Sometimes it happens that a book. play, movie, etc. apparently gets changed *before[/i it’s release, and the logical, intended ending has to go out the window.
I’m not talking here about movies they didn’t know how to end (like the notorious Lucky Lady), or movies they shot with multiple endings and let a test audience decide (as with Richard Kiel’s character “Jaws” surviving in The Spy Who Loved Me). I mean movies where they had an ending in mind all along and it got axed at the last minute.
Examples:
1.)The Haunted Mouse – A Tex Avery MGM cartoon with a cat chasing a mouse (although not Tom and Jerry). The mouse dies and haunts the cat, making his life miserable. According to Joe Adamson’s Tex Avery: King of Cartoons, the cartoon was supposed to end with the cat dying, and becoming nine ghosts (because a cat has nine lives, right?). But the studio axed it because they thought it was morbid (even though I can recall plenty of Warner Brothers cartoons where characters die – “Great act!” “Yeah, but I can only do it once!”)
2. The Gilbert and Sullivan operetta The Sorceror, in which a love potion wreaks its usual havoc. Isaac Asimov suggested, in his short story The Up-to-date Sorceror", that the original ending had the lovers getting married. This would break the spell, because the potion didn’t work on married people. Then they’d simply get divrced, and go back t their original lovers. The suggestio is that arriage for convenience follwed by quic and easy divorce was not something to be promoted.
Dr. Strangelove was supposed to end with a pie fight in the War Room, and the announcement that “the (presumably pie-smothered) President is dead” But the real President Kennedy’s death less than a year before the release squelched that ending.
Actually, it was “The president has been struck down in his prime”. There’s also a small alteration with the survival kit scene. At the end, Maj. Kong says “Somebody could have a fun weekend in vegas with all this stuff”. “Vegas” is a dub, as it was originally “Dallas”. You can still see his mouth saying “Dallas”.
Apparently it was too close to home after kennedy was shot.
The original Invasion of the Body Snatchers was supposed to end with Kevin McCarthy standing in the middle of the road shouting, “You’re next!” The studio insisted on changing the ending (and beginning) to indicate the authorities were starting to go after the pods.
Heaven’s Gate added a final scene at the last minute, which only added to its massive cost.
The original final scene of the movie was a guy walks into the convenience store as Dante is getting ready to close up. He shoots and kills Dante and robs the cash register. Kevin Smith decided such a grim ending would go against the tone of the rest of the movie. The scene is available on the DVD version of the movie.
It’s an older movie, but in “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari”, an ending was tacked onto the end, where we find out that the person telling the story of Dr. Caligari and his murders is a patient in a mental asylum and the whole thing is just a delusion of his. The government censors made the filmmakers add the last scene because they said the movie without it was disrespectful to authority.
I find it odd that one of the first (and one of the most copied) plot twists in cinema history came not from the filmmakers but from German censors.
This has been mentioned on this board before but the original ending to Fatal Attractionhad Alex (Glenn Close) committing suicide to the strains of “Madame Butterfly” and making it look like Michael Douglas’ character murdered her. It’s then up to the wife (Anne Archer) to clear Douglas of the crime.
I shoulda remembered Invasion of the Body Snatchers – I’ve seen it often enough. One nice thing, in that case, is that the “real” ending is there – they just tacked on some extra, with Mel Cooley as a doctor.
The Director, Don Siegel , always wanted the last shot to be from inside one of the cars, showing Kevin McCarthy shouting “You’re next!” When Philip Kaufman remade the film in 1979, they did shoot a scene near the beginning with McCarthy shouting “You’re next!” from inside a car. Only took 23 years.
McCarthy got to run around with a Pod shouting “You’re Next!” in Looney Tunes: Back in Action in 2003. It’s as if McCarthy has to do this every 25 years or so.
“Clue” Doesn’t really fit in with these – they always intended to put extra endings on that one.
Didn’t know about Clerks, Caligari, Attraction, or Suspicion. Interesting stuff.
I’ve never heard that they shot 12 endings. I remember when Martin Mull was on Letterman to promote this movie and I thought he said they filmed 3 endings only.
The original nihilistic ending, (the same one that is always used in the stage play, to the best of my knowledge,) didn’t get a good reaction when the movie was screened for insiders, so Frank Oz shot a happy ending.
I’ve seen stuill from the discarded ending – they did some in animation, and show a plant bursting through a wall with a poster for “Jason and the Argonauts” on it (a tribute to animator extraordinaire Ray Harryhausen). Is it available as an extra on disc?
I’m not sure it fits with my self-imposed rule, but they originally intended many more effects at the end of John Carpenter’s The Thing. They actually shot an animated section with The Thing attacking Kurt Russell’s character in the basement. A small portion of this made it into the final film (the tentacles grabbing the detonator and pulling it underground), but the rest as cut because the visual style different too much from the rest of the film, at least in Carpenter’s eyes (I didn’t think so – you ca see it on the DVD as an extra feature). But it was never in a version shown to an audience.
In the world of comic books, DC comics did one of its periodic line-wide massive crossover stories in 1991 called “Armageddon 2001.” Waverider, who lived in 2030, wanted to go back in time and stop Monarch, the totalitarian dictaor of 2030, from taking over. Waverider knew Monarch had been a superhero, but he didn’t know which one. So he goes back to 1991 and tries to find out. Reportedly, the original plan was for Monarch to be the mega-powerful Captain Atom, but when word got out, DC changed it to the kinda strong Hawk so as to preserve the suspense.
In the realm of comics, back in 1991, DC Comics came out with a story called Armageddon 2001. The gist was that one of the superheroes would eventually turn evil, become a villain named Monarch, and kill most of the superheroes and turn the future into a wretched place. A man traveled back in time to find out which superhero would turn into Monarch, and he became Waverider, who could touch anyone and get a glimpse of their future. This provided the basis for several stories, as Waverider visited the various superheroes and readers got to see “What If?”-style futures.
Anyway, all the clues led to Captain Atom being the traitor who became Monarch, but apparently this information leaked out. I have NO IDEA how this happened in the pre-Internet age, but apparently everyone at DC panicked and changed the ending at the last moment. In the final issue, Armageddon 2001 #2, even though all the events in the beginning still pointed to Captain Atom, you then saw Monarch in the present kill the heroine Dove, and then her grief-stricken and angry partner Hawk beat Monarch to death. Hawk realized HIS FUTURE SELF was inside the Monarch armor, so he put on the armor right there and assumed the role of Monarch.
Like I said, stupid. But the entire thing was pretty silly anyway.
Robert Heinlein’s Podkayne of Mars. The original ending has Podkayne dying in the final scene. His editor thought that would be a little too grim for a book for girls and in the end Podkayne is left very hurt (and offstage) while her brother finishes her diary.
It was included on the first DVD release but the story goes that David Geffen was furious that the original ending was released and had the DVDs recalled. Some of the already-sold DVDs turn up on eBay on a regular basis. The song associated with that ending, “Don’t Feed the Plants,” is on the soundtrack.
