Disney Buried Roger Rabbit for a Twisted Reason

0:00 Even if you haven't seen it, you know everybody's talking about Who Framed Roger Rabbit. >> For a moment, Roger Rabbit looked like Disney's next cartoon superstar. >> How did they do that? >> Disney pushed him into merchandise, theme park attractions, and even more theatrical shorts. That pushed his cartoon [music] chaos in even more extreme directions. >> You don't want to burn your weenie. >> Only you can prevent forest fires. >> Everyone's talking about Who Framed Roger Rabbit, whether there's going to be a sequel. >> And then that future just disappeared. >> No, there won't be a sequel. >> Behind the scenes, Disney spent decades trying to bring him back through canceled sequel ideas, expensive test footage, and revival attempts that each exposed a different problem. >> Has any movement been made that you guys

0:45 are aware of a sequel? >> There is movement, but it's not in the front. >> [laughter] >> And it all comes down to a bizarre legal twist that makes Roger Rabbit's missing sequel look like just the beginning of the story and reveals just how strange things got when Disney had to decide how far they were willing to go once Roger started to slip away. But to understand [snorts] why Roger Rabbit was always harder for Disney to control than he seemed, we have to go back to the deal that made [music] him possible. Because before Roger became a hit, that arrangement was already kind of a miracle and also a warning sign. >> Thank you, Mr. Valiant. I'll guard them with my life. >> And knock off the Mr. Valiant stuff.

1:30 Call me Eddie, like everybody else. >> Now as many other Roger Rabbit videos have covered, the original story came from outside Disney, from Gary K. Wolf's 1981 novel Who Censored Roger Rabbit, a strange detective [music] story Disney had set its sights on before it was even published. >> I get this call on my home phone. And a guy on the other end of the phone says, "Hi, is this Gary K. Wolf?" I said, "Yeah, yes it is." He says, "Well, this is Roy E. from the Walt Disney Company. >> Right. Desperate for something fresh to jolt its live-action studio back to life, [music] Disney bought the rights and developed an early version of Roger, only for it to disappear when the studio's leadership changed. >> I'm so glad we could talk. You have beautiful features,

2:15 so strong and well-defined. >> Mhm. Chiseled out of granite, that's me. >> This new leadership still saw the potential, but they didn't want a small, quirky detective movie. They wanted a bigger, wilder blockbuster, one that could rebuild Disney's identity around a new animated star who felt nostalgic to adults, fresh to kids, and dangerous enough to feel unpredictable. >> When I saw Jessica, it made my fantasy look really tame. And I felt like the most boring man in the world. It was even my [music] sexual fantasy don't come up to Disney. >> The problem was that 1985 [music] Disney still didn't have the influence, confidence, or internal knowledge to make that version of Roger Rabbit on its own. >> No one wanted to work for Disney.

3:01 >> They needed the kind of Hollywood clout and technical know-how that only someone like Steven Spielberg could bring. >> I really feel that this is a movie that we're making for Walt. >> While this solved their biggest problem, it created a very different one. To get Spielberg on board, Disney made an unusual bargain. Spielberg would get major creative control and a large share of the profits, while Disney focused on the characters' merchandising. That made sense on paper because they saw Roger's marketing potential as enormous, but it also meant [music] that their newest cartoon star came with heavy strings attached. >> I just flew in, and boy, am I tired. >> Though Once Upon Who Framed Roger Rabbit was released and quickly became one of

3:47 the biggest movies [music] of the 1980s, all of that was tomorrow's problem. Two thumbs up and two jaws dropping open in admiration. >> For now, Disney had a generational hit on its hands, and even with those strings attached, had every intention of turning Roger Rabbit into one of the biggest merchandising machines the studio had ever built. >> What's going on? >> I'm trying to introduce tonight's movie. >> Payton, please. I CAN'T BELIEVE IT. I'VE MADE A MISTAKE. I'VE MADE A MISTAKE. >> ROGER, we're filming. >> Almost immediately, the Walt Disney Company went into overdrive to turn Roger Rabbit into [music] one of its new long-term faces. >> It's Roger Rabbit's first Christmas at Disneyland, and he can't wait to get

