long time. Let's put it that way. The scare of beatles they keep popping up are actually a composite of several real insects. But the sound, though, it's the rainstick, which is charming, charming, low tech kindergarten music class of them. Yes, they use rubber ones as stand ins on the set though, thankfully, and not real life insects. This amazing behind the scenes thing where they show how they did the um the shot of when they mummify him Hotep at the beginning and they pour all the scarabs into his coffin, and before they're showing how they composited it right where they have like first like him and then a CG version of him that's being layered by computers. And in the end, in the bare bones version, they just dump this thing like the big thing out over him and it's like three or four rubber bugs full out. It's so underwhelming, but he's still like squirming around in the mummy rappings, like his eyes wide with tear. They actually wrapped him up in that. That's not a stunned person arnoldus really what the extra mile after being body shamed and shaved to day every day. Now we've gotta talk about the camels, which all the actors apparently hated. According to the film's commentary track, Kevin J. O'Connor, who plays Benny, said that his camel took a special disliking to him and O'Connor, who had worked with Stephen Summers on Deep Impact Is Really one of the film's m v ps. He had lived multiple lines, including the I love the whole wall of sand trick. You have to do it. In his weird voice, he did, I love the whole wall of sand trick the other one and he's like when Rick's beating up my little buddy Benny, when Rick peats him off, and he's he's like, please think of my children, And you don't have any children. The line he had lived some day I might by Oh God, all looks like I've got all the horses. Hey, Betty, looks like you're on the wrong side of the river. Yeah, movies. Movie is great. We didn't like the Mummy, I guess. He specifically asked the costume department for pants that didn't fit any grew a pencil mustache just to make him look even more ridiculous. That lie. I have never laughed maybe as hard as ever in that movie when he's he's being approached by the Mummy and he starts praying, and then he rips open his shirt and he's got religious icons from every religion, starts reciting prayers in like like Mongolian and ancient Hebrew. So good. But back to the Onset miseries. There were also sandstorms that would blow up and wreck equipment, hurling sand around with enough worse to strip the paint off of trailers. Imagine what that does your skin, as well as other human threats. Brandon Fraser totally w Jim Jacks. The producers said, I took out million dollar kidnapping insurance policies on you. We were like, so, basically, you put a bounty on our head. He's like, that's one way of looking at it. I'll never forget. Kevin j O'Connor goes, how much insurance did you take out on me? Fifty thousand? That should do it was the reply. He didn't tell them that until after they were done filming. Either. They were like, I guess all like that sitting around talking about how about the shooting, and Stephen Summers like, yeah, I had to take out kidnapping insurance on you guys. But thankfully the film had the support of the Royal Moroccan Army, presumably to guard against any near do wells We're gonna try to kidnap their star. Yeah, you know, it's good to have an army. Well, whence when's it? When's that never backfired? Yeah? Most of the cast and the Mummy excuse me, most of the cast in The Mummy nine, I should say, did their own stunts, including Rachel Weiss, who revealed to the Birmingham Post that there was quote one bad one where I had to turn around to shoot a rider on a horse. He was on a pully that yanked him off and he broke both his arms. They still used the shot, though this is not a charitable indicit vice has scene in which the library shelves topple over was achieved by spinning a single camera around three sixty degrees in one take, which meant Weiss had the duck out of its line of sight as the whole thing happened and pop back up at the end, which is risky. There were twelve thousand books on those shelves, and the whole thing had to be done in one take because it would have taken another complete day. This is set up the shot you know that scene right the Domino, the Domino library scene. That is wild. That is I think I always assumed I was computers. I had no idea that was for real. Yeah, it's the only thing about that that's aged poorly, is they when they do they go to a wide shot of her on the ladder. Balancing between the two shows is very clearly not a particularly slight man in a wig and address. But yeah, all those shows man one take Wow and well, the exterior of the Museum of Antiquities in Cairo is actually in Marrakech. Its interiors that of the meant More Towers and the village of meant Moore, buckingham shere, England, built in the eighteen fifties for the Rothchild family. That Rothchild family. Wow. The house was seen also in Terry Gilliams, Brazil. All that makes sense, and its exteriors used the Sandy Kubick's Wise Wide Shut and perhaps most famously, it's the Wayne