Ha! Boom baby!

Ah, good, nothing.

This is the original version

of The Emperor's New Groove.

Oh, wow.

Is that like a tattoo?

And although it has small traces

of the final version...

Hey, don't touch.

Woah! No touchy.

It was a disaster

after six years of rewrites.

So much of the movie isn't working.

Burnouts.

Part of me just wants to give up

and say, you know, forget it.

And firings.

I was up half the night

just sort of grieving over this whole thing.

How do you start a movie

over from scratch?

Oh yeah, it's all coming together.

And make an all-time classic.

Bring it on.

In a third of the time.

How did we Kronk?

Well, you got me.

By all accounts, it doesn't make sense.

It's been declared Disney's best yet

and a triumph.

Now the most acclaimed film of the year.

Following the massive success of The Lion King,

Disney decided they needed another musical epic

to follow it up.

So, they brought in The Lion King's co-director,

Roger Allers.

After Lion King, I was told,

"How about developing a story

about South American culture?"

I looked at them and I said,

"Oh, the Incas."

So, I gathered a crew to do the picture,

inspired by a setting like Machu Picchu.

The mythic aspect of the Inca culture

is important to me.

I'd love to get something of the essence,

it does have to do with their gods and the sun.

It's a story about Pacha,

a llama herder.

He loves the sun.

He believes there's always a way

to bring light into any situation.

There's Manco,

the arrogant, self-centered prince.

And Pacha comes to the city,

and when he's put into a position of leadership,

he transforms the city.

It's about a common man

teaching an arrogant man how to rule.

When I pitched the original story

that I had cooked up to Michael Eisner,

he said it has all the elements

of a classic Disney film.

Disney gave it the green light

and called it Kingdom of the Sun.

Kingdom of the Sun was this really cool,

epic Disney musical.

It was epic.

It was big.

Lots of elements.

It wasn't comedy focused.

It wasn't that type of film.

It was big drama, big spectacle.

It's like a Beauty and the Beast,

or a Mermaid,

or that type of thing.

The studio really opened up

and said we don't want to keep making

the same sort of film,

and have given the people in the studio

a lot of artistic license

to try different sorts of stories.

But with that artistic license

came lots of complications.

The first of which was the plot.

What we're grappling with at the moment

is that we have a lot of elements

in this story.

Much like Emperor's New Groove,

Kingdom of the Sun had an arrogant emperor,

a humble llama herder,

and an evil sorceress,

but a ton of plot differences.

For example, in Kingdom of the Sun,

Yzma's big evil scheme  involved blocking out the sun

by summoning the god of death,

not just turning Kuzco into a llama.

And the plot wasn't the only difficulty.

It's a complicated movie

because all the departments

are working simultaneously.

The production crew took a research trip to Peru

to study the Inca architecture and landscape.

And while seemingly beneficial,

it only added to the story's growing complexity.

One of my biggest faults

was to try to pull all  these different elements in,

you know, the mysticism,

you know, the funny villain,

the, you know, all of this,

trying to make all these things

into a rich soup or whatever.

And maybe I tried to hold on

to too many ingredients.

It's very hard for one guy Phil

to give all the answers he has to.

The day isn't long enough.

When the movie's narrative became too unruly,

the team decided to unify it

around its initial inspiration,

The Prince and the Pauper,

a novel about two identical looking boys,

one rich, one poor,

who switch lives.

I bet we're distant cousins

cuz we look exactly alike.

Pacha talks his way out of being killed

by saying, "Let's switch places

because we look exactly alike."

And of course, everything goes wrong from there,

but they switch places

just like the Prince and the Pauper do.

But even with the refocusing,

the film would only become more ambitious,

and they still had to figure out the casting.

I talked to Roger,

and we wanted me to do

the comedy sidekick character.

They're called Huaca,

a little stone figure,

and at the time I came on,

Garry Marshall was the voice.

Gambling.

That's why people come here.

They gamble.

As they continued through it, they realized,

okay, we just don't like this.

It's not working for us.

It needs to be different.

So, they started to look into

different voice talents and things like that.

We went through a bunch.

Uh, we went through Peter Ustinov.

Same faces, same noses, all green.

Nobody liked that.

So, that was out.

And then they settled on Harvey Fierstein.

Honey, I'm so happy.

And that's the one we were working on.

Why didn't I think of that?

You know what?

I will just walk out there

and I'll tell those 50,000 people

now you come back tomorrow.

For reasons we'll discuss a little later,

the character was scrapped

and Fierstein was out.

As for the main cast,

Disney locked in three big names.

David Spade.

I can't believe I've been here this long

and no one's kissed my feet.

Eartha Kitt.

The prince.

I told you he's dead.

And the biggest name

that didn't make it into the final film,

Owen Wilson.

