Flushed Away opened on this day 20 years ago. It was the first computer-animated film from British claymation powerhouse Aardman, and their last of three collaborations with DreamWorks Animation. Some fans were wary at the time of the Wallace and Gromit creators dipping their toes into the forbidden fruit of CGI, but the plot of Flushed required so much water the studio decided doing it in stop motion would’ve been virtually impossible. This did, however, cause for it to be their most expensive film ever, with a reported budget of roughly $150 million, and unfortunately that meant the box office returns were considered disappointing. DreamWorks made the rather ballsy move to release Flushed directly against Disney’s Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause, but in the end both family flicks would be beaten by the shocking success of Borat, which lead the weekend despite playing on less than 1,000 screens. Still, Flushed managed decent business until Happy Feet stole its target audience two weeks later. But that’s a topic for another header.

Like many animated films, Flushed Away went through a number of drastic changes during its production (including a title switch from Ratropolis to one that didn’t hide its toilet-centric plot in order to avoid confusion with Pixar’s upcoming rat outing Ratatouille–which ironically would seen as commercially underwhelming when it made “only” $200 million stateside). But the most notable move happened very late in production, as two major characters were completely removed from the movie at the last minute. Gilbert and Sullivan (I’m not going to explain that reference) were two hamster butlers voiced by Simon Callow and the late Geoffrey Palmer, who had apparently already recorded all of their dialogue. They were going to be loyal servants of Roddy, but kept their relationship with him “professional”–in other words, they weren’t his “friends” per se. Given that Roddy suffers from loneliness (and makes up for it in the final film by interacting with his child owner’s toys), the filmmakers decided to scrap the butlers entirely for this reason. He had to be truly alone.

According to some sources, this meant abandoning as much as twenty minutes of footage. Unfortunately, no deleted scenes have ever been officially released by DreamWorks or Aardman, for whatever reason (given they had famous voices, it’s most likely a royalties thing), although some of the test animation has made its way online. But that doesn’t mean they’ve remained completely unseen. As I said, these guys were cut from the pic very late in production…so they were featured in the teaser trailer. Shown in theaters before Over the Hedge, this preview does provide a pretty good idea of how they would’ve worked comedically in the story. It also, weirdly enough, gives the human family American accents (which they don’t have in the actual film) while maintaining the otherwise entirely British voice cast. Makes sense!

This wouldn’t be the only “public appearance” Gilbert and Sullivan would make, however, as they were also included in all of the video games, which were released on the PS2, GameCube, Game Boy Advance, and Nintendo DS. Whew! It really was a different era.

Have the power today, y’all! Be safe, be well, be you!