Manner and Christopher Nolan's Batman begins, it's our second nice wide shot wife referenced this episode. One of the sad things that Brendan Fraser has talked about recently is how these movies destroyed his body. By the time he was filming the third one, he told g Q, I was put together with tape and ice. I just got like really nerdy and fetishousy about ice packs, screw cap ice packs and downhill mountain biking paths because they're small in their light, they could fit under your clothes. I was building an exoskeleton for myself daily. He needed back surgery twice. He had a lambin ectomy which didn't fix his lumbar spine, so he had to have it again, needed a partial need replacement. He had to have spinal pads fused together, and he needed to have his vocal cords repaired, which I don't even know how you do that. I guess just yelling and now. And then of course he almost died making this film. In the scene where his character is hung at the prison, uh he you know. In I think the the urban legend started in this basically. I think with that Birmingham Post interview that that Rachel Vice gave she was one of the first people who talked about it, but in twenty nineteen he gave a very detailed explanation. Um he was saying that. He said, I did get fully choked out. It was scary, and then E. W. Immediately cuts to Stephen Summers, who says it was Brendan's fault. Uh. Fraser explained, there was a hangman's gallows and there was a hemp rope tied into a noose placed around my neck. The first take, I'm doing my best choking acting. Steve says, can we go for another one and take up the tension on your rope? I said, all right, one more, one more take, because a noose around your neck is going to choke you in the arteries no matter what. I remember seeing the camera start to pan around and then it was like a black iris. At the end of the silent film, he's talking about going unconscious. I regained consciousness to one of the E M T s saying my name, there was gravel in my ear. Oh. Compounding this is the fact that the rest of this cast all said that Summers would say the same thing before every take, which was ready, don't suck act shin. So that was the last thing Brendan Fraser heard before he almost choked to death. Uh memories. As you meditate on that, We'll be right back with more too much information. After these messages, production picked up at Shepperdton Studios in England for the interiors, with some exteriors shot not and about in the UK. For example, the scene that is supposed to take place on the Nile was actually the Thames. The port of Giza where they all board the ship was a massive set built at the historic dockyard in Chatham, about thirty five miles southeast of London and Kent, has also been seen in Leams and Guy Richie's Sherlock Holmes. The set they built was six hundred feet in length to portray the dockyard area. It had a steam train attraction engine, three cranes, an open two horse carriage, four horse drawn carts, five dressing horses with grooms, nine pack donkeys and mules, as well as a market, stalls and for vendors. This whole thing eventually was filmed with three hundred extras in it. Um Steven Summers said in the DVD commentary that some of the extras local extras they picked up were not particularly experienced in the film industry. There's a scene in which one of the gentleman's eyes had to be c g I closed because he couldn't stop looking directly into the camera at every take and they just got tired of reshooting it. They also had to c g I some of rachel Vices parts away because her white nightgown got wet and they had to preserve a p G three teen rating. But the biggest challenge for this stage production was I l M S motion capture work. UM Industrial Light and Magic was working on this and The Star Wars The Phantom Menace at the same time. Ah there was a VFX supervisor there named John Burton, who Somers had worked with on Deep Rising, and they basically planned out their vision of u Demotepe in the mom of the character of the Mummy. They said they didn't want the guy in bandages, so they wanted him to be a corpse, or first they wanted him as a human, and then a full corpse, and then a human again with all the stages in between. And so they planned these five stages of him as fully human, gross mummy, and then just sort of a guy who you can see his guts. Uh. We wanted to create a photo realistic living corpse that was obviously not a man in a suit, obviously not an animatronic, and obviously alive. Burton told Cina fantastique, and they were constantly walking the line and doing these character creations of something that was creepy but not gory because they had this PG three team rating in mind the whole time, so he couldn't be bloody or like obviously gooey, so they were like, well, he's got to be desiccated, but we still need to see his guts. And this concept would be fleshed out pun intended by Burton, along with a team of nearly one hundred artists, took them five months of research and development, two months of shooting, and then ten months of post production VFX work. The technology that they used to motion capture and replace the parts of Arnold Voslo's body