Beauty and the Beast: 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 Too Much Information, the show that brings you the secret history and little known fascinating facts about your favorite movies, music, TV shows, and more. We're two guys with too much free time on our hands. My name is Jordan run Tug and I'm Alex Tigel, and we're talking about a tale as old as time, a tune as old as song. Yes, we're doing a deep dive into Beauty and the Beast, a crucial part of the so called Disney renaissance of the late eighties and really into the nineties. The Little Mermaid kicked it off, but Beauty and the Beast really showed that this wasn't a fluke. This was the bar that the Disney animators were holding themselves too, and it was a high one. Uh. We'll talk about this in the episode, but Beauty of the Beast really took feature length cartoons out of the realm of children's entertainment and into the world of adults. And you know, even I can say this high art truly one of my favorite animated films. Ever, I think it's probably my favorite Disney film. If I had to pick what do you think. Well, it's the only one with Jerry Orback in it, so that's why he gets a sterling A plus for me, it's incredible, great film. And yeah, like you said, I mean, I would argue hasn't been topped. There are some that would argue Lion King, but I'm gonna I'm more of a Beauty and the Beast guy. I don't know. It's that I can't get past sexy Nala. It's too weird for me. Not that I wasn't sexually attracted to the Beast, but like he at least was bipedal. All right, let's get into it. You're all listening to this right now, just imagining we're doing this in like a big library like the Beast right now. Oh yeah, absolutely, that is where I am seated. Is awesome, It was so cool. All right, Well, folks, we welcome you to beat our guests, as it were. Relax, pull up a chair as Higgel and I proudly present everything you didn't know about Beauty and the Beast. So Walt Disney and himself and his frozen head wanted to do a version of Beauty and the Beast way back in the day. And just to give you a quick context, Um, there's Disney's like first great phase that runs from ninety nineteen fifty nine roughly, and Walt had supposedly considered the source material for this for adaptation in the nineteen thirties, but according to Peter M. Nichols in The New York Times Essential Library Children's Movies, he then abandoned it. Yeah, apparently the studio endured a lot of financial losses actually after the kind of not so great responses to Bamby and Fantasia their classics now, but I guess they didn't do as well as Disney had hoped the time, and then they were drawing into the war effort for the Second World War to make propaganda films, and so the whole Beauty and the Beast idea I kind of got put in the back burner for you know, at least a decade, probably into the fifties. Didn't Fantasias start finally recouping its losses when they started rerunning it in like the sixties for those donors, I think so, yep, yeah, um so by this point though, when once we get out of the war phase, when they started making propaganda films, which I don't know if I've seen any Disney propaganda films that sounds fun. It's up there with the doctors who's propaganda films. They're good, I mean good, let me qualify good. They're they're they're interesting. Yeah, but so by Jean Cocteau has put out his own live version adaptation, which is justifiably famous, regarded as one of the best films ever made. But between Disney's presume and hatred for the French and the fact that he just didn't like competition, which I'm probably also projecting, they just gave up on the storyline. Yeah, I mean, I guess Disney made an attempt to revisit the idea in the fifties, but he and his writers really struggled with the second half of the movie when Bells just locked in the beast Castle, and they were worried that the film was gonna be, in their words, claustrophobic, because there's some versions of this fare tale where she's locked up for months before she meets the Beast. So they really struggled with how to kind of like make this something that really played on the screen. And also Walt was tied up with not only other movies throughout the fifties, I mean from Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty and Peter pan On down. But he was trying to get Disneyland off the ground as well. So the Biddey and the Beast idea was put on ice before Wald himself was put on ice in six when he died. I'm sorry, I'm really sorry for that. That That is what brief is. Walt frozen sidebar. That is true, right, That's not an urban legend. He is crygetically frozen. I have no idea. I don't want it ruined. I wanted. I wanted in my heart he is and you're and you're equally frozen. Art. Yeah. Anyway, So fast forward to the nineteen eighties and honestly another one of my favorite films of all time. During production for Who Framed Roger Rabbit? You have to understand that at this point Disney had set up a satellite studio in London, and so they are doing kind of overseas productions at the same time they're doing stuff in the States, and so they initially pitch doing Beauty and the Beast to Roger Williams, who is the guy who's running the animated portions of Roger Rabbit. His passion project is another movie called The Thief in the Cobbler, which does eventually get made, and it's been kicking around also since the sixties. That film is wild because it's been it was just tating forever, like finally, yeah, it finally gets released and it flops. And one of the reason it flops is because Mirra Max and Harvey Scissor Hands actual monster Harvey Weinstein had done his classic thing, which is just get involved and just meddle with it. Um. You know, we don't have to go into what and how he did. But this film flops when it comes out in so um. Roger Williams almost directed it, wound up not directing it, and then his passion project was mercilessly with and died. So that's a fun story about the animation machine in the late eighties and nineties. Yeah, it's interesting. I think that duty to the beast at this stage was they wanted to be a non musical, which is sort of hard to imagine now. I know, one of the some of the best songs of all times, of all of like some of the best Disney songs, oh easily. Yeah, three of those songs were nominated for an Oscar that year. I mean, that's how you know the quality of these songs. So they decided that making it a musical is probably the best direction after the success of The Little Mermaid in nine. And that's really what we said. This is the top of the episode, the the movie that really kicks started the so called Disney renaissance. I mean that was really like the set the tone for the next ten years for the company. So Linda Wolverton, who went on to co write The Lion King, she also contributed to Milan. She wrote Malificent, she wrote we don't want to talk about this, but she wrote Alice in Wonderland. In their sequels, she becomes the first woman to script a major animated feature. Uh. And it was quite the promotion for her. And why was that, Jordan's because at this point her only experience writing for Disney had basically just been working on episodes of Chippendale. Rest You Rangers also a classic. Yeah, absolutely, um. And it's interesting to note that this is really the first Disney animation film that used a dedicated screenwriter. I mean, prior to that, most animated films kind of you story artists and story editors to dictate what, you know, what the film would be and the beat out the different plot points. And at this point, Michael Eisner had just joined Disney, and uh, he was relatively new to the animation world, and he basically wasn't used to how the stories traditionally came together, you know, as these big collaborative efforts in animators offices rather than you know, in the mind of a dedicated screenwriter. So he brought Linda Wolverton on board to work the script out and they really worked hard on this. Apparently that the prologue at the beginning of the movie with the you know, with the stained glass windows and everything, Apparently that scene was rewritten some two hundred times before they got the final versions. I mean it makes sense. I