Ghostbusters: Bill Murray and Dan Ackroyd As Hobos
Ghostbusters is probably the movie that most describes my childhood but I might have a completely different view of the movie if they had left this scene in. In this deleted scene, Bill Murray and Dan Ackroyd play two homeless guys who have a 45-second conversation about boxers vs. martial artists in the middle of the film for no apparent reason. Their conversation serves no purpose to the overall plot and would have derailed the film during the bottom of Act 2, right when the conflict is supposed to be at it’s highest.
Particularly as kids, I have to imagine many of us wouldn’t have figured out that Murrary and Ackroyd were playing different characters and would have wondered, did the Ghostbusters just become homeless right now? Not to mention, Bill Murray seems to be playing his Caddyshack character as a bum in this scene, even down to the wardrobe. In some alternate universe, this scene would have weirded out an entire generation of kids. In that parallel world, we would use this scene as our ultimate barometer of mind-fucks. Instead of saying, “that came out of left-field,” we would say, “Did it just get homeless in here?” In fact, I bet it’s probably a very popular Lol cat in that familiar but alien reality.
Demolition Man: Needless Emotional Subplot
Demolition Man is one of the stupidest but most fun action movies I know but it could have all fallen apart if they had keep in a serious side plot when Stallone grieves over his daughter who died while he was frozen. I’m not knocking Stallone’s acting abilities but how is any actor supposed to go from the trauma of losing their whole family in one scene and then react to how comically weird the future is. If I just found out my daughter had died, I wouldn’t really spend a couple minutes commenting on how wacky it is that every restaurant is now a Taco Bell, I’d be more focused on my dead daughter.
Besides, we had already seen this exact plot in a movie, it was called Aliens when Ripley’s daughter had died while she was frozen. Except that plot actually made thematic sense as it would give her motivation to protect Newt as a surrogate daughter. As opposed to Demolition Man, when the dead-daughter plot sets up John Spartan’s thematic struggle to understand that wackiness of radio stations that only play old commercial jingles.
Die Hard With a Vengeance: Psychologically Warped John McClane
The ending of Die Hard 3 that audiences came to know involves Bruce Willis taking out a helicopter by shooting power-lines with a revolver. It’s silly, but it makes sense for a Die Hard movie and leaves people walking out of the theatre happy and ready to tell their friends to go watch that Die Hard 3 for themselves. Contrast this with the original ending of Die Hard 3 where Jeremy Irons would get away with the robbery and framing Willis’s Jobn McClane for the crime (I keep on wanting to type John McCain) leaving McClane disgraced and psychologically twisted. McClane would track Irons all over the world and eventually force Irons at gunpoint to submit to a Saw-like puzzle. Irons would have to fire a rocket launcher with one end pointed at himself and the other pointed at McClane, insuring that one would die in the process. Boy, that’s going to leave the audience with a smile!
Yes, after two previous hit movies where Bruce Willis killed a lot of people and said awesome things, yeah, let’s assume that people don’t want that and put in some intense psychological trauma. I can understand how he thought this would be a good way to end the movie as Die Hard is most well-known as an intense psychological thriller. In fact, I often get Die Hard confused with Silence of the Lambs, I have to remember that Die Hard is the one with Carl Winslow. This ending would have done more damage to the Die Hard franchise than casting Justin Long as a sidekick.
The Blues Brothers: Magic Bluesmobile
Not to keep ripping on Dan Ackroyd’s scripts but for a funny guy, he has some really bad ideas. Like his Ghostbusters 3 script that would involve the Ghostbusters going to Hell or this deleted scene in Blues Brothers. Originally, Ackroyd wanted the Blues Brothers’ car, the Bluesmobile, to be struck with lightning right by a transformer (an electrical transformer, not car/robot). And he wanted to imply that it means the car is “charged up” for it’s impossible stunts.
What works about Blues Brothers is that it’s a movie that slowly gets more and more ridiculous. The movie does such a good job getting you into it that most people don’t even realize how weird the movie really gets. At the opening of the movie, we see the Bluesmobile do a quick jump over a bridge but 2 hours later we are willing to see it do backflips in the air because the movie has slowly ramped up the ridiculousness. Having something so silly so early in the film would have taken the audience out of the movie instead of gradually immersing you into that world.
Besides, director John Landis has the correct opinion on this matter, we don’t need to know how the Bluesmobile can do what it does, it’s just a magic car and we accept it.
Back to the Future II: Biff Disappears for No Good Reason
In this scene deleted from Back to the Future II, Old Biff returns from stealing the DeLorean time machine only to promptly fade away and disappear. Why? Well, according to director Robert Zemeckis, Marty’s mom had shot and killed Biff sometime after 1985. Wow, it’s so obvious. While movies often spoonfeed people too much plot (like having the Bluesmobile get struck by lightning), this example shows that doing the opposite and giving people too little information can be even worse. This plot point makes about as much sense as going from a scene in 1985 and abruptly cutting to a shot of Marty McFly on the moon. Would you expect that the audience would have inferred that Marty must have travelled back to 1969 and hopped on Apollo 11? No, instead audience members would have just said, “Did it just get homeless in here?”
