Did You Know? - Fun Facts About "Monsters Inc."

Welcome to another edition of a series that I like to call Did You Know?. Inspired a little by the Nostalgia Critic's "What You Never Knew" series, this series will allow me to share with you some interesting tidbits, behind-the-scenes information, and fun facts about an animated movie or TV series. Because I like sharing new information with people.

For this edition of Did You Know?, I wanted to take a look at one of my personal favorite animated movies - that being PIXAR's 2001 release, Monsters Inc.

The fourth movie made by PIXAR, Monsters Inc. has always been my favorite of the bunch. I've always loved rewatching the film, howling with laughter at the antics of Mike and the fast-paced humor. It's quite possibly the funniest of PIXAR's films, and certainly one of their most iconic. I remember seeing the film's 3D re-release in theaters back in 2012, then going to see the prequel, Monsters University, twice the following year.

And now, since Halloween is a few days away and, y'know, the film starts monsters so it technically qualifies as a Halloween movie, I'd like to share with you some things that I'm guessing you didn't know about it. Then again, maybe you did. But I'm going to post this anyway. Let's get started!

1) Before John Goodman was cast, Bill Murray was offered the role of Sulley. He was interested, but the producers couldn't get ahold of him since he'd replaced his team of agents with a 1-800 number, so they assumed he didn't want the part.

2) The filmmakers went through a couple different designs for Sulley. They considered making him a skinny monster with tentacles, they considered giving him glasses, they considered giving him five eyes, all kinds of things were considered.

By contrast, Mike didn't go through that many redesigns, but they did consider giving him fur, or at least a goatee and hair on the top of his head.

3) It took a while for them to decide on having Sulley be the top scarer, too. Early drafts of the script had him as a janitor, a scare assistant (like Mike is), and a scarer who couldn't scare anybody.

4) Art directors Tia Kratter and Dominique Louis helped figure out how Mike and Sulley should look. "For Sulley, I did about sixty paintings suggesting what the fur might look like," according to Kratter. "We had collected all kinds of samples and were looking at llamas, yaks, sheep, goats and bear fur. We decided on a kind of matted fur. It was really important to Pete to keep the character playful. He didn't want Sulley to look mean in any way. We really wanted him to be a big lovable bear. After reviewing versions of Sulley that looked like fruit stripe gum colors, a leopard and a giraffe, Pete decided to go with a blue-green color with purple dots."

As for Mike, he was originally going to be orange, but John Lasseter pointed out that he looked like a piece of fruit with arms and legs. They also considered making him purple or red until they finally decided on green, feeling that it worked best with Sulley's blue-green color.

5) Boo was also hard to pin down. At one point she was going to be an eight-year-old boy named Raymond. They eventually decided to make her a girl, and then made her younger because they felt it would make her more dependent on Sulley.

6) Y'know Ted, the gigantic monster who clucks like a chicken? Originally, in response to Sulley's greeting him, he was going to roar like Godzilla. The producers asked permission from Toho, Godzilla's film studio, to use the roar, but Toho turned them down.

More concept art for the film.

7) Mike is named after Frank Oz's father, Mike Oznowicz.

8) John Goodman and Billy Crystal recorded their lines together, which is uncommon in theatrical animated films.

9) The Abominable Snowman... I'm sorry, the AGREEABLE Snowman... says that the local village has tough kids, sissy kids, and kids who climb on rocks. This is a reference to that iconic Armour hot dogs commercial.

10) The scene at Harryhausen's initially culminated in the CDA blowing the place up. Then 9/11 occurred before the film's release, and they changed it to the restaurant being put under a force field.

11) The filmmakers considered calling the film "Hidden City". As a reference to this, early in the film you see a café called the "Hidden City Café" - which doubles as a reference to an actual cafe that was located near PIXAR's original headquarters in Point Richmond, California. Disney Legend Joe Grant is the one who came up with calling the film "Monsters Inc".

12) If you look closely, you can see posters for Disneyland attractions at certain points in the movie. For example, next to the aforementioned Hidden City Café is a poster for the Storybookland Canal Boats...