4:33 into everything. >> That's me. >> WHAT started as the usual assortment of toys, games, comics, clothing, and theme park appearances soon became more substantial, with Disney [music] giving Roger the same kind of treatment they'd normally reserve for one of their classic characters. And just 1 year after his release, Disney was using brand new Roger Rabbit shorts to help launch its other movies. First with Honey, I Shrunk the Kids and then Dick Tracy. >> Coming June 15th, Dick Tracy. >> I'm on my way. >> And Roger Rabbit >> I'M ON MY >> ARE TEAMING UP FOR THE entertainment event of the year. >> I'm on my >> Larger and more permanent theme park lands built around Roger were being designed, with Hollywood Land in Disneyland and Roger Rabbit's Hollywood at Disney-MGM Studios.

5:19 >> Coming to the Disney-MGM Studios theme park will be the all new Mickey's Movie Land, Roger Rabbit's Hollywood, with a wild ride on a Toontown trolley. >> Each was reported to have rides, shows, character meet and greets, and were intended to create a physical home for the character. >> OH MY GOODNESS. HOLY COW. IT'S REALLY HIM. OH MY GOSH, IT'S ROGER RABBIT. >> BUT ALL OF that was the easy part. Disney could sell Roger, put him back the theatrical shorts, and build him a permanent corner within their parks. But turning him into a full-fledged long-term franchise required the one thing that it once felt impossible. >> Morning, Roger. Yeah. Pleasant, isn't it?

6:04 >> Recreating that original miracle with the sequel to Who Framed Roger Rabbit. >> And what about Who Framed Roger Rabbit sequel? >> That sequel's going to get made. Trust me. Yeah, I mean we have a great script. We're just trying to pull it together and see if we can pull it off, but we're ready to go. If somebody says go, we're there. >> Work on a full-fledged Roger Rabbit sequel began soon after the first film was released. But from the very beginning, nobody could agree on what that sequel should actually be. With Spielberg and Disney exploring wildly different versions at almost the exact same time. And within months of Who Framed Roger Rabbit's completion, Steven Spielberg was already exploring a sequel with a young J.J. Abrams.

6:49 >> Uh I got to meet Steven. Um Joe Mizerski and I went in for a meeting. Actually, it was about a Roger Rabbit sequel. >> And we were we were >> Um what? >> Whoa. >> Hang [laughter] on a second. My truck >> Wait. You don't just gloss over that. >> Yeah. Honestly, it was we never really even got to that phase. We were writing an outline and it just it just honestly it went away before it was anything. >> Around the same time, Disney developed a bizarre World War II prequel that made it all the way to a first draft. Titled Roger Rabbit II, The Toon Platoon, it promised an original story for Roger, Jessica, and the world before Who Framed Roger Rabbit. As screenwriter Nat Mauldin put it, >> One of the ideas that came up was what about not a a sequel, but a prequel. How did Roger get to Hollywood? Because you

7:35 [music] we wanted to do a um the idea came up to do a war picture. >> According to the script, Toon Platoon would have opened with Baby Roger being found in an Easter basket and adopted by a human farming family in Kansas. Roger grows up, heads west searching for his biological mother with a new human companion, gets discovered as a comedy star, and is eventually pulled into the war. The script also introduces us to Jessica Krupnick, who at this point is a conservatively dressed radio performer. Roger befriends her right before he's drafted into the military's down-and-out Toon Platoon. Meanwhile, Jessica is abducted by a Nazi agent and forced to broadcast propaganda as Axis Annie. While in prisoned, she's transformed

8:23 into her familiar bombshell persona as part of an espionage disguise, which she uses to seduce the agent and sabotage the operation. Roger launches a mission to rescue her, eventually drawing the full Toon Platoon into a large battle against Nazi Toon forces. The climax involves Roger and his friends preventing a plot to assassinate Roosevelt, [music] and Stalin. And the story ends with the revelation that Bugs Bunny is Roger's father. >> Gee, ain't I a stinker? >> Wartime cartoon combat was quite a departure from the smaller gumshoe mystery of the first film. But according to Molten, there was one person who had a particularly strong reaction. >> And I have never in my life seen Spielberg react like this. You know what

