By Todd Garbarini
On Saturday, April 23, 1988, I attended
the Official Starlog Festival at the then-Penta Hotel in midtown Manhattan on
Seventh Avenue. It was my first time meeting makeup artist Tom Savini and several
cast members of Star Trek were also
on hand. Film producer Frank Marshall,
whom cineastes will know from The Warriors
(1979), Raiders of the Lost Ark
(1981), Poltergeist (1982), Back to the
Future (1985), and most recently The
Borne Legacy (2012), also showed up for a few hours to debut footage that director
Robert Zemeckis shot for a new upcoming film entitled Who Framed Roger Rabbit? which was based upon the 1981 novel by
Gary K. Wolf, Who Censored Roger Rabbit? The footage that we saw consisted of Bob
Hoskins interacting with Roger and other animated characters and it looked pretty
seemless. When the film opened two
months later, I was delighted to see my favorite cartoon characters appear in
one film.
The premise is fairly straight forward
and owes a huge debt to the film noirs
of the Thirties and Forties and there is more than a passing wink at Roman
Polanski’s Chinatown (1974) as Eddie
Valiant (Bob Hoskins) is hired by R.K. Maroon (the head of Maroon Cartoons) to
investigate allegations that Jessica Rabbit, the wife of cartoon star Roger
Rabbit (both of whom live in Toontown with other cartoon characters who act in
movies for real people producers and directors), is having an affair. Eddie hates toons because his brother, Teddy,
was killed by one some years earlier. Eddie
shows Roger pictures that he took of Roger’s wife, Jessica, playing patty-cake
with Marvin Acme. Roger interprets this
as his wife cheating on him, and when Acme is killed the next day by a fallen
piano, Roger moves to the head of the suspect list. Since toons are pretty much indestructible
(they have to be in order for them to be “killed†in their cartoons!), an evil
man named Judge Doom (Christopher Lloyd), who presides over Toontown, knows
that the only way to kill a toon should one of them step out of line is to
submerge them into a vat of acid he calls “The Dipâ€. His minions are sent out to find Roger and
bring him back for the murder of Marvin Acme. This leads to a series of action-packed misadventures that are executed
in the tradition of most of the beloved Warner Brothers Merrie Melodies cartoons.
This is the film’s first foray on to
Blu-ray, and its third go-round on DVD. It
comes in a 2-disc set with one Blu-ray and one DVD. The Blu-ray contains the following extras:
Filmmaker’s
running commentary (runs in tandem with the film)
The
Roger Rabbit Shorts: Tummy Trouble, Roller
Coaster Rabbit & Trail Mix-Up
Who Made Roger Rabbit (10:55)
Deleted
Scene: The Pig Head Sequence (5:30)
Before
and After (3:07)
Toon
Stand-Ins (3:14)
Behind the Ears documentary (36:37)
On Set! behind-the-scenes (4:50)
The DVD contains these additional extras:
Valiant
Files
Toontown Confidential, a feature that
can be enabled while watching the film which has facts and trivia
What is missing, and this is something
I have never seen on any home video release of the film be it VHS, laserdisc
(does anyone remember the controversy surrounding this release?), or
previous editions DVDs, is the CBS-TV special Roger Rabbit & the Secrets of Toon Town which aired on Tuesday,
September 13, 1988. Its exclusion might
be attributed to a rights issue. Fortunately, it can be seen here
on Youtube. The quality is not stellar,
however it is better than not having access to it at all.
All in all, this Blu-ray is a worthy
upgrade to a fun film that has earned its place in movie history.
Click here to order from Amazon