Everyone knows that one fan's trash is another fan's treasure, and even the worst moments
in film history can serve a purpose.
So maybe that's why these deleted scenes are so fascinating — because they bear such
a hilarious and terrifying reminder of how easily one scene could destroy a whole movie.
The Star Wars prequels are pretty much the definition of a mixed bag.
On the one hand, the visuals are often stunning, they have no shortage of bold ideas, and the
lightsaber duels are nothing short of spectacular.
On the other hand…
But this truly baffling deleted scene from Revenge of the Sith is a terrifying reminder
that, as bad as the prequels could be at times, they could have been so much worse.
The scene takes place after Anakin and Obi Wan board General Grievous' ship to rescue
the kidnapped Chancellor Palpatine.
The two Jedi are unsure of which way to go, so they contact everyone's favorite droid,
R2D2, for directions.
But they're stumped — because their communicator can't translate his beeps and bops into actual
words.
And then this happens:
"I'm pretty sure that beep is down.
“I sense Count Dooku is above us.”
“Oh yes, yes you’re right beep is up."
It goes without saying that this is the only time we've ever seen a human do that in Star
Wars.
The moment is played for laughs and it is kind of weirdly charming, but it also makes
absolutely zero sense and completely breaks the reality of the film.
Even though it's probably a good thing that this clip was unearthed and put on the internet
— so that everyone can marvel at how gloriously dumb it is — it's probably also a good thing
that it didn't actually make it into Star Wars canon.
Back to the Future has gone down in history as a classic movie for good reason.
Not only does it succeed at being a thrilling sci-fi adventure story and a hilarious comedy
at the same time, but it also has a genuinely good heart — and not many movies can say
all that.
But there are certain elements of the film that haven't aged well, and undermine how
sweet the rest of it is.
In particular, Back to the Future isn't great in terms of its portrayal of gender and sexuality.
It's one thing for Biff to be a predator — that's obviously terrible, but he is at least clearly
a villain.
It's quite another thing, however, that the theoretically adorable young George McFly's
horrifying hobby of spying on undressing women is played for laughs.
As if that wasn't enough, the film had an additional cringe-worthy deleted scene that
might have ruined the characters of Doc Brown and Marty McFly if the filmmakers had left
it in.
In this scene, as Doc Brown attempts to get Marty ready for his fake date with his mother,
Doc makes a less-than-stellar comment which really does deserve to be left in the past.
"I just don't know if I can go through with it, hitting on her.
Nobody said anything about hitting her, you’re just gonna take a few liberties with her."
Then after that, Marty worries out loud how putting moves on his mom might turn him gay.
Just be glad we ended up in the timeline where this horrible scene was erased from existence.
In The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, Bilbo and his dwarvish companions encounter a series
of difficult trials on their journey to slay the dragon Smaug.
One of the most difficult spots in which these heroes find themselves comes when they're
captured by goblins in the mountains.
As dire as things seem for them in the finished movie, there was a deleted scene in which
the king of the goblins forces the dwarves to endure a form of torture that was deemed
too cruel and unusual to depict on screen... a goblin musical number.
The song is called "Down in Goblin Town," and there's no way to sugarcoat this: it's
terrible.
You could argue that it's supposed to be bad.
“It’s one of my own compositions.”
"That's not a song.
It's an abomination!"
It's based on an intentionally atonal song from the original book, and does a good job
of characterizing the goblins as weird little monsters and their king as a self-important
diva who doesn't care for the well-being of his captive audience.
But that doesn't make it okay to be bad.
It's also two full minutes long, and nothing actually happens during those two minutes
that's relevant to the plot.
In a movie that's already almost three hours long, this scene is almost insultingly superfluous.
Of course, as seems inevitable with any Peter Jackson Tolkien adaptation, the scene was
later re-inserted into the film as part of an extended version.
Given that most of the cast of the original Ghostbusters were already established comedians
who were veterans of Saturday Night Live, it's no surprise that a decent portion of
the dialogue was improvised over the course of filming.
But director Ivan Reitman clearly wasn't sure just how absurd the movie's comedy should
be.
Among the failed comedic experiments that he was toying around with was one particular
subplot that was, in retrospect, gloriously ill-conceived.
In the book Making Ghostbusters, Reitman explains that he had planned to have Bill Murray and
Dan Aykroyd play dual roles, not only as the Ghostbusters Peter Venkman and Ray Stantz,
but also a pair of homeless men named Bojay and Coombs that were supposed to serve as
a kind of mundane counterpoint to the otherwise world-ending action.
"Run, get out of the way! Rush rush rush, always rushing."
Rather than grounding the movie, however, Reitman immediately knew upon watching Murray
and Aykroyd on film that focusing on two side characters who were inexplicably played by
the lead actors would have the completely opposite effect.
However, these characters were present in the novelization of the film, probably because
book characters can't suffer from weird casting.
Ridley Scott's 1979 film Alien is beloved as not only a work of thought-provoking science
fiction, but also a tremendously spooky horror film.