9:09 would be great? Have um uh Tom Cruise in a toon plane taking on the Luftwaffe. And I have never seen and I'm not that I know the guy that well, Steven was bouncing off the walls. He just thought that was the greatest idea. That would sell 5 billion movie tickets. >> Soon after Toon Platoon was written, the script was reworked and retitled to Who Discovered Roger Rabbit. It kept the same basic origin story, but swapped the World War II setting for a late 1930s Hollywood mystery, much closer in tone to the original film. Roger's human counterpart goes from aspiring actor Richie [music] Davenport to struggling talent agent Sid Savage, who guides him along his path to fame. The wartime rescue and assassination plot became a

9:55 Hollywood conspiracy involving a fading silent film star and a mad surgeon. The star kidnaps Jessica, now a shy buttoned-up aspiring performer, to steal her singing voice. While the surgeon freezes tunes and experiments with transplanting their features onto humans. The story ends with Roger and Jessica becoming Hollywood stars and, again, discovering that Bugs Bunny is Roger's father. >> It's shameful, but it's a living. >> But neither Toon Platoon nor Who Discovered Roger Rabbit ever got past this early script phase. And while there's a theory floating around that Spielberg's future work on Schindler's List caused a lack of interest, Moldon has a more grounded theory. [music] Just imagine how much more

10:43 a movie like the Toon Platoon would have cost you have made in 1992 and whether they, you know, I whether they wanted to do [music] it again. You know, I most of the time you know it comes down to money and and and I, you know, it's it's easy to pay a little money and develop a film. >> Already, Roger [music] Rabbit 2 was starting to look less like an obvious follow-up and more like a very expensive identity crisis. But whatever ultimately stopped these scripts, they weren't quite the end of the first wave. Disney and Spielberg briefly circled one more Hollywood version with Roger searching for his mother in a story heavily influenced by Sunset Boulevard, but it disappeared before [music] it reached the same level of development. And after

11:28 that, the idea of a Roger Rabbit 2 is [music] finally put on ice, but Roger and his friends wouldn't stay frozen for long because the next time Disney got that itch to revisit the sequel, it would come back bigger, more magical, [music] and reimagined as a full-blown musical extravaganza from the minds of some of Spielberg's and Disney's heaviest hitters. Even after that first wave disappeared, Disney kept the idea of a Roger Rabbit follow-up alive and even considered taking the Aladdin route with a direct-to-video sequel. >> It's a sensational Disney adventure for the whole family.

12:13 >> There is nothing [music] in the world quite like a friend, exclusively on video. >> But by 1997, a new classic Hollywood musical concept gained enough traction inside Disney to return Roger Rabbit 2 to theatrical status and to call in one of the big guns who had helped carry the studio through the Disney Renaissance. >> Alan Menken has won eight Oscars, more than anybody else alive. All of them for animated Disney musicals. >> Composer and songwriter Alan Menken was given a rough story outline involving Roger and a human companion as vaudeville magicians before heading to Hollywood, but Roger's clumsy slapstick accidentally shoots him into stardom. >> It's sort of a tribute to all Hollywood

13:00 musicals. So, this is a song from the prequel to Roger Rabbit, which didn't get made. It's called This Only Happens in the Movies. >> [music] >> Disney also stocked the project with people from Spielberg's orbit, including Sherri Stoner and Deanna Oliver, writers on Spielberg-produced shows like Tiny Toon Adventures and Animaniacs to draft the screenplay. Their version became a 1938 Hollywood musical-style prequel explaining how Roger became a star, how he met Jessica, and how Toontown came into existence. In this version, Roger is still raised by a human farming