mean, think about when you're writing an article or even like writing a song or something, you want to get that opening just perfect because that just sets the that draws people in. So in a way I understand that, but still that's times. Yeah. So at this point the film is starting to take shape, or at least the loose idea for the film is starting to take shape, and Roger Williams punts it to his buddy and another British gentleman, Richard Perdume, who starts work on the non musical version of the film under a producer named Don ham Uh. And it was meant to be kind of like The Rescuers down Under, which was also in production at Disney at this time, and it was also a non musical, so that was kind of the tone that they were going for. But executives jump in after seeing some early footage, Walt Disney Studios chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg scraps the entire thing and orders the team to start over from scratch, over, which Williams quits. I mean, yeah, I understandably, so, I mean, you can see this early storyboard on YouTube. I think it's like twenty minutes of it, and it's pretty interesting. It kind of follows in the tradition of Cinderella and Snow White and Beauty where Bell is basically being harassed by an older woman. This time it's like her aunt, I think, because she wants to marry her off to Gaston. And at this stage the enchanted objects were, I think, with just one exception, voiceless and faceless. And I said earlier there were no songs in this and the comment that kept recurring again and again for this early storyboard was that it was kind of dark. It was like, I think the summation was kind of unfair. That I heard mostly for this early version was that was basically two people sitting at dinner every night, and the general consensus with it was just pretty dark and depressing. And this became really even more apparent when A Little Mermaid premiered in eighty nine with you know, under the Sea and and you know Caribbean music and all the colors and the songs. It's bright. So like, Okay, maybe having a movie that's mostly like dinner and a dark, gloomy castle, like a you know, animated masterpiece theater kind of thing, maybe isn't the way to go. So they changed everything and and the producer's approached Beauty and the Beast basically as an animated Broadway musical, although we you know, the current Disney plan of rebooting every single franchise is like a dark and gritty origin story. I for one of him, am thrilled for am my Dinner with Andre esque version of Beauty and the Beast My Dinner with Louiser yea so at this point, Little Mermaid directors John Musker and Ron Clements are then approached and asked to take over production, but they basically said we are Are they British? Would they say, uh, we're knackered? I think they're American, but you can say an acurative, so they just said Disney. Um so then director the directing team of Kirk Wise and Gary Trousdale, who were sort of I don't want to use the phrase jobbers, but they're like Disney roustabouts. They've been working on Epcot short films. They storyboarded Rescuers down Under, the storyboarded Prince and the Pauper. They're teamed up with Han. Yeah. Kirk Wise, it's funny put himself through art school by drawing caricatures for Taurus, not at Disney but Universal Studios. They Disney looked past that and hired him. Anyway, Um, why isn't Showsdale really kind of had their work cut out for him because at this stage they basically had to start from scratch, you know, leaving just two years to meet Jeffrey Catsenberg's one film a year pace that he wanted to hit and Catsenberg, we really haven't talked enough about him. He's kind of the engine behind this whole operation, the so called you know, Disney renaissance. Uh. He had this mantra of bigger, better, faster, cheaper, and Little Mermaid has certainly, you know, achieved the first two goals of this aim. But making low budget animated films on a tight schedule really wasn't gonna work for these animators, Like they really believed in quality above all else. You can cut out when I call him, but you have to put in that thirty years later, he would be responsible for the stunning failure of Keep Queeby What is that right? Yes? Yes, yes, quick bites, the vertical oriented uh micro content and thing that launched during the pandemic and flopped majestically. Is it still still in existence? No? I think they had to port all of it to like whatever streamer would have it. Um anyway, so what do you say about these next guys, the greatest Disney composers Ashman and Mancon Howard Ashman and Alan Mencon. Oh, good lord, yes McCartney of Disney. Yeah yeah, that's yes, roll with that. Um. So. Katzenberg also decides that the film is going to be a musical and At this point, he brings on Howard Ashman and Alan Mancon to write the score. And you can't say enough about these guys, but Jordan's please try. Yeah. I mean, they were really a throwback to like the Sherman brothers, who were Walt Disney's go to composers who had worked on movies like Mary Poppins and The Jungle Book. And Ashman and Mankin really brought this Broadway musical sensibility to the production, and they structured the story as if this were for the stage, considering that this wasn't initially going to be a musical. The final result, I think has twenty five minutes of songs in the film, and I think there's only five minutes of the movie total that has no music at all. So I mean, they really transformed this top to bottom to have one small piece of their brilliance. Just look at the opening bell sequence, and it's just such an incredible example of their brilliance. It's it's like an operetta, like it's something that's like Stephen Sondheim would be proud of. I mean, it's what the folks in the in the Broadway business call and I want song where all of the desires and problems of the main characters are laid out, and in three and a half minutes you have all this information and exposition given to the audience. You know, you have who Bell is, what her relationship to her father is, what her relationship to the town is, what the people in the town think about her, what Gaston wants, what Bell thinks. A guest on the economy of that song is really amazing, not to mention the the instrumentation, the arrangements, and the melody um amazingly. Megan and Ashman were absolutely terrified about how Disney execs would receive this song. They were like, you know, what are you doing? What you're putting an operetta? This is for kids? Like what do you like? This was this in Gilbert and Sullivan. But thankfully Disney executives loved it, and in any event, the duo had much bigger problems than Disney's response. So, Howard Ashman has just found out that he's dying of complications from AIDS, and the other important thing in his life at this point is that he's working on his passion project, which is a Laddin, and he was reticent to pick up Beauty and the Beast because um, you know, he had other things on his plate. And the team at this point has also relocated production from London to New York to accommodate him. And that's what factors into this next part of the story. So Howard Ashman lived up about two and a half hours north of New York City, kind of upstate New York. And it's amazing I think that so much of the Beauty and the Beast story was banged out in a residence in in the town of Fishkill, New York, where a screenwriter, Linda Wolvelton and and the production team would meet to be closer to Howard Ashman and and they really banged out the story together in this residence in and Katzenberg approves the script, which had input from Ashman and Mencon and so storyboarding for the film picks back up in and there is really amazing article written by the Disney storian Josh Bagel for Slash Film, and according to him, Ashman wrote most of the lyrics for the six songs, while seven songs have you count the one that was cut, which we'll talk about later. But Ashman wrote most of the lyrics for these films when he was quite literally on his deathbed, which is I mean, just makes it all the more astonishing when you hear you know how how well crafted they are and how touching these lyrics are. And he would die before the film was