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From epic musical to slapstick comedy, this Disney masterpiece underwent one of the most dramatic transformations in animation history! Join us as we explore the chaotic production of "The Emperor's New Groove" - including scrapped songs, director conflicts, and the documentary Disney doesn't want you to see. How did Sting, McDonald's deadlines, and a disastrous screening change everything?
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00:00Welcome to Miss Mojo, and today we're looking at the most stranger than fiction facts about
00:10Disney's cult classic, The Emperor's New Groove.
00:13Spoilers to come!
00:24It was originally titled Kingdom of the Sun.
00:27It seems strange that this animated film was ever going to be something completely different.
00:43Fresh off his Lion King triumph, director Roger Allers was tapped to direct an animated film
00:49based on the indigenous cultures of South America.
00:52Allers chose the Incan Empire in modern-day Peru, and thus Kingdom of the Sun was born.
00:57When I pitched the original story that I cooked up to Michael Eisner, he said it has all the elements of a classic Disney film.
01:08Beginning development in 1994, the film would focus on the Incan creation myth, focusing on a selfish emperor and a humble peasant that change places, prince and the pauper style, and fall in love with each other's respective love interests.
01:23Meanwhile, the villain Yzma plans to destroy the sun and stay young and beautiful forever.
01:28Unfortunately, this conception was short-lived, as we shall see.
01:32There's Yzma.
01:33It's so perfect, I can't believe what's happened.
01:35Ah, I've just turned Manco into a llama.
01:38There's a dummy emperor in his place.
01:40Sting wrote a whole slew of songs that were ultimately scrapped.
01:44For the film's soundtrack, following the success of Elton John's work in The Lion King, Allers hired Sting.
01:51My only concern ever about Sting had been, is he too sophisticated?
01:55His music is very complex, and would it be able to integrate well into an animated story?
02:02Sting took the project at once, but only agreed to write songs if his wife, Trudy, could film the process in a documentary, eventually called The Sweatbox.
02:12Sting wrote eight songs for the Kingdom of the Sun.
02:15Yzma especially got a fun villain song, Snuff Out the Light, and even a reprise of Perfect World.
02:21Put an end to my frustration, now this perfect world begins and ends with mwah, what's my name?
02:28There was at least one love song, but as the film changed drastically in tone, most of these songs were cut.
02:34Poor Sting tried to quit several times, but the team refused his resignation letters.
02:39Sting did get an Oscar nomination for My Funny Friend and Me, so that's something at least.
02:52Denville vs. Allers
02:54It was producer Randy Fulmer who sounded the alarm on Kingdom of the Sun.
02:58The story was so convoluted that it took Fulmer the whole airplane trip from New York to Los Angeles to explain it to a fellow passenger.
03:06Our job is to make a film that is really entertaining, interesting storyline, but not too complex.
03:14There were also problems with the slow pacing.
03:17After the underperformance of ambitious Disney films like Pocahontas and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, the producers decided a change in tone was needed.
03:25Fulmer thus hired Mark Dindal as co-director to pare it down.
03:41The result was two teams, one working with Allers on a Disney epic and one working with Dindal on a buddy comedy.
03:48The winner was Dindal.
03:50Allers understood the decision, but was heartbroken at the loss of his film.
03:54The ghost went out of one corpse and went into another body and is walking around looking very different.
04:00You know, so it's not like the whole thing completely died.
04:03There's this sort of other thing that's continuing on.
04:07Happy Meal Deadline
04:09Part of what complicated Kingdom of the Sun's production was the very short turnaround.
04:14Disney had made promotion deals with McDonald's and Coca-Cola that needed to be fulfilled in the summer of 2000.
04:20By 1998, the project's budget had ballooned up to $30 million.
04:25We have a year and a half now to do the film, so it's not a time for faint hearts.
04:31We've got to have a plan and we've got to believe in that plan, stick with it and really motor to get it done in a year and a half.
04:37Producer Thomas Schumacher was in full panic mode, almost begging Fulmer to give him something to give to CEO Michael Eisner.
04:45I'm going to show Michael Eisner plus Sting the whole movie completely for the first time.
04:50It's actually very exciting.
04:52We're like little children at the principal's office waiting to find out what the verdict is.
04:57This pressure led to the film being stripped of its epic mythological elements and refashioned into the buddy comedy we all know and love.
05:05Thanks, McDonald's?
05:07In honor of Disney's new movie, The Emperor's New Groove, we're putting a llama in McDonald's Happy Meals.
05:12Hello, a toy llama?
05:14David Spade and Eartha Kitt were Cusco and Yzma from the beginning.
05:18It is astounding to say, given the wide variety of changes the film underwent, but it is true.
05:24David Spade as Manko, eventually renamed Cusco, and Eartha Kitt as Yzma were locked in stone from the get-go.
05:31What happens is I have a kind of a sorceress that works with me, Eartha Kitt, Yzma.
05:38She's jealous of me, angry, bitter and old.
05:42Even when Yzma's original animator Andreas Deja left the project, replaced by Dale Bear, Kitt stayed on.
05:49David Spade was called to do his signature sarcastic voice for the Greedy Emperor.