was a refinement of some of the technology that they used on The Phantom Menace, but on that film they were using it to replace a character's entire head. I'm pretty sure it was jar jar um, not just portions of their face. So what they basically had to do was create prosthetics for him that would motion capture parts of his face, but they had to be applicable as makeup and let him act through it. So they had to create like these led should capture things but still and and all that technology, but it had to be like two millimeters thick arnive. Also, his entire body I believe probably hairless at this point, was laser scanned. Uh. And then they also had to do the classic plaster cast thing to get to get his torso and head captured some of his mummy powers like the dust storms and and and the plagues that he summons. Our particle tech like particle animation stuff that I l M had developed for Twister, which is really funny, um, but others were much more low tech. The hail storm is dog food painted white and belted at the cast. The boils and sores, though the plague of boils and sores were those were prosthetics. UM. A six person makeup crew applied one and forty seven prosthetics two extras in three hours, which is some thing like one at the rate of seven and a half minutes. They crunched the numbers in Sinda fantastique, which thankfully they shot that at night, so they didn't have to deal with that doing that in a hundred thirty degree temperatures. Another fun thing that I l M was tasked with was creating digital gunfire because I guess maintaining all the prop guns in this heat and sand was such a nightmare that at some point while they were shooting, they were like, uh, yeah, just to have I l M digitalized all the gunshots. Later um for Frasier's big fight with the mummy, the soldier mummies at the end, that's the scene that Rachel Weiss is strapped to the altar for nine days at a clip. That was because basically they had a motion capture camera that he told Entertainment Weekly was the size of a very large industrial refrigerator that was on rails and programmed to make the same set of moves take after takeofter take. Uh. And he had to learn all of his choreography for that fight scene where he's like chopping mummies in half and like batting their heads around like baseballs. Um, he had to do all of that himself over and over and over again, and he had to learn that in two days. He said it on the on the commentary track. It's he said, it's one big mind fight with Rachel and I and we ended up doing it all in one take. And the compositing technology that they were doing at this point is really really interesting. Um, they basically built all of these creations like real humans. Like. They built them with skeletons first and then animated the musculature over it. Um. The mummies in that scene are supposed to look like the nineteen thirties, like universal mummies. They're supposed to be like dusty and raggedy. So they did uh, wire frame versions of their skeletons, and then another layer of all their clothing, and then the third layer of this particle technology to get the dust that's flying off of them. Um. Really wild. One thing that I've been unable to confirm but that could be accurate is that mummies from Toby Hooper's movie Life Force were reused. In Life Force is about a movie about a sexy space vampire lady who drains the titular life force from people and and and leaves them as um like desiccated corpses. It was like digital media. Ah heyo, Uh, this is where you do your golf swing anyway. Yeah, that movie was shot in England, so possibly some of it at Shepperton, so that sounds plausible to me, but confirmed by the BBC of all people. In one of the shots in this film, you can see an extra wearing the robe that Sir Alec Guinness war as Obi Wan Kenobi in Star Wars A New hope that you know what I have to say about that it does belong in. I believe it is in a museum because what happened was they after they filmed it, because no one thought. No one knew that first Star Wars was gonna be a hit, so they just sent all this stuff back to the costumer called Burman's at the time, and since they didn't, he didn't by the time he was a forced ghost in the next ones, they just found a different cloak for him because they didn't need the same one, so this cloak kept getting loaned out to other movies there. The BBC article says it may have also been in um Uh in the Name of the Rose starring Sean Connery, because it was labeled as like a monk's robe. And then that company, Burman's, was bought by another company called Angels, and all of their costumes were moved from Camden to Herndon, but this stuff just kept getting loaned out, and then finally in two thousand five they identified it as Sir Alec Guinness's Obi Wan cloak and took it out of active circulation and put it in a museum. I am reasonably sure that the Beatles got their Sergeant Pepper outfits from Burman's. Okay, I believe you. I think that's right. That's off top of my head. That fits right. The original spokeswoman for the costumer said that an original person original costumer verified it was the same cloak. One of the guys was sorting