released, although he did manage to see a rough cut of it, and there is a dedication to him in the film's credits, apparently his partner Alan mankon. I mean, he didn't know that Ashman was sick until I think it was the after party for the Oscars ceremony where they had just one for The Little Mermaid, which is if that's true, what uh I mean talk about your moment of glory immediately be an undercut by Oh it's it's too awful to even think about, but too brilliant composers. We'll talk more about them later in the episode. But their gifts live on, yes, well, said um So, speaking of the musical part of the film. The Voice of Bell beat out five hundred other hopefuls for this after seeing an ad in the New York Times. And that's Broadway actress Page O'Hara. She's thirty. She was thirty years old at the time, which actually ended up working in her favor because the team wanted an older sounding voice for the character. Um, there's a bunch of different influences that go into the character, one of which is Judy Garland, which is maybe a tad depressing, but yeah, you can definitely see that in the outfit. She's wearing that blue and white dress. It's exactly what Dorothy wears in the Wizard of Oz. But apparently Courtney Lender Wolverton at least based on a lot of Bell's personality on the actress Katherine Hepburn. So in the scenes where bells dressing the beast wounds after he saves her from a wolve attack, you see a little bit of like play fighting, and she's kind of like, you know, hold still, won't hurt if you hold still, Like it's it was supposed to be playing on Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy's relationship in the movies and thirties and forties. But the big influence was Katherine Hepburn's part in Little Women when she played Joe March. Speaking to the l A Times in, Wolverton said that both Joe Marsh and Bell were strong, active women who loved to read and wanted more than life was offering to them. The Wolverton really wanted to move Bell basically outside the realm of the you know, helpless princess kind of archetype that Disney had uh really carved out of the last half century. And there's this great story that Lyndon Wolverton tells. She had initially written a scene where Bell was sticking pins in a map of all the places she wanted to go, and then by the time the story boarders had animated it, Bell was just in a kitchen decorating a cake, and she was just like, no, that's not what we agree. This is not who this person is. So they compromised by going with the Bell as a bookworm angle. So that's kind of more where her personality came from. In terms of her look. Animator Mark Henn said that her visual parents drew on more modern influences like Jenny Garth apparently and Alissa Milano, and her movements were based in part on Ballerina's. I guess she studied for reference, like a lot of tapes of Ballerina's moving. Do you know if you watch the film and she moves very grace, she's light on her feet. Yeah, she's very light on her feet. Um. For a reference model, the animators hired a woman named Sherry Stoner, who also served as a reference model for Ariel in The Little Mermaid and What is Sherry Stoner Girl on to Do? She went on to create envoys Slappy Squirrel in the animated acts. I love that. I love that so much. Getting back Judy Garland, we talked about how her her blue and white outfit was really inspired in part by by Dorothy and The Wizard of Oz. Blue, the designers said, was an important color because if you look at the opening bell sequence in the town, she's the only person wearing blue, which is meant to signify that she's sort of out of step with everybody in town. Um. And then later during the famous Beauty and the Beast title song sequence in the ballroom, the Beast is wearing a blue regal uh suit, which is sort of meant to be, you know, their way of visually signifying that he's kind of connected to her. Now, I love that suit, which is it's a great suit. Um, they really borrowed a lot from the Wizard of Oz. I guess think the enchanted rose with the pedals falling off was supposed to be inspired by the Wicked, which is our glass and you know when the Beast is getting his makeover before that beauty and the Beast like dinner sequence and like Lumier has given him a pep talk and they cut to him and he's got like curlers in his beard, and like his hair is all done up and he's just look stupid. That was supposed to be. I don't know if it's supposed to be, but it definitely seemed to be an homage to the Cowardly Lion when he's getting a makeover at the Emerald City, right when they when they arrive with the ribbons and the curls. So yeah, a lot have a lot of little winks to the Wizard of Oz there. As you meditate on that, we'll be right back with more too much information after these messages. So I mentioned earlier, this was supposed to be a new kind of princess. This was like a Disney princess for the nineties. They all apparently was I think the oldest Disney princess at the time. She was I think twenty one, whereas Ariel I think was just sixteen, and uh Pedro Harry like sort of celebrated this fact. She said, I love the fact that Bell is independent, she wasn't looking for a man, and she's highly intelligent. I also love that she's the oldest Disney princess. She's the only one that they ever created to be in her twenties. All the others have been teenagers, so there's a maturity about her, which is true. And this is an insane factoid about the homogeny of Disney. I guess in this era, Bell was the first Disney princess that was brunette, which is crazy. And also apparently she's the second Disney princess to be a non royal birth. I think Cinderella was the was the first. Can you imagine, like if that casting news was announced today and it would be like BuzzFeed being like diversity win. Bell is the first brunette Disney princess and it's giving us life. Anyway, Pedro har is incredible. She knocks it out of the park and there's a great behind the scenes story where she is troules done wise talk about this. They're recording the Beast's death scene and we'll talk about how they actually recorded this later. Which is also precedent breaking. But um, she is crying so hard when they're taping this that the engineers actually stopped recording and you know, punch into the studio monitors and ask if she's okay, at which point she looks up, raises her hand and says, acting just like man, if you can fool a bunch of hardened studio engineers into checking if you're doing a wellness check on you, your hell of an actress. Um. But so we just alluded to the Beast, and uh so, there were a lot of people that they went through before they landed on gentleman named Robbie Benson. So Lawrence Fishburne, Val Kilmer, Tim Curry, and Mandy Pittankin were all supposedly considered for the role of the of the Beast, which was eventually played by Robbie Benson, who's one of the I keep using the term animation roused about, which is probably insulting, but um, Benson has been kicking around the industry for a long time. He famously lost the role of Luke Skywalker to Mark Hamill after getting to the screen test phase, but he didn't completely strike out. I guess when he was a kid. He dubbed old Godzilla movies into English back in the sixties, Like some of his earliest gigs were just screaming like oh Godzilla, Like yeah, so here's that going for him? Which, um, He and o' harro recorded their lines together, which is um any animation nerds will know was kind of a rarity in the history of the genre. You know, Simpson are famously one of the shows that broke that convention of having the cast in the same room anyway, so he and recorded recorded their lines together. Robbie's lines are slightly pitch modulated, which is funny because I don't know how they actually did this, but it would have been probably pretty tricky at the time unless no, no, it wouldn't have because they were already doing the like unsolved mysteries like or that pitch modulation. Obviously it's not that severe. But you know, Benson would continue to dine out on the Beast for a long time, as he rightly should have. U there's a great, great story about this. Oh yeah, I love this. Apparently, Um, in Robbie Benson's post Beast life, moms would