05:53Although in the original version, he worked with the similarly young Owen Wilson as Pacha.
06:10When the character was reimagined as a middle-aged father, John Goodman replaced Wilson in the role.
06:15With voices as perfect as Spades and Kitts, we're not surprised they were retained.
06:19I adore her because she goes after what she wants.
06:23The original ending had Cusco destroy a rainforest.
06:27This organization seems to want to take the best of different cultures, suck them up and then spit them out into something that's like a hamburger.
06:37It's really not what I want to do.
06:39This really stung Sting.
06:41With the switch to a more comic register, the plot quickly gained elements of Looney Tunes-style mayhem and merriment.
06:48One of the extra gags included an ending where a reformed Cusco builds his Cusco-topia on another hill, destroying a rainforest in the process.
06:57When you've achieved genuine human values, you don't need a theme park or a water slide.
07:02I've been aware for a while now that my vision of the world and Disney's may be at odds. I can only be candid.
07:08This change especially disturbed the environmentally conscious songwriter.
07:12Sting, who had spent 20 years fighting for indigenous rights, wrote a letter where he threatened to resign from the project if this ending were kept.
07:20Fortunately, it was scrapped for the more wholesome ending we know today. Thanks Sting!
07:25The movie shouldn't end with him have learned the lesson only to relocate his hideous palace.
07:31He should have learned not to make a hideous palace in the countryside.
07:34And I read it and I went, oh, this is a really good note.
07:38Disastrous 1998 Screening
07:41The impetus for the change from Kingdom of the Sun to Emperor's New Groove has to be this one screening.
07:48There, the original film's flaws were glaring, at least to Schumacher.
07:52He gave the team some really critical notes, saying the tone was leaden and the pacing was off.
07:57Sometimes they're pretty brutal and we welcome that because we'd rather get the bad news early.
08:05Moreover, it just wasn't fun.
08:07He even went so far as to say that if it hadn't been Allers' movie, he would have shut the whole thing down.
08:13So much of the movie isn't working. I just don't know who I'm supposed to care about, what I'm watching. The pace seems really, really wacky.
08:23Although shaken from this feedback, a professional Allers tried to modify his original pitch.
08:29Meanwhile, Dindal was brought in with a new, more comic approach. The rest is history.
08:34It's kind of a marvel to see how this machine can function when it's up and running at full speed.
08:41Because everybody's been through the process enough, they know how to get going.
08:45Disney refuses to release the sweat box.
08:47The big boss will look at it all and we fire us first off.
08:53You're fired. I've never been fired before.
08:57All throughout Kingdom of the Suns and eventually Emperor's New Groove's troubled production was Trudy Styler,
09:03quietly documenting this behind the scenes drama.
09:06That's right, the original deal with Sting was faithfully kept.
09:10Some of the documentary made it into the Emperor's New Groove DVD featurette.
09:14What I find so interesting about the cast of voices that we have is that every one of them, we could have stage play.
09:21But the film in its entirety did receive a release at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2002, as well as two other short runs.
09:29This candid look into the creative process, particularly the clashes between artists and producers, was perhaps too revealing.
09:38In fact, Disney refused to give the documentary a wider release, and in essence has banned it.
09:44Sometimes it resurfaces on the internet though if you know where to look.
09:47And having a sensor. An artistic sensor. Every time that I've had to go back and work it, it's better. It's gone better.
09:56New release date and Emperor's New Groove's marketing campaign.
10:00The refashioned movie had shown much promise in early screenings, especially among younger audiences.
10:07Disney, however, was Disney. Instead of a Thanksgiving release date, they decided to move the release to December 15th.
10:23Instead, Disney's live action remake, 102 Dalmatians, would fill the Thanksgiving slot.
10:29Moreover, Kingdom of the Sun got its final title as The Emperor's New Groove, which baffled the animated team.
10:36How do we introduce the llama portion of this? We have a title that's The Emperor's New Groove.
10:41And if you only show me a llama, there's a little bit of a disconnect.
10:46The marketing team decided to emulate Kuzco's narcissistic attitude with certain sassy posters.
10:52But for the most part, the film didn't receive a fulsome marketing campaign compared to other Disney movies.
10:58Sure enough, despite favorable critic reviews, the film underperformed at the box office.
11:03The lessons are profound.
11:05Why didn't I make these changes earlier? It was so painful to do it. It was expensive to change this late in the game.
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11:29No script.
11:30One of the more bizarre aspects of Emperor's long and strange history is that in the end, there was no completed script.
11:37That's right, Sting had to write his songs completely without context.
11:42I was writing songs in the dark, really, based on sort of hearsay of what the film was going to be. There was no hard script.
11:51When it was retooled into the finished comedy, the production team went for a let's throw everything on the wall and see what sticks type of process.
11:59As a result, the production team didn't have a full script until after the film was released in theaters.
12:05A poor intern probably stapled a bunch of papers together just to have something to hand in.
12:22This is ironic as the film has the best comic writing for an animated film alongside Shrek and The Road to El Dorado.
12:29Many of its lines are now memes and for good reason.
12:33Do you agree with the changes that made Emperor into what it is?
12:46Or do you long for the Disney epic we could have had?
12:49Let us know in the comments down below.
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