13:45 family in Kansas where he performs in a song-and-dance act with his brother Hutch. When the family farm is threatened, the two head to Hollywood to make enough money to save them. But once they arrive, Hutch is the one Hollywood notices first [music] while Roger is reduced to testing dangerous Acme gadgets for cash. Along the way, Roger falls for Jessica Rose Lee who's being pushed toward stardom and remade into the bombshell image she'll later become known for. Roger also learns he was drawn by a mysterious cartoonist named Wink Dilly before being kidnapped and dropped at the farm by the jealous Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. And when R.K. Maroon realizes that Roger's chaos actually improves his movies, the studio rebuilds their [music] latest cartoon around Roger, Hutch, and Jessica with

14:32 Toontown created as their primary filming location. [music] After the wartime battles and noir conspiracies [music] of the early drafts, this version was trying to make Roger feel more recognizably Disney up Hollywood musical about [music] show business, family, stardom, and the creation of Toontown. But Disney wasn't just rethinking Roger's story, it was also testing whether Roger himself could be rebuilt for a new animation era. Alongside the script being developed, veteran Disney animator Eric Goldberg small team were tasked with putting together a new animation test. For this, two versions were created, one mixing traditional 2D characters with 3D CGI props, and

15:20 another built around a fully CGI Roger. >> So, what do you think, big fella? >> While the fully 3D character test looked extremely [music] impressive for 1998, it was considered too labor-intensive and expensive for the time. And while the 2D 3D hybrid version was seen as a more practical option, Roger was now facing a very different Disney [music] than the one that had tried to turn him into a franchise a decade earlier. Studio politics were messier, budgets were higher, and the animation landscape was starting to shift. >> Some look at what's happening, they look at Hercules, and they saying, "Disney ought to be worried. This is not going as good as it used to go."

16:06 And Lion King was big. And since then, it hasn't been as big. All those subsidiary business like consumer products lose their attractiveness. Michael should be worried. >> Should I be? >> that was already expensive, technically complicated, and politically tangled, Roger Rabbit 2 became a much harder risk to justify. And once again, Roger found himself put into deep freeze, only to be thawed out a decade later for one final attempt at a [music] sequel. But this time, what emerges is a very different rabbit. And the more it's discussed, the harder it becomes to determine if Roger Rabbit 2 is actually alive or a ghost trapped somewhere between

16:53 this world and the next. >> How did you manage to look in the very right place in a vacuum where the rabbit might be? Um I learned to hallucinate. >> Which brings us to the most recent ill-fated attempt at Roger Rabbit 2, and somehow the murkiest one of all. >> Now, there's a good script sitting at Disney, but here's the thing. >> By 2009, original director Robert Zemeckis was publicly back on board, and Disney had also commissioned the original writers to work on a brand new script. [music] >> I have a wonderful history with Disney having done Roger Rabbit, and you know, Disney is in the forefront of 3D and digital cinema, and in the tradition of Walt Disney, um, the company continues to be uh, the most innovative in new

17:39 technologies. >> And while we know very little about the full story, [music] Zemeckis has described it less as a traditional sequel and more as a direct [music] continuation of what happened in the first film. The story would have moved Roger and Jessica out of the original film's 1947 noir [music] city streets and into the much brighter world of the 1950s. But things got much stranger with Eddie Valiant. By the time the script was completed, Bob Hoskins had retired from [music] acting after being diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. So, Eddie would have appeared as a fully digital ghost. >> When the >> [music] >> um, sequel was written, Bob Hosk- Eddie Valiant was was a lot a lot of the

18:25 um, a lot of the um, uh, story [music] was that um, Eddie was no longer with us, but he would show up as a ghost. [music] >> I lost control, and there was all rabbits coming out of walls. You know what >> Much of what we know about this version centers on the technical side. Around the same [music] time the script was being developed, Zemeckis was in the middle of a long-term deal with Disney to produce animated films using motion capture. So, naturally, audiences wanted to know, was that same department store mannequin effect from The Polar Express and A Christmas Carol about to be applied to Roger Rabbit and the other toons? >> How would you shoot it? How do you mean? Like motion capture or >> Oh, no, no, no, no. It It be done like

