Did You Know? - Fun Facts About "Madagascar"

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.

I can't believe Madagascar is twenty years old. I remember how I first found out about it - my family went to see Shark Tale in theaters (I don't know what we were thinking either), and at one point during the previews, I had to go to the bathroom. I walked back into the theater just in time to see the end of the teaser for the film. I sought out the teaser online after that.

The first film is a huge guilty pleasure for me. I feel like I should hate it - it's a film made by 2000s DreamWorks, which means that it's filled with celebrities who don't have much if any business doing voice-acting and unfunny pop culture references that have nothing to do with what's going on. And don't get me wrong, it's a very flawed film, but there's still a lot to like about it. The characters, even the ones that aren't given much to do, are great - the Penguins steal the show, of course, but Alex and Marty's friendship is definitely the heart of the film. And when the film is funny, it's genuinely really funny, and the dramatic and heartwarming moments work well too. The two sequels, while also flawed, are in my opinion even better.

The three Madagascar movies (I know there's technically four, I'm focusing on the three main films in this post) have a lot of fun facts about them that I would like to share. You probably already know that there are references to Planet of the Apes and The Twilight Zone (hot take: that "It's a cookbook! IT'S A COOKBOOK!" joke wasn't funny). You might also remember the "Madagascar Mania" tie-in with Denny's (I remember seeing that ad while watching Cartoon Network... or maybe it was Boomerang, I'm not sure). But did you know any of THESE things?

Concept art by Jordi and Carlos Grangel.

1) How did Madagascar come to be? In a recent interview with Animation World Network, co-director Eric Darnell revealed that Jerry Seinfeld had a hand in creating the idea: "I think part of it came from the relationship Jeffrey Katzenberg had with Jerry Seinfeld and this idea of doing something that would involve Manhattan and New York City. Jerry began developing the idea, and then he went on to work on what became Bee Movie. But we really fell in love with the idea: what if you take four New Yorkers, born and bred, rip them out of their New York home, where they've been their entire lives, and drop them into a savage jungle? How would they survive? And what if these New Yorkers were not people, but zoo animals?"

The other co-director, Tom McGrath, added, "It's a classic fish-out-of-water story. New Yorkers going camping. And New Yorkers going camping already feels funny. Originally, the story was about civility versus savagery, which is still a component of it, but it could be a very dark, unrelatable theme. We eventually found a theme that was more like, 'Don't eat your best friend.' Then, as we developed the movie, it became more about not letting the location define who you are. Home is where the heart is. It turned into a friendship story: as long as they were together, it didn't matter where in the world they were. That's why all the movies became kind of a travelogue built around that lesson."

2) Melman was originally going to be an okapi. They decided to make him a giraffe instead because more people know what a giraffe is than an okapi is (apparently, people were more aware of what one is by 2013, because the Valentine's Day special Madly Madagascar features an okapi as a minor character). Also, he was originally named Henry.

Concept art for Melman (then called Henry) by Buck Lewis.

3) The actual Central Park Zoo does not have lions, zebras, giraffes, hippos, or chimpanzees. It does have penguins, though. If you want to see lions, zebras, and giraffes in New York, you'll have to visit the Bronx Zoo (there are no hippos or chimpanzees there either, sorry).

4) The inital plan for the film had the animals being liberated from their cages by an animal rights group.

5) When the film was announced in 2001, Madonna and Jason Alexander were mentioned as being part of the cast (presumably, they were going to voice Gloria and Melman respectively). Ricky Martin, Adam Del Rio, and Mel Gibson were also attached to provide voices at one point. For whatever reason, all five of them wound up leaving the project at some point. Jennifer Lopez was also considered to voice Gloria, then Gwen Stefani was cast... then she left the project in 2002.

6) Melman wearing tissue boxes on his feet at one point in the film is a reference to Howard Hughes, who did it for the same reason as Melman - to keep germs away.

Concept art by Yoriko Ito.

7) King Julien's role was initially very, very small - originally, Maurice was going to be the leader of the lemurs, and it would've been his idea to have Alex help them against the foosa. Julien was just a minor character with only two or three lines who was questioning why they should have a lion help them. Then Sacha Baron Cohen got the part (and in case you're wondering why they brought a celebrity in to voice a character with only two or three lines, need I remind you that Zootopia 2 had Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson voicing a character who just screams and nothing more?) and did a lot of improvising, and the filmmakers liked it so much that they made Julien a more prominent character.

