Who Delayed Roger Rabbit?

Why there has been no sequel to one of the most popular animated films of the 1980s

By Rich Drees

     By 1997, Disney was anxious to get to work on the film. However, there was a new wrinkle. Michael Eisner’s former studio chief Jeffrey Katzenberg is now a partner with Spielberg at Dreamworks SKG. Katzenberg’s departure from Disney had been anything but amicable and it is thought that Eisner was worried that Katzenberg might try to influence Spielberg to scuttle the project. In perhaps what may have been a move to help stay in Spielberg’s good graces, Eisner hired Spielberg’s two former Amblin producers Frank Marshall and Kathleen Kennedy to serve as producers on the new film. For whatever reasons, Spielberg OK’ed the script and permitted Disney to start with pre-production.

     Thoughts of the cost overruns from the original Roger Rabbit were chief in Eisner’s mind and he was anxious to keep to that from happening again. He ordered a production test done to see if any of the new animation techniques the studio had developed during the `90s could be adapted for the production.

     The test was produced at Disney Feature Animation in Florida in the spring of 1998. Animator Eric Goldberg, who was first hired at Disney to work on the original Roger Rabbit feature, drew up a new model sheet for a younger Roger.

     The test scene consisted of two animated weasels bursting into the office of a Hollywood agent to “persuade” him to audition their friend Roger. Roger then bursts into the room and proceeds to cause the kind of havoc only a `toon like he can. The test was designed to see if traditional animation and computer-generated images could be successfully combined with live action footage of the agent and his office. Roger and the weasels were realized through traditional animation while the weasels’ Tommy guns and a table that Roger breaks were rendered through CGI. Unfortunately, the result was not as successful as hoped for, so another test was ordered. This time both characters and props were animated with a computer and produced a much better result.

     The second test was enthusiastically received by Eisner, until a projected budget that placed production costs for Who Discovered Roger Rabbit at over $100 million dollars. Faced with what he thought to be an extravagant cost for a sequel to a 12-year-old movie, Eisner cancelled the project. Having lost money on Another Stake Out and The Rescuers Down Under, sequels released six and thirteen years respectively after their original films, Eisner was unwilling to commit that much money to a character who last appeared on screen in a short film 5 years ago. Add in the general Hollywood thinking that a sequel generally pulls only 2/3rds of what its originally grossed, Eisner felt that it was too risky a project to undertake and in the summer of 1999 suspended pre-production.

     Since then, no new news has emerged on a possible future for Roger, Jessica and friends. But in Hollywood, the one firm rule is that anything can happen and something may come along that could cause Disney to reassess the viability of making a new Roger Rabbit film. Unfortunately, the box office failure of Monkeybone and The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle, two films that combined animation and live action, aren’t about to inspire anyone at Disney to greenlight a similar project anytime soon.

     In 1991, Gary Wolf released a second Roger Rabbit novel, Who P-p-plugged Roger Rabbit?, that combined elements from his original novel and the film version. In this new story, Roger hires Eddie Valiant to try and find out who his competition is for the role of Rhett Butler in Gone With The Wind. Soon, murder victims begin to stack up and Eddie looks to be the culprit. Eddie has to prove his innocence before the cops catch up with, along the way encountering Hollywood legends like Clark Gable, David O. Selznick and Baby Herman’s latest girlfriend, Carole Lombard. Wolf also introduced some new characters including Eddie’s sister Heddy Valiant, Jessica’s little (literally!) twin sister Joellyn and the shadowy Kirk Enigman.

     This book and Wolf’s original novel are unfortunately currently out of print, since this may be the only way that fans can get a further adventure of Roger Rabbit.

Special thanks to Paula Bower for assistance with book cover scans.