Deleted Scene from Dumbo_ The Mouse's Tale
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FunTranscript
00:00Hi, I'm Don Hahn and welcome to the Disney Animation Research Library.
00:07This is the place where all the original artwork from Disney animated films is carefully preserved
00:12and hidden right here among these millions of pieces of artwork.
00:15Sometimes we're really lucky and find the evidence of an old lost sequence from one of the studio's animated features.
00:21All the existing records indicate that the story of Dumbo went through just about no story changes over the course of production.
00:27So when we began our research for the special edition of Dumbo, we weren't sure if we would find anything that was dropped from the film.
00:35But we uncovered a series of really odd drawings from 1940 that outlined this dark tale of giant mice and prehistoric elephants.
00:45And when we went back and dug, we found the original story in this 102-page treatment written by a couple of Disney legends,
00:53Joe Grant and Dick Humer, and we found a chapter that was titled The Mouse's Tale.
00:59And in that story, Timothy realizes that Dumbo isn't afraid of him at all.
01:03I mean, elephants are supposed to be afraid of mice.
01:06And Timothy figures that he just wasn't educated properly.
01:09So he starts to tell him the whole story of why elephants are afraid of mice.
01:15And this is what it said in the script.
01:17First, said Timothy, assuming a very comfortable position on a bale of hay next to Dumbo...
01:22You've got to imagine in your mind things like they are today.
01:26You know, with buildings and circuses and automobiles and people and cheese factories.
01:34All right? You got that?
01:36Now, millions and millions of years ago, everything was a whole lot different.
01:42Those were what they called the un-pre-hysterical times.
01:48There was no circuses and no big buildings and no automobiles and no people at all.
01:56And not one single solitary cheese factory.
02:01There was nothing. You got that?
02:04Only some nasty rocks and some great big funny-looking trees.
02:11There were elephants in those days.
02:13Bigger and more hairy and with longer tusks.
02:17And they had things pretty much their own way.
02:19Life was a regular bed of peanuts.
02:21When they were hungry, they reached up into the peanut trees for the goobers that grew big as watermelons in those times.
02:30Now, as big as they were, there was one animal that was much bigger.
02:36Do you know what that animal was?
02:39Ha! You'd never guess.
02:41Well, sir, it was a mouse!
02:48Mice, a hundred times as high as this tent they were.
02:53They had eyes as big and bright as searchlights.
02:57And big sharp white teeth that could bite through the toughest cheese.
03:04And tails as long and fat as a sewer pipe.
03:09When they walked, the ground trembled.
03:14And they drew a shadow a block long.
03:19Ho! Ho! What a time my ancestors had with yours when they came to town.
03:25They chased them around and around.
03:27The little elephants grabbing each other's tails and running as fast as their little legs could carry them.
03:33Only to get caught in the end.
03:35And if they ran into their caves, the mice reached in with their long arms and dragged them out.
03:41Still holding on to each other's tails.
03:43Whole families of them.
03:46And when they had them rounded up, they tied their tails together and stood around and laughed.
03:53And used them as jump ropes and played with them in many other torturous ways.
04:00The mice made life just miserable for those elephants.
04:04And whatever they did, the elephants couldn't escape them.
04:08Even when they held up leaves with their trunks and pretended they were trees.
04:13Even that didn't fool those mice who could smell an elephant a mile away.
04:19All right, things are different now.
04:22Somewhere in all those millions of years, something happened.
04:25Now you're big and we're little.
04:28So why do elephants go all to pieces today instead of just stepping on us and flattening us out?
04:34Why does an elephant run a mile even when he thinks that there's a mouse around?
04:39It's because of the power we once had over him.
04:43He thinks of how we teased and tormented and ran him ragged those millions and millions of years ago.
04:50It's his curse.
04:52An elephant never forgets.
04:59So that's Timothy's story of why elephants are afraid of mice.
05:03This artwork proves some considerable creative effort went into imagining what this sequence would look like on film...
05:08...before it was ultimately cut.
05:10Why was it cut? We just don't know.
05:12But my guess is that Walt, who always had a keen sense for story and how to keep the plot focused...
05:17...felt that this little side story about Timothy and elephants and mice was just distracting from the main plot.
05:23En tout cas, c'est une fun séquence et je suis vraiment heureux d'avoir eu l'occasion de la partager avec vous aujourd'hui.
05:27Merci d'avoir rejoint moi ici à l'ARL.
05:29Jusqu'à la prochaine. Au revoir.