Frank Oz is, of course, the great puppeteer (Muppeteer, actually) turned film director. Here we have a recent interview with him about how he feels about the Muppets — especially the characters he birthed like Cookie Monster, Fozzie Bear and Miss Piggy — living on and being performed by others.
And here is news of the re-release of his 1986 movie of Little Shop of Horrors, which is now being put out there with its original, darker ending. When first made, it ended with a very-costly-to-film finale in which the evil plants won and the two leading characters were killed. Test audiences recoiled so Oz and his crew went back and filmed a new, happily-ever-after ending in which Seymour and Audrey won and lived to wed.
The rumor is that the film's owners decreed that the footage for the unhappy ending would never be seen (or maybe saved for a possible sequel) but someone who didn't know about the decree included it on the first DVD release. Further rumor has it that there was much anger and threats and that the first DVD release was recalled…but of course, many were sold before that. At one point, copies were selling for megabucks on eBay and of course, it later found its way to YouTube as all video eventually does at least for a while, copyrights be damned.
I understood why they made the change. What I didn't get was why they so thoroughly deleted all that wonderful special effects footage of the interplanetary plants destroying the world. Seems to me they could have used some of that, then cut to Audrey and Seymour saving the day before the plants' takeover was complete. Anyway, the film will now be available with the We-All-Die ending if that's what you wanna see.
The linked article wonders if people will indeed wanna see that. I dunno…but I'll bet most people who now experience the movie will think that the CGI of the giant plant is really well done, so much so that you could almost believe they had a real, working plant of that size on the set.
But of course, they did. It wasn't CGI, though everyone will assume it is. They built the giant puppet at great expense and it was operated by a whole crew of puppeteers. And here's something you might not know: The plant was so big and hard to operate that they had to manipulate it, at least during its lip-sync moments, at half-speed. The audio for those scenes was pre-recorded and slowed down by half, then the puppeteers moved the plant in accord with that reduced-speed audio…and later, that film was sped so the audio was normal and the movements matched the soundtrack. That meant that if, for example, Rick Moranis was in the same shot as the plant, Moranis had to move at half-speed also. That can't have been easy.