come up to him and ask him to do the Beast roar for their kids, and their kids would inevitably burst into tears because instead of a you know, a vaguely lovable cartoon character, you just have a strange man screaming in your kid's face. So I guess Robbie Benson stopped doing it and he started doing some other line instead, roar it my child, Yeah please, but your you missed a crucial bit of of Beast fantasy casting that kind of sort of almost took place. Apparently Regis Philbin audition to play the part of the Beast, which sounds like an urban legend, but this was I guess around the time that Disney bought a BC. So now Regis and Kathy Lee were We're in the Disney family as it were. And uh, Producer Don Han, in an interview with Glamour, I think in and I don't think he was being sarcastic, said that both Regis and Kathy Lee auditioned, but he was kind of vague about what the roles were. He said that he still has reaches his audition tape and that he and this is a quote auditioned for Bell's dad or the Beast or something. And I prefer to believe it was the Beast. Apparently Kathy Lee could actually sing, so they, you know, had a harder time turning her down. But I think everybody kind of knew pretty quickly that she wasn't right for the role. I could see Reaches being like like Lumier in a way, Yes, he's gonna cartoon his voice. Yeah. Maybe, I mean even Bell's dad. Maybe It's just it's like executive think like, oh, we just paid a load for this thing, how can we jam them together? Awkwardly? So, speaking of Beast, um and I want everyone to know Jordan's title for this section, and the outline is we can rebuild him Um. The design for the Beast, it's great character design, it really is. It's one of those things that looks like it has a bit of the uncanny to it, but everything is familiar. And so they achieved that by using the head structure and horns of a bison, the arms and body of a bear, the eyebrows of a gorilla, which is partially why he's so expressive in the face, the jaws, teeth, and mane of a lion, which I guess good warm up for doing Lion King a couple of years later uh tusks from the wild boar, and then he has the backwards bent legs of a wolf. And I guess Katzenberg wouldn't let the animators see Robbie Benson beforehand because he would unduly influence their design of the character. And he's supposed to be ten ft tall, which is wild when you consider the next design note that they originally had for the beast, which is one of the film's storyboard artists, Chris Sanders, who used birds, insects and fish as touchstones, which is horrifying. Trous Dale Wise, in the film's commentary, used the phrases avian insect, oyd and stag beetle and mantis beasts, which just put that in your mind's eye for a second. And it's also just it's just a bad sight. Again, tell them again so that they can really visualize it. I'm putting my mouth is close to the mic as fossile, avian insect oid and stag beetle and mantis beasts. It just doesn't make any sense to me, because it's like, you don't use God's most terrifying creatures as design notes for a children's film. But it's funny because Sanders later goes on to codirect and create Lelo and Stitch Andy Voices Stitch, which perhaps fulfilled his need to create animated sins against God and man alike. You know. And I think it's in the west wing of not the White House, the Beast Castle. Uh. They're all those like really terrifying sculptures of beasts, is the only way to put it. I guess those were early character drawings for how they were, you know, artists renderings of how they were going to do the Beast that didn't imagine it. Can you imagine a Sorkin scripted Beauty and the Beast where they're doing. They're doing walk and talks throughout the castle. But um, yeah, so apparently all those aren't at least many of those sculptures and stuff of these kind of really horrifying, monstrous almost like gargoyle figures. And I don't think the gargo. I think the gargoles are set, but the ones in the hallway that are really scary looking are disused. Beast concept designs. My favorite story about designing the Beast was designed by an animator, Glen Keane, and for inspiration he went to the Los Angeles zoo to study animals, and he came across a six hundred pound antisocial guerrilla named Caesar. Anti social is a very crucial part of this story, I guess, and Keene tried to draw him. Caesar charged at him and slammed against the bars, and he knew that this was how Bell would feel when she first caught sight of the Beast, and that proved to be something of like a breakthrough in his creation of the character. Do you want to know something funny about Caesar? Yeah? I do. He was the first guerrilla born by Caesarean section, which is where he gets his name. Yep, you It's astonishing how quickly you pull that up. You're you're quick on the Google draw there, my friend. Wow, another part of the beast anatomy. Uh. We may even end up cutting this, but I guess. An interview was screen ran. Never glad here you read this part. I feel like you you'll get some perverse delight out of sharing this information. In an interview with screen rant, Glenn Keene claims they gave the beast a rainbow butt like a man drill, but he says nobody knows that but bell Um. Uh, he might have been being facetious, we don't know, and Keen actually wished that the Beast had remained a beast, transforming his incredibly handsome human self later on, and UM, I don't know this, dude's got some issues because he wanted he wanted to have Bell also feel that way and be like sort of mezzo metso on the transformation, implying that she wanted him to stay a beast. And also at Keen's request, they had the voice of Bell overdubbed the line do you think you could grow a beard? Attack on at the end, and it got cut. And this is also under Jordan's header of the Beast's Rainbow Ass. So, in keeping with our tradition of hashtagging specific episodes of the show, if you have anything you want to tweet at the show about eating the Beast, please use the hashtag the beasts Rainbow Ass. Thank you, Thank you very much. Um. On the topic of the beast transformation, the smoke used during that scene when he kind of like spins around very lazarous like and begins turning back into a human. That's smoke wasn't animated. That was actually real smoke would have used for the black Cauldron film that Disney did with with Jim Henson. Yeah, it's funny. We'll get into a little bit of the of this later on, but this film like broke a lot of barriers with UM regards to animation technology, and it's funny that they were still also trying to cut corners where they could bring in the smoke we already used to get. I mean, yeah, that kind of seems like of all the things you can cut corners on, that seems like, I mean, I'm not an animator, so I don't know. Actually, you know what, I take that back. I can imagine you are an animator. No, no, no, I all the little tend rules and stuff. I guess that could be really annoying and time consuming. But but yeah, that smoke has some history. Um. We were trying to figure this out earlier about the best way to address the beast is it the beast or just beast? And I'm giving him a little dignity. I like giving him the title the title, It feels it feels appropriately respectful. But according to some sets of Disney scholars, the beast actually has a first name, which you can use if you get close enough to him. I guess. Yeah, so again on the commentary, troustill and wise joke about never having given him a name. And there's a persistent rumor that you will see in the Disney circles of the internet, which I don't really recommend going into um that the Beast's real name is Adam. But this does not come from I don't think canon stuff. It comes from a CD rom trivia game that Disney licensed called The d Show. Uh. The multiple Disney staffers, including Glenn Keene, who supervised all the animation for it, have gone on record said the Beast's name is not Adam. But you have an alternate theory about this. Yeah, i'd heard the whole like Adam name came from the Broadway musical that they made a Beauty in the Beast a few years after the film premiered. But yeah, you're right. Producer Don Hans said in an interview with Glamour, had