During the summer of 1988 Who Framed Roger Rabbit? lit up movie screens and became an instant classic. Disney and Amblin Entertainment waved in the truckloads of cash while Robert Zemeckis, the film’s director, had done the impossible in pioneering never before seen special effects. In the current climate of Hollywood, it is hard to understand why Who Framed Roger Rabbit? remains a stand-alone film, but right after the success of the movie a script for a prequel was written, and it is just bonkers.
Overcoming Fears and Punching Nazis
The script, written by Nat Mauldin, opens on a pastoral Kansas farm with a clueless Roger who believes he is a regular human. On the eve of his 18th birthday, he finds out that he was adopted and realizes he is a toon, which sets him on a quest to find his biological mother. His journey pairs him with Richie, a surly character filling a similar role to Bob Hoskins in the original, and they both arrive in Hollywood. Once out west they meet Jessica, who is shy, quiet and has yet to discover her bombshell ways, and while Richie tries to make it as an actor Roger is discovered by crashing into a set. This is all very short lived as the plot takes a heavy turn 
following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour which inspires Roger and Richie to enlist in the army. The American government has high hopes for the newly enlisted toons and they fill the newsreels with claims of the toons being a type of super soldier which will quickly end the war. There is a great scene where a unit of human soldiers open fire on Goofy with a barrage of machine gun fire and missiles which don’t even phase Goofy, he even cracks a joke afterwards. However, the Toon Platoon is a colossal failure as the toons don’t want to kill anyone and would much rather just goof about on the battlefield. Eventually the toons, and Richie overcome their fears and obstacles and bash some Nazis all while Jessica discovers eye-liner and that signature red dress. They save the day, by killing a Nazi commander with a falling piano, and at the very end Roger finds his mother and discovers that Bugs Bunny is his father.
What Happened?
The reasons why a follow-up to Who Framed Roger Rabbit? didn’t happen, and probably never will happen, is an interesting story in and of itself. The original film was a joint venture between Disney and Amblin Entertainment, Steven Speilberg’s production
company, and the production was marred with economic and technical problems. The film was originally budgeted at 30 million dollars, a number deemed too high by Disney and quickly swelled to double its original budget. The film struggled under its own ambition as the production crew couldn’t physically find enough animators to fill the cells, and certain compromises had to be made. The film was a very expensive gamble that caused countless headaches, but it did ultimately pay off. A huge reason for its success was the shock factor of the special effects, many of which had to be invented to fit the narrative, and being able to achieve the same effect on an audience again would be very difficult to replicate. Every now and again rumours of a sequel emerge but nothing has ever entered production. In the late 90s a CG, animated, and live-action film sequel was pitched, a link to some of the test footage can be found below, but the estimated budget sat at over 100 million dollars, which was just too expensive for the studios. Additionally, the legal climate surrounding IPs has changed radically from the 1980s making the necessary crossovers next to impossible to acquire. The Toon Platoon script is entertaining and the world of Roger Rabbit has many potential stories to tell, but unfortunately, is increasing unlikely to occur. It is interesting though that Who Framed Roger Rabbit? remains a stand-alone film (there is a handful of shorts that are equally entertaining which were produced around the time of the original), but being a standalone film it has allowed that movie to become an icon of the era in which it was produced.
-Ian Benke
Check out the Toon Platoon script here.
Check out the CG tests here.
apartment or finding love, while also using their superpowers to rescue cats and, um, making umbrellas for pretty girls. It’s pretty great. The pilot kicks off with Tori Olafsdotter, the soon to be Ice, hard at work and comically avoiding the outdoors. After a lab malfunction, she’s suddenly, and with no explanation, granted the superpower of freezing water instantly. She then goes on to rescue a stoner skater dude, think Poochie with a helmet, from drowning by freezing the water around him. He just says, “wow” and nods happily. It’s never explained how he gets out of a solid brick of ice or how he managed to avoid hypothermia, but it’s great that Tori Olafsdotter got to save the day. While Tori is going through a life-changing experience, the rest of the team have got their own problems to tackle. The Flash can’t land a job because according to him he has no useful skills and gets kicked out of his apartment. Hilarity ensues from his misfortune as he is forced to move in with the Green Lantern, and in the style of the Odd Couple, hilarity ensues. The Flash, after only living there for a couple of hours, manages to re-arrange the Green Lantern’s apartment. Green Lantern is first slightly annoyed but eventually warms up to the down on his luck speedster. It is very obvious that the show’s producers were going for a Joey and Chandler dynamic, just with members of the Justice League.