8) Editor Clare Knight was the one responsible for the film's use of "I Like to Move It". According to Eric Darnell, "We had the lemurs a little more cool, kind of loungy, almost like jazzy lounge lizards. Clare brought in this really fun number, and at first your instinct was, 'No, that's not who the lemurs are.' But as we listened to the song and brought it to Sacha, he totally embraced it and wanted to sing it. It completely redefined the character for the better."

9) Tom McGrath and Eric Darnell initially wanted Robert Stack to voice Skipper, but he passed away. Thus, Tom decided to voice Skipper himself because everyone really liked his scratch track for the character. Tom's voice for Skipper is sort of a combination of Robert Stack, Charlton Heston, and "maybe some Peter Graves every once in a while."

Concept art for Marty and Melman (who was still called Henry at this point).

10) Speaking of the penguins, they were very nearly cut from the film because they were only in one scene. Specifically, Jeffrey Katzenberg told them to take the penguins out, so they did, and then they had a test screening where a studio executive asked where the penguins were, resulting in Katzenberg saying that the penguins were "working out pretty good" and telling the filmmakers to put  them back in. According to Tom McGrath, "A way to give them job security was to embed them in the story, so we thought, 'OK, they can inspire the zebra to escape the zoo and then they're forever in the story and they can't be cut!'"

On top of that, the original plan was to have Alex, Marty, Melman, and Gloria's crates fly off the ship during a storm at sea. But a storm at sea is kind of cliched, isn't it? Tom McGrath thought so too, and he said, "I was in a restaurant, thinking about what to do with the storm. I thought it would be great if there was an animal revolt. When we first put them in the film, people were saying, ‘What’s with the penguins?'"

11) Okay, enough about the penguins for now. On the side of the pay phone that Alex uses when Marty escapes the zoo, there's a note reading "Room for rent, EAST Village, $10,000/mo, call Tom & Eric". This, of course, is a reference to Tom McGrath and Eric Darnell.

12) Madagascar is often brought up as one of the first CGI-animated films to have its characters move in a more "cartoony", squash-and-stretch style way. According to Eric Darnell, "We'd talk about animation style in the film, so we set out from the very beginning this very broad style with squash-and-stretch. But its difficult to do in computer graphics because you basically have a virtual puppet that you have to construct before you begin animation. All the controls and capabilities have to be built into this puppet before you start. With hand-drawn animation, if you want to draw a guy thats normally six feet tall and stretch him out to be 12 feet tall, or flatten him on the ground, you just draw it that way. And you're done. To design a puppet with those kinds of capabilities was a big challenge for us, because we wanted to be able to do that, too."

Animator Jason Schleifter said, "I think as a whole our department really started to push smear frames and stretching characters like crazy where it was warranted. We worked really hard to keep the characters on-model when striking a pose, but inbetween poses oh, man, we were going nuts! You'd have fingers stretch five times their normal lengths, eyes bulging all over the place. I even did a shot where a fossa hits the ground and when he does his eyes actually smack into each other, then stretch out so they're 2-1/2 times their normal distance from each other, and then rattle back. It happens so fast it's subtle, but boy does it add a nice punch to the action."

And Tom McGrath claimed, "We wanted to do something, animation-wise, that was more than what youve seen in 3D and to have a 2D sensibility, much like animation in the Forties: Tex Avery, Warner Bros. Because of the advancements we were able to do squash-and-stretch broad animation, and have this in a stylized world thats really believable in 3D."

13) And he does mean "stylized". "There were careful considerations in the design of this world that Kendal Cronkite had worked on with the simplification of things, and caricatured," Tom McGrath explained. "There were no straight angles. Everythings slightly off-skew. We called it Wack Factor. When things got to crazy we pulled it back. On Antz, when they surfaced the environments, they'd do it with photographs. They would photograph textures and use those. In Madagascar, it was all art. It was all hand-painted designs that were stylized that every surface was treated with. As opposed for using photos, the surfacing was all hand-painted."

Concept art for Alex.

"The artists in the surfacing department had a blast," Eric Darnell claimed. "Because they could invent every surface, every texture, for the surface of a leaf, the bark of a tree. Everything then could fit into this design paradigm that Kendal and her team devised. They just had a great time. They felt they had a creative input. What's up there on the screen is theirs. The majority of the plants that you see in the film are actual plants that are from Madagascar. But they're also very designed and stylized and fit in the style of the film. Even their organization and arrangement inside the frame and the environment, it's very different than how they would occur naturally, as we try to create this stylized fantasy of a jungle based on the Malagasy rain forest."