we named him, we would have named him a French name because the fairytale takes place in France, so we would have been Francoise or something. But also he doesn't care. He said, like, if you want him to be Prince Adam, go for it. Making Prince Adam if you want. The Beast is all things to all people, right, It's much like Jerry or ball u. Uh, well, the Beast is the hero of this movie. I guess was the male hero. Let's talk about the uh the villain, shall we? I thought you were gonna be like but the real hero of the films? Yeah, Jerry Orbach so uh. Gaston one of the famous Disney villains, one of my also favorite Walt Disney World characters because it's just like a handsome, buff dude who rolls around wearing the outfit. They don't like costume him any other way. But you know who they could have gotten to play him was Jay Leno, the supervising animator for Gaston. Uh. Andreas de Haa originally designed the character with an enormous jay Leno esque chin and jaw, which is a huge backhanded compliment to jay Leno because standard Disney operating procedure is making your villain as physically unappealing as possible. Um So Katzenberg later comes in, hasn't refined the character and wants to make him, you know, the hottie that he is in the final film. A lot of I've been covering a lot of things about myself during this taping. I mean it's tough because I mean the hero of the story is this ugly monster, so I mean you kind of almost have to accentuate the difference by making the villain this sexy amount, right, you know, It's true. I feel like the who's the bad guy in the Hercules Hades? Yeah, I always thought that Hades was supposed to be like a jail So maybe just Disney really has it in for Jay Leno and making him the villain. Who Jay Lennon was the answer that I gave on the when I was on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? That I got wrong, So I I personally have it in for j Yeah. So I'm on disney side if they're gonna make Jay Lenno the villain on all of these movies. But um, yeah, I mean that they basically they kind of needed to accentuate the difference between the Beast and guests on by making him, you know, this handsome, good looking guy to kind of offset it. They apparently based his physical appearance off the arrogant character from Stephen Sondheim's A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to the forum, Miles Gloriosis. There's a little but a superman in there, and I guess some soap opera stars too. Um. Apparently the screenwriter Linda Wolverton based his personality on some ex boyfriends, which is amazing. But my favorite story about developing guest On is that one of the supervising animators said there was actually a contest to design his chest hair that's exposed when he sings. Every last inch of me's covered with hair. Go ahead, sing the line I feel like you, sing the line I can't, I can't do it. But how many variations of gaston his chest hair did they go through? About twenty two hundred initial drafts of the opening monologue, twenty different variations of chest hair for Gaston. I hope you people know how much Disney bled for you for this film. In the realm of alternate universe casting, Rupert Everett auditioned, but I guess he didn't sound arrogant enough, just too darnlikable. But he redeemed himself and he was cast as the voice of Prince Charming and Shrek to a decade later. UM other potential Gaston's where Donny Osmond and Patrick Swayzy. I can see swayzyrazy to be great. I didn't realize this. Donnie Osmond apparently provided the singing voice for Shang and Mulan m it makes me like it less now, no district, I mean, yes, disrespected don An Osman. Sorry, I know you're probably an Osman's fan, right, I mean, I don't know what was it? One bad apple. He's a little bit country, she's a little bit rock and roll. Yeah, I'm a little more country, I guess then, like, but so answer the real burdening question, which is does Gaston die? Yes, there's that's kind of a something of a debate in uh in Beauty in the Best Circles, there's an easter egg when Gaston's falling from the castle turret. For a split second, tiny skulls appear in his eyes, almost like a subliminal message, and um, According to the filmmakers, that's meant to indicate that Gaston does indeed die from a fall. But the guy from the who voiced the character's a guy by name of Richard White, thinks he didn't die. He's gone on record saying did you see a body? I never saw a body, thinks animation works like he thinks that like does he not have object permanence? Or he's like, oh, something falls out of screen frame it doesn't exist. Um. I guess they were originally going to be less subtle and a bit more obvious about Yes, Gaston did die. An early version of the storyboard had him surviving the fall only to be mauled to death by wolves. Hell. Yeah, which I guess they did end up reusing that for for scar and uh and laying when the hyenas ripped them apart. We're going to take a quick break, but we'll be right back with more too much information in just a moment. All right, let's get into more alternate casting lightning rounds here. First up is Cogsworth. John Klee supposedly turned down the role of Cogsworth to appear in wait for It, on American Tale five Will Goes West, one of the also misbegotten sequels to Classic Properties. I would put Rescuers down under with that too. I think American Tale Five Goes West was released on the same day as Beauty and the Beast. Dude, really unfair. Yeah, if you like, I I rewatched Beauty and the Beast in advance of doing this episode. The lines, I mean it sounds like Basil Faulty in Fawlty Towers, like he Cogsworth is written. You can just hear John Kleese doing those lines. It really makes sense that he was like the one that they approached first. Apparently they considered asking Patrick Stewart, Sir Patrick Stewart, I should say um, but his schedule was slammed because he was doing Star Trek next Gen. Uh. Sir A McKellen also missed out, so they went with David Ogden Styres. I think how you say his name? Who played it was familiar to me as Major Winchester on Mash though he originally auditioned for Loumier. I feel like you would you should take Glumier from here on out. Yeah, well, speaking of Loumier, Dan Castelnada, the voice of Homer Simpson, apparently auditioned for the role, but it ultimately went to Jerry or back Baby, famously of Law and Order and also the dad from Dirty Dancing, who also want a Tony for his work in Chicago. And he called his take on the Candlestick a combination of Maurice Chevalier, Gene Kelly, and Pepper Lapu along with a little bit of Fred Astair God. I love Jerry or Rock. I don't know if it's going to influence my appreciation for Beauty and the Beast or Law and Order more. It's just so weird to me that there's a link between those two. Is it fifty second or one of the streets in midtown is named Jerry or back Way? Oh yeah, you're right, absolutely right. I mean, I know he obviously is a big theater background, but still, it's just it is very weird to make native born in the Bronx baby. Oh yeah, alright, continue, all right, I'll take us to Mrs Potts. I got all have to say about Mrs Potts. So Julie Andrews was originally considered to be the voice of everybody's favorite t Receptacle before the part ultimately went to Angela Landsbury, who, according to my research and I really hope this is true, recorded her dialogue between breaks on the set of Murder. She wrote, isn't that great? I mean, that's more or less how imagined it, and I'm so glad that that's how it was. In reality. Life is what happens in between takes of Murder, she wrote, Uh, side note, everything gets back to Murder. She wrote. Jerry Orbach, David Ogden, Stairs and Joanne Worley, who played the voice of the Wardrobe all made guest appearances on Murder. She wrote, which now I take to me, and that Murder she wrote as part of the Extended Disney and therefore the Marvel Extended Universe. So put Angela Lansbury in a Marvel film, you cowards. I mean, this is insane story about So. I guess Angela Lansbury flew to New York from I guess Los Angeles to record the title song for the movie, and the flight had to make an emergency landing because there was a bomb scare. I guess