Downtown Toontown

MAROON: Look, Valiant. His wife’s poison, but he thinks she’s Betty Crocker. I want you to follow her. Get me a couple of nice juicy pictures I can wise the rabbit up with.
VALIANT: Forget it. I don’t work Toontown.
MAROON: What’s wrong with Toontown? Every Joe loves Toontown.
VALIANT: Then get Joe to do the job, ’cause I ain’t going.
MAROON: Whoa, feller. You don’t wanna go to Toontown, you don’t have to go to Toontown. Nobody said you had to go to Toontown anyway.

– Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988)

It’s odd how some deleted scenes seem to take on a life of their own. Some are happily released on DVD and/or Blu-ray, but never end up being discussed much, no matter how interesting. The really obscure ones never even made the leap from LaserDisc. And yet other examples become… is “well-known” an exaggeration? Maybe. But if you’re the kind of person who does more than scrape the surface of a film, you’ll learn about them fairly quickly.

I fancy that Who Framed Roger Rabbit‘s “Pig Head” sequence is more well-known than the average deleted scene. Here’s the short version. After Valiant has hidden Roger at the Terminal Bar, the deleted section has him going back to the Ink and Paint Club to go snooping for Marvin Acme’s will. Here, he’s knocked out by Bongo the Gorilla (in a return appearance), and menaced by Judge Doom and the Weasels. They eventually dump him in Toontown, he gets a pig’s head tooned onto his own in a nasty bit of gang violence, and he ends up washing it off in the shower.¹

Here we rejoin the theatrical cut, with Eddie back at his office, and Jessica’s famous “I’m not bad, I’m just drawn that way” scene. Originally, Eddie was meant to be stepping out the shower having just washed his toon head off; instead, the filmmakers dub the sound of a flushing toilet to hide the cut scene. It mostly works, although if you stop and think about it for a moment, you might wonder why Eddie takes his shirt off to go for a dump.

This deleted material was fully animated, and is present on the DVD in the bonus features:

My favourite part of the whole scene is the depiction of night time over the skies of Toontown. A lovely piece of animation.

As is so often the case with deleted scenes which seem to take on a life of their own, parts of it poked out in unexpected places, long before it was released on DVD. Firstly, there’s a shot of Eddie with the pig’s head on in the theatrical trailer, at 2:31:

But hang on: this shot isn’t in the sequence from the DVD extras above! Making it a deleted scene of a deleted scene. Brilliant. A raw version of it does appear elsewhere on the DVD though, albeit with Zemeckis talking all over it; it’s clearly meant to be sandwiched between Valiant running off down the road with his pig’s head, and getting into the shower:

I’ve never seen a high-quality, colour version of this material anywhere, incidentally. We have to hope that it still exists somewhere, and simply wasn’t dragged out for the DVD/Blu-ray releases.

Descriptions of the pig’s head scene also ended up in the newspapers shortly after the film’s release. For instance, in The Monitor, 25th July 1988, “Cast and crew of ‘Roger Rabbit’ subjected to ‘tooner-rooning'”:²

“Everyone involved with Who Framed Roger Rabbit was ‘tooner-rooned’. I coined the word to describe Eddie Valiant’s condition when he entered Toon Town and came out with Porky Pig’s head,” said co-writer Jeffrey Price. “But we cut the scene when it seemed funnier to show how similar human and cartoon characters are than it would be to talk about it.”

In other words: the cast and crew were also “tooner-rooned”, because everyone had to used to the idea that for the film to work properly, humans and toons aren’t that much different from each other.

But this was just the start. Three years later, people finally saw the scene for real, when CBS ran Roger Rabbit as its movie premiere. Surely this is at least one reason the scene has become so relatively famous, and it was reported in many local newspapers at the time. The Atlanta Journal is typical, on the 5th November 1991:

“CBS will restore a four-minute scene cut from “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” when it broadcasts the movie at 8:45pm next Tuesday. In the scene, private eye Eddie Valiant (Bob Hoskins) has a nightmare in which he returns to Toontown. He get the dreaded “toon-a-roo” – a process that leaves him with a cartoon pig’s head instead of his human head.”

Of course, this is slightly misreported – it might be a nightmare in a metaphorical sense, but certainly wasn’t a real nightmare. It actually happens to poor Eddie.

The history of television, especially around this time, is full of extended edits like these. Sometimes the scenes are be added under supervision and approval from the original director; with others, they seem to be added just to bulk up the running time and give something new to the broadcasters. I don’t know how much input Zemeckis had with the CBS television version, but he does talk about this scene on the DVD, and expands on why they originally removed it:

“The pig’s head scene was really a scene that I regretted having to cut out, because we did such cool stuff in it. […] I love the scene where he washes off the pig head, and then Jessica shows up and he’s naked; the problem was that the scenes leading up to it were slowing down the movie. And the ironic thing is that animating the pig head being washed down the drain was our very first finished shot. And it got cut out.”

Zemeckis is undoubtedly speaking the truth here, at least as far as it goes. The scene with Judge Doom at the Ink and Paint club is far from terrible, but it would have slowed down the film. Not because the scene itself is that slow per se, but because returning to the Ink and Paint Club at this point in the film really feels like going backwards.

But I think there’s another, unarticulated reason why this whole sequence was better off cut. Let’s take a look at one of the key moments of the film, when Eddie decides to return to Toontown:

Here’s the thing. If Eddie has already returned to Toontown earlier in the film, the moment above simply wouldn’t have the emotional heft it has in the final edit. The whole point is that this is the moment where Eddie exorcises his demons; shooting the bourbon bottle is not exactly a subtle moment.³ His decision to return to the place he has avoided ever since a “toon killed his brother” is when Eddie changes, for good. He doesn’t change in the climactic scene in the warehouse; that’s where we simply see the results of the moment portrayed here.

Now, you could well argue: surely the deleted visit to Toontown doesn’t change things that much? After all, he was very specifically not making any kind of choice in the cut scene; he was dragged there by force. Surely, returning there of his own free will would still mean something?

I think this might be true logically, but it doesn’t mean you’d feel it emotionally. Some things need to be painted in big strokes. Far better to simply have Toontown be a place Eddie has never been near since his brother’s death. Eyeing it suspiciously over the wall earlier in the film is as close as he should go.

Anything else obfuscates Eddie’s big moment.

1. This, at least, is what was shot. As scripted, there was even more missing at this point, including the funeral of Marvin Acme, and a deleted scene with Eddie wearing the pig’s head on the Red Car. This stuff is interesting and well worthy of discussion, but outside the scope of this post. ↩

2. Not the spelling I would use. ↩

3. Shooting it using his old gang of toon bullets drags what could have been an eye-rolling moment back to something delightfully absurd-yet-meaningful. ↩

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