who framed roger rabbit

MAROON: Look, Valiant. His wife’s poison, but he thinks she’s Betty Crocker. I want you to follow her. Get me a couple of nice juicy pictures I can wise the rabbit up with.
VALIANT: Forget it. I don’t work Toontown.
MAROON: What’s wrong with Toontown? Every Joe loves Toontown.
VALIANT: Then get Joe to do the job, ’cause I ain’t going.
MAROON: Whoa, feller. You don’t wanna go to Toontown, you don’t have to go to Toontown. Nobody said you had to go to Toontown anyway.

– Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988)

It’s odd how some deleted scenes seem to take on a life of their own. Some are happily released on DVD and/or Blu-ray, but never end up being discussed much, no matter how interesting. The really obscure ones never even made the leap from LaserDisc. And yet other examples become… is “well-known” an exaggeration? Maybe. But if you’re the kind of person who does more than scrape the surface of a film, you’ll learn about them fairly quickly.

I fancy that Who Framed Roger Rabbit‘s “Pig Head” sequence is more well-known than the average deleted scene. Here’s the short version. After Valiant has hidden Roger at the Terminal Bar, the deleted section has him going back to the Ink and Paint Club to go snooping for Marvin Acme’s will. Here, he’s knocked out by Bongo the Gorilla (in a return appearance), and menaced by Judge Doom and the Weasels. They eventually dump him in Toontown, he gets a pig’s head tooned onto his own in a nasty bit of gang violence, and he ends up washing it off in the shower.¹

Here we rejoin the theatrical cut, with Eddie back at his office, and Jessica’s famous “I’m not bad, I’m just drawn that way” scene. Originally, Eddie was meant to be stepping out the shower having just washed his toon head off; instead, the filmmakers dub the sound of a flushing toilet to hide the cut scene. It mostly works, although if you stop and think about it for a moment, you might wonder why Eddie takes his shirt off to go for a dump.

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This, at least, is what was shot. As scripted, there was even more missing at this point, including the funeral of Marvin Acme, and a deleted scene with Eddie wearing the pig’s head on the Red Car. This stuff is interesting and well worthy of discussion, but outside the scope of this post. ↩

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When it comes to rumours and Who Framed Roger Rabbit, you all know the drill. Eddie Valiant and Jessica chase Judge Doom out of Toontown, they crash spectacularly, sail through the air, Jessica’s dress hitches up, and you may or may not be able to see her hairy minge. The whole thing has been investigated in great detail, although frankly not quite enough detail for my taste.

Still, that’s not what this piece is about. No, my query is about another rumour associated with the film – and specifically, about this scene in Toontown with Eddie:

allyson

We’ll let the previously linked to Snopes article give us the basics (emphasis mine):

“In another scene, Bob Hoskins steps into a Toon Town men’s room. Graffiti on the wall reads “For a good time, call Allyson Wonderland”, with the phrase “The Best Is Yet to Be” appearing underneath it. Allegedly, Disney chairman Michael Eisner’s phone number replaces the latter phrase for one frame. Although the “Allyson Wonderland” graffiti is clearly visible on laserdisc, Eisner’s phone number is not. If the phone number was in the film originally (as rumor has it was), it was removed before the home versions of the movie were made available.”

The removal of this phone number seems to apply to every single home version of the film I – or seemingly anyone – has ever come across. LaserDisc, VHS, DVD, Blu-ray, the lot. If Eisner’s phone number was ever there in the film’s theatrical release, it’s gone from the retail versions. If is was ever there, of course. Because without evidence, this really starts to take on the feeling of an urban legend. Notably, Snopes has no actual evidence to offer, and the article goes out its way to label the phone number story as a rumour.

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who framed roger rabbit

Downtown Toontown

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