somebody claimed that there is a bomb on board and they had to make an emergency landing. I think in like Las Vegas and so, I mean, that's enough to shake anybody. But Landsbury is such a pro. Flight continued on eventually to New York landed did the song in one take? One would take Landsbury absolutely amazing. I I think we'll get more into the music of this later on. But good lord, what a pro. But did you know that Mrs Potts was originally supposed to be called Mrs cam a Mile because the producers wanted a name that was supposed to be, you know, the most soothing association possible. Unfortunately, nobody knew the correct way to pronounce it. If it's cam a Mile, came a meal and they were also worried about kids not being able to pronounce it. Same with the character of Lumier, which is hard enough to say. They was originally gonna be called Shandal like Chandelier. Honestly, I think Lumier is harder to say for me than Sean Chandels Sands. Um. Why didn't they Mrs Shandls? Yeah? Why didn't they just call her Mrs Sleepy time t this is celestial seasonings. Yeah. On the topic of of Mrs Potts her what I assumed to be her son, Chip, Uh, he's a ward of the state. I mean, Chip seems very, very very young, and Mrs Podds seems quite old. Maybe it's her grandson. I don't know. But Chip was originally supposed to be a one line character, and the line was prepared to die. I guess maybe that was when they at the end of the movie, when the objects are fighting off the town's people invading the castle and maybe he was gonna spill scalding hot water and Lufu's eye or something. But um, the producers decided they really wanted to get like a kid's point of view in the story, and that's what Chip was. Chip was one of the kid's access points. So that's why they beefed up the roll of Chip. And prior to that, the sort of token cute role in this movie was supposed to be a little music box that jumped around and didn't speak, but it made like little chiming sounds. But that wasn't the only element dropped from the final film. Yeah, get into some of the what ifs of the of the of the score, I mean of the musical numbers. There's a long lost musical number, a very like eleven minute long musical number that got cut from the final version. It's called human Again, and it was basically the sequence features all of the beasts many servants who are tired of living as household objects, longing to be human again and uh again. The song was dropped in part because it was added eleven minutes to the movie and it just dragged down the pace of the story and it created timeline issues too in the narrative, basically like what is the dad doing all this time? Like it just added like days to the story, I guess, and it just messed everything up. And it was basically considered too ambitious. So what did our friends Howard Ashman and Alament can right in its place? Cycle there's something there which they kind of dash off at the last minute because they needed something a little simpler, shorter, more direct, puts the focus back on Bell and her relationship to the Beast. But not all is lost for human again because it's included in the odd Way production of Beauty and the Beast, and then it's actually thrown back as an extra on the DVD and Blu ray editions when those come out in two thousand two. That I'm just now thinking about this, but this is still a very dark movie. Like it is dark an adult you have, Chip is like the only child character all that all the characters are adults. They're trapped in a cough, gast nightmare of slave servitude as inanimate objects. It's dark, dude, honestly rewatching it. The scariest part to me and never many, was when when the Beast freeze Bell's dad and puts him in this carriage and the carriage move, it moves like a spider, and the legs move. I can't even really articulate why it's terrifying, but it is so upsetting. It's Freud. It's the uncanny. It's like seeing that's what the whole That's why the furniture thing is so sinister to me, because just anytime you have an inanimate object that's been like humanized in some way, your mind, like I mean, according to Freud, like you're subconscious, like is just like automatically like what is that? I'm unsettled anyway, And one of them is a child, which is so much worse. It boggs my mind that they're like, that's how we need to make this film lighter. Let's have a child who's trapped as a slave in an inanimate object. Anyway, great, oh, great segue. It could have been a lot worse because there was a scene where I guess the beast was gonna drag a dead animal carcass into the castle. Here's a question. Does the beast kill only what he eats, because like he's cooked for right, so is he doing this? Does he kill for funerous game. Alright, other lightning ground, other bits. And Bob's speaking of when when Maurice spells Dad is uh is lost in the woods. Uh towards the beginning of the movie, when he when he ends up, you know, the horse runs away. He sees a bunch of signs, like in a fork in the road. One of them, if you look really closely, points the way towards Anaheim, which is the home of Disneyland. It's also like in nash when they have all the signs pointing to everybody's hometown in the camp, like four thousand miles to Des Moines. Maybe that was a David augen Styr's tribute. Yeah, And I was speaking of Maurice's horse of office is called Philippe. And this name, and I guess other variants of Philip means lover of horses. Your mom is a French teacher. Did you know that? I sure didn't. What else we got um? As per Disney tradition, they throw characters of different people involved in production. In Gary, Trousdale and Kirk Wise are in the scene where Bell is given the book. Three men sing in this scene. Look there she goes the girl who's so peculiar. I wonder if she's feeling well up. Thing to say about a woman who just wants to read. They're the two people on either side of the blonde guy. And again you know, again that thing to say. There's three women who swoon over Gaston in that scene. They were termed the bim Bets and they're true and you look at IMDb, that's what they're called. That's other credited and their hairstyles are references to Ariel's Bells and Jasmine, which wasn't even released at the time. Too. That was just yeah, it seems like, yeah, super deep cut to throw in, um oh god, oh yes. So in the opening shot of the movie, there's a cameo made by Bambi's mother. You can see the opening shot of the movie. She's drinking from a stream in the lower right in front of the castle. So, uh, you know, traumatizing, as so many moments of this movie can be. At least know that Baby's mom got away everybody and she's living on the beast Front lawn, which somehow makes me, I guess less happy about her survival now that I think about it. It would have been great if they'd kill her again. I say that was the carcass that the Beast was dragging in. So Belle though, pops up again in Hunchback of Notre Dame. Um, which is on the sort of downward slide of Disney movies in my opinion throughout the nineties. But you know she's reading during it, and also in that film speaking of beloved characters who have been slaughtered. Yes, um, I guess pumba Is also makes a cameo, or at least his body does in the Hunchback of Notre Dame because he appears to have been slaughtered and the magic carpet from A Laddin pops up. Oh yeah, I think it's like being sold or something like hanging. Yeah, But the directors have confirmed all of these cameos, so it's not just overactive imaginations. So well, and there's the there's one last one in a Laddin when the Sultan is like sort of being magically enchanted and infantilized by Jaffar. One of the one of the toys he's playing with is the Beast. I think my favorite little odds and in fact toy is you know the scene when the beasts asked Cogsworth about like a special thing he can do for Bell and cog'sworth response with, well, you know, there's the usual things. Flowers Chocolates promises you don't intend to keep the voice actor for Cogsworth David uggen Stairs. Um, that's probably not how you say his name. I'm sorry, David Sires, but he apparently improvised that last part in the vocal booth and the directors liked it so much that they kept it in. Yeah, that's