Robert Zemeckis is making the press rounds at the moment, promoting his new Tom Hanks/Robin Wright/More Dinosaurs Than You Were Probably Expecting movie Here. That press tour included a stop by the Happy Sad Confused podcast this week, where Zemeckis addressed one of the crown jewels of his career-long obsession with blending groundbreaking effects work with genuine storytelling, Who Framed Roger Rabbit. And, specifically, the question of the film’s long-rumored sequel, a “good” script for which has, in Zemeckis’ telling, been sitting in a drawer over at Disney for more than a decade at this point, where, also by his telling, it has no chance of ever being made.
“Here’s what you have to know—and you know this,” Zemeckis asserted to host Josh Horowitz. “The current Disney would never make Roger Rabbit today. They can’t make a movie with Jessica in it,” he added, referencing Kathleen Turner’s character from the 1988 film, a riff on old-school bombshell cartoon classics whose design was, let’s just say, impactful, on a lot of people who saw the movie at a very young age. Zemeckis went so far as to cite a re-design of the character in one of the Disney parks a few years back that saw the company put her in less revealing clothing, saying, “Look what they did to Jessica at the theme park, they trussed her up in a trench coat.” Disney toyed around with extending the Rabbit brand shortly after the movie became a massive, Oscar-winning success, producing three shorts with Turner and voice actor Charles Fleischer, but Zemeckis seems pretty firm in his belief that you won’t be seeing a return to Toontown any time soon.
Zemeckis notes that he was only able to make Roger Rabbit in the first place because it arrived during a transition period for Disney, when the Michael Eisner-led company was pushing to dig itself out of a serious slump in its animated fortunes from the 1970s and ’80s. “They were full of energy,” he said, saying he himself was always trying to follow in Walt Disney’s footsteps by making a film for adults that kids could enjoy. (He also revealed that he initially offered the part of Eddie Valiant, played by Bob Hoskins in the final film, to Paul Newman, who was “insulted” at the prospect of playing opposite a cartoon rabbit.)
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