Little Shop of Horrors - re:View

A funny thing about Rick Moranis fighting a giant alien puppet: during filming, Moranis would have lunch with Sigourney Weaver, whom he knew from Ghostbusters and was filming Aliens across the street, fighting a giant alien puppet.

The entire dentist scene is golden from start to finish, and to have a sadist meet his nemesis in a masochist is brilliant. Martin's disgust at Murray is perfectly on point.

The Director's Cut vs. the Theatrical ending of the movie feels like a game where the main character forgot to do an important sidequest that helps him beat the final boss.

Rick Moranis was untouchable in the 80s. Such a uniqe character. God bless him for takimg care of his children over acting. I still hope too see him on the big screen again one day

The use of real-life puppets with slowed down video as a means to speed it up and make the musical numbers seamless is beyond spectacular. I still consider this one of the greatest special effects/puppet work accomplishments in the history of film.

Steve singing " i am your dentist " Into the guys mouth And you hear his own echo as backing vocal is just ... inspired.

There is an old expression about musicals and stage play about how you can get away with more stuff like characters dying and not getting a happy ending because after the dark ending the characters come out and give a bow while that movie story ends when it ends.

You're correct about how the theatrical cut kneecapped itself by making Seymour too sympathetic. But if you compare it to the Corman original, there's also an issue of tonnage: in the 1986 film Seymour is indirectly responsible for at most, three deaths. In the 1960 film, he's going out every night and feeding the plant vagrants from Skid Row and it's a whole gruesome joke that the neighborhood is improving because there's no more vagrants. That's a much easier path to the audience agreeing with "yeah, he should get eaten."

My friend Jeremy worked on this. It was one of his first ever examples of his film work. He sculpted and painted all the inside mouths of the 'baby' Audreys. lol

Somewhere that's Green seems so satirical when you're young and so poignant as an adult. Her most ambitious dream is just not to be abused. 10/10 film, a total classic

Howard Ashman is the one to thank for Little Shop of Horrors existing the way it is as a musical and there's plenty of archival interviews and documentaries about him where he details certain elements of the show/film and how he was satirizing standard musical theater formula. Somewhere That's Green for instance to Howard is more a satire on "heroine sings a song of what she desires" scenes in musicals past than 50's family values, even before helping shepherd the modern Disney formula and their "want songs" years after. Also, Howard while working on Little Mermaid also playfully nicknamed Part of Your World as "Somewhere That's Wet".

Never knew how incredible those puppets were. The articulation in the lips synced with the audio COMPLETLY sells the illusion of the plant speaking/singing. My brain is completely fooled even knowing how they did it. PS yes redlettermedia, people do still read the descriptions, all 4 of us

I rewatched this recently and was blown away by bill Murray and steve martins scene. Totally over my head as a kid

I really like the Jay and Colin from Canada combination for Re:View episodes. Whenever Mike is on it feels like Jay is arguing about which movie to rent with his grandpa for 40 mins.

Here's a quote from Howard Ashman regarding the "somewhere That's Green"/"Part of Your World" similarities: "In almost every musical ever written there's a place usually early in the show where the leading lady sits down on something - in Brigadoon it's a tree stump; in Little Shop of Horrors it's a trash can - and sings about what she wants most in life. We borrowed this classic rule of Broadway musical construction for 'Part of Your World' because Jodie Benson (the voice of Ariel) is an actress who also sings and she was able to convey a tremendous amount of soul and specificity in her performance." I believe I've read an interview with either Menken or Ashman where they referred to this type of scene as the "Dorothy on a Hay Bale" scene. The songwriters were conscious of this type of moment as a trope, maybe it was intentional they reused bits of music from Little Shop. Also, Menken has spoken about their inexperience with film score vs. stage at the time, so leaning on a trope and reusing a bit of melody in Disney's The Little Mermaid (whether they were aware they did it or not) might've been how they got through the process.

The bassline on Suppertime is probably my favorite in musical movie history

This movie has my absolute favorite character introduction of all time, where Steve Martin comes flying out of the air on his motorcycle, screaming and lands in the street. Total awesomeness.

This was my dad's favorite movie until O Brother Where Art Thou came out. 30 years later he would still randomly throw out a "feed me, Seymour".

Alan Menken wrote the music, but the late Howard Ashman was the genius behind the lyrics off the music. He and Menken were the secret weapon at Disney during their renaissance until Ashman's passing from AIDS just prior to the release of Beauty and the Beast. Disney attempted to fill his role with Tim Rice but the music never quite felt the same. Ashman wasn't just a musician and lyricist, he was a student of music in a way that allowed him to understand the structure of a musical to know what type of song was needed instead off just trying to fill time with a song.

One documentary covered how Aliens was being filmed next door. Rick would talk to Sigourney over lunches over both having to act in slow motion to accommodate large puppets.