through this pile of monks robes and saw this brown one with an odd shaped hood. He put it on and the manager said, oh my god, it's Alec Gits his cloak from Star Wars. All this time we've been renting it out to customers wanting to hire a monk's outfit for a fancy dress party. So it's probably has like smudges of MS on it from some like, and it's in the Mummy in one shot one crowd shot in the Mummy. Yeah. I was on display at Herod's after they found it Angels. The costumer has had an auction in two thousand seventeen, and you know what it went for? Okay, I mean we wan Kenobi's robe. I mean that's got to be I'm gonna say like one point two million. Oh so far over, I'm so sorry, really just over a hundred thousand? What do you know? How much like v prop though? Also well, also at this auction Sean Connery's dinner jacket from Thunderball. I mean, I don't know, I feel like that's not of the Connery bonds. That's like not one of the bigger ones. I mean fifty six thousand close seven? Uh, the hat and suit he wore in Indiana Jones in the Last Crusade. What do you think that went for? Um, I'm gonna say forty six Thousanday? In two thousand six, what do you think that Givon Si dress worn by Audrey Heppurn and Breakfast at Tiffany's went for in the opening scene she's eating the Danish in front of Tiffany's oh Man. In two thousands six, I'm gonna say thousand. Good thing you're not doing this nine hundred grand. I can't believe that's sold that much more than Alec And this is Obi wan Kenobi robe. What can I say? There you go, there's your there's your auction auction corner, t m I auction corner. Yeah. Anyway, Sorry, I didn't mean to cut you off talking about the historical accuracies of inaccuracies of the Mummy. Mummy ninety nine. Excuse me because we didn't do Mummy thirty two or Mummy Mummy seventeen. Well, folks, January was Titanic month. February is Mummy Month here on t m I. We're gonna do every Mummy movie to a week the rest of this month. It's a short month, but damn it, we're gonna make it count anyway. This brings us to the most important question in this episode. How historically accurate is the Mummy? Well, perhaps unsurprisingly not very for starters. The film opens with a panoramic view of the Pyramids and Giza, featuring the Sphinx on their construction, so the narration refers to Thebes City of the Living, which is actually several hundred miles away. Also, city's royal palace is in the film located next to the Pyramids, but considering the modern conception of the Pyramids is basically giant cemeteries. Palaces wouldn't have been anywhere near them. You're an egyptologist, can you confirm that. I'm not a huge expert. I just I think that's true though. Yeah, that sounds right, uh Hamadopta. The City of the Dead in the movie in the burial place of the Pharaohs was actually not real. The city of the Dead would probably be more akin to the Valley of the King's where you know a lot of the famous mummies have been found. And Imhotep, the real person, was not a high priest, but was actually the architect under the pharaoh. Jo's er, I think that's how you say that Set the first, the pharaoh he betrays at the beginning of the film actually ruled around b c E, which is actually about years after im Hotep died, so they never overlapped. And as Sunaman comes from Aksunmun, as he says it in the film Moons, Suna Moon comes from a similarly named person. A similarly named person I can't pronounce who was the wife of Tutonka Moon or King tut from the late fourteenth century BC, but both she and im Hotep are taken directly from the two film Mummy, better known as Mummy thirty two. Now, certain mummification details in The Mummy are incorrect. There's no such ritual as the Home Die. The horrifying faith that him Hotep suffers in the film remind us what home die is. Uh. They cut out his tongue, wrap him up, and pour the scarabs over him, and then they chisel the Uh. They supposedly chiseled the blessings off the outside of the sarcophagus, which damns him in both life and the afterlife. Although you know that's a bit of a plot hole because if they ripped his tongue out with hot pincers, he couldn't speak as the Mummy, and he talks a lot. He's a talks He's a real talker. Emotep was his bits dying, keep going. No, I was trying. I'm trying to find a find a joke. There's not there's not been there. Uh. The canopic jars containing him Hotep's organs are somewhat accurate to the actual momification process where they would remove uh what was it, lungs liver. Oh, you wrote it down, lungs liver and testines and stomachs, also known as a divorce. It's good, that's good. They would not have removed the heart from the body because weighing the heart, overseen by the god Anibus, was an important part of the path to the afterlife, so they kept the heart in the body. The Ancian agypsist believed that the heart recorded all the good and all of the bad deeds of a person's lives, what like a a person's inner black box if you will, or your browser history are your browser history, and this was needed for judgment in the afterlife. After person died, the heart was weighed against the feather of Mott, the goddess of truth