a great line. Uh. And as again with every Disney film, there's hidden mickey's. And so if you're if you're watching along at home while you listened to this podcast, which why would you? The mickey's are at the top of the center bookshelf in the library. After guests on his men chopped down the tree, there are three droplets of water that form an upside down mickey head, which is wild. Um. There are three stones by the roots to the left of the cottage at the beginning that also form an upside down mickey head. And on the back of Cogsworth's head there's a latch that looks at a scooch like Nicky's face. So, getting into more the nuts and bolts of the film, but this we mentioned a little bit early on. This is film kind of during a transition period for the animation industry. But they're they're off, They're on the wrong foot already from the beginning because they remember they scrapped an earlier version of this film. So the production team has two years to finish it, which is down from the standard Disney operating timeline of three or four. So, again going back to Peter M. Nichols, Heat says that this is one of the first film that Disney considered using computer animation for but three months of work with an earlier version of computer animation yielded exactly one wire frame chicken leg, which is again like two drafts of the opening monologue, twenty version of Gaston's chest hair, three months to sculpt a wire frame chicken leg and a computer and so they said, uh, and they they use um. They go back to traditional animation, which is then rendered with a scanning and compositing system called CAPS Computer Animated Production System developed by Disney four Pixar, And this is one of the earliest collaborations between the two companies. Yeah, I think this was the second Disney movie after Rescuers down Under to use this system, but it was the first, you know, non sequel prestige film, and this system allowed for characters and scenery to be depicted in a wider range of colors and to be placed on separate layers to give the illusion of depth. So you know, you see that in the in the Beauty and the Beast title song sequence, it's so much more three dimensional, and that just the different layers of varing degrees of focus. It's really it was strange watching it from the vantage point of thirty years later to see the moments that were very clearly traditional animation and then these moments when did you get into sort of primitive computer animated stuff, because the juxtaposition between the two really pretty jarring. Yeah, and the technology that underpins the industry is advancing so fast that during the two years they were producing this, the animation computer animation gets good enough that they're able to use it for the ballroom dance scene. But the dance scene at the end of the film is again an sort of an example of economy. Uh. They reused animation from Sleeping Beauty because they got down to the point where they're deadline to finish. This was literally days away I mean, that's something. There's a lot of YouTube clips of like little moments that Disney recycled, like from characters, just like turning around or like waving a flag or in motion or in this case, dancing where I mean they reuse animation from movies that are forty fIF years old. In some cases too. It's really amazing how they kind of, you know, obviously changed the details on it, but in terms of the actual motion of it, it's really interesting. But yeah, there's a YouTube clip where you can see the uh, the ballroom dance at the very end, right before the credit sequence. It's the same as at the very end of Sleeping Beauty when they're they're dancing. Apparently Don Han, the producer, talks on the commentary clip about keeping the film really really lean with smash cuts and no extraneous exposition or dialogue, which is, you know, one of the ways that they helped get Duty to be done on time. But the finished product consisted of are you Ready for this? Seventh was in feet of hand drawn film, one thousand, two hundred backgrounds, two hundred and twenty six thousand painted animation cells, and over a million drawings created by nearly six hundred animators, artists, and technicians over the course of about four years. That is insane. That is yeah, I mean, I guess I don't know how normal. You know, any other animation that might just be Sting's hearing that is insane. But enough about the nuts and balls of the thing. Let's when it finally gets out into the world, even in an incomplete form. This was a first for Disney in that when they screened it at the New York Film Festival in September, they only screened a partially completed version of it. Roughly sevent of the completed film was shown at this premiere. The version that they showed at the Film Festival included pencil tests and storyboards. You could see like coffee stains and paper folds and sometimes there'll be a character that would be accompanied by arrow was enhand scribbled numbers on it. And it was pretty revolutionary as far as Disney was concerned, because obviously they're so concerned about, you know, the finished product and how they presented the public. This is really one of the first times that they pulled back the curtain and let you see, you know, how they did what they did. I mean, they were toggling back and forth between the work in progress and the final result, and in the way it really added to the experience of seeing especially at the New York Film Festival, which is a bunch of cinephiles who really kind of appreciated seeing you know, Okay, this is what we started with, and this is what it's gonna look like when it's done. Um, And there's clips of it on yes, yes, and you can you can see the the opening bell sequence, uh that was shown at the New York Film Festivals on YouTube where I mean again, it's like three quarters of the way dumb, and everything all of a sudden in the middle will just be like chicken scratches on a piece of paper with a character and arrows going where they're walking and stuff, and it's really as interesting to see it. But the crowd at the New York Film Festival loved it. Ten minutes standing ovation at screening. Yeah, and you know, also important to note probably no children at this screening, So the fact that a bunch of critics have kind of stamped it and its approval in in an under three quarters finished version, that sort of gets the ball rolling for the adult cachet that the film is gonna accrue and uh, Hans says later on, it was almost as if everyone wanted to regard it as live action. Yeah, I mean no, we we touched on this at the beginning of the episode. But this was really a crucial moment in the history of not only of The Beauty and the Beast of the film, but also just the so called Disney Renaissance. And there are like really lengthy pieces in Vulture and Gothamist about this premiere. It's really like a big moment in in cinema history. Uh. The New York Film Festival, who you know, aren't the most nostalgic bunch, they staged a tribute screening for the twenty fifth anniversary in so this was this was a big deal. And the Code director Kirk Wise said in the in the Vulture piece, I really do feel that that screening represented the turning point in terms of the audience perception of these movies, from Beauty and the Beast onward. I think animation managed to escape the kids movie ghetto we've been consigned to for so long. It made the audience look at it not as just cartoons, but as film. I think that look behind the curtain really did give the audience a much clearer understanding of the complexity of these movies and just how much art and decision making and planning goes into them. Absolutely, Yeah, it's insane. I mean the stretch, the stretch from Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast Lion King. I mean, that's Aladdin. That's nuts. Oh good lord. I mean even the ones that you know, you were saying, how you know, Hunchback is kind of Stack is Fine's Hercules move on, Pocohonas are kind of I don't like them as much as those first ones you mentioned, but still, I mean when you watch them today, it's still is pretty astonishing. The quality, especially the stuff that came that wasn't Pixar driven in