From the Little Shop of Horrors Official Comic Adaptation by Michael Fleisher, Gene Colan and Dave Hunt.
Here’s something I’ve never seen. The original ending of Little Shop of Horrors has been dug up from the rare Special Edition (withdrawn after producer David Geffen protested this material’s inclusion) and made its way onto Youtube. Sadly, the colour prints of the original ending were destroyed in a studio fire, so the black and white work print is all that remains.
It’s easy to see why it wasn’t popular with test audiences and was changed. Yes, I know that it’s closer, if not identical, to the stage version of the musical, but the ending is by far and away my least favorite part of that.
The last part does include Don’t Feed The Plants, with a fantastic B-movie styled visuals, though, which I do think was a shame to lose, so it’s nice to see it finally. Apparently the sequence cost $5m to produce using various miniatures and paying tribute to movies like King Kong and War of the Worlds, amongst others. But, as Frank Oz commented after it was cut: “In a stage play, you kill the leads and they come out for a bow — in a movie, they don’t come out for a bow, they’re dead. And the audience loved those people, and they hated us for it.”
