I love deleted scenes and outtakes - so much that whenever we watch a movie my husband always sighs with resignation and waits patiently when I check for them.
And alternate endings are like the icing on the cake!
So what are your favorite outtakes, deleted scenes and alternates?
Old School
Mitch (Wilson) is telling Beanie (Vaugn) they are going to arrest him for sleeping with his bosses underage daughter.
Beanie responds “Arrest you for what? Being awesome?”
The outtake at the end of Being There. It was clear when watching the movie that there was supposed to be a scene of Chance delivering the foul-mouthed message the hood told him to deliver, but, when the time came for it, it wasn’t there.
Over the final credits they showed it. It was hilarious – Peter Sellers doing a long expletive-laden “gangsta” type monologe, in his deadpan “Chance the Gardener” voice. It was probably just too funny to be left in.
On the Season 2 DVD set of Alias, the outtakes feature a montage of Jennifer Garner walking smack into a variety of set peices.
(A woman after my own heart. (With the clumsiness, not the Affleck lovin.))
The outtakes from “Meet the Fokkers” were some of the funniest I’ve ever seen. It was fun to see Blythe Danner, Dustin Hoffman, Barbra Streisand, and Robert DeNiro just clowning around and making mistakes. They were clearly having a great time. I think the best part was just seeing DeNiro so relaxed and goofy.
In Waiting for Guffman, there’s a deleted scene which is funnier than anything in the film. They’re doing the auditions for the play, and this one gal comes in and does this whole routine about getting revenge on the brother who molested her as a child. At one point, she’s just screaming, “Who’s on top and who’s on bottom now, Billy?”
After the credits of “Grumpier Old Men”, the litany of euphemisms for having sex that Burgess Meredith comes up with is one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen. His delivery of the line, “he’s ridin’ the skin boat…ta TUNA TOWN!!!” is awesomely funny! Actually, it was probably funnier than anything in the rest of the film.
In Ali G second season DVD there is an outake (actually it is billed literally as “Unseen Sh6t”) where Borat is on a farm in Texas where they “hunt” exotic animals – at one point Borat gets the Good Ol’ Boy to agree with Borat (clearly not kidding) words to the effect “yeah it would be great if we could be allowed to hunt Jews here as well.” Also Borat shows them how they call animals in Khazikstan – by doing a crazy dance in his underwear – not sure why it didn’t air it was great.
The plot of Dungeons & Dragons (the movie) makes almost no sense.
Amonst the deleted scenes, there are two crucial scenes where they explain the plot.
What makes them particularly precious is that the reasons the scenes were baleeted was because they were hugetastic special effects scenes and they ran out of . . . something. Time? Money? RAM? Or maybe patience, like the SFX team just said, “Guys, this movie beyond lame. We’re going to go play D&D for real. Later.”
One of the deleted scenes is the main character acting in front of a blank bluescreen. The disembodied voice of an unrendered dragon gives important information about why the characters go on to do almost everything else they do in the movie, as the main character reacts very convincingly to the bluescreen. (In the movie, the character jumps into a magical scroll then jumps back out and says to the other characters, “Hey! We’re going to [place]!” with basically no explanation, and the other characters say, “Rock! Rock on!”)
The other scene is also a bluescreen dealie, but they’ve added in some placeholder video . . . of a paper puppet. As in, a handdrawn dragon, cut out and pasted to a popsicle stick. In the bluescreen, it is all blown up and gigantic, and they jiggle it up and down as the main character reacts. And the puppet explains the plot.
I can think of many other movies that would be greatly improved by a popsicle-stick puppet explaining the plot at some point.
Ronin’s alternate ending changes the movie’s aftertaste. It’s really depressing.
The extra scenes in Wild Things. I don’t know if they really count, as they were scattered among the credits, but if you stayed and watched, they changed the whole freaking movie! Everything you knew was wrong!
The anime Berserk has some truly classic outtakes from the American dubbing. It’s especially funny as the anime itself is a very grim series about mercenaries, and then the outtakes are completely zany and silly. Stuff like Griffith’s voice actor randomly bursting into song (including stirring renditions of “I Will Always Love You”, Metallica’s “One”, and the Little Mermaid’s “Part of Your World”). Or the narrator starts arguing with the director and declaring, “Who is Jon? I am the voice of God hovering above!” and in the background you hear the director calling for security. Or a tender moment between two characters, when the voice actor goes off script and starts saying, “My love for you… is like a big truck. Berserker. Would you like some making fuck, BERZERKER!”
Soon, very soon, I will use this line on my girlfriend.
One of the tapes of the anime Video Girl Ai had this amazing clip where the voice actors went crazy with the accents. They dubbed a scene of the girl, fresh out of the shower, confronting the milquetoast lead, using a variety of accents – redneck, Brooklyn, upper-class British, etc.
The bit in Pirates of the Caribbean where they edited the ship battle sequence using audio from a car-chase gunfight was also hilarious.
The otherwise forgettable Rush Hour 2 had a great bit where Chris Tucker’s cellphone went off during a scene, and he answered it by chewing out the caller for calling him at work. At one point he yells, “NO you can’t talk to Jackie Chan!” A few moments later, he hands the phone to Jackie, who proceeds to yell at the caller for calling Tucker at work. (Maybe it was the original Rush Hour. I don’t exactly recall.)
CLERKS!
Easily the funniest is the outtakes from the farting in the elevator scene from The Pink Panther. Peter Sellers could not keep a straight face and he messed up about 20 takes. The first time I saw the outtakes I laughed so hard my cheeks and sides hurt.
Deleted scenes in Spinal Tap. Verrrry funny.
I liked the deleted scenes fromB]Galaxy Quest**, not to mention Terminator 2, Aliens, and the Abyss – the movies were much better with them in, and I was annoyed that they were removed.
Funniest outtakes were the ones of burgess Meredith coming up with all the cutesy euphemisms for sex at the end of Grumpy Old Men (and Grumpier Old Men)
The DVD of the great mockumentary This is Spinal Tap has a long sequence of outtakes that practically make a whole other version of the movie. They just had too much funny for two hours. I understand the same is true of the DVD of Best In Show.
From The Two Towers, the scene of Eowyn singing the lament for Theodred just about broke my heart, and made me appreciate the job Miranda Otto did with the character that much more.