It’s ALIVE!…
Ten years ago, Little Shop of Horrors was available on a DVD that included a “toothier” alternate ending: an army of giant plants rampaging past city skyscrapers, overturning cars, swallowing railroads, and demolishing New York City, Godzilla-style. The U.S. army discovers the plants are bulletproof, and as helicopters flee, the plants swarm over the statue of Liberty.
Though it took for years to produce, and cost $5 million, it was available for only five days. At that point Warner Brothers realized that it had failed to secure the necessary copyright clearances for the alternate ending, and the DVD was recalled.
For the next decade, producer David Geffen and Warner Brothers wrangled and promised to restore the original ending, until Warner Brothers finally discovered in 2007 that it had already been destroyed in a studio fire.
But readers needn’t despair, that groovier ending is available in three parts on You Tube: Part One, Part Two, Part Three; indeed, it’s been sitting there since July of 2006… apparently one of the few folks who scored a copy during it’s all-to-brief life figured out how to rip and upload. The full story (including the tale of Roger Corman’s original) is at 10 Zen Monkeys.
As we feed our Fly-Traps, we might recall that it was on this date in 1871 that Henry Morton Stanley located missing explorer and missionary, Dr. David Livingstone at Ujiji, near Lake Tanganyika, and famously asked, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?”
