The 10 Most Regrettably Missing Movie Scenes of All Time

Posted at 5:04 AM Mar 31, 2008

By Todd Ciolek

Admit it: you sometimes skip to the deleted scenes when you first pop in that DVD. Sure, there’s an entire movie to be watched, but it can’t compare to the mystique of the stuff that didn’t make it in, the stuff that would be locked forever in film vaults if studios weren’t so desperate to pad out DVD “special editions.”

Well, some scenes are still lost to us DVD-buying peons. That’s often for good reason, but we’ve dug up ten that stir a certain fascination, morbid or otherwise, in our inner film nerd.

10) “Murder by Mist” in Disney’s The Black Cauldron

As Disney’s first PG-rated animated flick, The Black Cauldron was also the studio’s darkest, a title it might still hold even after the high body count of Atlantis: The Lost Empire and the manifold furry depravities of Brother Bear. A trite and surprisingly grim adaptation of Lloyd Alexander’s far more clever Prydain novels, the Black Cauldron’s original cut was, in fact, edited to remove things too graphic for even a PG. While we don’t care about Disney yanking images of Princess Eilonwy’s clothes ripping a little too much (and if you care, seek help), they also cut two scenes that could only have improved the film.

In one of these missing shots, an undead warrior spawned by the title cauldron gorily slices through an unsuspecting villager. In the other, one of the villain’s more disposable henchmen gets a dose of cauldron-born mist and dissolves quite messily. These scenes have never been released by Disney, surfacing only in anecdotes from the film’s staffers and in this animation cel, which allegedly shows off the amazing dissolving henchmen.

Damn, Disney. You missed your chance to scar a generation of kids even more than the death of Optimus Prime.

9) “More Dead Robots” in Transformers: The Movie

Speaking of that testament to childhood trauma, Transformers: The Movie featured a few scenes that never made it into the movie. Fans love the idea of seeing the Autobots’ little-loved stop-gap leader Ultra Magnus getting drawn and quartered by Deception jets, as per the original script, but his was only one of many gruesome robot deaths never animated.

Our favorite comes during the movie’s first major Autobot-Decepticon battles, when the brilliant toy-selling scheme known as the Constructicons merges to form the gigantic Devastator and pound on the Autobot base. In the final cut, the scene ends there, but in the movie’s storyboards, Devastator peels back the base’s thin candy shell to find Ultra Magnus and three other Autobots (including the prissy Red Alert) waiting for him. Magnus breaks Devastator apart with one well-placed blast, but the Constructicons rise separately and return fire, shooting Red Alert in the back as the Autobots flee. Red Alert is then stepped on by the pursuing Decepticons, and his corpse later appears amid background wreckage. Sorry, Red Alert. Nobody likes a firefighting Lamborghini.

8) “Gone to Tosche Station” in Star Wars

The directing skills of George Lucas may be too easy a target for ridicule, but we’ve got to wonder why, of all the scenes restored in his 1997 “Special Edition” of Star Wars, he left out a genuinely interesting one. Instead of some banal exchange between Han and a blubbery Jabba, we could’ve seen Tosche Station and learned just why Luke was so whiny about going there to pick up power converters.

Woven into the movie’s opening shots of R2-D2 and C-3PO escaping the Empire’s forces and crashing on Tatooine, the Tosche scenes show Luke gazing at the space battle above and chatting with his friend Biggs Darklighter, who tells Luke just why teenagers on some pissant desert world should join an intergalactic rebellion.

While Biggs later showed up to get shot down in the film’s climactic Death Star assault, two of Luke’s other friends, Fixer and Camie, completely disappeared from the film when the Tosche Station scenes went. Camie, played by hottie actress and British royal plaything Koo Stark, would’ve made her mark by snatching Luke’s binoculars and thereby establishing herself the second most empowered female character in the original Star Wars trilogy.

The whole sequence is available legally only on a Star Wars: Behind the Magic CD-ROM, but deleted scenes belong on DVD, alongside other scenes that should have been deleted.

7) “Kong’s Pit of Pets” in King Kong

When it comes to classic lost movie scenes, nothing really touches King Kong’s spider pit sequence. Sure, we could give this space to all the footage that RKO ripped out of Orson Welles’ allegedly masterful cut of The Magnificent Ambersons, but Welles’ movie never had a giant ape tossing sailors into a ravine to feed a bunch of giant bugs and lizards.

In the film, we’re made to imagine Kong’s would-be captors meeting swift and merciful fatal head injuries after they’re shaken off a log and into a pit, but, as the story goes, the original test screenings of King Kong saw the sailors gruesomely devoured by the pit’s resident enormous lizards, crabs and spiders, all in that creepy stop-motion way. Depending on who you believe, Kong producer Meriam C. Cooper excised the scene either to keep the story moving or because test audiences found the bugs more horrifying than Kong himself. We like the latter account, even if it's a big lie.

It must be noted that director Peter Jackson did the next best thing to finding the lost spider pit sequence; he painstakingly recreated it for of King Kong’s DVD release in 2005. But it’s not quite the same.

6) “In Space, No One Can Hear You Screw” in Alien

Ridley Scott once described Alien as a slasher film in space, and it almost fills that role, what with the lurking, never-fully-seen horror, the uncomfortably sexualized violence, and, of course, a first victim too dumb to merit sympathy. But there’s one thing missing: a gratuitous sex scene. Scott’s storyboards for the film had one, but it was never actually shot for two obvious reasons. One, it involves Tom Skerritt having sex. Two, it’d be way too funny to fit in a movie about an acid-bleeding alien death-raping a bunch of space truckers.

The setup: shortly after launching the corpse of Kane, their chest-burst crewmate, off into space, a dejected Ripley and Captain Dallas (Skerritt) meet up in the ship’s shuttle craft and explore the sexual tension only hinted at in the movie’s final cut. They’re interrupted when Kane’s corpse drifts by the shuttle’s window. Both the scene’s description and Scott’s drawing come across as a bit too silly for Alien, but mood-breaking scenes are the stuff that DVD extras are made of. And if Peter Jackson can recreate a King Kong scene seventy years lost, why can’t Scott recreate Alien’s missing comical tryst? Just use CG instead of the real Skerritt.