14) Jeffrey Katzenberg contributed to a lot of the film's jokes. For example, Eric Darnell and Tom McGrath thought of having that old lady beat up Alex, and Jeffrey suggested having her also kick Alex in the groin and mace him. And when the scene where the characters were all doing spit-takes ("You don't swallow it. It's just temporary 'till the plumbing's done.") wasn't getting the laughs the filmmakers were expecting in test screenings and they were getting advice that maybe it just wasn't a good gag, Jeffrey claimed, "No, the problem is, you don't have ENOUGH. You need two more big spits." And it worked!

Concept art for Madagascar itself.

15) Dana Carvey turned down a role in the film. I don't know which character they wanted him to voice.

16) The scene where the penguins arrive in Antarctica and discover that it, in Private's words, "sucks" was suggested by Bob Saget (who also voices a mnor character in the film - that one zoo animal who shouts at Alex and Marty to shut up because "WE'RE NOT ALL NOCTURNAL, YOU KNOW!"). It was originally going to be the film's stinger - for those unaware, that means the scene after the end credits. The filmmakers decided that they wanted the penguins to come back into the story, so they moved it.

17) Look closely at the patch on the suit that the ship captain is wearing - apparently, the name of the boat is "S.S. ACT II".

Food tie-ins for the film - maybe you remember seeing the Madgascar fruit snacks?

18) Remember how Mason and Phil escape the zoo because they've heard Tom Wolfe is giving a speech and they want to fling their crap at him? According to a behind-the-scenes bonus feature, the line was originally "I saw in the Times that Donald Trump is speaking at Stony Brook." Ah, remember the days when Donald Trump was just a punchline and not our president? Good times...

In the German dub, Tom Wolfe is replaced with Hilary Clinton. In the Hungarian dub, it's simply a lecture on evolution. In the Russian dub, they want to visit a lecture on "anarchy in the society". Speaking of foreign dubs, in the Hungarian dub Marty wants to go to Miami instead of Connecticut (probably harder to get to via train, unless you live in Florida already), and in the Korean dub, Melman assumes that they've wound up in Hollywood as opposed to San Diego.

19) The look of the jungles on the island was inspired by the paintings of Henri Rousseau.

A billboard for the film.

20) At some point in production, there was a reference to The Lion King in the movie - specifically, Maurice made a comment about the "oval of life". For some reason, this line was removed, but it's still present in the junior novelization.

21) Madagascar was released on May 27th, 2005 - the very same day that The Longest Yard, starring Adam Sandler, was released. Why is that noteworthy? Because both movies feature Chris Rock as a main character.

22) 2010 saw the launch of a live touring stage show adaptation of the first film that I believe is still being performed every so often today. Here are some photos of some productions:

Not exactly Shrek the Musical, is it?

23) Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa was originally going to be called "Madagascar: The Crate Escape". Presumably, somebody pointed out that at no point in the second film do the animals wind up in crates (unlike the first) so they gave it a new name.

24) In the second film, Young Alex is voiced by Ben Stiller's son, Quinn Dempsey Stiller, and Young Gloria is voiced by Jada Pickett Smith's daughter, Willow Smith. According to Eric Darnell, "You can’t coach [Quinn]. Ben was doing most of it, he was trying to get stuff out of his son and the most valuable stuff we got was things like when he didn’t want to sit in a chair and he was like, 'No, I don’t wanna…' and we had the mic on him and could use it when [young Alex] gets thrown into the crate.  So we really weren’t able to coach a performance out of him as much as we were able to follow him around with a mic and get what you would get following any toddler around."

For those wondering, no, Young Marty and Young Melman were not voiced by the kids of Chris Rock and David Schwimmer - Young Marty was voiced by Thomas Stanley and Young Melman was voiced by Zachary Gordon, who would go on to play Greg in the Diary of a Wimpy Kid movies.

25) Once a month during production on Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa, the crew would act out scenes. "We put wigs on the layout artists. The animators got involved," Tom McGrath claimed. "We did 60 percent of the film in this high-school play type of video. In the first movie, we locked off the camera to reduce rendering time. It felt a lot like postcard shots. With this one, we had more processors."

Concept art for Alex's father, Zuba.

26) What was the hardest thing to animate in the second film? According to Scott Peterson, the film's effects head, "Grass - that was a big one. The African plains are vast, big vistas, where you can see a couple of miles out. Our challenge was to fill those plains with grass and do it in a way we could manage. We designed a tool for the layout department that would distribute grass by positioning geometric chunks of it in a shot. From there it went to the surfacing department where they handle its density: how it clumps, how scraggly it looks. They add accent grass and come up with the overall texture.