Oh, I've got one of those, too.

But mine sort of looks like a moon.

See right there?

In addition to Eartha Kitt,

the most important thing

that survived till the final version

was David Spade.

And not just his voice.

Boo is similar to me.

He's kind of a brat.

There you go.

Yeah.

Could you write something funny?

Sure.

There's something funny.

Yeah, that's very clever.

Jay Leno makes a smiley face.

Find him.

No, you threw off my groove.

I'm sorry, but you've thrown off

the emperor's groove.

They also film me when I record,

so they get a lot of my Elvis moves

when I talk.

What I love about Yzma

is that she's a classic Disney villain,

big scale villain,

and she's operatic.

She's over the top.

Eartha Kitt brought such an eccentric quality

to that character.

She said, you know,

that she loves to play

that sort of wild diva role.

I adore her because she goes after

what she said.

While the casting was crucial

to the film's identity,

like any Disney movie,

so was the music.

In 1997, I was approached

by the Walt Disney Company

to write songs for an animated feature

called The Kingdom of the Sun.

I was deeply flattered.

You know, I mean, Disney films

have been in my life

since I saw Sleeping Beauty.

Since the story was all over the place,

Sting was hesitant to commit to the film,

which was far more warranted

than any hesitancy to hit that subscribe button.

My only concern ever about Sting had been,

is he too sophisticated?

His music is very complex,

and would it be able to integrate well

into an animated story.

They hadn't really settled on a script.

I was writing songs in the dark,

really based on sort of hearsay

of what the film was going to be.

There was no hard script.

He eventually agreed to participate,

but only on the condition

that his wife, Trudie Styler,

could tag along

and film a documentary

about the film's production.

Hi, I'm Trudie.

I'll play the guitar.

You do what you do.

Clearly, she didn't realize

the tumultuousness

that she'd be capturing.

You just be a tinsy winsy little bit

more obnoxious and on camera.

And everything would come to a head

when executives finally saw  a screening of the film.

Screening the movie like this

is having someone chop your hands off

and pull your pants down

in front of a crowd,

and you stand there with stumps bleeding,

incapable of pulling your pants back up.

I'm sat in this meeting right now,

and that's kind of determined the fate

of Brooklyn Project.

For me, so much of the movie isn't working.

I just don't know who I'm supposed to care about,

what I'm watching.

The pace seems really, really wacky,

like just so lean,

and I'm not having much fun.

Multiple reworks were attempted by the team,

but they just weren't enough

to salvage the movie,

especially since it was already

so far along in production.

If none of the outlines strike Peter as brilliant,

then they might completely shelve the project.

Instead, the producers made an unusual decision.

They split the production into two teams.

One led by Allers,

which focused on the movie's original story,

and another led by co-director Mark Dindal,

which worked on a comedic version of the film.

By this point, Allers had been struggling

on the project for 4 years.

I sort of feel like I'm standing here

with fragments of confetti

falling through my fingers.

I was up half the night

just sort of grieving over this whole thing.

He was ultimately removed from the project.

With the film's original architect gone,

the plot was uncertain,

and so was the music.

Now I hear that they want to change the script.

So it makes all the characters and the plot

and everything that songs

have been written around,

moves.

Constant rewrites made it difficult for Sting

to capture the film's emotional tone.

And despite repeated objections,

executives didn't listen.

Filmmakers want everything short and punchy,

but songs have to have a certain amount of time

to breathe,

and they have to have their structure intact.

This organization seems to want

to take the best of different cultures,

suck them up,

and then spit them out

into something that's like a hamburger.

It's really not what I want to do.

I don't think this is what  they want to do, really.

Sting eventually had enough

and gave Disney an ultimatum,

writing a letter

essentially threatening to quit

if the story didn't stay true

to its original message.

Gentlemen, I have achieved genuine human values.

You don't need a theme park or a water slide.

I've been aware for a while now

that my vision of the world

and Disney's may be at odds.

I can only be candid,

but there's something intrinsically faulty

with this film,

and I find it very difficult

to continue working on something

that goes against my beliefs.

I offer my views humbly,

and I look forward to your response.

I read it, I went,

"Oh, this is a really good note."

The thought occurs.

Ironically, Sting was arguing

against the new direction,

which would culminate in an all-time classic,

but not before it was dead.

Upper management had problems.

So, they shut down the picture.

They just shut it down.

Disney executives had enough.

She's going down.

The movie was halted for 6 months.

Ultimately, the studio couldn't afford

to have sunk so much money into a project

just to throw it out entirely.

So, they demanded a full rebuild.

Most of Sting's music was cut,

and a new plot was demanded.

This time under even higher pressure.

Deadlines start to get real.

The release date coming at you like a brick wall.

Everybody's killing themselves now

to get it done.