And in the room of the kid Mike entertains at the end, there are posters for Rocket Jets and the Sailing Ship Columbia.

13) Boo was voiced by toddler Mary Gibbs. The crew followed her around with a boom mike as opposed to trying to get her to sit still in a recording booth. If they wanted her to laugh, they used sock puppets.

14) Speaking of which, Boo's actual name is Mary as well, as evidenced by the signature on her drawings (look very closely at the bottom-right corner):

15) According to Lee Unkrich in the DVD commentary, Ms. Flint (the Bonnie Hunt-voiced character we see at the beginning) was originally going to have a larger role in the film.

16) A good chunk of the scarers at Monsters Inc. are named after PIXAR employees.

17) So, uh... how exactly DO those closet doors work? According to Pete Docter in a June 2005 edition of the Chicago Sun-Times, "John [Lasseter] laid down the rule that 'no magic' in PIXAR's animated features. Actually, you're allowed one magical thing that the audience will buy and beyond that everything ripples out logically from there. For our one magical thing it was the door that transports Boo from her closet to a fantasy factory run by monsters. We just put on this veil of technology that explains it all."

At one point, poor Mike was stuck as Randall's scare assistant. Also, I'm kind of glad
they got rid of Randall's collar and bow tie... it makes him look a bit too much like
Wally Gator, and I can't imagine most kids being afraid of somebody that looks like
Wally Gator.

18) Sulley's supervising animator was John Kahrs, who shares Sulley's easy-going personality. "My first instincts were to make sure that Sulley wasn't going to be some monkey or gorilla," he said. "He's not a Mighty Joe Young guy and he doesn't walk on his knuckles. He walks upright and he's more like a powerful bear than a gorilla. The challenge was to think of him as not some heavy lumbering guy but rather as a more energetic character with a lot of confidence. The scene where Mike is coaching him with the 'scary feet, scary feet' routine was a big turning point for me. I started thinking of Sulley as a guy in football training camp. It turned my whole world around and gave me a new perspective on him."

19) What PIXAR movie would be complete without a few references to previous and upcoming PIXAR movies? You probably already know that Jessie from the Toy Story movies and Nemo from Finding Nemo are among the toys Boo owns. But Nemo makes at least one other cameo in the film, too - he's hanging up on the wall of the trailer home that Randall is banished to.

A clownfish can also be seen as part of the mural behind the sushi chef at Harryhausen's, but I'm not sure if it's supposed to be Nemo or Marlin.

Oh, and that trailer home? It previously appeared in A Bug's Life. In both movies, the iconic Pizza Planet Truck is parked next to it.

20) Two of Monsters Inc's main characters are a big, hairy monster and a toddler wearing a t-shirt. Fur and clothing were, at this point, very difficult to do in CGI. As a result, David Baraff and Andy Witkin, two members of PIXAR's Tools Group, created a new Dynamics System (using a program called "FIZT") to understand the physics of each situation and simulate the movement of the hairs and the clothing. Technical leads Michael Fong and Steve May implemented these programs and determined how to apply them to the characters. This was to free up the animators to focus on, y'know, animating the characters and not have to worry about how the fur and clothing move.

May said, "For Sulley, not only did we have to model and render each individual hair - almost three million in all - but we had to make it move like it would in the real world. We had to dynamically simulate this movement. This meant adapting it for all lighting situations from dark to bright-lit rooms and a variety of environmental conditions including fog, snow and rain. Boo's hair presented similar challenges for our group."

Another big problem, according to Fong, was collisions. "When Sulley's running through the hall and brushing up against all sorts of things, that makes it pretty hard for us," he said. "When he goes to grab something or puts his hands together, does the hair spring back or move in reaction to what is touching it? One of the innovations we came up with allowed us to control the direction and flow of the hair along with the length. Instead of simulating every single hair, we came up with a way to indicate the movement for key hairs or representative samplings. The surrounding hairs would mimic their neighbors and give the pattern of movement that was desired."