and justice, and the scales were watched by Anubis, the jackal headed god of embalming, and the results were recorded by Thoth, the ibbisheaded god of writing. And if a person had led a decent life, the heart balanced with the feather and the person was rendered worthy to live forever in paradise with Osiris. However, the heart was heavier than the feather. The mystical creature Ammet, which is part lyon part crocodile and part hippopotamus, devours them. Hell yeah, that's a good myth. I was always more of a Greek and Roman guy than but I love the animal gods. I love the animal headed gods. It's a it's a good it's a good conceit. They have had cooler momnsters, you know. I like minyturs, I like hydras. I like, uh, what's the one with like Griffin's Greek like. I just like monsters. They cool. They cool monsters. But you know Anubis mummies. Uh, there's also Artist Bay, who is the super hot goth guy with the face tattoos. That funny fun fact, Artist Bay is what Boris Karlov's character goes by in the Original Mummy. It's he's like human alias. That's what Emo teps fake name. It's an anagram for death by raw. Isn't that cool? And that's spooky who anyway, he's uh, he's he's a member of the secret Society of the Medgi, who are devoted to preventing Imo Teps return. That they were a real group, they were. They appear in Egyptian archaeological records from the Middle Kingdom to the Early New Kingdom era um. Some records suggest that they might have been mercenary ease other than they were basically like pastoral itinerant farmers, but they were a real group um and by the time of the New Kingdom they were in charge of protecting the royal tombs, so that was somewhat accurate. The guy uh that the hot dude playing uh our des Bay did fair who's later induced bigelow male gigglo, right, I think he's the like training gigglow who trains s Douce Biggelow. I'm pretty sure we double check that ah. I was close. He's induced Biggelow European giggolo. The second one really gotta get your deuced bigelows. We pride ourselves on accuracy on the show, and if you can't get your duced bigelows right, you lose the trust of the audience. So that the forehead tattoo that he has is actually Egyptian characters that transliterate to Imhotep the letters of his name, and across his cheek Uh is a word that's mot which it translates to like truth or justice or something. So those are real Egyptian characters that he has tattooed. And apparently Stephen Summers was like um. He wanted him to be completely covered like head to toe and tattoos, and then was like, I gotta look at him, and was like, well, I cannot, I can't throw soup on this mona Lisa I am. And there are there are, there's a lot of facial tattooing that happens in that part of the world, the Berbers different places in Algeria, but you see it actually a lot more with women tribeswomen or have facial tattoos, but the Medgi did not, So that's a w. And lastly, there is no such thing as an actual bound copy of the Book of the Dead. That is a cinematic conflation. Probably has something to do with the necronomicon, like the Book of the Dead from the Evil Dead movies. UM. The closest thing to that would have been a series of texts that were found written down a bunch of different tombs, um. But they were more of a They were a series of of guidances to people who who had died. It was essentially the handbook for the recently deceased from beetlejuice that they buried people with. They were It wasn't like how to raise the dead, It was like Hey, since you're going to the eternal afterlife, here's all the stuff that you're gonna need. We're gonna write it down and bury you with it. So I mean. The Beatles song, the last track on Revolver Tomorrow Never Knows, was based on a book, The Psychedelic Experienced by Timothy Leary that was based on Spettan Book of the Dead. You know, turn off your mind like stream, it's kind of traces its origins back roughly to this type of thing. Yeah, it's Buddhist versus you know, different, but but sure wedge the Beatles in there. Yeah, I need that. Let me have this. Sorry, so mean you. We really should have been reading a lot of your section headings on this because they're they're very good. We've had h what's mum got to do with it? The momsters? Uh, Mummy dearest? Is my fav is too easy? Uh? Mom's the word under wraps? Yeah, there's some really good ones. Now for the ride out, we've got mom want did he did he? Mum? Did he do? It's good? Thank you? All right, just a little treat for you. Yeah, I like that. I want everyone else to share. Test audiences did not respond well to Mummy nine, and they were put off by the vague title. What more do you need? It's descriptive. Yeah, I don't know. The president of domestic marketing for Universal, Mark Smudger, told Entertainment Weekly at the time they saw it as ikey horror stuff, this musty old guy in bandages. We debated changing the name to Raiders of the Lost Mummy or something like that, presumably Stevens Pilvert, the season's assists, but in the end we decided to go with just the Mummy. We decided we would redefine the myth with the film, which I would argue it did. The studio sent cash into a