the late nineties and early two thousands. Yeah, there's a definite. I mean it's also important to note, I think at this point that also Nightmare Before Christmas comes out like a year after Aladdin, in between a Laddin and Lion King, and that's not I mean, that is a Disney product. But like you want to talk about crazy animation achievements, I mean, the stop motion in that movie, Henry Selick is just that is out of control. And I think if you're going to consider that film in the lineage of Disney, that's another feather in their catman. I mean, good Lord bat in a thousand Baby or close to it. But the death of Howard Ashman, that lyricists for this movie and and Little Mermaid and Aladdin really cast a pal over this otherwise really triumphant story. Early in the production. I think this was even before the New York Film Festival, Disney convened the bunch of critics and members of the Motion Picture Academy to watch a really rough cut. I think the bell sequence was the only thing that was in color, but everything else was in black and white, and it got this extremely enthusiast stick response, and the filmmaking team immediately went to St. Vincent's Hospital in New York City to tell Howard Ashman about him was where he was dying. Um and Don Han, the producer, told him that the film quote would be a great success. Who'd have thought? And Ashman, who's at this point so ill that he's lost his sight and he's extremely frail, he apparently whispered, I would And he was dead a week later. And uh, he receives a dedication in the closing credits of Beauty and the Beast for quote having given a mermaid her voice and a beast his soul. Oh oh man, it's a real heart punch. Yeah. Well here, this will help. This will help it a little bit. Jeffrey Katzenberg claims it's just the mere invocation of Katzenberg. Will we'll fire up the rage um. He claims that there are two angels watching down on him. Uh, whenever he makes his movies to help him, you know, put their magic touch on every film that they've made. Those two angels are how at Ashman and Walt Disney himself. Walt Disney's going, can we make this ten more racist? I need some I need some jive talking crows in this film. Uh God, when Song of the South going in the Criterion collection, Yeah, through chattering teeth from the frozen cryogenic m Yeah. So once the film comes out to no one's I guess actually too many people's surprises. In the review mirror, it seems completely obvious, but it conquers the world. Comes out in November, becomes the first animated film to reach a hundred millions in the US and Canada. During its initial run finishes as the third highest grossing film of the year, behind as you would probably expect, Terminator to Judgment Day and Robin Hood Prince of Thieves, as you would less probably expect, given that it is most popularly remembered at this point in history for the film in which Kevin Costner butchers in English acts got about that. It's also the highest grossing film in checks notes Italy that year, beating out I mean, this is hard to beat out Roberto Bernini in Italy, but it beats out his film Johnny Stickino, which is a mistaken identity film in which he his character is believed to be a savage gangster. I watched that movie parts of it in my uh college Italian one oh one class. Oh yes, yeah. While we're on the topic of foreign adaptations of Beauty and the Beast, did you know that Jackie Chan the Jackie Chan dubbed the Beast voice for the Chinese version of the movie. He's sang too, I love it, probably while being hit with a ladder. God, Jackie Chan is the best. But the film does not only read financial rewards. It cleans up during awards show season. It picks up the Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture in the Musical or Comedy category, the first animated film to do so, and it becomes the first animated film to be nominated for the Best Picture Oscar. It wins Best Original Score. It wins Best Original Song. You mentioned earlier that it has three of the original songs UH nominated in that category, Bell, the opening number, be Our Guest, and the title track. And obviously be Our Guest was robbed? Which one we didn't look up? What do you know offhand? What one? I think the title track of Eating Them? Okay, well that's fine as long as it was kept in house, but b our Guest was robbed. Weird think about be Our Guest. That song was basically written I guess you could say almost by accident, because Megan wrote this really kind of simple melody, just as a dummy melody so that Ashman could write words to it, and it just stuck. Like Mechan would later say that he couldn't write anything better than quote that dumb piece of music I wrote initially because it was just right. A really weird part is that, I guess in an early version of the Beauty in the b script, b our Guest was going to be sung to Bell's kidnapped father Maurice after he arrives at the castle instead of Bell. And then they thought, wait a minute, this is a really great song and production number. Why are we wasting it on what's you know, kind of a secondary character. So the whole scene had to be reanimated with Bell, and the lyrics tweaked and the principles had to be brought back to re sing it. And uh, side note, the gray stuff in um be our guest. You know, try the gray stuff. It's delicious. There's a br Guest restaurant in Disney World, and I guess they actually served the gray stuff. And and I don't know what's in it. I do know what's in it. I maybe we should launch an investigate a podcast to talk about what's in the gray stuff. It's um seal meat. Sorry, that's an Eric Andre reference in the In the iconic episode where they scare Kristen Cavalry off the set, Hannibal Brus says, I don't know what kind of meat, but I think the only meat that's gray is seal meat. It's probably porridge, right, I don't know what French food is gray cheese Uh, nice smoked brie. I anyway, talk about award show season. Yes, speaking speaking of seal meat, talk about the Oscar. If they gave Pulitzers for podcast transitions right now, that would that would most certainly that's a Peabody Award right there. But yes, Beauty of the Base was up for Best Picture, and uh this was the error when there are only five films per categories. So I mean, I feel like that makes the fact that this was the first animated film to be up for Best Picture even more impressive. But the Academy went in the way opposite direction that year and gave the Best Picture Oscar to Silence of the Lambs. Um, another film in which an older flesh eating gentleman has undue sway over a young woman. Man like Go four era some weird time, wacky weird time. Um. But yes, I think that was the only animated film to be nominated for Best Picture until up in two thousand nine, I think m I fewer than three years after the film's release, it becomes Disney's first animated film to be adapted into a Broadway musical, which subsequently runs for thirteen years. And uh, it's later selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress in two thousand two, the same year as an IMAX version of the film was released, which I didn't see. Did you see it in Imax? I did not know. I do kind of want to. Yeah, I want to see be our guests at imax, So that sounds awesome. I was gonna say, yeah, I want the like speaker, like the synaps rattling drops, I want that. Um yeah, I mean, I don't know. What more do you say about Beauty and the Beast? Not bad for a film about beast reality and Stockholm syndrome. Bump bump bump, But Nana, Nana, I think well. As always, as always, if you have anything to tweet at us about the show, please do so, do using the hashtag the Beasts Rainbow ass and uh, We'll see you now. Time for more. Too Much Information. I'm Alex Hegel and I'm Jordan runt Talk. Thanks so much for listening. Too Much Information was a production of I Heart Radio. The show's executive producers are Noel Brown and Jordan run Talk. The supervising producer is Mike John's. The show was researched, written, and hosted by Jordan run Talk and Alex Heigel, with original music by Seth Applebaum and the Ghost Funk Orchestra. If you like what you heard, please subscribe and leave us a review. 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