The creation of Robert Zemeckis’ 1988 live-action/cartoon comedy Who Framed Roger Rabbit is one of my favorite potpourri stories, where multiple source materials meshed with new technology and Bob Hoskins to create a very interesting piece of cinema.

When Roger Rabbit was released, it was one of the more expensive movies of its time with a budget of $75 million. The film managed to sweep up over $150 million in North America alone ($330 worldwide) and went on to win 4 technical Oscars at the 61st Annual Academy Awards in 1989.

The story of the film, revolving around Roger being framed for a murder and Christopher Lloyd attempting to build a freeway through Toon Town, was copped from two different sources and adapted to the film we know today.

Gary Wolf wrote the novel “Who Censored Roger Rabbit?” in 1981. This novel is generally considered to have brought the majority of the ideas to the screenplay. In the novel, detective Eddie Valiant (the name of Bob Hoskins’ character in the movie) is hired by Roger to find out why his bosses have reneged on a promise to give him his own strip (the book is based more around the theme of comic strips than the film’s animated cartoons), eventually he finds Roger murdered with a clue left in the form of a “word bubble.” In the book, ‘toons talk with sprouting word bubbles as well as vocalization as a nod to the comic strip origins of the book’s characters.

The other portion of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, the plot involving Chistopher Lloyd’s Judge Doom wanting the deed to Toon Town so he could build a freeway through it, was actually lifted from the proposal for a sequel to Roman Polanski’s Chinatown. The screenwriter Robert Towne, who wrote the Chinatown screenplay had planned out a trilogy for Jack Nicholson’s Jake, the second called “Cloverleaf” and featured - you guessed it - the building of the first freeways and the decline of Red Cars (more on Red Cars HERE).

Since the film was made in 1988, a lot of the Bob Hoskin’s acting was done to thin air. While watching the flick over the weekend with some friends, we all noticed that Hoskin’s, obviously new to the idea of things being animated in later (as Hollywood had yet to break into the post-Juarassic-Park SFX Mecca), acts most of his scenes with toons looking waaaaaay off frame.

Of course, now we live in a world of motion capture and 3D animation. So what property could be suited to deal with the ramifications of such a thing?

I guess that question was leading…

From MTV:

MTV News caught up with director Robert Zemeckis recently, he dropped a news bomb that had our eyes popping cartoon-style out of our sockets. “I’ll tell you what is buzzing around in my head now that we have the ability—the digital tools, performance capture—I’m starting to think about ‘Roger Rabbit,’” he told us.

Aha! So where is Roger gonna go now?

There is a pre-existing idea as decribed by producer Frank Marshall from way back in the 90s when test footage started being shot for what was only called “Roger Rabbit 2,” though it was actually a prequel:

“It came pretty close. We shot a test. We had a script. But unfortunately, we didn’t have computer generated animation quite yet - it was just too expensive,” Marshall explained of the untitled sequel project, “Roger Rabbit 2.” “If you think about it, in the original movie there’s really only 48 minutes of animation and in the new movie - or in that movie - he was in everything. So it went from 48 minutes of animation to over 100 minutes of animation.

“I remember we shot the test to try and see how much we could do with digital props - We weren’t even into digital characters yet,” Marshall continued. “The idea was to see what we could do with digital props as opposed to what we did in the original movie where everything was puppeted - all the props were puppeted by strings and wires and poles.”

For the first time ever, Marshall also revealed details of the plot of “Roger Rabbit 2,” and if you thought Toontown was a trip, you should have seen where they were sending Roger next.

“New York!” Marshall enthused of the setting for the second film. “Roger was a song and dance man in New York City [when he] discovered that he wanted to be in the movies and so he came across the country. I remember there being a big dance number. He came out with a troupe of sort of Busby Berkeley dancers on a train and they got to Hollywood and he and Baby Herman moved in together. And that’s when he met Eddie Valiant.”

And of all the Roger Rabbit stuff I’ve been reading this morning, I think I’m really into Peter from /Film’s idea:

I actually think that there might be more stories to tell in the Roger Rabbit universe, and I even have some really topical ideas. Like I would like to see how Toon Town has dealt with the invasion of computer animation. I’m sure the 2D cartoon stars have now become “old news”.

Nifty, right?

/Film managed to do a lot of quality reporting on the proposed prequels to Who Framed Roger Rabbit that eventually became the project Marshall describes above. You can read that HERE.