“Rivalry”- youtube.com/watch?v=2-k56HttY5k
Yup, there it is folks, the lost fourth grade scene.
As Dan Scanlon and Pete Doctor suggested, they were right to disregard the line for the sake of the University story. I’m glad this scene didn’t occur as it was Mike who started as the bully. But interestingly, Sully’s insecurities are made clear there whereas the final products hints his insecurities and fleshes them out later.
“Recon”- Behold, the mystery of how Monsters acquire info about the human world. I feel paranoid… youtube.com/watch?v=MIj2KAbmvfg
“Drama Class”- youtube.com/watch?v=ShBwRwvUgIk
Well, this certainty does explain that Mike had limited experience in theater. Also, we find an earlier version of a bubbly Claire. We also find out at one point, Terri was a goth. It’s like they switched Claire’s and Terri’s personality. I certainly noticed that Sully was more of a slow learner rather than a flaunting jerk with the mask of confidence. Oh, and apparently this was originally a way for world-building of the monster world.
“Movie Night”- youtube.com/watch?v=0-pR_bBssMc
The original Oozma humiliation scene. I really wish they kept the line, “He’s a jerk, but I’m not really sure they’re wrong,” because it really does speak to a harsh reality.
Not sure where my reply to you last night went, but posting again since I finally did get to see these. I’d already seen the one of Mike and Sulley in Drama Class on Tumblr, but the “Recon” deleted scene was really interesting; suffice it to say I’ll never look at a firefly quite the same again! It does also show how the monsters are so easily mislead about human children, though, how they incorrectly interpret what they see. In my experience, humans, children included, put up pictures of things on their walls that they LIKE, not things that they’re afraid of, so a child with lots of pictures of snakes and lizards on their wall would indicate a fondness for those animals, rather than fear. I mean, how many of y’all here on Pixar Planet have pictures of things that scare or upset you all over YOUR walls? Still, given their limited direct contact with humans, it’s easy to see how the Recon guys could make that mistake.
I’m glad that they changed the ROR prank scene, though. The final result was more like the pranks I’ve experienced-from both perspectives-when I was in college, and Scanlon was right in that the first version only proved that the OK’s were easily scared, NOT that they weren’t scary themselves.
Now that I got the blu-ray and checked out one of the features, I found some interesting old concepts
-Sulley originally studying to be a dentist
-Sulley suffering a case of father-abandonment.
And there seems to be more deleted scenes that the dvd choose not to feature. The Art book mentions a “Bar Fight” scene and Scanlon mentions an alternative opening featuring Mike’s parents.
There’s so much ideas they had. So much I wanted to see fully on the Deleted Scene features. I thought it was particularly interesting that Goodman and Crystal were able to record for a storyboard scene in the deleted Drama sequence.
The “Rivalry” scene is actually rather sad, and there was actually another deleted scene mentioned in the commentary that they don’t show on the DVD, that was even more disturbing and gave some deeper insights into Sulley’s “daddy issues”. His father, the famed Scarer Bill Sullivan, left him and his mother after a nasty divorce, and Pixar had actually created a scene showing young Sulley, as a seven-year-old, chasing after his father’s pickup truck in tears as his father drove away for the last time. That was to have tied in with the “Rivalry” scene, in which Sulley is now the New Kid At School, a loner having to deal with both that and the recent split-up of his parents, so it explains why he’s so unhappy-looking and so “distant” there. Stuff like this, while probably boring as heck to young children, is what really fascinates me, and makes me wish that Pixar could make directors’ cuts of some of these movies to release on DVD just for those people like me, who like to dig deep and analyze characters and what makes them tick, and don’t care if the result is three hours long, lol.
I saw Scanlon’s brief discussion of the parental abandonment scene as being a bit “forced,” and this seemed to be written long before Michael became the central protagonist. Funny, because in my viewing experience, it was odd to me that in the final product, this Bill Sullivan is talked about but never seen, not even in photos. Scanlon must have believed it was more important to focus on Sulley’s and his peers’ reaction to the family name rather than the actual relationship with Bill Sullivan itself.
In the final product, it was like the concept of this Bill Sullivan was a ghost of a deleted concept/aspect. And I was right. Sulley’s insecurities in the finished product stems from other monsters’ reaction to the family name rather than the approval of his father. I wondered why Bill Sullivan never seemed to show up or why Sulley really didn’t speak much of him.