19:10 the first movie. >> Though in the end, even this version never made it past early development. And by 2024, after the script had been sitting in Disney's vault for more than a decade, Zemeckis was effectively calling it dead. >> Here's what you have to Here's what you have to know, and you I and you know this, the current Disney would never make Roger Rabbit today. >> But [music] it's Disney's reasoning that unlocks the bigger mystery of why a Roger Rabbit sequel may never have truly been possible in the first place. And it also opens the door to one of the strangest twists that not even Eddie Valiant's digital ghost could have seen coming. >> You cannot anticipate a cultural phenomena. If you plan your business to

19:56 hit a cultural phenomena, you will hit a cultural dead end. >> And this was the problem Disney kept running into with Roger Rabbit. Every comeback attempt was trying to engineer a second miracle. By this point, it no longer looked like a single abandoned sequel concept. It looked like a pattern. Each version found a new way Roger could almost work again, and a new reason to keep him out of the spotlight. Because [music] that original miracle, a collision of noir, classic cartoons, live-action performance, studio cooperation, adult edge, and a high-risk spectacle could not have been repeated at any other time. >> We were able to make it um um right at the time when Disney was

20:43 [music] ready to rebuild itself. >> Right. >> Well, we were there when the new regime came in and they were full of energy. >> And as [music] Disney's and Spielberg's other projects became more successful, finding agreement on anything Roger related only got harder. Because almost immediately after Who Framed Roger Rabbit, the animation landscape started changing. Disney entered its Renaissance, Pixar pushed computer animation [music] forward, rival studios got more interested in animation, and everyone became more protective of their own characters. That included Spielberg, whose relationship with Disney had already been strained by a dispute over Roller Coaster Rabbit, where Disney placed Roger Rabbit's second short in

21:29 front of Dick Tracy instead of Amblin's own Arachnophobia, a move he reportedly [music] did not take well. >> Get out of here, you no-good vermin! >> This didn't just complicate future Roger projects. It showed how quickly that original partnership was coming apart, especially as Spielberg [music] began building his own animation studio with some of the talent that had helped bring Roger Rabbit to life. [music] >> I'd like to do this every year, and I'd love to be able to have a feature film in animation come out for [music] families once a year. So, uh, Universal backed sort of my >> [music] >> wish list. We found some office space

22:15 and some work space in London, and I formed [music] a company called Amblimation. >> And while Amblimation didn't last, Spielberg later co-founded DreamWorks, turning that competitive tension with Disney into something much bigger. >> A new movie and entertainment [music] studio was launched today in Hollywood, but this is no ordinary studio. It's [music] headed by three of the biggest names in entertainment. >> The studio, as yet unnamed, will be in five businesses: movies, television, animation, records, and interactive new media. >> Meanwhile, Disney never fully let Roger go. The massive Roger Rabbit theme park worlds were gone, but pieces of that future survived, most notably with Roger Rabbit's Cartoon Spin in Mickey's Toontown. But even after those old

23:01 tensions faded and Disney had an entirely different leadership team, the larger problem remained. Nobody could solve what a modern Roger Rabbit was supposed to look like. He'd become too old to be new, but too strange to be nostalgia safe. And by the 2010s, Disney didn't even see Roger as the biggest problem. [music] >> They can't make a movie with Jessica in it. So, there's very little So, the So, the Seeman and Price sequel script um isn't ever going to see the light of day as good as it is. >> Really? >> Cuz I mean, look what they did to Jessica at the theme park. They dressed her up in a trench coat, you know. >> Usually, this is where a Roger Rabbit 2

23:47 what could have been video would end. A beloved Disney sequel doesn't happen because of creative clashes, studio politics, and modern brand discomfort. But that's not the case here. We couldn't go for all that without a happy ending, now could we? Because in late 2025, Roger Rabbit was suddenly making headlines again. And this time, the real twist wasn't just what happened to Roger. It was how Disney responded. >> The Roger Rabbit universe is expanding. And um I can say categorically that um it's going to be fun. Uh fans are going to love what happens. Fans are going to love what they see.