It's like, how long is this going to take?

And I'm thinking,

I'm here 72 hours a week, buddy.

You know, drawing this stuff.

You come in for 3 hours

and you're complaining.

Give me a break.

There's sort of a molding, shaping stages.

Our story guy sort of came up with another idea,

that the story ought to be simple enough

to really have time

to get to know the characters

and their personalities,

and that's where the humor will evolve from.

And just do a blue sky thing.

Just try some crazy stuff

off the top of your heads.

So they came up with an  entirely different storyline,

except that it involves a prince

who becomes a llama.

What was originally conceived

as a period piece epic

turned into a buddy road-trip comedy.

I would say it was probably

one of the most drastic pivots

in Disney animated film history.

Several things have happened.

We changed the name of our film

from Kingdom of the Sun

to Kingdom in the Sun.

We also have a year and a half now

to do the film.

So, it's not a time for faint hearts.

Where animation technology stood in the '90s,

that was not a lot of time.

And although you can only hand-draw

2D animation so fast,

the writing team was pushed

to make up that time.

I wrote the whole scene,

that whole dinner party scene,

in 15 minutes.

Hey, did you see that sky today?

Talk about blue.

Peter Schneider, the head of the studio,

just burst out laughing,

and everybody laughed.

And then at the end of it,

Tom Schumacher just turned to me and goes,

"Well, Dave, looks like you saved your character."

The comedic direction was now validated,

but the rest of the plot

still needed to be reworked.

I heard that MO was going to be

the main character of the movie,

that Pacha was out of the movie,

that they changed the setting of the movie

from Peru to Nebraska,

and they were all going to be sheep

instead of llamas.

The original plot followed Manco and Pacha

as they live the other's life

and work to defeat Yzma,

who threatens to block out the sun

to prevent herself from aging.

Not only was the story thrown out,

but so was the idea for one of the characters.

We have a new Pacha.

The old Pacha was 16 years old.

This one's now 45.

He's big.

He's a big farmer with big hands.

There are sort of like two storylines

going on at one time,

which is the Pacha-Kuzco storyline.

Then there's sort of like a B storyline,

which is Yzma and Kronk the villains.

The biggest difference

in the Kingdom in the Sun version

from the Emperor's New Groove version

was that in the second act,

Kuzco stayed in Pacha's village.

They didn't go on the road back to the palace.

It wasn't a road movie yet.

So instead it was like an episode

of the Andy Griffith Show,

or The Office, or something,

where you just meet

a bunch of weird eccentric characters.

Since Pacha was 45 instead of 16,

Owen Wilson was no longer a fit,

so he was fired,

and a much warmer, mature voice

was brought in.

John Goodman brought such a warmth

to the Pacha character.

Pacha is just a big, burly,

good-looking, dependable family man.

It's unlike any other feature

I've ever seen before.

It's just so different and so good.

Dad, I ate a bug today.

Oh, was mom baking again?

Don't tell her I said that.

But the one character that to me

takes the film beyond hilarity

is Kronk.

If you're thinking,

"Where have I heard this voice?"

Well, you might be hearing this.

Is it weird that we're in a group text

with our friend's wife,

but not our friend?

Or this character from Ted,

who's actually a lot like

the dim-witted Kronk.

My longest relationship was like 6 months,

and then she farted in her sleep.

I'm like, I'm out of here, man.

We have this beefcake character named Kronk.

He's basically Yzma's boyfriend.

What about dinner?

First, I started playing him off

as a sort of vain character,

and I think he's just more of a lovable,

hunky type of character.

Kronk replaced Huaca,

the scrapped character mentioned earlier

as Yzma's stooge.

Fun fact, Huaca's design

can be seen in this scene here

as an Easter egg.

You know, instead of making them dark like that,

I thought, you know,

maybe he likes to cook spinach puffs.

Be a shame, working on this dinner.

That's where he came from, you know,

down here,

as opposed to up here.

All the elements of the film

were coming into place.

And even when the plot didn't make sense,

they stole an old trick from Monty Python,

when suddenly the animator

suffered a fatal heart attack.

The cartoon peril was no more,

and wrote the plot imperfection

into the film.

How did you get back here before us?

You got me.

By all accounts, it doesn't make sense.

While the original version of the movie failed

despite constant care, effort,

and poring over every detail,

there is an opposing philosophy

that when life gets hard,

care less about it.

This movie, there was no script,

which is really rare today.

We would just come to work and go,

"Okay, so what's the next scene?"

There's something to be said

about taking a carefree approach

to one's endeavors,

especially creative ones.

If you're not so hung up on the result,

you just might get the best possible one.

I'm Adam.

This is Spinach Puff.

I mean, ScreenPuff.

If you liked this, check out this next video.

And as always,

thank you for watching.