Jim Hill: From the Archives
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LaughingPlace.com continues its publishing of "Jim Hill: From the Archives" with this article, originally published in March 2000.

(c) Disney and Amblin

The Sad Tail... I mean "Tale" of the stalled Roger Rabbit Sequel
or 
Why you shouldn't expect a return trip to ToonTown anytime soon...

Now that Peter Schneider - former head of feature animation - is the new chairman of Walt Disney Studios, does that mean his old buddies at Feature Animation will get preferential treatment?

Not bloody likely. 

Schneider's a true corporate creature, folks. The moment he took over for former Disney studio head Joe Roth, all loyalty to Disney Feature Animation [DFA] ended abruptly. Now Peter leans hard on his former charges to keep production costs down and productivity up.

Which is a shame. Because - for a while there - some DFA staffers thought Schneider might do something positive with his new-found power. 

Like - say - finally green-light a film that animation fans have been waiting twelve years for.

But don't hold your breath, folks. Roger Rabbit II isn't going to happen anytime soon. Though the key pieces are already in place (A script -- featuring five new Alan Menken songs - has been written. Menken himself has agreed to serve as the film's executive producer. Master Disney animator Eric Goldberg has committed to supervising the animation of this project. Disney Feature Animation's Florida unit even had staffers working on test footage last spring), this long awaited sequel to the 1988 blockbuster stalled out again last summer.

What happened? How is it that a film like Roger Rabbit II - a project that's almost guaranteed to make money -- keeps failing to get made? 

Part of the problem is cost. Then there's that deal Eisner made with Spielberg. Plus all the personality conflicts involved.

It's a long story, folks. (I know, I know. All my stories are long stories. Sorry. I guess - when it comes to the history of the Walt Disney Company - there are no neat, short answers). 

But - to understand why it is that a guaranteed blockbuster like Roger Rabbit II can't get made - you have to go back over the unlikely chain of events that lead up to the original film getting produced in the first place.

Roger Rabbit started on the road to screen stardom way back in 1980, when then-Disney Studio head Ron Miller got a hold of the galley proofs for a soon-to-be-published novel.

This book - Gary Wolf's Who Censored Roger Rabbit - was a clever spoof of all those old hard-boiled detective novels. It was a twisted tale set in a film noir never-neverland; a Hollywood where humans and toons lived and worked uneasily side by side.

Miller thought that Walt Disney Productions could make something really special out of Wolf's book. He brought the story to the attention of then-Disney CEO Card Walker. Walker was less than impressed. Finding the novel weird and dark, Card told Ron to pass on the project.

Miller didn't. In fact - over Walker's objects - Ron paid $25,000 for the film rights to Who Censored Roger Rabbit. Miller then handed the project off to a young Disney production executive, Mark Sturdivant, for development. Sturdivant hired two former advertising copywriters, Jeffrey Price and Peter Seaman, to work up a screenplay. He also assigned Disney animator Darrell Van Citters to begin roughing out character designs as well as pencil tests for the project.

Seaman and Price wrote ten different drafts of their Roger Rabbit screenplay before they finally got the story right. In the process, the screenwriters chucked out most of Wolf's original storyline - while retaining most of his character names as well as the book's core concept.

What made Seaman and Price's final version of their Roger Rabbit screenplay so much fun is that they decided to go whole hog with Wolf's "toons are real" idea. So they wrote a murder mystery set in 1947 Hollywood, where private detective Eddie Valiant didn't just interact with Roger, Jessica and Baby Herman. He also had to rub elbows with Betty Boop, Bugs Bunny and tons of other established cartoon stars before he could solve the murder of R.K. Maroon.