Ralph Breaks The Internet’s Post-Credit Scenes Came With Some Major Hurdles

Ralph Breaks The Internet’s Post-Credit Scenes Came With Some Major Hurdles

Hopefully fans who saw Ralph Breaks the Internet this weekend stayed until the very end of the credits. If so, they were rewarded with not one, but two additional scenes, both of which are hilarious but also came with their own unique set of difficulties.

The directors of Ralph Breaks the Internet, Rich Moore and Phil Johnston, along with producer Clark Spencer, broke them both down with us.

If the first scene probably felt oddly familiar, that’s because you saw it in the first teaser trailer released back in March. However, the scene in that trailer was cut from the movie just as toys and other products (like the VR) featuring the characters were going into production. This posed a problem for the filmmakers. They knew the scene didn’t work for their movie, but also that it had to be in there if at all possible. Here’s the trailer, cued to the scene in question.

“The first teaser came out in March,” said producer Clark Spencer. “And by then we knew that [scene] wasn’t going to be in the movie.” The scene features a young girl in a car playing a game called Pancake Milkshake — a game that’s then taken over by Ralph and Vanellope with gruesome results.

“We would have bet money this is going to be in,” said Moore. However, it was not meant to be. Just as the trailer was being released, the scene was cut.

“Stories evolve over time,” Spencer said. “You get a scene like that and it’s so brilliant in boards and you’re [saying] ‘This is 100 per cent going to be a movie’ because the audience goes crazy. Then you animate it and the film starts to shift and you keep it in for a couple screenings where you really are trying to make it work and then eventually you have to say ‘This does not belong in the movie.’”

And yet, in a way, it had to be. “People kept talking about it and they were making toys of the bunny and yeah we [couldn’t] not have it,” Moore said.

The result, as you saw in the credits, was a meta twist on the scene – the characters comment on how the scene from the trailer wasn’t in the movie, even as you are watching the scene from the trailer now in the movie. As for the question of who that little girl is…

“[The scene] also created kind of an online buzz saying ‘Wait. That’s baby Moana, right?’” Johnston said. “Which, I mean, maybe it’s the model? Maybe it’s not? I don’t know. The mum refers to her as ‘Mo’ and the woman who voices the mum is the same actress who was Moana’s mother so I don’t know. We can’t control these things.”

Then there’s the second scene at the very, very end of the movie. A title card promises a tease of Frozen 2, the next movie from Disney Animation Studios, only for us to be Rick Rolled by Wreck-It Ralph. You can get a taste of it here.

“The joke was ‘Oh wouldn’t it be funny, instead of ‘Rick Roll’ it’s ‘Wreck Roll,’” Johnston said. “Ages ago we had that idea but then for some reason never did anything with it.”

Moore and Johnston thought maybe they’d put Wreck Roll in the credits, but since the credits are often one of the last things completed on a film, the idea kept being put off. “It seemed like, ‘Well, maybe there’s not going to be time to do it,’” Moore said. “Then we pitched it to someone and they’re like ‘Oh you’ve got to do that.’ It was one of the last [things we did.]”

It was so last minute, in fact, one of the actors wasn’t available. The main actor.

“To his credit John C. Reilly was on vacation and he got on a boat from an island, came to the city of New York, went into a recording studio, recorded it, and then went back out to have vacation with his family,” Spencer said. “Because we were in that time constraint of ‘If we’re going to do it we need to record it now and get it into animation immediately,’ he did it and the animators pulled it off.”

Each post-credits scene, while not easy to crack, put an excellent exclamation point on a movie that’s already pretty damn good on its own.


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