24:33 And um it's just going to be a very, very joyous time in Toontown. >> It turns out the one major player quietly threaded throughout all of this is Roger Rabbit's original creator, [music] Gary K. Wolf. Because a series of disputes, lawsuits, and legal filings dating all the way back to the original film reveal a very different side to this mystery. The public paper trail begins in 2001 when Wolf sued Disney alleging that they hadn't properly paid him the Roger Rabbit royalties [music] agreed to in prior contracts. And it's what was in those contracts [music] that shed light on a more complex relationship between Wolf and Disney than anyone had

25:18 realized. >> You know, Disney's Disney. >> These 2001 [music] court filings showed that Wolf's original deal included a share of Who Framed Roger Rabbit's profits, as well as a percentage of sales from the use of those characters, while also still allowing him to write additional books. But the relationship had already become complicated long before that lawsuit. Soon after the film's release, Wolf disputed the compensation he'd received under the agreement, and the two ended up settling for increased financial visibility, as well as Disney agreeing to purchase the rights to his In Pro a sequel novel, Who Plugged Roger Rabbit. >> You know, most people see Roger Rabbit and Jessica as the movie characters, not the book

26:04 characters. Uh so, for the second book, I had to decide, am I going to Disney-fy this or keep it as a you know, a kind [music] of a dark, brooding, hard-boiled private eye. >> Wolf ended up doing a bit of a hybrid. The main characters now appeared closer to their movie versions, although the stranger tone and details of his original book were explained away as one of Jessica's dreams. Disney, of course, never ended up using Who Plugged Roger Rabbit, but by buying [music] the rights to that book in 1989, they had inadvertently started a legal clock that would keep ticking in the background as Disney, Spielberg, Zemeckis, [music] and the other creatives kept circling different visions of Roger Rabbit's

26:49 future. But the significance of that clock did not [music] become clear until decades later after Wolf had released two more books, pitched Disney additional movie concepts, and even explored a spin-off TV series set in Toontown. And [music] while there was interest from different networks, they all had the same question. >> Does he have [music] the right to use Toontown? >> While researching this, Wolf discovered something that dwarfed the question of Toontown ownership. A little-known provision in US copyright law >> [music] >> that can give an original author a narrow window to reclaim certain rights they sold decades earlier, even when [music] the contract was supposed to last forever. And it just so happened

27:36 that by the mid-2020s, Wolf was approaching the 35-year mark from Disney's 1989 purchase of Who Plugged Roger Rabbit. But the final twist in all of this is how Disney, the massive multimedia corporation famous for protecting its characters at almost any cost responded. >> I expected that this would be a contentious uh process. I expected that, you know, who knows. Who knows what was going to happen. But it it was not. >> How far was Disney willing to [music] go once Roger started slipping away? It turns out not far at all. >> It was very civil, very courteous, very straightforward. Um [music] there was no intimidation,

28:23 there was no uh threat of a lawsuit. There was nothing. >> For decades, Disney had spent money, talent, and corporate energy trying to turn Roger Rabbit into [music] its next big thing. But with every stalled revival and every abandoned future, Disney's biggest casualty was time. And And the end, they just let him go. The twisted part is that Disney didn't bury Roger Rabbit with one dramatic fight. They buried him with one comeback attempt at a time until the years they lost became the thing that finally took him away. But while Roger remains tied to the Mouse House through nostalgia, the original movie, and his lone surviving theme park ride, he has become

29:10 something stranger than a forgotten Disney character. He has become one of Disney's ghosts, visible, beloved, but no longer fully theirs to define. And now, after decades of false starts, Roger and Jessica may finally have another chance in the spotlight, just not the one Disney once seemed destined to provide. >> The sequel, any sequels that we do, has to at least match the quality of the original movie and in production value and tone, uh in script content, and in empathy, and character development. Uh it has to be as good or better than what we did

29:57 before. >> But to see what happens when Disney gets in over its head on another character it can't fully [music] control, check out my video on Dick Tracy, where the real drama starts after the cameras stop rolling.