million dollars. Now, 20 million is a lot of money, but come on, this guy has invented a machine that controls and localizes weather. If he tried to sell that technology, a technology that could put an end to droughts, he could easily become mega rich and completely change the course of human history. But nope, instead he is going to use hail as a weapon and make funny weather related puns while the world’s shittest looking superheroes chase him down. Everything resolves itself and Tori is taken to the underwater spaceship of the Martian Manhunter and added into the Justice League. After watching The Justice League, it is quite apparent that comic book fans are in a golden age of superhero cinema. Even though message boards are filled with debates over Ben Affleck’s Batman or how crappy the last Green Lantern movie was, they are all still leagues above this TV pilot. For the first time in comic history, these characters are being taken very seriously by Hollywood, and as a result, interesting movies are being made with beloved characters. Just watch the pilot if you don’t believe me.
What’s even stranger, and raises some historical questions, is what the hell is San Fransokyo? The movie is obviously set in America, but did the Japanese take over? Did they win World War Two? How did the world of Big Hero 6 come to be? Why is Baymax so lovable? Unless Disney moves into some dark directions these questions will never be answered. They didn’t throw out everything though, they kept the name Hiro and Baymax and kinda, sort of, kept the two female characters. Honey Lemon is by far the most similar thing between the two stories. In the comics, just like in the movies, she’s an upbeat, blonde with big heels who uses her purse to dispense justice. In the comics though, her purse is a straight up, super powerful item with no real limits put onto it, and Hiro is obsessed with her. Gogo in the movie is known as Gogo Tomago in the comics, and while she’s got a chip on her shoulder in both, her power in the panels is her ability to transform into force energy which allows her to move, and attack, incredibly quickly. TJ Miller’s stoner character and Wasabi are nowhere to be seen in the comics, and their positions on the team are filled by Silver Samurai and Sunfire of X-Men fame. Hiro’s still a boy genius, but in the comics he is super arrogant, super rich, and loves to wave a gun around. Their the perfect team to take on the fused together souls of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Big Hero 6 is a great kid’s movie and full of imaginative settings and characters, but the comic is really a completely different beast. Every Marvel fan out there owes it to themselves to read this interesting and short-lived series. It’s definitely not for kids.
is in fact, God. The Enterprise crew, who have all been promoted except for McCoy who has become a vet and Scotty who’s now a drunk, are all immune, because you know, plot. Kirk and the gang then go on to engage the menacing object which responds by becoming different interpretations of messiahs before settling on Jesus. They find out that the object is a very old spaceship with an advanced AI that is sentintent and extremely powerful. However, because every movie needs a villain, it’s programming has gone wonky and has become a threat to Earth and only Kirk and the crew can save the day. It then tells the plucky bunch, after cutting off Sulu’s legs and then reattaching them, that it has come to Earth several times before and had some hijinks. It came before to inspire the early Israelites who worshipped it as a god, and then came back later on as Jesus to teach galactic law. Kirk and the gang convince the god thing to travel to another dimension and everything comes out peachy. Pretty wild stuff, but it gets pretty weird at parts.
. Star Trek: The Motion Picture used some key scenes and character developments, like all the crew being promoted, while Star Trek: The Final Frontier grabbed onto the idea of God as a spaceship. What those works were missing though was the biting commentary that The God Thing was full of. Gene Roddenberry was incredibly forward thinking on countless ideas. Despite being a campy TV show Star Trek managed to tackle some heavy social issues with a tremendous of grace and intelligence. It would have been amazing if Paramount grew some Kirk sized balls and put this movie into production. Religion is a hot topic that too many people shy away from, and a topic Hollywood regularly avoids. It would be interesting to see the landscape of movies and pop-culture today if The God Thing had been produced in the 1970s.
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