I finally saw this movie recently, and I was wondering if the toon who disguised himself as Judge Doom was supposed to be a famous toon character? A quick google didn’t reveal any hints.
Do you mean the actor? Cuz that’s Chris Lloyd. If you mean the character, I’m quite certain it isn’t meant to be a caricature of an existing cartoon. For that matter neither was Roger Rabbit. Except for Bugs and Daffy (and its been awhile but was Mickey Mouse there at the end?), all the toons in the movie existed in the context the movie.
He wasn’t supposed to be a known animated character like Mickey Mouse or Bugs Bunny. The character-who-called-himself-“Judge-Doom” was a deranged self-hating toon who apparently failed to make it as a cartoon character in Hollywood so he disguised him as a human and tried to make himself powerful and rich so he could wipe out Toon Town and thus all traces of his real heritage.
Actually, there were a whole assload of existing characters in the movie. Mainly Disney, but also WB, MGM, Fleicher, and others.
Donald Duck and Daffy Duck had a fairly famous scene together, in fact.
A Disney wiki has a long (if not necessarily complete - I can’t say) list.
None of the characters whose pasts were key to the plot, which was somewhat darker than your average cartoon, were based on, or actual, pre-existing characters. You just wouldn’t be allowed to do that with licensed properties. The closest that they could come to adjusting what we know of their personal lives, as it were, is the idea that they all exist in the same universe and know each other.
Well, that and Droopy Dog must’ve had a lousy agent early on - he made four pictures, then hit a dry spell from the summer of 1946 to the spring of 1949 (without film work in 1947, he has to take a job as an elevator operator), after which he averages more than two pictures a year through 1958. Not a great career, but a respectable one.
I did say its been awhile. I knew there were more that I was forgetting!
According to the Disney wiki, early scripts had Eddie Valiant reveal that Judge Doom was the man who shot Bambi’s mother. (It also spells out that he was originally a Toon who took up the role of playing the antagonist in movies – until he suffered a concussion and woke up believing he was a real villain.)
Interesting. All I knew before this was that he’s the only character made up for the film. Sure, Jessica Rabbit is heavily modified from her counterpart in the book, and Bennie the cab is much less important (he may not even be named) but Judge Doom is a whole other character.
It makes sense that they would try to pull him from one of the other works.
Also, it’s pretty good his backstory was removed, since the unkillable nature of toons seems to also extend to them actually being hurt for any extended length of time. Then again, all you need is to have part of his brain erased by Dip, or, at least, its precursors.
I notice that at the end the had Woody Woodpecker (who hadn’t been seen in the rest of the movie) show up. I got the distinct impression that they wanted to make sure you knew they weren’t suggesting that the manic Woody wasn’t Judge Doom. He had the wild voice and insane manner that would fit Doom.
Althpough, come to think of it, although they mentioned Screwy Squirrel, he didn’t show up in the final scenes (he shows up in a picture on the wall in Lena Hyena’s room). Although practically forgotten today, he did make several cartyoons, and cartoon hstorian Joe Adamson says he was even more manic and annoying than Woody or Daffy at his worst, to the point of being truly annoying rather than funny.
(For the Record, I don’t think that Judge Doom was intended to be any particular cartoon character.)
A popular theory is that Judge Doom was really Buddy, or another one of those characters from the early days of cartoons, who got kicked to the curb by Mickey Mouse, Bugs Bunny, and the rest of the “Golden Age” characters.
Judge Doom is far, far too sane to be Screwy Squirrel.
Judge Doom: “Roger… I am your father.”
Okay, maybe not.
I always wondered why they left out one of the biggest in-move jokes in WFRR?
We know that Judge Doom was deranged, self-hating monster. He wore black. He had familiarity with most of the Toon tricks. He was intelligent. It’s obvious who he was. He was a …wait for it…
Loon[e]y Toon
Although it’s never confirmed in the movie, you get a big clue as to Doom’s identity during the scene where Eddie interrogates Maroon in his studio.
A poster of the toon “Pistol Packin’ Possum” is show a few times, showing off that he has Doom’s gun, the red eyes, and the fedora hat.
Anyone else ever read Who Censored Roger Rabbit? Most poignant ending to a book that I’ve ever come across. Several orders of magnitude darker than the movie.
Yes, I read it about three years before the movie came out. I was surprised when I first heard it was made into a movie, because I thought it was too dark a story for a PG movie.
I also read Who P-P-P-Plugged Roger Rabbit?, which was published after the movie, and wasn’t quite as memorable.
Huge fan of the movie, never knew it was (loosely) based on a book.
Is the book worth reading on its own merits? Or did it just make for a great idea for one of my personal favorite, and I think, one of the best movies ever made?
The book is ok. It’s better in concept than it is in execution and it isn’t really all that similar to the movie, but the idea is interesting. The movie took the basic idea of cartoon characters being real people (in the book they were comic strip characters) and sort of did its own thing with it. It’s a totally different plot.
To each his own, of course. But I thought the book was much better than OK. :). As I said above, the way he ended it has stayed with me for over 25 years, which in itself says a lot.