Along with Jaws, Alien is famous for solidifying the conventional wisdom among horror movie
aficionados that the less of the monster you see, the better.
There was, however, a scene deleted from the middle of Alien that violated this sacred
tenet of filmmaking, and proved just how quickly scary can become silly if a movie shows too
much too soon.
In this scene, while trying to escape the ship, Lambert stumbles upon the alien sitting
on the ground.
She stares at it for a moment, paralyzed with fear, before the alien… kinda just crab-walks
over to her.
It's probably supposed to be tense, but from the way the scene is framed and paced, it
ends up being totally ridiculous — and not even remotely scary.
And as cool the effects were in Alien, this scene is a reminder that terrifying creatures
look way better in quick glimpses, allowing your mind can fill in the details.
When you have the chance to see the alien's entire body for a long period of time in a
well-lit room, it quickly becomes very clear you're just looking at a guy in a rubber suit.
The setting of Who Framed Roger Rabbit seems absurd at first glance, because it is: a film
noir version of Los Angeles in which real people live alongside cartoons as separate
social classes.
Despite this strange premise, the worldbuilding ends up being remarkably consistent, and it's
pretty easy to get your head around it once the story gets going.
But that might not have been the case if one sanity-shattering scene had made it through
the final edit.
After being captured by the villains, protagonist Eddie Valiant finds that his head has been
trapped inside a cartoon pig head that seems to be at least partially alive.
"Oh, God!
OH!"
After freaking out for a moment, Eddie escapes from his cartoon confinement in an equally
cartoon-like way.
Relative to all the other weird gags in this movie, this one is much harder to understand,
largely because it doesn't seem to be based on anything from pre-existing cartoon convention.
Was the pig head once a part of larger organism that was beheaded?
Or did the bad guys somehow create a sentient severed pig head from nothing?
Did Eddie kill the creature when he washed it down the drain?
There's no way to answer these questions without getting into some really strange existential
territory.
Perhaps the wildest thing about this scene is that, even with hindsight, director Robert
Zemeckis doesn't seem to think it was all that weird.
the only reason he cut it was because it slowed down the movie.
Released during the same summer as Iron Man, Hancock is something of a forgotten oddity,
from a time before the MCU had redefined superhero movies.
It stars Will Smith and Charlize Theron, and has a script co-written by Vince Gilligan,
who later went on to create Breaking Bad.
Although the film only got mixed reviews when it came out, no one could fault it for lacking
ambition.
It was a bold deconstruction of superhero conventions, with no costumes, codenames,
or explosions, aiming to be more of a comedy/drama than a nonstop action movie.
Nevertheless, one deleted scene did feature an explosion of sorts.
During this scene, the depressed alcoholic superhero Hancock is having a casual fling
with a woman he doesn't really know, fooling around with her on the couch in his mobile
home.
Before things go further, however, he tries to warn her about some of the side-effects
that may occur during their impending encounter.
"Start climbing the mountaintop you know.
You’re gonna need to be as far away from that as possible."
Unfortunately, she's far too eager to heed his warnings.
So she's thrown across the room while Hancock recovers.
Considering the scene is nothing more than a long set up to a silly joke, it probably
deserved to be left on the cutting room floor.
Although the Terminator films are generally pretty grim, they're not afraid of getting
a little goofy every once in while.
But one scene deleted from Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines might have taken things a
little too far.
The scene depicts a promotional video for "Cyber Research Systems," the company that
developed the original Terminators.
In case you don't remember, Terminators are killer robots from the future, many of whom
are designed to look and sound like Arnold Schwarzenegger.
And this video introduces its audience to the human whose likeness was used as the base
for these robots: Chief Master Sergeant William Candy, who's voiced by Samuel L. Jackson.
"It is now within our power to make war safe."
The real icing on the cake, however, is when one of the politicians watching the video
complains about Candy's accent.
"I don't know about that accent.
“We can fix it."
The whole affair is completely unnecessary, thoroughly dumb, and utterly delightful.
Even though it was cut, many Terminator fans have accepted this wonderfully weird scene
as canon, and William Candy has his own entry on the Terminator Wiki.
James Cameron's 1997 blockbuster hit film Titanic is no stranger to the concept of dramatic
irony.
"So this is the ship they say is unsinkable.”
“God himself could not sink this ship."
This concept works pretty well for Titanic, however, considering it's clear from the beginning
how things are going to end.
In case you forgot your high school lit, dramatic irony is a literary device in which the audience
has more knowledge of the events of a story than the characters do, which lends these
character's words an additional layer of meaning they themselves don't understand.
When writing a historical fiction epic like Titanic, the temptation to write nothing but
jokey lines that wink at the audience must be overwhelming.
Generally, however, Cameron does a good job of limiting his use of dramatic irony — save
for one particular instance.
"Hey sonny, how about a little ice?"
Needless to say, Cameron eventually decided that this, the most dramatic moment of the
film, was not the right time for a really terrible Dad joke.
Probably a solid decision.
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