Then it goes to the lighting department. They had to develop tools that would regroup those chunks of grass into layers that make it easier to render large amounts of geometry. The surfacing department had to come up with a way of changing the grass' density -- have it very detailed when it's close to camera and more coarse as it get further away, but do it in such way that the audience doesn't notice the transition. We spent some time implementing that, making it efficient and coming up with intuitive controls for them to set up. On the rendering side, one of the ways we fixed the 'buzzing problem' [between the grasses' differing textures] was from a trick I learned at SIGGRAPH. It was the same one they used to fix King Kong's fur, which was to make the grass transparent as it gets skinnier -- it makes it blend better."

27) A couple of DreamWorks' other films have cameo appearances from the franchise's characters. For example, Roddy's owner in Flushed Away has an Alex doll:

Mason and Phil are seen on a newspaper at one point in Turbo:

And Gloria makes a cameo in How to Train Your Dragon... being carried by a dragon presumably to be eaten:

28) Some early plot summaries for the third film mentioned that Alex, Marty, Melman, Gloria, the Penguins, the Lemurs, and the Chimps would be joined in their quest to get back to New York by a performing llama. There aren't any llamas in the actual film, so I don't know if there WAS a llama in early script drafts or if the plot summaries were inaccurate (probably the latter).

29) Gia was initially going to be an albino jaguar kept in a cage at the Monaco casino. She would've been freed by Alex and joined the zoo animals in the ensuing chase (in the book The Art of Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted, you can find storyboards for the car chase scene featuring Gia among the animals in the car). The filmmakers decided it'd fit the story better if Alex met her in the circus.

Concept art for the third movie by Travis Koller.

30) Look closely at the multiple hunting trophies on Captain DuBois' wall. Among the animals she's hunted down are Nana's dog from the Madagascar Penguins: A Christmas Caper short (released theatrically in front of Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit), a larger version of King Julien's gecko buddy Stevie from the first movie, that fish from the second movie who screamed when the watering hole went dry, and Eggy the duckling from the Penguins of Madagascar TV series.

31) At the end of the third film, when DuBois and her crew are in crates on a ship headed for Madagascar (yeah, sorry about the spoiler), take a look at their crates. Stenciled on them are "Freedom Fries", "Freedom Dressing", "Freedom Toast", and "Freedom Dip Sandwiches". For those unaware, this is a reference to the House of Representatives' decision in 2003 to start calling the French fries served in their cafeteria "Freedom Fries" in response to France refusing to support Iraq.

32) Character designer Craig Kellman modeled Stefano's face after his own.

34) Marty's (in)famous "Afro Circus" song was ad-libbed by Chris Rock - he was originally just supposed to hum that usual circus music, but he made up his own lyrics. So if you hate that song, you now know who to blame for its existence.

Concept art by Samuel Michlap - you can see the albino version of Gia among the characters here.

35) Finally, I found an interesting tidbit in an interview with Eric Darnell for the second film. Now, as you probably know (if not... sorry again about the spoiler), Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted's third act has Alex, Marty, Melman, and Gloria making it back to the zoo... but they realize that they actually prefer being free and traveling the world, and that when they were with the circus, they were already home. So they, the penguins, the lemurs, and the chimps join the circus.

But back in 2008, Eric had this idea for the third (or fourth, I'm not sure if the plan was for three or four films at this point) film's ending: "I have this idea of them back in the zoo and Marty saying something like, 'You know, we never made it to Connecticut,' and so the last shot would be a freeze frame of them jumping over the wall for one more adventure."

Sources:
- https://www.awn.com/animationworld/survival-funnies-lion-zebra-and-wack-factor
- https://www.awn.com/animationworld/madagascar-escape-2-africa-what-next
- https://www.cgw.com/Publications/CGW/2008/Volume-31-Issue-10-Oct-2008-/Home-is-Where-the-Art-is.aspx
- https://www.skwigly.co.uk/behind-the-scenes-of-madagascar/
- http://am.animatedviews.com/Madagascar.html
- http://legacy.aintitcool.com/node/15457
- https://www.razorfine.com/news/film-news/madagascar-2-the-interview/
- https://www.awn.com/animationworld/madagascar-20-qa-tom-mcgrath-and-eric-darnell
- https://animationscoop.com/interview-madagascar-back-in-theaters-for-20th-anniversary/

Seriously, twenty years of Sacha Baron Cohen singing "I Like to Move It Move It". It doesn't feel natural.