21) Pay attention to Randall in the commercial for Monsters Inc. seen near the beginning:

He's clearly not happy to be there.

22) Color is an important thing in an animated movie. The backgrounds in Monsters Inc. - the city, the factory, etc. - were painted in more muted, cool colors to make sure the monsters are the most colorful thing in Monstropolis.

23) According to Pete Docter, one of the biggest challenges the folks at PIXAR faced was coming up with a reason as to why monsters scare kids. "For a while," he said, "We played with the idea that it was like a Broadway show and monsters entertained each other by scaring kids. That evolved into the whole business idea, which seemed pretty ripe for humor."

Concept art for the film's climatic door vault sequence. When are they gonna build
a ride based on that scene in Disney World?

24) Harryhausen's, the sushi restaurant, is named after stop-motion animator Ray Harryhausen. In addition, the restaurant's chef being an octopus with six arms is a reference to a film that Ray worked on, 1955's It Came From Beneath the Sea - which featured an octopus that, for budgetary reasons, only had six arms.

25) Randall's threat to personally put Fungus through the door shredder is a reference to Steve Buscemi's role in the film Fargo.

26) On the film's first DVD release (don't know if it's on more recent DVDs of the film as well or not), there's a featurette called "The History of the Monster World", part of a timeline that Bud Luckey produced during the film's development, when they were still figuring out how this monster world worked. Here's the story that the featurette tells:

Once there was a land with two primitive tribes: the Mans and the Mons. The Mons tried to make friends with the Mans, but the Mans hated the Mons because they were small, hairy, had bad breath and smelled bad. So they frightened them away and drove them out to sea. The Mons swam and swam until they arrived at an enchanted island. They ate the strange fruits and veggies on the island and, as a result, they became hairier, their teeth became worse, and they started to smell horrid. In addition, they discovered that if they ate the same things that the animals living on the island ate, they would take on some of their characteristics (for example, one monster eats the same thing that a wild boar eats, and gains a boar's snout and tusks). And by eating some pods, they became bigger. Then one day, a Mon looked at himself in a reflecting pool and scared the heck out of himself. This gave him an idea... he gathered the others and suggested that they sneak back over to the place where the Mans live and scare the heck out of 'em - you know, give them a taste of their own medicine. So they did. And they found the act of revenge so sweet that they decided to keep on doing it. This act is known as "monsterizing".

Now, is any of this still canon to the finished movie? Not sure. Just figured it was worth including here.

27) Have you seen the Looney Tunes cartoon "Feed the Kitty"? Remember the scene where the dog thinks the kitten is being made into cookie dough? The scene in Monsters Inc. where Sulley thinks Boo is going through the trash compactor and keeps having over-the-top horrified reactions is a reference to that.

Here's a piece of concept art for that scene, which shouldn't be as funny as it is.

28) This actually isn't the first time that John Goodman, John Ratzenberger, and Jennifer Tilly have all lent their voices to the same production - that would be an obscure cartoon called Pigs Next Door, which premiered before Monsters Inc.'s release.

29) According to production designer Harley Jessup, the Monsters Inc. factory was envisioned as "sort of a 60s era modernist building" - the idea was that the original turn of the century factory had been torn down and the one we see in the film was put up during the heyday of the baby boom.

30) Pay attention after the scene where Mike throws a sock at the CDA - Boo is only wearing one sock! The reason? That sock Mike threw at the CDA was one of Boo's.

31) To promote the film, Kmart stores put up gigantic Sulley standees and conducted a drawing for one lucky winner (one per store) to take the standee home. There were also Doritos 3Ds with Sulley on the bag dubbing it a "Monster Colorz" flavor... because if you ate 'em, they'd turn your tongue blue. Kind of like those Shrek Cheetos that turned your tongue green.

Sources:
- https://www.cinema.com/articles/724/monsters-inc-production-notes.phtml
- https://transformco.com/press-releases/pr/1642

For more fun facts about Monsters Inc., I recommend watching this video. Also, check out Monsters At Work on Disney Plus.