Super Bowl ad, which Stephen Summers told DW helped drum up interest in the film, and the movie May release date up to give the film room against Star Wars the Phantom Menace, which it probably needed, and it worked. The Mummy was the number one film in the United States and Canada on its opening weekend, grossing forty three million dollars, the highest non holiday May opening and the ninth biggest opening of all time. Yeah, I remember this movie being huge. It went on to gross over four hundred and sixteen point four million dollars worldwide and obviously spanned a franchise what two sequels plus the movie Two Scorpion Kings Three Scorpions, also an animated TV show that I remember nothing about about that um it ran for two seasons. Alma Julie, who played the Warden, told e W. The Universal representatives said the film's opening was so strong it saved the studio. Universal had a number of flops, and The Mummy literally saved the studio. I had some family who worked at Universal at the time, and I confirmed this. I was I was gonna say, what did your aunt say about I don't remember any specifics beyond like, you know, thank god you're okay, because I remember Babe pigging the city being the bomb that it was, and I remember the the Rocky and Bullwinkle movie with Renee Russo and Bobby Baby right right right that bombed Dudley do right bombs. Yeah, they really went in with trying to do all that ward, all those g ward stuff. Yeah, precipitated. You know what it might have been. I mean it might have been the flint Stones doing so well, although they did, you know what they did Viva Rock Vegas, which I went to see Amira of the head of Universal's house, and that was another bomb, But I think it was I think they really thought that if they just kept going hard on, you know, I'm gonna get In the late eighties early nineties, they were revamping all the comic book superheroes and stuff, and then they kind of moved into the more family friendly cartoon franchise, and I think they thought that they would finally find one that hit man. But back to the Mummy's video release in September sold seven million units on VHS and one million on DVD. Very early DVD, I would imagine, became the year's best selling live action VHS and second best selling DVD behind the Matrix. And it was figures like those that help Universal gross over one billion dollars in home video sales that year. You know what the first movies released on DVD were? Oh? Man, I knew this trivia fact and I can't remember now. What is it? Twister? Oh? That wasn't what I thought. Would that have been Twister? Mars Attacks? That's in the US, though. Do you know what they were? In ninety six? No? In Japan? Blade Runner, the Arnold Schwartzeger movie, Eraser and The Fugitive oh To Harrison Forward movies first released on DVD in History Good for Him. Uh. Critics didn't love Mummy, but mostly they agreed it was fun. Unsurprisingly, Roger Ebert had a great line, There's hardly a thing I can say in its favor except that I was cheered by nearly every minute of it. I cannot argue for the script, the direction, the action, or even the Mummy. But I can say that I was not bored, and sometimes I was unreasonably pleased. Mariah Lewis wrote it junkie in on paper. Nothing about the Mummy should have worked. It was an earnest action adventure movie in a decade when three films in that same genre had spectacularly failed back to back, The Rocketeer, The Shadow starring Alec Baldwin, and The Fan Him starring Billy Zane in do you remember any of those? You have to remember Rocketeer, I bet you like the Rocket, Yeah, I remember The Phantom because of Billy Zane. Yeah in his purple suit. Uh. She continued. The film rested on the shoulders of Brendon Frasier doing an Indiana Jones riff after a string of comedies where he played a variation of the dumb Blonde, and the filmmaker at the helm was a guy whose last flick was about a tentacled sea creature that eats a cruise ship. But the film spawned an empire continues to be beloved by people today. I found a Thrillist article from a few years back that said The Mummy is the only perfect film, um which you know, your mileage may vary. Obviously, I love it. I'll still go to bad for it. I'm glad people are coming back around on Brendan Fraser. I want to give Roger Ebert, unsurprisingly the last word in this his from his review that I love that sums up the charms of this film. There is a little immaturity stuck away in the crannies of even the most judicious of us, and we should treasure it. That's beautiful. Hashtag Mummy. Folks, thank you for listening. This has been too much information. I'm Alex Hagel. I almost said I'm Brendan Fraser. I'm Alex Brendan Fraser. Tonight, Heigel, you can be Brandon Fraser and I'm Jordan Brendan Frasier Rachel Weiss. All four of us will catch you next time. Too Much Information was a production of I Heart Radio. The show's executive producers are Noel Brown and Jordan run Talk. The show's supervising producer is Michael Alder June. The show was researched, written, and hosted by Jordan run 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. 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